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Weekend Diversion: Breaking the gender barrier?

Find something that you're really interested in doing in your life. Pursue it, set goals and commit yourself to excellence. Do the best you can. -Chris Evert The Olympics have recently ended, and there were a trio of athletes who left me awestruck at their level of mastery of their sport as compared to the rest of their field. Every one of Shaun White's halfpipe runs simply outclassed the other competitors, as did Lindsay Vonn's downhill run (did you see how steady she kept her skis as compared to everyone else?), and -- perhaps in particular -- I believe that Yu-Na Kim's short and long…

Dark Energy: Hard to Kill (Part 1)

Once you can accept the Universe as being something expanding into an infinite nothing which is something, wearing stripes with plaid is easy. -A. Einstein But accepting the expansion of the Universe is easy compared to accepting the existence of dark energy. Why -- and how -- is there some mysterious property inherent to space that prevents the expansion rate from dropping to zero? Why is the expansion rate as large as it is today? Why, of the four options we can reasonably conceive of, is the Universe obeying this "accelerating" picture below? The why and how are questions that we do not…

Weekend Diversion: The Performing Arts

Music. Dance. Theatre. Take your pick, ranging from something classical like the symphony or the ballet to something modern like musical theatre or fusion dance, there's a world of sights and sounds for you to enjoy. For an example of a new twist on an old favorite, have a listen to Yo-Yo Ma (on cello) and Bobby McFerrin (on vocals) perform The Flight of the Bumblebee: Flight of the Bumblebee,As you prepare to enjoy this new world, you may ask yourself, "What qualifies as proper behavior in this new venue?" I have put together a passive-aggressive set of (in)frequently asked questions about…

Wow, that was some promotion Avalos got — to tyrant lord king of ISU!

If you've recently had lunch, don't go to this opinion piece from a fanatical sports fan at Iowa State University. It will turn your stomach. It's a tirade against Hector Avalos, of course, who is apparently the man who runs ISU (it's amazing how holding an opinion contrary to the majority suddenly elevates you to a controlling power). It's an appalling demonstration of ignorance and idiocy by some born again fool named Steve Deace. This isn't about the separation of church and state, and this isn't about tolerance. This is about one thing and one thing only—the separation of Christ and…

2012: The Real "Milestone", The Real Danger

Doomsday in 2012? Please, I don't even have time for that. (Check out Ian O'Neill's work for a nail-in-the-coffin of those myths.) But there is a big milestone that we will reach right around 2012. Prior to the industrial revolution, the Earth's atmosphere was really ideal for supporting the wide diversity of life on the planet. Breaking it up into its physical, molecular contents, the atmosphere, weighing in at just over 5,100 trillion tonnes (5.1 x 1018 kilograms), was made up of the following elements (by mass, not volume): Nitrogen gas (N2): 3,890 trillion tonnes (around 75.5%), Oxygen…

Want to be a Professional Astronomer?

We need one of those propaganda videos, like the Marines had when I was a kid: Seriously, I remember watching that and actually thinking it would be awesome to be a Marine! (And for those of you who don't know me that well, I loathe armed conflict.) Well, I'm a scientist. Can't we do anything cool to attract people to be interested in it, or help support it? Baby steps, folks, baby steps. And Duncan Forbes at Swinburne in Australia (where I almost moved when I was offered a position with them last February) has composed a how-to guide entitled: So You Want To Be A Professional Astronomer! It…

No One Believes in Stare Decisis

One of the ridiculous little rituals that has come to surround every Supreme Court nomination these days is the stare decisis dance. Everyone knows what it's really about; it's about abortion and Roe v Wade. No nominee is going to come right out and say that they think Roe should be overturned. Roe has become a sacred cow in American politics, despite the fact that legal scholars pretty much agree that it's a very badly written and badly reasoned decision. I'm pro-choice but I can certainly recognize how weak this decision was. Still, no nominee can afford to say that without cranking up the…

In which I respond to optimism about the religious with cynicism

John Pieret quotes a religious apologist, about which I am rather conflicted: For a Christian, when science is allowed to be neutral on the subject of God, science can only bolster faith. In contrast, and I imagine without realizing it, ID proponents have become professional Doubting Thomases, funded by Doubting Thomas Institutes. When advocates of ID use the vocabulary of science to argue for God's presence in cellular machinery or in the fossil record, they too poke their fingers through Jesus' hands. In so doing, ID vitiates faith. This is the conundrum we face when we get a thoughtful…

