Science
rallain | December 14, 2009The solar system is difficult to show correctly. Why? It is difficult because the size of things are vastly different. Let me use units common in solar-system astronomy, the Astronomical Unit (or AU). One AU is the distance from the Sun to the Earth. If I want to look at all the planets, I would need to go out to about 30 AU (to Neptune - remember that Pluto is not a planet). That is not a problem but then if I want to look at the size of even the Sun, it is just 0.001 AU across. And the Earth is even smaller, at 0.0001 AU. So that is the problem. The distance from the Sun to Neptune…
drorzel | December 14, 2009In response to my post about Amazon sales-rank tracking, Matthew Beckler created just such a tracker:
That's the last few days' worth of hourly rankings of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, as of 10am Eastern. Enormous dork that I am, I find this really fascinating, and not just in an absolute-number sense (because, really, these numbers don't mean much of anything).
The big thing that jumps out at me is the quantization of books. You see a bunch of sharp, downward-going jumps in the graph, which presumably correspond to discrete book purchase events. In between jumps, there's a slow upward…
drorzel | December 14, 2009Like every other media outlet, Slate has a Best Books of 2009 list, in this case featuring one book chosen by each of their 22 editors. Editor in chief Jacob Weisberg chose Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder, and writes:
If, like me, you didn't study much science after high school, this absorbing narrative will make you appreciate the gravity of your mistake. At one level, it is simply an enchanting group biography of the great British discoverers Joseph Banks, Humphrey Davy, and William Herschel, and their relationships with the likes of Keats, Coleridge, Byron and the Shelleys. At another,…
bioephemera | December 13, 2009
Okay, so these tricks aren't rocket science. But I think lighting and extinguishing candles remotely is a pretty entertaining diversion - definitely for an audience experiencing a post-holiday meal food coma. You can lecture them all about chemistry, and they won't be able to flee! Bwahahahahaha! Good stuff.
Then I found this "Extreme Physics Party Trick". . . and I'm still laughing.
EXTREME!
grrlscientist | December 13, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
drorzel | December 11, 2009I was sitting in my office on campus, working on some computer stuff, when I noticed a bunch of guys from Facilities out in the hall, bustling around doing something. A few minutes later, one of them stopped right outside my door, and called into the main Facilities office on his cell phone.
"We're up here in Science and Engineering to do the annual fire alarm test but, um, there are a bunch of faculty still in the building. Could you, you know, send them an email or something to let them know we're going to ring all the alarms?"
This wouldn't be a big deal if it were a one-off thing-- we are…
rallain | December 10, 2009This picture has been all over the blogs.
I don't want to talk about this picture too much - that has been done (a good summary discussion can be found at Bad Astronomy). Apparently, this is some type of rocket mistake or something.
Although the picture is cool, it is not as cool as this simulation that someone made.
Here is the best shot from the video:
Maybe that picture didn't turn out so well. The point is that someone made a simulation (I assume it is a simulation, and not just an animation). How do you know if a simulation is any good? You look and see how well it compares with…
drorzel | December 10, 2009A purely hypothetical situation for today's poll. Purely.
You have agreed to read and review six grant proposals by Sunday. Today is Thursday, and you have not read them yet. What do you do?(poll)
If anybody needs me, I'll be in an undisclosed location not responding to email.
drorzel | December 10, 2009Months ago, during the DonorsChoose fundraiser, I offered to answer questions from people who donated to the Challenge. I then promptly forgot to respond to the questions sent in. Mea maxima culpa. Here's a way-too-late response to a good question from "tcmJOE":
I've spent the past few years trying to explore physics and figure out what I would be interested in doing--I've settled more towards energy research, somewhere between CM and MatSci, but I've tried at a variety of different things in the along the way. So my question for you is: How did you end up in AMO? Were there any other fields…
bioephemera | December 10, 2009
Albert Einstein has never reminded me much of Dr. Evil. Quite the opposite, in fact. But even Einstein occasionally had to ask for one MEEEEL-LION dollars - for a good cause, of course:
Dear Friend:
I write to you for help at the suggestion of a friend.
Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic power of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except…
grrlscientist | December 9, 2009I made a mistake. Madhu, the author of Reconciliation Ecology, will be your host for the 21 December 2009 edition of Scientia. Once again, to send your science, nature or medical writing to Scientia Pro Publica, email the link directly to its email address; ScientiaBlogCarnival@gmail.com. Be sure to include (1) the URL or "permalink", (2) the essay title and, to make life easier for the host, (3) please include a 2-3 sentence summary.
