Another Kieslowski Film

I'm watching No End, a little Polish film from the eighties.
Kieslowski is a genius.


Film poster

Surprising Ancient Zircons

Constraints on Hadean zircon protoliths from oxygen isotopes, Ti-thermometry, and rare earth elements one of the coauthors of this paper is named "Dustin Trail"!
Oxygen-isotope evidence from ancient zircons for liquid water at the Earth's surface 4,300 Myr ago
4.4 billion years of crustal maturation: oxygen isotope ratios of magmatic zircon

Here's a nice summary as of July 2007:GEOLOGY: Early Earth Mirrored in Zircon

The Raven

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, with beautiful illustrations by Gustave Doré at Project Gutenberg.

Elevators

Up and Then Down:The lives of elevators in the New Yorker Magazine.

Let's Beat Monty Hall to Death

There's a series of posts in the New York Times TiernyLab column about the famous Monty Hall problem: Is That a Fair Coin in Your Pocket?.
Partition–Edit–Count: Naive Extensional Reasoning in Judgment of Conditional Probability

Fog of War

The Fog of War the 2003 documentary about Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of defence under Kennedy/Johnson by director Erroll Morris. The film was made before 9/11 and the current Iraq war, but there are eerie similiaries.

Gardner Gathering

Penn and Teller hang out with magicians and mathematicians at a Gardner Gathering - meetings held in honor of the writer Martin Gardner.

Number Gossip

Number Gossip
Number Gossip: Plug in your number!

Find out which number is: composite, deficient, even, odious, palindromic, powerful, practical ...

The Tudors / Sweating Sickness

I've been watching the Showtime series The Tudors on DVD. It started out 'ok' but become more engrossing as it went on. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of looking up the historical figures in Wikipedia and found there were major historical inaccuracies in the show, which I found distracting. I should have waited until finishing the show!
The show mentions a devasting epidemic of "sweating sickness" in England at the time. I assumed that was another term for the bubonic plague, but apparently it's a completely different disease. The exact nature of the sweating sickness is still unknown.

The Early Universe

Let there be Light: the Emergence of Structure out of the Dark Ages in the Early Universe

The initial conditions of our Universe can be summarized on a single sheet of paper. Yet the Universe is full of complex structures today, such as stars, galaxies and groups of galaxies. In this review I describe the standard theoretical model for how complexity emerged from the simple initial state of the Universe at early cosmic times through the action of gravity. In order to test and inform the related theoretical calculations, large-aperture telescopes and arrays of radio antennae are currently being designed and constructed. The actual transition from simplicity to complexity has not been observed as of yet. The simple initial conditions were already traced in maps of the microwave background radiation, but the challenge of detecting the first generation of galaxies defines one of the exciting frontiers in the future of cosmology. Once at hand, the missing images of the infant Universe might potentially surprise us and revise our current ideas.

Polarisation vision

The secret world of shrimps: polarisation vision at its best
New Form of Vision Discovered

Earth Rise

This image is a still from a high-definition April 5, 2007 video of the Earth rising above the moon as seen by Japan's Kaguya lunar orbiter. The probe was about 236,121 miles (380,000 km) away from Earth at the time. Credit: JAXA/NHK.
High Resolution Video

John A. Wheeler Dies

John A. Wheeler, Physicist Who Coined the Term ‘Black Hole,’ Is Dead at 96 article in the New York Times.

Gecko Acrobatics

Active tails enhance arboreal acrobatics in geckos in PNAS.

Geckos are nature's elite climbers. Their remarkable climbing feats have been attributed to specialized feet with hairy toes that uncurl and peel in milliseconds. Here, we report that the secret to the gecko's arboreal acrobatics includes an active tail. We examine the tail's role during rapid climbing, aerial descent, and gliding. We show that a gecko's tail functions as an emergency fifth leg to prevent falling during rapid climbing. A response initiated by slipping causes the tail tip to push against the vertical surface, thereby preventing pitch-back of the head and upper body. When pitch-back cannot be prevented, geckos avoid falling by placing their tail in a posture similar to a bicycle's kickstand. Should a gecko fall with its back to the ground, a swing of its tail induces the most rapid, zero-angular momentum air-righting response yet measured. Once righted to a sprawled gliding posture, circular tail movements control yaw and pitch as the gecko descends. Our results suggest that large, active tails can function as effective control appendages. These results have provided biological inspiration for the design of an active tail on a climbing robot, and we anticipate their use in small, unmanned gliding vehicles and multisegment spacecraft.

Asian-American Birth Gender Bias

Son-biased sex ratios in the 2000 United States Census in PNAS.

We document male-biased sex ratios among U.S.-born children of Chinese, Korean, and Asian Indian parents in the 2000 U.S. Census. This male bias is particularly evident for third children: If there was no previous son, sons outnumbered daughters by 50%. By contrast, the sex ratios of eldest and younger children with an older brother were both within the range of the biologically normal, as were White offspring sex ratios (irrespective of the elder siblings' sex). We interpret the found deviation in favor of sons to be evidence of sex selection, most likely at the prenatal stage

Let's Not Have a Nuclear War, OK?

Total ozone deviations following 5-Tg soot injection in the upper troposphere.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/105/14/5283

Atmospheric consequences of nuclear exchange Nuclear winter has been hypothesized to dramatically alter the Earth's climate. Michael Mills et al. have studied ozone depletion as a result of regional nuclear war, developing a computational model that links climate to atmospheric chemistry, and conducting 10-year simulations. The fires that would result from a total exchange of 100 Hiroshima-equivalent nuclear devices (yield 15 kilotons) would generate 5 million tonnes of soot that firestorms and solar heating would loft into the stratosphere. At altitudes up to 60 km, the soot would absorb solar radiation and heat surrounding gases, thus increasing the rate constants for several reactions that break down ozone. The authors found that two chemical reactions in particular would dominate alterations in ozone after a nuclear war: (i) the Chapman cycle, in which an oxygen free radical and ozone combine to form two diatomic molecules; and (ii) a coupled pair of reactions catalyzed by NO and NO2 that similarly produces diatomic oxygen. In the year after a nuclear war, the Chapman cycle would account for the greatest ozone loss, but NOx catalysis would then become dominant and persist for several more years. Mills et al.'s model predicts that the net result in both hemispheres would be an ozone hole extending from 20° north or south latitude to the poles. — K.M.

Massive global ozone loss predicted following regional nuclear conflict in PNAS.

We use a chemistry-climate model and new estimates of smoke produced by fires in contemporary cities to calculate the impact on stratospheric ozone of a regional nuclear war between developing nuclear states involving 100 Hiroshima-size bombs exploded in cities in the northern subtropics. We find column ozone losses in excess of 20% globally, 25–45% at midlatitudes, and 50–70% at northern high latitudes persisting for 5 years, with substantial losses continuing for 5 additional years. Column ozone amounts remain near or <220 Dobson units at all latitudes even after three years, constituting an extratropical "ozone hole." The resulting increases in UV radiation could impact the biota significantly, including serious consequences for human health. The primary cause for the dramatic and persistent ozone depletion is heating of the stratosphere by smoke, which strongly absorbs solar radiation. The smoke-laden air rises to the upper stratosphere, where removal mechanisms are slow, so that much of the stratosphere is ultimately heated by the localized smoke injections. Higher stratospheric temperatures accelerate catalytic reaction cycles, particularly those of odd-nitrogen, which destroy ozone. In addition, the strong convection created by rising smoke plumes alters the stratospheric circulation, redistributing ozone and the sources of ozone-depleting gases, including N2O and chlorofluorocarbons. The ozone losses predicted here are significantly greater than previous "nuclear winter/UV spring" calculations, which did not adequately represent stratospheric plume rise. Our results point to previously unrecognized mechanisms for stratospheric ozone depletion.

Is the Solar System Stable?

On the Dynamical Stability of the Solar System

The experiments yielded one evolution in which Mercury falls onto the Sun at ~1.261Gyr from now, and another in which Mercury and Venus collide in ~862Myr. In the latter solution, as a result of Mercury's unstable behavior, Mars was ejected from the Solar System at ~822Myr. We have performed a number of numerical tests that confirm these results, and indicate that they are not numerical artifacts.

