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Mapping Swedes and Geats

How the mighty have fallen. I used to do all my plans and maps in a hard-core CAD program using a digitising tablet, but then WinXP came along and my mid-90s software would no longer run. For years now I've been tracing maps onto translucent film with a pencil, scanning them and editing them in PhotoShop and Windows Paint. Here's an example of my handiwork, and a snippet of the paper I made it for, submitted last week. The first decisive step in the formation of the Medieval state of Sweden appears to have been taken about AD 1000 when two ethnic groups, the Svear and the Götar, elected a…

Divestment campaigns: Fight the power?

No, not Eli but The Economist. You'll be unsurprised to learn that they have a somewhat different perspective, closer to mine, or perhaps vice versa. They do some half-hearted "analysis" of the South Africa and Israel disinvestment campaigns, but really all they do is point at a couple of graphs and say "its hard to see anything here"; by the Economist's standards, that's rubbish. Some may like: On the other hand, there is little evidence that ethical investing—or its close cousins, sustainable investment, environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies and corporate social…

Author opens mouth, exposes wackiness

James Randerson scrapes a little more info on the Han and Warda paper. The editor, Michael Dunn, sounds uncommunicative, but I can't blame him for wanting to proceed cautiously…I just hope that eventually we get a better accounting. The interesting revelation is a letter from one of the authors, Warda. I think we've found the source of the weird fantasies in the text. The problem is that we described in very clear and definite way the disciplined nature that takes part inside our cells. We supported our meaning with define proteomics evidences that cry in front of scientists that the…

Amsterdam man, 2013

Just like 2011 or 2012 but faster! TL;DR: 3:43:06. Just 5 minutes faster and I'll only be an hour slower than Maz. This post is mostly for my records. Transport and accommodation just like before, except I had Miranda with me. As you can see, Amsterdam has some exciting architecture. My GPS track is here, or at least a bit of it is. Turning it on as I went in to the stadium I realised I hadn't bothered to charge up the battery. Oops, though its perhaps nice that I'm getting rather casual about things I'd once have obsessed over. So the track contains the first ~16k, and the last ~4k. The…

The Bottleneck Years by H.E.Taylor - Chapter 51

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 50 Table of Contents Chapter 52 Chapter 51 Soap, February 20, 2057 Anna came down the hall complaining. "Mommy, my tummy hurts." There were bubbles coming out of her mouth. Edie took one look and yelled, "Luc, call an ambulance!" I came out of the kitchen and saw Anna down on her hands and knees vomitting on the front room floor. There was a trail of liquid down the hall to the bathroom. Following the trail back, I found a shampoo bottle on the bathroom floor. It was about half full. "Do you know how much was in this?" "Oh my god!" exclaimed…

Sandefur Reviews Barnett

Timothy Sandefur has published a review of Randy Barnett's book Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty. The review is called The Normality of Freedom, and that is a good title. While he has some criticisms of what the book lacks, I think he captures the essence of the importance of Barnett's views here: [T]he presumption of liberty, he writes, flows necessarily from the existence of inalienable rights. If rights preexist the state, then the government must always bear the burden of proving the necessity of its acts which limit or abridge those rights; if the government…

Cucumbers and Sex Ed

The Worldnutdaily is reporting about a group in Maryland that is up in arms because a new sex education program in Montgomery County Public Schools includes a video of a woman showing how to put on a condom by using a cucumber: Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum features an excerpt from the seven and a half minute video on its website. The group is fighting a decision by the Board of Education of Montgomery County, Md., to show the video, entitled "Protect Yourself," to students as part of its new sex-education curriculum. "Remember to use a condom for oral, anal and vaginal sex," the…

Dobson Thinks Spongebob Squarepants is Gay

First it was Jerry Falwell publicly claiming that Tinky Winky was gay; then a bunch of "pro-family" groups actually claimed that the animated movie A Shark's Tale was encouraging kids to be transvestites; now it's James Dobson's turn, taking aim at Spongebob Squarepants. His spokesman says that a new video by the We Are Family Foundation, featuring about 100 cartoon characters dancing to the song We Are Family to encourage tolerance and caring for one another, is "an insidious means by which the organisation is manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids." Yeah, what could be more…

