Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Shakedown problems from our change of hosting services continue to pester us just a bit, but I think we’re getting the hang of it. We had to upgrade to a more powerful plan, which changed our monthly cost from “trivial” to “somewhat annoying,” so we’ve added some hopefully-unobtrusive Google ads to the sidebar. If you take our estimated earnings from the ads, subtract from that the piece demanded by the heavy hand of the state in the form of those collectivist utopians at the IRS, and subtract from what’s left the cost of our web host, you are left with a very good approximation of zero. Freewheeling public-intellectual leisure-time blogging is not the road to riches I was led to expect. (This despite the impression that I am only in it for the money.)

The “latest comments” plugin and the “comment preview” plugin both seem to have recently decided to act up, for reasons that may or may not have anything to do with anything else. They are temporarily disabled, but hopefully will see a comeback at some point.

Since things are largely in working order, however, this is as good a time as any for me to take my quasi-annual Summer Blogging Vacation. Not a real vacation, of course; precisely the opposite. There are a handful of good ideas languishing on my laptop, which need coaxing and encouragement in order to grow into refereed papers in respectable physics journals, and I’m going to concentrate on that for a while. I have all sorts of things I want to blog about, but for the most part it would take time to do a good job, and it’s time I don’t have right now. So I’m going to disappear for a few weeks, leaving you in the capable hands of the rest of the crew.

But I should go without offering congratulations to members of the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-Redshift Supernova Team, who have just been awarded the Gruber Prize in Cosmology for discovering the acceleration of the universe. This wasn’t their first prize, and it won’t be their last. Our universe is big, it’s getting bigger, and it’s getting bigger faster — Edwin Hubble discovered the first two of these facts, and these two teams discovered the third. Not too shabby. For some inside scoop you should refer to the blogging member of the SCP, Rob Knop, who is also celebrating a new job. A distinguished astronomer forwarded to me the following sites, ready and available for follow-up reading:

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/Phys-Gruber-Prize-2007.html
http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/home07/jul07/gruber.html
http://newsinfo.nd.edu/content.cfm?topicid=23706
http://carnegieinstitution.org/news_releases/news_2007_0717.html
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/07/17_gruber.shtml
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/press/2007/pr200717.html
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/07.19/99-darkenergy.html
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22092372-12332,00.html

And of course I can’t resist:

“Cosmology is the most scientifically rigorous, aesthetically elegant, and the most poetic of the sciences.”
Peter Gruber, Chairman of the Board
The Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation

Hey, I’m just quoting here.

For Science!

Upon moving to a new city, one naturally pokes around a bit to find interesting things to do that one’s previous location may not have offered. Los Angeles, of course, is the modern Mecca of novelty and experience, so one is faced with an impressive menu of possibilities. But this one struck me as particularly clever: Dining in the Dark, which is just what the title promises. The idea is to take a relatively standard restaurant experience, but to turn out all the lights, removing that pesky “visual” aspect provided by the ambient photons. You save a bundle on decor, and you can charge extra for the novelty! Genius.

So naturally we had to try. And on Saturday we did.

This little video comes from a local TV station that solved the “How do we do a story on TV about something that happens totally in the dark?” problem by bringing in an infrared camera. It’s not held at a standalone restaurant, but only happens on weekends in a conference room at the West Hollywood Hyatt. (Saving on decor, remember?) The waitstaff guide you to your table, which is decorated with a few rose petals but otherwise as uncluttered as possible. (”Bumping into stuff” is a big part of the dark experience, but you get used to it.) The staff is generally very helpful, and you are encouraged to shout for them if you need something at your table, or wish to be escorted away — I’m pretty sure that the restrooms were not themselves dark, although I didn’t check. You were, however, expected to be able to pour your own wine from its bottle to the glasses without soaking the table. I managed.

The idea, of course, is to offer a different angle on the process of eating and enjoying a meal with friends. Deprived of sight, your other senses rally to the task, and you are more sensitive to the sounds and tastes around you. And it’s certainly not impossible to get by; blind people do it all the time. Actual blind people, of course, don’t have the option of stepping back into sight once the meal is over, and there was a danger that the whole operation would seem like some sort of creepy “blindness tourism.” But I never got that sense; the waitstaff themselves are all blind or visually impaired, and if anything the experience gives you just a tiny bit of insight into what their lives must be like — or would be like, if they lived in a world in which great efforts were made to accommodate their sightlessness.

