Conscientious

I'm a sucker for scientific animated movies. Having made a few myself - years back when I was a graduate student and when making those animations was a huge amount of work given the clumsy technologies available - I particularly enjoyed watching the medical animations on this page. Ignore the somewhat not-too-thriling thumbnails and just click to watch them. They're spectacular!
(thru iconomy)

Seems like for the current administration space science basically has two main reasons: "Bush's new space policy had a partly political genesis, with presidential advisers saying that it emerged from a White House search for a bold goal that would help unify the nation before Bush's reelection race and portray him as visionary. [...] Officials said the lunar and Mars program will have a military component, noting that the Pentagon will be consulted and may help with launches." (full story) So astronomical research is basically only good if it helps to detract from a miserable presidency and to get the military into space?

Not that this is any news. Scientists have for decades said that manned space stations orbiting Earth are a waste of money as the research you get out of them is pretty much negligible. But here we are, building a space station....

Disclaimer: I'm an astrophysicist.

PS (18 Jan 2004): This entry needs a little clarification. It's about the calibration of the digital cameras used by the various scientific instruments mentioned above. It's not about conspiracy theories that claim that NASA is systematically hiding information about life on Mars. To make it very clear, I think those "theories" are utter nonsense. My interest in the calibration problem originates from an article in New Yorker magazine that wrote "The digital images radioed home by the Viking lander in 1976 were notoriously 'over-pinked'; if you actually stood on Mars, you would see a landscape whose color resembled not cotton candy, but butterscotch." (The New Yorker, January 5, 2004, p.27)

In the latest edition of The New York Review of Books, physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize, and author Steven Weinberg discusses NASA's latest changes in plans after Bush jr decided to send people to Mars.

"There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear that he might be one of them. Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent." (story - this isn't necessarily a new article but it's quite timeless)

"A 2003 study by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis suggested a very real safety problem exists when drivers are paired with cell phones.

"The study found an estimated 2,600 deaths a year could be linked to cell phone use. Cell phone use also is connected to approximately 330,000 moderate to critical injuries annually and 1.5 million instances of property damage a year, the study found.

"But the Harvard researchers wanted to quantify the potential cost, measured in lost productivity, of banning cell phone use in cars. They concluded that taking cell phones away from drivers would cost $43 billion a year in lost economic activity — about the same economic value of the lost lives and injuries. "

Note how chatting on the phone in your car is filed under "productivity": "Honey, I'm in a traffic jam, so I'll be late for dinner." Yeah right. And then comes the disclaimer that throws scientific integrity right out of the window: "The Harvard study, like an earlier 2000 study, was funded by AT&T Wireless."

This is hardly new for those who follow the news regularly but it's well worth the read anyway (despite of the use of the Kindergartenesque 'evil' in there): "All humans are capable of committing torture and other 'acts of great evil'. That is the unhappy conclusion drawn from an analysis of psychological studies. Over 25,000 psychological studies involving eight million participants support this finding, say Susan Fiske and colleagues at Princeton University in New York, US."

The probably best place to have a look at the new images of Saturn's moon Titan is the official project website of the European Space Agency.

"Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: 'Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.' Science mines ignorance. [...] Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the effect that creationism or 'intelligent design theory' (ID) is having, especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons, under a new name." - full story

Have a look at these pretty spectacular photos from inside the eye of hurricane Katrina.

"A bitter debate about how to teach evolution in U.S. high schools is prompting a crisis of confidence among scientists, and some senior academics warn that science itself is under assault." - story

And speaking of "intelligent design", this article exposes "ID" for what it is: Monty Pythonesque nonsense: "So, this is my theory, which belongs to me, and goes as follows. All intelligently designed things are brought about by an intelligent designer through a process of intelligently conducted design."

Conspiracy theories, irrational fears of "the government", and the belief that Earth is constantly being visited by "unidentified flying objects" (UFO's) from outer space are as American as apple pie. Needless to say, all of these contain just enough actual facts that they're not outright dismissable - even though it basically just takes about ten seconds of thinking about them to get there anyway.

