The Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History has sponsored a video contest, asking participants to express in two minutes or less how science has moved them or impacted their lives. These contests are great ways to let an “audience” become real participants in a process, and have some fun along the way.

Sadly the deadline is passed, so we can’t encourage you to contribute, but you can check out the entries. Here’s a video about the LHC, by Luke Cahill. (I’m using YouTube’s new “iframe” embedding scheme; let me know if it doesn’t work.)

Edge is collaborating with the Serpentine Gallery in London on projects at the art/science interface. Last year they looked at equations; this year they’re looking at maps. It’s a playful and broad conception of what constitutes a “map”; you will see a few astrophysical examples in there.

Here’s an excerpt from a map of the emotions by Emanuel Derman, based on Spinoza’s Ethics. I zoomed in on the cluster centered around pain, because that’s what people will be drawn to first anyway.

Great post yesterday by fellow Discover denizen Ed Yong, asking “Should science journalists take sides?” Honestly, it shouldn’t be a hard question, although the answer depends on how you visualize the sides. If you have in mind

He said vs. She said,

then the job of a journalist is not to take sides. But there’s another possible dichotomy that is much more crucial:

Truth vs. Falsity.

In this case, it’s equally clear that journalists should take sides: they should be in favor of the truth. Not just passively, by trying not to make things up, but actively, by trying to figure out whether something is false before reporting it, even if it’s been said by someone.

All sounds kind of trivial, but it’s easy to lose sight of this principle by hewing to a misguided definition of “objectivity.” Ed pulls an extremely damning quote from medical journalist Jeremy Laurance:

Reporters are messengers – their job is to tell, as accurately as they can, what has been said, with the benefit of such insight as their experience allows them to bring, not to second guess whether what is said is right.

That sounds about as wrong as it it possible to be wrong. It reflects a kind of lazy pseudo-objectivity that stems mostly, I would uncharitably suggest, from fear — the fear that one will make a mistake in trying to judge whether someone is lying or telling the truth. If journalists are just mindless stenographers, they can’t be accused of making that particular mistake. But they are actually making a much more serious mistake, abandoning the search for truth in favor of the goal of not being blamed.

It’s hard to argue against this mindset, which is often mis-labeled as “objectivity.” So maybe we should be defending the New Objectivity: the crucial duty of reporters to separate what is true from what is false. If a scientist says “this drug will cure cancer,” but the peer-review study doesn’t back that up, it should be a journalist’s duty to make that clear. If a politician says “my plan will cut the deficit,” but a GAO report suggests otherwise, it should be a journalist’s duty to highlight the inconsistency. “Objectivity” shouldn’t mean “report what is said and don’t pass judgment”; it means “uncover the truth, no matter who says what.”

Observe as a striving young author demonstrates how to fluster an innocent morning TV host by dropping quotes from Zombieland. (If you don’t get the first clip, press pause and go to the menu on top.)

There is a lesson here, in the reaction to the title The Calculus Diaries. You write a book to emphasize the fun and conceptual side of math, to reach an audience that doesn’t traditionally pick up science books. How do you get them to buy a book with “Calculus” in the title? Zombies and Vegas help, but it’s an uphill battle.

Yes, I know, I’m not very good at this hiatus thing. But there is important news that needs to be promulgated widely — the news of calculus. No more will innocent citizens cower in fear at the thought of derivatives and integrals, or flash back in horror to the days of terror and confusion in high-school math class. Because now there is a cure for these maladies — The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse.

Yes, you read that subtitle correctly. Let’s be clear: this book is probably not for you. That’s because you, I have no doubt, already love calculus. You carry a table of integrals in your back pocket, and you practice substituting variables to while away the time in the DMV. This isn’t the book for people who already appreciate the austere beauty of a differential equation, or even for people who want to study up for their AP exam.

No, this is the book for people who hate math. It’s for people who look at you funny and turn away at parties when you mention that you enjoy science. It’s for your older relatives who think you’re crazy for appreciating all that technical stuff, or your nieces and nephews who haven’t yet been captivated by the beauty of mathematics. The Calculus Diaries is the book for people who need to be convinced that math isn’t an intimidating chore — that it can be fun.

