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Observed Arctic sea-ice loss directly follows anthropogenic CO2 emission?

I haven't read the paper (Observed Arctic sea-ice loss directly follows anthropogenic CO2 emission; Dirk Notz and Julienne Stroeve; Science 03 Nov 2016: DOI: 10.1126 / science.aag2345), of course, because it is paywalled. Curiously, it doesn't seem to have made anyone else's blog (a paper about sea ice in Science, and everyone ignores it like it was in poor taste or something?). But I found U.S. and German researchers calculate individual contribution to climate change which offers us the immortal quote “The observed numbers are very simple,” Notz said. “For each ton of carbon dioxide that a…

Links for 2012-04-17

A few thoughts on Hilary Rosen, moms and work But instead of engaging Rosen's points, the media storm is about how Democrats Hate Mothers. Or, Democrats Hate GOOD Mothers -- you know, the kind who stay at home. The women the Democrats like are those slutty Planned Parenthood sluts, or something. And while all the Democratic and Republican spokespeople (including President Obama) seem to agree that being a mother is THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB IN THE WORLD: -None of the men who think parenthood is THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB IN THE WORLD seem willing to do it full-time themselves, even when, like Mitt…

Climate inaction to be ‘catastrophe’

Or so says Auntie, reporting well-known climatologist John Kerry. In fact, I have a guilty secret that I will share with you: I faked this screenshot. But only a bit. Here's the original. My monkey, whilst faked in, is every bit as valid as their monkey. Its from the Rare Animals feed on facebook, which I recommend. I have another secret I'll share with you: I haven't read the report. Not only that, I haven't really read other people reading the report. But what I was interested in, at least somewhat, was the general tenor of reactions. So the Beeb has Viewpoints: Reactions to UN climate…

The Bottleneck Years by H.E.Taylor - Chapter 66

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 65 Table of Contents Chapter 67 Chapter 66 Arrangements, December 11, 2058 Anna was mercifully asleep when I got home. When I told Edie about Matt, she was subdued. She put her hand to her mouth and sat down quickly. Then to my surprise, her attention shifted to me. She was concerned about me. I appreciated that, but I had another duty. To call Jon. Matt's death hit Jon just as hard as it hit me. The braggadocio and oneupmanship were gone. We didn't talk long. I pointedly did not raise the issue of Matt's body and interment in order to give…

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor - Chapter 39

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 38 Table of Contents Chapter 40 Chapter 39 A Walk in the Park, April 26, 2056 I got a bit of a surprise when I got home. Edie caught me just as I was entering and asked, "Do you think we are descending into a New Dark Age?" My head was full of genomic patterns, molecular shapes and chemical cycles --- walking home I had been going over the design of my synthetic carbon eater --- and I was flummoxed. It was so out of the blue. "I don't know. I haven't thought about it." Edie wasn't about to be put off. "Well think about it. I'd like to discuss…

Jim Babka's Report on Brayton vs. Klayman

Jim Babka, the host of the radio show I was on a few days ago, has posted a report to his blog on how the show went. It seems he thought it went pretty much the way I thought it went: Brayton, who argued that the outcome of Terri's case was correct, was well-prepared and forensically strong. I think Mr. Klayman, who was primarily upset with Jeb Bush's failure to intervene and rescue Terri, is used to shorter interviews because after his four or five-bullet point initial statement he crumbled into almost entirely ad hominem arguments. He called one set of judges morons, his opposing guest an…

The Doctrine of Incorporation

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case involving a display of the Ten Commandments on government property. The case is McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky. This morning I received a PDF of a brief filed in that case on behalf of several religious right organizations. I do not know if the brief is publicly available, so I won't post a link to it at this time. What makes this brief interesting is that it doesn't just argue that posting the Ten Commandments on public property doesn't violate the first amendment, it argues that the first amendment does not apply to the states at all, leaving…

Two Must-Read Articles

The first is from Andrew Sullivan, an article on how the red state/blue state division is largely one of those who talk the talk and those who walk the walk. The red states talk about morality and "family values", but the blue states tend to actually put those values into practice far more often: Take two iconic states: Texas and Massachusetts. In some ways, they were the two states competing in the last election. In the world's imagination, you couldn't have two starker opposites. One is the homeplace of Harvard, gay marriage, high taxes, and social permissiveness. The other is Bush country…