What is a Galaxy?

What is a galaxy? How Cold is Cold Dark Matter? Recent progress in Near Field Cosmology

These data show that there is a bimodal distribution in half-light radii, with stable star clusters always being smaller than 35pc, while stable galaxies are always larger than 120pc. We extend the previously known observational relationships and interpret them in terms of a more fundamental pair of intrinsic properties of dark matter itself: dark matter forms cored mass distributions, with a core scale length of greater than about 100pc, and always has a maximum central mass density with a narrow range.
...
Galaxies are embedded in dark matter halos with these properties; smaller systems containing dark matter are not observed

SS433

SS433 a strange object in our own Galaxy. Aligned Molecular Clouds towards SS433 and L=348.5 degrees; Possible Evidence for Galactic "Vapor Trail" Created by Relativistic Jet

High speed cameras

Nice "slow-motion" videos on the site Vision Research.

Bridge Technology

Super-Bridges Suspended Over Carbon Nanotube Cables

In this paper the new concept of super-bridges, i.e. kilometre-long bridges suspended over carbon nanotube cables, is introduced. The analysis shows that the use of realistic (thus defective) carbon nanotube bundles as suspension cables can enlarge the current limit main span by a factor of 3.

Anne Adams

Anne and Robert Adams

What is the reason for Menopause?

Reproductive conflict and the separation of reproductive generations in humans in PNAS.

An enduring puzzle of human life history is why women cease reproduction midway through life. Selection can favor postreproductive survival because older females can help their offspring to reproduce. But the kin-selected fitness gains of helping appear insufficient to outweigh the potential benefits of continued reproduction. Why then do women cease reproduction in the first place? Here, we suggest that early reproductive cessation in humans is the outcome of reproductive competition between generations, and we present a simple candidate model of how this competition will be resolved. We show that among primates exhibiting a postreproductive life span, humans exhibit an extraordinarily low degree of reproductive overlap between generations. The rapid senescence of the human female reproductive system coincides with the age at which, in natural fertility populations, women are expected to encounter reproductive competition from breeding females of the next generation. Several lines of evidence suggest that in ancestral hominids, this younger generation typically comprised immigrant females. In these circumstances, relatedness asymmetries within families are predicted to give younger females a decisive advantage in reproductive conflict with older females. A model incorporating both the costs of reproductive competition and the benefits of grandmothering can account for the timing of reproductive cessation in humans and so offers an improved understanding of the evolution of menopause.

aMazing Lock

Chain style Doorlock forces you to solve a maze to exit
100% Titanium Alloy Construction

Very Hard, I would imagine

In the Wall Street Journal today: UBS Shares Rally on Breakup Push
By CARRICK MOLLENKAMP and KATHARINA BART

The article discusses UBS, a Swiss Bank that's been having problems recently

"It's hard to make a case to someone wealthy that you can manage their money well when you've just lost $37 billion yourself," said Dirk Hoffmann-Becking, an analyst at Bernstein Research in London.

Are Neutrinos their own antiparticles?

ARE NEUTRINOS MAJORANA PARTICLES?
Photons are their own antiparticles, could that be true of neutrinos as well? There is an experiment which can tell - neutrinoless double beta decay. Unfortunately this is a difficult experiment.

Nanowriting

Floating Tip Nanolithography

We demonstrate noncontact, high quality surface modification with spatial resolution of ~20 nm. The nanowriting is based on the interaction between the surface and the tip of an Atomic force microscope illuminated by a focused laser beam and hovering 1-4 nanometers above the surface without touching it. The floating tip nanowriting is compared to mechanical surface scratching, and is found to be much more reproducible, and of higher quality. In an Apertureless Scanning Near Field Optical Microscope geometry the tip is illuminated by a focused femtosecond laser, leading to two different, clearly identifiable mechanisms for removing material from the surface: when heated by the laser beam, the hot-tip thermally patterns the surface of low melting temperature soft materials, and when focused right at the apex of the sharp tip, the enhanced electric field of the laser beam causes ablation in high melting temperature metal films.

Einstein's Relativity Song

The date it was posted on Youtube - April 1.

The Safest Rest You've Ever Had

The Quantum Sleeper

The Quantum Sleeper Unit is a high-level security system designed for maximum protection in various hostile environments

On Haircuts

No Country for Old Men with Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh:

Chigurh's distinctive look was derived from a 1979 photo from a book supplied by Tommy Lee Jones which featured photos of brothel patrons on the Texas-Mexico border.[33] Describing his "extraordinary moptop haircut," he said, "You don't have to act the haircut. The haircut acts by itself."

Sensitive Optical Measurements

Beating the standard quantum limit: Phase super-sensitivity of N-photon interferometers

Quantum metrology promises greater sensitivity for optical phase measurements than could ever be achieved classically

Quantum enhancement of N-photon phase sensitivity by interferometric addition of down-converted photon pairs to weak coherent light

Quantum Heat Engines

Coherent Power Booster in Science Magazine.

According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a heat engine requires two heat baths to operate-a warm source of heat and a cooler dump for waste heat. In apparent violation of this law, Scully et al. propose a heat engine that uses quantum coherence to extract work from a single, warm gas. In his Perspective, Linke explains that the Second Law is not violated, because the power extracted from the bath is smaller than that required to achieve coherence. By combining quantum mechanics with traditional heat engines, the efficiencies of various kinds of motors could be enhanced.

Improving Carnot efficiency with quantum correlations

Was There a Big Bang?

Was There A Big Bang?

The big bang hypothesis is widely accepted despite numerous physics conflicts. It rests upon two experimental supports, galactic red shift and the cosmic microwave background. Both are produced by dark matter, shown here to be hydrogen dominated aggregates with a few percent of helium nodules. Scattering from these non-radiating intergalactic masses produce a red shift that normally correlates with distance. Warmed by our galaxy to an Eigenvalue of 2.735 K, drawn near the Earth, these bodies, kept cold by ablation, resonance radiate the Planckian microwave signal. Several tests are proposed that will distinguish between this model and the big bang.

Build your own Rebreather for $100 ...

... using a hot water bottle: A HOT WATER BOTTLE PENDULUM

Warning Warning Warning

REBREATHERS CAN AND DO KILL
I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOU
YOU MAKE YOUR OWN DECISIONS
AND REAP THE CONSEQUENCES



You can die from too much oxygen by using pure oxygen below 20 feet of seawater. You can die from too little oxygen. You can drown. Screw up and you are likely to die. When you enter the water, you are on your own, even if a buddy is nearby. You alone must make the decision that you are capable of using a rebreather, you are up to the dive, and that your equipment is up to the dive. Even extensive open circuit experience will not prepare you for the details inherent with staying alive underwater on a rebreather. If you have any concerns about your abilities, take a course or do not dive. If you are foolish enough to dive rebreathers, be aware that it is a case of Evolution in Action. It is an effective sorting out process that has created many unhappy widows, mothers, and children. I recommend against it. This project is described for your amusement only. It is not the intent of the author that you build one of these and go out and kill yourself. As I have shown it, if you take the mouthpiece out of your mouth, water will flow in filling the scrubber, and your next breath is a caustic cocktail. If you don't know what you are doing, don't try this one at home. If you know what you are doing, I am sure you have a rig that makes this one look childish.

Information Storage in the Brain

Compartmentalized dendritic plasticity and input feature storage in neurons in Nature.

Although information storage in the central nervous system is thought to be primarily mediated by various forms of synaptic plasticity, other mechanisms, such as modifications in membrane excitability, are available. Local dendritic spikes are nonlinear voltage events that are initiated within dendritic branches by spatially clustered and temporally synchronous synaptic input. That local spikes selectively respond only to appropriately correlated input allows them to function as input feature detectors and potentially as powerful information storage mechanisms. However, it is currently unknown whether any effective form of local dendritic spike plasticity exists. Here we show that the coupling between local dendritic spikes and the soma of rat hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neurons can be modified in a branch-specific manner through an N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor (NMDAR)-dependent regulation of dendritic Kv4.2 potassium channels. These data suggest that compartmentalized changes in branch excitability could store multiple complex features of synaptic input, such as their spatio-temporal correlation. We propose that this 'branch strength potentiation' represents a previously unknown form of information storage that is distinct from that produced by changes in synaptic efficacy both at the mechanistic level and in the type of information stored.

