Science
drorzel | April 16, 2010Around 470 people voted in yesterday's optics quiz. I continue to be amazed at the power of radio button polls to bring people into the blog.
As of early Friday morning, the correct answer is solidly in he lead-- 63% of respondants have correctly replied that the image remains intact, but is half as bright. You can see this fairly easily by looking at a traditional ray diagram of the image-forming process (re-drawn slightly from yesterday's picture, to get the arrows right):
The arrows in this picture show the paths followed by three different rays of light that all leave from the tip of the…
catdynamics | April 15, 2010There is a webcam from vodafone at the northwest side of the volcano - it caught the onset of the major flooding this evening
Popup images - click to enlarge.
Before:
14:02 local
During:
19:04 local
After:
19:19
after that there appears to be some haze obscuring the view...
PS: aftermath
13:30 the next day - the white bits are chunks of ice from the glacier - BIG chunks of ice...
From vodafone.is
catdynamics | April 15, 2010Flash flood alert at Markárfljót and Fljótshlíð in Iceland.
The real flood is finally here...
Almannavarnir (Civil Defence Authority) in Iceland has issued a general urgent evacuation alert for Fljótshlíð - a scenic farming area southwest of Eyjafjallajökull due to major flooding.
Gígsjöull lets go - from visir.is
from mbl.is
There were two previous flood surges yesterday, but it was known that the bulk of the ice cap was still in place, melting.
The few km3 of water had only two places to go - it could go up, as steam explosions carrying ash, or break out sideways and come down the…
drorzel | April 15, 2010The pace has slowed, but there are still occasional sightings of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in my Google vanity searches:
It turns up on library blogs with some regularity. This particular one, from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater is nice because it's not just a rewrite of the publicity copy
I was really excited to see Daily Kos show up as one of the sites found by the blog search, because they have bazillions of readers. It was only a plug in a comment, but still...
The strangest-- in a good way-- mention recently was this passing reference in a newspaper column from Michigan,…
drorzel | April 15, 2010I was starting to type up the next Laser Smackdown entry, when it occurred to me that this was a good point to talk about a neat little thing from optics. It further occurred to me that this would be a good poll/quiz topic, to see what people think before I give you the real answer.
So, here's the scenario: You have a brightly illuminated object, the canonical example being a vertical arrow (it could also be a shadow cast in a beam of light). You take a lens, and put it in front of the arrow, projecting an image of the arrow on a screen, like so:
As you can see from the picture, the image…
awild | April 15, 2010The downside to a celebrated and prolific scientific career is that you generate enough of a paper trail for something you concluded, somewhere, to be erroneous.
I happened on an amusing example this week while photographing the Caribbean turtle ants I blogged about earlier. Like most of the world's 12,000 or so ant species, not much is known about the biology of Cephalotes varians. However, famed myrmecologist E. O. Wilson maintained a few lab colonies in the 1970's and detailed his hours of meticulous observations in a paper entitled "A Social Ethogram of the Neotropical Arboreal Ant…
drorzel | April 15, 2010A neighbor pointed out to me yesterday that there's a big hole in our clapboard siding that was made by some sort of bird. This morning, I got a picture of the culprit:
I'm not quite certain why the animal kingdom has decided to trash my stuff this year-- insane jealousy of Emmy?-- but I would like it to stop. I will call the contractor who did our garage conversion to replace the siding, but it would be very helpful if somebody with actual knowledge of birds could tell me what these little guys are, and whether this hole-digging is a fluke behavior (which would be just my luck), or…
oracknows | April 15, 2010Although this blog is not the Denialism Blog, there is no doubt that one of the overarching themes of Respectful Insolence has been, since its very beginning, combatting science denial. Go back to the very beginning and read a couple of my earliest posts, dating way back to 2004. In one of them I discussed cancer cure testimonials and why they are almost never evidence of efficacy of a given alt-med therapy, a post that, in my ever-insolent opinion, holds up with anything I write today. In another one, I wondered how intelligent people could use alt-med, and in another one I discussed "…
catdynamics | April 14, 2010After a brief hiatus during which the first two fissuers at Fimmvörðuháls closed, the main caldera at Eyjafjallajökull let rip early in the morning of April 14th.
ash plume through the clouds - from visir.is - click to embiggen
There was a jökulhlaup - wish I could have been there with Vatnamælingar on my old route... - actually there were 2 of them, so far. Only about 1/4-1/3 of the ice cap has melted, it is about 1/4 km thick and several km across.
There are, apparently, 5 active vents inside a 1-2 km caldera, with ash rising to 5-10 km.
Heavy ashfall reported across the east, with ash…
oracknows | April 14, 2010Michael Specter, author of Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, on the danger of science denial:
He also wrote an editorial to go along with it. Given that combatting science denialism, be it the anti-vaccine movement, the "alt-med" movement, or "intelligent design" creationism, maybe I'll comment further tomorrow. In the meantime, watch the video...
drorzel | April 14, 2010What'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…
drorzel | April 14, 2010I won't attempt to explain the chain of reasoning that led to this topic this morning. The poll itself doesn't need much explanation, though: As any geek knows, the tv show(s) CSI: Descriptive Subtitle rely heavily on fake technologies. which of these would you most like to be real?
