I have a hard time thinking that my readers need to be reminded to read the web comic xkcd, but just in case, Randall Munroe chimes in on the faster-than-light neutrino controversy. Go read the comic now, since I spoil it below…

In fact, I agree with his idea, and said as much on Google+ yesterday:

So yeah, I’m skeptical. The fact that you’re reading this on a computer shows we understand a lot of physics pretty well, so the best thing to do here is to calm down and see what comes out of this. But I’d bet against it.

… and I’d win that bet either way. If I’m right, I make money. If I’m wrong, warp speed! Woohoo!

Scientist Brian Cox has an interview online where he describes why this is important, too.

We should have more news about all this soon, since the scientists involved are giving a talk in Zurich, and I’ll write up a review once I understand what’s what.

Like a bazillion other geeks, I’m a big fan of Randall Munroe’s web comic xkcd. It’s funny and wonderful, but sometimes it’s his particular way of expressing his view that’s simply astonishing.

As poignant as that is, you really need to go to his page and mouse over the comic to read the text that pops up. It reminded me strongly of my own sentiments in an OpEd I wrote for the New York Post a couple of years ago. Especially this part:

For all of history, the Moon was a metaphor for an unreachable place, beyond our grasp. But in 1969 NASA looked to this unachievable destination and made it achievable. It was an event so singular that every accomplishment ever since has been compared to it. It was NASA’s shining hour.

But I’ve met many Apollo astronauts, and — no offense to them — they’re old. The last man to walk on the Moon is 75. How old will he be when the next human leaves a footprint on the lunar surface?

It’s a question I’d like the answer to very soon.

Randall Munroe, who draws the geekerrific xkcd webcomic, has created a really good chart showing relative radiation doses absorbed by humans doing various activities.

I’ve put a piece of it here, the section with the lowest doses. I like this! A lot of folks don’t understand what radiation is — light is radiation, for example — or that just by existing on the surface of our planet you absorb a certain amount all the time: from the ground, from space, from things you eat. Wikipedia actually has an excellent rundown of what radiation is, and the critical distinction between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation (there’s also electromagnetic versus subatomic particle radiation, but that’s less of a concern here).

In the chart, Russel deals with doses from ionizing radiation. This is the kind that can cause damage… but only in sufficiently high doses. For example, bananas are a natural source of gamma rays due to the decay of an isotope of potassium (⁴⁰K). It’s a pretty weak source — a few years back I had access to a gamma-ray detector and we could barely detect a banana’s emission — and it doesn’t affect you in any real way. Potassium iodide is a common salt that’s also a gamma-ray emitter, but again you’d need a lot of it for it to be dangerous… and if you ate that much you’d have worse issues!

The average amount of radiation you absorb in a year is about 3 – 4 milliSieverts, depending on where you live. At higher elevations — like, say, Boulder, where I live — cosmic radiation puts you on the higher end of that scale. I’ll note that cancer risk is not really higher living up here than at sea level (lung cancer rates are lower than average here, probably due to the healthy lifestyles most people follow in Boulder, but skin cancer rates are slightly higher than average, probably due to a combination of people being outside more than average together with the thinner air blocking less UV).

In general, you can actually absorb a much higher than usual radiation dose (up to a point, of course) without ill effects, since your body can heal some amount of damage (just like it heals from a cut). Too many such doses too close together, or too big a dose all at once, can do too much tissue damage and be fatal (I guess, again, like a cut). For example, I like to point out that the Apollo astronauts got roughly a year’s worth of radiation absorption in their tissue while voyaging to the Moon and back, but didn’t suffer any ill effects.

Obviously, this is a complicated issue, but the xkcd chart looks like a pretty good way to eyeball where things fall on a scale of "nothing to worry about" to "AIEEEEPANICPANICPANIC".

The brilliant web comic xkcd is usually right, but he’s never been righter than in this destruction of alt-med nonsense.

Of course, some will argue that these things do make lots of money, but then those people probably didn’t read the text that pops up when you hover your mouse over the comic…

… or they aren’t used to making reality-based arguments anyway. I’m no fortune teller, but I predict this comic will get sent far and wide for years to come. Especially when someone gets that email from their Great Aunt about that one person who predicted that one thing happening because of that other thing they did.

Hmmm, not all VDs are happy: this strip from xkcd is a little bit of a downer, but I have a hard time disagreeing with his message. Hover your mouse over the strip to see what he means.

This particular strip reminds me of Robert Sheckley’s "The Language of Love". I have to say, I’m rather fond of his writing.

Today’s xkcd comic takes a somewhat different stance on the plight of Spirit than I did.

Still, it’s funny how we anthropomorphize objects, especially when they are vaguely human or animal looking. Especially if they’re cute. And Spirit is very cute.

Who’s a good rover? Hmmm? You are! You’re a good rover!

Logarithms are cool. Sure, some of you may have flashbacks to middle school and may collapse on the floor twitching upon their mere mention, but seriously, logs are the language of the Universe. Our senses (eyesight and hearing) are sensitive logarithmically, and a lot of ways the world behaves make a lot more sense when you plot them using logs.

For those of you scratching your heads, a simple way to think of logs is to think factors of ten. Instead of counting like we normally do — 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on — in log space you count by factors of 10: 1, 10, 100, 1000, and so on. There are lots of advantages to this, one being that you can make graphs that show things that are very small and very big on the same plot. Using regular numbers, it would be hard to make a graph showing the size of a human (2 meters tall) and a skyscraper (200 meters tall) on the same plot, but using logarithms, they are only two ticks apart in size. Easy peasy.

And if you take this idea to the extreme, what do you get? Why, you could get a plot of the whole freaking Universe, from the surface of the Earth out to the fires of the Big Bang itself!

But who would do such a thing? Astronomers at Princeton, that’s who.

[Click to exponentiate.]

That picture is just a small piece of a much larger graphic showing, well, everything. At the bottom is the Earth and at the top is the most distant thing we can see: the cosmic microwave background, the cooling fireball from the Big Bang. Included are planets, asteroids, stars, galaxies, and pretty much everything you can think of, all plotted out for your perusal. The vertical axis represents distance, and the horizontal is cleverly done in Right Ascension, sorta like longitude (East/West) on the sky. That way they get the whole sky — the whole Universe — on one graph.

I know xkcd did something like this, but I’d love to see this done up as a vastly scrollable webpage with actual images instead of dots, and the objects actually described (rollovers, popups, links, whatever). If done correctly, that would cause a wave of nerdgasms across the web, and not-so-incidentally be an awesome learning tool. Any takers?

Tip o’ the order of magnitude to Stuart at @astronomyblog.