So here it is. This will be exciting to some! For the few of you out there who care, the folks at the BBC have decided to make the new Doctor have some “Geek Chic” (their words). I imagine this is the retro sneaker bit.

(I found this article in today’s Guardian and cheekily snapped the photo out for you to see.)

The producer that was interviewed says “I think we’ve come up with something distinctive that’s both timeless and modern, with a bit of geek chic and of course, a dash of Time Lord”. I guess this (and the scary-looking sidekick in the background) is a package meant to appeal to the younger generation while still keeping the adults interested. Yay!

(For those of you not following: The Doctor is a “Time Lord” from another planet who travels in that thing behind him. The box thing that says “Police Box”. It’s huge inside and only a box on the outside. Some trick with extra dimensions and such. He goes in and does a bunch of computations and pulls a lever and then he’s elsewhere and elsewhen. He’s basically a practical String Theorist…. Look, this is prime time British TV, ok?)

In addition to the style improvements (now he’s too well-dressed to be a String Theorist) we are promised new villians. Rather than just resurrect the Cybermen, there’s going to be “an evil race of Cat Women”. Double yay! Now we’re talking! (Were there ever any good races of Cat Women by the way?)

I don’t know if this show (“Dr. Who”) ever gets to screens in the USA (or anywhere else outside the UK), so it might all be meaningless to several of you. Sorry. Its a bit meaningless to me too, but I keep hoping that one day the BBC will be truly creative and one day when the doctor regenerates and comes back (as his people do….and he does this a lot; this is the tenth doctor since 1970), he’ll be a woman. That would be a really fun scenario to play with, don’t you think?

-cvj

Atheists are often asked whether there is any sort of argument or evidence that would make them believe in God. Of course, the answer is yes. Jesse at Pandagon mentions one example.

After a July 14th commentary in the Philly Inquirer on Intelligent Design, ID proponents wrote in to the Inquirer to defend their rigorous scientific methodology.

Mr. Franek mentioned that “most educated religious authorities affirm that belief in God and evolution is not in conflict.” How can this statement be true if it leaves God (creator) out of the picture in creating man? God says he created man in his own image in Genesis, the first book of the Bible.

How is it that scientists can examine a rock specimen from Mars and “affirm” that there was once water on Mars (which has no water), and look at our planet, which is 70 percent water, and declare that there is no evidence of a worldwide flood?

Scientists and religious authorities are, indeed, fallible.

It’s called “science”. You see, massive flooding leaves evidence. You do know what evidence is, don’t you? It’s that stuff that convicts the B-list celebrities on Law & Order. Think about that…but on a big, global scale.

You see, one thing has nothing to do with the other – whether or not there was ever water on Mars has no bearing on if the entire planet flooded several thousand years ago. It’s not like Noah built an intergalactic starship and bumped his ass to Mars to dump off the extra water, all the while bringing the pure power of funk to benighted Martians.

And if he did, I have to rethink this whole atheist thing, because that’s sweet.

It’s true. Any credible evidence of God using his omnipotence to help humans bring the funk to other planets, and I’d become a regular churchgoer.

Let’s see if I can do a two-line post. It’s hard for me. I must practice.
See reports by Paul Cook on the ongoing LMS workshop I mentioned here. -cvj

That’s us.

Sorry for the two-line postings, but today I talked to a hundred people for five hours. It’s JoAnne’s fault. Details tomorrow.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, p. 194:

Harry wondered vaguely who the Half-Blood Prince had been.

Why didn’t he just Google him?

Writing in the Bad Science section of The Guardian, Ben Goldacre has a fun little article, titled “Party Hard”, in which he asks for readers’ input. Goldacre recounts some of the more stupid comments ever made to him about science at a party – his personal best involves being told that Newton’s laws of motion might have turned out differently if Newton was a woman (this might be a good time to make it crystal clear that this is not a comment about, or the beginning of an intended thread on, or anything to do with questions of women and science, and that I do not expect to see Larry Summers’ name in the comments).

Goldacre wants to gather more anecdotes regarding what he calls the Public Misunderstanding of Science and is exhorting his readers to send him their examples of the most stupid thing ever said to them about science at a party. If you want to take part, you can email your examples to bad.science@guardian.co.uk.

I’m not sure I’m prepared to reveal my personal party stories. Most of the silliest things I’ve heard came from people I know pretty well and who would recognize their role in any such story if they were to read the post (I do like the idea that, if they do read this post, they’ll be running their minds back through the rash comments they may have made to me in a half-soused haze). Rather, I’ll let you have a story from a different setting.

About eight years ago I was getting a haircut at a random place to which I never returned. My hairdresser was a very sweet woman who seemed to enjoy chatting with her clients. Part of our conversation went like this:

HD: “So what do you do then?”

MT: “Oh, I’m a physicist.”

HD: “That sounds interesting – what is it?”

MT (Thinking a little more specificity is required): “I study cosmology and particle physics. I’m interested in the universe and black holes and the big bang – that sort of thing.”

HD: “Yeah, but what sort of thing is it?”

MT: “You mean cosmology, or physics, …?”

HD: “Whichever. What you do”

MT (Trying to make touch with more everyday concepts): “You know, when you look up at the sky, at outer space, you see stars and galaxies. Well I care about the universe – how all that space and those galaxies came into being and behaved between the beginning of the universe and now.”

HD: “Hmmm…”

MT (Now thinking more generality is needed): “You probably remember physics, from school. You know – figuring out the laws of nature, like gravity and magnetism. How they work. I’m interested in those questions, applied to the universe.”

HD: “Yeah, but what is it? Is it dead bodies or what?”

MT: “Would you mind using the child-proof scissors please?”

OK, so I didn’t actually say the last quote. But I wanted to.