Know anybody like that? Any gift-giving holidays coming up?

Now it’s true, I know the author. In fact, I appear as a character in the book (to a certain degree of comic effect). I’m the one who gets soaked when we ride Splash Mountain at Disneyland, but also the one who maximizes his winnings at craps by clever betting in Vegas. You get the idea: this isn’t a textbook, it’s a tour through the real world (and occasional fantasy worlds), pointing out that math is all around us, and that perceiving it is kind of cool.

When you understand math, how you think about the world changes. Every day, we all change position by accumulating velocity, or do informal optimization problems when making a decision. But most people don’t know about the wonderful insights that math can add to these processes. You know, because you are a mathphile. But you are outnumbered by the mathphobes. You have a secret that they don’t know, but now there’s a way to share it. What are you waiting for?

Speaking of video goodness, we’d be remiss not to remind everyone that Sunday is the premiere of Phil Plait’s new mini-series on Discovery, Bad Universe.

It will be a lot like Armageddon, with Phil instead of Bruce Willis in the role of the balding hero figure. And science instead of complete nonsense. Improvements all around!

This past week has seen a lot of news stories about a “Manhattan-sized” plume of oil found in the Gulf of Mexico by researchers near the site of the BP Deepwater Horizon well. This sent my BS detector into the yellow zone, so I have been trying to get a better idea of just how much oil remains in the Gulf from this disaster. It’s definitely not gone.

So I went to Wikipedia. There, you can find a reference to a New York Times article from the beginning of August, where the total volume of the leak was estimated to be 780,000 cubic meters of oil. Now, that’s clearly in the category of “reasonable guess” – no one knows for sure. But it is very unlikely to be a factor of two larger or smaller than that, so let’s just use that for now. There are a lot of other uncertainties, for example the amount of natural gas (methane) that came out with the oil, how the flow rate changed with time, and so on. But again, let’s just ignore those.

How big is 780,000 cubic meters? Simply taking the cube root of this number, this is the volume of a cube 92 meters on a side. It would look something like this next to the Pentagon:

I can imagine two reactions to this comparison: 1) Damn, that’s a lot of oil! 2) That’s tiny compared to the volume of the Gulf of Mexico! (I bet one’s political views might play a role in which reaction comes first…)

If we were to take this volume and spread it out in a layer 1 millimeter thick, it would cover an area of 780 million square meters, which is a square about 28 kilometers on a side. The satellite images of the oil slick showed affected regions much larger than that, from which I conclude that the thickness of the surface layer must have been much less than 1 millimeter at those times. (But check my math, somebody!)

If all the oil were dissolved uniformly into the Gulf, which has a total volume three million billion times the size of the leak, the concentration would be about one third of one part per billion. That’s an interesting number all by itself, and not at all as small as it seems. But not all the oil leaked is in the Gulf – much of it evaporated and a good deal has been consumed by bacteria. But the rest of it went somewhere, right?

Now to the underwater plume. In the abstract of the Science Magazine paper that led to all the news stories, the authors said “Our findings indicate the presence of a continuous plume over 35 km in length, at approximately 1100 m depth that persisted for months without substantial biodegradation.” I cannot find the word “Manhattan” anywhere in their article, and so I have to conclude this was some mainstream media (WSJ?) person’s rather inept attempt at putting the size of the plume into perspective. It was parroted endlessly in the media as if it had meaning. In fact it’s quite misleading – clearly the term “Manhattan-sized” conjures up images of the whole island of Manhattan along with all the tall buildings…but as we have seen the total volume of oil leaked into the Gulf is about the size of one of those buildings.

So what is this plume? The authors define it as “a discrete spatial interval with hydrocarbon signals or signal surrogates (i.e., colored dissolved organic matter or aromatic hydrocarbon fluorescence) more than two standard deviations above the root-mean-square baseline variability.” That is, a place in the water where there is clearly oil present at detectable levels. It can be at quite low concentrations and still be detectable. One of the article’s main findings was that “Gas chromatographic analyses for only monoaromatic hydrocarbons of several water samples gathered using survey guidance confirm benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and total xylenes (BTEX) concentrations in excess of 50 μg L^–1 within the plume at 16 km downrange from the well site.” This is all bad stuff we don’t want in the water or getting into the food we eat.

