Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Less than a century after Einstein’s development of General Relativity (GR), physicists still marvel at its geometrical beauty and the myriad observational tests it has passed. One of the best tested theories in the history of science (that’s right IDiots - it’s “just” a theory), General Relativity is mature enough that these days it is increasingly being used as a tool through which to make other scientific discoveries. One of the most successful examples of this is the use of gravitational microlensing to tell us about the presence of small mass distributions - particularly planets.

The bending of light around massive bodies, as predicted by Einstein and later confirmed by Eddington’s observations during the 1919 solar eclipse, is a basic result of GR. Taken to extremes, light from a distant object, passing precisely around a closer, massive object leads to the Einstein Ring phenomenon. More typically, what is observed is a brightening of the light from a distant object as a massive object passes across the line of sight. In the eclipse observations, the presence of a known object was used to measure the way in which light bent, and thus to test GR. But these days, GR is so well understood on these scales, that one may turn this technique on its head and use GR as a tool, interpreting the brightening of such a distant object as evidence for an intervening mass distribution.

For planet detection, the increase in light from a far away star as a closer one passes can happen in a subtle way, revealing the presence of another massive object orbiting the nearer star. This is what is being reported for the smallest object so far - a roughly Earth-sized one. As the BBC article puts it

If the foreground star has a planet orbiting it, it will distort the light even more, and will make the star behind it look even brighter. But this effect lasts for a much shorter period, giving astronomers just hours or days to detect it.

Dr Martin Dominik from the University of St Andrews is a co-leader of the PLANET collaboration, one of the microlensing networks used to detect the new planet.

“We first saw the usual brightening reaching a peak magnification on 31 July 2005. On 10 August, however, there was a small ‘flash’ lasting about half a day,” he said.

“By succeeding in catching this anomaly with two of the telescopes of our network and with careful monitoring, we were able to conclude that the lens star is accompanied by a low-mass planet.”

The planet they discovered is unusual compared to other recently discovered extrasolar planets

The planet, which goes by the name OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, takes about 10 years to orbit its parent star, a red dwarf which is similar to the Sun but cooler and smaller.

It is in the same galaxy as Earth, the Milky Way, but is found closer to the galactic centre.

[…]

Like Earth, it has a rocky core and probably a thin atmosphere, but its large orbit and cool parent star mean it is a very cold world.

Predicted surface temperatures are minus 220 degrees Celcius (-364F), meaning that its surface is likely to be layer of frozen liquid. It may therefore resemble a more massive version of Pluto.

Since I spend a great deal of my time thinking about and investigating the role that GR plays in the early universe, it is nice to be reminded by stories such as this of the important role that GR plays in relatively late-universe science; in this case as a tool.

You can always rely on Albert.

So I was sitting on the bus reading and annotating my lecture notes on electromagnetic inductance for a lecture I was going to give 15 minutes later. A woman got on wearing a very short strapless red dress and medium height heels. She had short curly black hair. She seemed familiar in a way, but I could not place why, and she passed me and sat somewhere at the back of the bus. I carried on reading my notes. A few stops later the woman stood up and stood near the back door waiting for the bus to stop for her. I looked at her again, and it hit me. “She’s dressed a bit like Betty Boop, how funny!”, I thought to myself.

Then I noticed her little black handbag. I noticed the little mobile phone dangling from it on a strap. Then I noticed that it was a Betty Boop handbag. It had the ‘ol gal herself pictured on it, wearing the classic red dress - identical to the one the real person was wearing. She stepped off the bus and disappeared into the city.

I got to thinking about why on earth she was dressed that way at 8:45am? I googled to see if it was Betty Boop day or something but it does not seem to be. With a violent shake of my head I quickly dismissed the idea that she was actually Betty Boop (apparently -why not?- from Puerto Rico, or maybe Cuba, given my guess at her ethnic origin).

So I’ve no idea….. Thoughts?

I’m just chalking it up to the wonderful randomness of living in a huge city like LA with a diverse culture and all sorts of things going on. I love it.