StopTheACLU Peddles False Quotes

Our fevered friends at StopTheACLU have issued a "Code Red Alert" because the ACLU is trying to get the courts to allow people of different religions to be able to swear on something other than the Bible when taking an oath in court (they don't have specific links, so you'll have to scroll about halfway down to find it). They've filed suit in North Carolina, which forbids people from taking an oath in court on anything other than the Bible. And naturally, the anti-ACLUers are up in arms over it. And their reasoning is quite amusing: We are a Judeo-Christian country, not a Muslim one. The…

Egnor mangles the history of eugenics

John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution. He used a textbook called A Civic Biology, by GW Hunter, which, if you ever seen it, is a rather awful book, and is certainly something we wouldn't want poisoining our classrooms today. Michael Egnor, as behind the times and obtuse as ever, uses the ugly racism of A Civic Biology to falsely damn evolution. He quotes some nasty bits of the book, such as suggestions to prevent breeding with the feeble-minded and its equation of civilization with white skins, and then concludes with a foolish switcheroo. The struggle between a '…

Gay Marriage: Do It For The Children

Glen Lavy, an ADF attorney, has a deliciously illogical column at Townhall.com about the New Jersey gay marriage ruling. Even if one grants his premise, his conclusion completely contradicts that premise: Here's the premise: Those pressing for the legalization of same-sex marriage built a lot of their case on the notion that people in love have a right to get married, whatever their gender, and that the government has an obligation to protect and enforce that right. In fact, the government has only one obligation, when it comes to marriage, and as recently held by three major courts - the New…

Walcott on D'Souza's New Book

James Walcott has received the galley proofs for Dinesh D'Souza's new book, wherein he blames the "cultural left" for 9/11 because our horrible decadence makes the whackos so very angry. I think Walcott's reaction is about right: It isn't rare that I take instant animus against a book like this. But I don't tend to react right away. The responsible thing for me to do as an occasional book critic is to wait until the official pub date, find a suitable venue for review, and thrash the book based on its merits. But this is a special book, deserving special mistreatment. With The Enemy at Home, I…

How to Clean a Mirror

Let's say you have a mirror-- not some cheesey $2 makeup mirror, but a research-grade aluminum mirror-- and it has some crud on it, say a film of junk deposited during your Summer Institute for Hot MEtal Chemistry. Like, say, the mirror on the right in this picture: How do you get that mirror clean? Well, first, you assemble your tools: You'll need the mirror, some lens tissue (special soft, lint-free paper), a hemostat (I prefer the curved-tip kind shown here, but you can use the straight ones, too), and some solvent (the bottle here is methanol, but you sometimes need to use acetone). The…

The Academic Scene

A few weeks ago, Ethan Zuckerman got wistful about collaboration: Dave Winer's got a poignant thought over at Scripting News today: "Where is the Bronx Science for adults?" He explains that, as a kid, the best thing about attending the famous high school "was being in daily contact with really smart and creative people my own age." It's harder to find this in adulthood, he observes, even as a fellow at the Berkman Center, where Dave and I met four years ago. I empathize with Dave - the experience of being surrounded by smart people working on the same kinds of problems is one of the most…

Baghdad Update: Too Much TV

Another update from my friend Paul, working as a journalist in Baghdad, this time on an unfortunate collision between the Sci-Fi Channel and reality: ----------------- Today two suicide bombers walked into a police commando recruitment center and blew themselves up, killing 35 recruiting hopefuls. The night before I watched a TV show where a young cadet blew himself up at the police graduation ceremony - killing, as I recall, 35 people. That was a bit of a shock. The moments after I leave the desk at night, after a long shift, are very special to me. I read, listen to music, decompress and…

True Lab Stories: Smells Like... Not Victory, That's for Sure

(A couple of regular commenters will recognize this one...) Every working research lab has a sort of rhythm to it. There's always a collection of background sounds, in a particular pattern, that indicates that the lab is functioning properly. When I was a post-doc, the pattern was something like three mintues of white noise (the humming of the fans on the various electronic instruments, and the cooling water running through the magnet coils), followed by a sharp click (a mechanical shutter closing), then a loud clunking sort of noise (as the high-current supply for the magnetic trap switched…

Seminar Series: Threat or Menace?

