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aardvarchaeology | November 18, 2014
No, Kim Stanley Robinson, when two groups of characters meet and tell each other what they've gone through recently under the reader's watchful eye, you shouldn't write that dialogue. Because the reader already knows.
Back when my father-in-law the engineer had just come to Sweden from China and worked as a waiter, he used to have a few hours off in the afternoon. One day he decided to relax with a movie, despite understanding neither the English dialogue nor the Swedish subtitles. He was confused and horrified by what he happened to see: Alien.
Feeling flush after my intense September bout…
gregladen | November 18, 2014Of course they do. To the extent that genes make you anything in particular, though the role of genetics in human behavior is pretty limited.
You've probably heard about the newly reported research in which a genetic link was found to homosexuality in a study of gay brothers. Kelly Servick has a good writeup on it here. The study looked at 409 pairs of gay brothers, and found a region on the X chromosome that was similar across the sample. This sort of shotgun approach, comparing a trait (in this case, gayness) with a bunch of DNA (I oversimplify) is very likely to get results that look real…
gregladen | November 14, 2014A new study just out in Science suggests that we will have an increase in lightning strikes of about 12 percent for every degree C of global warming. That could add up. From the abstract:
Lightning plays an important role in atmospheric chemistry and in the initiation of wildfires, but the impact of global warming on lightning rates is poorly constrained. Here we propose that the lightning flash rate is proportional to the convective available potential energy (CAPE) times the precipitation rate. Using observations, the product of CAPE and precipitation explains 77% of the variance in the…
esiegel | November 13, 2014“I asked the Zebra,
are you black with white stripes?
Or white with black stripes?
And the zebra asked me,
Are you good with bad habits?
Or are you bad with good habits?
Are you noisy with quiet times?
Or are you quiet with noisy times?
Are you happy with some sad days?
Or are you sad with some happy days?
Are you neat with some sloppy ways?
Or are you sloppy with some neat ways?
And on and on and on and on and on and on he went.
I’ll never ask a zebra about stripes…again.” -Shel Silverstein
What about, though, when it comes to the fundamental nature of things in the Universe? Are they waves…
gregladen | November 12, 2014Have you heard the comet singing? From the Rosetta Blog this press release:
Rosetta’s Plasma Consortium (RPC) has uncovered a mysterious ‘song’ that Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is singing into space. RPC principal investigator Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier, head of Space Physics and Space Sensorics at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, tells us more.
Sound_comet2
Artist's impression of the 'singing comet' 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NavCam
RPC consists of five instruments on the Rosetta orbiter that provide a wide variety of complementary information about the…
jrosenhouse | November 10, 2014After taking last week off, Problem of the Week returns. This week's problem has several possible answers, so even after a solution gets posted you can feel free to look for others. In fact, I'd be curious to know the various approaches people took to solve the problem. Did anyone come up with anything more clever than trial and error?
jrosenhouse | November 9, 2014Babson Task problems are hard work, so we shall resume our consideration of them next week. Instead I have a lovely lightweight problem for you this week, composed by Pal Benko in 1968. Actually, you can have an interesting philosophical discussion about whether this problem was composed or discovered. In the position below, white is to play and mate in three:
The story behind this problem is that Benko challenged Bobby Fischer to solve it in thirty minutes. Fischer accepted the challenge, but was unable to find the solution. When Benko showed him the solution, Fischer then claimed…
gregladen | November 8, 2014See here to see why you might want to install the Mate flavor of Ubuntu 14.10.
