格致

Readers of the science blogosphere would have to be living under a rock to have missed the rise of fabulous geek-friendly web comics. Everyone’s fave Xkcd has been getting CV love for a couple of years now (and I’ve been remiss in linking to the latest size-o-everything visualization). PhD Comics is also a consistent source of relevant comics, though we’ve never linked to one of my early favorites. I’m also a long time fan of My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable, and in particular this one, which is sadly too foul mouthed for me to show to any of my intro astronomy classes. Web comics have even produced entropy-confused dinosaurs and explorations of the anthropic principle that Sean has linked to, and my favorite piece of science-themed clothing (from Achewood).

Recently, the creator of Abstruse Goose is using his/her powers for good, by endorsing CV’s Donors Choose efforts through Scienceman. You may know Abstruse Goose through the immortal lines “You don’t find the Higgs Boson. The Higgs Boson finds you.“, or perhaps “Science. If you ain’t pissin’ people off, you ain’t doin’ it right“, or maybe because it’s the only place in existence where you’d find me and Ed Witten given comparable levels of respect. If you found your way here through AG, perhaps you should just move right along to Donors Choose and give the kiddies and their teachers a little love. Scienceman would want you to.

Aquaman, however, wouldn’t give a rat’s patootie.

Update: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is sending folks to CV’s Donors Choose as well! Go Web Comics! Go!

Via Greg Laden, apparently originating in this Daily Kos comment: the candidates as trains.

I had the pleasure the other day of talking with science writer Jennifer Ouellette, blogger at Cocktail Party Physics, who also happens to be a black belt in jujitsu (!), and Sean’s wife. The conversation was recorded for Bloggingheads.tv, which is a (to me) peculiar project to record bloggers talking to each other. I admit to being baffled that people actually want to listen to bloggers talk into their computers. However, people seem to actually watch these discussions, and given that I enjoy talking about science (and had never had the opportunity to meet Jennifer before), it seemed like a fun thing to do. If you’re interested, the discussion is here:

While I enjoyed the actual discussion, I confess to finding it disconcerting to have a recording of myself floating around the internet. I still have a bit of the anxious 13 year old stuck in my head, replaying years-old conversations where I wish I hadn’t said something, or said something different. The rational 40 year old part of me knows these conversations were long forgotten by everyone but me, but with the internet, they’re actually not. Instead, people can replay them over and over, and (even worse) comment on whether or not I misused a particular word (I did — I said “spurious” when “serendipitous” would have been more appropriate), or whether or not it’s distracting that a hunk of my hair tends to fall down and cover my one non-functional eye. It’s like my middle school nightmares actually coming true. I’ve progressed enough in the intervening two decades that I’m not paralyzed or depressed over it, but the desire to get everything just right, and feeling faint flips in the stomach when you fall just a little bit short, has never completely gone away.

Every time I hear it, it’s like fingernails on a blackboard: “nucular” instead of “nuclear”. It’s baffling where that locution comes from. I am afraid it really does bring the speaker down a notch in my estimation, on the intelligence scale, though I am usually able to get past it. Even in my field, where we use the word a lot, you hear the occasional “nucular”.

Recently it’s been in the news, with Sarah Palin being a nucular type. But she also likes “heckuva”, “doggone”, and “you betcha” and many more, despite their clear tendency to turn off her audience. Anyway, Palin’s problems go a lot deeper than that - I think Steven Pinker got it right in the New York Times op-ed section today.

There are, if you start to think about it, a ton of words that many people mispronounce, and it doesn’t cause one to necessarily cringe. Though, I have to say, some of the following ones do make me cringe now that I sensitized myself to it:

• “realtor” Somehow, a lot of people pronounce this as “ree-la-tor”. Perhaps it’s because a realtor handles real estate?
• “jewelry” This one comes out of some people’s mouths as “joo-ler-ee”.
• “February” Why do we need that first “r” anyway?
• “Wednesday” Okay, I have to admit no one at all bothers with the “d”…should they?

There are so many more…asterisk, espresso, et cetera. (Yes, people mispronounce that last one.)

Well, you get the idea. Language is ever-evolving, and, alas, common usage wins out in the end.