Charge of the Lite Brigade

On February 17th, some 40,000 people showed up at an event in Washington DC in order to draw attention to the most pressing issue of our time: Climate Change. Another group of people also attended that rally. They represented the Climate Science Denialists, which in the US overlaps considerably with the Tea Party. They wore yellow jackets and called themselves "The Light Brigade." This follows the tradition of the Tea Party, who in their early days used the nickname "Teabaggers" for themselves, a term which refers to a particular sexual act, or so I'm told. I was reminded of this because…

Ebb And Flow Crash Into Sally Ride!

Ebb and Flow were the twin space craft that mapped in the Moon's gravitational field by flying near each other, and then as the gravity of the Moon tugged on them they could suss out how much gravity that was, exactly. The gravity map of the moon, actually two of them, at two different scales, is done, so the space craft were "de-orbited." To me, the first thing that is really interesting about this is the fact that they kept the space craft in very very low orbit for a long time. We earthlings tend to think of orbiting as something you have to do at high altitude, because we always send…

Let's talk science at YearlyKos this summer

Darksyde has just announced a few details about the science panels that will be held at the YearlyKos Convention. One relevant piece of information is that I'm the guy in charge of the science caucus, and I have to organize something. If Darksyde had ever seen my office, organization is not a word that would have come to mind… Anyway, there was a science caucus at last year's convention, too, and it was a bit the-opposite-of-organized. We got together in a big room and started talking, and the conversations all converged on one issue: what the heck are we going to do about this gigantic…

How to be a better birder

There are several things you need to do to be a better birder. Some of these things can be handled by just tossing money after the problem. Better binoculars, more books, that sort of thing. If you use those tools well they will improve your abilities as a birder. But the most important thing you can do is probably to consciously want to improve yourself and to go and learn stuff pertaining to that. And, to do that, knowledge is important bus so is approach, perhaps methodology is a good word. There really are three or four aspects to being a better birder that could be viewed very…

Greedy Lying Bastards

Check out this film trailer. Description below. Wildfires in the West. "Brown-Outs" in the East. Farmers losing crops to the worst drought since the Dust Bowl. Climate change is no longer a prediction for the future, but a startling reality of today. The U.S. Pentagon believes it to be a matter of national and international security. Yet, as the evidence of our changing climate mounts and the scientific consensus proves a human causation, there continues to be no political action to thwart the warming of our planet. "Greedy Lying Bastards" investigates the reason behind stalled efforts to…

What is scarier than Halloween?

What is scarier than Halloween? 1804 Lewis and Clark struck out on their famous expedition. Alexander Hamilton was shot to death in a duel. Morphine is invented. Short distance transport is done on foot or horses, long distance on clipper ships or packets. The world population reaches 1 billion. 1927, over a century later Horses are still widely used but some people are driving around in cars and trains have been in use for almost a century. The War of 1812, the American Civil War, the Spanish American War, and World War 1 have all come and gone. The first transatlantic phone call is made.…

Evolution Book For Young Children: Grandmother Fish

In a previous life (of mine) my father-in-law, an evolutionary biologist, kept an oil painting of a fish on the wall of the living room. At every chance he would point out, to visitors or to anyone else if there were no visitors, that he kept a portrait of his distant ancestor hanging in a prominent location, pointing to the oil painting. It was funny even the third or fourth time. It isn't really true, of course, that this was his ancestor. It was a bass, more recently evolved to its present form than humans, I suspect. But it is true that the last common ancestor of humans and fish was a…

Forum: Science, Democracy, and a Healthy Food Policy

I recently wrote a post called "Did you ever wonder how you are going to die?" which was my response to a forum at the Humphrey Center, University of Minnesota, organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists called "Science, Democracy, and a Healthy Food Policy: How Citizens, Scientists, and Public Health Advocates Can Partner to Forge a Better Future". It was a great forum, with sessions moderated by my friend Don Shelby, and including an absolutely excellent group of speakers and discussants. Every single one of the talks was excellent, and the panel discussions were amazing. It is a…

