Blogs / Cosmic Variance

This Saturday, at the invitation of science writer George Johnson, I’ll be participating in “Science Saturday” at bloggingheads.tv. If you don’t already know, the idea behind bloggingheads seems to be to bring together bloggers (or writer/pundits, more generally) for one-on-one conversations about subjects of mutual interest. Videos of the conversations are recorded using Quicktime on the participant’s MacBook Pros (or related pieces of inferior technology), and then shared with the world. Some day, of course, every room of every house will have a webcam broadcasting 24 hours a day, and we won’t need such artificial set-ups.

Most of the Science Saturdays have been discussions between George and John Horgan, and the most recent one is no exception. (I believe the redoubtable PZ is teaming up with John on the following episode.) In the closing bit, George advertises my upcoming gig and John responds by suggesting that George challenge me to a bet. John himself has a bet with Michio Kaku, detailed at Long Bets, on whether or not anyone will win a Nobel Prize by 2020 for “work on superstring theory, membrane theory, or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature.” Horgan is voting “no,” Kaku is voting “yes.” I’m happy to bet on things, but when it comes to predictions I like to take even-money bets on propositions that I personally believe are at least 3-1 favorites. And that certainly doesn’t qualify. In fact, I suspect it’s not even money; nobody will win a Nobel for quantum-gravity type work until there is some experimental prediction that comes true, and the chances are running against that happening in the next decade or two. Beyond that, my powers of prognostication become pretty weak, at least where there’s money concerned.

Note that, earlier on, Horgan talks about inflation, segueing smoothly from “evidence for inflation is purely circumstantial” (true) to “inflation is not really a legitimate theory any more” (completely crazy). Evidence for inflation is indirect, and likely to remain so for a while even if the theory is true (which of course it might not be), but it’s still by far the dominant theoretical paradigm for thinking about the early universe. That’s what happens when your theory both solves pre-existing problems and makes predictions that come true.

I enjoy bloggingheads occasionally, even if one’s selection criteria for “good blogger” or even “good writer” aren’t necessarily the same as those for “engaging video personality.” Video has certain obvious disadvantages when compared to text — it’s much harder to skip quickly to the parts of interest, for example — but also some advantages — you can see the person’s face and peer through their eyes into the inner reaches of their soul. The highlight of the series so far, I think, was a well-publicized meltdown on the part of Ann Althouse. I doubt any such thing will happen between George and me, unless one or the other of us has at least a couple of martinis before our 10 a.m. taping. We’re both pretty laid-back guys by nature, so we need to come up with some good topics to get feisty about. Any suggestions?

Links people have been passing to me:

The Foundational Questions Institute Community Site now has a handy RSS feed:

feed://www.fqxi.org/community/rss.php

If, like me, you read your blogs in a newsreader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) rather than the old-fashioned way of actually visiting every damn blog, this is a godsend. Anthony Aguirre has an interesting post, inspired in part by the Alternative-Science Respectability Checklist, on How Do We Fund Einstein Without Funding Crackpots? (To a large extent I think the present system does a pretty good job at that, actually. I would love to see much more flexibility in how researchers with a good track record get to use their funding, and much less onerous reporting requirements, but I haven’t seen any non-anecdotal evidence that the next generation of Einsteins is being denied their fair share of grants. I’d be interested in hearing otherwise.)

I’m on a new American Physical Society Committee on Informing the Public, and one of the things (the only thing, really) I was able to help them with was some suggestions on improving their website. The APS runs a public-outreach site, Physics Central, that occupies some prime internet real estate — it’s a top-ten result when you do a Google search on physics. One of the things I suggested to keep the page current and lively was a regular update on interesting articles to appear on physics blogs — and lo and behold, they now have a regular Physics Blogosphere feature. From there, for example, you might be directed to Cocktail Party Physics, to learn about speeding Priuses, cloud chambers, the Iron Science Teacher competition, Cute Child Syndrome, the Exploratorium, and some insight into Rush Limbaugh’s manifold shortcomings. (That’s just in one post, of course; there are others.) It’s sort of like Seed’s Daily Zeitgeist, but just for physics. Now if we could only get them an RSS feed…

Finally, Terri Yu points to a series of podcasts by MIT physicist Peter Fisher on Life as an Academic. A good example is this episode on imposter syndrome — the nagging feeling that you don’t belong here among all of these actually-smart people. For the most part, they don’t either, so don’t worry about it.

