Silver Science: Musings on Science, Anywhere

Hello, editor....

2008-08-12T12:38:00.000-07:00

I know not every article will be perfect, but can't one hope to avoid errors in the first sentence?

With the advent of a series of satellites intended for a variety of communication and navigation purposes and with transmitters from 136 MHz to 1600 MHz, the importance of the phenomenon known as scintillation [...] becomes of importance.

Particle physics in the oilfield

2008-05-09T11:28:00.000-07:00

This at a time that US investment in particle physics research is plummeting:

Geneva, 9 May 2008. A Protocol to the 2006 Cooperation Agreement between Saudi Arabia and CERN was today signed at CERN by H.E. Dr. Mohammed I. Al-Suwaiyel, President of the King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology, on behalf of the Government of Saudi Arabia, and Robert Aymar, Director General of CERN , in the presence of H.E. Ali I. Al-Naimi, Minister of Petroleum and Mineral resources and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Saudi Aramco, H.E. Dr. Ibrahim A. Al-Assaf, Minister of Finance and a delegation of representatives of Saudi universities and Saudi Aramco.

The objective of the Protocol is to provide the operational framework as required for the execution of a range of specific tasks under the Cooperation Agreement in order to build a growing high-energy particle physics community in Saudi Arabia that eventually will participate as a visible member in the global scientific community collaborating at CERN.

Saudis know they must work on having a life after oil. When the US gives up leading the way in any and all research, what will we have left?

source: Interactions News Wire #32-08 (9 May 2008)

Whoopsie

2008-05-09T06:26:00.000-07:00

This sinkhole opened up a few days ago in Daisetta, TX. It's an old salt dome that probably had the oil pumped out from underneath it and has now decided to collapse. According to the Houston Chronicle, some local teenage girls have taken to calling it the "Sinkhole de Mayo." Clever!

picture credit: James Nielsen/Houston Chronicle

Don't listen to anything this man says

2008-04-07T09:28:00.000-07:00

Robert Zubrin, author of Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil, starts out a recent interview on DailyKos with this whopper:

This year, the USA will import 5 billion barrels of oil. At $100/bbl that is $500 billion dollars taxed out of the US economy by the collection of foreign governments known as OPEC, some of whom are using it to promote terrorism directed against the United states and numerous other countries. When George Bush took office in 2001, we were paying $90 billion per year for foreign oil. So the Bush administration has effectively responded to 9-11 by increasing our financing of the enemy fivefold -- and now we are actually paying OPEC more than we are paying our own defense department (the US DOD budget this year is about $435 billion).

A few "minor" details to point out, courtesy of the US DOE's Energy Information Agency:

1) We import 5 billion barrels of "total crude oil and products," but less than 4 billion barrels of actual crude oil. "Products" includes things that are already refined, such as gasoline, kerosene, and even liquified petroleum gas.

2) Only about 1.9 billion barrels of crude oil come from OPEC countries.

So 1.9 billion barrels times $100/barrel is $190 billion dollars to OPEC - not, in fact, more than we pay the defense department. This does not leave me inclined to believe any other figures or comparisons Zubrin quotes.

Oh, and one other thing. Only about 800 million barrels come from the Persian Gulf, with roughly 200 million from Iraq, so say $60 billion dollars. I know terrorists can come from any part of the world, but to the American public it means the Persian Gulf. Hyperbole, anyone?

This I can agree with, though: "the Bush administration has effectively responded to 9-11 by increasing our financing of the enemy fivefold."

A 30-minute round trip to space!

2008-03-26T08:35:00.000-07:00

XCOR Press release

That explains a lot

2008-03-21T13:00:00.000-07:00

From The Onion:

March 19, 2008 | Issue 44•12

HOUSTON—According to an official NASA report released Saturday, nearly 32 percent of all prayers exiting Earth are deflected off satellites orbiting the planet—ultimately preventing the discharged requests for divine intervention from ever making it to the Gates of Heaven. "After impact with the satellite, these diverted prayers typically plummet back into the atmosphere, where they either burn up or eventually land, unanswered, in a body of water," the report read in part. "Of the remaining prayers, research confirms 64 percent fail to make it past the stratosphere because they aren't prayed hard enough, 94 percent of those with enough momentum are swallowed by a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and 43 percent are eaten by birds." The report concluded that, of the 170 billion prayers issued last month, one made it to God, whose reply was intercepted by a hurricane and incorrectly delivered to a Nigerian man who reportedly did not know what to do with his brand-new Bowflex machine.

