Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Once a year we implore our loyal CV readers to dig deep into their pockets, and support the cause of scientific literacy. One of the most direct and straightforward ways to do this is through Donors Choose, which facilitates direct contributions to primary and secondary classrooms (alas, for the moment only in the United States). The projects are described in detail, and one knows exactly why and how the funds will be used. Your gift has a clear and discernible impact, emphasized by the personal handwritten thank you notes you receive from the students.
To further incentivize readers, Donors Choose runs a yearly Social Media Challenge, where blogs compete to win fame and (give away) fortune. Last year we handidly trounced the folks over at ScienceBlogs. Over 100 CV readers donated a total of almost $9,000, impacting 1,700 students across the nation. We’re truly proud; our readers came through big time! This year we’re once again throwing our hat in the ring. Donate here. Tax deductible. Other bloggers are encouraged to set up their own challenges, or advertise ours (and we’ll happily list you at the top of our Donors Choose page). And although that warm feeling in your heart from helping needy children will certainly be sufficient, we’ll also post a list of all who contribute more than $100 (unless you request anonymity, of course). This is an incredibly direct way to improve the state of science and math education. Donations start as low as $5! And our schools need all the help they can get.

Cosmic Variance now has its very own Twitter feed:

• @CosmicVariance

This might seem superfluous, since we have, you know, a blog. Mostly the tweets will consist of pointers to the blog posts (automatically generated from the RSS feed). Perhaps the occasional special intervention. But this is a quick and dirty way to integrate with the twitterverse, if people want to follow us there and re-tweet and all that delicious stuff.

I’ll try to post something of substance soon. Hopefully I will elaborate on this picture:

We’ve tweaked the blog template once more, and things continue to look better. This time we’ve re-arranged the format of the posts so that the top features just the name of the poster, and all the clutter is at the bottom. And you can click on “N comments” to actually be taken to the comments!

By “we,” of course I mean the web gurus at Discover — your humble bloggers didn’t have to do a damn thing. Thanks, all.

Thanks to the arcane magicks of Discover web producer Gemma Shusterman, this blog now offers the latest in commenting technology: the ability to edit your own comments! That’s right: after you type in the comment and hit “Submit,” for the next fifteen minutes you will be able to go back and change what you wrote. We expect that this will totally eliminate the appearance of typos or mistakes of judgment in any further comments. (Note that, in order to actually leave a comment, you have to click on the post title.)

You’ll also notice that the name of the author now appears at the top of the post, which is very helpful. We have a list of upgrades we’re trying to gradually implement, in order to make your blog-reading experience as pleasant as possible.

Of course we hand out congratulations for newly minted Ph.D.’s; but there are other milestones worth congratulating as well. Yesterday our very own JoAnne got married, at a beautiful winery nestled in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It comes at the end of some trying times, so all the more worthy of celebration. Congrats to the happy couple! (Now back to blogging, okay?)

And the winner of our Elevator Pitch Contest is: Jason Dick, for New Horizons!

Takes place about a century from now. Humanity has discovered planets around other stars harbor life. We send out a generation ship, where multiple generations of intrepid explorers will be born and die before it reaches its destination. This show follows their journey, where they are faced with mechanical failure, collisions with small dust grains that cause lots of damage, and people who crack under the stress of their situation. Mostly it’d be about a human drama of extremely driven people who are in a difficult situation, and whose children are forced to carry the torch of their parents.

A well-deserved victory, as Jason has long been one of our most intelligent and helpful commenters. And it’s a good show idea, certainly comparable with many things actually appearing on TV. Jason, shoot us your address and a T-shirt will be forthcoming — soonish.

Interestingly, concepts that took the framework of a conventional sitcom or drama (Friends/ER) and made the characters scientists didn’t fare as well with our voters. This might be a reflection of our voting pool, or a real difficulty involved in translating the life of a scientist into compelling narrative.

Slightly belated congratulations go out to our very own John Conway, for being chosen as a Fellow of the American Physical Society. The citation reads as follows:

Conway, John S.
University of California, Davis
Citation: For outstanding contributions in the search for the Higgs boson and physics beyond the Standard Model at high energy particle accelerators.
Nominated by: Particles and Fields (DPF)

And even more belated congratulations to our very own JoAnne Hewett, for being chosen last year, which I totally missed!

Hewett, Joanne
Stanford University
Citation: For her contributions to our understanding of constraints on and searches for physics beyond the Standard Model, and service to the particle physics community leading studies of future experiments.
Nominated by: Particles and Fields (DPF)

This is a great honor, which indicates that the newly-minted Fellow has advanced past a stage of callow youth and cheerful enthusiasm, to a status of grey eminence and profound wisdom. Those of us remaining in the youthful stage will endeavor to show proper respect.

Yesterday’s launch event for the Science and Entertainment Exchange was a smashing success. The enthusiasm of everyone in the room was palpable, especially on the Hollywood side — these folks would love to be interacting more closely with scientists on a regular basis. (Let me pause to give a plug for Eleventh Hour, a show which I haven’t actually seen yet, but whose writers were complaining that they sometimes take grief for being too scientifically accurate.) I came away from the symposium with lots of new ideas, and also a deep-seated fear of our coming robot masters.

