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Hello, Southern Maryland: Talk Wednesday at St. Mary's College

I'm in last-minute-revision mode here, made mroe frantic by the fact that SteelyKid developed a fever yesterday, and had to be kept home from day care. I did want to pop in to note that I will be giving the Natural Science and Mathematics Colloquium at St. Mary's College in Maryland tomorrow, Wednesday the 13th. This will be the "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk, described for the colloquium announcement as: Quantum physics, the science of extremely small things like atoms and subatomic particles, is one of the best tested theories in the history of science, and also one…

Kirkwall, Orkney

I'm in Kirkwall on the Orkney islands for a conference on maritime societies in the Viking and Medieval periods. It's a lovely sunny evening, which is apparently a rare and precious occurrence around these parts. The dialect is also something to experience: the waitress at the fish & chips shop I'm in took my order and then asked "Ta se' en?". On the third try I managed to understand that she wondered if I wanted to sit in, that is, to eat my fresh skate on the premises. I do. And now I'm outside on the dock, smelling the sea, hearing a blackbird and the occasional seagull. Hardly any…

Lind & Mörner Still Mucking Around in Ravlunda

Local newspaper Ystads Allehanda reports on new fieldwork in Ravlunda by amateur archaeologist Bob G Lind and retired geology professor Nils-Axel Mörner. The last time the two enthusiastic gentlemen interfered with the Iron Age cemetery in question, they were reprimanded by the County Archaeologist. Now they are clearing brush from the site in order to make their imagined Bronze Age calendar alignments clearer. Future plans include magnetometry mapping. Mörner is quoted as believing that this technique will allow the pair to map individual ancient footprints in the subsoil, because in his…

Science Debate 2008

Dear Reader, according to my server logs, you are likely to live either in the US or in Sweden. Considering the blog neighbourhood I'm in, and the contents of Aard, I believe you care about science. Regardless of party politics, and wherever we all are in the world, I think we can agree that we urgently need the next US president to be science-friendly, science-savvy and reality-based. The Science Debate 2008 initiative has been launched to push science policy as a central issue in the US presidential campaign. Specifically, and using their not inconsiderable media clout, the original…

Afro-Chinese History Manipulation

China's interest in the natural resources of Africa has ballooned lately and received much media coverage. Apparently, the last time somebody was that interested in metal ores and scrap, they were Germany in the late 1930s. This political force field across Africa is now, of course, being dressed up in cultural finery, including the manipulation of historical perceptions. Under the leadership of Admiral Zheng He, China enjoyed a brief era of transoceanic power with insanely huge ships in the early 15th century. These efforts were apparently terminated because the Chinese failed to reach…

Firefox Rages Against the Dying of the Light

I've run Firefox 2.0 under three different operating systems on several machines. And every time I start this otherwise excellent program after re-booting, it gives me the following error message "Your last Firefox session closed unexpectedly. You can restore the tabs and windows from your previous session, or start a new session if you think the problem was related to a page you were viewing." My method of turning the thing off is in fact uncontroversial: I just click the "close window" button top right. So why does it consistently give me this buggy message? I don't know. Maybe it's because…

Stockholm Library Vandalised

Dagens Nyheter reports that the Stockholm University Library has seen some pretty bad vandalism. Yesterday morning it was discovered that someone had disconnected the drain-pipe from an upstairs washbasin and opened the taps to the max. Several cubic meters of water flooded out during the night and drenched three floors. Luckily, few books were damaged, but the place will have to close while everything is dried out and the carpeting replaced. Vandalising libraries is of course on a par with organising book bonfires or bringing down internet hubs, a particularly ugly crime. I hope whoever did…

Odin, Thor and Other Space Aliens

Regular Dear Reader Christina lives in a small town in western Canada, where there are "lots of nice rock art and arrowheads and Indians (though they don't want to get excavated for political reasons) ". Here's a cool snippet from a letter she sent me. "Speaking about books and the local library, I've discovered that if you want to read about Old Norse religion, then you'll have to look in the science fiction section. I guess I should have known, or what? Most likely, the reason is that I live in a town that used to be a really tiny place, but that's grown into a major city in the past five…