When you travel extensively, you become accustomed to the routine of flying. You snag your window seat, unpack your kit of ipod, neck pillow, and water bottle, and then get down to the serious business of ignoring the flight attendent’s safety instructions. As a person to whom American Airlines once sent christmas cookies, I am the classic seasoned traveller.

However, I had a first yesterday, descending through the somewhat inclement cloud cover over Sydney. As I looked out the window to see if I could get a glimpse of the city, I instead got to watch the wing of the plane get hit by lightning (accompanied by a loud CRACK, which is the last noise you ever want to hear on a plane).

Now the startling thing in retrospect was that this was completely non-terrifying. The event ended before I could really process what had happened, and absolutely nothing happened to the plane. Lights didn’t dim, movie didn’t stop, oxygen masks didn’t drop. Yeah, there was a bit of screaming, but it didn’t really seem necessary as we showed no signs of plummeting out of the sky. Like running into birds, this is clearly something that planes are designed to cope with.

Brynn at Shakesville points to a study by Kristine Nowak and Christian Rauh of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Connecticut. The authors investigated the impact of the appearance of digital avatars on people’s perceptions of trustworthiness. (Here’s what appears to be an earlier version of the study.) They did a blind test, with participants chatting online via various sorts of avatars. Some looked recognizably human and gender-specific, others were cats or lizards or apples. They then asked the participants to rate the credibility of the people they had been talking to.

Everyone is talking about the fact that the participants rated androgynous avatars as less trustworthy. Images that were recognizably male or female were thought of as more credible than those sneaky in-between ones.

To me, the more important finding was that the ketchup bottle finished near the very bottom of the trustworthiness scale, only beating out a menacing-looking lizard beast. Even the cat was judged more trustworthy than the ketchup bottle; if you’ve ever met a cat, you’ll understand that that’s saying something. I’m happy to see that my long-standing distrust of ketchup has been scientifically vindicated.

(Others have suggested that the study’s authors are just dumb bitches. Happily, sexism has been eradicated, so that web page must be at least fifty years old.)

Now that I’ve been back from hunting dinosaurs with Project Exploration for a few days, I owe you all the report. I’m not going to go into all of the background, as that was covered pretty well in my blog posts about the 2004 trip, Dinosaur Report I and Dinosaur Report II. So this will just be a little photo-essay about the heavy lifting that was specific to this trip.

During the previous two trips I had been on with Project Exploration, the focus was on prospecting and the early stages of bringing fossils out of the ground. Clearing away the dirt, exposing bone, determining what we found, estimating the physical extent of the fossils. The eventual goal, of course, is to clear away everything but the bones and enough rock (called “matrix” in paleo-speak) to hold it together, wrap up the pieces snugly in wood and plaster (”jacketing”), and bring it all back home — in this case, Paul Sereno’s lab at the University of Chicago. But the process as a whole takes time, and three days of work by a crew of enthusiastic but untutored amateurs generally isn’t going to make it happen. But on this trip we were working on a site where most of the work had been done, and our task was to finish the job. In fact, we were back to the site I had gone to in 2005. In the meantime the locations of the various bones had been ascertained, many of them had been fully jacketed, and our task was primarily to finish off the biggest pieces. “Finishing off” means completing the jacketing process and transporting the jackets to Billings, Montana, where a freight company would carry them to Chicago.

The story is conveyed better by words than by pictures. Click to get hi-res versions in a new window.

Here is a view of our vans, as seen from the dig site. Each morning we’d get up bright and early to have breakfast at Dirty Annie’s (the finest dining establishment in all of Shell, Wyoming, featuring chokecherry pancakes the size of garbage-can lids). Afterwards we’d head out to the site in two rented vans, the backs of which were filled with all the paleontological necessities: burlap, plaster, water, picks, awls, hammers, GPS units, shovels, trowels, gloves, 2×4’s, buckets, tarps, brushes, kneepads, and sundry snack foods. The vans would bounce over dirt trails to the foot of the hill where the fossils were, and we would all jump out, eager to get our hands dirty. (On at least one occasion, unanticipated logistics forced the crew into drafting a theoretical physicist into van-driving duty. Thankfully, nobody was seriously injured.)