Back Again

Well, I'm back from a grueling weekend of travel. We basically spent all of Friday and all of Sunday either driving or flying. We were delayed yesterday in Chicago because of the weather, and it wasn't fun taking a little puddle jumper prop plane to Grand Rapids with storm systems all around. That plane bounced around the sky like a hyperactive child. The graduation ceremony was typical of graduation ceremonies, except my big brother was involved and that was cool. We yelled so loudly that the president of the university laughed and asked my brother if he had a third of the audience there…

Jon Rowe on the Founding Fathers

My thanks to Jon Rowe for the very nice comments in this post, where he references some entries I wrote on the founding fathers and Christianity. He chides me for missing why the Patrick Henry quote is also fraudulent, and I have to confess that I didn't really give it much thought. The quote in question is this: "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great Nation was founded not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For that reason alone, people of other faiths have been afforded freedom of worship here." Since I know…

Leiter v VanDyke Redux

Brian Leiter has replied to VanDyke's latest response, posted on Ex Parte and as a comment here, and it is a devestating reply, to be sure. I was hoping Brian would get around to doing this, mostly because I've been too busy to do it myself. The misuse, probably born of misunderstanding and trusting Beckwith's portrayal, of Laudan, Kuhn and other philosophers of science and their positions on methodological naturalism, fairly screamed out from VanDyke's reply and Leiter corrects the misconceptions very well. VanDyke gets himself into particular trouble, I think, with this smug citation of…

Goldstein Collection: New Viral Marketing Game?

I got a rather odd email yesterday, with the Subject: header Help me identify a youtube video and solve my grandfather's mysterious death. That's eye-catching, to say the least, and the text of the message was also interesting: There's a youtube video involved in my grandfather's odd circumstances of death. Please take a look at the attached picture and pass it along. This frame belongs to the video I'm looking for and it's the only evidence that I have so far: it's a snapshot of the computer screen he was seeing when he died. If you ever saw the entire footage or recognize any detail of this…

The Great Beer Mystery

I was just reminded again of a mysterious thing in Yokohama, that some readers may be able to help with. One of the first nights we were in Yokohama, I went up to the bar on the 70th floor, just to see what it was like. I was neither cool enough nor rich enough to really be there, but they let me sit at the bar and listen to the jazz band they had playing. When I sat down, I asked the bartender what sort of draft beer they had, and he said "Budweiser." I said "I see a tap over there that says "Guinness," so bring me a Guinness." Then I watched him go to a cooler, take out a bottle, and pour a…

USVI: Wild Wildlife

I should preface this with a note that I am one of the world's worst nature photographers. I don't have a very fancy camera, and I'm not terribly good at spotting critters at the best of times, so my best pictures are of relatively immobile creatures like the crab in yesterday's post. Still, I find myself trying to take pictures of lots of animals and bird, and here's a selection of what I got from St. John. The vast majority of these are birds, for whatever reason, such as these pelicans off Lovango Key: (click for larger image). Pelicans on land or in the water are ridiculous, ungainly-…

Conference Blogging: DAMOP Day 2

The highlight of Day 2 of DAMOP was, obviously, the special Undergraduate Research session. OK, it's possible that I'm only saying that because one of my students was talking in that session... Mike did a really good job with his talk, though there were a couple of phrases in there that I would've preferred not to hear in the final talk... The other two talks that I heard were also excellent, and as the session chair said, if that's the future of science, the future looks good. In the present of science, there were some really good talks in the morning sessions. Ian Spielman of NIST gave a…

Science Is Not Zero-Sum

Matt Yglesias spent a while on Friday taking shots at Newt Gingrich, and made a dumb argument in the process: I'm consistently baffled by the invocation of China and India in this context; I'd love for somebody to write up a model for me in which the optimal level of US investment in math and science education is increased by an increase in the number of Asian scientists and engineers. If anything, it should be the reverse, right? If engineers are scarce, then a country with a lot of engineers will be a country with a lot of relatively well-compensated people. But if the supply of foreign…

Bose, Fermi, Hanbury Brown, and Twiss

Via Doug Natelson, a very nice paper from the arxiv on Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiments with atoms. The Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment (that's two guys, one with a double unhyphenated last name) is a classic experiment from the field of quantum optics, which can be interpreted as showing the bosonic nature of photons. I posted some lecture notes about it during my Quantum Optics class. (The Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment can also be understood classically, but that's not as much fun...) The key idea here goes back to the symmetry business I talked about a little while back.…

Only We Can Do That to Our Pledges

It's fraternity pledging season on campus, which means there are dozens of slightly addled sophomores wandering around being forced to do silly things by upperclassmen. This, combined with the passing mention of cable-making in the college advice post, got me thinking about scientific hazing-- the sort of crap jobs that get given to first-year grad students in research groups. I suspect this is mostly an experimental phenomenon, as experimental work provides many more opportunities for really unpleasant tasks. There are oil traps on vacuum systems that collect thick, nasty sludge that…

Finite Supergravity?