For the first issue of 2010, published on 4 January, I will be assisting host Bob O'Hara, author of currently hibernating blog, Deep Thoughts and Silliness.…
awild | December 9, 2009In reading various web reactions to news that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contained nearly 1 million dollars for ant research at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, it seems there's a lot of confusion about how something like ant behavior winds up getting a stimulus check. Here's an explanation.
Our starting point is the observation that stimulus has to be fast to be effective. The obvious problem is that we all know how fast goverment usually acts, and if the government were to put out a call for stimulus proposals with a full process of review and…
catdynamics | December 9, 2009There has been a lot of chatter about the e-mail cracked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (not to be confused with the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the UK Met Office in Exeter).
I would like to post abou it, but, I really can't comment.
Since PSU is involved in the issue and there is an ongoing inquiry into the issue, I can not comment: there is a slightest possibility anything I say could be considered in some sense official from PSU; or, prejudicial to the inquiry; or, biased, as I have some connection to some of the people involved…
drorzel | December 9, 2009I just finished shoveling six-plus inches of snow off our cars and driveway (the forecast called for something like 3-5", but we've got more than that, with no slowing in the fall). In honor of the first significant snowfall of the year, a poll:
It's snowing:(survey)
This one has ticky-boxes, which will play hell with the percentages, but I'm too tired to deal with complaints about radio buttons.
catdynamics | December 8, 2009there is an amusing rumour on the resonaances blog about cold dark matter
The CDMS experiment is a Cold Dark Matter Search experiment, looking for nuclear recoil in lab detectors, due to scattering of weakly interacting massive particles with normal matter.
[hmm, link is to UC site for CDMS - the Stanford CDMS website is password protected, don't know if that is usual - I have some recollection of linking to CDMS at Stanford in the
past with no problems.]
CDMSI ran for several years, and reported upper bounds on WIMP masses and cross-sections, and CDMSII has been running for a while now with…
awild | December 8, 2009The Republican Party speaks:
GOP senators on Tuesday highlighted âpure wasteâ in the billions of stimulus funds spent this year, including money for fossil research in Argentina, puppet shows and to protect cruise ships from terrorist attacks...
What does the Republican Party consider wasteful? Science, apparently:
Half a million dollars went to Arizona State University to study the genetic makeup of ants to determine distinctive roles in ant colonies; $450,000 went to the University of Arizona to study the division of labor in ant colonies.
âI had no idea that so much expertise concerning…
drorzel | December 8, 2009There's been a bit of a kerfuffle in the SF blogosphere about what writers should be paid for short fiction, which has led to a lot of people posting lists of their short fiction and what they were paid for it (Scalzi has links to most of them). This naturally leads me to wonder what the analogous situation for non-fiction is (being that I am vastly more likely to be paid money for non-fiction pieces than fiction).
Of course, I can't claim a long list of sales that I can list as my contribution to the discussion. I've only had a handful of pieces printed in commercial outlets: two pieces (so…
grrlscientist | December 8, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) was just published at Mauka to Makai. This edition is entitled Scientia Pro Publica 17: The EPIC Edition. The current host, Kelsey, author of Mauka to Makai, deserves our gratitude and appreciation for her super efforts to publish this edition despite the fact that she only had one submission on the Friday before the carnival was published -- due to the malfunctioning online blog carnival submission form.
Scientia Pro…
rallain | December 7, 2009So, it snowed here (in Louisiana). Sure, it wasn't a lot, but it was still a big deal. The following day, there was still some snow on the house roofs. I took some pictures. Here is a shot looking at the North side of a house.
And here is a view of the South side of the same roof.
What is so cool about that? All the houses were the same way. North side of roof = snow. South side = no snow. At first, I was going to use these pictures to talk about flux. Basically, since the Sun is lower in the South sky the southern side of the roof gets more solar energy flux. Then I realized my…
bioephemera | December 7, 2009
Every year, I do my charitable giving at the holidays. It doesn't make much sense from a personal budget standpoint, since I'm always running out of money and time, but it just feels like a good thing to do. This year, I'm going to feature one recipient here on the blog, in the hopes of raising awareness of all the great local charities out there who don't get much press.
Unlike my perennial favorites Doctors Without Borders and DonorsChoose - both wonderful organizations who do a lot of good, and have been featured on BioE already this year - or media groups like NPR and Wikimedia, there…