Book Review: Lönn, Uppdragsarkeologi och forskning

The Department of Archaeology at the University of Gothenburg recently published a nice little book written in Swedish by the seasoned contract archaeologist Marianne Lönn: Uppdragsarkeologi och forskning, "contract archaeology and research". Lönn's main theses are: Archaeologists look at old things to find out what it was like to live a long time ago. Contract archaeology is research. This research has its own agenda and needn't pay any attention to what university scholars are doing unless their work is clearly relevant to contract archaeology. Contract archaeologists should be proud of…

That it is easier to agree on economics than morality

When I argued for treating GW as economics not morality, I didn't trouble myself to say "and I think it is easier to agree on economics than on morality", because it hadn't occurred to me that people might disagree. But of course, this is the internet, so people do disagree. CIP says so, for example. To start off, consider the usual pieties about the intertwining of economics and morality to have been uttered. This post won't be as brilliantly convincing as most of mine, because I haven't really thought it through; it being so obvious to me, as I said above. It's almost a layers / category…

Get Out the Vote

If you're in the US, it's Election Day, so go vote. I'd like to say something here about how I don't care who you actually vote for, but of course that's not true-- I would strongly prefer it if you were to vote for Barack Obama and other Democrats, and against Mitt Romney and a Republican party that sees sneering contempt for modern science as a path to electoral victory. But more than that, I prefer to live in the sort of country where people actually exercise their hard-won rights to help determine the future course of the nation. So, go vote. Even if it's for the wrong guy. And if your…

Weekend Fun

Played the new German board game Finca that my friend Eddie the heathen goldsmith brought along. It's an abstract system lightly dressed up in a story about harvesting and distributing fruit and greens on Mallorca of all things. Good fun though! Then we played Blokus, always fun too. Took a sunny six-hour bike trip with my 11-y-o son, had kebab & fries, found three geocaches, failed to find two. It's great when your kid is big enough that he can keep up for hours like that! Quality time. Went to Circus Brazil Jack with my 6-y-o daughter. As usual a mix of the semi-desperately cheezy and…

Weekend Fun

Saturday me and the kids went on an unusual package tour. First we took the 1903 steam ship Mariefred from Stockholm to Mariefred, and got to visit the engine room while the machine was working. Mariefred is a small town on Lake Mälaren whose name preserves that of Pax Mariae, one of the last monasteries founded in Sweden before the Reformation. It is home to one of Sweden's liveliest steam railroad societies which runs a narrow-gauge railroad with a plethora of lovely locomotives and wagons. We saw an amateur musical played at the old railway station, with the actors making entrances and…

Walls Impede Wifi

My experiments with the wifi installation in our house and the excellent Bredbandskollen TPTEST bandwidth tester (mainly for machines in Sweden) has taught me a few interesting things about wifi. Your operating system may report the quality of the connection in percent or columns or somesuch. This is not directly proportional to the actual bandwidth you're getting. One percentage estimate may correspond to a wide range of bandwidth figures. The bandwidth of a wifi connection is extremely sensitive to obstacles such as walls, doors, even waste paper baskets. I started with the access point…

Sb Reader Survey

ScienceBlogs has a huge audience (largely thanks to Pharyngula), which attracts advertisers. However, though the site's hit rate is a good quantitative selling point when you're pushing ad space, it lacks a qualitative dimension. If you advertise here, you know a lot of people will see your ad, but you won't know who they are. My dad the ad man has actually worked with this sort of thing for decades. He and his colleagues will help you classify consumers and media outlets so that you can identify your ideal customer and ways to reach her. Put simply, if you're in the business of selling yarn…

Oh, the fun you can have

Who's Afraid of Peer Review? by John Bohannon is about his experiments in sending a fatally-flawed paper to a variety of open-access journals, and the appalling lack of rejections that followed (note that PLOS-ONE correctly rejected it). To make it not too easy to reject just based on "I can't find your institute on the internet" (and, I think, to simulate the target group) the paper was supposed to come from non-West non-native-English speakers. And so: ...my native English might raise suspicions. So I translated the paper into French with Google Translate, and then translated the result…

People in Alabama Supporting Judge McKathan

The judge who has begun wearing a judicial robe with the Ten Commandments stitched into it is finding support in his own home town of Andalusia, where his district court is found. I doubt anyone could be surprised. But here's what I find amusing about it. Look at this quote: Elizabeth Shine, also of Andalusia, has no problem with the Pleasant Home native's judicial robe, and the fact that it is emblazoned with Old Testament scriptural verses. "It's his robe," Shine commented. "So, if it's the way he feels, he should have every right to put it on his robe." Is there really any doubt that if,…