The highlighted article in Friday's Physical Review Letters is something Peter Woit has been going on about for months: "Cancellations Beyond Finiteness in N=8 Supergravity at Three Loops". It's been on the ArXiv for ages, but I'm old school, and don't think of papers as real until they're actually released in peer-reviewed journals. The thing is, I'm really not sure what this means. That is, I know what the paper is about, but I'm not sure what the implications are. My extremely limited understanding is that "N=8 supergraviy" is one of the early attempts at creating a theory of quantum…

Rob Thurman, Nightlife [Library of Babel]

Back at Boskone, I went to a panel consisting of a number of revieweres recommending books that we might not have heard of. Toward the end, one of the panelists rattled off a list of authors writing urban fantasy (what he described as "Laurel Hamilton without all the porn"), and Rob Thurman was on the list. A couple of weeks ago, I was in Borders buying books, inclusing Jim Butcher's Proven Guilty (which I read out of the library when it came out in hardcover). Since I was buying that, I decided to look for something else in the Dresden Files vein, and picked up Nightlife, thinking that it…

Thought Experiments Made Real

We're back from Boskone, which included lots of fun stuff, and not enough sleep. I also cleverly forgot to bring my lecture notes home from work, which means I need to go in early to figure out what the hell I'm talking about in class today, so there's not much time for blogging at the moment. I would be remiss in my physics-blogging duties, though, if I failed to point people to this Physics Web story about a new single-photon interference experiment (you'll need a subscription to read the Science article). A French group including Alain Aspect (who else?) has done a beautifually clean…

links for 2008-10-24

Good Math, Bad Math : Credit Default Swaps: Gambling as Insurance "Credit default swaps are interesting - in the same way that a Rube Goldberg device is interesting. They are in a fundamental sense very simple, but the structure that's built up around them is so bizarre, so ridiculous on the face of it, that when you look at it in retrospect, it's hard to believe that anyone actually thought that it was a good idea, or that it could ever work." (tags: economics math stupid) Spin segregation puzzles physicists - physicsworld.com "John Thomas and colleagues at Duke University found that…

Quantum Physics for Dogs Preview

We're out for a walk, when the dog spots a squirrel up ahead and takes off in pursuit. The squirrel flees into a yard and dodges around a small ornamental maple. Emmy doesn't alter her course in the slightest, and just before she slams into the tree, I pull her up short. "What'd you do that for?" she asks, indignantly. "What do you mean? You were about to run into a tree, and I stopped you." "No I wasn't." She looks off after the squirrel, now safely up a bigger tree on the other side of the yard. "Because of quantum." We start walking again. "OK, you're going to have to explain that," I say…

European Politics Have No Right Wing

Over at Aardvarcheology, Martin complains about US politics. This is bog standard European oh-you-benighted-Americans stuff, with a convenient one-sentence summary: From a European perspective, US politics are an ongoing battle between the extreme Right and the middle Right. This gets up my nose a bit, because as I commented over there, it would be perfectly equivalent to say "From a US perspective, European politics are an ongoing battle between the extreme Left and the middle Left." It wouldn't let Europeans feel all smug, though, so you don't see it as often. I don't disagree with the…

What Employers Want

I haven't linked to Inside Higher Ed in a few days, but lest you think I've forgotten them, they have a short piece today about the results of a survey of employers "with at least 25 employees and significant hiring of recent college graduates," regarding the preparation of their recent hires. It turns out that employers aren't as frustrated with the skills of new graduates as some politicians and policy makers suggest. In a number of areas, employers appear to think graduates are coming out well positioned. And while employers would love to see better assessment tools used in college (as you…

The Year in First Sentences

2006 Was Just This Year, You Know: I lost a lot of weight, read a lot of books, taught a lot of classes, did a bit of research, and oh, yeah, I got tenure. Dorky Poll: Favorite Tool: In the comments to the post where I noted how many more people had least favorite textbooks than favorite ones, dr. dave writes: "Textbooks... particularly SCIENCE textbooks, are not really written to be ENJOYED by anyone." Maryland vs. Duke: One-sentence review of this game: I don't think I've ever seen so many two-foot shots missed in a Division I game. On the Superiority of String Theory: As we look at…

Academic Poll: Talk or Poster?