Which imaginary technology from CSI would you rather have?online surveys
Yes, I have read the relevant xkcd comic. Personally, I lean toward the image enhancement, because if we had their image processing capability attached to the Hubble, we'd be mapping continents on Earth-like planets in the Andromeda Galaxy…
oracknows | April 14, 2010With all the anti-vaccine nonsense going on and my feeling the obligation to fire a broadside at "America's doctor," there was a tasty bit of woo that totally escaped my attention from an old "friend" of the blog. Actually, he's an old "friend" of many skeptical blogs, both here on ScienceBlogs and around the blogosphere. In fact, it's a man so steeped in only the finest quantum woo that I once coined a name for it: Choprawoo.
Yes, we're talkin' Deepak "Quantum Consciousness" Chopra! He's back and woo-ier than ever in--where else?--that repository of woo, quackery, and anti-vaccine lunacy,…
drorzel | April 13, 2010I am currently on a committee looking to set some standards for technical writing in the introductory engineering sequence (which means the first two terms of physics, as they constitute 50-67% of the classes common to all first-year engineers). One of our jobs is to come up with a list of skills that we want to particularly emphasize in student writing in the first year.
I've already sent this query to my colleagues, who are the votes that really matter, but this seems like a worthy subject for a blog poll. If nothing else, it will be interesting to see if my wise and worldly readers prefer…
drorzel | April 13, 2010I'm teaching a junior/senior level elective this term on quantum mechanics. We're using Townsend's A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics, which starts with spin-1/2 and develops the whole theory in terms of state vectors and matrices. This is kind of an uneasy fit for me, as I'm very much a swashbuckling experimentalist, and not as comfortable with formal mathematics.
This occasionally leads to good things, though, such as Monday's class, on photon polarizations. the book uses some vector arithmetic to show that circularly polarized photons have spin angular momentum of one unit of h-bar.…
bioephemera | April 12, 2010Wednesday night, Radiolab's "science cabaret" program, Awe-mageddon, kicks off at 7pm with its first live video webcast, hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich:
"AWE-MAGEDDON" will feature Radiolab's trademark mash-up of world-class scientists, artists, philosophers and generally interesting people sitting down with Jad and Robert to explore the interdisciplinary nature of big ideas. For the first time ever, a Radiolab event can be experienced by audiences around the globe via live video webcast, available at www.wnyc.org/thegreenespace.
Their guests will be Iain Couzin, assistant…
drorzel | April 12, 2010What's the application? LIGO stands for Laser Interferometer Graviitational Wave Observatory, because (astro)physicists feel free to drop inconvenient words when making up cute acronyms. This is an experiment to look for disturbances in space-time caused by massive objects, which would manifest as a slight stretching and compression of space itself.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "Can we directly observe the gravitational waves that are predicted by the equations of General Relativity?" 2) "Can we detect things like colliding black holes, because that would be awesome!"
How does it…
drorzel | April 12, 2010Several weeks ago, I announced a contest to determine the Most Amazing Laser Application. Personal issues interrupted this, but I want to finish it out in honor of LaserFest Here's the list of finalists, with links to those already written up:
Cat toy/ dog toy/ laser light show
Laser cooling/ BEC
Lunar laser ranging
Optical tweezers
Optical storage media (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray)
LIGO
Telecommunications
Holography
Laser ignited fusion
Laser eye surgery
Laser frequency comb/ spectroscopy
Laser guide stars/ adaptive optics
I'll be writing up LIGO shortly, and will try to finish the whole thing as soon…
bioephemera | April 12, 2010
from "Visualizing biological data--now and in the future"
Seán I O'Donoghue, Anne-Claude Gavin, Nils Gehlenborg, David S Goodsell, Jean-Karim Hériché, Cydney B Nielsen, Chris North, Arthur J Olson, James B Procter, David W Shattuck, Thomas Walter & Bang Wong
Nature Methods Supplement 7, S2 - S4 (2010)
Nature Methods has a special supplement out right now on bioimaging methods, with five commissioned reviews, "Visualizing genomes: techniques and challenge," "Visualization of multiple alignments, phylogenies and gene family evolution," "Visualization of image data from cells to…
bioephemera | April 11, 2010Something I ran across by accident, while perusing our latest copy of Issues in Science and Technology: currently, the National Academies are sponsoring a Visual Culture and Evolution Online Symposium. It runs through Wednesday. What that means, apparently, is their panelists discuss the intersection of design, art, and culture with evolutionary biology concepts (sexual selection, genetics, adaptation, etc.) at a blog set up for the purpose.
The blog is basic (generic template), and a bit confusing. What seems to be happening is that panelists' ongoing contributions are folded into the posts…