And here is the dig site, as seen from where we parked the vans. Just to the left of center there you can see the plaster around the main group of fossils — jacketing that bad boy and trucking it to Billings was our primary challenge for this trip.

For some reason (too excited by the goings-on, probably) I neglected to take a close-up photo of the main fossil group before we covered it with plaster. But to get the idea, here is a smaller group, this one a collection of vertebrae. In the field, the main goal is to roughly carve out the bone and get it back to the lab in workable condition. On the other hand, you don’t want to make it heavier than it needs to be, so you try to remove as much matrix as you can without sacrificing the structural integrity of the fossil. Once the bone is exposed, you cover it with tinfoil, then wrap it with burlap strips dipped in plaster. Delicate soul that I am, I resisted participating in the plastering at first, but ultimately I realized that everyone else was right, it really was the most fun part of the whole procedure. To make the jacket a bit stronger you can plaster pieces of wood to the whole collection, as seen in the bottom part of the picture.

Here is Paul on the first day, explaining to our intrepid crew of newcomers what we’ll be doing out here. The part of the process for which I was best suited was the delicate work with an awl and a brush, clearing away bits of matrix right up against the bone. Probably I’d be even better suited for the close-up work performed by the preparators back in the lab, who work under microscopes to remove things at the grain-of-sand level and reconstruct the bones. Actually, come to think of it, I’d be best suited to be sequestered in a room far away from any fossils, left with a pen and paper to think about the universe. So that all worked out for the best.

Paul, eager to get going, burns off nervous energy by doing push-ups. (He was the only one to employ that strategy.)

Here is the main collection of fossils, separated out from the surroundings and covered on the top with plaster. It consisted of vertebrae, ribs, and sundry other bones that I won’t pretend I could identify. Paul figured that it was a sort of Diplodocus, one of those lumbering herbivores with giant necks and tails that roamed North America during the Jurassic. But the structure of the hip bones differed from that of the ordinary Diplodocus, so Paul judged that it was a new species. By the second day he had promoted it to a new genus — apparently the rules for whether a new species is in a distinct genus or an entirely new one are a little fuzzy. In any event, our job was to hack away at the underpinnings of this rock, and eventually to bring it home.

And away we go!

(more…)

In early 2005, back when I blogged at Orange Quark, I wrote about my good friend Teri Weaver, who is a reporter (then based in Seoul, now in Tokyo), for the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes. Teri was heading off for a six week assignment in Iraq and had started an interesting and well-written blog detailing her visit. It was fascinating reading, and I was lucky enough to get some first-hand versions of the stories when Teri and I met up in Beijing later that year.

Well, it’s two years later and Teri is back in Iraq for another assignment and is once again writing at Stonesoup. The posts are a riveting and quite personal window into what it is like to be on the ground in Iraq, and I hope you’ll drop by and take a look at some of them.

Update: I hadn’t realized, but Teri’s blog is invitation-only! However, Teri has been nice enough to participate in our comment thread and writes

If you’d like to take a peek, send Mark your email and I’ll sign you up. I’m a little leary of putting it out there for the web-at-large.

Thanks! Teri

Typically, sentences do not commute. But sometimes they do. Consider:

Scooter is a liar.

Liar is a scooter.

Both equally true, as convicted perjurer Scooter Libby manages to zip past his required jail time, with a little help from his friends in high places.

(I find it hard to believe that I’m the first to think of this joke. Or perhaps I’m just the first to admit it in public.)

The deep, inscrutable irony here, of course, is that George W. Bush hates to pardon people or commute their sentences. Not his job to overrule a jury, he proudly proclaims. Even if we’re talking about a mentally retarded inmate sentenced to death by a jury that never had a chance to hear mitigating evidence. Those inmates could count themselves lucky if W didn’t openly mock them. But Scooter was special; the usual formalities were readily dispensed with in this case.