The Steinmetz Symposium is today at Union, as mentioned in yesterday's silly poll about fears (I love the fact that "Wavefunction Collapse" leads "Monsters from the Id" by one vote at the time of this writing-- my readers are awesome). As a more serious follow-up, there were two presentation options offered to the students, and this year's physics majors overwhelmingly chose one over the other. I'm curious as to how many people would make the same choice, so here's a poll: You have to give a presentation about a research project you have done. Which of these presentation types would you…

Amazing Laser Application 9: Fusion!

What's the application? The goal of laser ignition fusion experiments is to heat and compress a target to the point where the nuclei of the atoms making up the sample fuse together to form a new, heavier nucleus, releasing energy in the process. Nuclear fusion is, of course, what powers stars, and creating fusion in the laboratory has been the holy grail (well, a holy grail, at any rate) of nuclear physics research for the last sixty-plus years. What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "Can we create fusion reactions in a laboratory setting on Earth?" 2) "How can we get more helium without…

Links for 2010-04-19

Rev. Mod. Phys. 82, 1155 (2010): Introduction to quantum noise, measurement, and amplification "The topic of quantum noise has become extremely timely due to the rise of quantum information physics and the resulting interchange of ideas between the condensed matter and atomic, molecular, optical-quantum optics communities. This review gives a pedagogical introduction to the physics of quantum noise and its connections to quantum measurement and quantum amplification. After introducing quantum noise spectra and methods for their detection, the basics of weak continuous measurements are…

Reflecting on crakar and snowman

(why am I thinking about cocaine now?) So recently two very prolific climate contrarian commenters picked up their toys and went home. Skip did a nice piece on that surprise event. crakar was one of my most prolific commenters, contributing about 100 comments per month since last December. He always struck me as a congenial fellow but he was definately antagonistic to the science of global warming and contributed mainly misinformation and misunderstanding. Nevertheless, I am actually a bit sorry to see him go on a personal level even though his presence was on balance a negative…

How to talk to crakar - point 1

Crakar said: We are told that increasing CO2 levels cause/are causing the temps to rise, however the geological record shows this to be the opposite. Even if we look at the past 70 years (post 1940) when mans activity is supposed to be most pronounced we find that CO2 has risen for all 70 years but the temps have been either stable or falling for 40 of the 70 years. This would suggest to me that CO2 does not in fact cause the temp to rise but for others this information is of no concern because there is a general agreement amongst some scientists (IPCC) that the opposite is true. One thing at…

Red River flooding

This was passed on to me for posting by het, just as a human interest angle to this current event My brother David lives 50 feet from the Red River north of Winnipeg about half way between Lockport and the perimeter highway. You may have heard about the flooding across the river at St. Andrews. Below I have copied an email received from him last night. > I've been getting calls and emails about the Red River and flooding, so I thought > I would write and let you know. > > On monday, after work, we had the most amazing experience. The river ice was groaning > and moaning and…

Great White Sharks

Through the filter of time ... a repost that may still be interesting to you from two years ago. The only place I've ever seen Great White Sharks in the wild (I'm not a SCUBA diver!) is in South Africa, where you can see them from cliffs, swimming back and forth looking for penguins (and seals?). I've heard there were some recent attacks near Cape Town (False Bay) by great whites, but I think they generally don't eat too many people there. That is probably because most South Africans either stay out of the water entirely or go all the way ... in SCUBA gear, or otherwise just keep a…

Water on a sub-freezing Mars

NASA researchers is now reporting in the May 21st issue of Nature that water could remain liquid at sub-freezing temperatures if made stable against freezing by containing dissolved minerals. From the abstract: Many features of the Martian landscape are thought to have been formed by liquid water flow, and water-related mineralogies on the surface of Mars are widespread and abundant. Several lines of evidence, however, suggest that Mars has been cold with mean global temperatures well below the freezing point of pure water. Martian climate modellers, considering a combination of greenhouse…

How do you know when to start worrying about the new Swine Flu threat?

