Blogs / Cosmic Variance

What’s in a name? What if I had a major mid-life crisis and ceased being JoAnne Hewett and insisted on being Susan Smith instead? How would friends and relatives get in contact with me? What if I thought I told everybody, but had forgotten about my best friend from high school who suddenly needed me? How would people connect the theoretical research of JoAnne Hewett with that of Susan Smith? Would all the work and untold fame associated with JoAnne Hewett be lost to the new Susan Smith? My identity and history would be lost, as well as a sense of who I am.

People change their names all the time, of course, for various reasons. But what about major research institutions? What if the federal government suddenly decided to change the name of one of its more prestigious national laboratories? One that has been in operation for more than 40 years and has generated several Nobel prizes and major discoveries?

This is precisely what is happening to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, my home institution. The US Department of Energy, in its infinite wisdom, is proposing to change SLAC’s name to something as yet undecided. A committee of representatives has been formed to recommend new names for the laboratory. Persis Drell, SLAC director, quotes part of the rationale as:

Our stakeholders have suggested that the name is also no longer fully representative of the laboratory with its increased involvement in photon science and particle astrophysics in addition to our particle physics program

SLAC is in the midst of a transition. We are no longer operating an accelerator for High Energy Physics. We are building the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), which has an exciting discovery potential in Photon Science. I can’t help but note that the word linac appears in the name of the new machine. In fact, the linear accelerator at SLAC is the cornerstone of the new LCLS. The LCLS could not be built without it. So doesn’t it seem appropriate that the lab housing the LCLS be named Stanford Linear Accelerator Center? It is hard to understand this argument.

There is also some legalese about the DOE wanting to trademark and patent the name SLAC, but is having difficulty because one apparently can’t patent a name containing “Stanford.” The University and DOE are communicating on this issue, but there is no resolution yet. Of course, there are numerous companies dotting Silicon Valley which freely use the name “Stanford” in their moniker, so it is hard to understand this argument as well.

The employees at SLAC, no matter what their discipline may be, are understandably upset. They have started a petition, addressed to the President of Stanford University and to the Secretary of Energy, asking that the name of the laboratory not be changed. This petition addresses the history of the lab, the role of accelerators in both photon and particle science, and the close connection between the lab and the university. The petition can be found here, and anyone who agrees with it may sign.

Lab name changes have happened before, albeit under different circumstances. Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Laboratory was known as CEBAF (Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility) before 1996, which is the name of its main accelerator. CEBAF was founded in 1984 and the name change took place just after construction was completed and just before the beam turned on. Likewise the National Accelerator Laboratory became the Enrico Fermi NAL in 1972 while the lab was under construction. So while laboratory names have changed, it has happened only before data taking had commenced and long before history and reputation had been established.

I wish I could wake up and discover this was only part of a really bad dream.

The Orlando Sentinel (which clearly has a dog in this fight) is reporting that Obama is backing off of plans to cut NASA’s budget. The article is somewhat brief on details, but it seems clear that Obama is now willing to continue shuttle flights until 2010 and to continue the Constellation program (which he was originally going to freeze for 5 years to save money for education).

I’m all for more money for education, but one just can’t stop and restart projects that require major intellectual infrastructure. When highly trained aeronautical engineers are laid off, they’re not necessarily around 5 years later. Re-starting from scratch 5 years later is not cost effective, and may not even be possible after all the relevant expertise has dispersed. In the speech, Obama also acknowledged the mismatch between plans for Constellation and its funding level, and recognized that the disparity has led NASA to cannibalize everything else.

So, it sounds like he’s climbing the NASA learning curve, which can only be seen as good news. He may still ask for changes in NASA’s priorities, but he’s clearly becoming educated on what’s actually feasible. I’m not arguing that NASA necessarily should continue Constellation (since many space-related scientists would love NASA to tilt more towards becoming the NSF in space), but that in previous incarnations of Obama’s space policy, he was clearly talking as someone who didn’t have a detailed understanding of how NASA’s ~17 billion dollar enterprise operates. Now, he does.