Traffic Jams Just Happen

Traffic Jams Happen, Get Used to It in Science Magazine.

Roundabout.
Too many cars equals a traffic jam, even without an external cause.
Credit: Mathematical Society of Traffic Flow

Precision Clocks

A Milestone in Time Keeping in Science Magazine.

Researchers have made atomic clocks so precise that effects of general relativity are on the verge of complicating the concept of keeping time.

So much for "junk DNA"

Only 1-2% of the DNA in humans and other higher organisms appears to code for proteins. But the remaining so-called "junk DNA" may be transribed into RNA with numerous functions.
The Eukaryotic Genome as an RNA Machine in Science Magazine.

The past few years have revealed that the genomes of all studied eukaryotes are almost entirely transcribed, generating an enormous number of non–protein-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). In parallel, it is increasingly evident that many of these RNAs have regulatory functions. Here, we highlight recent advances that illustrate the diversity of ncRNA control of genome dynamics, cell biology, and developmental programming.

Cliche Mashups

Growing Pangs: growing pains / birth pangs --- attributed to Condi Rice

No Shit Jose: No Shit Sherlock / No Way Jose

Don't Bite the F---ing Horse: Don't Bite the Hand That Feeds You / Don't Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth

Green Behind the Ears: green / wet behind the ears --- Barack Obama in 2008 Presidential Debate

"They create a desolation and call it peace"

From Tacitus, Agricola, a rebel's comment about Rome.

Science as Art Competition

Image: Fanny Beron, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Canada)
Science as Art competition held at the 2007 Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting

Speed Camera Irony

Cities that have installed speed cameras are discovering motorists are driving slower, which is decreasing revenues from fines. So they're turning the cameras off.

Schneier on Security

You First

Galaxy Rotation

Disk galaxy rotation curves and dark matter distribution

After explaining the motivation for this article, we briefly recapitulate the methods used to determine somewhat coarsely the rotation curves of our Milky Way Galaxy and other spiral galaxies, especially in their outer parts, and the results of applying these methods. Recent observations and models of the very inner central parts of galaxian rotation curves are only briefly described. We then present the essential Newtonian theory of (disk) galaxy rotation curves. The next two sections present two numerical simulation schemes and brief results. Application of modified Newtonian dynamics to the outer parts of disk galaxies is then described. Finally, attempts to apply Einsteinian general relativity to the dynamics are summarized. The article ends with a summary and prospects for further work in this area

Galaxy Zoo

Galaxy Zoo: The large-scale spin statistics of spiral galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We re-examine the evidence for a violation of large-scale statistical isotropy in the distribution of projected spin vectors of spiral galaxies. We have a sample of $\sim 37,000$ spiral galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, with their line of sight spin direction confidently classified by members of the public through the online project Galaxy Zoo. After establishing and correcting for a certain level of bias in our handedness results we find the winding sense of the galaxies to be consistent with statistical isotropy. In particular we find no significant dipole signal, and thus no evidence for overall preferred handedness of the Universe. We compare this result to those of other authors and conclude that these may also be affected and explained by a bias effect.

Nature's Brightest Explostion

Observations of the Naked-Eye GRB 080319B: Implications of Nature's Brightest Explosion

The first gamma-ray burst (GRB) confirmed to be bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, GRB 080319B, allowed for exquisite follow-up across the electromagnetic spectrum. We present our detailed optical and infrared observations of the afterglow, consisting of over 5000 images starting 122 s after the GRB trigger, in concert with our own analysis of the Swift UVOT, BAT, and XRT data. The event is extreme not only in observed properties but intrinsically: it was the most luminous ever recorded at optical wavelengths and had an exceedingly high isotropic-equivalent energy release in gamma-rays

The French

There's a charming article about the French in the New York Times A Guide to the French. Handle With Care

“Every man has two countries, his own and France,” says a character in a play by the 19th- century poet and playwright Henri de Bornier.

“The most beautiful makeup for a woman is passion,” Yves Saint Laurent once said. “But cosmetics are easier to buy.”

Giant Undersea Robot

The UT-1 ‘Ultra Trencher’ is the world’s most powerful jetting
trencher: pdf technical specification.

New Form of Vision Discovered

Mantis Shrimps can detect polarized light, an ability previously unknown: Science Magazine.

They are also really cute.

Crayon Physics

Cute video demonstration of the Crayon Physics program. You will smile.

Cocteau Twins

Recently I've been listening to the dreamy 80/90's Scottish band Cocteau Twins - a lot. I wondered about the "lyrics" which seem like they're in some unknown language.


Here's a wonderful collection of comments on the lyrics by singer Liz Fraser.

Droll Retort in "Not Even Wrong Blog"

In the comments of Peter Woit's blog:

Eric Says:
March 9th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Tim,
At least 99% of the 10^500 possible vacua are complete garbage and can be ruled out easily. Thus, the regions of the landscape for which realistic vacua may arise is limited. If string theory is the right theory, then at least one of these vacua is our universe and it can be found with a focused effort.

Peter Woit Says:

March 9th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Eric,

Once you rule out the 99% garbage, you’re left with 10^498 vacua to study….

Fundamental Constants

Fundamental Constants a preprint by Frank Wilczek, has a nice discussion of the fundamental constants of physics as well as systems of units.
There's a nice quote attributed to Einstein:

I would like to state a theorem which at present can not be based upon anything more than upon a faith in the simplicity, i.e., intelligibility, of nature: there are no arbitrary constants ... that is to say, nature is so constituted that it is possible logically to lay down such strongly determined laws that within these laws only rationally completely determined constants occur (not constants, therefore, whose numerical value could be changed without destroying the theory).

Gravity poses some problems:

Straightforward estimation suggests that empty space should weigh several orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude (no misprint here!) more than it does. It “should” be much denser than a neutron star, for example. The expected energy of empty space acts like dark energy, with negative pressure, but far more is expected than is observed.

And there are other less than pretty parts as well:

The flavor/Higgs sector of the standard model is, by a wide margin, its least satisfactory part. Whether judged by the large number of independent parameters or by the small number of powerful ideas it contains, our theory of this sector does not attain the same level as we’ve reached in the other sectors. This part truly deserves to be called a “model” rather than a “theory”.

Cell Phone Scams

I'm forced to admire the scams described in The Anatomy of a Vishing Scam.

Ah, the irony. Here we have the very accounts these entities use to respond to complaints about fraudulent activity being used to perpetrate fraudulent activity.

Blind Chance

Blind Chance: a brilliant 1981 Polish film by Krzysztof Kieślowski.

Bacterial Snowmakers

Ubiquity of Biological Ice Nucleators in Snowfall: is ice nucleation, essential to snow and rain, mainly catalyzed by bacteria?

Stretching and Flexibility

To Stretch or Not to Stretch? The Answer Is Elastic in the New York Times on March 13, 2008.

But distance runners do not benefit from being flexible, he found. The most efficient runners, those who exerted the least effort to maintain a pace, were the stiffest.

Cable News

Fourth Undersea Cable Failure in Middle East from Schneier's blog. What's going on?

A fun article by Neal Stephenson in Wired 1996 Mother Earth Mother Board about the ocean spanning fiber optic cable network.

The Balloon Blowup Analogy

Jim Kelnhofer, underwater videographer extraordinaire, asked the following nontrivial question (about cosmology, when it comes to underwater video, the questions flow in the other direction:)

ok, so I've been thinking about space and time a bit and the fact that there is no real center to the universe, or so everyone says. The analogy that I kind of get is that points in three dimensional space are kind of like points on the surface of a balloon. And, as you blow up the balloon all the points recede from one another as the universe, represented by the balloon, grows. I can sort of conceptually get this, though I don't completely comprehend all the math involved in the 3D/2D transformations. My question would be, is the expansion of the balloon representative of time, and does that translate to the center of the universe being time t=0? Is that how the math works out or what the math means?

jim...

