News from the home town, actually:
“I know God is in control,” she said. “And that in everything we’re to give thanks to Him. I don’t know why our house is sinking but there’s a reason so we’re trying to be thankful.”
Personally, I think God is just a little peeved that somebody named a suburban subdivision “Cambridge at Heritage Plantation.”
Dear Nature News,
Get your facts straight. The new National Institutes of Health policy currently up for a vote on Capitol Hill will not require researchers “to publish only in journals that make their research papers freely available within one year of publication.” This is false. Such a requirement is nowhere present in S.1710 or H.R.3043. The new policy will require research funded by the NIH to be placed in an open-access repository within 12 months of publication. Really:
The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
Notice how there’s no Index of Prohibited Journals? In the industry jargon, the NIH policy will mandate “green OA,” not “gold OA.” This mistake is old enough and tiresome enough that we have a name for it: Journal-Archive Mixup, or JAM.
I’m cynical enough to expect the Washington Post to get this wrong, but Nature News should do better. The truly unfortunate part is that Slashdot picked up the error, so now a legion of science geeks will be completely misinformed.
Eric “Dr. Evil” Dezenhall must be pleased: his strategy for misinforming the public works so much better when all the reportage is sloppy anyway.
(Tip o’ the fedora to Peter Suber.)
I grew up on James Burke‘s books and television series, a taste I inherited from my father. All the way through high school, I had a reputation as a know-it-all, a walking encyclopaedia (who was, at least, a helpful guy). I kept telling people that if they’d watched Connections — and read The Cartoon History of the Universe — my know-it-all-itude would be a great deal less impressive.
I saw James Burke live, once, at an aerospace conference back in 2000. I had to run off and do something else right after his talk, so I didn’t get a chance to have a conversation or even get a book autographed (one more reason I’m glad I was able to say thanks to James Gleick). I do, however, remember a story he told about his days in the BBC, covering the Apollo program.
He was responsible for explaining the scientific motivations for going to the Moon, the motivations which stay valid after you beat the Russians there. As he reports in the Connections book, the British media put more emphasis on this than the Americans did, so British interest remained relatively high during the later missions, when NASA’s TV ratings in the United States were dropping. At the time, the significance of all this was probably less apparent, and Burke was busy enough just trying to translate NASA tech-speak into something people could understand.
Part of this job involved reading through NASA’s manuals for the equipment which would be used on the Moon. These machines were not simple devices, nor were their instructions straightforward. Each manual had to have a full description of possible failure modes, with contingency plans for each eventuality, and all written with such detail that both the astronauts and the Mission Control people could handle all possible malfunctions without going back to the original engineers. The result, Burke said, was something like this: “If X-Y-Zed, then gobbledygook. If X-Y-Zed-Beta, then gobbledygook squared.”
Finally, after a whole page of bullet-pointed technical jargon, came the last contingency plan:
“If all else fails, kick with lunar boot.”
And because this is the multimedia era, here’s a clip from BBC Four, in which James Burke demonstrates how the KC-135 “Vomit Comet” was used for weightless training.
When my mother saw MIT’s Stata Center, also known as Building 32, she said, “My God that’s an ugly building.” Are you gonna call my mother a liar?
Now, for some fascinating news. “The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is suing renowned architect Frank Gehry,” says the AP newswire, “alleging serious design flaws in the Stata Center, a building celebrated for its unconventional walls and radical angles.”
Let’s see that again: “The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is suing renowned architect Frank Gehry, alleging serious design flaws in the Stata Center, a building celebrated for its unconventional walls and radical angles.”
No, the suit isn’t over the building’s looks:
Instead, “The school asserts that the center, completed in spring 2004, has persistent leaks, drainage problems and mold growing on its brick exterior. It says accumulations of snow and ice have fallen dangerously from window boxes and other areas of its roofs, blocking emergency exits and causing damage.” Also, at one point, it had skunks living in the main air intake (or so I’m told). The amount of damages sought by the suit is as yet unspecified; the building cost $283.5 million in all, $15 million of which went to Gehry’s firm.
Scott Aaronson says that he first thought the headline “MIT Sues Architect Frank Gehry” had to come from The Onion or, more likely, an MIT publication like Voo Doo. Actually, Voo Doo did once have a headline about the Stata Center (I know because I wrote it): “Building 32 morphs into battle droid; saves Cambridge from Mothra, Megalon.”