George Washington's Mythical Prayer Journal

I noted in my last post on the Steve Williams lawsuit that I had contacted a Washington scholar to confirm that the "George Washington Prayer Journal" was indeed known to be fraudulent. That scholar is Frank Grizzard of the University Virginia, a senior associate editor of the George Washington Papers collection housed there. Here is his response: The so-called prayer journal is not in GW's writing, although I'm not sure it's actually a forgery. The manuscript dealer (Burk I think) who first sold it when it came to light in the 19th century printed a facsimile edition in which he admits…

Ask Ethan #112: The very, very end of the Universe (Synopsis)

“End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.” -J.R.R. Tolkien There's a realization we all face at some point in our lives: that not only are we going to someday have our lives come to an end, but that everything that exists in the Universe will cease to be in its current form. All life will wither away, the last stars will burn out, the galaxies themselves will be driven apart from one another, the individual stars and planets will be ejected,…

The Physics Of Back To The Future (Synopsis)

Mr. Strickland: “I noticed your band is on the roster for the dance auditions after school today. Why even bother, McFly? You don’t have a chance. You’re too much like your old man. No McFly ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley!” Marty McFly: “Yeah, well, history is gonna change.” -Back To The Future If you've ever wished you could go back in time and undo that mistake you made, to have a second chance to get it right the first time, you're certainly not alone. Indeed, for as long as the concept of time has been around, humans have dreamed about this possibility, as some of…

Ask Ethan #110: What Did The Sky Look Like When Earth First Formed? (Synopsis)

“In such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the flowers of night inhale their perfume, lighted like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding his soul in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not himself perhaps have told what was passing in his own mind; he felt something depart from him, and something descend upon him, mysterious interchanges of the depths of the soul with the depths of the universe.” -Victor Hugo The night sky is a memorable, inimitable sight. With the exception of the planets, the stars that shine so brightly and…

Weekend Diversion: The NFL Story You Don't Hear (Synopsis)

“I can look in their eyes and see it. That’s the best feeling I can have. … I know I didn’t affect their lives just today, but it carries on for years and years to come.” -Warrick Dunn When most people think about the NFL, they think of a sport they either enjoy watching or couldn't care less about. But when they think of the players, words that come to mind are violent, thug and criminal, which doesn't paint a flattering picture. Maybe you'll get a song running through your head when you think of it, like Uncle Tupelo's Criminals. You may have heard of any number of crimes committed by its…

Ask Ethan #109: How Do Photons Experience Time? (Synopsis)

“Everyone has his dream; I would like to live till dawn, but I know I have less than three hours left. It will be night, but no matter. Dying is simple. It does not take daylight. So be it: I will die by starlight.” -Victor Hugo Whether you're at rest or in motion, you can be confident that -- from your point of view -- the laws of physics will behave exactly the same no matter how quickly you're moving. You can move slowly, quickly or not at all, up to the limits that the Universe imposes on you: the speed of light. Image credit: Noreen of http://thecampgal.com/2014/06/17/flashlight-…

Throwback Thursday: Do you really love science? (Synopsis)

“When I say, ‘I love you,’ it’s not because I want you or because I can’t have you. It has nothing to do with me. I love what you are, what you do, how you try. I’ve seen your kindness and your strength. I’ve seen the best and the worst of you. And I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are.” –Joss Whedon When you first venture out into the world, you're armed, as a human being, with an incredible intelligence, but with no experience. All sorts of basic things must be learned, often the hard way: hot things will burn you, hot things that don't look hot will also burn you, and that…

Ask Ethan #102: Is Everything In The Universe The Same Age? (Synopsis)

“The total number of people who understand relativistic time, even after eighty years since the advent of special relativity, is still much smaller than the number of people who believe in horoscopes.” -Yuval Ne’eman It's been 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang for us, and when we look out at a distant object in the Universe, we're seeing it as it was in the past. Its age -- as it appears -- is determined only by how long the light took for it to travel from that object to our eyes, but to someone living there, it will also appear that the Universe is 13.8 billion years old. Image credit…

Mostly Mute Monday: The Milky Way's Largest Star Cluster (Synopsis)

“The wonder is, not that the field of the stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.” -Anatole France Wherever large, dense collections of cool gas gather together under the force of their own gravity, new stars are bound to form. Every galaxy goes through peaks and lulls in star formation, yet at any given time, one star cluster will always be the largest and most massive. Image credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team. Discovered only in the 1960s due to its location in the galactic plane, Westerlund 2 holds…

