Gabrielle Giffords, 40-year-old U.S. representative from Arizona, was shot in the head at a public event this morning. Several people were killed, including a nine-year-old girl. Police have a suspect in custody.
[Update: I originally wrote that Giffords had been killed; this was wrong, and I apologize for the misinformation. That's what NPR and CNN and other outlets were reporting, and I mistakenly assumed that they wouldn't do so without incontrovertible reason. She is in critical condition following surgery. A doctor at the hospital says he is "optimistic" about a recovery -- please please please let this be true.]
I met Gabby at a reception a year ago. She seemed, on our very brief acquaintance, to be a really wonderful person — energetic, smart, full of optimism about doing good things as a member of Congress. Her husband, Mark Kelly, is an astronaut. If I may step away from the ideal of journalistic objectivity for a moment, this is a stupid fucking tragedy.
When a politician is shot, people will draw political conclusions. In this case, Gabby had been “targeted” by her political opponents using explicitly violent language. Sarah Palin released a map with a target site pointing at her district; her opponent had a “shoot an M16” fundraiser. (Via @mattyglesias.) At the time, various people were horrified at the casual invocation of this kind of violent rhetoric. Is it now inappropriate to link that rhetoric to the actual violence? I have no idea whether her killer was politically motivated in any way — he might have just been an unstable person with no agenda at all. Regardless, it would be good to tone down the language of deadly force in political discussions. Maybe both Democrats and Republicans can agree on that.
My heart goes out to her family and friends, as well as those of the other victims. We need more public servants like Gabby Giffords.
Obviously everyone in the world has heard about Wikileaks and its associated controversies. It seems like the site itself has to keep moving to avoid various attacks, but at the moment it can be found here.
My strong first impulse is to be in favor of shining light in secret places. This can be taken to extremes, of course; there is such a thing as appropriate privacy, for governments and corporations as well as for individuals. But the natural tendency on the part of governments (or bureaucracies more generally) is to go too far to the other extreme, making secrecy routine where it should be exceptional — and using it to cover up embarrassment rather than protecting people’s lives. Something like Wikileaks is a great corrective to this tendency.
I don’t really see, however, how something like the wholesale release of diplomatic cables helps this cause. Some of the cables might have been covered up for pernicious reasons, but for the most part diplomats should have an expectation of privacy in these kinds of communications, as much as an ordinary citizen would when making a phone call. This doesn’t seem like a brave strike against government corruption as much as a bit of leering Peeping-Tommery. I’d personally be happier if Wikileaks were a bit more selective in what it shared with the world.
Personally, the most depressing aspect of the whole affair — even more than the cartoonish responses from craven politicians — has been the attitude of the established media. Sure, they will publish the stories, although usually accompanied by some sort of meek apologia. But on TV and in the op-ed pages, there is enormously more discussion about Julian Assange and Wikileaks itself than about what we have actually learned from the documents. A lot of people in the media these days consider themselves to be more like partners with government, rather than respectful adversaries. I’d love to see more thoughtful pieces about what we’ve learned from all these documents about how the world actually works.
Regardless of the ambiguities, I certainly hope Wikileaks keeps going. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “The press, confined to truth, needs no other legal restraint.” Or as Ruben Bolling more recently tweeted: “If a journalist is walking down the street, and happens to find a box of secret government documents, what should he do?” Telling the truth is always a good first strategy.
Earlier today I learned of the passing of Allan Sandage. Allan was a tremendously broad astronomer, who had a lasting impact on fields of astronomy stretching from stellar evolution to the largest cosmological issues. He is perhaps best known for his work on the distance scale, and measurements of the Hubble Constant, but he had equally significant contributions to our understanding of stars.