I have no independent knowledge of the veracity of this report, but a local TV station in the Bay Area is reporting rumors that the SETI program running at the upgraded Arecibo radio telescope has detected an anomalous signal (or in the very high tech language of their reporting, a “mystery signal”). The report includes some quotes from Dan Wertheimer, the director of the program, so presumably the reporter talked to someone with verifiable science cred before writing the piece. The quotes from the project’s scientists are guarded enough that I’m guessing this is just a lousy job of science reporting in the local news.

The part that got my blood pressure going was the follow-up about what we should answer back. The idea that our backward, technologically impaired civilization should jump up and down and wave its arms around saying “LOOKY HERE!!!! LOOKY HERE!!!! PICK ME!!!!”, is,….what’s the word….oh….batshit crazy. History is not exactly awash in cases where the technologically less advanced civilization wound up the winner when two cultures collide. Usually, it gets rolled.

In spite of this, some crazy optimists in Russia are actually beaming signals out to nearby stars, right now. This “active SETI” program strikes me as completely foolish, and has already caused a rift within the SETI community (so apparently, I’m not alone in my abject fear of being spotted by a more advanced civilization). While this issue hopefully has less urgency than figuring out the political response to planetary climate change, we need to eventually get our collective goverments organized into a treaty about how to deal with this issue. Suppose someday we actually detect some alien space ship whizzing through our local neighborhood. Do we let the Raelians and Scientologists invite them down for a drink, even if the rest of us think it’s better to lay low?

In the meanwhile, Earth should just STFU.

(UPDATE: Link to timesonline changed to the original reporting that they swiped from a much better article by David Grinspoon at Seed.)

(AND ANOTHER UPDATE: Phil Plait did some actual reporting (you know, calling and actually asking), and yup, it’s just bad journalism, as expected.)

I know it seems obvious, but two of today’s news stories brought home the absurdity of how people are judged.

On the one hand we have a Republican (who would have guessed?) Senator who is accused of soliciting sex in an airport men’s bathroom.

On the other is this priceless story about legislating against the wearing of too baggy clothes.

What is striking is that I don’t think the first should be news except that the Senator in question consistently votes against gay rights and gay marriage. His fellow Senators seem concerned with the actual behavior, which I think is irrelevant, and unconcerned with his hypocrisy, which I think is abhorrent.

But the individuals involved in the second story seem to ignore completely the behavior of the persons wearing the dangerously low-riding jeans. Even those defending these loose-legged louts seem to miss the point:

“The focus should be on cleaning up the social conditions that the sagging pants comes out of,”

No, the focus should be on how they behave, not on what they wear.

Being a good citizen is about how you behave to others – what rights you support or try to deny them, or how you treat them – not about how you choose to meet sexual partners or about how you dress.

We’ve been hearing a lot over the last few days about the damage to the tiles on the shuttle Endeavour. Roland Piquepaille at ZDNet blogs has now posted some exclusive pictures of the affected region, provided by Neptec Design Group.

I don’t know how serious this is, but now at least I understand what they mean by a gouge in the tiles. Here’s keeping our fingers crossed for the safety of the astronauts on board.

It was with great interest that, during a typical CNN post-mortem on a, well, prominent recently departed American, I saw the face of Christopher Hitchens. I knew that this would be outrageous – a smackdown of Jerry Falwell before his body was even cold, much less the mud on the mourners’ boots dry. You can find the video of this posted over at Newsbloggers. It is definitely a Must See, with Hitchens waxing truly poetic on the Falwellian nightmare, calling him “odious”. “small”, and a “toad”. Thank you, thank you, Anderson Cooper for having Hitchens on! It was brilliant.

Putting aside for the moment Falwell’s bigotry, homophobia, and his blaming of the troops in Iraq for failure there (and the gays for 9/11), let’s not forget that lately he had been particularly alarmed that the evangelicals in this country were beginning to ally with the environmentalists on the global warming issue. His sermon from Feb. 25 typifies his anti-science stance, which we saw earlier in his statements on creationism, where he brands leading researchers in these areas as “pseudo-scientists.” Yeesh.

In the end, though, it occurred to me that we’ll miss Jerry, in a way. Now we need some other buffoon to bring out into the open the ignorance and anti-intellectualism that is the hallmark of true religious fundamentalism. Any nominations from the floor?

I keep hearing that one shouldn’t, so soon afterwards, speak of the implications of the Virginia Tech tragedy for certain political positions. But shouldn’t we be outraged by this horrific event? And if there’s an elephant in the room, why should we ignore it?

