Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Now I finally have an idea what might have happened!

I woke up this morning to find this:

and it triggered my instinct to kill. I mean, some varmint is eating my food! Can’t get more instinctual than that. Not to mention all the time and investment I have put into nurturing this crop. Not to mention that my very first BIG juicy tomato was just about ripe enough to pick…

After a thorough debate and inspection of the photos, the concensus of the SLAC theory group is squirrels, rats, or birds. Keeping in mind that my tomatoes are in container pots, on my deck, about 30-40 feet off the ground, rabbits were immediately excluded. I have ruled out birds after a detailed investigation of the crime scene this evening. Burton Richter himself (Nobel prize winner and co-discoverer of charm and former director of SLAC) made a point of calling his wife - an expert on such things - in order to determine the origin of the varmit. Mrs. Richter suggested roof rats. Egads!! I certainly hope not - that sounds rather disgusting and I’d rather have squirrels…

Meanwhile, I have put up every defense possible, short of building a cage for the plants. I might do that this weekend, but since the plants are 6 feet tall, it will be a job. I did some web research and devised a fortified multi-strategy defense. I have purchased Shake-Away Critter-Repellent, it is composed mainly of garlic and fox urine so it is organic, and sprinkled it about. I put out boxes of rat poison and traps, as well as one of those ultra-sonic/EM-wave rodent repellent thingies I had in my garage. I also put out 2 bowls of water (several websites said squirrles eat tomatoes for H2O during a drought - which adequately describes summer in California) and a bowl containing the 7 partially eaten tomatoes from the night before, hoping it might be easier for the varmint to finish them off first. I have also left the lights on, on my deck.

Short of building a cage (or sleeping on the deck with a BB gun) it’s the best I can do….we shall see what has transpired in the morning. If my tomatoes are further eaten by the morning, hell will hath no fury….

Update: It is now Friday. Last night around 1 AM I went out to check on the plants. Sure enough a large juicy (but green) tomato was sitting at the base of the pots. Then there was a rustling noise and a reasonably large RAT (Eeuw!) scurried out of the container pots and ran away. I caught the varmint red-handed! I involuntarily jumped back and screamed (wonder what my neighbors think now), but had no weapon on me so just watched the critter scurry away. (Actually, I don’t have weapons save for a baseball bat or two.) So much for the ultra-sound thingie. I unplugged it and turned on a radio instead for the rest of the night. LaRose Richter gets the prize for the correct hypothesis. Today I took action - the rat control people are coming first thing tomorrow morning, the container with my best plants is now sitting in the middle of my kitchen for the night, and I have about 10 zillion traps surrounding the plants left outdoors….

Update^2: 1:30 AM Saturday. No rat like a dead rat. Yep, my tom-cat snapper trap got’em! Gotta have the right tools for the job.

Jacques is advertising the launch of a new physics group blog - The n-Category Café. Run by John Baez, David Corfield and Urs Schreiber ( of the String Coffee Table), with technical support from Jacques himself, their self-described brief is the interface between Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy.

They’re just getting going, but I expect we’ll see plenty of fascinating stuff from them, and I hope you drop by to welcome this new venture to the physics blogosphere.

Can’t … stop … blogging … must … resist …

So you may have heard that Pluto is still a planet, and indeed we have a few new ones as well! Phil Plait, Rob Knop, Clifford, and Steinn have all weighed in. Hey, it’s on the front page of the New York Times, above the fold!

The problem is that Pluto is kind of small, and far away. Those aren’t problems by themselves, but there are lots of similar-sized objects that are also out beyond Neptune, in the Kuiper Belt. As we discover more and more, should they all count as planets? And if not, shouldn’t Pluto be demoted? Nobody wants to lose Pluto among the family of planets — rumors to that effect were previously enough to inspire classrooms around the globe to write pleading letters to the astronomical powers that be, begging them not to discard the plucky ninth planet. But it’s really hard to come up with some objective criteria of planet-ness that would include the canonical nine but not open the doors to all sorts of unwanted interlopers. Now the Planet Definition Committee of the International Astronomical Union has proposed a new definition:

1) A planet is a celestial body that (a) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (b) is in orbit around a star, and is neither a star nor a satellite of a planet.

It turns out that, by this proposed definition, there are twelve planets — not just the usual nine, but also Ceres (the largest asteroid, between Mars and Jupiter), and also Charon (Pluto’s moon, but far enough away that apparently it doesn’t count as a “satellite,” but as a double-planet), and UB313, a faraway rock that is even bigger than Pluto. I’m not sure why anyone thinks this is an improvement.