Or perhaps Bush has simply experienced a change of heart, and will now start freeing all sorts of unjustly convicted prisoners. He has plenty of opportunity; the U.S. has by far the world’s largest prison population, over two million, and it’s growing faster than ever. Over a third are estimated to be nonviolent drug offenders, typically punished by preposterous mandatory sentencing laws. I might point out that the impact of such laws does not seem to fall equally on members of all racial and economic groups, but that could seem shrill.

Folks who would, on ideological grounds, tend to be sympathetic towards the Republican party are struggling with the challenge presented to them by the Bush administration. It’s perfectly possible to be in favor of tax cuts, Social Security privatization, and the war in Iraq, and yet recognize that this administration represents a vortex of corruption, venality, and incompetence that the country hasn’t had to suffer through in at least the last hundred years. Bush’s fondness for signing statements that declare his intention to follow the laws passed by Congress only when he wants to would typically be grounds all by itself for honest conservatives to wash their hands of the guy. But so many people still find it hard to do. Over at the Volokh Conspiracy (where one of their co-bloggers, Randy Barnett, was actually a co-author on a brief submitted on behalf of Libby), both Orin Kerr and Eugene Volokh can only look at the President’s decision to commute Libby’s sentence and shake their heads in disgust. But their commenters, not so much. These are people who used to think that perjury was bad, but now seem to have softened their stance, characterizing (Republican) investigator Patrick Fitzgerald’s prosecution of Libby as politcal and partisan (except that it’s not).

Republicans should be thanking their lucky stars for the 22nd Amendment, and by extension FDR. Can you imagine if Bush were allowed to run for a third term? The acrimonious split between his die-hard supporters and conservatives with any sort of remaining integrity would tear the party apart, possibly for good.

Today is the last day left in the FDA’s public comment period regarding changes to the labeling rules for irradiated food. Given the other problems in the world, this may or may not have been on your radar screen, but if you eat meat it certainly should.

Imagine if there were a product, say a soft drink, that sickened upwards of 200,000 people every year, and killed thousands. How would the public react? Clearly there would be outrage on a truly massive scale, legislation, regulation, whatever it took to end the scourge. Just look at the outrage ensuing after the spinach crisis last year.

We have such a product in this country: meat. It is produced in conditions such that the main processing challenge in bringing it to market is simply keeping “filth” - the animals’ own excrement - from infecting the final product. The public has simply accepted the sickness and death as collateral damage, not a problem to be solved. Nothing must get in the way of the steady stream of 99 cent burgers!

The meat industry has a “solution” which I put in quotes because it may be worse than the problem itself: food irradiation. The minute most people hear that their hamburger is made from meat that was irradiated, they don’t want it. And if more read the label that is presently required (but proposed by the meat industry to be removed) then they might not buy it.

Food irradiation kills bacteria, but not all of them. The meat industry wants to irradiate food so as not to have to spend more money making meat processing safer at the slaughterhouse, which would raise the cost to consumers.

The real problem, though, is how radiation kills bacteria. Often the irradiation is performed using an isotope of cobalt which emits gamma rays - very energetic photons, more energetic than x-rays, which are also used for this purpose. These photons travel a long way through most materials and lose their energy by knocking electrons off the atoms of the material. The emitted electrons have a great deal of energy and knock off other electrons, sometimes resulting in breaking up the molecules of the material. These molecular fragments are called radiolytic byproducts. The radiation does not just kill bacteria, but produces new molecules in the meat itself never encountered in nature, some of which may be harmful. We actually don’t know very much about this possibility.

We do know that for irradiated fats, long-chain carbon based molecules, the radiolytic byproducts include 2-ACB, a chemical shown to cause colon cancer in mice. But that is just one of potentially thousands of different radiolytic byproducts of irradtiation. In effect, we are performing an enormous, uncontrolled experiment on millions of human beings - us - for the sole purpose of saving the already heavily subsidized meat industry a few pennies on the dollar. The effects could be devastating, healthwise, or maybe not. Is it worth the risk?

Even more interesting is a study of the change in flavor of irradiated meat products. The irradiated meat was descibred as tasting like “wet dog” or “singed hair”. Yum.

Food irradiation is banned in Europe, largely due to the above concerns. At a minimum, the labelling requirements should stay in place. The meat industry has lobbied to change the label to say “cold pasteurized” or remove it altogether. But we ought to be considering an outright ban on this very questionable practice.

