Chocolate Candle Pours Hot Syrup Over Chocolate Cake
I’d totally burn that at both ends, if you know what I mean.
It Doesn't Even Matter if They are Ill-Tempered!
Marine biologist-cum-TV personality Luke Tipple attached a 50-milliwatt green laser to a lemon shark off the coast of the Bahamas in late April.
OK, 50 milliWatts isn’t going to melt a city or anything. But it’s a start. (Though wasn’t this accomplished in one of the sequels?)
The Basketball Kama Sutra
Analytics Reveal 13 New Basketball Positions
For as long as basketball has been played, it’s been played with five positions. Today they are point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward and center. A California data geek sees 13 more hidden among them, with the power to help even the Charlotte Bobcats improve their lineup and win more games.
I think it has been long recognized that within any position you can have more of an offensive/defensive prowess, and that there are hybrid positions, regardless of what label you put on them. I’m also not close to being sold on NBA 1st team/2nd team, role-player or one-of-a-kind being a position. (Hey, I’m won the starting job at NBA All-Star on my team!) I think these are ways of categorizing the productivity of players, i.e their roles, rather than defining the position they play. You need a player or players with ball-handling skills, you need ball distribution, you need rebounding, you need scoring ability (interior and perimeter and also free throws), you need defense. How you divvy up those needed skills isn’t fixed, though some pairings might work better than others. This breakdown seems to imply that good players excel at a couple of skills (and the best at even more), or are somewhat less adept at each but possess a wider range of skills, and those pairings/groupings are given.
Now what would be really interesting would be looking at the depth and breadth of coverage of these roles as a function of the teams’ success. The diversity and output of the Mavericks that is shown — does that represent their success as well? Would a cellar-dwellar have the same breadth but simply be at a lower level of achievement, or do they suffer from not having some skill-set combination (e.g. single-skill players, rather than dual-skill), or both?
Oh, That Pesky Factor of Two
Venus to Appear in Once-In-A-Lifetime Event
On 5 and 6 June this year, millions of people around the world will be able to see Venus pass across the face of the Sun in what will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Other than the fact that Venus made a transit in 2004; I got to see it and even got to see it with a telescope used in the 1874 and/or 1882 transit expeditions. So this is (for many of us; some people have been born since 2004) a twice-in-a-lifetime experience. However, if you missed the last one, this is it — you won’t get another chance until 2117. In the US, the sunset will interrupt the transit. For much of South America or western Africa (or anywhere in Antarctica), you’ll miss out if you stay where you are. Looks like Iceland has a unique situation of having sunset interrupt the middle of the transit, but will see at again at sunrise.
More information at Transit of Venus dot org.
Are You Getting Enough Fiber in Your Timing Diet?
I saw this paper last week and I might have gotten around to doing a blog post, but for reading Chad’s book, so he beat me to it. (OK: no, not really; I have to many other unfinished posts in the queue) Clock Synchronization Done Right: “A 920-Kilometer Optical Fiber Link for Frequency Metrology at the 19th Decimal Place”
OK, I admit, that’s a lot of zeroes. But why does that matter? Isn’t the whole point of ultra-precise atomic clocks that they all work exactly the same way? Why do you need to compare them? All atomic clocks using a given type of atom have the same basic frequency, but not all clocks are equally well made. The only way to determine the performance of a new one is to compare it to one you know works, but they’re also not very portable, so you need to be able to do the comparison remotely.
A nit: I wouldn’t necessarily characterize this as an issue of not being “equally well made”. One problem is that they are not identical — they are not the ideal clock used in thought experiments: there is noise, and it’s different for each clock. Each component in the clock can impact the clock in slightly different ways. But even if they were identical in all respects, you still have natural processes present in your oscillator, and these will give you white noise in the frequency of the clock. The integral of frequency give you the time, and the integral of white frequency noise is a random walk in phase, i.e. in the time. What does that mean? It means two clocks at identical frequencies will still undergo a random walk away from each other — they will lose synchronization. So you will still need to synchronize clocks, even if you could get them to the exact same frequency and remove all other kinds of noise. (Which you can’t).