Now, I have no problem with hunting, and don’t want to ban guns entirely. But there is plenty to agree with in Elayne Boosler’s furious rant over at The Huffington Post. You don’t have to buy it all – I don’t – to feel that there is something right about this kind of outrage. Why isn’t the mainstream media, instead of repeating the same grisly facts over and over, exploring the implications of

The number of children under the age of 17 shot by guns in America every year is greater than the gun-related deaths of children in all the industrialized nations of the world COMBINED.

and

3,300 Americans have died in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last four years. 120,000 Americans have been shot to death in America in the last four years. Where is the outrage? If we can elect a new congress based on its commitment to end the war overseas, we can elect a congress committed to end the war here at home. End both wars.

Boosler ties her piece up by anticipating the associated hypocrisy we might see when the President responds to today’s Supreme Court decision that refuses women a medical procedure even in the case that it may be life-saving.

“Today’s decision affirms that the Constitution does not stand in the way of the people’s representatives enacting laws reflecting the compassion and humanity of America. This affirms the progress my administration has made to defend the “sanctity of life”.

Thanks for the outrage Ms. Boosler – you’re not alone.

The blog world, and now, timidly, the “real” media (if Netscape News is the real media) are abuzz about a purported attack code named Operation Bite in six days against Iran. Many of the stories are straight cut-and-paste, all pointing back to a single newspaper article in Russia, by Andrei Uglanov in the Moscow weekly “Argumenty Nedeli.”

With tensions at the present level between the US and Iran, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the U.S. would take unilateral action like this. But is this all just a propaganda leak from the Russians? Apparently an ex-advisor to Putin, former Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, speculated that the US might even use small-scale tactical nuclear weapons against hardened underground facilities. Well, that got people’s attention.

So, anyway, April 6 at 4 am Iran time…

Here’s a question for our highly mathematically talented readership: what does the following condition describe?

[(δU/δL) / (δU/δC) | Sp=0] ≤ w – [(δU/δr) / (δU/δC) | S = 0]

If you said

“An individual will start to sell prostitution if the price for selling the first amount of prostitution, minus the costs of a worsened reputation for doing so, exceeds the shadow price of leisure evaluated at zero prostitution sold.”

you were spot on. That’s right; according to Marc Abrahams’ Improbable Research column in The Guardian, this is the equation to describe when a prostitute finds it worthwhile to sell (typically) her services.

The story is a little unclear, but the very least you’ll need to make sense of the equation is a definition of the variables:

• U is the “utility”
• L is the amount of leisure you have.
• C is the amount of goods and services you, as a consumer, consume.
• S is the amount of prostitution you, as a prostitute, sell to your customers.
• W is the going price for prostitutes.
• R is a measure of your reputation.

And here I am working on particle cosmology when there are these huge open problems in other fields!

Jonathan Dorfan, the director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), made a stunning announcement this morning – he is stepping down from the laboratory directorship this Fall. This news is certainly a surprise – at least to me! It seems that this decision is all about timing. This Fall marks Jonathan’s 8^th year as laboratory director, as his tenure began in the Fall of 1999. Factor in that Jonathan has said he believes change at the top is healthy for large organizations and when he accepted the directorship he stated his intent to serve only for 8 to 10 years. Couple this to the fact that SLAC’s contract with the Department of Energy will be sent out for bids and competed against in about two years time. And recall that when a new contract is drawn for the lab in this two years time, one condition of the contract is that the lab’s directorship must pledge service (i.e., stay in place) for an additional five years. Jonathan apparently looked at the numbers and decided that now is the right time to step down.

Stanford University President John Hennessy said, “Jonathan Dorfan’s tenure at SLAC has been characterized by exceptional scientific vision and foresight. He deserves our thanks—and those of the greater scientific community.”

During Jonathan’s tenure, he has accomplished many things, including:

The Stanford President has asked Persis Drell, deputy director of SLAC, to head the search committee for Jonathan’s replacement. The committee will be established shortly, will conduct a world-wide search and report back to the President. Jonathan will remain on the SLAC faculty and will no doubt become actively involved in actually doing science again.

Best wishes to Jonathan, and thanks for what you’ve done!