The prominence of his work on the Hubble Constant is in part due to the rather contentious history of this subject over much of the 90′s and early 2000′s. Allan was at heart a stellar astronomer, but one who found himself tied to Hubble’s legacy by virtue of being Hubble’s telescope assistant in the years leading up to Hubble’s unexpected death in 1953. As one of the earliest pioneers (with Martin Schwarzschild) of the technique of using main sequence turnoffs to assign ages to globular clusters, Allan was deeply (and understandably) bothered by experiments that returned large values of the Hubble Constant — these values implied ages for the universe that were younger than the oldest globular clusters, which was clearly an implausible contradiction. Instead, Allan and his collaborators published a long series of papers attempting to deal will every uncertainty and bias in the distance scale, and found a consistently smaller value of the Hubble Constant than the other competing team (the “Hubble Key Project”, led by Wendy Freedman with many collaborators). In time, Allan’s group’s on-going evaluations of the distance calibration gradually pushed their value of the Hubble Constant up somewhat, while the Key Project’s values were being nudged down a bit (although they never did actually meet, particularly as error bars shrank in more recent years). Simultaneously, the discovery of dark energy changed the age estimates for the universe, allowing old globular clusters to co-exist harmoniously with a moderate value of the Hubble Constant.
During this time, Allan developed a reputation for being, well, difficult. His scientific disagreements on this issue unfortunately veered occasionally into the personal. That said, I had the pleasure of being a postdoc at the Carnegie Observatories during this time, and had an office a few doors down the hall from him. Allan was invariably gracious and kind to the postdocs. He was scientifically engaged, and always willing to share his knowledge, which was both deep and wide. I enjoyed having him for a colleague for 4 years, during a very scientifically vibrant stage of my astronomical training, and I am very sorry to hear of his passing.
The sun kind of burped yesterday, and sent gigatons (or maybe definitely not hellatons) of material streaming our way – to Earth that is. There is an awesome video of it over at SpaceWeather.com. The particles, mainly electrons and protons in the sub-100-eV range, are expected to reach earth tomorrow (Aug. 3) and could give vigorous auroral activity. I am not sure that northern California is northern enough to see it, but who knows? Take pictures, someone!
Once, about six or seven years ago, on an airplane flight from Chicago to California, I was on the right side of the plane and stared for hours at the shimmering curtains of green and red and purple, slowly waving as if in a breeze. It was an amazing sight!
This has been an fairly quiet solar cycle, and we are now heading to a solar max in three years which is on track to be just over half as intense as the last one in 2001, and the lowest in over 100 years. Too bad, just when I got into amateur radio…
Being kind of a volcano/earthquake geek, I regularly check in on the recent California earthquake records, the Kilauea activity, and, in the past couple months since the Eyjafjallajokull, the earthquake activity near it that might presage an eruption of Eyja’s big sister, Katla. Historically, eruptions of Eyjafjallajokull are followed by eruptions of Katla, which are an order of magnitude larger. The eruption of Eyjafjallajokull disrupted air travel in Europe for weeks. It’s interesting to consider what a big volcano Katla might do. There is also the fact that Katla erupts every 40-80 years and hasn’t erupted since 1918, making this a potentially bigger buildup to an eruption. Some of the Katla eruptions in the past have gone on for months.
Since I have been watching, the number of earthquakes near Katla has been small, with a few periods of a dozen or so within a 24 hour period. Almost every time I have looked it’s been very quiet, perhaps one or two a day. I was away the previous two weeks, and apparently missed a day with 11 earthquakes on July 10. I checked again today, and I got the map below, with over a dozen earthquakes! Now, clearly, these are all small earthquakes, with magnitude near 1, and there are no reports of steam or ash as yet.
I bet it’s coming, though, fairly soon. The president of Iceland does, too.
Two hundred thousand gallons per day of Gulf crude are leaking from a hole 5000 feet under the water’s surface in the wake of the still mysterious destruction of British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform last week . How and when it will be stopped is entirely unknown. The mayonnaise-like oil is being blown ashore into the nursery for shrimp for the whole region and the home of hundreds of the other species. Welcome to what may turn out to be the worst single human-caused environmental disaster ever. (Unless you regard global warming in general as a single event. Semantics.)
This thing is going to need a name. The Exxon Valdez incident was a spill – there was a finite amount of oil aboard the ship. A lot of oil: 11 million gallons (40 million liters). The new one in the Gulf of Mexico could blow past that, depending on whether present efforts to close the valve or drill a relief well work.