Here's my less than satisfying response.

One way to understand a weird space is to formulate it as a subspace of a simpler space. For example, we can understand a balloon, the surface of a sphere, which is a slightly tricky space, by thinking of its embedding in good old flat three dimensional space.

General Relativity, on the other hand, is formulated in terms of Differential Geometry. In Differential Geometry, the spaces are called Manifolds. By definition an n-dimensional manifold can be completely covered (nicely) by n-dimensional Euclidean slabs (called charts in the literature).

By the way, if you think about it, the surface of a sphere cannot be modeled so nicely by just one chart (you end up leaving out at least one or two points, like the North and South poles). It takes at least two charts.

So there are these two ways to bootstrap our knowledge and intuition about Euclidean space to handle more general spaces: embeddings and coverings.

Can a given n-dimensional manifold (defined by coverings) always be embedded in a "nice" way in some higher-dimensional Euclidean space? That's an interesting question. John Nash, the dude depicted in the movie and book "A Beautiful Mind" found some impressive stuff along those lines.

General Relativity doesn't start off by worrying much about embeddings, it's fundamentally about the local properties of the space - that was the way Einstein went about it. Local properties can usually be addressed nicely by a covering formulation, you don't even need an embedding as it turns out.

There are more complications, in addition to Differential Geometry, once Time and Causality are involved.

There are however various ways to try to visualize a global picture of different space/time models. One popular way is the Penrose diagram.

Unfortunately it's not very easy to get from the local situation to a more global picture. It fact it is damn hard.

For example, Einstein came up with the local formulation, but he never got very far himself with global solutions (the ones he found are pretty trivial really).
One of Stephen Hawking's claims to fame is a book called "The Large Scale Structure of Space/Time" which is full of very hairy math addressing these global questions.

So the way mathematical physics often works is, people try to get the local formulation right, then they do some very hairy stuff to see what sorts of global implications follow.

What's been going on in the mathematics community, getting back to the time of Gauss in the 1800's, is that they've been able to come up with all kinds of bizarre "geometries" that are quite different than the Euclidean geometry that seems to be intuitive for most of us human types. However, the mathematical work tends to have a purely spatial flavor about it. Einstein happened to have a mathematician buddy who showed him one of these formalisms called Riemannian Geometry and Einstein basically kludged Time in. The nature of the kludge is that, locally, everything looks like Special Relativity, and the space-time geometry of that had already been worked out, by Einstein and other dudes at that time. The mathematical consequences of this have been slow to unfold, even though it's now been over 90 years.

Mathematicians have been very creative, they have given us powerful tools for formulating things with lots of dimensions and weird shapes. Sometimes there's even originally a physical motivation for some of that, but often they're just spinning out lots of crazy new junk for their own amusement. Every once and a while, someone with a more practical bent grovels through the math literature and finds something inadvertently useful, to the horror of Pure Mathematicians everywhere.

The interesting thing now is, we have these observations (red shifts, the cosmic microwave background, etc.) that seem to give some hints about what the global picture might be like. After the astronomers observe something new and cool, the physicists have to see if they can reproduce those results in their models. Lately they've been having a hard time of it, hence all the buzz about Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

So after all that did I even manage to address Jim's question about the Balloon Analogy? Not really! I think that model might have been specifically designed to show the universe could be finite, but still not have a center, at least at t>0. Even so there is apparently a singularity at t=0 when, if you extrapolate backward, the balloon seems to just materialize out of nowhere: a Big Bang.

Old Jewish Joke

A mother buys her son two ties, he visits her wearing one of them. She frowns and says, "What, you didn't like the other one?"

Dark Energy Crisis

Dark Energy and Dark Gravity

Observations provide increasingly strong evidence that the universe is accelerating. This revolutionary advance in cosmological observations confronts theoretical cosmology with a tremendous challenge, which it has so far failed to meet. Explanations of cosmic acceleration within the framework of general relativity are plagued by difficulties. General relativistic models are nearly all based on a dark energy field with fine-tuned, unnatural properties. There is a great variety of models, but all share one feature in common -- an inability to account for the gravitational properties of the vacuum energy. Speculative ideas from string theory may hold some promise, but it is fair to say that no convincing model has yet been proposed. An alternative to dark energy is that gravity itself may behave differently from general relativity on the largest scales, in such a way as to produce acceleration. The alternative approach of modified gravity (or dark gravity) provides a new angle on the problem, but also faces serious difficulties, including in all known cases severe fine-tuning and the problem of explaining why the vacuum energy does not gravitate. The lack of an adequate theoretical framework for the late-time acceleration of the universe represents a deep crisis for theory -- but also an exciting challenge for theorists. It seems likely that an entirely new paradigm is required to resolve this crisis.

Globular Clusters and Gravity

Using globular clusters to test gravity in the weak acceleration regime

We report on the results from an ongoing program aimed at testing Newton's law of gravity in the low acceleration regime using globular clusters. It is shown that all clusters studied so far do behave like galaxies, that is, their velocity dispersion profile flattens out at large radii where the acceleration of gravity goes below 1e-8 cm/s/s, instead of following the expected Keplerian fall off. In galaxies this behavior is ascribed to the existence of a dark matter halo. Globular clusters, however, do not contain dark matter, hence this result might indicate that our present understanding of gravity in the weak regime of accelerations is incomplete and somehow incorrect.

Dark Matter in Galaxies

Dark Matter in Galaxies: Conference Summary

Abstract. The competition between CDM and MOND to account for
the ‘missing mass’ phenomena is asymmetric. MOND has clearly demonstrated that a characteristic acceleration a0 underlies the data and understanding what gives rise to a0 is an important task. The reason for MOND’s success may lie in either the details of galaxy formation, or an advance in fundamental physics that reduces to MOND in a suitable limit. CDM has enjoyed great success on large scales. The theory cannot be definitively tested on small scales until galaxy formation has been understood because baryons either are, or possibly have been, dominant in all small-scale objects. MOND’s predictive power is seriously undermined by its isolation from the rest of physics. In view of this isolation, the way forward is probably to treat CDM as an established theory to be used alongside relativity and electromagnetism in efforts to understand the formation and evolution of galaxies.

Reionization Review

The Frontier of Reionization: Theory and Forthcoming Observations

The cosmic microwave background provides an image of the Universe 0.4 million years after the big bang, when atomic hydrogen formed out of free electrons and protons. One of the primary goals of observational cosmology is to obtain follow-up images of the Universe during the epoch of reionization, hundreds of millions of years later, when cosmic hydrogen was ionized once again by the UV photons emitted from the first galaxies

Under the assumption that general relativity describes the evolution of the Universe, the measured CMB anisotropies indicate conclusively that most of the matter in the Universe must be very weakly coupled to electromagnetism and hence cannot be the matter that we are made of (baryons). This follows from the fact that prior to hydrogen recombination, the cosmic plasma was coupled to the radiation through Thomson scattering. Small-scale fluctuations were then damped in the radiation-baryon fluid by photon diffusion. The damping is apparent in the observed suppression of the CMB anisotropies on angular scales well below a degree on the sky, corresponding to spatial scales much smaller than 200 comoving Mpc. To put this scale in context, the matter that makes up galaxies was assembled from scales of < 2Mpc. In order to preserve the primordial inhomogeneities that seeded the formation of galaxies, it is necessary to have a dominant matter component that does not couple to the radiation fluid

Empathy, Gender, Fantasy and Fiction

High Empathy (Mostly Women), Low Empathy (Mostly Men) and the Movies in the New York Times.

To test empathy levels and the subjects’ reactions to various melodramas, the researchers turned to several classic short stories, like “The Last Leaf” by O. Henry, that include struggles against adversity and melancholy plot twists.

People with low empathy (mostly men) who believed the stories to be fantasies liked them much better than those who were told the stories were factual. The reverse held true for people with high empathy, who were mostly women.

