Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Readers of the science blogosphere would have to be living under a rock to have missed the rise of fabulous geek-friendly web comics. Everyone’s fave Xkcd has been getting CV love for a couple of years now (and I’ve been remiss in linking to the latest size-o-everything visualization). PhD Comics is also a consistent source of relevant comics, though we’ve never linked to one of my early favorites. I’m also a long time fan of My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable, and in particular this one, which is sadly too foul mouthed for me to show to any of my intro astronomy classes. Web comics have even produced entropy-confused dinosaurs and explorations of the anthropic principle that Sean has linked to, and my favorite piece of science-themed clothing (from Achewood).

Recently, the creator of Abstruse Goose is using his/her powers for good, by endorsing CV’s Donors Choose efforts through Scienceman. You may know Abstruse Goose through the immortal lines “You don’t find the Higgs Boson. The Higgs Boson finds you.“, or perhaps “Science. If you ain’t pissin’ people off, you ain’t doin’ it right“, or maybe because it’s the only place in existence where you’d find me and Ed Witten given comparable levels of respect. If you found your way here through AG, perhaps you should just move right along to Donors Choose and give the kiddies and their teachers a little love. Scienceman would want you to.

Aquaman, however, wouldn’t give a rat’s patootie.

Update: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is sending folks to CV’s Donors Choose as well! Go Web Comics! Go!

LHC First Beam Day ended with a bang last night in the SF Bay Area – swissnex, an annex of the Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco, threw a party! Around 200 folks were there, with physcisists from all around the area. The champagne flowed, the food never ran out (a minor miracle given an entire roomful of physcists) and the consulate even gave out free bags of stuff. What more could you ask for? It was great to celebrate with colleagues and let our hair down.

Wired magazine was there and commemorated the event by interviewing folks about their LHC expectations:

Well, I did say the champagne flowed…. and we were all giddy in our excitement about the LHC! A truly excellent time was had by all.

Anyone watching this evening’s episode of Comedy Central’s new Lewis Black vehicle, The Root of All Evil (10:30, 9:30 Central), might just see some familiar scientists and/or bloggers. Maybe.

Elsewhere, stars of the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory (about which more anon) seem to have been reading up on their Spacetime and Geometry.

No appreciable bump in my Amazon ranking, though.

Rediscovering this ancient Sesame Street skit has been my one source of joy while I slog through the writing of an immense, tedious, but necessary data paper.

Sorry for the meager posting of late. I’m in one of those phases with papers that are justthatclose to being done, and have to concentrate on pushing them out the door. So blogging might be light for a while.

By way of light diversion, here’s the LA Times’ take on grading recent Nobel Laureates on their fashion savvy (hat tip to Jennifer). The first thing to note is that physicists come out looking good, although one suspects that the grading was done on a curve. Here is Peter Gruenberg, of Giant Magnetoresistance fame.

On the Hit/Miss scale, the Times bestows a “Hit” on Gruenberg’s ensemble. “Here’s a guy who knows cool,” they say. Who am I to argue with the mainstream media?

But it’s not only the physicists who seem to get the benefit of the doubt. Here’s Literature laureate Doris Lessing, just after the Prize was announced.

This one is also graded a “Hit.” Admittedly, I wouldn’t want to be graded on my fashion choices as I was being surprised by photographers upon returning home from a trip to the grocery store. But still, rhapsodizing about the “curving highlight of red scarf” seems a bit much.

In other cases, the Times is unduly harsh. Here is Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

I’m sorry, but that is one stylin’ bureaucrat. Yet the Times gives him a “Miss,” complaining that the blue of his tie blends into the blue of his shirt. Like I said, graded on a curve, and not the same curve for everyone.

And then we have Medicine laureate Mario Capecchi.

Again, the Times comes down hard, especially on the hat. Obviously they’ve spent too much time at Oscar parties and not enough at convocation ceremonies. The guy’s receiving an honorary degree in medical biotechnologies from the University of Bologna. This is the one yearly chance for your typical academic to go whole hog for the pomp and circumstance. Good for him.