-cvj

(P.S. I borrowed the image above from this site, where it seems you can get an awful lot of stuff associated to Ms Boop.)

I’m sure we have a slew of budding Pynchons and Stoppards out there in the CV audience. Here’s your chance to break into the big time: the Second Annual Seed Magazine Fiction Supplement.

In the June/July issue Seed will publish its Second Annual Fiction Supplement. We are not looking for traditional Sci-Fi — we are looking for fiction that reflects the significant role science plays in our culture; fiction that uncovers the rich narratives in science; and fiction wherein scientists are fallible and human. We are looking for Science-In-Fiction, Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction — in the tradition of Andrea Barrett, Richard Powers, Margaret Atwood and Alan Lightman, writing that brings new meaning to our understanding of Science Fiction.

Scientists are fallible and human? Sorry, can’t help them there. Remember, if anyone who reads this post goes off and writes a story that gets into the magazine, we want to hear about it.

Update: Apparently we’re talking about an entire genre of fiction here — LabLit. (Via grrlscientist.)

The Astronomy Picture of the Day from Sunday was a cool one — a nutrient agar plate of Deinococcus radiodurans, a/k/a “Conan the Bacterium.” (Photo: M. Daly, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.) D. rad is quite the remarkable little microbe — it’s an extremophile, an organism that thrives in conditions that you and I would deem overly harsh. (And no, not the internet.) It even has a listing in the Guinness Book of World Records under “World’s Toughest Bacterium.”

D. rad is able to survive in vacuum and through extremes of temperature as well as dehydration, but its special ability is to shrug off large amounts of radiation: a dosage 3,000 times what would kill a strapping young human. Now, you may perhaps wonder why the Intelligent Designer would bother to equip a certain unicellular organism with such an impressive, but not manifestly adaptive, kind of superpower. It could be that radiation tolerance was quite useful in the environment of the very young Earth, but biologists are also thinking that the radiation resistance may come along with resistance to dehydration (which is something that obviously is useful) — radiation and dehydration seem to cause similar types of DNA damage, and D. rad has a remarkable ability to keep its DNA in good working order. It carries along several copies of its genome, stacked on top of each other, ready to step in at the first sign of damage. It’s like towing an entire repair shop behind your car at all times.

Which means, of course, that we meddling humans want to put it to work. D. rad has already been genetically engineered to clean up spills of toxic mercury, which can be highly radioactive. And now, NASA is exploring the possibility of recruiting the plucky bacteria into the astronaut corps. They are imagining adapting D. rad to help with a variety of tasks that humans might face on a trip to Mars — synthesizing drugs, recycling wastes, producing food, all the way up to terraforming the planet. If I were in charge of this project, I would tread pretty lightly here. These are some tough bacteria — I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re just biding their time until we can fly them to Mars, at which point they’ll rise up and take over both planets.

Sir Isaac Newton may have written the greatest physics work of all time, but he shouldn’t rest easy — he has heavy competition for being the greatest experimenter. Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles aims to find out. He’s assembled an impressive list of nominees for the greatest physics experiment ever (and is drumming up interest in the greatest in other fields). Contenders include such household names as Galileo, Roemer, Faraday, Cavendish, Michelson and Morley, Hertz, Rutherford, Hubble, Mossbauer, and Aspect, not to mention Newton himself. Greedy bastard. Be sure to go vote.

On the opposite side of the practicality/speculation scale, Christine Dantas has the somewhat more modest goal of finding the Best Quantum Gravity Paper of 2005. Help out, she needs both nominees and votes. Of course what we think is the best paper now might not be what we remember a hundred years later.

A final way to have your own bit of vox populi be heard is to visit Wampum and vote for the Koufax awards (previously mentioned here). You’ll have to keep checking in, as posts where you can actually vote are gradually being assembled; so far we’ve seen

• Best New Blog
• Blog Deserving of Wider Recognition
• Open Thread

If I’m good I’ll keep a list here. We’ve been nominated in a few categories, including Best New Blog; I have high hopes for a respectable third-place showing in the Best Expert Blog category behind Pharyngula and Informed Comment.