Another surprising observation from the study: not one of the 492 students tested reported having read or heard any of the stories, even though some are quite prominent. “I was appalled,” Professor Argo said.

The Intergalactic Medium

The Physics of the Intergalactic Medium

Intergalactic space is filled with a pervasive medium of ionized gas, the Intergalactic Medium (IGM).

The reionization of the IGM is one of the principal unsolved problems of cosmological structure formation.

The Flyby Anomaly

Is the physics within the Solar system really understood? discusses the flyby anomaly as well as the Pioneer anomaly and others. Simulation of the flyby anomaly by means of an empirical asymmetric gravitational potential with definite spatial orientation explores this anomaly and explains:

During several Earth flybys carried out since 1990, some spacecrafts have experienced an unexpected and until now unexplained anomalous velocity increase. This phenomenon is called the flyby anomaly and looks like the effect of an instantaneous acceleration of the spacecraft at the time of closest approach to Earth.

Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays

Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays: origin and propagation

We discuss the basic difficulties in understanding the origin of the highest energy particles in the Universe - the ultrahigh energy cosmic rays (UHECR). It is difficult to imagine the sources they are accelerated in. Because of the strong attenuation of UHECR on their propagation from the sources to us these sources should be at cosmologically short distance from us but are currently not identified. We also give information of the most recent experimental results including the ones reported at this conference and compare them to models of the UHECR origin.

The highest energy cosmic ray ever detected had the energy of a 290km/h tennis ball! From a single particle. Gasp.

Faint Irregular Galaxies

Gas rich galaxies from the FIGGS survey

The FIGGS (Faint Irregular Galaxy GMRT Survey) is aimed at creating a multi-wavelength observational data base for a volume limited sample of the faintest gas rich galaxies.

Some of these objects have very extreme dynamical mass to light ratios. Over 100 in some cases.

These very large dynamical mass to blue luminosity ratios naturally lead one to ask whether extremely gas rich dwarf galaxies have abnormally small baryon fractions, i.e. have they just been inefficient at forming stars, or did they end up with less than the typical baryon fraction?

Neutrinos are So Weird

Neutrino Properties, Cosmology

We now know that neutrinos have masses and that the flavor eigenstates (νelectron, νmuon, νtau ) are not the mass eigenstates (ν1, ν2, ν3).

This means that an electron muon is a quantum mechanical mixture of different masses and a neutrino that has a definite mass is a quantum mechanical mixture of the different flavors (electron, muon, tau).

Gack.

Car Key Fobs

A post from Scheier on Security

my wife used to live along the flight path of a smallish airport, and often all the garage doors in the neighbourhood would start opening and closing on their own when a plane flew over.

Gertrude Bell

The Queen of the Quagmire By Rory Stewart in the New York Review of Books.

[In talking to an Arab nationalist leader] I said complete independence was what we ultimately wished to give. "My lady" he answered—we were speaking Arabic —"complete independence is never given; it is always taken."

Problem/Solution

Problem: while a woman was working construction her male co-workers would help themselves to her tools.
Solution: she painted her tools hot pink.

A Single Molecule Radio

Nanotube Radio

We have constructed a fully functional, fully integrated radio receiver from a single carbon nanotube. The nanotube serves simultaneously as all essential components of a radio: antenna, tunable band-pass filter, amplifier, and demodulator. A direct current voltage source, as supplied by a battery, powers the radio. Using carrier waves in the commercially relevant 40-400 MHz range and both frequency and amplitude modulation techniques, we demonstrate successful music and voice reception.

An Enigmatic Object near the Center of the Galaxy

The enigma of GCIRS 3 - Constraining the properties of the mid-infrared reference star of the central parsec of the Milky Way with optical long baseline interferometry

On the second page of this preprint there's a fascinating image of the center of our galaxy in mid infrared, highlighting GCIRS3, the hottest and most compact of the sources of thermal dust irradiation in that vicinity. It appears that this object is a cool dust-forming carbon star.

University has some mice that will kick your butt.

Case Western develops superstrong mice

Researchers at the university have bred a strain of "mighty mice," known as PEPCK-Cmus mice because of specific genetic enhancements, that can run for six hours at a speed of 20 meters per minute, or a total of 5 or 6 kilometers.

The Art of Reviewing Books

"I never read a book I must review," said Oscar Wilde, "it prejudices you so."

The Status of Fundamental Physics Today

Fundamental Physics: Where We Stand Today by John Baez.

By fundamental physics, I mean the search for a small set of laws which in principle determine everything we can calculate about the universe. The reductionist dream – not always practical, but very seductive. Where do we stand in the search for these laws? What do we know, and what are the mysteries? Why do many physicists feel stuck?

Magnetic Monopoles!

Magnetic Monopoles in Spin Ice

Electrically charged particles, such as the electron, are ubiquitous. By contrast, no elementary particles with a net magnetic charge have ever been observed, despite intensive and prolonged searches. We pursue an alternative strategy, namely that of realising them not as elementary but rather as emergent particles, i.e., as manifestations of the correlations present in a strongly interacting many-body system. The most prominent examples of emergent quasiparticles are the ones with fractional electric charge e/3 in quantum Hall physics. Here we show that magnetic monopoles do emerge in a class of exotic magnets known collectively as spin ice: the dipole moment of the underlying electronic degrees of freedom fractionalises into monopoles. This enables us to account for a mysterious phase transition observed experimentally in spin ice in a magnetic field, which is a liquid-gas transition of the magnetic monopoles. These monopoles can also be detected by other means, e.g., in an experiment modelled after the celebrated Stanford magnetic monopole search.

Before the Big Bang?

A talk by Roger Penrose: Before the Big Bang? A new perspective on the Weyl curvature hypothesis

The Brightest Supernova So Far

SN 2006gy: Discovery of the most luminous supernova ever recorded, powered by the death of an extremely massive star like Eta Carinae

We report our discovery and observations of the peculiar Type IIn supernova SN2006gy in NGC1260, revealing that it reached a peak magnitude of -22, making it the most luminous supernova ever recorded. It is not yet clear what powers the total radiated energy of 1e51 erg, but we argue that any mechanism -- thermal emission, circumstellar interaction, or 56Ni decay -- requires a very massive progenitor star. The circumstellar interaction hypothesis would require truly exceptional conditions around the star probably experienced an LBV eruption like the 19th century eruption of eta Carinae. Alternatively, radioactive decay of 56Ni may be a less objectionable hypothesis. That power source would imply a large Ni mass of 22 Msun, requiring that SN2006gy was a pair-instability supernova where the star's core was obliterated. SN2006gy is the first supernova for which we have good reason to suspect a pair-instability explosion. Based on a number of lines of evidence, we rule out the hypothesis that SN 2006gy was a ``Type IIa'' event. Instead, we propose that the progenitor may have been a very massive evolved object like eta Carinae that, contrary to expectations, failed to completely shed its massive hydrogen envelope before it died. Our interpretation of SN2006gy implies that the most massive stars can explode earlier than expected, during the LBV phase, preventing them from ever becoming Wolf-Rayet stars. SN2006gy also suggests that the most massive stars can create brilliant supernovae instead of dying ignominious deaths through direct collapse to a black hole.

The Quantum Measurement Problem

This preprint Can the Quantum Measurement Problem be resolved within the framework of Schroedinger Dynamics and Quantum Probability? addresses a fundamental problem in the foundations of physics. Traditionally a quantum measurement consists of two physical subsystems: a quantum subsystem (like an atom) and a classical subsystem (like a measuring instrument). The quantum subsystem is modelled using the often counterintuitive framework of quantum theory and the classical subsystem is modelled using the less startling laws of classical physics. Each subsystem in isolation evolves in a reasonably straightforward deterministic fashion, but when the two subsystems are coupled together something rather mysterious happens: a quantum measurement, which is fundamentally probabilistic in nature.

Ultimately, it's expected that the "classical" subsystem should be modelled by quantum theory as well and so too the composite of the two subsystems. After all, the classic subsystem is in term made up of constituents (like atoms) which obey the laws of quantum theory. However, it's been difficult to work out a completely quantum description of the measurement process. So much so that there has even been speculation that consciousness might be irreducibly involved.