Ron Cowen at Science News has a fun story about the very first political recordings. A century ago, amidst the 1908 Presidential election campaign, the two candidates — William Howard Taft and William Jennings Bryan — took time to record messages on wax cylinders for mass distribution. Previously, recordings had been made of actors reading the text of various speeches, but this was the first time the candidates themselves got into the game.

Best of all, you can listen to the recordings themselves. Hear Bryant speak on “The Security of Bank Deposits”, and Taft talk about the “Rights and Progress of the Negro.”

Happily, those problems have been completely solved by now.

Each year, DonorsChose does a Blogger Challenge, where they harness the power of the internet to bring money to deserving classrooms in public schools across the U.S. In the past we have wimped out and supported other bloggers, but this year we’re stepping up to the plate. Big time.

Cosmic Variance Challenge 2008

It’s a simple and compelling model: individual classrooms isolate a pressing need, and donors can choose which projects to support. We’ve picked out a number of great projects that will help students learn about science in fun, hands-on ways, and we’re going to be adding a few more soon.

We’ve set a fundraising goal of $10,000 over the next month. That sounds like a lot, but it is enormously less than the capacity of our readers; we get about 5,000 hits per day, so that’s a pitiful $2/visitor. But most visitors, we understand, are wimps. So if we get $20/person from the 10% of visitors who are not wimps, we hit the goal. But it’s okay to go over! If we fall short, you should all feel embarrassed.

Mostly we just want to crush the folks at ScienceBlogs, who have put together their own challenge. Crush them, I say. Sure, they have a zillion blogs, several of whom have many times our readership. So what? This is a matter of how awesome the reader are, not how many of them there are. We will also be asking other friendly bloggers to either set up their own donation pages, or hop aboard our bandwagon — if anyone wants to advertise the challenge, we can list them as an affiliate on the challenge page.

And don’t think that we don’t appreciate your efforts. Once all is said and done, we’ll put up a post that lists and explicitly thanks anyone who donates more than $100 (unless you ask not to be listed). And if anyone donates more than $500, I’ll send a copy of my Teaching Company Lectures on dark matter and dark energy. Which aren’t cheap, let me tell you.

Reading through the list of projects is guaranteed to break your heart. In a world where we can “lose” $15 billion through fiscal malfeasance in Iraq, it’s painful to see public-school teachers go begging for a frikking LCD projector or a couple of microscopes. It’s not that hard to click the link and send a few dollars their way. The classrooms make a special effort to write back to every donor to thank them — it will put your heart right back together again.

Artist Nina Katchadourian has a lovely little series of photographs of stories told through the spines of books:

Or, for more drama, and less of the sweep of history:

(h/t Slog)

For American citizens, there is a Presidential election fast approaching. (Have you heard about it?) Election Day is Tuesday, November 4. It’s time to register to vote. The Obama campaign has set up a great tool that let’s you figure out whether you are already registered, and if not, prints out a form you can mail in to do so:

• Register to Vote

It works for Republicans, too! Even Republicans who want to vote for a Republican this time around, although those are increasingly scarce.

If you think this election is important, you can go even further and donate money. Ad buys are crucial, of course, but get-out-the-vote efforts will be equally important, and they don’t come cheap.

• Barack Obama
• John McCain

There are also various third party candidates. Sadly, the Socialist Workers Party has nominated Róger Calero, who was born in Nicaragua, and is therefore ineligible to be President. If he wins, it will be quite the constitutional crisis!

For those who can’t make it to a polling station on Election Day, deadlines are very fast approaching for absentee voting. Start here:

• Long Distance Voters

Note that there’s nothing stopping you from absentee voting even if you could vote in person on Election Day; if you’re feeling motivated right now but might be lazy on November 4, why not vote right away?