Throwback Thursday: Are asteroids dangerous? (Synopsis)

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” -H. P. Lovecraft When it comes to risk assessment, there's one type that humans are notoriously bad at: the very low-frequency but high-consequence risks and rewards. It's why so many of us are so eager to play the lottery, and simultaneously why we're catastrophically afraid of ebola and plane crashes, when we're far more likely to die from something mundane, like getting hit by a truck. One of the examples where science and this type of fear-based fallacy intersect is the…

Mostly Mute Monday: Terrific Tails, For A Time (Synopsis)

“Without any doubt, the regularity which astronomy shows us in the movements of the comets takes place in all phenomena. The trajectory of a simple molecule of air or vapour is regulated in a manner as certain as that of the planetary orbits; the only difference between them is that which is contributed by our ignorance. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge.” -Pierre-Simon Laplace Originating from well out beyond the planets we're accustomed to, the cold, icy worlds of the outer Solar System normally roam in isolation, hardly noticed by anything at…

Mostly Mute Monday: The Milky Way’s Most Recent Supernova (Synopsis)

“And no one showed us to the land And no one knows the where’s or why’s But something stirs and something tries And starts to climb towards the light” -Pink Floyd, Echoes It's pretty difficult to imagine, but a little over 300 years ago, a supernova -- a dying, ultramassive star -- exploded, giving rise to such a luminous explosion that it might have shone as bright as our entire galaxy. And nobody on Earth saw it. Image credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); Acknowledgment: R. Fesen (Dartmouth) and J. Morse (Univ. of Colorado). Located in the plane of our Milky Way galaxy…

Saint, monster...they're the same thing

A name I'd like to see banished to oblivion is that of Paul Hill, the religious fanatic and murderer who gunned down Dr John Britton and James Barrett at an abortion clinic. I don't care whether you are pro-choice or anti-woman, only the most wretched, insane god-walloper can possibly approve of assassinating health-care providers to protect fetuses. And there can't be that many of them, can there? And they are going to face universal public censure, right? Cruelly, archy tells me otherwise. Behold, Paul Hill Days. A couple of deranged Christian organizations are planning to send their…

Ask Ethan #67: Dark Matter vs. Dark Energy (Synopsis)

“We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposed to rob us of their companionship.” -James Harvey Robinson The Universe seems to be full of contradictions. On one hand, everywhere we look -- in all directions and at all locations -- we find that it's full of stars, galaxies and clusters. There are regions pretty much everywhere where, in the great cosmic struggle between all the pulls and pushes, gravitation has won. Image credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, UCO/Lick Observatory and the University of…

A Cincinnati local paper reacts to Ken Ham's Folly

A Cincinnati news weekly, the City Beat, has weighed in on the Creation "Museum". They don't seem to like it. Here are some of the good quotes from the article. Gene Kritsky, biologist: it's almost like intellectual molestation. Not only is it bad science, it is filled with bad religion, and it's also bad sociology and bad history, too. Lawrence Krauss, physicist: This is an institution designed to mis-educate children. This is nothing but an institutionalized lie and a scientific fraud. Edwin Kagin, lawyer: What they are doing is no less an attack on the very way that science and…

Messier Monday: The Most Elusive Globular Cluster, M55 (Synopsis)

“The only thing I have learnt over the years is that if you enjoy your work and put in the best efforts, it will show. If you follow this process, things work out. But if you go chasing a formula, success will elude you.” -Mahesh Babu When you know something is there but you can't find it for yourself, it makes the search all the more maddening. Yet this exactly was the case for Charles Messier, hunting a catalogued object by a colleague of his for fourteen years before he finally found it! Image credit: Jim Mazur’s Astrophotography, via Skyledge at http://www.skyledge.net/Messier55.htm.…

Ask Ethan #54: What’s the Earliest Signal from the Universe? (Synopsis)

“From earliest times, humans — explorers and thinkers — have wanted to figure out the shape of their world. Forever, the way we’ve done that is through storytelling. It is difficult to let the truth get in the way of a good story.” -Adam Savage When we look back into the Universe, there's a wonderful, remarkable story that it tells us about itself. The more light we gather, of different wavelengths and over longer periods of time, the more we can discover. Image credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and…