Road trip!

2008-03-18T10:49:00.000-07:00

If only Geneva were within driving distance of Atlanta:

On 6 April 2008, CERN will open its doors to the public, offering a unique chance to visit its newest and largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), before it goes into operation later this year. This scientific instrument, the largest and most complex in the world, is installed in a 27km tunnel, 100 metres underground in the Swiss canton of Geneva and neighbouring France. CERN will open all access points around the ring for visits underground, to the tunnel and the experiment caverns. On the surface, a wide-ranging programme will be on offer, allowing people to learn about the physics for which this huge instrument is being installed, the technology underlying it, and applications in other fields.

Source: Interactions News Wire #21-08 (18 March 2008)

How does your mindwandering compare to others?

2008-02-26T13:48:00.000-08:00

I just took this fun little survey about daydreaming that was put together by some people at Harvard. The results will not surprise anyone who's known me for longer than, say, 5 years:

You spend more time than the average individual ‘lost in thought’ or mind-wandering.

Your daydreams are more creative than most.

My glasses give me superpowers

2008-01-24T08:22:00.000-08:00

I'm...Spectrum Analyzer Woman! My glasses, being both high-index and ridiculously thick at the edges, tend to separate out colors. I've noticed this before - usually it shows up as a blue shadow on one side of the object and a yellow shadow on the other side. Flat-panel computer screens do it bad. When I look at neon lights I can sometimes separate out the emission lines. The other day, though, I noticed for the first time that it works on the fluorescent lights in my bathroom. I happened to be standing in just the right place such that a narrow reflection from the shower door separated out and showed the dominant emission lines, even though the bulb produces white light. There's a line in blue quite far from the actual reflection, a green line closer to it, and a red line just on the other side of the reflection. Needless to say, this is way cooler than yellow and blue shadows. Next I'm going to see if I can get a picture of this with my camera.

Snow!

2008-01-18T06:28:00.000-08:00

My Texas Rain Gauge was doing double duty as a Texas Snow Gauge Wednesday evening. Unfortunately the snow turned to rain after a few hours, so not much was left by morning.

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

2008-01-03T07:49:00.000-08:00

From
Interactions News Wire #78-07
03 January 2008
(http://www.interactions.org):

Proposed for "first light" in 2014, the 8.4-meter LSST will survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its three-billion pixel digital camera, probing the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move.
...
The LSST will be constructed on Cerro Pachón, a mountain in northern Chile. Its design of three large mirrors and three refractive lenses in a camera leads to a 10 square degree field-of-view with excellent image quality. The telescope's 3200 Megapixel camera will be the largest digital camera ever constructed. Over ten years of operations, about 2000 deep exposures will be acquired for every part of the sky over 20,000 square degrees. This color "movie" of the Universe will open an entirely new window: the time domain. LSST will produce 30 Terabytes of data per night, yielding a total database of 150 Petabytes. Dedicated data facilities will process the data in real time.

This is extra cool:

LSST is designed to be a public facility - the database and resulting catalogs will be made available to the community at large with no proprietary restrictions. A sophisticated data management system will provide easy access, enabling simple queries from individual users (both professionals and amateurs), as well as computationally intensive scientific investigations that utilize the entire database.

By the way, "synoptic" is related to "synopsis" in that this telescope is meant to survey the state of the sky at regular intervals. It is also a meteorological term.

Hmmm

2007-08-27T18:45:00.001-07:00

Have you seen the show on Animal Planet called "Meerkat Manor?" We have a show produced in our backyard that could be called "Hummer House." All summer we've had these resident hummingbirds that frequent a feeder hanging by our deck. And when I say frequent, I mean that they visit every few minutes.

Here's some closeups of a single female: (click on a picture to see a larger version)

She has a lovely green back that's really brought out by the sunlight.