I would like to embed a video!

No particular reason, really.

Celebrated economist, James Bates Clark Medal winner, and Freakonomics author Steven Levitt is having a good time, and doing pretty darn well, at the World Series of Poker. (Via Marginal Revolution; here’s Levitt’s own blog.) I am willing to go on record as predicting that he will not do as well as physicist Michael Binger did last year.

I’ve been reading a bit about game theory and the mathematics of poker, and have lots of great theories, including an elaborate analogy between poker and quantum mechanics. Here is one theory: physicists (and I imagine economists, too) will end up being much better poker players than mathematicians. The reasoning is that No Limit Hold’em is an incredibly complex system; not only can we not derive a dominant strategy in closed form, we can’t even prove any very useful theorems about realistic games. So game theorists and mathematicians study simplified systems about which they can actually prove theorems. They can do pretty well in figuring out strategies at a showdown (just two players), but early in the hand at a full table there’s almost nothing they can say. It becomes a question of which approximations to make and which models to choose for your opponents. That’s much more the purview of physicists and economists, who are forced to get their hands dirty in the real world. (A corollary: phenomenologists and astrophysicists will be better poker players than string theorists.)

Why am I not at the WSOP myself? Good question. I’m totally going next year.

I know everyone is eagerly awaiting the cinematic event of the summer: Ocean’s Thirteen, third in a series of the lighthearted adventures of a gang of elegant rogues who like to pull off elaborate capers centered on lavish casino heists. Admittedly, the Eurocentric Ocean’s Twelve was a somewhat rambling letdown, but the latest installment promises a return to Vegas and hopefully also to form.

Seeing buzz about the new movie reminded me of a review I read of Ocean’s Twelve. To paraphrase, it expressed the sentiment “This isn’t by any means a very good film, but man, these people sure know how to wear clothes.” This summer’s installment adds Ellen Barkin and Al Pacino to the cast, so the knowledge of clothes-wearing should only be enhanced. (Also Noureen DeWulf, although I’m not familiar with her work.)

So my question is, what does it mean to “know how to wear clothes”? We might at first guess that it refers to the ability of a person to choose clothes that are right for their style, their body type, and the occasion. But in a major motion picture, one presumes that there are professionals whose job it is to do the clothes-choosing, so (respecting the reviewer enough to imagine that they meant exactly what they said) that can’t be it. It could also mean “is wearing nice clothes” or simply “is pretty hot,” but neither of those talents would accurately be characterized as knowing how to wear clothes.

So is there a specific kind of knowledge that refers to the ability to wear clothes? Is it not just a matter of picking out a good outfit, but a particular method of wearing them, adapting one’s demeanor and bearing to the clothes one wears? Or are we just faced with a sloppy deployment of language in an attempt to convey “Boy, that George Clooney would look yummy in a burlap kilt” in an imaginative way? Help me out here, people.

(p.s. Apparently we don’t have a “fashion” category on this blog. Yet.)

March Madness is winding down and today is the start of the Men’s Final Four games, while the Women’s Final Four have just been determined. This year, science has also participated in March Madness, complete with brackets of its own (via Science Blogs):

(A full screen image is available here.)

Note that science is still on the sweet sixteen stage and has yet to determine the final four. Sometimes the progress of science marches more slowly than we would like. It’s probably a funding issue.

The four regions being represented are physics, scientific methods, biology, and chemistry. Not that I’m biased or anything, but may particles win!

From Angela Gunn comes news of Flatland: the Movie. And also, unconnectedly, Flatland: the Film. So, two different animated versions of Edwin A. Abbott’s classic “Romance of Many Dimensions” available for your DVD player. The Movie has the bonus that Martin Sheen is voicing the protagonist, but the Film has the advantage that it’s already available.

Of course, as Angela points out, you could just read the original. It’s a favorite among physicists, especially those who work on extra dimensions. What they never seem to remember is how the book ends — protagonist A. Square, who has claimed to have proof that extra dimensions exist, is imprisoned for life on charges of heresy. Hmmm.