Interesting Interview from Dover

My buddy Burt Humburg is featured in a story in the York Daily Record, which has been doing a great job of covering the Dover situation as it has developed over the last year and a half. I met Burt at a conference at Berkeley in 2003 and he was a riot. On leave from his medical residency at the time, he was taking full advantage of his few precious days of freedom by imbibing large amounts of wine underneath a giant T-rex skeleton (one of the cooler places I've ever seen for a cocktail party). Burt has a knack for being right in the middle of every anti-evolution controversy in the country.…

Hoppe Fisks Luskin on AVIDA

After Rob Pennock's testimony the other day, Casey Luskin - who now works for the Discovery Institute - wrote an attempted critique of Pennock's claims concerning digital evolution. Pennock is the co-author of a paper published in Nature based on research from the Digital Evolution Lab at Michigan State (Go Spartans, crush the Wolverines tomorrow), where Pennock has a faculty appointment. In that paper, they used a digital evolution program called AVIDA to model the evolution of complex features, features that would fit Behe's definition of irreducible complexity. Not only did irreducibly…

The Party of Smaller Government (wink, wink)

A truly astonishing statement from someone alleged to be an advocate of smaller government: House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said yesterday that Republicans have done so well in cutting spending that he declared an "ongoing victory," and said there is simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget. Mr. DeLay was defending Republicans' choice to borrow money and add to this year's expected $331 billion deficit to pay for Hurricane Katrina relief. Some Republicans have said Congress should make cuts in other areas, but Mr. DeLay said that doesn't seem possible. "My answer to those that want to…

Congratulations, Jason Kuznicki

My partner-in-blogging Jason Kuznicki is now Dr. Jason Kuznicki. He successfully defended his dissertation and completed his doctorate in history from Johns Hopkins University. He is now demanding to be called His Royal Highness, Master of All He Surveys, but I'm sticking with "Grand Poobah". Seriously, congratulations to Jason for slaying the ABD dragon and scaling the ivory tower. It's an enormous accomplishment that caps off many years of hard work. The last friend of mine to get his PhD was Wes Elsberry and there are a couple of funny stories that accompany that one. Shortly after he…

World Series of Poker, Day 6

Well, the World Series of Poker is down to 27 players and things seem to be falling right into place for ESPN to have a compelling storyline for their broadcast of it. The three biggest names left in the field are all in the top 5 in chip stack. Mike Matusow is in first place with $5.1 million; Phil Ivey is in second place with $4.6 million; and Greg Raymer is in 5th place with $3.8 million. Today the action moves from the Rio to Binion's downtown, the birthplace of the event, and they will play down to the final table of 9 players. And in the initial seating assignments for today, Ivey and…

More Music Reviews

Okay, I finally got to see the Pink Floyd reunion from the Live8 show. That was just great to see those guys together again. Floyd is the only band I would pay to see in a big stadium show, if they're all together again. I hope they put out something new and tour with this lineup again. Dave Gilmour is the most underrated guitarist in rock history. He is that rare guitarist who actually knows how to make a solo that makes sense within the structure of the song. Unfortunately, that was followed up with....Paul McCartney. Paul....please....for the love of all things decent in this world....just…

Prediction of merging stars may solve one of Hubble's greatest mysteries (Synopsis)

"We have chased away the clouds, the sky is all 'rose.'" -Francois Hollande When you have a light curve with two different large, periodic dips in it, a binary star system is the likeliest explanation. The stars eclipse, and in the case where they're so close their envelopes touch, they're known as contact binaries. That, alone, is enough to make a system spectacular. Contact binaries come in all sorts of different masses and sizes, but cannot be directly observed or resolved by current telescopes. Image credit: ESO/L. Calçada. But in the case of this system, KIC 9832227, the orbital…

How the Hubble Space Telescope changed the Universe (Synopsis)

“The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.” -Edwin Hubble Over its more than 25 year lifetime, the Hubble Space Telescope has shown us what the Universe truly looks like. It’s done so in a myriad of ways, from planets to stars – dying and forming – to galaxies to gravity’s effects to the deepest abysses of blackness of all. Nothing in space is the same as it was before humanity knew Hubble. Yet even the camera most responsible for our iconic images, WFPC2, isn’t the end of the story. The gravitationally interacting system, Arp 147. Image credit: Arp 147, via NASA, ESA, and…

Why does the 'Windchill factor' make you feel so cold? (Synopsis)