The Family Tree of the Placental Mammals

In PNAS Genomics, biogeography, and the diversification of placental mammals

Among the placental mammals, phylogenetic branching events have been inferred by using either nucleotide sequence data (4–11) or rare insertion/deletion patterns (12–15). Many of the results recognize four primary eutherian groups: Afrotheria, Xenarthra, Laurasiatheria, and Euarchontoglires. Afrotherians (e.g., elephants, hyraxes, manatees, aardvarks, tenrecs, and allies) are a clade of mammals that originated in Africa, and whose extant members still mostly remain on that continent with the exception of Asian elephants and sirenians such as the Florida manatee. The Xenarthra includes the sloths, armadillos, and anteaters that today are restricted to South and Central America (although some Xenarthra, such as the nine-banded armadillo, have recently dispersed to North America). The Laurasiatheria (e.g., bats, eulipotyphlans, pangolins, carnivores, perrisodactyls, and cetartiodactyls) is a diverse clade including extant lineages that originated in the ancient northern continent of Laurasia. The Euarchontoglires includes the species from five living mammalian orders (e.g., primates, treeshrews, flying lemurs, rabbits, and rodents). This last group remains the most controversial, and a number of recent studies have suggested it is not valid (4, 6, 7).

The Human Visual System is Tuned for Animals

From this PNAS article: Category-specific attention for animals reflects ancestral priorities, not expertise

Visual attention mechanisms are known to select information to process based on current goals, personal relevance, and lower-level features. Here we present evidence that human visual attention also includes a high-level category-specialized system that monitors animals in an ongoing manner. Exposed to alternations between complex natural scenes and duplicates with a single change (a change-detection paradigm), subjects are substantially faster and more accurate at detecting changes in animals relative to changes in all tested categories of inanimate objects, even vehicles, which they have been trained for years to monitor for sudden life-or-death changes in trajectory. This animate monitoring bias could not be accounted for by differences in lower-level visual characteristics, how interesting the target objects were, experience, or expertise, implicating mechanisms that evolved to direct attention differentially to objects by virtue of their membership in ancestrally important categories, regardless of their current utility.

Where do Supernovas Come From?

In the preprint Constraining the Type Ia Supernova Progenitor: The Search for Hydrogen in Nebular Spectra the investigator looks for hydrogen emissions that are expected by theories of supernova formation. This signal has not been detected to date.

The "Mean King's" Problem

Quantum theory makes many very peculiar predictions and worse, they have always been confirmed by experiment. First of all, quantum theory often gives only a probability for an outcome. Einstein disliked this, hence his comment "God does not play dice with the Universe".
A further odd situation is a mutually complementary set of measurements. In a two state quantum system (also known as spin 1/2), there are exactly two possible outcomes for any measurement. Depending on the state of the system and the measurement chosen, quantum theory assigns a probability to each outcome. If a measurement is performed on a system and the actual outcome is noted, the new state of the system is determined - there's no addition influence from the original state. Two measurements X and Y are complementary when the probabilities of the two possible outcomes of Y performed immediately after X, are equally likely. In this case, performing X first completely randomizes Y's outcomes. The definition of a mutually complementary set of measurements is: each pair of measurements is complementary. As it turns out, in quantum theory for a two state system, we may have a set of three mutually complementary measurements, but no more.

The preprint The "mean king's problem" with continuous variables explains the "mean king's" problem:

In its original version [1] (and as
retold in the whimsical setting of Refs. [2, 3]), a physicist,
Alice, is challenged by a mean king to precisely ascer-
tain the outcome of an ideal measurement that the king
performs of a spin-1/2 observable randomly chosen from
the mutually complementary set {ˆσx, ˆσy, ˆσz}.

So first Alice gets access to the system (she can perform measurements and observe the outcome), then without Alice being present the King gets to choose and perform one of the three complementary measurements and notes the outcome. Alice returns and may perform additional measurements on the system. Finally the King reveals which measurement he performed and Alice must predict the outcome.

How can Alice possibily do such a thing? As it turns out, it's crucial that Alice uses an auxillary quantum system. She performs her measurements not just on the King's system, but on a composite system which includes her auxillary. She seperates the original system and her auxillary while the King is doing his thing but recomposes them when she gets her second shot.

Cosmic Microwave Background Anomalies

Probing the Origin of the Large-angle CMB Anomalies

There has been mounting evidence that the large-angle cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy has anomalies roughly at 3 sigma level.

Overhang

Overhang

How far over the edge of the table can we reach by stacking n identical, homogeneous, frictionless blocks of length 1? A classical solution achieves an overhang asymptotic to 1/2 ln n. This solution is widely believed to be optimal. We show, however, that it is exponentially far from optimality by constructing simple n-block stacks that achieve an overhang of cn^1/3, for some constant c>0.

With the restriction that only one block can be on top of another, the classical solution is optimal. However with multiple blocks on top of each the solution can be improved significantly.

Reason and the Passions

"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them"
David Hume

Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science

Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science in Science Magazine.

Resistance to certain scientific ideas derives in large part from assumptions and biases that can be demonstrated experimentally in young children and that may persist into adulthood. In particular, both adults and children resist acquiring scientific information that clashes with common-sense intuitions about the physical and psychological domains. Additionally, when learning information from other people, both adults and children are sensitive to the trustworthiness of the source of that information. Resistance to science, then, is particularly exaggerated in societies where nonscientific ideologies have the advantages of being both grounded in common sense and transmitted by trustworthy sources.

Accelerated Expansion

Astrophysics preprint Chasing Lambda

Recent astronomical observations of SNIa, CMB, as well as BAO in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey suggest that the current Universe has entered a stage of an accelerated expansion with the redshift transition at about z=0.5. While the simplest candidates for explanation of this fact is cosmological constant/vacuum energy there exist a serious problem of coincidence. In the theoretical cosmology we can find many possible approaches alleviating this problem by applying new physics or other conception of dark energy. We consider state of art candidates for the description of accelerating Universe in the framework of the Bayesian model selection. We point out advantages as well as troubles of this approach. We find that the combination of four data bases gives a stringent posterior probability of the LambdaCDM model which is 74%. This fact is a quantitative exemplification of a turmoil in modern cosmology over the Lambda problem.

Ultra Compact Dwarf Galaxies

In the astrophysics preprint UCDs - more massive than allowed?, Ultra Compact Dwarf Galaxies (UCD) found in Galaxy Clusters are observed to have a very high mass to light ratio. One possible explanation is an extraordinarily dense concentration of Dark Matter.

Chimpanzees are insensitive to fairness

Chimpanzees Are Rational Maximizers in an Ultimatum Game in Science Magazine.

Traditional models of economic decision-making assume that people are self-interested rational maximizers. Empirical research has demonstrated, however, that people will take into account the interests of others and are sensitive to norms of cooperation and fairness. In one of the most robust tests of this finding, the ultimatum game, individuals will reject a proposed division of a monetary windfall, at a cost to themselves, if they perceive it as unfair. Here we show that in an ultimatum game, humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), are rational maximizers and are not sensitive to fairness. These results support the hypothesis that other-regarding preferences and aversion to inequitable outcomes, which play key roles in human social organization, distinguish us from our closest living relatives.

Gould's Belt

Many of the bright stars in the spectacular constellations Orion and Scorpio are a part of Gould's Belt a nearby ring of stars - the cause of which is still unknown.

Cosmic Reionization

In the Big Bang model of cosmology, early in the history of the universe it was too hot for neutral hydrogen gas, all the electrons were stripped from the nucleus (usually a proton), and the hydrogen gas filling the universe was ionized. As the universe expanded, the temperature cooled enough for neutral hydrogen, and the electrons became bound to protons. At some point stars began to form and the ultraviolet radiation the stars radiated was sufficient to ionize hydrogen gas once again - cosmic reionization. In this preprint Testing Reionization with Gamma Ray Burst Absorption Spectra the era of reionization is studied by looking for very ancient gamma ray bursts, the most energetic events known in the universe.