The thing is, it doesn’t matter. Most everyone who writes about it admits that it doesn’t matter, before launching into a passionate defense of what they think the real definition should be. But, seriously: it really doesn’t matter. We are not doing science, or learning anything about the universe here. We’re just making up a definition, and we’re doing so solely for our own convenience. There is no pre-existing Platonic nature of “planet-ness” located out there in the world, which we are trying to discover so that we may bring our nomenclature in line with it. We are not discovering anything new about nature, nor even bringing any reality into existence by our choices.

The Pragmatists figured this out long ago: we get to choose the definition to be whatever we want, and the best criterion by which to make that choice is whatever is most useful and convenient for our purposes. But people have some deep-seated desire to believe that our words should be brought in line with objective criteria, even if it’s dramatically inconvenient. (These are the same people, presumably, who think that spelling reform would be really cool.) But as Rob says, there is no physically reasonable definition that would let us stick with nine planets. That’s okay! We have every right to define “planet” to mean “Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, plus whatever other large rocky bodies we find orbiting other stars.” Or whatever else we want. It’s completely up to us.

So we really shouldn’t have to tear up a century’s worth of textbooks and illustrations, and start trying to figure out when the shape of some particular body is governed by hydrostatic equilibrium, just to pat ourselves on the back for obeying “physically reasonable” definitions. But it looks like that’s what the IAU Planet Definition Committee wants us to do. Of course that’s what you’d expect a Planet Definition Committee to suggest; otherwise why would we need a Planet Definition Committee?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have change-of-address forms to fill out.

[And don’t even contemplate accusing me of hypocrisy for dragging myself away from a much-deserved blog-vacation to carry on about something that I claim doesn’t matter. The definition of “planet” doesn’t matter; but appreciating that the choice of definition is a matter of our own convenience, not a matter of necessarily conforming to some objective criteria about the physical world, matters a lot.]

Update: Chris Clarke for the opposition.

The team behind the popular science magazine Symmetry is having a workshop at SLAC this week with the purpose of designing a good graphical presentation of the Higgs mechanism and Supersymmetry. People have tried this for years and it’s a tall order. Believe me, I know. But if anyone can pull it off, the Symmetry folks can!

I’ve been enlisted as a technical expert - one not only has to design a good graphic, it also has to bring home a technical point - and be technically correct. I consider this a fun challenge and am asking for you - our CV readers - for help! When designing a graphic to entice the interest of the scientifically interested public (not to mention policy makers), what better than to actually ask that audience what they like? So here we are….

To define a place for us all to get started, I asked David Harris, editor-in-chief of Symmetry, to give the top 4 graphics, each, for Higgs and Supersymmetry that are on the market today. And here they are (note these are a collage of the 4 different graphics):

For Higgs,

and for Supersymmetry,

They can be found at the links higgshere, higgshere, higgshere, higgshere, susyhere, susyhere, susyhere, and susyhere.

Let’s all take a few minutes to look critically at these pictures. Gosh - they are actually pretty bad, aren’t they! To be honest, I was shocked (although I have a slight fondness for the SUSY shadow dancing). The Higgs graphics hit me the hardest - I don’t even get the point in some of them, at least not by just looking at the picture without reading the accompanying commentary. I think we, the collective CV readership, can do much better than this! Don’t you!?!? So this is your challenge: please, spout forth your opinions - what do you like about these graphics? what turns you off? what confuses you? what better ideas do you have?

After the workshop, I’ll post the drafts of the new and improved graphics for further comments… And, don’t be shy now, this is your chance to speak up!

I haven’t vanished, but Foo Camp is a remarkably busy event, and I truly have zero time to blog. In addition, I need to sit down and figure out what the rules allow me to say. But for now, let me just say that I’m having a tremendous time here. Google is a great host (much more about that soon) and from morning to late night one is continuously in sessions and fascinating discussions with fine minds from an array of disciplines.

Just to mention one specific for now, yesterday I was part of a lively and productive session on the politicization of science, led by Gavin Schmidt (of RealClimate). In Science Foo Camp fashion, this led into a fun and interesting dinner conversation with Gavin and others. You wouldn’t believe some of the innovative ideas some non-scientists have for helping “encourage” the media to play fair on science!

Anyway, I must get up, shower, and get over there for the last half-day of sessions.

I know I’m on vacation, but this seems important: for the first time, the Department of Homeland Security has deemed an entire state of matter to be a national security risk.

Cynical-C has more (and more).