The Female Science Professor is thinking about seminar series. Specifically, whether attendance should be mandatory for students: Being required to attend the departmental seminar eliminates that pesky decision-making process about whether to go to seminar or not. But then, if required to attend, you might sit there in the seminar, seething with resentment about being forced to attend rather than being trusted to make the decision to attend, and your anger at the controlling professors who are oppressing you leaves you unable to appreciate the seminars, even the ones that aren't horrific…

Letter to a non-atheist New Atheist

Dear Sam, I read your presentation to the Atheist Alliance. You were eminently successful in being a controversial contrarian, so your intent was well executed. Good work! However, I do have to disagree with your argument (oh, right — you were trying to stir up dissent. Again, good work!). You say that using the term "atheism" is a mistake, and that "Attaching a label to something carries real liabilities" … and that atheism is entirely negative. You say that accepting that label means we are agreeing to be "viewed as a cranky sub-culture". You say you never thought of yourself as an atheist…

Kids Those Days

One of the odd things about blogdom, and the commentariat in general, is the way that people will all seem to latch on to some particular idea at about the same time, despite the lack of any obvious connection between them. I keep having days when I scan through my RSS feeds, and find the same topics coming up again and again. This week's emergent theme seems to be "Kids These Days." It started with this deeply silly complaint about the "whiteness" of indie music by Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker, which strikes me as a classic example of a writer straining to find deep cultural meaning…

Virginia Heffernan Is Our Target Audience

There's a great post at NeuroDojo on the Heffernan business this weekend, and what the take-away ought to be: Yeah, let's criticize that she didn't get past the first impression of science blogs. We should expect Heffernan to look before leaping - she writes for the Times, after all, which still has a certain reputation as a paper of record and quality. But let's not pretend that her impression ain't shared by anyone else. For instance, she took heat for recommending a climate denialist blog. But that's not the first time that blog got recommended by people who ought to know better. That…

Sex, Intuition, and Evidence in Science

Over at A Most Curious Planet, Alexandra Jellicoe offers a story with the provocative headline Is Science Sexist?, which spins off an anecdote from astronomy: I was listening to Radio 4 a few months ago and the discussion about gender intelligence lodged in the deeper recesses of my brain unthought-of until recently when I went to see Jocelyn Bell Burnell talking of her 'Eureka' moment. She discovered the existence of neutron stars called Pulsar's in 1967 and I think she can safely be considered one of England's most pioneering and gifted scientists. I was struck by her comments that she…

The High Cost of Doing Physics

Yesterday, I spent $52 (plus shipping) buying sand. Not a gret big sack of sand, either-- just 200 grams of it. I count it as a bargain, too, because I was prepared to spend twice the amount for half as much. Now, granted, the $1000/kg sand is extremely high purity silicon dioxide, designed to be used in putting high-quality coatings on optical elements, and I would've bought that if it hadn't been back-ordered. The cheaper stuff is slightly lower purity-- 99.9% instead of 99.95%-- but it ought to work. And they had it in stock at Aldrich, so I decided to take a chance, and save $50 in the…

Climategate and why Monbiot is wrong

If you do not know what climategate refers to you probably got here via some odd typo in a google search. If you do but have not yet read Real Climate's post on it, you should do so. It is too late to rename the whole affair, but I thing "Swifthack" would have been more apropos. Climategate is big news and not just in the climate blogosphere, all the major newspapers have opined. Here in cyberland, I have seen a doubling of traffic without really writing a thing about it or having a high traffic site link to me, I am assuming general interest in the story is the reason. Most of what I…

Hansen wants the sceptics thrown in jail

This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic. Objection: In his June 23, 2008 testimony before the United States Congress, James Hansen called for the punishment of climate change skeptics for "crimes against humanity". This is a mockery of free speech, the antithesis of scientific investigation and a clear indication that global warming "science" is just another religious persecution like the Catholic Church's persecution of Galileo. Answer: The accusation is simply false. James Hansen never…

Baby stars, expected but heretofore unseen, seen.