Well, at some level, you should be worrying now. This is serious. But there are a lot of other things you should be worried about as well, such as the nuclear threat and, if you live in tornado alley, tornadoes. But when do you have to start paying attention to current information, bulletins, and so on, and to perhaps start planning to alter your behavior (like, not going to Mexico, or wearing around a mask and staying in the house, or perhaps something in between)? The World Health Organization (WHO) has a threat level system. The lowest threat level is 1, the highest is at 6. The good…

The evolution of creationists in the United States

A new paper by Kevin Padian of UC Berkeley is just out in Comptes Rendus Biologies, a French peer reviewed journal, on American creationism. Padian summarizes the history of creationism in the US. From the abstract: The history of anti-evolutionism in the United States begins only in the early decades of the 20th century but has evolved considerably since then. Various versions of the movement ("equal time" for creationism, "creation science", "intelligent design") have developed over time, but they have made few positive contributions to serious discourse about science and religion. Their…

Cease Fire, Congo Style

Amid calls by the rebel leader in the Congolese war, intensive fighting has broken out along the front lines among troops north of Goma, between Goma and Vitshumbi. This is a fairly large area of the Western Rift Valley nestled between the western rift wall and the Virunga Volcanoes (which is where the famous mountain gorillas live). Details here. I was once arrested for attempting to overthrow the government of Zaire in Vitshumbi, but was able to talk my way out of it pretty quickly. I was arrested by the Navy because, well, the Navy guy did not have a boat, and I did. In fact, I had…

They make laughingstocks of themselves, don't they?

I could not believe this thread at the antievolution.org forum. Wesley Elsberry pointed out an instance of blatant fraud in a creationist presentation by Cornelius Hunter: Then there was the ID conference in San Francisco where Dr. Cornelius G. Hunter, the "expert" involved in the antievolution shenanigans in Roseville, CA, presented the wolf and thylacine as identical twins separated at birth argument. His visual aid, handily printed in the proceedings, consisted of two images side-by-side. On one side, you had the usual painting of two thylacines in color. On the other, you had the same…

A few more bits on Keating/McCain

McCain's recent history (September 13th, 2008) Why is the distant history of John McCain as a prisoner of war always part of his resume, but his more recent history in the savings and loan failings of the 1980s and 1990s is never mentioned? McCain was one of the senators in the Keating 5 who took $1.3 million in campaign contributions from Michael Keating. Those five senators then used their influence to get regulators to back off their investigations of Lincoln Savings and Loan, owned by Keating. Way back then McCain showed his propensity for working across the aisle as the other four…

Comer's Suit Against Creationist Texas Ed Agency: More Details

From the NCSE: As reported in last week's Evolution Education Update, Chris Comer, the Director of Science at the Texas Education Agency (TEA) who was forced to resign over a dispute involving intelligent design, filed suit in federal court, seeking an injunction against TEA's "policy of neutrality with respect to the teaching of creationism in the Texas public schools." According to the Dallas Morning News (July 3, 2008), Comer's suit alleges "that she was terminated for contravening an 'unconstitutional' policy at the agency. The policy required employees to be neutral on the subject of…

Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity

I have not read this book, but I'm interested in finding out more about it. Has anyone out there had a shot at it? Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Sather Classical Lectures) Information from Amazon.com: Review "Sedley's argument is subtle and expert. . . . The brilliance of this book is that Sedley lets the Greeks talk to us and, surprisingly, we can understand what they're saying."--Nature Product Description The world is configured in ways that seem systematically hospitable to life forms, especially the human race. Is this the outcome of divine planning or simply of the…

Frustrations Of the Academic Life

After writing yesterday's post, I found I was still muttering about Michael Ruse's paper. So I thought to myself, why should I just rant here at the blog? How about I get down to business and write a proper journal article about it? Mentally I started doing just that. To my surprise, I found the article practically writing itself. I quickly had an outline of what I wanted to say, started composing paragraphs, and thought about various books and articles I would want to cite. I started to get excited. Figured I could toss it off in a week, and then get back to my various other unfinished…