Currently we are in a regime where clocks are better than time transfer techniques, at least over interesting distances. One can compare co-located clocks pretty well, but it doesn’t do anyone else any good if the precise time cannot be disseminated to them.
I Think That Should be Thick Air
Wind turbine creates water from thin air
All air trapped during this procedure is then directed through an electric cooling compressor situated behind the propellers. This contraption extracts humidity from the air, creating moisture which is condensed and collected.
…
One turbine can produce up to 1,000 liters of water every day, depending on the level of humidity, temperature and wind speeds, says Janin
Still pricey, however.
Do the Double-Take
Science, health, medical news freaking you out? Do the Double X Double-Take first
1. Skip the headline. Headlines are often misleading, at best, and can be wildly inaccurate. Forget about the headline. Pretend you never even saw the headline.
Schmientist Shortage
But what “we all know,” as Senator Cornyn put it, turns out not to be true—and the perpetuation of this myth is discouraging Americans from pursuing scientific careers. Leading experts on the STEM workforce, including Richard Freeman of Harvard, Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Paula Stephan of Georgia State University, Hal Salzman of Rutgers, Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown, and Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis, have said for years that the US produces ample numbers of excellent science students. In fact, according to the National Science Board’s authoritative publication Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, the country turns out three times as many STEM degrees as the economy can absorb into jobs related to their majors.
One of the answers, from later in the article,
The public perception of a dearth of homegrown talent has shaped national policy, permitting companies and universities to import tens of thousands of foreign scientists and IT workers who toil for artificially low wages.
I think it’s important to properly define what we’re talking about. Are we talking about a shortage of domestic STEM workers? Because that could still be the case, and we’ve simply saturated the market with imported workers.
The subtitle of the article is “The Johnny-can’t-do-science myth damages US research”, which seems to be much more about scientific literacy than science as a career, which seems to me to be a distinct issue and makes arguments somewhat muddled right off the bat. Acceptance of science such as evolution and climate change are abysmal, and I think science literacy levels reflect that. Even if one were to accept that we don’t need more scientists, that does not mean we need less science education.
The author cites Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, but doesn’t give any specific citation for the claim for the 3X too many STEM graduates.
I find this tidbit in the highlights for chapter 3
Between 1980 and 2000, the total number of S&E degrees earned grew at an average annual rate of 1.5%, which was faster than labor force growth, but less than the 4.2% growth of S&E occupations. The loose fit between degrees and occupations and the immigration of S&E workers helped to account for the different rates of degree and occupation growth.
which supports the idea that we have a shortage.
There’s also this, from the “Labor Market Conditions for Recent S&E Graduates” section
At the bachelor’s degree level, across all S&E fields, the IOF [in other field] rate was 11.5%, but ranged from 3.6% for recent engineering bachelor’s graduates to 15.7% in the social sciences. In all fields of degree, the IOF rate decreases with level of education, reaching 2.9% for recent doctorate recipients.
Nothing close to 2/3 of STEM recipients working outside of their field, according to these numbers. (I wonder if this is merely the “the only acceptable job for a PhD is to be a professor” canard.)
However, I wonder if that even matters. Is a Literature major a failure if s/he does not get a job involving reading all day? Colleges are not vocational schools.
American college students have for decades shown strong and consistent interest in STEM; year after year, just under a third of all college students in this country earn degrees in those subjects. But, ironically, dismal career prospects drive many of the best of those students to more promising professions, such as medicine, law, or finance.
I think this is just a gross misrepresentation of reality. Anyone who aspires to a career in medicine or law goes to a school requiring an undergraduate degree. For those who drop out of pre-med, many of them don’t stay in the science field, so it’s not fair to characterize medical students as disillusioned scientists — they wanted to be doctors, which says nothing about how they arrived at that decision. Which raises the question about lawyers who majored in science — perhaps patent law was their goal all along. The reporter didn’t ask, so we don’t know.
The author also cites testimony from Ronil Hira, during a Senate hearing
Contrary to some of the discussion here this morning, the STEM job market is mired in a jobs recession…with unemployment rates…two to three times what we would expect at full employment….Loopholes have made it too easy to bring in cheaper foreign workers with ordinary skills…to directly substitute for, rather than complement, American workers. The programs are clearly displacing and denying opportunities to American workers.