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy constitutes one of the finest reading experiences for children I’ve ever seen. I read them as an adult, on the advice of a literary colleague, and fell under their spell immediately. They are fantasy books, for sure, but with a strong rational and anti-authority philosophy. And although I don’t think of them as purely anti-religious, if your religion is one with an authoritarian streak then …

In a brief article in The Guardian, Pullman takes on those who would seek to ban his books from library shelves. He points to the futility of such bans, the inevitable increased readership of banned works, and the utterly moronic reasons that some give for requesting bans. But he saves his real vitriol for religion. Pullman’s basic take on religion

My basic objection to religion is not that it isn’t true; I like plenty of things that aren’t true. It’s that religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

isn’t precisely the same as my own, since I do disagree with religion because it is false. I also like plenty of things that aren’t true - the works of David Foster Wallace are a timely example - but the things I like that aren’t true don’t claim to be true. But I certainly also agree with the things that drive Pullman nuts

In fact, when it comes to banning books, religion is the worst reason of the lot. Religion, uncontaminated by power, can be the source of a great deal of private solace, artistic inspiration, and moral wisdom. But when it gets its hands on the levers of political or social authority, it goes rotten very quickly indeed. The rank stench of oppression wafts from every authoritarian church, chapel, temple, mosque, or synagogue – from every place of worship where the priests have the power to meddle in the social and intellectual lives of their flocks, from every presidential palace or prime ministerial office where civil leaders have to pander to religious ones.

Well put!

Let’s see. The bailout bill was scuttled.

The stock market is tanking.

The Hubble repair mission is delayed.

The LHC is on ice until the spring.

John McCain is still running for President.

But that’s all okay, because:

Michael Bérubé is back.

CNN is reporting that NASA is delaying the upcoming Hubble servicing mission till at least next year. The data handling and communications system has failed, so the telescope has stopped sending down data. This obviously needs to be fixed, but with the launch scheduled for two weeks from now, there is no time for the astronauts to practice doing the repair. The astronauts spend months and months of time training to do repairs (in the very nifty Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory), and you can’t just say “Oh, while you’re up there, do you mind putting a bit of duct tape over here? Thanks much!”. The repair process needs to be designed as well. NASA thinks they can get a backup control channel working in a few weeks, in which case more data can come down in the interim. On the other hand, there’s no plan for observations during the coming year — the plans were all based around instruments that were supposed to be up there by late October, but that are instead going to be sitting in a clean room.

Another bit of fallout is that before this happened, the EVA (extra-vehicular activity) schedule was extremely tight, with a good chance that either the ACS or STIS repair would have to be scrapped if even the slightest activity went slower than planned. If you stick in a computer repair as well, I think the odds that we’ll get either instrument in are way down. On the other hand, the teams who work on these missions are vewwwwwwy, vewwwwwy clever, so who knows.

Oh, and yet one more awful thing is the havoc this plays with budgets. In large missions like these, time is money. There are hundreds of people supporting the repair mission in various ways, and while they’re critical to its success, the budgets were not anticipating having them working on repair issues during the next year.

The only bright spot is that this failed before the launch. If they had gone up there, installed all the fancy new hardware, and then had the data transfer system fail, we’d be well and truly hosed. But to dim that bright spot again, there are a number of ancient systems on the telescope (gyros, thermal blankets, etc) that are essential to keeping the spacecraft healthy. They’re scheduled for repair as well, and one can only hope that they can last another year.

And I suppose the post I was going to write crowing about how I get to go to the launch is tabled until next year too…

Update: Steinn has a lot more details over at his place.

If you’ve run across Microsoft’s new ads, which aim to counter the witty “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” series by Apple, you might have noticed this tweedy academic-looking guy near the end:

Years back, I had the idea that Apple should include more famous-for-academia types in its Think Different ads. Ed Witten, Jacques Derrida, Amartya Sen, people like that. But I didn’t actually call up any ad agencies to make the pitch. So I figured that Microsoft had the same idea, and was including some professor-type among its self-declared PC’s in order to lend some gravitas to the proceedings.

Yeah, not so much. The somber mug above belongs to none other than Deepak Chopra, celebrated purveyor of quantum nonsense. He did, of course, win the 1998 IgNobel Prize in Physics for “for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness.” So there is that. (In certain religious circles, there is an increasingly popular teaching known as the Prosperity Gospel. I wonder if I could make money writing a book about “The Prosperity Hamiltonian”?)

The construction of jokes comparing Deepak Chopra’s understanding of quantum mechanics to Microsoft’s understanding of software is left as an exercise for the reader.

