Researchers at University of Arizona’s Lunar & Planetary Laboratory have just released images of major rockslides on Mars in progress.

That’s just plain cool. Phil at Bad Astronomy has more, as expected!

Spotted in the Google Ads sidebar of a news article:

So there’s snow in Chicago, and I’m stuck on the tarmac in Baltimore, on the phone to United Airlines, trying to reschedule my connection. But alas, the chipper recorded gentleman has not offered me the option “If you are currently trapped in an airplane, please say ‘Trapped’”. I take the best of the available options, but that man on the phone keeps prodding me for more information, none of which seems to be leading me closer to dealing with the “trapped on an airplane” issue. In increasing frustration, I start muttering “Operator. Operator. Operator”. After which I hear:

Infinitely patient phone guy: “I heard that you want an agent. Is this correct?”

Me: “Y.e.s.”

Infinitely patient phone guy: “Thank you! Before I transfer you, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

Me (muttering): “oh fuck you.”

Infinitely patient phone guy: “I’ll transfer you to an agent immediately!”

Apparently, the voice recognition system has an escape hatch.

Rediscovering this ancient Sesame Street skit has been my one source of joy while I slog through the writing of an immense, tedious, but necessary data paper.

Former UW grad student Jason Steffen got a wee bit irked on a flight a few years ago. Which led to this:

arXiv:0802:0733

Using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo optimization algorithm and a computer simulation, I find the passenger ordering which minimizes the time required to board the passengers onto an airplane. The model that I employ assumes that the time that a passenger requires to load his or her luggage is the dominant contribution to the time needed to completely fill the aircraft. The optimal boarding strategy may reduce the time required to board and airplane by over a factor of four and possibly more depending upon the dimensions of the aircraft. I explore some features of the optimal boarding method and discuss practical modifications to the optimal. Finally, I mention some of the benefits that could come from implementing an improved passenger boarding scheme.

While you will not find the article in Phys Rev, it will hopefully be found in a future issue of the Journal of Air Transportation Management.

One of my postdocs has turned me on to blackle.com. The simple idea behind Blackle is that it’s identical to Google, except for the energy efficient black background:

It’s a cute idea, though they should have chosen dark blue and gone for “Bloogle”.

Now that late January is upon us, a wave of graduate school admissions letters is soon to come crashing down upon undergraduates throughout the land. The process can be immensely frustrating to a student, as one often has little idea as to what magic ingredient is determining whether one is admitted or rejected from different schools. Having been involved in graduate admissions decisions for much of the last decade, I therefore thought I’d give a summary of how it’s done at UW Astronomy, so students can get a sense of where in the process their application might potentially go astray. My take will be different from other schools and other departments whose admissions committees may emphasize different strengths, but at least it’s one data point where few are available.

Details below the fold. Enter if you dare!
Continue reading ‘The Other Side of Graduate Admissions’

Given that no one seems to have told Seattle about the housing bubble or economic downturn, developers are throwing up Hip! New! Condos! all over the metropolitan area. The most heavily advertised are those just north of downtown, in the South Lake Union area, largely because this area is underdeveloped, awash in biotech firms, and the future site of the new Amazon headquarters. Given the neighborhood’s demographic, the new condos are naturally targeting high-tech urban professionals who can afford $500K for a one-bedroom loft.

Now, if you were marketing condos to someone working in “high-tech”, would you then name your condo development this?

Carbon-fifty-WHA!?!?! Carbon 12, or Carbon 13, now that I’d consider, but 56????? There’s no “56″ anywhere in the address, or even in the stupid phone number. It’s not at the intersection of 7th and 8th (it’s near 9th, but 56 isn’t even divisible by 9). A bit of web research finally reveals that there are 56 units in the building, but that’s hardly reason enough for forcing residents to sound like scientifically illiterate ignoramuses every time they give their address: “Where should you pick me up? Oh, just outside of Carbon-mumble-mumble-mumble….”

I just can’t wait till they sell all the darn things, because the ads make me flinch.

ESA has just done the first big press release for the Integral gamma-ray telescope, and the big woosh you’re hearing is the sound of numerous dark matter models flushing down the toilet.

For several years the community has been carefully eyeing an extended, apparently spherical excess of gamma-rays from the center of the galaxy. Theorists have been busy generating crafty models where the excess in gamma-rays comes from the direct annhilation of dark matter particles, or from a decay chain from the dark matter particles themselves. These models were attractive because the shape and extent of the gamma-ray detection was wrong for just about any Galactic source except for the dark matter halo itself. The dark matter halo would produce just the right sort of signal, since it’s presumably highly cuspy in the center, leading to high rates of the sorts of interactions which might lead to detectable photons, but only near the center of the galaxy. The halo is also expected to be mostly spherical, as was consistent with the previous observations.

Well, with the higher resolution of the new Integral telescope, the distribution of gamma-rays looks distinctly disklike and lopsided, which smells much more like a boring old astronomical explanation (where “boring” means something to do with neutron stars and black holes, but still — no one’s expecting the Nobel Prize for this one, yet).

I have no independent knowledge of the veracity of this report, but a local TV station in the Bay Area is reporting rumors that the SETI program running at the upgraded Arecibo radio telescope has detected an anomalous signal (or in the very high tech language of their reporting, a “mystery signal”). The report includes some quotes from Dan Wertheimer, the director of the program, so presumably the reporter talked to someone with verifiable science cred before writing the piece. The quotes from the project’s scientists are guarded enough that I’m guessing this is just a lousy job of science reporting in the local news.

The part that got my blood pressure going was the follow-up about what we should answer back. The idea that our backward, technologically impaired civilization should jump up and down and wave its arms around saying “LOOKY HERE!!!! LOOKY HERE!!!! PICK ME!!!!”, is,….what’s the word….oh….batshit crazy. History is not exactly awash in cases where the technologically less advanced civilization wound up the winner when two cultures collide. Usually, it gets rolled.

In spite of this, some crazy optimists in Russia are actually beaming signals out to nearby stars, right now. This “active SETI” program strikes me as completely foolish, and has already caused a rift within the SETI community (so apparently, I’m not alone in my abject fear of being spotted by a more advanced civilization). While this issue hopefully has less urgency than figuring out the political response to planetary climate change, we need to eventually get our collective goverments organized into a treaty about how to deal with this issue. Suppose someday we actually detect some alien space ship whizzing through our local neighborhood. Do we let the Raelians and Scientologists invite them down for a drink, even if the rest of us think it’s better to lay low?

In the meanwhile, Earth should just STFU.

(UPDATE: Link to timesonline changed to the original reporting that they swiped from a much better article by David Grinspoon at Seed.)

(AND ANOTHER UPDATE: Phil Plait did some actual reporting (you know, calling and actually asking), and yup, it’s just bad journalism, as expected.)