I did actually persevere with the conversation and did my very best to explain what physics and, more concretely, cosmology are. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I was unsuccessful is getting an appreciable amount of information across. Gotta try though.

Please let me share with you an idea I had a while ago. It emerged in a conversation with John Ellis when I was visiting at CERN giving some string theory training lectures. I was commenting about how great the QuantumDiaries experiment is, having a wide variety of physicists blogging from around the world for the World Year of Physics.
You will recall my mentioning about being reluctant to get involved with blogging, and I may have mentioned there that I did not want to reproduce already good effort out there, and so began to think of new ways to contribute using the medium. Well, as you read, I found some reasons to give it a try and here I am.

Well, a number of things did come up as interesting and fun to try, and the following is one of them. I’ve already said on this blog that our particular field (string theory and related topics) could do with more ways of having discussion, both general and specific. We have already accelerated the primary way in which we exchange research results (revolutionizing scientific publishing in the process) by establishing the Archive (see writing about this by Paul Ginsparg), and it undeniably helped drive the field’s rapid developments in the middle 90s while also democratising it by enabling serious papers from the traditional large and famous institutions to be seen on everybody’s computer screen right alongside the serious papers from smaller less well known institutions, often within minutes or hours of the completion of the work.

Imagine if we could do the same with discussions. How might a blog help? Well, of (more…)

You know how, when you take snowboarding lessons, they teach you to look in the direction you want to go, not at obstacles you want to avoid? Well they do, and it’s good advice — keep looking at that tree and your subconscious will steer you right into it. Works for driving, too.

I’m not sure if it’s the same psychological phenomenon, but this is what I was reminded of when reading a post by Chris at Mixing Memory about some puzzling psychology experiments. Apparently, just being exposed to words expressing the concept of rudeness is enough to make people behave more rudely.

Bargh, Chen, and Burrows set out to demonstrate the existence of “automatic social behavior.” They conducted three experiments, each targeting different behaviors. In the first experiment, they first gave participants a scrambled sentence test, which involves presenting five scrambled words and asking the participant to form a grammatically correct sentence out of four of them as quickly as possible. They developed three different lists of scrambled words, one of which primed the concept RUDE, another that primed POLITE, and a third that was neutral with respect to rudeness/politeness. The primes in these lists included adjectives, adverbs, or verbs that were associated with the concepts (e.g., brazen, aggressively, or disturb for RUDE, and considerate, patiently, and respect for POLITE). While the participant was completing the scrambled sentence test, the experimenter left and began talking to a confederate (an experimenter posing as another participant). When the participant finished, he or she came out of the room to look for the experimenter to receive instructions for the next task (as the experimenter had instructed). However, the participant always found the experimenter talking to the confederate. Bargh et al. then measured the time it took for the participant to interrupt the conversation between the experimenter and the confederate.

Guess what they found. Of the participants who did the RUDE version of the sentence test, more than 60% interrupted in under ten minutes (they cut it off at ten minutes — can you imagine how frustrated some of those participants were after standing there for ten minutes?), whereas fewer than 20% of the POLITE-primed participants interrupted in that time. The neutral list participants were in between at around 40%. The RUDE participants also interrupted a full 3 minutes sooner than neutral participants, and almost 4 minutes sooner than the POLITE participants.

As Chris says, it gets weirder. My favorite was how people move more slowly after reading words associated with older people. So how do you think our personalities are affected by reading too many blogs?

This is probably old news now, but it is worth a visit if it is still news to you. The clever folk at Google have put up a site with a zoomable and pannable map/image of the moon’s surface (functioning just like the satellite images of the earth’s surface they now supply on their maps site), starting out focussed on the region on the moon where various moon landings took place. Note that July 20th is the annivesary of the first moon manned (as opposed to some other life-form) landing on the moon, which took place in 1969.

Check it out here. (
I found this first on Dynamics of Cats.)

Be sure to note especially the amazing and indeed surprising detail that you can see if you zoom all the way in.

-cvj

I’d like to continue the tradition started by Sean of using the ipod as a divination device.

In view of the varying opinion about the state of string theory, regarded by some (I’ve heard) as the last, best hope for fundamental physics (going to get myself into trouble here), discussed wonderfully, passionately, and I hope continually on this very blog (e.g. here and here), it might be worth sitting back, letting the pod do its thing, and tell us the future.

I’m new to this, so please bear with me. I ask the ipod oracle to tell us the future of string theory, then I turn on the pod, set it to shuffle songs, and see what the first ten are. I then put them alongside the Tarot-like categories and interpret using the key given here. Well, I get:

1. The Covering: iTrip_98-1
2. The Crossing: iTrip_92-3
3. The Crown: iTrip_104-9
4. The Root: iTrip_94-7
5. The Past: iTrip_90-3
6. The Future: iTrip_93-5
7. The Questioner: iTrip_98-9
8. The House: iTrip_96-7
9. The Inside: iTrip_105-1
10. The Outcome: iTrip_102-1

And they all seem to be by “Griffin Technology”, from the album “iTrip”.

Bugger. Said I was new to this.

Um…help!

-cvj

P.S. Ok. So I was in my “iTrip” in-car broadcast stations playlist, not “All”. Well, hey, maybe we should run with this anyway. There’s a lot of important numerology in string theory (number of dimensions of spacetime, light families of subatomic particles, etc). Maybe the ol’ pod knows something about that. Perhaps they’re Hodge numbers (i.e. topological data) telling us the correct manifold on which to compactify to get our four dimensional world with all the observed physics. Any experts care to take a stab at interpreting? Perhaps they are years in which key papers were written that can help, or key Strings conferences. Perhaps they are part of www.arxiv.org/hep-th/yymmnnn paper numbers and if we could work out the code we’d know which vital papers to read? The pod could be on to something here.