From Andrew Jaffe, I just learned that Peter Coles has a new blog:

• In the Dark

Peter is a theoretical cosmologist at Cardiff, in the UK, and the author of various interesting books.

And in case you didn’t notice it in John’s last post, there is a new blog by particle theorist Ben Lillie:

• Peculiar Velocity

Ben’s thesis advisor was our very own JoAnne, so this is practically our blog-offspring. And it also reminds me that I never properly introduced the blog of my own former student, Eugene Lim:

• When In Doubt, Do

Finally, for those who don’t scan the comments as well as the posts themselves, CV commenter (and distinguished string theorist) Moshe Rozali has joined David Berenstein at

• Shores of the Dirac Sea

Putting them all together, amount of blogging by respectable physicists has taken a substantial leap forward. We still have a long way to go to catch up to the economists.

The documentary film The Atom Smashers, which I posted about earlier, premiered at the Museum of Science and Industry last week, followed by a panel discussion and Q&A with Mark Oreglia from Chicago, Ben Kilminster and Marcela Carena from Fermilab, Robin and me from UC Davis, and the two filmmakers, Clayton Brown and Monica Ross. We took individual questions from a moderator, Sylvia Ewing, and then from the audience. I have to say that my favorite question came from a student who asked if our quest to understand nature at the particle level was never-ending, due to Godel’s Theorem or something like that. That question is worth a post all by itself, and I want to apologize to than young man for not answering it more fully. Bottom line answer: it probably is never-ending, but more like an infinite series is never ending, rather than the truth being out there, never accessible to experiment.

Ben Lillie, a theorist from Argonne/Chicago who attended the premiere, wrote a very thoughtful review and captures a lot about what folks have been saying. Julia Keller wrote an article about it two days before hte show for the Chciago Tribune. The film was shown at Fermilab yesterday, and overall we’ve gotten a lot of great positive feedback on it.

Robin and I only saw the movie the night before the premiere for the first time, and had only 24 hours to get over the weird feeling of seeing yourself in a movie. But Clayton and Monica did a great job of picking out some of the more interesting and intelligent things we had to say, and they fit well into the overall story line of the film.

This is a truly new approach to making a science documentary, rarely if at all pedagogical about the science itself, but rather digging a level deeper into what it’s like to do what we do, what motivates us, and the never ending struggle to maintain funding. There is kind of a bittersweet feeling at the end - no Higgs, no funding - but the fact that we all still hope that we will break through some day soon to the next level of understanding about our universe is palpably present at the end.

The film will be shown on PBS’s Independent Lens on Nov. 25. Bravo, Clayton and Monica and all the rest at 137 Films!

I found Chris Wilson’s article, in Slate, to be an interesting opinion on the coverage of the LHC and other topics in particle physics, and well worth a look. I swear though, before I’m accused of it, that this quote

On the whole, the best writing about physics for a general audience seems to come from physicists, not journalists.

wasn’t why.

I have a birthday coming up, and this is definitely going on my Amazon.com wish list.

That is Swiss pilot Yves Rossy, flying at a height of about 6000 ft across the English Channel in his personal jetpack yesterday. He reached speeds of up to 125 mph before releasing his parachute and landing in England. Via.

This would make my morning commute quicker. More science would get done, and the world would benefit. Let’s start taking up a collection, right?

Sixty one Nobel Laureates have just released an open letter endorsing Barack Obama for president of the United States. As far as I know, this is far and away the largest number of prize-winners to ever endorse a presidential candidate. It’s a sign of just how bad things have gotten in this country.

Of course, there has been plenty of evidence for the decline of the scientific enterprise in the US (science funding issues, The Gathering Storm, the politicization of science). Eight years of Bush have not been kind to science. And given the challenges we are facing (e.g., how to sustain well over 6 billion people without destroying our planet), this is not the time to short-change the scientific enterprise. Sadly, there is much evidence that McCain will carry on the Republican trend. Picking a running-mate that believes the Earth is 3000 years old, and that humans have nothing to do with global warming, does not inspire confidence. The McCain campaign has finally responded to the questions from Science Debate 2008, and the answers are mostly platitudes, without substance or firm commitments. Obama, on the other hand, gives science its due. His campaign has released an extremely detailed plan to rescue science. Both Nature and Physics Today have done fairly thorough comparisons, as has a certain somebody’s better half.