Communication with Gravitational Waves?

Generation and detection of gravitational waves at microwave frequencies by means of a superconducting two-body system

In engineering, it could open up the possibility of intercontinental communications by means of microwave-frequency gravitational waves directly through the interior of the Earth, which is transparent to such waves. This would eliminate the need of communications satellites, and would allow an economical means of communication with people deep underground or underwater in submarines in the oceans. Such a new direction of gravitational-wave engineering could aptly be called “gravity radio”

Chilling Account of the "Storm Worm"

Gathering 'Storm' Superworm Poses Grave Threat to PC Nets by Bruce Schneier. See also his blog: Schneier on Security for interesting information on security and privacy.

How to Grow a Silicon Crystal

It's not easy!
Czochralski Crystal Growth Method from the BBC.

Czochralski Crystal Growth Process tells more about why it is difficult.

Britney's Guide to Semiconductor Physics

Britney's Guide to Semiconductor Physics
It is a little known fact, that Ms Spears is an expert in semiconductor physics. Not content with just singing and acting, in the following pages, she will guide you in the fundamentals of the vital laser components that have made it possible to hear her super music in a digital format.

Vanadium Dioxide is Fast

Timing nature’s fastest optical shutter

It's nature's fastest quick-change artist: In less than the time it takes a beam of light to travel a tenth of a millimeter, vanadium dioxide can switch from a transparent to a reflective, mirror-like state.
How this material (VO2) can turn from a transparent insulator into a reflective metal so rapidly has physicists scratching their heads, but a collaboration among researchers at Vanderbilt, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has clocked the transfiguration at one-tenth of a trillionth of a second.

More on the Pioneer Anomaly

Here's the abstract from a new preprint: Physics Engineering in the Study of the Pioneer Anomaly

The Pioneer 10/11 spacecraft yielded the most precise navigation in deep space to date. However, their radio-metric tracking data received from the distances between 20--70 astronomical units from the Sun has consistently indicated the presence of a small, anomalous, Doppler frequency drift. The drift is a blue frequency shift that can be interpreted as a sunward acceleration of a_P = (8.74 +/- 1.33) x 10^{-10} m/s^2 for each particular spacecraft. This signal has become known as the Pioneer anomaly; the nature of this anomaly remains unexplained.
Recently new Pioneer 10 and 11 radio-metric Doppler and flight telemetry data became available. The newly available Doppler data set is significantly enlarged when compared to the data used in previous investigations and is expected to be the primary source for the investigation of the anomaly. In addition, the flight telemetry files, original project documentation, and newly developed software tools are now used to reconstruct the engineering history of both spacecraft. With the help of this information, a thermal model of the Pioneer vehicles is being developed to study possible contribution of thermal recoil force acting on the two spacecraft. The ultimate goal of these physics engineering efforts is to evaluate the effect of on-board systems on the spacecrafts' trajectories.

Here's a previous post on the Pioneer Anomaly.

30 Rock

I haven't actually watched this show, but it's having a season premier this week. As I understand it, Alec Baldwin does a good job playing Jack, a crazy network executive in the show. There's a review in the New York Times Sophomore Jitters and Seinfeld Vision :

Jack has decided to increase advertising revenues by digitally inserting Mr. Seinfeld into NBC shows like “Law & Order” and “Deal or No Deal.” Jack calls his computer-generated fakery “SeinfeldVision.” The counterfeited comedian shows up at Rockefeller Center to complain, and that’s when the show goes a little wobbly: Mr. Seinfeld is strangely ill at ease playing himself, making his self-impersonation unpersuasive.

Tina Fey is the creator of the show and also appears in it. In real life she has a family and a very busy schedule - here's a quote from a recent interview:

"At home,” she added, “I cry” — about, among other things, not being home enough.

A census of nearby galaxies

In Mining the Local Volume 550 galaxies have been found within 10 million parsecs. A surprising observation was that there seems to be an absence of dark matter outside of the galaxy groups - if I understood the paper correctly. The preprint had some nice graphics too!

The Ant Nebula

The gorgeous Ant Nebula image from the .Hubble Space Telescope

Surprisingly Evolved Galaxies in the Early Universe

This astrophysics preprint describes A Population of Massive and Evolved Galaxies at z>=5, when the universe was less than a billion years old, which "... seems surpising at first sight". z is the redshift which according to the standard Big Bang models of cosmology is related to the age of the galaxy.

The galaxies found in this study are remarkable in that they contain a large stellar mass, have small physical sizes and that their main epoch of star formation occured at z >= 10. Galaxies with similar properties have, however, also been found by others.

Here's another preprint Morphologies of Two Massive Old Galaxies at z ~ 2.5 which says

Considerable observational evidence has built up over
the past few years that a substantial fraction of the mas-
sive galaxies around us today were already massive at
very early epochs.

the Jailing of Black America

Chilling statistics from the New York Times article: Jena, O. J. and the Jailing of Black America by ORLANDO PATTERSON of Harvard University.

America has more than two million citizens behind bars, the highest absolute and per capita rate of incarceration in the world. Black Americans, a mere 13 percent of the population, constitute half of this country’s prisoners. A tenth of all black men between ages 20 and 35 are in jail or prison; blacks are incarcerated at over eight times the white rate.

The effect on black communities is catastrophic: one in three male African-Americans in their 30s now has a prison record, as do nearly two-thirds of all black male high school dropouts.
...
The rate at which blacks commit homicides is seven times that of whites.

Something is very wrong - obviously. See Prof. Patterson's article for his perhaps surprising views.

I don't think that word means what you think it means

“Today, a megayacht is indispensable,” said Olivier Milliex, head of yacht finance at the Dutch bank ING. “It’s not like 15 years ago, when a yacht was a luxury item.”
[emphasis added]

from The New York Times: For the Yachting Class, the Latest Amenity Can Take Flight

Boston Molasses Disaster

The Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919 has to be one of the most bizzare calamities ever.

"A large molasses tank burst and a wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 mph (56 km/h), killing 21 and injuring 150. The event has entered local folklore, and residents claim that on hot summer days the area still smells of molasses."

Though I used to live less than a mile away and still live fairly nearby, I don't ever remember hearing of this event.

Great Storm of 1953

Speaking of winter weather, The Great Storm of 1953 in the North Sea was one of the great weather catastrophes in recent history. While 1,835 lost their lives in Holland, a much great calamity was narrowly avoided - from Wikipedia:

The Schielandse Hoge Zeedijk dyke along the river Hollandse IJssel was all that protected three million people in the provinces of South and Noord Holland from flooding. A section of this dyke, known as the Groenendijk, was not reinforced with stone revetments. The waterlevel was just below the crest and the seaside slope was weak. Volunteers worked to reinforce this stretch. Neverthelesss, the Groenendijk collapsed under the pressure around 5:30 am on 1 February. The seawater moved into the deep polder. In desperation, the mayor of Nieuwerkerk commandeered the river ship de Twee Gebroeders (The Two Brothers) and ordered the owner to plug the hole in the dike by navigating the ship into it. Fearing that the ship might break through and dive into the polder, captain Arie Evegroen took a row boat with him. The mayor's plan turned out to be successful, as the ship lodged itself firmly into the dike, saving many lives.

The North Atlantic Oscillation

For the past five years I've spent several weeks each winter with the Humpback Whales of the Silver Bank in the Dominican Republic. I'm planning to go again this year. Naturalist Tom Conlin of Aquatic Adventures leads expeditions that give us the opportunity to observe these magnificent animals and their fascinating behaviour.

Being moored 80 miles offshore on the Silver Bank, I've taken a keen interest in the weather. In the winter of 2005 (February/March) in particular, I noticed a seemingly relentless series of "cold fronts" which brought high winds, rain and cooler weather from the north. Typically the wind on the Silver Bank (which is north of the Dominican Republic and south of the Turks and Caicos) blows from the east at 10-15 knots and brings pleasant warm temperatures in the 80's farenheight. The cold fronts would bring higher winds (20-30 knots), cooler temperatures and rain, often in a series of very localized squalls.