Needless to say, none of this is going to have any effects on the fools that comprise large parts of the Republican Party. And why would it? Given they gave a damn when New Orleans got flooded why would they care about Florida or New York City?

"Gilles Trehin is an autistic 28-year-old. Since the age of 12, he has been designing an imaginary city called Urville, named after the 'Dumont d’Urville,' a French scientific base in Antarctica. He has created detailed historical, geographical, cultural, and economic descriptions of the city, as well as an absolutely extraordinary set of drawings. His Guidebook to Urville will be published later this year." - story (also see this page)

"Imagine that all the people on Earth [...] could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. [...] Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust. [...] All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here." - story

One of the many clearly somewhat irrelevant facts about me is that while I am working as an astrophysicist now, I started out as an experimental high-energy physicist, back at what used to be LEP. More precisely, I got my undergrad degree in that stuff and then went on to get a Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics. The only thing that I remember fondly from the LEP days is when I got the chance to actually see the underground structures that housed the experiment and that now are used for the next generation particle accelerator, called LHC. There's a brief and somewhat unspectacular article in the NY Times about LHC today, but the photos that accompany the article are quite nice - even though standing in the gigantic underground dome, 100 m (300 feet) below the surface, is an experience that no photograph can convey. To get a better feeling for the scales, have a look at this photo (which shows this detector under construction), and this shows the tunnel with the "beam pipe" - if you stand in the tunnel it's really quite impressive; it's so big that it curves only very gently.

"A network of artificial nerves is growing in a Swiss supercomputer -- meant to simulate a natural brain, cell-for-cell. The researchers at work on 'Blue Brain' promise new insights into the sources of human consciousness." - story

For me, this is a bit too much on the side of things that made the book "The Da Vinci Code" a bestseller, but it's quite entertaining anyway: "it’s a compelling thought: that this magnificent temple, built 1400 years before Copernicus ever saw it, designed by a pagan, Sun-worshipping Roman emperor, and later transformed into a church, may have had secretly encoded within it the idea that the Sun was the center of the universe; and that this ancient, wordless wisdom helped to revolutionize our view of the cosmos." (interview)

"The energy relationships to be created at CERN correspond to the state of the entire universe around one ten-trillionth of a second after the big bang (so according to what we know it's not a simulation of creation - that happened around ten to the power of minus twenty seconds earlier). Whether such an investigation into our material origin can have any significance for us is hard to say." - story

While the spacecraft bound for Pluto, the just demoted former planet, has an incredibly goofy name, its cameras are quite excellent. And yes, this is a real movie. I'm afraid learning about the resolution of the cameras on board of the spacecraft might shatter people's obsession with "Megapixels" - but that's just to prove that it's not the number of "Megapixels" that determines whether you get a good photo, it's how you use the camera.

Was the Antikythera Mechanism the world’s first computer?

For reasons that will probably be obvious I find the research mentioned here quite interesting. When I'm extremely tired, my brain's switch that controls which language to use ceases to work properly, usually much to the amusement of my wife. And it's also quite interesting that when I swear I automatically mix words from both languages (German and English) - I guess in that case the switch does get circumvented altogether.

This list is not only quite informative, but also holds quite a few lessons. If you find yourself agreeing to what I just wrote, that might just be a case of confirmation bias.

"The Sokal Affair was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of a then-non-peer-reviewed postmodern cultural studies journal called Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a pseudoscientific paper for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal's words: 'publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions.'" (source) You can find all the details at Alan Sokal's website. Hmmm, "liberally salted with nonsense" and "sounding good"...

Via Pruned come photos of Super-Kamiokande, a gigantic underground neutrino detector. With scientific faith now replacing religious faith in many parts of the world (certain restrictions apply), is it a surprise to see certain images? (Of course, Gursky fans will be familiar Super-K.)