Sunday Chess Problem

It's time to take a break from helpmates and return to selfmates. This week's problem was composed by Andrey Selivanov in 2014. The stipulation is selfmate in three: Recall that in a selfmate, white plays first and forces black to give checkmate in no more than the stipulated number of moves. Black, for his part, will try despeartely not to give mate. It's a complete inversion of normal chess logic! Selivanov is something of a wizard when it comes to selfmates. He routinely churns out problems that make other composers weep with envy. This is actually one of his lighter efforts, but…

Sunday Chess Problem

Well, it's eleven o'clock at night and I just remembered I forgot to do a Sunday Chess Problem for this week. So I guess we'll have to go with one of those charming lightweights whose main point is a shocking key. This one was composed by Gerhardus Goethart in 1952. White is to play and mate in two. Remember that white is always moving up the board and black is always moving down. Vertical files are labeled a--h from left to right, while horizontal ranks are labeled 1--8 from bottom to top. So, in the diagram, white's king is on f6 while black's king is on d4. When we write down…

Hate should be outed too.

Today is National Coming Out Day. Last week, a young man from Norman OK killed himself, a few days after listening to hours of hateful comments at a Norman City Council meeting. Watch it. Comments start at ~min 43. I picked a time-point at random-- ~ 1 hour in. I got to see a comment by Fred Pope, a hateful, disgusting piece of shit. Fred Pope said he and his family moved to Norman 15 years ago looking for a place that didn't necessarily embrace the GLBT community. "We moved here so we could raise a family in a great location," Pope said. "And what this does tonight is begin to undermine…

Backwards day: Using ERVs to treat cancer

Retroviruses cause cancer. Like how HPV causes cancer, its not really 'on purpose', its just a side-effect of their life-cycle-- insert DNA randomly into a genome enough times, and eventually youre going to plop somewhere you aint supposed to be, and cause cancer. Thus I am terribly amused when Creationists bawww about how ERVs are perfect and special (not junk!)... cause if those ERVs werent rendered junk by mutagenesis or epigenetics, we would all be dead (technically, never born). Found a paper in Nature Cancer Gene Therapy that kinda turns this issue upside down: Fusogenic membrane…

XMRV and chronic fatigue syndrome: British cohort

October 16, 2009-- The science of this paper is fine. Their experiments are fine. And, there is clearly a bias for the presence of XMLV in CFS patients. BUT, this story doesnt make sense. October 23, 2009-- This normally 'harmless' virus is more prevalent in certain areas of the world (Africa) than in others (US), and is 'enriched' in sick populations where its not normally so prevalent (US HIV). Similarly, XMRV was not found in 589 prostate cancer biopsies in Germany. None. Zero. In 589 biopsies, as opposed to the 233 in the XMRV+ paper I wrote about earlier. It could be that XMRV is a US…

Return of the PERVS: Abandoned pigs and diabeetus

Back in 2006, I wrote a short note on the use of pigs for organ transplants. Why the hell was I interested in pig organs? Well, pigs can be genetically engineered to be almost perfect organ donors for humans that need transplants. Perfect... except for the fact pigs have PERVs like humans have HERVs. So sure you could put a pig aortic valves into humans... but would those transplanted organs start producing pig-specific retroviruses? Would they evolve into the next HIV-1/AIDS pandemic? Would they stay silent and everything would be fine? Hell, we dont know what the human ERVs do in…

Giles on Atheists

The next time you see someone criticize Richard Dawkins for not giving adequate treatment to the modal logic version of the ontological argument, remind him that this column, from Town Hall columnist Doug Giles, is far more representative of the depth of American religious thought: Paul (not the lead singer of the Beatles, but the apostle Paul) states that God has made Himself known, via creation, to all men. According to the apostle, God's revealed Himself not just to Christians and to Jews, but to every one everywhere (see Romans 1:18-21). This means that from Jo-Jo the Brazilian monkey…

Space Travel, Einstein, and GPS

Below you'll find the slides from my Physics Day presentations at Space Center Houston, embedded via SlideShare. I was doing the TED-style minimal text thing, so they're probably not all that comprehensible on their own. The event was supposed to have a pop-culture connection, so I decided to use space travel and extrasolar planets as a hook for talking about relativity, thus all the movie images near the beginning. The original idea I had was to look at different fictional ways of evading the ban on faster-than-light travel, but they wanted something more in the half-hour range than the hour…