In the News
drorzel | November 27, 2006The Times this morning has a nice article on the Archimedes Palimpsest, which turns out to contain more than just important works on early mathematics:
An ambitious international project to decipher 1,000-year-old moldy pages is yielding new clues about ancient Greece as seen through the eyes of Hyperides, an important Athenian orator and politician from the fourth century B.C. What is slowly coming to light, scholars say, represents the most significant discovery of Hyperides text since 1891, illuminating some fascinating, time-shrouded insights into Athenian law and social history.
"This…
drorzel | November 21, 2006New Scientist has decided to commemorate their 50th anniversary by asking a large number of scientists to predict what will happen in the next 50 years. As you might have predicted, the list of responses includes a large number of short essays of the form:
Exciting new developments in my own field of research will completely transform our understanding of the universe and our place in it.
Nevertheless, they make for some interesting reading. Of course, they're not sorted by topic, and it can get a little daunting trying to figure out who you should read, so it's good that Sean Carroll (who…
drorzel | November 17, 2006The dark energy press conference mentioned a couple of days ago happened yesterday, and is written up in the Times. You can also get information straight from NASA.
The basic result here is that astronomers have made a bunch of measurements of supernovae at extremely large distances, which amounts to looking at galaxies a very long time ago. From those measurements, they have made a rough measurement of the expansion of the universe at that time, and find that the mysterious "dark energy" that appears to be causing the modern universe to expand faster over time was also making the universe…
drorzel | November 10, 2006I would post some sort of wrap-up about the Lisa Randall chat yesterday, but Discover is broken. They don't have a link to a transcript on the site-- in fact, they haven't updated the front page to reflect the fact that the chat was yesterday, and is now over. There was a link that would sort of give you access to a transcript, but it's broken now, or at least doesn't work in either Opera or Firefox on my home computer.
It's pretty much of a piece with the chat itself, actually-- I thought it was pretty sharp of them to email physics bloggers with invitations to the chat, but the chat itself…
drorzel | November 2, 2006Scott Aaronson speaks for the computer scientists, partly in response to the same Times piece that I blogged about recently.
drorzel | November 1, 2006NASA has scheduled a mission to service the Hubble. This should keep the space telescope flying and producing great science until 2013 or so.
Obviously, there are a lot of caveats in there-- the mission isn't scheduled until 2008, so the Hubble needs to last that long, and there can't be major delays or disasters with the Shuttle before then-- but this is genuinely good news. Congratulations to the scientists and politicians who lobbied hard for this.
drorzel | October 31, 2006The Times this morning has an article on the future of computer science:
Computer science is not only a comparatively young field, but also one that has had to prove it is really science. Skeptics in academia would often say that after Alan Turing described the concept of the "universal machine" in the late 1930's -- the idea that a computer in theory could be made to do the work of any kind of calculating machine, including the human brain -- all that remained to be done was mere engineering.
The more generous perspective today is that decades of stunningly rapid advances in processing speed…
drorzel | October 30, 2006Because I'm a Bad Person, I no longer remember who pointed me to Halfway There's primer on polling, but it's really an excellent of the effects of sample size, and why it's legitimate to project results based on small numbers of interviews. Some important notes from the conclusion:
Second, even a poll that is supposed to be within its estimated margin of error 95% of the time will be wrong and fall outside those bounds 5% of the time. That's one time in twenty. Therefore, whenever you see a political poll whose results seem way out of whack, it could be one of those flukes. Remember, polling…
drorzel | October 29, 2006Gina Kolata in the New York Times today reports on new attempts to blame obesity for the problems of the world:
Last week the list of ills attributable to obesity grew: fat people cause global warming.
This latest contribution to the obesity debate comes in an article by Sheldon H. Jacobson of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and his doctoral student, Laura McLay. Their paper, published in the current issue of The Engineering Economist, calculates how much extra gasoline is used to transport Americans now that they have grown fatter. The answer, they said, is a billion gallons a…
drorzel | October 22, 2006The New York Times Magazine this week has a troubling story of scientific misconduct, involving the fraudulent research of Eric Poehlman:
Before his fall from grace, Poehlman oversaw a lab where nearly a dozen students and postdoctoral researchers carried out his projects. His research earned him recognition among his peers and invitations to speak at conferences around the world. And he made nearly $140,000, one of the top salaries at the University of Vermont. All of that began to change six years ago, when [Walter] DeNino [a technician in Poehlman's lab] took his concerns about anomalies…
drorzel | October 20, 2006The New York Times today has a story about Web-based classes offering virtual labs, and whether they should count for AP credit:
As part of a broader audit of the thousands of high school courses that display its Advanced Placement trademark, the [College Board] has recruited panels of university professors and experts in Internet-based learning to scrutinize the quality of online laboratories used in Web-based A.P. science courses.