"People who are narrow-minded and dogmatic have a poorer working memory capacity, which is what makes it harder for them to process new information. That's according to Adam Brown who tested 212 university students on a verbal working memory task." - story

Sometimes, it's quite nice to look at something entirely different, something remote from one's usual interests. I found two immensely interesting articles on insects today, so I'll just share them. For those who just love fruit flies (don't we all?) there's brain-scanning the fruit fly. And for all the bee lovers out there, check out how bees kill predator hornets.

"In March of 1985, Clive Wearing, an eminent English musician and musicologist in his mid-forties, was struck by a brain infection [...] affecting especially the parts of his brain concerned with memory. He was left with a memory span of only seconds - the most devastating case of amnesia ever recorded." (story)

"Can it really be true that men and women understand language in different ways? Nonsense, says Deborah Cameron in this second extract from her new book - the supposed miscommunication is a myth."

Most people will be familiar with echolocation (even if they have never heard of the term), because they have know how bats manage to fly at night: Bats emit a sound and then use the echo of that sound to navigate. Turns out humans can develop the same technique. Amazing.

Found at things magazine: Karl-Hans Janke spent the final 40 years of his life in a psychiatric hospital, suffering from paranoia, schizophrenia, and possibly autism. His doctor noted the main symptom of his illness was "manic inventing". You have to see the catalogue of a show about his work to believe it - note that most of the German texts appear in English translation a few pages later (unfortunately, the quotes by Wernher von Braun - which make you question his sanity - aren't translated).

"Computer servers are at least as great a threat to the climate as SUVs or the global aviation industry." (story, via the incomparable bldgblog) That's bad (and, if you think about it, unsurprising) news. But then there's a way for you to do something useful with your computer: "Climateprediction.net is the largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century. To do this, we need people around the world to give us time on their computers - time when they have their computers switched on, but are not using them to their full capacity." If you look around on that site, not only do you find a plethora of information on the science side, you also get to see the results - it's serious science, the first results were published in Nature. And after you have installed the program you don't even have to do anything.

"Our need to feel as though we know ourselves is so strong that unexpected success can leave us feeling anxious and undermine our future performance." (story) I have no way to prove this, but I am pretty sure that this also applies to photography: When you are working on finding your style or on sharpening your skills, getting new results can cause the same problems as those reported in the article.

"Twenty subjects tasted five wine samples which were distinguished solely by their retail price, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the subjects were told that all five wines were different, the scientists had actually only given them three different wines. [...] Not surprisingly, the subjects consistently reported that the expensive wine tasted better. They preferred the taste of the $90 bottle to the $10 bottle, and thought the $45 bottle was more delicious than than the $5 wine." (story) - Leicas take better photos?

Today's Man is a documentary that I just watched twice (on the two different PBS channels "basic" cable has to offer in Western Mass). I can only recommend it - it's about a young man who was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome ("People with Asperger’s, which is a form of autism, tend to be highly intelligent - often geniuses in certain subjects - but are unable to pick up on social cues." If you're wondering why I'm so interested in this subject matter, have a look at this page).

Pulsating stars (so-called cepheids) have long been used as one of the best means to determine distances in astronomy. Needless to say, the devil is in the details. A team of astronomers has now studied the star "RS Pup" to measure its distance using light echoes - light from the star bouncing off surrounding material. If you're interested in this, have a look at the press release or even the actual publication. But regardless of how interested you are in this, you will definitely want to watch the movie the researchers made, with time compressed into seconds, the star pulsating visibly, and material ejected from the outer layers of the star streaming into space (the black line masks the star so its brightness won't overpower the camera).

This via The Frontal Cortex (the blog, not mine): "My friend “Jason” (not his real name) is one of thousands of amputees living with a huge secret. Years ago, after a lifetime of anguish due to having an extra hand - essentially a birth defect in his opinion - he took the radical step of amputating this hand just above the wrist." (story)

One of the most impressive presentations I've seen in a while: Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor describes experiencing a stroke herself (thanks, Michael!).