Below, one chases another away from the feeder:

Here are three at the feeder, looking at each other warily:

Here's the same three in a rare moment of peace:

I've seen as many as five at one time, but was unable to get them all on film at once!

Guns don't kill people, preschoolers kill people

2007-07-20T18:09:00.000-07:00

Note: I was raised (safely) in a house with several firearms.

Exsqueeze me?

2007-04-17T12:48:00.000-07:00

I'm currently looking for a job and have been posting my resume everywhere I can find. I signed up on one website, www.CareerBuilder.com, that scanned my resume and uses a "patent-pending recommendation engine" to suggest jobs that match my profile. It doesn't seem to work very well. They send me an email about once a week with a list of jobs. Keep in mind that I have a PhD and have worked in the oil industry for 5 years as a nuclear physicist. This week's job selections include:

pharmacy technician

polymer chemist

psychiatrist/psychologist

registered nurse

nurse practicioner

photo lab and retail sales associate (my favorite)

Also included are jobs "similar" to the ones above:

blood bank supervisor

driver

paramedic

loan processor

dispatcher/transportation

microbiology technician

molecular biologist

food production supervisor - entry level

dental hygenist

It seems I'm qualified for more jobs than I thought!

Hail, hail

2007-04-09T08:17:00.000-07:00

We had some unusual weather here recently. First we had a severe thunderstorm, which produced the marble-sized hail pictured. As you can see, the hail beat up the new growth on the trees and also many of my potted plants. A few nights later, it got down to 28°F. The poor plants didn't know what hit them (no pun intended). The leaves on one of our Japanese maples out front weren't so happy with the cold weather and have all wilted. I'm assuming the tree will put out some more leaves, or at least I hope it will. It's right in the middle of the bed and will be an eyesore all summer otherwise. Maybe I will go speak some encouragement to it.

Note the curious shapes of some of the hail. Most of them were smooth, some with white centers, but some of them had jagged edges. I'm not sure how that happens - do pieces of hail sometimes run into one another and break off pieces? If so, what does that imply about the conditions inside the storm cloud?

Metabolizing carbohydrates just for me

2007-04-01T11:02:00.000-07:00

Who else but Weird Al would write a song about his pancreas? My favorite part, because the physics reference was so unexpected, is

My pancreas attracts every other
Pancreas in the universe
With a force proportional
To the product of their masses
And inversely proportional
To the distance between them

But you have to love the bits about lipase, amylase, and tripsin, too.

On the same album (Straight Outta Lynwood), his "White and Nerdy" is absolutely brilliant, although a little too close to home!

Catching some rays

2007-03-26T11:54:00.000-07:00

This picture is from last October, on the morning of the first heavy frost. The frost was burning off as the sun rose, producing a rather local example of crepuscular rays.

Every sperm is great

2007-01-24T12:44:00.000-08:00

Q. What are some of the underappreciated attributes of sperm?

A. I’m fascinated by how determined they are. Sperm — each one seems an individual in the way they move. When they change from one motion to another, it’s fascinating.

Moreover, they have the ability to do much more than most other human cells: they crawl long distances in a short period of time, they can sense their surroundings. In fact, they have molecules that are much the same as olfactory receptors in our noses.

As you watch them under a microscope, you get the sense that they are going somewhere, or at least “think” they are. They surround an egg and vigorously try to fuse with it. They don’t give up until they run out of energy.

Interview of David E. Clapham of Harvard Medical School
from the Science section of the New York Times, January 23, 2007

Plus, they're great at karaoke.

The Bundt Cake That Ate Cincinnati

2006-10-29T18:38:00.000-08:00

I recently came upon a short story written when I was in middle or high school. I don't actually remember if I wrote it, or one of my friends, or all of us. (Anyone want to take credit? You might want to wait until after you read it.) I suspect this was a product of one of our late-night creative sessions at a slumber party.

To date myself and the story, it's printed by a dot-matrix printer (look here, kids) on banner paper with the holes down the side. It appears heavily influenced by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Whoever typed it up was obviously not big on copyediting, but in the spirit of preservation, I am reproducing it here exactly as found. Enjoy!