"Professors are saying that simulations can be really good, that they use them to supplement their own lab work, but that they'd be concerned about giving…
drorzel | October 18, 2006Well, at least, the physics of the new NBA basketball, at any rate...
For those who haven't heard the story already, the NBA is changing the style of the basketballs used in its games this season. They're moving away from the traditional leather basketballs to a new synthetic material, which is supposed to hold up better to wear and tear.
Predictably enough, most of the players hate the new ball, and Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has gone so far as to enlist physicists to look into the situation:
Jim Horwitz is chair of the physics department at UT-Arlington, and Kaushik De is the project leader…
drorzel | October 11, 2006Back in late July, I got email from a writer for Physics World magazine (which is sort of the UK equivalent of Physics Today), asking my opinion on a few questions relating to particle physics funding. The basis for asking me (as opposed to, you know, a particle physicist) was presumably a post from April in which I ranted a bit about the justification of Big Science projects.
The article is now out, but not available on-line, so I haven't read it. I spent a fair amount of time typing up my response, though, so I'm going to recycle it into a blog post, because I can do that.
The original…
drorzel | October 10, 2006In a weird example of synchronicity, Dr. Free-Ride posted about science journalism yesterday, and Inside Higher Ed offers a viewpoint piece by Michael Bugeja on the same topic this morning. You might almost think it was one of those "meme" things.
They both agree that there's a problem with science reporting, but come at the problem from different ends. Bugeja is mostly concerned with the supply side of the problem, talking about the difficulties scientists have with communicating to the public:
These professors rank among the most ingenious, passionate people I have ever met.
Put some of…
drorzel | October 7, 2006While I'm being cranky about graphics in the mass media, a quick Bronx cheer for the New York Times and their Mars rover story this morning, which opens:
NASA's Opportunity Mars rover spent 22 months trekking almost six miles to a large scientifically promising crater. Like a tourist who asks a passer-by to take a picture for proof he made it to a famous site, the robot rover has had another spacecraft snap an image of it sitting on the rim
The picture isn't included with the article. There's a very nice picture taken by the Opportunity rover, but not the picture of the rover. For that, you…
drorzel | October 7, 2006Sean Carroll comments on an item in the Atlantic Monthly on test scores compared across nations. There are two things that really bug me about this item, the most important of which is the deeply dishonest graphic the Atlantic did to illustrate the item.
Here's the honest version of the graph, redone using data from this table (the relevant figures don't appear in the report cited in the original piece). (Click on the graph for a larger version.)
I've plotted the normalized test score (the score for each country divided by the reported maximum score, because I'm a physicist and like…
drorzel | October 5, 2006The announcement of a distinctly bio-flavored Nobel Prize in Chemistry has a lot of science-blogging folks either gloating (see also here) or bemoaning the use of Chemistry as an overflow category for prizes awarded to work in other disciplines.
Of course, it must be noted that this is not a new state of affairs. After all, Lord Rutherford, the man famous for saying "In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting" won the 1908 Nobel Prize in... Chemistry.
So, there's a long and distinguished tradition of chemistry as the overflow category for smart people from other fields…
drorzel | October 4, 2006The Paper of Record provides the Story of Record for yesterday's Nobel Prize in Physics for Mather and Smoot, including recent photographs of both. One of my favorite bits of the 1997 Nobel was seeing the media circus that went on around the Prize-- I'll put some amusing anecdotes into another post.
All the usual blogger suspects have weighed in with comments, including but not limited to Sean, Rob, Steinn, Clifford, and Jennifer Ouellette. Most of them took the time to find the appropriate COBE graphics to illustrate their posts, which I was too lazy to do.
Janet Stemwedel deserves special…
drorzel | October 4, 2006The Chemistry Nobel Prize was announced this morning, and goes to only one guy (which is somehwat unusual in this age of massively collaborative science): Roger D. Kornberg of Stanford University, "for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription".
I am very much not a chemist, so all I can really do is sound those words out, and get that "eukarote" is a term for a type of organism, and "transcription" usually seems to involve DNA, so this must have something to do with getting messages from DNA to other parts of the cell. Well, OK, I can also read the press release, which…
drorzel | October 3, 2006Hot off the presses: The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John C. Mather and George Smoot "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." This is recent enough that they don't even have much on the Nobel site, but happily for me, it's something I know a tiny bit about.
The prize here is for the COBE ("Cosmic Microwave Background Explorer") mission back in the early 1990's, which made extremely precise measurements of the radiation left over from the Big Bang (the discovery of which led to a previous Nobel for Penzias and Wilson). Mather…