Then, install it and consider doing these things. Get your system up to date. Yes, yes, you just installed it but that install image was old(ish). Update and upgrade now:
First, you probably want to open the Software Center, to to Software and Updates, and enable all the Ubuntu Software Sourcews (other than source and the CDRom option). Then:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Go to Preferences/Additional Drivers and then allow additional drivers, and pick a proprietary driver for your graphics…
jrosenhouse | November 6, 2014Here's an interesting article from Quanta. It's about efforts by physicists to test the idea of the multiverse:
If modern physics is to be believed, we shouldn’t be here. The meager dose of energy infusing empty space, which at higher levels would rip the cosmos apart, is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times tinier than theory predicts. And the minuscule mass of the Higgs boson, whose relative smallness allows big structures such as galaxies and humans to form, falls roughly 100 quadrillion times short of expectations. Dialing up…
jrosenhouse | November 5, 2014Chris Mooney has an astonishingly weak op-ed in a recent edition of The Washington Post. Desperate to make an argument that liberals deny science just as surely as conservatives do, he seizes on a recent study that shows a large percentage of sociologists are not open to the idea that certain gender differences are the result of evolution, as opposed to cultural factors. We shall come to the specifics of that argument in a moment, but we can save some time by skipping to the end of the essay:
None of this is to say that a few sociologists' views about evolution can be considered…
jrosenhouse | November 5, 2014Here in the math department at James Madison University, we are currently debating certain changes to the major. The problem is that we have distinct groups in pure mathematics, applied mathematics, statistics and math education. We also have students that major in mathematics for very different reasons. Some are training to be teachers, some are planning to go into industry, others are interested in graduate school, still others might be double majoring in something like physics or computer science. All of this diversity makes it difficult, more like impossible, to craft one major that…
jrosenhouse | November 3, 2014It is not just his controversial stance that the Church should dial back its dickishness towards homosexuals that has brought attention to Pope Francis. He has also weighed in on evolution:
Pope Francis on Monday (Oct. 27) waded into the controversial debate over the origins of human life, saying the big bang theory did not contradict the role of a divine creator, but even required it.
The pope was addressing the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which gathered at the Vatican to discuss “Evolving Concepts of Nature.”
“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the…
jrosenhouse | November 3, 2014Brittany Maynard died this weekend. If you are not familiar with her story, she tells it here, in her own words.
On New Year's Day, after months of suffering from debilitating headaches, I learned that I had brain cancer.
I was 29 years old. I'd been married for just over a year. My husband and I were trying for a family.
Our lives devolved into hospital stays, doctor consultations and medical research. Nine days after my initial diagnoses, I had a partial craniotomy and a partial resection of my temporal lobe. Both surgeries were an effort to stop the growth of my tumor.
In April, I…
gregladen | November 3, 2014Sad news today: Tom Magliozzi, one of Cambridge Massachusetts greatest gifts to public radio (and Cambridge has given a LOT of gifts to public radio) died today. Car talk was, verily, one of the best things ever.
I have one Car Talk story and this is as good a time as any to tell it. It might be the only link between Sean Connery and The Tappet Brothers.
Look at the picture above. It is Harvard Square. Remember the movie Just Cause, starring Sean Connery and some other people? One of the first scenes in the movie has the mother of a young black man wrongfully accused of murder taking…
jrosenhouse | November 2, 2014I'm sure you remember my epic, two-part series, from 2008, about my love for locked-room mysteries: Part One, Part Two. Well then, I'm sure you can imagine my delight at learning of the publication of Otto Penlzer's new anthology The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries.
Penzler has a short essay up over at HuffPo announcing the new book. He writes:
I don't care how old we get -- as long as we retain a sense of wonder, we'll stay young and live a happier life than those too-cool-for-school cynics who have a weary, ho-hum, is-that-all-there-is response to magic shows, fireworks,…
jrosenhouse | November 2, 2014Our diagram position today was composed by Joseph Babson in 1927. The stipulation is selfmate in three:
Recall that in a selfmate, white plays first and forces black to give checkmate. That's right! White is trying to get checkmated, while black is doing everything in his power to avoid giving checkmate (or at least to postpone it beyond the stipulated number of moves). It's a complete inversion of normal chess logic.
Let's get right down to business. The key move is for white to play 1. a8Q!, leading to this position:
Folks, as key moves go, that's pretty appalling. Promoting to…
jrosenhouse | October 29, 2014Pope Francis has been continuing his campaign of liberalization within the Roman Catholic Church. At the recent synod on the family, reform-minded bishops within the Church, many installed by Francis, proposed language that, while not changing doctrine, would have liberalized the Church's stance toward homosexuals and divorced people. The paragraphs that are getting all the press are these:
Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community: are we capable of welcoming these people, guaranteeing to them a fraternal space in our communities? Often they wish to…
gregladen | October 23, 2014Arctic Sea Ice extent continues to be a problem. This year, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, ARctic Sea ice reached its lowest extent this year on September 17th, which is about the sixth lowest extent on record, following a multi-year trend of decline. There is variation from year to year. This year's minimum was almost exactly the same as last years. With the exception of 2001, minimum extent has been below the climatalogical average every year since 1998.
Dana Nuccitelli has a post on this with excellent discussion and some nice graphics, and he has also produced a…