The Bundt Cake That Ate Cincinnati

Chapter One - "Fred"

Once upon a time, in a galaxy not too far away - in fact, a galaxy very close to our own; in fact, it was OUR galaxy; anyway, there lived in a small ramshackle shack on the edge of town (Cincinnati), a man named Fred. Now, Fred spent most of his days pouring hot dogs at the local hot dog factory, and therefore did not have much money (he got a penny for every hot dog he poured and he was a very slow worker besides). Fred spent most of his nights sleeping. The nights that he didn't spend sleeping, he sat up watching Benny Hill and Archie Bunker and the LateDamnLateRealLate Show. Fred watched this trash because he was lonely. Unfortunately, Fred couldn't drown his loneliness in a bottle of Yukon Jack, simply because he had never heard of Yukon Jack. Nor could Fred afford any other recreational pharmaceuticals to hide his trouble with. So he had practically resigned himself to a life of lame T.V. and Stouffer's frozen dinners.

Chapter Two - "Fred"

The one thing in life Fred wanted more than anything else was a hot babe. But, he reasoned, if he couldn't get a hot babe, he'd settle for a pet. a dog, a cat, a pet rock, ANYTHING! As long as he didn't have to feed it. Okay, that ruled out the dog and the cat. But a pet rock would be nice. It required no food, no water, no litterbox or newspapers, a little polish once in a while, and a bit of love. And it would be useful, he realized, to throw at the neighborhood kids. fred decided to go out and but himself a rock the very next day.

Chapter Three - "Fred and the Bundt Cake"

A thud awoke Fed. He was rather annoyed, as he had been having a very nice dream about a very hot babe name Barbie, who had been whispering "Whip me, beat me, call me BEOWULF!" At first, Fred thought the noise was the morning paper. He figured that he'd probably better go check the front porch, as he didn't get the morning paper. Fred opened the front door and stared at the ground, obviously stupefied. What made Fred blow some brain circuits was a tiny little Bundt cake, wrapped in a blanket with a note attached, which read "please take good care of my baby bundt cake." This, of course, made Fred very happy, because he would be lonely no longer. He vowed to give his baby Bundt cake the best care he could provide, and love it always. Fred had always wanted to die a happy man, and now, it seemed, his wishes would be fulfilled.

Chapter Four - "The Bundt Cake"

But the Bundt cake had other plans. You see, Bundt cakes grow very slowly. Their life span is the same as a human's, but they never get their growth spurt till their mid 40's. This Bundt cake was in his mid 30's, and he was a Communist spy. His mission was to find out whether the Americans were deserving enough to live, or if they were just plain silly. Sitting on top of the kitchen table, the Bundt cake (who happened to be named after the god of panic, Crises) could plainly see the T.V. and decided to tune in while Fred was at work. Crises got himself a diet Cherry Coke from the fridge and a bag of Cheetos Cheez Balls, sat back, relaxed, and got ready to enjoy a day of American television.

Chapter Five - "The Bundt Cake"

People screamed. Blood flew. People got trampled, run over, squashed. Panic was everywhere. One woman's eyes literally popped out of her head. This happened immediately after she saw....it. A giant Bundt cake was eating everyone it came across, getting bigger by the meal. Of course, it fed by phagocytosis, as bundt cakes don't have mounths, Total destruction seemed certain for the city. It was inevitable doom.

Chapter Six- "Cincinnati"

It was gone. It it's place sat a giant fat round Bundt cake, happy at last.

"but himself a rock"???

To the editor:

2006-09-28T13:49:00.001-07:00

I wrote my very first "letter to the editor" yesterday on an issue near and dear to my heart. They didn't print it (it was the New York Times, I'm sure they got hundreds), but I can share it with you here:

John Tierney’s critique of the National Academy of Science report “Beyond Bias and Barriers” (column, Sept. 26) demonstrates the very social pressures that he discounts. Tierney complains the authors dismiss the possibility that the imbalance in the number of women pursuing careers in science and engineering is due to innate differences in mathematical ability and interest in abstract theoretical subjects. Data on postsecondary degrees do not support such claims. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2003-2004 women earned 46% of bachelor’s and 28% of PhD degrees awarded in mathematics in the US but only 21% of bachelor’s and 18% of PhD degrees in physics and engineering. Surely Tierney is not arguing that physics and engineering are more mathematical and abstract than mathematics itself.