I’m spending part of today doing a little background preparation for a fascinating event that I’m attending this coming weekend. I have been lucky enough to be invited to the first Science Foo Camp, “a free, invitation-only gathering produced by Nature and O’Reilly Media, and hosted by Google at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA”.

I’m pretty excited about attending, and am looking forward to meeting many talented new people from disciplines with which I do not usually strongly interact, since the formal goal of this rather unusual meeting was spelled out in the invitation as

The aim is to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas–and to have fun. We believe that a host of interesting problems straddle the intersections between scientific disciplines, and between science and computing. Science Foo presents a unique opportunity to explore topics that cross these divides: what can biology learn from physics (and vice versa), how are experimental and information technologies transforming the scientific process, how should scientific information be communicated in the age of the web, and how should science engage with society at large?

When I participate in a meeting in my field, I pretty much know what to expect, what the structure will be, how I’ll navigate the meeting, and what is expected of me. In this case, I have a broad sketch of what will go on, a list of participants, and access to some wiki pages through which to communicate some preliminary ideas and bios with them. Indeed, as Timo Hannay of Nature put it when he kicked off blogging about the event over at Nascent,

In true Foo Camp style, there’s no agenda yet, but by the end of Friday evening, shortly after our kick-off dinner, there will be. And then two remarkable days will follow.

So this free-form nature is precisely what the organizers intend, and should make for a dynamic meeting, albeit one which tests my natural tendency to want to know what’s going on at all times.

I’ll certainly blog more about the meeting when it’s over, and hopefully even while I’m there. However, what I can say (for example, about the remarkable invitee list) will be limited by the Chatham House Rule, under which the entire meeting is being conducted:

When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.

Nevertheless, I hope to be able to provide some idea of what goes on, and of the general atmosphere at this unique gathering.

We’ve finished with the World Cup and the big bike race across France. We’re in anticipation for the Fall season of baseball with the playoffs and world series. But, in between, is a lessor known sporting event - the World Series of Poker. The final game will be played Thursday 10 August, and one of the 9 finalists in that game is a genuine particle theorist! It’s Michael Binger who was a graduate student here at SLAC, studying under Stan Brodsky, and defended his thesis just a couple months ago. I was on his committe and can say that he did a fine job. And on Thursday he is playing at the final table at the World Series of Poker. He is coming into the final table ranked 8 out of 9 (apparently 9 people sit at the final table) with a pile of chips worth over $3 million.

This is the World Series of Poker, No-Limit Texas Hold-em Championship. Within poker circles, this is the big event. About 8700 people entered the contest, buying in with $10,000 of tournament chips, each. These 8700 card-playing studs battled it out several weeks until 9 super-players were left. Those 9 will battle it out for the championship on Thursday. And a particle theorist - from Stanford - has amassed over $3 million in chips and thus cracked the top poker playing circle. Eat your heart out Sean!

Michael Binger worked on physical renormalization schemes with applications to grand unification and split supersymmetry here at SLAC under the guidance of Stan Brodsky. Essentially, they have a unique method of describing the running of the strong coupling constant (i.e., how it changes with the energy scale it is being measured at) and found a number of qualitative differences and improvements in precision over conventional approaches when applied to calculations within grand unification theories. It’s interesting work and I’m glad somebody took a look at it.

It seems that Michael is somewhat of a novelty in the poker circles due to his physics PhD. He’s been interviewed and quoted as saying:

Michael Binger hopes to continue doing research in physics without having to run the rat-race of getting a job and impressing all the right people as he puts it. A win here at the World Series of Poker Main Event would definitely give him the freedom to do pretty much anything he wants.

I’ve never followed the world series of poker before, but now I’m rooting for a rising star and a genuinely nice person. GO, BINGER GO!!!

Update: Michael Binger finished in third place! His winnings totalled $4.123 million. He was eliminated in hand #229 at 3 AM PDT, after more than 12 hours of play. He had an Ace-10 suited pair in his hand and with a hand like that he understandably bet the store. For more details on the hand, please see Sean’s comment below (#20). All of us here at SLAC give him our heartiest congratulations!! Rumor has it he will be stopping by on Monday!

After nearly two and a half years of practically non-stop blogging (with a nap here and there, I admit), it’s time for me to take a short break and leave CV in the capable hands of my co-bloggers for a bit. I need to focus on some other things for the next month or so, like moving to Los Angeles. A scary prospect, to be sure, but don’t worry about me. Despite the impression that the satellite view from Google Maps might give you, the 777 Tower is not about to topple over and collapse onto Figueroa Street, reducing my new neighborhood to rubble.