I assume a lot more scientific research will need to be done to know the actual damage that the presence of these oil components will do to marine life, the fisheries, and the food chain. The authors took a stab at making an estimate of how much oxygen depletion was occurring due to biodegradation of the oil, concluding that “it may require many months before microbes significantly attenuate the hydrocarbon plume to the point that oxygen minimum zones develop that are intense enough…to threaten Gulf fisheries.” That’s good news for marine life, I assume, but means that the subsurface oil will take quite some time to be bioegraded, which is bad in the longer term. So why hasn’t the media talked about that aspect of the article?

There is no question that this was a huge amount of oil leaked into the Gulf and that the impacts will be felt for many years to come. It is an epic disaster by any measure and may have consequences no one has considered yet. But we have to be rational about the real impacts of the disaster, and rational about the real risks involved in deep water drilling. The only way is to continue vigorously the kind of research we saw in the Science Magazine article, and debate the findings openly. BP needs to release publicly everything it knows about the spill.

I feel like I have successfully negotiated a Hollywood rite of passage. I was being interviewed on camera for a TV pilot, when I took off my microphone, tossed it aside, and stormed off. How awesome is that??

Not so awesome at all, actually, but it did happen. I much prefer a low-drama lifestyle, and it takes a certain kind of talent to get me that annoyed. Nothing to be proud of; I should have been more careful in learning what the show was about in the first place.

The backstory is that I was called on the phone by producers at a company I had never heard of, but that means nothing, as I haven’t heard of the vast majority of TV production companies. [Update: name of the company removed because I signed a non-disclosure agreement. They didn't complain, just being cautious.] They wanted to come to campus to interview me for a pilot they were producing. I’ve done the drill before, for respectable outlets like the History Channel, Science Channel, and National Geographic. It’s a couple of hours of work, no heavy lifting, and hopefully you get to explain some cool science that will be seen by a much larger audience than I could possibly reach by giving a thousand public lectures. And it’s fun — I get to be on TV, which growing up wasn’t the kind of thing I ever thought I’d get to do.

They explained that they wanted me to talk about quantum teleportation. I countered by mentioning that there were surely better experts that they could talk to. But they really just needed some background information about quantum mechanics and relativity, and were comforted by the fact I had appeared on camera before. And the producer emphasized that they knew perfectly well that teleportation wasn’t realistic right now, but thought it was interesting to speculate about what might ultimately be consistent with the laws of physics. So I agreed. There was a slight hint of sketchiness about the operation — they seemed to be unable to come to an agreement with Caltech in regards to consent forms, which National Geographic or the History Channel never had trouble with. But my antennae weren’t sensitive enough to set off any alarm bells.

So the taping was this afternoon, and it consisted of me chatting informally with the show’s two hosts, while taking a leisurely walk around Caltech’s quite lovely campus. But as soon as we started talking, things went rapidly downhill. The first question was what I thought about claims that people had actually built successful teleportation devices. When I expressed skepticism, one of the hosts challenged me by asking whether I would just be repeating the “party line” of the scientific establishment. I admitted that I probably would, as I think the party line is mostly right. And that we have very good reasons for thinking so.

They next asked whether it wasn’t possible that people had built teleporters by taking advantage of extra dimensions. I explained why this wasn’t possible — extra dimensions are things that physicists take very seriously, but if they are macroscopically accessible they would have shown up in experiments long ago. From there, the downhill spiral just continued. They asked whether I was familiar with the “black projects” conducted by the CIA and the military? What about eyewitness testimony of people who had been to Mars and back? Was it possible that ghosts and/or extraterrestrials used quantum mechanics to travel through walls?

It sounds even worse in retrospect than it did at the time, because they would intersperse the craziness with relatively straightforward questions about physics. But I think that even the straightforward questions were just an accident — they were trying to be goofy, but didn’t understand the difference between what is possible and what is just crazy. (“Do you think it’s possible to travel into the future at a faster rate than normal?”) The producer would occasionally interrupt with some sort of suggestion that they actually say something about quantum teleportation. “I don’t really know anything about that,” replied the host to which I was speaking.