The menu itself was simple, and purposely so: by concentrating on a few basic and recognizable flavors, the chefs offer you the opportunity to disentangle all of the ingredients for yourself, without seeing directly what they are. And the food itself was none too shabby; I can vouch that the truffle-infused macaroni and cheese would have been a hit under any circumstances. True, there was occasionally a temptation to bypass the traditional knife and fork and use one’s fingers. It may even have occasionally happened that one would mistakenly push a morsel off of one’s plate, and rescue it from the table with one’s hands; happily, there were no witnesses, and I’m not saying anything.

The above video, while evocative, really gives the wrong idea by letting in the infrared cameras. The foremost lesson of the dark dining experience is that it is really, really dark. That might come as no shocking news, but it makes you realize how very rarely in this world we are really plunged all the way into complete darkness. We are usually always accompanied by streetlights, or the glowing face of an alarm clock, or the stars in the sky. True and absolute darkness is a different experience, and one worth trying. I love those photons, but I would definitely do it again.

Simultaneously, and without apparent coordination, Phil Plait, PZ Myers, and Chris Pirillo put up posts that say basically the same thing: “I like to blog about stuff I am interested in, which includes more than one thing. If your interests do not precisely coincide with mine (which should hardly be surprising), you are welcome to skip over those posts you don’t care for, and enjoy those that you do.”

Hmmm. A daring, quirky, somewhat off-the-wall point of view. I wonder if it will catch on?

The much-anticipated Bloggingheads.tv faceoff between George Johnson and myself is now available. We talk about string theory, religion, love, the anthropic principle, and plates. After this, any further episodes might just be superfluous.

From Mark Thoma, via Brad DeLong, comes what will henceforth be my absolutely favorite example of twisting data to fit your theories. Observe the following graph of corporate tax rates vs. revenue in units of GDP:

Pretty straightforward, really. As you raise taxes, the government collects more revenue. Norway seems to collect more than its fair share, which might be interesting to dig into, but the trend seems clear. But there’s something nagging at the back of your mind — aren’t there people out there in the world who believe that raising taxes actually decreases revenue past some certain not-very-high tax rate? “Supply-side economists,” or something like that? People who exert a wildly disproportionate influence on U.S. tax policy? What would they make of such a graph?

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as supply-side economics, and you can find its practitioners in such out-of-the way places as the American Enterprise Institute and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Here is how such people view these data:

No, I am not being unfair. I did not draw the “Laffer Curve” on top of those data in order to embarrass the WSJ or AEI. They did it themselves; the second graph is how the plot was actually published by the Journal, while the first one was Mark Thoma’s subsequent reality-based-community version of the plot. As Kevin Drum says, it’s “like those people who find an outline of the Virgin Mary in a potato chip.”

Among other features, we note with amusement that the plotted curve implies that tax revenues hit zero at a corporate tax rate of about 33%, and become dramatically negative thereafter. As of this writing, it is unclear what advanced statistical software package was used to fit the Laffer Curve to the data; the smart money seems to be on MS Paint.

It seems that Kitt Peak, home of most of the US’s National Optical Astronomical Observatory’s north american telescopes, has been spared. Over the last several days it was threatened by the Alambre wildfire in Arizona, to the point where the observatory was evacuated, with the exception of a few key personnel. Smokey webcam pictures are here.

The fear of disaster was quite real, as an important observatory in Australia was indeed overrun by fire in 2003. Mount Stromlo observatory lost several telescopes, along with an instrument lab which at the time contained a million dollar instrument which was being built for another facility. (Pictures of the disaster are here, and background is here).

Astronomers like to put telescopes on top of high mountains with dry conditions, both of which improve the quality of the images that can be obtained, and the likelihood that weather will be agreeable. These sites are typically remote (to avoid light pollution) and are frequently environmentally sensitive (do a Google search on “Mount Graham” and “red squirrel”). As a result, observatories typically have dry conditions, and nearby vegetation that cannot be disturbed. Frequent droughts aren’t helping either.

So, for now the telescopes seem to have been spared, but this probably won’t be the last time you’ll read about an endangered observatory.

Today has been a good day for smackdowns! First up, Simon White in New Scientist, punching up his previous argument:

We need to apply a hard-nosed cost-benefit analysis to dark energy projects. We must recognise the cultural differences between high-energy physics and astronomy, and be willing to argue that astronomical discoveries - that the universe expands, chemical elements were built in stars, black holes exist, planets orbit other stars - are no less significant for humanity than clarifying the underlying nature of forces and particles.