When 61 Nobel Laureates express such dismay at the current state of affairs, and such uniform and clear conviction that Obama is the best candidate, perhaps it’s time to take notice?

On the theory that it is good to mention events before they happen, so that interested parties might actually choose to attend, check out the upcoming Skeptics Society conference: Origins: the Big Questions. It will be at Caltech, and will take just one day, Saturday October 4, with a pre-conference dinner the previous night, Friday the 3rd. The day’s events are divided into two parts. In the morning you get a bunch of talks on the origins of big things — I’ll be talking on the origin of time, Leonard Susskind on the origin of the laws of physics, Paul Davies on the origin of the universe, Donald Prothero on the origin of life, and Christof Koch on the origin of consciousness.

Then in the afternoon they change gears, and start talking about science and religion. Names involved include Stuart Kauffman, Kenneth Miller, Nancey Murphy, Michael Shermer, Philip Clayton, Vic Stenger, and Hugo Ross. It’s this part of the event that has stirred up a tiny bit of controversy, as it is co-sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, famous appliers of lipstick to the pig that is the interface between science and religion. It’s legitimate to wonder why the Skeptics Society is getting mixed up with Templeton at all, and it’s been discussed a bit in our beloved blogosphere: see Bad Astronomy, Pharyngula, and Richard Dawkins.

I am on the record as saying that scientists should be extremely leery of accepting money from organizations with any sort of religious orientation, and Templeton in particular. (Happily, in this case the speakers aren’t getting any money at all, so at least that temptation wasn’t part of the calculation.) But it’s by no means a cut-and-dried issue, as we’ve seen in discussions of the Foundational Questions Institute.

Personally, I prefer not to have the chocolate of my science mixed up with the peanut butter of somebody else’s religion, and certainly not without clear labeling — peanut allergies can be pretty severe. But if someone wants to explicitly put on a peanut butter cup conference, that’s fine, and I don’t have any problem with participating. The problem with the Templeton Foundation is not that they coerce scientists into repudiating their beliefs through the promise of piles of cash; it’s that, by providing easy money to promote certain kinds of discussions, those discussions begin to seem more prominent and important than they really are. Perhaps, without any Templeton funding, the Origins conference would have devoted much less time to the science-and-religion questions, leaving much more time for interesting science discussions. This would have given outsiders a more accurate view of the role that religion plays in current scientific work on these foundational questions: to wit, none whatsoever.

The Templeton Foundation has every right to exist, and sponsor conferences. And there is undoubtedly a danger among atheists that they get caught up in a “holier than thou” competition — “I’m so atheist that I won’t even talk to people if they believe in God!” Which gets a little silly. I don’t think there’s anything explicitly wrong with the Origins conference; the Templeton-sponsored part is clearly labeled and set off from the rest, and it might end up being interesting. (Also, the conference concludes with Mr. Deity — how awesome is that?) Michael Shermer’s own take is here. But I look forward to a day when discussions of deep questions concerning the origin of the universe and of life can take place without the concept of God ever arising.

Today would have been John Coltrane’s 82nd birthday. Here he is playing Naima.

And here is an interview from 1960. “The reason I play so many — maybe it sounds angry, because I’m trying so many things at one time, you see — I haven’t sorted them out. I have a whole bag of things that I’m trying to work through and get the one essential, you know?”

Here is a computer animation, to the tune of Giant Steps.

And here is a robot playing the Giant Steps solo. Not as good as the original.

Coltrane died in 1967, at the age of 40.

I gave a talk yesterday at the Center for Inquiry branch here in LA. It was a popular-level spiel on The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time; click for slides. If I had been thinking, I would have advertised the existence of the talk before I had given it, rather than afterward. Either that, or I was trying to smoke out time-travelers.

But the real reason I’m even bringing it up is to give credit to this great YouTube video, found via Swans on Tea.

I was literally zipping through blogs yesterday morning while drinking coffee and preparing for the upcoming talk, when up popped this wonderful illustration of entropy and the arrow of time, which naturally I showed at the talk. And it features a kitty. (Schrodinger has his own cat, why shouldn’t Boltzmann?)