Social pressures steering women away from science are overt and mainstream. Let’s not forget Mattel’s Barbie that announced “Math class is tough.” As a female nuclear physicist who volunteers her time to encourage young women to pursue science, it dismays me to see Tierney perpetuating bias.

Side by side

2006-08-25T15:25:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I was surprised to find two obituaries of interest to me in the New York Times; surprised, because I don't normally look at the obituaries. In a parallel to my dance/science dichotomy, the two notable people were Melissa Hayden, a dancer, and James Van Allen, a physicist. I make a few remarks about the latter here, and a few about the former on my dance blog.

A quote from "James A. Van Allen, Discoverer of Earth-Circling Radiation Belts, Is Dead at 91" by Walter Sullivan (August 10, 2006):

In the celebration of the Explorer 1 success, Dr. Van Allen posed for what became an iconic picture of the early days of spaceflight. He is standing with Wernher von Braun, whose team built the rocket, and William H. Pickering, who directed the spacecraft development, all smiling broadly and holding a model of the spacecraft high over their heads. He was the last of the three to die.

Explorer 1 was the first satellite put into orbit by the United States of America. For the record, von Braun died in 1977 and Pickering died in 2004. The three were born withing 4 years of each other. For a brief introduction to Werner von Braun, check out this song by Tom Lehrer.

Talking Barbie all over again

2006-08-21T08:48:00.000-07:00

Is it any wonder that women are underrepresented in math (about 18% of PhD's granted) and the "hard" sciences (about 21% of PhD's granted)? Check out this t-shirt I saw for sale yesterday. Oh, and I saw another t-shirt at Kohl's, this one for guys, that defined "girlfriend" as "mistake," "someone who is never satisfied," "ball and chain," etc. Nice.

Thesis in a box

2006-07-31T14:46:00.000-07:00

I am stupified by this site:
http://www.phd-dissertations.com/

This is the part that really gets me:

It is a recognized FACT that over 94% of "thesis" and "dissertation" services hire unskilled, amateur, low-paid, foreign writers who steal sources and plagiarize text from published documents. Rest assured, however, that our American company is among the legitimate 6%.

Yes, God forbid the dissertation you PAID SOMEONE ELSE TO RESEARCH AND WRITE come from a dishonest company!

2006-04-12T15:47:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine recently sent me a journal article with the alluring title of "AVPR1a and SCLA4 Gene Polymorphisms Are Associated with Creative Dance Performance." This article was published in PLoS Genetics (you know you have it in your bathroom) in September 2005. It describes a study comparing the frequency of variants of certain genes in dancers, non-dancing athletes, and the general population. The authors find significant correlations between being a dancer and having particular variants, which suggests a genetic predisposition to have the urge to dance. (It seems therefore appropriate that the phrase "Gotta dance!" was announced in Singin' in the Rain by Gene Kelly.)

A few quotes:

We suggest the notion that the "dance" phenotype is no more difficult to define than other complex human behavioral phenotypes (schizophrenia, attention deficit, personality, violence, and others) that have shown to be both heritable and amenable to genetic analysis. Dancers fulfill a set of criteria with considerable face validity (similar in principle to the usual Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-style "symptom checklist") that both identifies and distinguishes one disorder from another.

Read that last sentence without the words in parentheses: "Dancers fulfill a set of criteria with considerable face validity that both identifies and distinguishes one disorder from another." A little copyediting would have helped here, because I don't think the authors were suggesting that dancers suffer from a disorder - although that's open for debate! Two words: pointe shoes.

...in the Korean Salpuri dance, an ecstatic trance state is induced that results in changes in alpha wave activity. [snip] We suggest the notion that the association we observe between SLC6A4 and dance is perhaps related to the need for altered consciousness states that subjects participating in and performing this art form sometimes have. [snip] Perhaps a prerequisite for some types of dancing...is the ability to enter into such a higher state of awareness.

This idea intrigues me, because I've always found performing to be different than any other experience in that I seem to be particularly aware of the emotion and physicality of the movement.

Cross-posted on my dance blog.