So, in honor of the new program, we hereby announce the Cosmic Variance Elevator Pitch Contest. I don’t know about you, but many folks I know with an interest in science take great pleasure in complaining about the embarrassing lack of realism and respect for the laws of nature apparent in so many movies and TV shows. Here’s your (fictional) chance to do something about it.

Opening scene: you step into an elevator at the headquarters of CBS/Paramount Television in Hollywood. (Unclear why you are there — perhaps to have lunch with your more-successful friend from high school, who works for their legal team.) There is only one other person in the elevator with you for the journey to the top floor — and it’s Les Moonves, President and CEO of CBS! (Again, unclear why he is taking the same elevator as you — we’ll fix that in post-production.)

Here is the perfect opportunity for your elevator pitch.

You have thirty seconds — which, as this blog is still a text-based medium, we’ll approximate as strictly 100 words or less — to pitch your idea for a new TV show that is based on science. It can be an hour drama, a half-hour sitcom, a reality show, game show, documentary, science fiction, whatever you like. For example:

I have an idea for a show called Cosmic Variance. It’s about seven scientists who blog during the day, but at night they fight crime! And to do it, they used advanced notions from modern physics and astrophysics, from adaptive optics to quantum decoherence. They’re young, they’re sexy, and they break hearts as they bust heads. But their university colleagues are already suspicious of their blogging, so they have to keep the crime-fighting activities completely secret. They have a deep underground lab where they carry out cutting-edge experiments, and there’s a canine sidekick named Sparky.

Okay, that’s a fairly silly example. I’m not eligible to win the contest. But you, the reader, are! So here are some of the ideas you want to keep in mind while polishing your pitch:

Most importantly: Les Moonves’s goal in life is not to make science look good. It’s to make money. So don’t pitch that this show would make the world a better place, or make science seem interesting; convince him that it’s exciting to everyone and will attract millions of eyeballs.

Use the science. For our purposes, we’re less interested in a show idea that tacks on some science to make things sound cool, as we are in a concept that couldn’t happen without the science.

Story is paramount. As much as we love accuracy and realism, there has to be a compelling narrative. You need to convince Moonves that people will be emotionally connected to the characters and their situation.

It’s easy to mock the efforts of others, but here’s a chance to see whether you could really put together a compelling show idea. Leave your entry in the comments. They will be judged by our crack team of scientists/bloggers/crime-fighters, and the winner will get a Cosmic Variance T-shirt. (We have plans to upgrade the quality of our current swag options.) Please note that there is not some hidden plan to actually make any TV shows out of this — we have no clout along those lines, so if you are a professional scriptwriter, don’t dump your plans out in public here on our blog. But if you’re a pro you already knew that.

And then: memorize your pitch! You never know when you might find yourself trapped in an elevator with the right person, and you have to be ready.

Many have been asking: who won our famous Presidential Prediction Contest? The task, you will remember, was to predict how the popular vote would be distributed between the two major candidates, throwing away third-party votes and ignoring the electoral college altogether, expressed as a percentage of votes for Obama. So if the total number of votes for Obama is V_O , and the total number for McCain is V_M , the number you were predicting is

We’ve been delaying the announcement of the results, as the entries were tightly bunched and it takes time for votes to trickle in. Indeed, Alaska still seems to be problematic, but patience is thin and it’s time to declare a winner! Visit here to be reminded of who had staked out which bits of territory. Here are the vote totals as of today:

Barack Obama: 66,679,600

John McCain: 58,227,508

which implies

f = 53.38.

The relevant entries, courtesy of wqz, are

( 52.81689, 53.10869): Tim
( 53.10869, 53.32282): Elliot
( 53.32282, 53.47922): Anonymous Snowoboarder
( 53.47922, 53.74739): Gabe
( 53.74739, 53.78569): joulesm

And so the winner is:

Anonymous Snowoboarder!

Who, I am guessing, may have mistyped their name. But when you have mad prediction skills like that, who cares about typographical irregularities?

Here were the distribution of predictions near the right value:

It’s interesting to note that the contest was announced in late June, just when Obama was hitting his summer peak of popularity (which was not as pronounced as his fall peak of popularity). I wonder how the predictions would have gone had we done the contest in September?

Frankly speaking, I am not big on change. Oh yeah, the Obama business was pretty good, and I recognize that change is necessary for progress, blah blah blah, but man, it doesn’t come easy for me.

I was made excruciatingly aware of this by my stubborn refusal to log into CV’s back end at our new home. Why? Because it was going to be <cringe>different</cringe>.

I actually can’t make any sense of this behavior on my part, because science is all about change. I have no problem changing topics and points of view in a scientific context. Want to know what I’ll be working on in 5 years? It’ll probably be found in the set of things on which I am currently not working, nor have ever worked on before.

But technologically-driven changes in my day-to-day behavior? Scaaaaaary. One of my students mistakenly assumed that I was a bleeding edge of technology sort of person, based on my spiffy new MacBook Air. However, the only reason I have a new laptop is because after six and a half years, my old one was sufficiently dented that I couldn’t close it anymore, and it made ominous noises when writing to disk. Oh, I could have afforded a new laptop at many points in the intervening years, but then I’d have to install software or learn to use Leopard, and that, my friends, is not change I can believe in.

So, this post is my attempt to get past the queasiness and start defining this as the new normal.

And hey! Did you see the new images of extrasolar planets?!

Ok. That didn’t hurt a bit.