This just in from NASA: PASADENA, Calif. -- Astronomers have at last uncovered newborn stars at the frenzied center of our Milky Way galaxy. The discovery was made using the infrared vision of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The heart of our spiral galaxy is cluttered with stars, dust and gas, and at its very center, a supermassive black hole. Conditions there are harsh, with fierce stellar winds, powerful shock waves and other factors that make it difficult for stars to form. Astronomers have known that stars can form in this chaotic place, but they're baffled as to how this occurs.…

Learning the Bash Shell

This is a repost of a review that is timely, given this week's focus on setting up your Linux server and changing all your computers over to Linux and so on. For the most part, computer operating systems all have a "shell." When people talk about the "command line" ... they are talking about the prompt in a shell. The concept of a shell, and the way we think of a shell today mostly stems from its implementation on Unix systems. A shell is a computer program that has a human interface and a number of built in or accessible functions (mostly other programs) that humans can invoke to make the…

The Bible as Ethnography ~ 05 ~ The Virgin Birth

I have a cousin in law who tells this story: Her youngest child found out about sex. Then he made the connection that if he existed, his parents must have had sex. So he confronted the parents with this, and mom was forced to admit, yes, of course, this is how babies get "made" and this is simply how things are. The child did not seem too concerned. Moments later, the child noticed his sister playing in the other room. A thought occurred to him ... a light went on, as it were. He turned back to his mother with an expression somewhere between accusation and perplexity. "You did it twice…

Innate Immune Response Defines Pathology and death in Those Infected by Highly Pathogenic Influenza

For the last couple of decades, perhaps beginning around the time of the publication of Laurie Garret's excellent thesis (The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance) on disease and politics and continuting through Gina Kolata's "Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic" there has been increased attention on the 1918 flu virus and pandemic, as well as subsequent outbreaks. This interest has probably been fueled by increased knowledge of (or incidence of?) tragic and highly newsworthy outbreaks of Ebola, SARS, and so on. More recently, the perception has grown…

Hints and Tips for Kicking Butt on the Wii Mario Kart

First of all, I want you to understand that I'm a lightweight in the Mario Kart game. Julia is not. So my pointers come mainly from watching her. (Watching her kick my butt, actually.) I also want to make a few other comments that are not tricks, tips, or "cheats" on how to win, but rather, general observation. First this: You never know who is watching you. On the Wii, you can make a Mii to look like yourself, a loved one, a famous historical character, or a blogger. So when we are driving around Coconut Mall (one of the race tracks) we often see, for instance, Charles Darwin or PZ…

The Rightful Place of Science

The rightful place of science is moving, never staying in one place, ever dancing and watching, on the always shifting sociopolitical landscape. A team of white coated eggheads can solve any problem with enough science. We need to get rid of the Jews, and we don't have enough bullets, so let's get the eggheads to figure out a way to do that. We need to take the Americans out of the Pacific, but we have insufficient resources but a lot of pilots. Let's get the engineers to come up with a one-way airplane. We need to get rid of the Nazis and Imperialist Japanese, and we hear the Eggheads…

Anthrax, Al Qaeda, and how having a Moron as a president has ruined this country

Photograph of anthrax Do you remember the Anthrax Scare? Envelopes with strange notes and mysterious white powder were showing up in various mailboxes. In many cases the white powder was "weaponized anthrax" ... anthrax (bacterial) spores processed in such a way to enhance the spread of the spores by air and infection via lung tissues. A total of five people died in that incident, which occurred shortly after the September 11th attacks. US Government Scientist Bruce Ivins had been under suspicion for a number of reasons, and on learning that prosecutes were about to charge him with…

The Kent Beuchert Affair: Bias and Corporate Lobbying on a Science Blog Energy Blog sponsored by Shell?

... Or just some kind of odd Internet Shenanigans. It turns out that if there is an organized effort to bias the discussion, it may be coming from the usual place ... the trolls... As I've been following the new energy blog on Sb, something seemed odd. Tiny pieces of evidence filtered together ... a memory here, a memory there ... and suddenly it became apparent that one of the commenters on Sceicneblogs new energy blog "Next Generation Energy" not only rang a bell, but indeed might be ringing numerous bells. I'm talking about Kent Beuchert. Kent is always there on the internet when the…

Biology Will Never Be the Same Again: Scott Lanyon

The Evolution 2008 conference started out today with a special program for K-12 teachers (mainly life science teachers) organized by the Minnesota Citizens for Science Education (MNCSE). The opening speaker was Scott Lanyon, director of the Bell Museum of Natural History. (The Bell hosted this event.) Scott's objective was to outline several areas of evolutionary biology where fundamental changes had occurred over recent years. This was to provide perspective and food for thought for the Life Sciences teachers attending the event, and Scott was very successful in this effort. In each case…