The fact that we called it the “Exxon Valdez” incident clearly indicates the responsible (if not guilty) party involved. So, though I like the moniker “Spill, Baby, Spill” from a political point of view, it doesn’t lay any blame and this thing is not a spill. It’s a leak, and BP leased the rig from Transocean LTD, the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor. I think the responsibility has yet to be determined. If you rent a car, and wipe out a family in an accident because the steering was faulty, is it your fault or the car manufacturer’s? It may take some time, or even never be known, what happened a week ago to cause this tragedy.
The name of the rig was the Deepwater Horizon, but that doesn’t convey ownership or responsibility. Will this become known as the “BP Deepwater Horizon Spill”? The “Transocean/BP Leak”? The media seem to be stuck on “spill” and so I bet that will be in the name long term…and it will take a very long time to assess responsibility here.
My heart goes out to the families of the 11 lost on the rig, and to the thousands of fishermen and others whose livelihoods are in peril.
We’ve suspended new offshore drilling until we have understood this incident better. And no doubt a new debate about offshore drilling will ensue. This has certainly put the lie to those who claim that new modern drilling rigs are far safer than in the past, something even President Obama was saying as recently as April 2. Sigh.
Since March 30, when the LHC at CERN first collided protons at an unprecedented total energy of 7 TeV (7 trillion electron volts) the machine has been steadily moving from crawling to walking. Last Saturday, I’d say it took its first steps, and like any toddler, will soon be running.
The plot shows what we call “integrated luminosity” which is simply a measure of the number of collisions of protons in the interaction regions at the four experiments. In this case, it’s my own experiment, CMS, the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment. CMS and ATLAS are the two large general-purpose detectors, each with thousands of physicists eager for real physics data.
(more…)
Bits of the blogosphere are taking note of a recent post by John Sides noting the growth of NPR compared to other news sources:
Sides comments:
Something in their business model is working. And I have a hard time imagining that NPR listeners won’t watch televised news programming as a matter of principle.
So where is the NPR of cable news?
To me, the reason seems dead obvious. Radio is the only delivery mechanism that you can absorb while doing something else. Driving? Check. Cooking? Check. Reading email? Check. Lingering in bed after the alarm goes off? Check.
I don’t have a “principle” against watching televised news. I just don’t have time. You could have Ira Glass and Carl Kassell doing the Hustle surrounded by frolicking puppies and I still wouldn’t make the time to sit down and watch.
The Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter has released a new online museum, The Emergent Universe. This is, I think a truly novel approach to communicating the central ideas of the new field of emergent phenomena and complexity, combining the underlying physical basis of a wide array of examples with art and music. The site itself presents an animated, non-directed interface to branching sets of topics and what I guess one would call exhibits (since it’s a museum after all). A lot of these are quite fun, and instructive. A visitor is left with the feeling that there is lots more to explore. The interface itself, I have to say, is very cool and a glimpse of what is to come on the internet. Today’s text- and photo-heavy web pages are bound to give way to sleek sophisticated designs like this one…
Have fun!
The prizes were awarded this evening at Harvard’s annual IgNobel Prize ceremony. This year’s theme was “Risk”. Among the winners are:
Veterinary Medicine: Catherine Bertenshaw and Peter Rowlinson, Newcastle, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than nameless cows. (Not sure what that has to do with risk…)
Peace: Stefan Bolliger (sp?), et al., Univ. of Bern, Switzerland, for determining whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full or empty bottle of beer. (The empty ones work better!)
Public Health: Ilena Badnar of the University of Chicago for inventing a brassiere that can be converted to a pair of gas masks. Paul Krugman with a pink bra cup on his face…woah.
Biology: Fumiyake Yamaguchi et al. for demonstrsating that the feces of giant pandas can be used to reduce kitchen waste by 90%.
It’s great that Little Miss Sweetie Poo keeps the speeches short by running up and yelling “please stop! I’m bored!”
Hopefully the whole list and the video will be up on their web site soon!