Earth Sized Planets Elsewhere Discovered

First, there were big-giant planets discovered orbiting other stars. Then, more recently, a planet in the star's Goldilocks Zone ... where water would be at least sometimes liquid, were it present. But that was a big planet that may or may not have been truly "class M" in having a surface, atmosphere, etc. Now, NASA reports planets the size of the earth beyond our solar system. Unfortuntely, they are not in the zone. But still, this is cool. NASA's Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system. The planets, called Kepler-20e…

How to make pumpkin pie

How to make pumpkin pie This makes one pie. You probably want two, so double everything. PROCEDURE PREHEAT oven to 425F. Set the rack to above the middle of the oven but not too high up. Mix dry ingredients in one bowl. Mix wet ingredients in a different bowl. Mix the wet and dry ingredients together. Put a pie crust in a pie shell. Make the edges all fancy looking by using a fork. Stir the ingredients up one more time and put it in the pie shell. Place the pie in the center of the rack. Bake for 15 minutes Remove pie, shut oven. Put strips of aluminum foil around the crust to slow…

It's April 2nd!

Yesterday, the Panda's Thumb revealed that Michael Egnor had only been pretending to be a creationist. They even linked to his confession at Evolution Views and News. I chimed in, defending our prior work on Egnor's absurd claims with argument that "the line between creationist parody and creationist reality is drawn awfully fine". It was an April Fool's joke, of course. Egnor hasn't been kidding — he really is that kooky. Or is he? His real April Fool's Day post was remarkable in its hypocrisy and religious credulity. What if experimental evidence demonstrated that we could account for…

Have a querulous Paul Nelson Day!

The new generation of creationists has been doing something rather remarkable. Flaming anti-scientific religious nutcases like Wells and Dembski have been diligently going to real universities, not the usual hokey bible colleges, and working hard to get legitimate degrees in actual fields of science and math to get themselves a superficial veneer of credibility. It's basically nothing but collecting paper credentials, though, since they don't actually learn anything and never do anything with the knowledge they should have acquired, other than use it to razzle-dazzle the rubes. One other…

Wild IPCC excitement!

Well yes indeed, someone has leaked bits of the upcoming IPCC AR4 report to the BBC. The only odd thing is that its taken this long. The draft has "do not cite or quote" written on it, of course, but so many people have access to it that its hard to believe the media don't. Chris Mooney has noticed the BBC; but the Grauniad had much the same a day earlier. RP predictably enough uses this as a peg to hang his favoured IPCC-is-politicised hat on; but this is nonsense: there is no evidence at all to connect this to anyone IPCC-ish. The Grauniad leads with The Earth's temperature could rise…

GMO retroviruses vs Parkinsons

Long-term safety and tolerability of ProSavin, a lentiviral vector-based gene therapy for Parkinson's disease: a dose escalation, open-label, phase 1/2 trial 1. Start with HIV-1s 'country cousin', Equine Infectious Anemia Virus (EIAV). EIAV is a lentivirus, like HIV, so it is a good gene therapy virus. Lentiviruses are a bit more trustworthy than the gamma retroviruses (not as likely to cause insertional mutagenesis/cancer), plus the scientists made some modifications to the LTRs to keep them from accidentally over-expressing nearby genes. 2. Scoop out EIAVs genomic guts. Replace them with…

Tornadoes

Some folks have been worried about me, so I thought Id write this post to mention that I am okay, Arnie is okay, everything is okay with me. In the seven years Ive lived in OK, Ive been though a lot of storms. Its only been bad enough for me to come to work (I live close to work, work has an emergency shelter, generators, etc) three times. This past Friday was one of those three times. And the first time I was actually scared. The wind, the frantic way the trees were shaking, the way the windows were breathing (not in unison)-- Its the first time Ive left my penthouse lab for the emergency…

La Sierra University: We want our scientists to make us look good, not teach our students science

La Sierra University April 2011-- L. Lee Grismer, a field biologist at La Sierra University in Riverside, is gaga over a new species of forest gecko from Southeast Asia that he will present in the scientific journal Zootaxa in three months. ... Grismer will test his hypothesis that the forest lizard is closely related to another new species he discovered last June. He will isolate the forest gecko's DNA and compare it to that of a similar reptile he tracked down in a cave at the Malaysia-Thailand border. "We're still in the age of discovery," said Grismer, who is credited with detecting more…