Later, of course, Doonesbury covered the same territory.
I’ve found the answer. You can stop looking now. It’s really simpler than we’d thought.
You see, if the fundamental constants or the physical laws of the Universe were even a teensy-weensy iddle-liddle bit different, then evil could not exist. Logically, therefore, the Universe was finely tuned to produce evil.
I call it the Misanthropic Principle.
This is what I can’t see happening because it’s raining in Boston today. Click for video:
This TRACE Project/NASA video is brought to you by Astronomy Picture of the Day.
Neil Gaiman quotes a bit of a report about the forthcoming Beowulf movie, and asks us to spot the typo. At first, I thought it was “embarrassed,” because I can never remember how to allocate the Rs and Ses in that word anyway.
Angelina Jolie has admitted she was got a little shy when she saw her nude scenes in her latest film “Beowulf.†The actress says although the nude scenes were stimulated, she was still a little embarrassed. “I was a little shy,†she says. “I was really surprised that I felt that exposed. There were certain moments where I actually felt shy — and called home, just to explain that the fun movie that I had done that was digital animation was, in fact, a little different than we expected.â€
Suddenly, I’m feeling the urge to go see Beowulf.
Also, the Coolidge Corner Theatre will be showing the “final cut” of Blade Runner (1982) starting the sixteenth of this month. For the proper ambiance, they should have chosen a venue in Chinatown, of course — but hell, it’s Boston in November. We’re going to have to walk from a half-broken subway through a construction zone in the sleet. All you need to add is a giant speaker on the Hood blimp telling us, “A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. . . .”
At one point, during a film-studies class, I made a chart comparing the profusion of versions then known of Blade Runner. Nowadays, alternate or unused footage is a little easier to come by. For example, there was filmed a scene where Deckard meets Holden in the hospital, and they talk about hunting replicants. Watching the clip, I think I concur with the choice to leave it on the cutting-room floor:
It’s entirely the wrong feel for Blade Runner. It conveys no information not present in Rachel’s Voight-Kampff interrogation scene, and it undercuts the severity of Captain Bryant’s line, “He can breathe all right, so long as nobody unplugs him.”
On the other hand, this deleted scene from Terminator 3 (2003) is no worse than the rest of the movie (cough, cough).
Continue reading Happy Fun Movie Time
Tired of slogging through troll-infested comment threads? Want to reinvigorate your sense of hope for the Internet? Then try blog posts on peer-reviewed research! A week ago, the “Research Blogging Icons” were unveiled, and now, dozens of posts have been marked with these identifiers, indicating that they discuss serious science which has appeared in professional venues. Dave Munger has picked out a sample of ten, and they all look worth reading.
For a wonder, one of my ICCS posts is on the list. Also, I quite enjoyed Kevin Z’s take on the evolution of fireflies. Did you know that the firefly family of beetles, the Lampyridae, contains about 2000 species worldwide, with around 120 represented in North America? And that the species which more closely reflect the ancestral form use pheromone signals, instead of light?
Kevin Z also describes research which has recently been done to understand the costs of flashing lights, both in terms of energy and with regard to attracting predators. And here’s where I kick myself: back in 2005, I wrote a scene for a science-fiction novel which used almost exactly the experimental setup of that predation study, although the goal in the novel was to understand why their flashes had started to synchronize.
Greg Laden, formerly of gregladen.com, has moved to ScienceBlogs. Don’t let the champagne fountain and the Tokamak-fueled plasma screen TV go to your head, Greg.
Donalbain points out that the front page of Conservapaedia is now complaining about that “prominent liberal evolutionist blogger and biologist,” PZ Myers. Actually, there’s a bit of back story behind this: a creationist troll dropped by Pharyngula and Jason Rosenhouse’s EvolutionBlog to demand that we evolutionists find even a “single factual error” in Conservapaedia’s article, “The Theory of Evolution.”
Honestly, he shouldn’t have wasted his breath. Conservapaedia endorses the “Darwin caused Hitler” myth, says the bacterial flagellum couldn’t have evolved, etc., etc. It reads like a pile of creationist remarks extracted from the TalkOrigins Index and fed through a Markov process. (To pick one example out of the farrago, the quote attributed to Colin Patterson, saying that there are no transitional fossils, is a classic creationist deception.) Not only is every reference to an actual scientist a quote mine, but also, the out-of-context quotations they use aren’t even assembled in a coherent order. They don’t care about making a good presentation; they just want to throw mud against the walls of academia and make science look bad.
