Decline of America, One in a Continuing Series

Tidbits of news, depressing enough on their own and adding up to a bigger picture.

• The James Webb Space Telescope, having gone so far over budget that large swathes of NASA’s science program has been shelved to make room for it, is now in danger of being cancelled.
• Everyone knows that education is of paramount importance, especially for economically disadvantaged kids. Therefore, communities across the country are — cutting back on school time, especially for economically disadvantaged kids.
• Transformers: Dark of the Moon — the climactic conclusion to auteur Michael Bay’s explosive trilogy of awesome explodyness — grossed over $116 million over the holiday weekend.

On the other hand, Google+ was launched. So it’s not all bad.

I Get Email

Few things warm the heart of a scientist more readily than a query from a young, curious mind, eager to learn about our universe. Why, just now I received this inquiring email:

R xxxxxx xxxxxx@hotmail.com to me

Sean,

Neutrons have no chemical properties and reflect no light, but they do have mass and occupy space =matter, and clouds of them will never be visible in space!

I find it difficult to believe people who are supposed to be so smart are suck fucking retards!

Cheers Retard ,

Robert

For the curious:

• Lifetime of neutron
• Age of the Universe

Always happy to help a fellow seeker of knowledge.

Here and There

Collected things before I hop on a plane for France:

• I’m hopping on a plane for France. Spending next week at the Pope’s old palace in Avignon, conferencing with fellow cosmologists about the latest and greatest in the field. I have apparently been appointed to honorary Grand Old Man status, as I’m giving the closing talk at the conference. The title is “White smokes and Dark smokes in cosmology,” and I presume you all understand the reference. I didn’t pick the title, I swear. No live-blogging, but if I’m feeling energetic I might drop in with updates.
• I’m still thinking about the Open Science idea, haven’t forgotten. But I haven’t really homed in on an appropriate project if we were to try it out. Ideally (I think) you would have something relatively modular, where people could work on separate sub-tasks and then bring them all together. But my own kind of research really isn’t like that; it’s more like I have a single idea that works or doesn’t, and we work out the basic consequences. But still contemplating.
• Subsequent to the post about NASA giving up on LISA, more official words have come from NASA itself. (The original posts here and elsewhere were based on emails from officials to scientists.) You can read more at Steinn’s blog, or some words from project scientist Robin Stebbins at Jennifer’s Discovery News blog. As far as I can tell, NASA has indeed given up on LISA, but they’re saying that “funding for gravitational wave astrophysics is unchanged,” which is certainly great news.
• Also at Discovery, Jennifer blogs about Silent Sky, a play by Lauren Gunderson about Henrietta Swan Leavitt. Well worth checking out for you Southern Californians. Amazing what ground-breaking scientific research the women “computers” at Harvard College Observatory managed to do, essentially in their spare time.
• Sad news out of Yale: an undergraduate physics and astronomy major was killed in a machine shop accident. Thoughts go out to her family and friends.
• U.S. Federal prosecutors, clearly sitting around bored with nothing better to do, have indicted leaders of online poker sites, and attempted to shut down the sites entirely. There is some legal confusion concerning the status of online poker, stemming from a silly piece of legislation called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. It’s fairly clear that the people who wrote the bill intended to make online poker illegal, but the sites contend that they’ve found ways around the constraints, and have been operating openly for quite a while now. (I personally play at Full Tilt Poker.) Even more clear is that people should be able to play poker for money legally if they want to, and this is an absurd overreach by the government. But it might very well be the end of online poker, at least until the legislation is repealed.
• Interesting in giving a TED talk? Here’s your chance: they’re accepting auditions. Make a one-minute video that blows them away, and you might find yourself speaking in front of a global audience. Think of it as American Idol for ideas instead of voices.
• And while we’re talking about videos, the Dunlap Institute at the University of Toronto has a new effort to put science videos online. Right now mostly focused on their own videos, which have an astronomy slant, but they’re planning to branch out. Worth a look.

Off to Old Europe with me, see you on the flip side.

Danny Hillis on Richard Feynman

One more video from TEDxCaltech. Danny Hillis is the founder of Thinking Machines, the Long Now Foundation, and Applied Minds. Touching and inspirational.

See also Lenny Susskind’s reminiscences.

TEDxCaltech

Everyone knows about the TED talks — the great, and mercifully short, presentations whose videos are among the most-shared on the web. Even clicking on a completely random talk, you’re likely to be rewarded with something interesting. Part of that is the extraordinary level of quality control — not only in choosing speakers, but in working with speakers ahead of time to fine-tune their presentations. And holding them to a time limit.

Besides the big TED conferences, there are also independently-organized events known as TEDx. Caltech is going to host such an event for the first time, TEDxCaltech, on January 14. The theme is “Feynman’s Vision: The Next 50 Years.” In practice that means three groups of talks: Conceptualization and Visualization in Science, Frontiers of Physics, and Nanoscience and Future Biology. Check out the list of speakers. If it weren’t for the fact that I am on it myself, I’d emphasize what a great program this is — any event that includes both Scott Aaronson and Lyle Mays shows quite a bit of promise. Throw in Leonard Susskind and Craig Venter, and it might be worth a special trip.

All are welcome to come! The flip side of the fact that so much work goes into making the talks successful is that a corresponding level of commitment is asked of the audience — so you don’t simply buy a ticket, you apply, and it does cost money. But who can put a price on inspiration?

The Beginning – A Halloween Tale

It was a dark and stormy night, two years ago to the day – All Hallows’ Eve indeed. As the rain pelted the windows of my mansion, I gazed out at the common folk scurrying around with their tricking and their treating. Allowing the briefest of smiles to flicker across my lips, I picked up my phone and dialed the number.

“Hello?

“Jonathan, it’s me – Mark. Don’t speak, just listen. I’ve figured it out.”

“What are you …?”

“Remember what we always talked about? How one day we’d crack the system? How we’d ride this cosmology gig all the way to the bank? And how we’d make these poor saps so very very sorry for taking all that free knowledge for granted for all these years?”

“Oh yes – that I remember! And when that day comes, we’ll squeeze the cash from those rubes so hard that the streets will run red with their blood!”

“Well my friend, that day has come.”

“Don’t toy with me Mark!”

“Listen carefully. We begin tonight. We write, slowly but steadily. This will take two years. It will require patience, dedication and hard work, but I know we can do it if we keep our eyes on the prize. We are going to be rich beyond our wildest dreams, and we can bankrupt those losers at the same time. Jonathan, we’re going to write a Scientific American article!”

A stunned silence followed from Jonathan, as I began my trademark cackle, imagining sucker after sucker shelling out their hard-earned cash for nothing but knowledge! It was beautiful – just perfect. A crack of lightening and almost immediate rumble of thunder drowned out my joy before it reached its enviable crescendo.

“Was that a cackle?”

“Yes Jonathan, it was.”

“No Mark, this is a cackle!”

And so it began.

Happy Halloween!