Monthly Archives: December 2010

A Matter of Perspective

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The Virtuosi: The Law and Large Numbers

The US budget, deficit and the ludicrous “Youcut” program (which has been rightly lambasted almost everywhere in the science blogohedron)

I just want to point out again, claiming that cutting NPR funding makes a dent in the US budget is similar to claiming you’ve moved closer to Orlando (while in LA) by crossing the room

…

In my undergraduate physics lab, the instructor had a mantra: “A number without context is meaningless”. Now, he originally meant the statement to be a lesson on how important it is to quote errors on your measurements, but I think I can adapt it to apply to giving out numbers like 7 billion without a sense of scale.

(I think the motivation for “cutting NPR” has less to do with budget than ideology, and NPR doesn’t actually get any direct appropriations from the government, but it’s still a nice example of scale)

Movie Not Starring Jim Carrey

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The airline passenger who wore a very realistic mask to get past security was just the start. Now it’s bank robbery: Masks so realistic they’re arresting the wrong guy

A white bank robber in Ohio recently used a “hyper-realistic” mask manufactured by a small Van Nuys company to disguise himself as a black man, prompting police there to mistakenly arrest an African American man for the crimes.

From the manufacturer:

“We’re proud of the fact that our masks look real, but I’m not proud of the way they were used,” said Slusser, a 39-year-old former makeup artist. “We’re very embarrassed this has happened. We were shocked that this happened.”

Shocked. Shocked. Yes, Captain Renault is shocked.

Once Again, Separating Me From My Money

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[Shakes fist at sky] Think Geeeeeek!

Back when the Monolith Action Figure was just an April Fool’s joke, I wrote

I wonder of this will turn into a real product, not just available on Europa, based on consumer demand. I’d buy one.

It’s now a real product. When you click on Buy Now it takes you to a real shopping cart, instead of a gotcha! page. I am following through on my vow (Ha! Who says I’ve got commitment issues?!)

They still bring the snark, though. There are some LEGO™ randomly selected toys, and they tell you

-Random packed means you have a 1 in 16 chance of getting any particular figure

-For liberal arts school graduates: Ordering 16 will not “guarantee” you get all 16 figures.

X Doesn't Mark the Spot

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io9: Poisson’s Spot: The Greatest Burn in Physics

There was nothing left to do but award the prize to Fresnel. Poisson had put forward a consequence of light as a wave that was so ridiculous, so unlikely, that it couldn’t be explained by anything else. Fresnel was smart enough to come up with the theory. Poisson was smart enough to have proved Fresnel right, and proved himself wrong. Even though Dominique Arago had actually done the test, the tiny dot of light at the center of the shadow of a spherical object has ever after been called Poisson’s Spot. There is no perpetual motion in physics, but there is perpetual taunting.

If you want a short story about the essence of science, here it is. You have a model, it makes a testable prediction which will either confirm or falsify it. You do the experiment, find out that the model was right, and then tweak a detractor’s nose in perpetuity.

Attack of the Math Monster

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Uncertain Principles: Two Cultures Within Science

[No equations in a paper] is almost completely inconceivable to me (at the risk of leaving myself open to the Vizzini joke). In my part of science, a paper without an equation is suspect, and I’m not exactly the world’s most mathematically inclined physicist. Physics is so intimately connected to math, and the business of doing physics is so inherently mathematical that its difficult to imagine a scientific paper about physics that doesn’t contain at least one equation. A press release or popular article, sure, but to a physicist, the equations aren’t some offal to be avoided en route to the science. The equations are the science. Objecting to the presence of an equation in a scientific paper is like objecting to the presence of meat in a steak sandwich.

I had the serendipity of reading another post just before reading Chad’s, related to the closing remarks concerning physicists sometime needing to learn some less “standard” math to do the physics they are interested in pursuing:

Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations

My more reasonable friends claim that this abstract isn’t really as amusing as I make it out to be. And to be sure, they’re right.

Murray Gell-Mann developed the “eight-fold way” to explain the spectrum of hadrons in the 1960s. It wasn’t until after he’d developed this formalism that he discussed his model with mathematicians, who then told him that he’d rediscovered group (representation) theory. This ushered ina new era in the history of particle physics where symmetry became our guiding light and group theory became a necessary tool for any particle theorist. Though, to be fair, in the 1960s group theory—unlike calculus—wasn’t something that physicists were expected to take during high school.

I’m also aware of a few instances of some of my colleagues struggling through some new way of analyzing clock performance, only to find out that the math is standard analysis of some other sort of problem. As they say, math is the language of physics.

Why Don't You Glide?

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“Pointless, action-free and totally mesmerising”

Both glides were filmed by sticking a – relatively cheap – digital camera out of the window of a train as it arrived at a station. The ‘trick’ is the camera collects images at a rate of 210 per second – but the film is played back at 30 frames per second. So, every seven seconds of footage that you watch corresponds to 1 real second. At least at the start, one real second is plenty of time for someone to move into, then out of, the camera’s field of view, but isn’t enough time for them to really do much: hence, the frozen effect. It breaks down towards the end not because I’m doing something clever with the frame rates (captured or replayed), but simply because the train was stopping! Thus, as it decelerated, any given person would be in view for longer, and have more time to point an arm, take a few steps along the platform, or maybe even notice me at the window. Any such action captured is still slowed down seven-fold during playback, just as with my usual static captures.

Neat effect. I will have to try this sometime.

Thar She Blows!

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Well, he. Swimmer blows some bubble-rings, while another swimmer drops a bottle cap into it, and the cap swirls around the toroid due to the turbulence.

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The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

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Yesterday was the 180th birthday of the Naval Observatory (yay, we had cake); it was established on Dec 6th, 1830 as the Depot of Charts and Instruments. One of my colleagues sent out a copy of a 1913 House appropriations committee hearing transcript, in which the USNO superintendent was interviewed regarding his budget requests.

I found it quite compelling, but I’m biased. It’s interesting that congressional failure to grasp science and general dickishness is not something new; there are inquiries into whether the functions of the observatory could be done with a reduced staff, or eliminated completely in order to save money, possibly because it was being duplicated by one of the “great universities” (those being Harvard and Stanford). The answer then, as now, is no; there’s a distinction between basic and applied research. University astronomers of recent times don’t do the systematic position measurements that go into producing an alamanac. I think the attitude displayed by Mr. Burleson implies that he thought that everyone with a telescope must be doing the same thing. He pegs the dick-o-meter when he suggests that the work being done is” rather crude or backward as compared with the work that is being done at the naval observatories connected with the universities.” I don’t really know why one would phrase the inquiry that way.

There’s a bit of bureaucracy tedium as well, such as trying to convince the committee that when the staff is underpaid as compared to other government jobs or the private sector, people tend to move on before they might otherwise do, and retaining people, even at higher salary, is usually cheaper than continually training new employees.

All in all, not very different from what I see today.