I agree with the effect, but no numbers are cited. STEM unemployment is usually lower than for the general public, so having 2-3x the rate when the general population is also having a similar (or larger) increase in their unemployment rate is not exactly a smoking gun for having a glut of scientists.
Beyond all this, there was a recent set of discussions about employment life in Phd-land. Comrade Physioprof says “Overproduction of PhDs” Is Demonstrably False. Mike the Mad Biologist and Chemjobber disagree, citing a flat salary curve. Once again, I have to say that the problem hasn’t been properly phrased. The flat salary points to saturation, but when you have more than one source — domestic and foreign — you can’t trace this back to domestic overproduction. It’s one equation with two unknowns. Consider, however, this note from the “highlights” section of the Science and Engineering Indicators 2008:
About half of S&E doctorate holders in U.S. postdoc positions may have earned their doctorates outside of the United States.
About half! I would argue from this that the domestic supply of scientists is indeed short of the mark, if we have to bring this many in from abroad. I’m sure that academia and industry like the salary competition from this, but it would seem that any oversupply that we have is not because we are producing too many at our own universities.
Relativity Goes to the Dogs
This is late, and I have to apologize for that, but I finally got to finish reading Chad Orzel’s How To Teach Relativity To Your Dog. For my tardiness I blame the really nice stretch of weekend weather we’ve had, which “forced” me to do outdoorsy things with my disposable free time. (There’s also the issue of my bifocals, which make reading small-ish type somewhat uncomfortable, or I might have finished this one or two sittings)
Chad is a professor at Union College in Schenectady, NY (something I can type without looking it up, since I grew up in that area), has a background in atomic physics and writes a blog called Uncertain Principles. If you read my blog on a regular basis you should already know of him, since I link to his blog on a fairly regular basis.
I’ll get this part out of the way first: I am not a data point to confirm that this will help you understand relativity; I’m not really the target audience — I already have an understanding of relativity. I was happy to be offered a copy of the book for review, but I don’t normally buy mass-appeal (or books that aspire to be mass-appeal) physics books, because I already have a physics degree. But I can say this: I think it’s a valid approach, and it’s done fairly well.
The problem with mere textbooks is that they are usually quite dry, and pop-sci books often skimp on technical accuracy in trying to compensate to engage the reader. Chad has grabbed the middle ground in using the conversations with his German shepherd, Emmy (The Queen of Niskayuna) to both set up the discussions and to raise objections to the various conundrums that appear in learning about relativity. The dialogue format is helpful, because as anyone familiar with the topic knows, there are a lot of moments in learning relativity where the natural reactions is, “Whoa! That doesn’t make sense!” and this is pretty much what happens. (The only textbook I’ve read that uses a conversational approach is Electrodynamics by Griffiths, which is excellent) There’s a lot of dog dialogue (dogalogue?), and depending on your tolerance for the approach (along with some puns and pop-culture references) it might be a little much. There’s 300 pages of it.
Chad covers all the topics, starting with special relativity, including spacetime diagrams. Invariant quantities and E=mc^2 follow, and then general relativity, with all that entails, along with the ramifications of relativity in the form of cosmology and high-energy/particle physics.
The diagrams and equations are a necessary evil, but shouldn’t scare you off if you find them intimidating, because there’s plenty of discussion, and no problems to work. The satisfying part for me was that the level of technical accuracy is quite good (which is not at all surprising) even at the level where it probably wouldn’t matter to the casual reader, but things I would pick up on, especially in discussing clocks. In fact, I think my only technical nit was when he discusses energy holding nuclei together (forces hold things together) but in the context of the depth of the discussion, I understand the approach.
All in all, a pretty good book, and something a science enthusiast would probably find to be a worthwhile read.
"Buckeyball" Motor
These “Buckeyball” magnets look like fun (but IMO a tad pricey for a good-sized collection). The towers are just for structural integrity; it’s the ones on the battery itself that are responsible for the motor action.