Article Processing Charges

In yesterday's post I mentioned that I wanted to use spring break to make progress on various writing and research projects. One of those projects is based on one of the Darwin Day talks I gave in February, in which I discussed some of the mathematical arguments used by anti-evolutionists. In my preparations I gathered together far more material than I could possibly include in the talk itself, so I thought I would turn it all into a proper article. The title would be something like, “The Evolution Of Anti-Evolutionary Mathematics.” Partly the intent would be to gather together and refute…

Sunday Chess Problem

I'm feeling a bit bereft now that the Sinquefield Cup is over. Fabiano Caruana won his first seven games, and then drew his last three, to win the tournament by a ridiculous three points (ahead of World Champion Magnus Carlsen). This is certainly one of the great tournament performances in chess history, worthy of mention alongside Anatoly Karpov's six straight wins in the 1994 Linares tournament, or Victor Korchnoi's eight straight in the 1968 Wijk aan Zee tournament. Not quite at the level of Bobby Fischer's twenty straight wins over grandmasters, though. Just saying. The incredible…

Church and State in Kansas

When I finished graduate school in 2000, I interviewed with a large number of schools. One of them was Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. They are a pretty strong liberal arts school which, its name notwithstanding, has never had a religious affiliation. I was interviewed by the chair of the department, and at one point he asked me, after noting that I had lived in the Northeast for nearly my whole life, whether I thought I would be happy to moving to Texas. I waxed eloquent about how I could be happy living anywhere, regardless of the state or whether it was a big city or a small…

Progress on the Twin Primes Conjecture

Number theory is chock-full of easily stated problems that are very difficult to solve. One such is the twin primes conjecture, which asserts simply that there are infinitely many twin primes. I'll assume you know what a prime number is. Twin primes are primes that differ by exactly two, such as 3 and 5, 5 and 7, 11 and 13, 17 and 19, or 101 and 103. Of course, everyone knows there are infinitely many primes. If you have not seen it before, here's one easy way to prove that fact. We assume for a contradiction that there are only finitely many primes, let's say k of them. Then we can…

Does God Like it When You Question Him?

Yoram Hazony, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says He does! I suppose that's good news for someone like me, but the basis for Hazony's argument strikes me as a bit dubious. Here's the opening: Today's debates over the place of religion in modern life often showcase the claim that belief in God stifles reason and science. As Richard Dawkins writes in his best-seller “The God Delusion,” religious belief “discourages questioning by its very nature.” In “The End of Faith,” his own New Atheist manifesto, Sam Harris writes that religion represents “a vanishing point beyond which rational…

[insert generic Draco Malfoy joke here]

A bunch of folks have emailed me about this article, being heavily pimped in pop media: Broad-Spectrum Antiviral Therapeutics Being SciBlogs resident Debbie Downer, it was good to see Ive trained you all well. The most common comment people emailed along with the link to a pop news article: "Why is this wrong?"/"Why is this not going to work?"/etc LOL!! Well, this is a very very very preliminary paper-- The concept itself is clever, the basic science seems fine, and they have taken it beyond 'this works in tissue culture' to 'this can work in mice with a specific pathogen'. Thats more than…

Mixed messages from the NAS

The NAS has a new edition of their Science, Evolution, and Creationism publication, which is a genuinely excellent piece of work. We've used the previous editions in our introductory biology course here at UMM, and if you want a short, plainly written introduction to the evidence for and importance of evolution to modern biology, I recommend it highly. It fills a niche well — it explains the science and gives a general overview for the layman without getting distracted by the details. And if $12 strains your wallet and 70 pages exceeds your attention span, you can download an 8 page summary…

Lunch with a crazy old lady

Oklahomas Christian Medical and Dental Association is such a massive joke. They brought in Donald Ewert, a clueless dork, to talk about the 'Evolution of the Immune System' Creationism. Brought in Mr. NOMNOMNOMNOM to talk about the science/religion/ethics behind stem cell research SCIENTISTS KILLING BABBIES! And yesterday they brought in Ellen Myers to talk about: "Did the Nazis have it correct? Part II: Euthanasia and Doctor Assisted Suicide; Will We Repeat the Past." I had no idea who this woman was. A casual Google search turned up juicy morsels like this: She has published papers in the…