"October extinguished itself in a rush of howling winds and driving rain and November arrived, cold as frozen iron, with hard frosts every morning and icy drafts that bit at exposed hands and faces." -J.K. Rowling As cold as it gets outside over the coming months, particularly with the effect of a displaced polar vortex in play, there’s another factor that can make it feel even colder: the wind. Coupled with extremely cold temperatures, the Windchill factor can exacerbate this tremendously, stripping the heat from your body and putting you at risk of various cold-related traumas. Collisions…

Could dark matter be powering the EMdrive? (Synopsis)

"...axions are potentially detectable through their weak coupling to electromagnetism..." -Aaron Chou We know, from hundreds of years of experience with the laws of physics, that momentum is strictly conserved, and therefore a reactionless drive is impossible. What's not impossible is an engine that has a reaction that's simply invisible, or otherwise undetectable to us. This has been seen in experiments involving neutrinos, but NASA's impossible space engine, the EMdrive, offers another possibility: a dark matter reaction. Image credit: ESO/L. Calçada, of the illustration of the dark matter…

Colder than empty space? How the Boomerang Nebula does it (Synopsis)

“If you want your boomerang to come back, first you've got to throw it.” -Steven Hall If you take all the matter out of the Universe, all you’d have left to warm you would be the radiation from the Big Bang’s leftover glow: the cosmic microwave background. At just 2.7º C above absolute zero, there’s no way of escaping this omnidirectional heat bath, as weak and ineffectual as it might be. Yet right here in our own galaxy, we’ve got an example of something even colder: the Boomerang Nebula. A millimeter-wavelength view of the Boomerang Nebula. Image credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF/NASA/STScI/JPL-Caltech…

Cassini prepares for its final, suicidal mission

"All the atoms of our bodies will be blown into space in the disintegration of the solar system, to live on forever as mass or energy." -Carolyn Porco Launched in 1997, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has shed unprecedented views on our Solar System’s majestic, ringed world. From the discovery of new, outer rings to infrared hazes beneath its clouds to surprising storms, the nature of its rings and structure atop Saturn’s north pole, Cassini has delivered beyond any reasonable expectations. A false-color image highlighting Saturn’s hurricane over its north pole, inside the much larger hexagon-…

The Most Impossible Technology From Star Trek (Synopsis)

“‘Star Trek’ says that it has not all happened, it has not all been discovered, that tomorrow can be as challenging and adventurous as any time man has ever lived.” –Gene Roddenberry Today marks the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek, our first science fiction adventure that promised a positive view of the future, ushered in by technology and humanity's best traits. In addition to a utopia where maladies like hunger, disease and poverty were eradicated, Star Trek promised a future where technology was widely available and sufficiently advanced to the benefit of all of humanity.…

The Multiverse for non-scientists (Synopsis)

"Go, then. There are other worlds than these." -Stephen King We think of the Universe as all there ever is, was or will be. But, in fact, there's a limit to the most distant galaxies, stars, matter and radiation we can see. The hot Big Bang occurred a finite amount of time ago, and hence the amount of the Universe accessible to us through any observational means is necessarily limited. Artist’s logarithmic scale conception of the observable universe. Image credit: Wikipedia user Pablo Carlos Budassi. What lies beyond that? According to our best explanations and theories, there's more…

Random thoughts

I haven't written much lately, because I've been very busy. I just built a new computer last night, but I'm not using it to type this. I have to run some network cable in my house before it's ready to use and I'm still tweaking. It's a screaming machine, a huge step up in speed from the old one. I can actually watch DVDs and have the sound and the video match each other now. Anyway, some random thoughts while reading today's news. Two stories that have to do with succeeding your boss... Jim Cantalupo, the CEO of McDonalds, died today of an apparent heart attack. Rumor has it his widow is…

LIGO's second black hole merger leaves no doubt: Einstein was right! (Synopsis)

"It turned out that nature was very kind, and there appear to be many of these black holes in the Universe and we were lucky enough to see one." -Dave Reitze, executive director of LIGO On September 14th, 2015, just days after turning on, the twin Advanced LIGO detectors detected the first gravitational wave signature: a merger between two black holes, of 36 and 29 solar masses. They inspiraled, they merged, and they lost 5% of their rest mass to gravitational radiation, sending ripples through the fabric of space due to Einstein’s E = mc^2. It raised a whole slew of questions: were these…