So you’ve got the idea by now (if you’ve been reading about my Walkabout) that Taiwan is wonderful for food. Taipei is said to be the most important city on the world map of Chinese cuisine for the sheer quality, quantity and variety. That may well be true enough…..

But the real Source is Tainan, in the South of the island. Getting -at the last minute- the opportunity to go there, I gave a seminar on the 23rd December to the String Theory group (essentially all of the Taiwan string community came…this was part three of a series of talks), shut down my computer, excused myself as best and genuinely apologetically as I could, and grabbed my bags and headed for the door. A while later, after fortifying myself with a bowl of beef noodles (what else?) at Taipei Main Station, I headed for the bus, and the four and a half hour journey from Taipei to Tainan. There’s a bewildering variety of bus stops, and several bus companies to figure out, and getting on little shuttle buses to go to the other place to get the main bus….. and lots of yelling of destinations which I could not understand….I will not claim that I figured this all out myself……the brother of the friend I was going to stay with was also travelling this way, and so he offered to accompany me. I was dreading the bus journey, to be honest. It is not that I can’t do long bus journeys - as a student, to save money on home visits, I regularly took the marathon nine hour one leaving from from London Victoria at midnight, headed to every busstop between London and Preston - but that it was a bit cold, I only had my jacket, and I was not as well prepared in my mind for it either… I was not really in the mood for it, but it was the only way to get there and I was certainly going to go and was prepared to put up with whatever hardship it entailed.

When the bus actually showed up, and I boarded it, I felt a bit silly about being apprehensive. It was not so much a bus as actually twelve fat -FAT- soft beds on wheels! With large (ish) TVs with lots of movies. And massagers built into the chairs. And curtains. And blankets. Yes…..there’s so much room to recline these guys all the way back and put out the leg rests because there are only. twelve. seats. Fantastic. Did I mention how much I love Taiwan?

Four and a half pleasant hours later, having gorged on incomprehensible kung-fu movies (helpfully dubbed and subtitled from Cantonese to Mandarin), and got about half an hour’s shut-eye, the bus pulled up at a street corner in the middle of somewhere or other, and we were in Tainan.

Not much later - about 1:00am - it was time to begin the real business of why I was there…. to spend time with my friend and eat my way around Tainan. My food guide (this was going to be way deeper culinary exploration than I could do on my own) for the two days I’d be there, the dear friend I came to visit, was reassured a day earlier when I told her that I was not looking for Western food of any sort. I wanted to try what was considered good to eat by the locals, and she should not assume that my palate was unable or unwilling to try things. This cleared the air, and I heard her (over the phone when we had the conversation) breathe a sigh of relief, as this meant that she could really have some fun exploring some of her favourite places and sharing some of the tastes of Tainan with me. (I don’t think she was fully convinced until later though…. she seemed to be often surprised when I asked for certain foods, or enjoyed certain flavours that were considered to be only to local tastes.)

So stopping only to pick up my friend’s husband from home, we went to the restaurant of a friend of theirs to start with. While spending my time untangling myself from the establishment’s (shall we say, to avoid blushes) extraordinarily friendly hostess (who was also trying to drink me under the table… goodness knows what lay in wait for me there…), I worked my way through just the first of many excellent meals in Tainan:

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Forget about Peak Oil, here’s the real looming crisis: we’re running out of new words. Do you realize how hard it is, in our hyperactive age, to come up with a word that hasn’t already been invented for some purpose or another? Surely we’ve all had the experience of mistyping a word into Google and nevertheless hitting a handful of results. So as a little experiment, I made up some strings of letters that sounded like they could be words, checked in the dictionary that none of them actually exists as a conventional English word, and asked Google to go look for them. Here’s how many hits I got.