Links for 2011-06-29

Chuck Klosterman on Led Zeppelin's last stand - Grantland "4:52 to 5:24: brrrrrrringgggggg ... brrrrrrrrrringggggggg "Hello?" "Hi. Is this John Paul Jones?" "Yes. Yes it is. Why are you calling me in the middle of this song?" "I just noticed you had a telephone on your keyboard, so I thought I'd give you a buzz. Why do you need a telephone on stage?" "No reason. Sometimes I like to phone Peter Grant and inquire about our tax status before playing 'Trampled Under Foot.' Who is calling me, incidentally?" "My name is Gibson. I'm 22 years old, and I live in Texas. Many years from now, you will…

Dark deeds of definitions?

In comments on the sea ice post, both Rob Dekker and Chris Randles has queried an apparent change to the definition of "ice free" as applied to the Arctic. As any fule kno, the definition of "ice free" usually used is "less than a million square km" (1MSK) in order to account for the misc pockets of stuff that will hang around Greenland. FWIW, I'm not sure how useful this defn is, or whether it will survive closer analysis as we get closer to the event, but we're decades away now so it hardly matters. Except, there's an unclarity. Is it 1MSK for a single year (maybe not; there could be a…

Oh my god! Moveable printed type!

We must keep this from the serfs, lest they gain literacy and threaten the landed gentry!! Worried that some of us would start thinking Christians have a monopoly on teh stupid, Muslims in Indonesia have bravely stepped up to defend their faith against Evil Atheists like Richard Dawkins... By not letting people read his books... Atheism books like Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Sam Harris' The End of Faith or Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great may have been on the bestselling charts somewhere else and can now be spotted in nearly all international airports, but the top local…

The Perils of Doing Math While Foreign-Looking

Here's a a charming story: On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse. Or so dozens of unsuspecting passengers thought. The curly-haired man tried to keep to himself, intently if inscrutably scribbling on a notepad he'd brought aboard. His seatmate, a blond-haired, 30-something woman sporting flip-flops and a red tote bag, looked him over. He was wearing navy Diesel jeans and a red Lacoste sweater--a look he would later…

The Bottleneck Years by H.E.Taylor - Chapter 72

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 71 Table of Contents Chapter 73 Chapter 72 No Miracles, April 30, 2059 All that winter and spring, the sunshield count slowly increased. We passed 3,000, but nothing changed on Earth. Methane levels were still rising. Drought, flood and fire were constant. Grain reserves were less than a week, and some challenged those statistics, claiming they were just to make us feel good. The demand went out for more sunshields. Brahmaputra got more money. That meant more factories and railguns to be built on the moon. Some 150 people in Hipparcus were…

FRC Absurdity on Connecticut's Civil Unions Bill

The Family Research Council is naturally quite upset by the Connecticut Senate passing a bill to allow civil unions for gay couples in that state. They're also trying very hard to pretend that the public in that state doesn't support the bill. And the Worldnutdaily, naturally, gives them the forum for doing so: "So-called 'civil unions' are simply same-sex 'marriage' cloaked with a different name, something that a clear majority of Connecticut residents oppose," Tony Perkins, president of Family Research Council, said in statement. "I call on the Connecticut House to reject this bill. If the…

Gay Marriage and Interracial Marriage

Colbert King wrote a fascinating column in the Washington Post the other day about the history of laws against interracial marriage, or miscegenation. He points out that the appeal to natural law, longstanding tradition and religious tenets, so often heard as arguments against gay marriage, were also used in opposition to interracial marriage: The Georgia Supreme Court in 1869 based its interracial marriage ban on natural law, observing that "the God of nature made it otherwise, and no human law can produce it, and no human tribunal can enforce it." Hear the 1871 Indiana Supreme Court…

ACLU Hypocrisy?