I am not a vegetarian, but I used to be for about eight years, partly for reasons like this. I buy organic meat now whenever possible, and avoid fast food. I want to know what I am getting, and the meat industry doesn’t want us to know! Why don’t we let an informed market decide this one?

Here is a link to the FDA proposed rule change and public comment info.

When you’ve been kicked off the Solar System puzzle, you’re not a planet anymore.

Maybe Bush can give Pluto a pardon?

I’m writing this from Berlin, in my room at Harnack-Haus, a meeting center and guest house owned by the Max Planck Society. The institute itself has a fascinating history, of which I just found the following spellbinding

Immediately upon opening its doors, the Harnack-House began to feed the “Dahlem Legend.” Nobel Prize winners and their students met here in social exchange and for academic discussion, holding lectures and colloquia. The House served as a club for members of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Here they could lunch, read the international press, drink coffee in the garden, engage in sports, and play music. Foreign scholars were lodged in the guest apartments. The list of guests and lecturers reads like a “Who’s Who of Science”: Albert Einstein, Peter Deybe, Werner Heisenberg, Fritz Haber, Adolf Butenandt, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Otto Meyerhof, Max Planck, Max von Laue and Otto Warburg. One Nobel Prize winner, the biologist Hans Fischer, even received the news of his award during his stay at the Harnack-House.

I’m here on an extremely short visit (arrived in Berlin around 1pm yesterday and fly out early tomorrow morning) for the annual meeting of the editorial board of New Journal of Physics (NJP). While quite a trek, and a not inconsequential amount of work, this is nevertheless a fun meeting (even though I didn’t get to watch World cup games in London, like last year.)

One thing that NJP likes to do is publish a number of focus issues each year. These involve enlisting one or more guest editors and getting them to corral a group of experts to contribute original research to a volume tightly concentrated on a particular topic. Sean and I (and our students) contributed a paper to one last year (for which Sean was the guest editor), but there are many others across all fields (which is what NJP covers). A full list, going back to 2000, when focus issues began is

• Focus on Measurement-Based Quantum Information Processing
• Focus on Complex Networked Systems: Theory and Application
• Focus on Interference in Mesoscopic Systems
• Focus on Dark Energy
• Focus on Accelerator and Beam Physics
• Focus on Casimir Forces
• Focus on Nanophotonics
• Focus on Correlated Electrons, Magnetism and Superconductivity in High Magnetic Fields
• Focus on Cold Atoms in Optical Lattices
• Focus on Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Swift Era
• Focus on Nano-electromechanical Systems
• Focus on Spacetime 100 Years Later
• Focus on Solid State Quantum Information
• Focus on Negative Refraction
• Focus on Photoemission and Electronic Structure
• Focus on Brownian Motion and Diffusion in the 21st Century
• Focus on Ultrafast Optics
• Focus on Orbital Physics
• Focus on Single Photons on Demand
• Focus on Turbulence
• Focus on Neutrino Physics
• Focus on Nanostructured Soft Matter
• Focus on Carbon Nanotubes
• Focus on Pattern Formation
• Focus on Quantum Gases
• Focus on Complex (Dusty) Plasmas
• Focus on Clusters at Surfaces
• Focus on Quantum Cryptography
• Focus on Turbulence in Magnetized Plasmas
• Focus on Supersymmetry in Physics
• Focus on Quark Gluon Plasma Searches in Heavy Ion Collisions
• Focus on Microlaser and Cavity QED
• Focus on Dark Matter

You can find links to all these at the focus issues site, and I hope you’ll take a look if interested, because anyone can read them, since open access is one of NJP’s raisons d’être.

I particularly enjoy the part of our meeting in which we brainstorm about possible future focus issues, and there are a couple coming out relatively soon that I am quite proud to have been either the originator or co-originator of. And, at today’s meeting, I suggested one specific focus issue to be initiated that was well received and which I think, when it comes out, will be of particular interest to many of our readers. It wouldn’t be right to go into details here (and I won’t in the comments), but I really hope it works out, and assuming it does, I’ll link to it here with a covering discussion.

Anyway, time for bed - my taxi will arrive ridiculously early tomorrow.