Colors

2006-03-23T15:46:00.000-08:00

Driving back from Austin this morning, I had what I consider to be a highly amusing thought. I was driving past a field of cows, and I thought, "Huh - cows and rocks come in the same colors."

Inspiration

2006-02-09T15:31:00.000-08:00

Last night I heard a commentator on NPR's Marketplace say in almost the same breath that funding basic research doesn't help the economy and that our schools need to produce more scientists and engineers. Does...not...compute....

Does he think that people major in physics because they have a burning desire to, say, improve the way nuclear well-logging is done? It's true that a degree in science or engineering can lead to a good job, but in my experience most people major in science because it's cool. Launching probes that fall into the atmosphere of one of Saturn's moons is cool. Building colliders that make antimatter is cool. Discovering superfluid He-3 is cool. Research like this may not help the economy directly, but it is crucial to the economy because it inspires people to go into science and engineering in the first place.

Science in the air

2006-01-16T15:30:00.000-08:00

I spent most of a plane flight yesterday reading the 12/23/05 issue of Science. Generally I do not take the time to sit down and read the magazines that come poring into my house every month, so as a captive audience of sorts, I was determined to read the whole damn thing. I didn't read every word, but I was pretty thorough. There were some interesting things in there.
Having gotten my PhD in experimental particle physics and then chosen to enter industry rather than stay in academia, I felt somewhat vindicated upon seeing Adrian Cho's article on U.S. Particle Physics as the "Breakdown of the Year." It seems that physicists have once again run up against the "wisdom" of government budgets that invest in the first half of a project and then cut and run. I'm...I'm getting flashbacks to...to 1993...when Congress decided to axe the Superconducting Super Collider after investing...HOW MUCH?? I was shocked to learn that BTeV had been cancelled - I thought anything Fermilab touched was golden. If you want the complete story of why this was a stupid decision stupidly made, check out this statement issued by the (former) collaboration. How heartbreaking to have joined a new collaboration/experiment because the funding for your old collaboration/experiment got cut, and then see the new collaboration/experiment get its funding cut! I don't know for sure, but I think that happened to some of the BTeV scientists.

Don't get me wrong - I want nothing but large budgets and success for those still in the field, but sometimes it's hard to stomach feeling like a second-class citizen of the APS. Most of the society's activities are geared towards academia. They couldn't even maintain publication of The Industrial Physicist, a monthly magazine that made me feel less like a nobody in the physics community. I don't think I made the wrong decision, but seeing the woes of U.S. particle physicists makes me a little happier with the route I chose.

Woo hoo!

2006-01-05T15:29:00.000-08:00

You Passed 8th Grade Science

Congratulations, you got 8/8 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Science?

This was fun, but, hello, "What's the electric charge of a neuron?"!

Why We Do It, by Niles Eldredge

2006-01-03T15:28:00.000-08:00

No, this isn't a book review. I picked up this book at the airport yesterday and made it through a good bit before I succumbed to sleep on the plane. This quote, from a section titled "Physics Envy," stuck in my head:

And later evolutionary biologists, such as Earnst Mayr, have occasionally wondered aloud why physicists can't seem to grasp the concept of natural selection. Inasmuch as physicists are not a uniformly stupid lot, that many of them don't seem to "get" core evolutionary concepts like natural selection is actually very interesting.

I have to say that as a physicist, and hopefully not a stupid one, I have never, my whole life, had trouble understanding natural selection. I don't imagine that most of the other physicists I know would have trouble with the concept, although I have not actually discussed it with them. One wonders of whom the author is speaking. Perhaps he thinks physicists can only understand things as equations? I've run in to that attitude before. Maybe I know an unusually broad-minded group of physicists.

In any event, the following sentence stands as an intriguing challenge: "A true physics of genetic information remains to be developed." I'm not quite sure what he means by that yet. He alludes to "some interesting early attempts" but doesn't give specifics.

What? You have more to say?

2006-01-03T15:27:00.000-08:00

Howdy, and welcome to my new blog. Apparently my dance blog stirred the writing juices, because now I feel compelled to put pen to paper (figuratively) and record my thoughts on science. Mostly this will be an attempt to organize my thoughts on a wide range of scientific topics as well as make note of recent discoveries that I find interesting. I might review a few books, but don't get your hopes up.