• antrith (865)
• splicky (230)
• queigh (43)
• nurdle (885)
• tobnet (53)

“Splicky” is a pretty sweet-sounding word, actually; I’ll have to start dropping it into conversation. Admittedly, most non-words appear on Google as abbreviations or computer terms or simple nonsense, and furthermore it’s not that hard to invent random strings that don’t get any hits. Still, I’m worried. If Shakespeare were alive today, I’m pretty sure he’d feel that Google was cramping his style, coinage-wise.

Today is the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade. It is also Blog for Choice Day. It has also, by way of a sharp stick in the eye to those who believe women should be the ones to choose to have abortions or not, been declared National Sanctity of Human Life Day by President Bush. This is from the President’s proclamation.

National Sanctity of Human Life Day, 2006
A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

Our Nation was founded on the belief that every human being has rights, dignity, and value. On National Sanctity of Human Life Day, we underscore our commitment to building a culture of life where all individuals are welcomed in life and protected in law.

America is making great strides in our efforts to protect human life. One of my first actions as President was to sign an order banning the use of taxpayer money on programs that promote abortion overseas. Over the past 5 years, I also have been proud to sign into law the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, and a ban on partial-birth abortion. In addition, my Administration continues to fund abstinence and adoption programs and numerous faith-based and community initiatives that support these efforts.

When we seek to advance science and improve our lives, we must always preserve human dignity and remember that human life is a gift from our Creator. We must not sanction the creation of life only to destroy it. America must pursue the tremendous possibilities of medicine and research and at the same time remain an ethical and compassionate society.

It’s funny, but try as I might, I can’t “remember” that my life is a gift from a mythical Creator. And I wish the President would stop trying to enshrine his personal beliefs as national policy.

But the Culture of Life does crack me up. In this week’s New York Review, Garry Wills reviews the latest book by Jimmy Carter, on the hijacking of moral values by conservatives.

Yet the anti-life movement that calls itself pro-life protects ignorance by opposing family planning, sex education, and informed use of contraceptives, tactics that not only increase the likelihood of abortion but tragedies like AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The rigid system of the “pro-life” movement makes poverty harsher as well, with low minimum wages, opposition to maternity leaves, and lack of health services and insurance. In combination, these policies make ideal conditions for promoting abortion, as one can see from the contrast with countries that do have sex education and medical insurance. Carter writes:

Canadian and European young people are about equally active sexually, but, deprived of proper sex education, American girls are five times as likely to have a baby as French girls, seven times as likely to have an abortion, and seventy times as likely to have gonorrhea as girls in the Netherlands. Also, the incidence of HIV/ AIDS among American teenagers is five times that of the same age group in Germany…. It has long been known that there are fewer abortions in nations where prospective mothers have access to contraceptives, the assurance that they and their babies will have good health care, and at least enough income to meet their basic needs.

The “culture of life” idea traces its origin to the Catholic doctrine that life is a seamless garment, to be respected from conception to grave — but its American incarnation has dropped some of the inconvenient bits, like opposition to the death penalty. As Governor of Texas, Bush presided over a record spree of executions, while ridiculing death row inmates’ pleas for clemency. Wills continues:

Capital punishment is also a pro-death program. It does not protect life. It aligns us with authoritarian regimes: “Ninety percent of all known executions are carried out in just four countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia—and the United States” (emphasis added). Execution does not deter, as many studies have proved. In states that abolished it, Carter writes, capital crimes did not increase:

The homicide rate is at least five times greater in the United States than in any European country, none of which authorizes the death penalty. The Southern states carry out over 80 percent of the executions but have a higher murder rate than any other region. Texas has by far the most executions, but its homicide rate is twice that of Wisconsin, the first state to abolish the death penalty. It is not a matter of geography or ethnicity, as is indicated by similar and adjacent states: the number of capital crimes is higher, respectively, in South Dakota, Connecticut, and Virginia (all with the death sentence) than in the adjacent states of North Dakota, Massachusetts, and West Virginia (without the death penalty).

How can a loving religion or a just state support such a culture of death? Only a self-righteous and punitive fundamentalism, not an ethos of the gospels, can explain this.