Any large new astronomical project should be designed to push back frontiers in several areas of astronomy…

If we don’t do these things, we may lose both the creative brains and the instruments that our field needs to remain vibrant. Dark energy is a Pied Piper, luring astronomers away from their home territory to follow high-energy physicists down the path to professional extinction.

Next, Pope Benedict (via Atrios and Cynical-C), putting the hurt on those nefarious splitters:

The Vatican reiterated Tuesday that the Catholic Church is the one true church established by Jesus Christ and that other Christian denominations are defective, although they have elements of truth and sanctity.

In a brief document, “Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine of the Church,” the Vatican’s doctrinal office, with Pope Benedict XVI’s approval, reiterated controversial assertions made in its 2000 document, “Dominus Iesus,” that Christian denominations that do not have apostolic succession — the ability to trace their bishops back to Christ’s original apostles — can’t properly be called churches.

And finally, Senator Patrick Leahy, via Matthew Yglesias and a dozen other blogs:

A powerful elixir of sarcasm and high dudgeon mixed into a few sort sentences! Awesome.

Vote for your favorite.

So, I’ve been in the throes of grant proposal writing, which as far as I can tell is the worst part of becoming a professor. As such, I’ve been ignoring as much of my email as humanly possible for the past week. Until I got an email from David Weinberg this afternoon, announcing to the SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) mailing list the arrival of a new web-based galaxy classification project, Galaxy Zoo. The project was started by some scientists with SDSS, including Alex Szalay and Bob Nichol, and others. They had a press release today, and it’s already been covered by the BBC and was picked up by AP, so I think the website has gotten a bit hammered in the first day.

The basic idea here is to harness the collective eyes and brains of the internet to visually classify galaxies by morphology. It turns out that galaxy mophologies are in some ways a lot easier to classify by eye than by computer, just like faces and other complex images. This is one reason that now that surveys include millions of galaxies, morphology studies have not been as popular as other classification schemes based on colors or spectral types. Apparently, galaxy zoo to the rescue!

Here’s the first thing I learned: looking at pictures of galaxies is a lot more fun than writing proposals to the NSF to get funding to think about galaxies.
(Dear Galaxy Zoo: if I don’t get a CAREER grant this year, I blame you!)

There were tools to do this before, and I actually have managed to (finally) look
at a bunch of these Sloan galaxies over the past few years (I’m a theorist who’s never been observing, and normally I only look at fake galaxies in my computer — or real galaxies labeled by just a couple of variables like luminosity and color instead of their infinite structural variety). But the fact that galaxyzoo gives you a goal for looking at each galaxy makes it totally addictive. Plus galaxies are just pretty awesome looking! Even better, each galaxy has a link directly back to the SDSS Sky Server, which has tons of other info about the galaxy, like a spectrum where available, 5 band magnitudes, etc.
Personally, I found myself compelled to look at this information when perplexed about how to classify something. What’s it’s color? Is it star forming? What’s is redshift? All there. (Really, it was all there in the Sky Server before, but this is a pretty cool interface to it because you start by wondering.)

It turns out there’s a lot of cool stuff in the Universe. In just a bit of classifying, I found a couple of cool galaxy interactions (click for more info):

A galaxy that to me looks like the cartwheel galaxy with bad seeing:

My main gripe about the site is that they’ve made the classification pretty simple,
just allowing for 3 types of spirals, counterclockwise, clockwise, and edge on
(none of which are really different types in the classical sense), elliptical galaxies, and mergers.
What was I supposed to do with the cartwheel?
And what about this bloby guy, which has whopping H-alpha and OII emission and the mysterious zwarning “NOT_GAL”? Clearly has no structure but I just couldn’t bring myself to call it an elliptical.

Or these very nebulous beauties:

I kept wishing for a button that said “This one’s interesting” or allowed me to choose from a menu, including things like “close pair“, “blobby star forming thing“,
“scoop of neopolitan ice cream” or “i’ve got a green crayon“.
In all seriousness, I understand the simple scheme, but it does seem like there’s a lot of potential here from a lot of eyes that won’t be realized with it. I wonder whether a lot of this won’t come from the classification statistics, though, i.e., probably many of the interested objects will have less consistent classifications than normal ellipticals or spirals.

To be honest, I think I have exactly the wrong amount of knowledge to do this task effectively as designed — I overanalyze it and think I must know what’s going on, but am clearly just a clueless theorist. Turns out we’re still trying to explain the two most basic parameters.

Anyways, go check it out. A Universe of galaxies awaits at your fingertips!