Eventually one of the hosts mentioned psychic remote viewing, and smirked when I tried to explain that it’s easier to disbelieve a few eyewitness reports than to imagine a complete breakdown of the laws of physics. With that, after having resisted the temptation for a good fifteen minutes, I cut it off and walked away. The producers tried to get me to come back, but there was no way. I don’t know whether they will go ahead and use any of the footage from my interview; I don’t think I said anything I would later regret, but I did sign a consent form. Hopefully they will try to salvage a shred of their own respectability, and not use me on the show.

The problem for me wasn’t primarily the credulous attitude toward craziness — although there was that. The real problem was dishonesty. In their last-ditch effort to get me to come back, the producers tried to explain that they really were interested in quantum teleportation, and the hosts had simply wandered off-script. The show wouldn’t be biased in favor of the paranormal, they assured me. The problem is, nowhere in talking to me about the show was the word “paranormal” ever mentioned. I was given the impression that it was a straightforward science show, and that was simply untrue.

There is a perfectly reasonable debate to be had, concerning the extent to which respectable scientists should publicly engage with pseudoscientific craziness. Under the right circumstances I could conceivably be willing to participate in a show that discussed paranormal phenomena, as long as I could be convinced that it was done in a sensible way and my views would be fairly represented. This was nothing like that — all of my pre-interview communication with the producers was strictly about quantum mechanics and teleportation, with no mention of pseudoscience at all. Once the cameras started rolling, it was all ghosts and remote viewing. Completely unprofessional; hopefully next time I’ll be more careful.

Also, for future reference: no brown M&M’s in the green room!

Spent a day last week at the bacchanalia of imagination that is San Diego Comic-Con. Really an amazing experience, anyone who gets a chance should go at some point. My own excuse was appearing on a panel sponsored by Discover and the Science and Entertainment Exchange, on Abusing the Sci of Sci-Fi. I was joined by Jaime Paglia, TV writer and creator of the very charming show Eureka; Kevin Grazier, JPL scientist, blogger, and science advisor to both Eureka and Battlestar Galactica; and Zack Stentz, writer for Fringe and the upcoming Thor movie. We were ably moderated by Phil Plait, and Tricia Mackey provided technical wizardry behind the scenes. We packed the room to bursting, with a long line of people who unfortunately weren’t able to fit inside. There’s a huge demand for this kind of discussion. See also reports here, here, here, here, here.

And yes there is a video record of the whole event! (And other Discover videos.)

The rough idea was to point out examples of good and bad science in science fiction on movies and TV. Phil scored the best example of bad science, finding a brief clip from Armageddon where Bruce Willis is doing delicate work on the surface of an asteroid — in the rain. Jaime and Zack, who actually work in Hollywood, wisely foresaw the pitfalls of holding up someone else’s stuff as an example of badness, and graciously both chose examples from their own work. Sometimes the science must take a backseat to the story.

But not usually. In my own presentation I tried to move beyond the model of scientist as copy-editor, running through stories and films looking for violations of the laws of physics, wagging the finger of shame with ill-concealed glee. I think scientists should take a more creative role, helping fiction writers to develop consistent rules for their fictional worlds and extrapolating the consequences of those worlds, even if those rules are not the rules of our real universe. We should be more than scolds.

Update: since the two clips I showed were apparently missing from the video, I’m linking to them here. The first was a forward-looking philosophy of the proper relationship between science and narrative, and the second was an example of carefully exploring the logical consequences of an imaginary world.

Even if I’m on hiatus, there’s no reason not to post links to interesting things that I would be tweeting anyway. Blogs are still much better places to have conversations, whatever the Twitter triumphalists might think.

With that in mind: check out this story by Sharon Begley from Newsweek, on how media are slowly backing away from the Climategate hysteria. (Via PZ.) She very rightly highlights the real damage: the backing-away won’t undo all the misimpressions of scientific malfeasance that people absorbed when the story was at its height.