On its anniversary, Roe v. Wade is threatened as never before. Perhaps it will have to be eviscerated beyond recognition before the American public will make an effort to preserve abortion rights.

While settling down on the patio with a tasty but simple bagel-cheese-espresso combination, I idly reached over for the LA Times, and ran across three interesting articles that I thought I’d point out to you. Like me, if you teach, you might well have varied from the script a few times and ad-libbed a joke with a little political flavour. We’ve all done it from time to time, right?

Well if so, be careful…you could find yourself a target of certain groups that would like to claim that you’re part of a movement to indoctrinate your students with political ideology. A read of the article entitled “Witch hunt at UCLA”, by Saree Makdisi (a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA) gives you a good taste of the debate raging in the press right now. It seems that there is a website, created by the Bruin Alumni Association, which offers money - real folding money - to students who help them “expose” professors who “can’t stop talking about President Bush, about the war in Iraq, about the Republican Party, or any other ideological issue that has nothing to do with the class subject material…”. Wow. Makdisi notes however, that a lot of the specifically targeted professors on the website are targeted mostly for what they’ve been saying outside of the classroom, rather than inside. The case is made that it is part of an academic’s duty to engage in such discussion:

I earned my own inaccurate and defamatory “profile,” for example, not for what I have said in my classes on English poets such as Wordsworth and Blake — my academic specialty, which the website pointedly avoids mentioning — but rather for what I have written in newspapers about Middle Eastern politics.

My colleagues and I are being targeted for speaking out on the kinds of urgent social matters and universal principles that it has always — in every society and every age — been the task of intellectuals to address.

The article goes on to say:

The website assumes that any professor who speaks out in a public forum must at the same time be indulging in ideological abuse of his or her students — proselytizing them, indoctrinating them. And it’s actually not just any professor; it’s only the supposedly “liberal” ones, since “conservative” faculty are not targeted on the website.

Ah. That’s what this is about. The usual case of trying to stop someone from saying something when it is something you don’t want heard. (This can take place on both sides of the divide, of course…..) Alongside the article (and the other two I’ll mention in a moment) is a sidebar which has some very interesting numbers in it. The numbers (if the self-reporting they are based on is to be relied upon) seem to support the often made statement that university campuses are becoming more left-leaning in recent years. It’s all very interesting, and so I did a separate post on it for you to discuss the data if you like.

The data are silent (as far as I can see) about whether the presence of left-leaning professors (and to a lesser extent, students) actually is having a significant effect on the student body. Well, it almost certainly having some effect, but what is the effect and what is its extent? Surely, data like that is what the worried Conservatives who started this whole discussion should (perhaps) be waving around, no? Let’s hear from them next….

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In the LA Times today there was (as part of a larger discussion; see the longer post to follow) a set of data about the increase of the proportion of people with left-leaning political views on American University Campuses. I comment about it in the other post, but there are some interesting features which bear discussing outside of that context. First, the data:

Among faculties
Academics who identified themselves as left or liberal
• in 1984 39%
• in 1999 72%

Academics who identified themselves as right or conservative
• in 1984 34%
• in 1999 15%

Among campus faculties in 1999, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 5 to 1

The Democratic advantage by department in 1999
• English: 35 to 1
• History: 17.5 to 1
• Biology: 4 to 1
• Engineering: 3 to 1
• Computer science: 2 to 1
• Chemistry: 1.5 to 1
• But in agriculture, Republicans held a 1.3 to 1 edge.

In 2004, employees of the University of California and Harvard University were John Kerry’s largest dollar contributors and among Howard Dean’s top five.

That was for faculty. The first thing I wanted to know when I saw these numbers was why there were not any numbers for Physics or Mathematics! Also, what does this mean, exactly? Is it that the scientists and engineers are not reporting accurately, or is there really something going on here that means that there are fewer “left-leaning” people in thsoe groups. Or is it that people in English and History are more politically active or aware? I’ve not got a clue, but these data are certainly very interesting, don’t you think?

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