The New York Times reports that the ACLU has a huge internal battle going on over their use of a data mining company to gather information on those who contribute money to the organization, as well as potential legal trouble: The American Civil Liberties Union is using sophisticated technology to collect a wide variety of information about its members and donors in a fund-raising effort that has ignited a bitter debate over its leaders' commitment to privacy rights. Some board members say the extensive data collection makes a mockery of the organization's frequent criticism of banks,…

Dennett on ID

Daniel Dennett, a man I consider one of the half dozen or so most brilliant thinkers on the planet, has an op-ed piece in today's New York Times about "intelligent design" called Show Me The Science. He makes essentially the same argument I have been making on this blog for nearly 2 years now: The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically, obscured something else: genuine scientific controversies about evolution that abound. In just about every field there are challenges to one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an alternative…

Election Wrapup

So much for last minute predictions, eh? First, let's dispose of the obvious - Ohio is going for Bush, and the desperate hope of a miracle by the Kerry folks is a fantasy. Game, set and match for Bush. So with that fact clearly stated, what do we conclude? First, three major pieces of conventional wisdom died last night. Among the very first things one learns in Political Science 101 (at least back when I was a poli sci major) are these three things: 1. High turnout always favors Democrats and hurts Republicans. 2. High turnout always favors challengers and hurts incumbents. 3. Negative and…

ID and Peer Review, take 2

In the comments on a post below, Dan Ray suggested that perhaps Stephen Meyer's article on ID in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington had gotten into that journal by "questionable means". He was apparently right. The editor at the time, Richard Sternberg, apparently violated the journal's procedures for reviewing manuscripts by not showing it to any of the journal's associate editors. The PBSW procedures for contribution state: "Manuscripts are reviewed by a board of Associate Editors and appropriate referees." But according to a statement released today by the board of…

An Odd Response

Matt Powell of Wheat and Chaff has responded, at least indirectly, to my post on evolving morality. That is, he is ostensibly responding to my friend DarkSyde's comments left on Rusty's kind-of response to my post, but he mentions me by name. The mistakes in Matt's post begin with the title itself, which is "Judging God". But nowhere do I "judge God". What I judged - i.e. analyzed, thought about, reached conclusions about - are claims about God, specifically the claims that God ordered slavery and genocide. I reject those claims, in every case in which they are made. Matt rejects all such…

The Temperature Record Reliability Attack

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: The surface temperature record is so full of assumptions, corrections, differing equipment and station settings, changing technology, varying altitudes and more.  It is not possible to claim we know what the "global average temperature" is, much less determine any trend.  The IPCC graphs only say what the scientists want them to say. Answer: There is actually some truth to the part about the difficulties, there are many of them that…

The Clothes Make the Faculty Member

Via Steinn, the Incoherent Ponderer ponders academic clothing: For some strange reason, whenever it is not clear whether the attire is formal or informal, I am much more concerned about overdressing, than dressing too informally. I think that this is because it's very difficult to be dressed too informally in academic environment - unless of course it's a fancy dinner or cocktail party or something. Even if I err on the side of informal dress code, chances are - there is still someone dressed even more informally, likely a senior faculty member. I know some people who seem to be wearing…

Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale [Library of Babel]

I still have one Hugo nominee to read, but I needed to take a break between Glasshouse and Blindsight, so I rewarded myself with the latest in Steven Erikson's epic Tales of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, Reaper's Gale. We're still a few books behind in the US, so this is a gigantic UK trade paperback that I got as a birthday present. There's really not much point in doing a highly detailed entry on this, because it's the seventh book in a series of books that average about 800 pages (this one is 907, not counting the character list and glossary). If you've read this far, you're obviously…

Give the Rubes Some Credit

Kevin Drum and Mark Kleiman both pick up on the new book from Dennis Kuo saying that the "faith-based initiatives" program was a political scam. The MSNBC piece contains a few colorful quotes about the shenanigans Kuo is reporting, which sound pretty bad. Kevin cites them, then asks: Like I said a few days ago, are social conservatives ever going to catch on to the way they're being conned by the Republican Party? I agree that they're being conned, but at the same time, what, exactly, does Kevin think they're going to do about it? This is one of the central problems with the "What's the…

Math Question: Introducing the Euler Relationship

For tedious reasons, I find myself faced with giving what will basically be a pure math lecture next Friday. I need to introduce a bunch of mathematical apparatus that we will need in the coming weeks, and I know that the Math department doesn't cover these topics in any of the classes that these students have taken. If I want them to be able to use this stuff, I need to teach it myself. Formal mathematics is probably my least favorite part of teaching physics. I'm very much inclined toward the "swashbuckling physicist" approach to math, in which we cavalierly assume that all sorts of picky…