Increasingly, the 2008 Presidential campaign is taking on the form of some sort of weird competitive theology stand-off. “My faith is stronger than yours!” “Yeah, well, my God can kick your God’s ass any day of the week! Except on Sunday, when He rests.” Not that you can really blame the candidates; when Americans put atheists just above child molesters in terms of electability, savvy politicians are happy to put their faith in the Big Guy on public display.

Which provides us with an excuse to fire up the Wayback Machine and revisit last May, which brought to us this delicious circumlocution by Karl Rove, of all people:

Karl Rove is not a believer, and he doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, but when asked, he answers quite honestly. I think the way he puts it is, “I’m not fortunate enough to be a person of faith.”

That’s courtesy of Christopher Hitchens (of all people).

The “I’m not fortunate enough” phraseology raises two questions. One is, “Is Karl Rove congenitally capable of telling the truth?” I’m guessing no. If he is not a person of faith, then he believes that people of faith are wrong. So he’s saying that he’s not fortunate enough to be wrong. Which is the sort of transcendently twisted conflation of condescension and disingenuousness that only a true political genius is able to achieve, and even then only when all the stars are properly aligned.

The other question is, “Should atheists feel regretful that God doesn’t exist?” To reformulate it in a more operational language, imagine that you are given the choice of a Red Pill and a Blue Pill. If you choose the Red Pill, you suddenly and with 100% certainty live in a world which is purely materialistic, governed by impersonal and ironclad laws of nature, in which we human beings are nothing other than complicated chemical reactions, and there is no realm outside the physical. If you choose the Blue Pill, you suddenly and with 100% certainty live in a world which shares the same gross features and known laws of physics as our world, but in which there exists an all-powerful supernatural deity who cares about us humans and is the origin of our lives and consciousness. Which do you choose?

Not only would I unhesitatingly choose the purely-materialist cosmos in which I actually believe, I would have guessed that almost all atheists would do so. But Ezra Klein provides at least one counterexample, so there you go.

On the face of it, the notion of a higher power that somehow cares about us can be attractive. (Also potentially attractive is the handing-down of rules from on high, helping one decide what actions are right or wrong — there’s something reassuring about being told what to do, rather than working out the rules of the game as you play.) It’s nice to have someone looking over you, in precisely the same way that it’s nice to have parents that care for you when you’re growing up. When it becomes unattractive, I think, is when you try to think seriously and consistently about what kind of deity could possibly be consistent with the world in which we live. One that is purportedly pretty darn powerful, but that allows all sorts of pain and suffering. One that, if the majority of scriptures are to be believed, not only “cares” about us, but is quite willing to punish us when we go wrong, despite handing down somewhat muddled instructions. One that, despite all that power, seems to be pretty darned parsimonious when it comes to actually intervening on our behalf. And one that, when it comes to giving moral guidance in the tangible form of the teaching of various religions, seems to hew suspiciously closely to the prejudices of the local tribes that wrote them down.

When taken to their logical conclusions, the consequences of a supernaturally powerful deity that judges us from on high are not really ones that I would prefer to live with. I know that some people would feel a sort of cosmic disappointment that they and their loved ones simply represent the workings-out of a few physical laws when applied to some particularly complicated chemical structures, but I don’t share the feeling. None of that prevents me from loving them just as fiercely, or caring just as much about justice or beauty in the world. I’m stuck in a universe where the rules of right and wrong and good and bad are for me to decide, on the basis of reason and evidence and consultation and negotiation with my fellow chemical reactions. I like it that way; give me the Red Pill any day.

According to the Argus Leader, via the Science Journalism Tracker. The National Science Foundation has finally decided on a location for its Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, which has been up in the air for years now. The winner is the place that had a head start on its various competitors: the Homestake Mine in the Black Hills.

The underground lab will be the site for a diverse array of experiments, from searches for dark matter and proton decay to investigations into biology and geology under extreme conditions. The Homestake site is already famous, of course, as the home of Ray Davis’s neutrino experiment, where the solar neutrino problem was first identified. The mine itself, the deepest and (until recently) oldest operating mine in the Western Hemisphere, was operational until 2001. The NSF immediately wanted to take it over to use as a lab, but the Barrick Mining Corporation demanded that the government also assume any future liability for problems arising the mine (not a stance that fills one with confidence), and if not, they would flood it. While negotiations dragged on, others jumped into the game, and eventually a competition was launched that ended up choosing Homestake anyway. I’m not expert enough to judge whether the effort expended on the competition was all just a waste of time, or whether the ultimate scientific capabilities of the facility were really improved by the process.