Media Reaction to Romney I: The Good Guys

There were a few bright spots in the way the media reacted to Romney's disgusting speech. Keith Olbermann offered these characteristically wise words: In a milestone speech in 1960, the national candidate for the Democratic Party, John F. Kennedy, told this nation why his Catholicism would not interfere with his responsibility as president, explaining he believed religion was a private matter, that separation of church and state should be absolute, that his presidential decisions should be made without any regard to any outside religious pressure. Tonight in our third story on the…

The Democrats and FISA

Several of my fellow Science Bloggers have come to a strange conclusion regarding the recent FISA vote in Congress. Ed Brayton titles his post on the subject “Democrats Cave on FISA Amendment.” P.Z. Myers concurs, writing, “It's a perfect example of the failure of the Democratic party: they allowed the FISA bill to pass, and essentially revealed that they don't give a damn about civil liberties.” Mike Dunford, writes, “Because every time the Republicans threaten them, they drop to their knees and beg for mercy - like they just did in the Senate, with this wiretap legislation. I swear,…

A Paradigm Shift in Evolution?

Today's New York Times has a series of articles up about various aspects of evolution. One that caught my eye was this essay by paleontologist Douglas Erwin. It discusses various challenges to the Neo-Darwinian synthesis. Not the silly, brain-dead challenges of the creationists and ID folks, but the serious challenges from people who actually know what they are talking about. Erwin begins by explaining the basics of Neo-Darwinism: To understand the current tumult it helps to understand how our evolutionary framework developed. It was constructed from the 1930s to 1950s by early…

Imminent Death of the Paper Book Predicted, .GIF at 11

I got a royalty statement yesterday for How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog (it continues to sell steadily, which is very gratifying), which includes a breakdown of the sales in terms of different formats. That reminded me of a particular annoying quirk of many recent discussions of the state of modern publishing, which is the often unsupported assertion that everything is ebooks these days, and paper books (and book stores) are just a small residual element that publishers and authors cling to out of historical affection. Since I happen to have my royalty statements in front of me,…

Nordita Workshop for Science Writers: Wrap-Up

I didn't write a summary of the third day of "Quantum Boot Camp" to go with my Day One and Day Two summaries for a simple reason: I would've needed to do that on Saturday, and I spent Saturday in transit back to the US. More than that, though, it was harder to summarize than the other two days, because my talk was the middle of three, and thus I spent most of the first talk fiddling with my slides and fretting, and most of the third fighting off the post-talk adrenaline crash. Happily, Sedeer at Inspiring Science offers a summary of the first two talks, namely Larus Thorlacius from Nordita…

SteelyKid Demonstrates Relativity

Before going to the playground Saturday to investigate non-intertial frames, SteelyKid and I went over to campus to do some experiments in relativity. Galileian relativity, that is: What you see here is SteelyKid sitting on a rolling lab cart with a camera bolted to it. She throws a ball up in the air a couple of times with the cart at rest, then I start pushing it across the room, and she tosses the ball a few more times. You can see from the video that, other than the motion of the background, the two cases look very similar. This is a demonstration of the principle of relativity, which…

Small College, Exotic Particles

Topping the looooong list of things I would give a full ResearchBlogging write-up if I had time is this new paper on a ultra-cold atom realization of "Dirac Monopoles". This is really cool stuff, but there are a lot of intricacies that I don't fully understand, so writing it up isn't a simple matter. The really short version, though, is that a team of AMO physicists have created particles that are analogous to magnetic monopoles-- that is, to a particle that was only a "north" or "south" pole of a magnet, not both together like a conventional bar magnet (leading to my favorite social-media…

Bose Condensation of Coffee?

Writing up the evaporative cooling post on cold atom techniques, I used the standard analogy that people in the field use for describing the process: cooling an atomic vapor to BEC is like the cooling of a cup of coffee, where the hottest component particles manage to escape the system of interest, and what's left behind is colder. The departing atoms or coffee molecules carry off more than the average energy per particle, leaving a lower average energy (and thus a lower temperature) for the remainder. A question that sometimes comes up when I talk about this is how you can possibly use this…

On Consciousness

David Barash has a short, but interesting post about consciousness. Responding to someone who asked him about the most difficult unsolved problem in science, Barash writes: I answered without hesitation: How the brain generates awareness, thought, perceptions, emotions, and so forth, what philosophers call "the hard problem of consciousness." It's a hard one indeed, so hard that despite an immense amount of research attention devoted to neurobiology, and despite great advances in our knowledge, I don't believe we are significantly closer to bridging the gap between that which is physical,…