Category Archives: Other science

aka stamp collecting

Contradictions

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It’s pretty standard fare (with too few notable exceptions) for the GOP to take anti-science stances on topics like evolution and, more recently, global warming. From my perspective, it’s interesting to note that those candidates who have declared global warming to be false are taking a position that’s contrary to that of the military — the people who have a vested interest in the science as far as it involves the security of the US, and who do not have to take positions in order to “align” themselves with voters.

This is a video of the Oceanographer of the Navy, RADM David Titley, who was formerly the commanding officer of the Meteorology and Oceanography command (i.e. my boss, several levels up). It also turns out that I grew up less than a mile from him, and while I am junior enough that our paths did not cross in high school, a younger brother of his was my patrol leader in the Boy Scouts. It made for an interesting exchange when I got a chance meet him when he toured the lab — a comment from left field (not being related to the science and technology) and it took him a second to mentally shift gears and process it.

Anyway, he was a skeptic until he got a good look at the science, and now it’s his job (and others) to worry about the impacts of global warming on our nation’s defense. So I wonder how a GOP candidate — who usually comes with a “strong on defense” label already attached, would reconcile these opposing positions? Are they really willing to weaken our defense by ignoring global warming? Would voters be swayed from a denialist stance, knowing that the navy accepted it as good and valid science and takes it very seriously?

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Oceanographer for the U.S. Navy, RADM David Titley discusses the hot topic of climate change, and its impending ramifications on national security. Listen as he details some of the top facts and figures you should know about climate change and your future, explained in terms that even the most unfamiliar with science would be able to understand.

I love the observation that ~390 ppm, dismissed as inconsequential by global warming denialists, is enough to get you a bit drunk if it’s alcohol in the blood.

Ha Ha Ha HA Ha

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What Woody Woodpecker Can Teach Us About Football

Kids always ask the best, most basic questions; they haven’t learned yet to pretend to be smart, to be ashamed of their ignorance; they’re just curious about how the world works. And the best scientists ask those kinds of questions too, which is why we might roll our eyes and chuckle a bit when we read about two California scientists who decided to delve into the underlying science of why it is that woodpeckers don’t get headaches.

Cautionary Tale From Neutrinoland

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There’s one main reason I don’t care how many non-experts rail against topics like we see with global warming or evolution. It’s because they are NOT EXPERTS. When you get into the details, science is subtle and tricky, and even though you might understand the big chunks, there comes a point where the non-expert — even a very intelligent one — will be out of his or her depth.

I offer up an example from the brouhaha of the month, the neutrino experiment. (I trust I don’t have to say no, not that one, the other one.) Followup: FTL neutrinos explained? Not so fast, folks.

There are two issues here. One is the paper itself on which Phil is commenting; the author seems to assume that the GPS satellite use for synchronization is always traveling in the same direction as it passes over the experiment, which I don’t think is the case. But I’m not a GPS expert. The second is that if this purported timing offset weren’t already accounted for in GPS receivers, it would show up as a positioning error. 1 nanosecond is 1 foot, roughly. (3 ns is a meter). So from just this one source we’re talking 10 – 11 meters of error. GPS does better than that. It’s kind of silly to assume that this wouldn’t be accounted for in setting up the system. So my initial reaction is that it’s bunk.

The second part is what Phil posts

I had thought of something like this as well. CERN and OPERA are at different latitudes, and since the Earth rotates, they are moving around the Earth’s axis at different speeds. Could that be it? I did the math, and the answer is no. Too bad; it would’ve been fun to be the person to have figured this out!

As I’ve mentioned at least once before, the rotation of the earth has no effect on clocks. The rotation causes deformation of the earth (we are oblate spheroid, mighty mighty oblate spheroid) and it turns out that the slowing from the kinematic time dilation is offset by a speedup cause by being slightly higher in the gravity well. So on the geoid, clocks all run at the same rate, and you only have to account for elevation changes.

It’s not surprising that an astronomer wouldn’t know that. Hell, I didn’t know that for the first few years I worked with clocks, and when I asked the question, the people I talked to weren’t sure why latitude corrections weren’t necessary. I went and found the answer in Neil Ashby’s “Relativity in the Global Positioning System”

Considering clocks at two different latitudes, the one further north will be closer to the earth’s center because of the flattening – it will therefore be more redshifted. However, it is also closer to the axis of rotation, and going more slowly, so it suffers less second-order Doppler shift. The earth’s oblateness gives rise to an important quadrupole correction. This combination of effects cancels exactly on the reference surface.

What does all this mean? Smart people outside of their field will not be familiar with subtle but very important effects. They may, as happened here, raise what seem to be legitimate objections that are well-know to people who actually work in the field.

Going On and On and On About Archaeology

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Tiny drone helps reveal ancient royal burial sites

The machine tested in a remote area in Russia called Tuekta was a four-propeller “quadrocopter”: the battery-powered Microdrone md4-200. The fact it is small — the axis of its rotors is about 27 inches (70 cm) — and weighs about 35 ounces (1,000 grams) made it easy to transport, and researchers said it was very easy to fly, stabilizing itself constantly and keeping at a given height and position unless ordered to do otherwise. The engine also generated almost no vibrations, they added, so that photographs taken from the camera mounted under it were relatively sharp. Depending on the wind, temperature and its payload, the drone’s maximum flight time is about 20 minutes.

Let's Get Small, 2011 Edition

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Super Small: Top 20 Microscope Photos of the Year

We’re never disappointed with the photos from the Nikon Small World contest, and the top 20 judges picks contained in this gallery suggest that the photographers just keep getting better. These photos were selected from more than 2,000, but if you disagree with the judges, you can still pick your favorite in the popular vote contest throughout October.

Mr. McGuire was Wrong About This One

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It’s not about plastics

Far From Any Lab, Paper Bits Find Illness

While other scientists successfully shrank beakers, tubes and centrifuges into diagnostic laboratories that fit into aluminum boxes that cost $50,000, George Whitesides had smaller dreams.

The diagnostic tests designed in Dr. Whitesides’s Harvard University chemistry laboratory fit on a postage stamp and cost less than a penny.

His secret? Paper.

Say It Loud, Too, So I Understand

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Slow Down! Why Some Languages Sound So Fast

[S]ome languages seem to zip by faster than others. Spanish blows the doors off French; Japanese leaves German in the dust — or at least that’s how they sound.

But how could that be? The dialogue in movies translated from English to Spanish doesn’t whiz by in half the original time, after all, which is what it would have to do if the same lines were being spoken at doubletime.
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Vietnamese was used as a reference language for the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists to be very information dense) given an arbitrary value of 1.

For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable is, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and the slower the speech thus was.