The North Atlantic Oscillation seems to be a major factor in the winter weather for a vast region including the Silver Bank: see the maps on this NAO page at Columbia University. It appears that when the NAO index is negative, the easternly winds reaching the Silver Bank will be weaker. The page also says the the Eastern U.S. experiences more cold air outbreaks. The Silver Bank cold fronts seemed to originate from cold systems in the U.S. which then moved south (my interpretation from looking at the satellite weather maps available on the boats).

So the question is: was the NAO index actually particularly negative in the winter of 2005? And of course, what are is prospect for the upcoming winter of 2008?

And the answer is ...

Apparently the NAO index was dropping rapidly in the winter of 2005, it was in transition from a fairly high index to a fairly low one. Here's a graphic I found at NOAA.

NOAA graphic

The next step would be to find actual weather data for the region as opposed to relying on my subjective recollections.

How to Steal Cars?

RESEARCHERS SAY THEY'VE HACKED CAR DOOR LOCKS

"KeeLoq is badly broken," the paper says, adding, tongue-in-cheek, "Soon, cryptographers will all drive expensive cars."

Unknown Symmetry in Mesons?

Towards understanding broad degeneracy in non-strange mesons
Authors: S.S. Afonin
Abstract: The spectroscopic regularities of modern empirical data on the non-strange mesons up to 2.4 GeV can be summarized as a systematic clustering of states near certain values of energy. It is getting evident that some unknown X-symmetry triggers the phenomenon. We review the experimental status of this symmetry and recent theoretical attempts put forward for explanation of broad degeneracy.

preprint

By the way, a meson is a strongly interacting particle composed of a quark-antiquark pair.

A bright millisecond radio burst of extragalactic origin

D. R. Lorimer, M. Bailes, M. A. McLaughlin, D. J. Narkevic, F. Crawford
(Submitted on 27 Sep 2007)
Abstract: Pulsar surveys offer one of the few opportunities to monitor even a small fraction (~0.00001) of the radio sky for impulsive burst-like events with millisecond durations. In analysis of archival survey data, we have discovered a 30-Jy dispersed burst of duration <5 ms located three degrees from the Small Magellanic Cloud. The burst properties argue against a physical association with our Galaxy or the Small Magellanic Cloud. Current models for the free electron content in the Universe imply a distance to the burst of <1 Gpc No further bursts are seen in 90-hr of additional observations, implying that it was a singular event such as a supernova or coalescence of relativistic objects. Hundreds of similar events could occur every day and act as insightful cosmological probes.

A bright millisecond radio burst of extragalactic origin

A pulsar is thought to be a rotating neutron star.

The Small Magellanic Cloud is a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, it's visible in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Sun is Peculiarly Deficient in Lithium

According to the preprint below, the sun has a strangely low amount of Lithium.

"For example, the depletion in the
observed solar Li abundance by about a factor of 200
relative to that found in meteorites is not explained by
standard stellar evolution models. Since more physically
realistic models, calculated from basic principles, cannot
be computed yet, non-standard stellar evolution models
have to introduce free parameters to reproduce the ob-
served Li depletion"

"The Sun appears to be lithium-poor by a factor of 10 com-
pared to similar solar type disk stars"

HIP 56948: A Solar Twin With a Low Lithium Abundance

Sun's 'twin' an ideal hunting ground for alien life in New Scientist.

The Proton Spin Problem

The proton (and neutron) are supposed to be composed of quarks and gluons. The spin of the proton is known. It would be nice to be able to calculate the spin based on the physics of its components - presumably the Standard Model of particle physics. This has proved difficult. Here's a recent preprint discussing the problem:

Resolution of the Proton Spin Problem
Authors: F. Myhrer, A.W. Thomas
(Submitted on 26 Sep 2007)
Abstract: A number of lines of investigation into the structure of the nucleon have converged to the point where we believe that one has a consistent explanation of the well known proton spin crisis.

preprint

Search for a Solution of the Pioneer Anomaly

Search for a Solution of the Pioneer Anomaly
Authors: Michael Martin Nieto, John D. Anderson
(Submitted on 25 Sep 2007)
Abstract: In 1972 and 1973 the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions were launched. They were the first to explore the outer solar system and achieved stunning breakthroughs in deep-space exploration. But beginning in about 1980 an unmodeled force of 8 X 10^-8 cm/s^2, directed approximately towards the Sun, appeared in the tracking data. It later was unambiguously verified as being in the data and not an artifact. The cause remains unknown (although radiant heat remains a likely origin). With time more and more effort has gone into understanding this anomaly (and also possibly related effects). We review the situation and describe ongoing programs to resolve the issue.

preprint

a previous pioneer anomaly post

William Henry Fox Talbot - Pioneering Photographer

"(In) October, 1833, I was amusing myself on the lovely shores of the Lake of Como in Italy, taking sketches with a Camera Lucida, or rather, I should say, attempting to make them; but with the smallest possible amount of success...
After various fruitless attempts I laid aside the instrument and came to the conclusion that its use required a previous knowledge of drawing which unfortunately I did not possess.
I then thought of trying again a method which I had tried many years before. This method was to take a Camera Obscura and to throw the image of the objects on a piece of paper in its focus - fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away...
It was during these thoughts that the idea occurred to me... how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably and remain fixed on the paper!"

William Henry Fox Talbot on Wikipedia

Franklin, the Lightning Rod Known Round the World

Book review in the New York Times by By WILLIAM GRIMES Published: August 16, 2005.

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

STEALING GOD'S THUNDER
Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America
By Philip Dray

Unlike many of his European counterparts, Franklin showed a distinctly American obsession with practicality and efficiency. As a child he suggested to his father that if all the meat being salted for the winter meals were blessed at once, it would not be necessary to say grace at each meal, resulting in "a vast saving of time."

I like Ben!

General Relativity Resolves Galactic Rotation Without Exotic Dark Matter

by F. I. Cooperstock, S. Tieu, Preprint in the physics archive.

The stars in galaxies are observed to have "flat rotation curves", the velocity of the stars is the same, independent of their distance from the center of their galaxy. However, when we look at the distribution of luminous matter in the galaxies, Newtonian gravity predicts that the velocity of stars should fall off. Hence all the buzz about "Dark Matter", that there must be non-luminous matter in galaxies which is causing the stars to rotate uniformly.
However, Newtonian gravity is not the final word. Einstein's 1915 theory of gravity, General Relativity, makes more accurate predications. It was thought though, that because gravity is very weak in galaxies (apart from black holes and the small supermassive region at the very center of the galaxies) that the differences between Newton's theory and Einstein's theory would be insignificant.
To the contrary, the authors point out that the differences are very significant. They claim to reproduce the observed rotation curves with a quite reasonable distribution of matter, consistent with the observed distribution of luminous matter using General Relativity instead of Newtonian gravity.
There's been a veritable industry of Dark Matter research with all kinds of exotic proposals for new, hereto unobserved forms of matter. This now appears superfluous.

The Arrow of Time and the Initial Conditions of the Universe

by Robert M. Wald. preprint at the physics archive.

Wald is critical of "inflation" the standard explanation for some of the key features of the Big Bang.

In This Corner, in the Flouncy Skirt and Bowler Hat...

By JUAN FORERO
Published: July 21, 2005 article in the New York Times


Noah Friedman-Rudovsky for The New York Times

Wrestlers warming up in El Alto, Bolivia, near La Paz. Indigenous women, dressed in their traditional garb, are the stars of the increasingly popular bouts, Bolivia’s version of the World Wrestling Federation

Thickness of ventromedial prefrontal cortex in humans is correlated with extinction memory

Article published online in PNAS.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is a part of the brain which has been show to be involved in fear extinction. In this study, the subjects were conditioned to associate a light with an electric shock. Then they were shown the light without the shock - the extinction phase. The next day they were again shown the light with no shock, to test "extinction retention". Skin conductivity was used to measure fear. There was a correlation between the thickness of the medial orbitofrontal cortex and lower skin conductivity.


Jack in "24" could be pretty thick.