So, a few people with too much free time have been slagging this out down in the ScienceBlogs comment threads. There it would no doubt have fizzled, except that the folks at Conservapaedia decided to whine. On their front page, mind you:
Continue reading Whines from Conservapaedia
Mike Stay has just posted “Category Theory for the Java Programmer,” an introduction to the subject intended for people with practical programming experience. This is the latest, but hopefully not the last, in a series of introductory articles on his blog:
Continue reading Category Theory for Java Programmers
OK, after all that science talk, it’s time for some “mature viewers” content. Here is an adaptation which Julia Dameron directed of a scene in Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan, specifically Spider Jerusalem’s encounter with the President of the United States in a men’s room. The original can be found on pages 20–24 of Lust For Life (1998). Geek out, comix fans:
That’s probably as much of Transmet as you can film without a budget.
Rob Knop, having decided to leave ScienceBlogs.com, has discovered that the SB Overlords will remove the archives of his blog sometime during the next couple months. Rather than let them vanish entirely into the memory hole like a factual comment on a creationist blog post, I thought I’d mirror a few here at Sunclipse. (In no way will Dr. Knop be responsible for answering comments on these mirrors, or anything like that; I’d just like to preserve the information.) First up is an essay from 10 October 2007, “Supernovae: the source of cosmic rays.” I have something of an interest in big stars going boom — check the SNEWS link over in the sidebar and say hello to my old colleagues — so I don’t want to see good explanations of this stuff slip away into the aether.
Continue reading Rob Knop on Supernovae
Yesterday, the International Conference on Complex Systems wrapped up with five talks on networks. For me, the most interesting was that by Dan Braha, who spoke about what happens when you analyze a system as a network which changes over time, instead of the aggregate network formed by lumping all the timesteps together. Imagine a system made out of a whole pile of parts. At time [tex]t[/tex], part number [tex]i[/tex] might or might not be interacting with part number [tex]j[/tex], which we could represent as a time-varying matrix [tex]C_{ij}(t)[/tex]. Many studies of network-related phenomena obscure the time-dependence part. For example, in a living cell, genes are switching on and off, concentrations of enzymes are going up and down, and all sorts of stuff is changing over time. You can mix proteins A, B and C in a test tube; perhaps A bonds both to B and to C. You’d then draw an interaction network with links connecting A to B and to C — but what if B and C are never present in the cell at the same time?
Braha and company looked at a collection of e-mails sent over 113 days, exchanged among 57,138 users. (The data comes from arXiv:cond-mat/0201476v2, published five years ago in Phys. Rev. E, and were gathered at Kiel University.) A node is an individual e-mail address, and a link is established when a message is sent from one address to another. They found, among other things, that whether or not a particular node is a “hub” changes over time: popular today, an outcast tomorrow. Moreover, a node which is in the top 1000 most connected on one day may or may not be in the top 1000 for the aggregate network. Furthermoreover, when the window of aggregation is gradually increased — from one day to two days, to a week, up to the entire time period — the similarity to the total aggregate network increases, as you’d expect, but without any threshold.
In the last few minutes of his talk, Braha did a brief overview of a related investigation, in which they studied a “social network” derived from Bluetooth devices. If my Bluetooth gizmo is within two meters of yours, we’ll call that a link. The network of Bluetooth devices will naturally change over time, so we can do the same comparison between the graphs observed at short timesteps to the graph formed by aggregating all connections. During the Q&A session afterwards — before I had to, ironically enough, run off to find my cell phone — I pointed out something which it appears Braha hadn’t fully grasped.
Continue reading ICCS: Time-Dependent Networks
I seem to have become the official Conference Paparazzus. Some of my photos are standard conference fare. For example, here’s Gregory Chaitin having a chat with his session chair, Bob Savit:
However, every picture I have of Philip Zimbardo looks at least a little. . . evil.
This is, in fact, how many of the people in the audience will remember Dr. Zimbardo:
Continue reading ICCS: Pictures
Okay, I’m uploading files to a MediaWiki 1.10 installation. If I try to upload a JPEG image with the execute permission not set (i.e., its entry in ls -l begins with -rw-------) then I get an error message:
Error creating thumbnail: sh: line 1: /usr/local/bin/convert: No such file or directory
Uploading another copy of the file with different permissions doesn’t fix the problem.
Sigh. Some days I just hate computers.