God's Atom

Doug Natelson is thinking about fortuitous physics, inspired by some solid state examples: Every now and then you stumble across a piece of physics, some detail about how the universe works, that is extremely lucky in some sense. For example, it's very convenient that Si is a great semiconductor, and at the same time SiO2 is an incredibly good insulator - in terms of the electric field that it can sustain before breakdown, SiO2 is about as good as it gets. From my own field of physics, I would suggest the rubidium atom. Rubidium isn't a substance you run across every day, and that's a Good…

No Mock Trials Without Preconditions

Inside Higher Ed this morning has a story about a mock trial to be held at Northern Kentucky University: The trial centers around the termination of fictitious biology teacher Susan Scott (a traditionally trained evolution adherent), who according to her complaint, encouraged students to "explore creation theories." Scott, who will be played by Simon Kenton High School teacher Heather Mastin, is suing the fictitious Chandler County School Board for wrongful termination and seeks reinstatement, compensatory damages and a judicial declaration that the school board violated her First Amendment…

Obama on Science

As you have no doubt seen by now, if you read any of the other blogs on ScienceBlogs, the Science Debate 2008 group has gotten Barack Obama to answer their 14 questions on science issues. John McCain has apparently promised answers at some point in the future. The answers are, well, pretty much what you would expect. For example: What policies will you support to ensure that America remains the world leader in innovation? Ensuring that the U.S. continues to lead the world in science and technology will be a central priority for my administration. Our talent for innovation is still the envy…

A request!

Here's a really good question from Katrina Refugee: Due to the unforeseen events of Katrina, my family and I ended up staying with relatives in South Carolina, and my children (for the year) are going to a small Christian school with their cousins (the public schools in this area are quite horrendous and we were trying to ease the transition as best as possible). They will be back in public school next year, but in the meantime have been exposed to some really silly creationist crap in the science classroom. Can you recommend some reading material for the summer to "wash away" all the stuff…

Links for 2010-07-13

Scientists vs. Engineers - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences "In the past, I have heard there was conflict between the "two cultures" of science and the humanities. I don't see a lot of evidence for that type of conflict today, mostly because my scientific friends all are big fans of the arts and literature. However, the two cultures that I do see a great deal of conflict between are those of science and engineering. " (tags: science engineering culture academia) Abstruse Goose » College Friend "The less you know about your doctor the better." (tags: silly comics internet…

Links for 2010-07-07

Physics - Keeping atoms synchronized for better timekeeping "Atomic clocks often have a limited coherence time due to the interactions between the constituent atoms. While it is usually very easy to use fewer atoms to reduce the interactions, this leads to lower signal-to-noise and less precise measurements. This tension between strong interactions and noise seems unavoidable and limits the accuracy of the world's best cesium clocks, the keepers of international atomic time. As reported in a paper in Physical Review Letters, Christian Deutsch and coworkers at three laboratories in Paris,…

Uncomfortable Question: My Bad?

Next in line of questions from readers, we have tbell with: Since science is a self-correcting process (maybe only at a statistical level, not necessarily an individual level), it would be cool if you would relate the last time you were seriously wrong about some aspect of science or research, and how you altered your thinking as a consequence. This is kind of a tough one to answer, because I'm an experimentalist. Most of the mistakes I make in the process of research are problems of a technical nature, like "I totally thought that would work, but the impedance of the vacuum feed-throughs…

Links for 2010-04-16

YouTube - Real Word Problems From My Physics Book - PH17 Amazingly, this isn't the silliest problem I've seen in an intro physics book... (tags: education physics science silly video youtube) Twitter / @busynessgirl/Calcwars Newton, Leibniz, meet Twitter. Twitter, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. (tags: silly math science history internet) Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 153202 (2010): Scattering in Mixed Dimensions with Ultracold Gases "We experimentally investigate the mix-dimensional scattering occurring when the collisional partners live in different dimensions. We employ a binary mixture…

Amazing Laser Application 7: Telecommunications!

What's the application? Telecommunications, namely, the sending of messages over very long distances by encoding them in light pulses which are sent over optical fibers. What problem(s) is it the solution to? "How can we send large numbers of messages from one place to another more efficiently than with electrical pulses sent down copper wires?" How does it work? The concept is dead simple: You take a signal and encode it in light-- this could be analog, like the SpectraSound demo LaserFest is selling, with higher intensity meaning higher signal, or it could be digital, with a bright pulse…