CV’s spam filter has been a tad bit overenthusiastic these days, so I’ve recently had to troll through the spam to retrieve misfiled comments. As expected, the spam is a morass of viagra ads and truly horrid lists of porn-related search terms (where “horrid” means “things that Dan Savage would not approve of”). But lurking in there is a new breed of affirmation spam:

Warm greetings! Thanks for all the information, a very nice and well done site! Cheers.

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Moreover, now that they’re tired of thinking only of on-line casino gambling, spammers seem to wish to join the CV conversation:

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I am not sure that I can completely understand your comments. Would you be so kind as to expand on your reasoning a little more before I comment.

Sometimes, though, the spammers enthusiasm for our work transcends their usual respectful admiration:

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And at least among the spammers, our work is being appreciated.

Thank you. You have helped someone more than you could know.

Trevor Paglen has written a fun book, peeking discreetly into the “black world” of secret military projects by reproducing the patches worn by workers on the projects. The patches are surprisingly artful and whimsical, often invoking wizards and dragons to heighten the aura of mystery. Here is a typical example:

In this case, the motto has proven accurate, as Paglen was unable to figure out what unit was associated with the patch. Probably has nothing to do with pornographic movies, but you never know.

The staging areas for many of the secret operations are in the Southwest U.S., including the Area 51/Groom Lake facility where conspiracy theorists are convinced that the government is harboring alien technology from the crash at Roswell. Which, as you might imagine, makes for great source material for the patches. This one comes from the 509th Bomb Wing, in charge of the B-2 Stealth Bomber — the 509th used to be based in Roswell, although it has now moved to Missouri.

“Gustatus Similis Pullus” translates from Latin as “Tastes Like Chicken.” Get it? “To Serve Man?” If not, there is a subtle knife and fork on the patch just to drive home the message.

Other times, the emphasis on secrecy is more overt. This patch is from the 22nd Military Airlift Squadron, which would fly C-5’s to deliver classified aircraft from aerospace plants in Southern California to testing facilities around the country.

“NOYFB,” in case you were wondering, stands for “None of your fucking business.”

Over at Steinn’s place, we’re all a twitter anticipating the number of Hubble Space Telescope proposals submitted this Cycle. Fancy new instruments and shiny bad-ass spectrographs coming to the telescope, so interest should be high. Based on comments, here’s proposal number versus time until deadline. I’ll add any late breaking data to the plot — post submission times (PST, preferrably, because math iz hard) in comments here or at Steinn’s, and I’ll add them as I can.

Apparently this is a nice exponential, so my prediction is that we’ll have an infinite number of proposals this round.

Update: No! Flattening off! We may not even break 1000, which is a shock! Highest number so far is 928 at 10 minutes until the deadline. Extrapolated fit uses the most recent decade in time. Any procrastinators out there have something higher?

Post-Mortem: While cracking some beers with my group at 5:05 PST, we talked with a student who had submitted a STIS proposal. Apparently the spectroscopic ETC (exposure time calculator) was all kinds of crazy, so I’m betting that cut down on the number of proposals one could just whip out for COS or STIS. The imaging ETC worked just great (or at least, it lied convincingly). I also agree with Steinn that a lot of people decided to sit this one out, since there were of course going to be 2000 proposals (the same way that the number of proposals went up after the ACS failure, since of course no one was going to be asking for time on WFPC2 and NICMOS). Apparently you’d make a killing placing short sales on HST proposal betting.

Apparently heretics are, on the aggregate, lazier than I suspected. I had the unusual pleasure of reading a blog post for completely independent reasons and coming across my own name — Ethan Zuckerman was reporting on a talk given by gerontologist Aubrey de Grey at the recent BIL Conference, in which he quotes my line from the Edge World Question Center that “Being a heretic is hard work.” (His other quote was from Gandhi.) It hadn’t occurred to me that such a sentiment was sufficiently unique to deserve being quoted, but as far as Google knows nobody else has pointed this out before. (While we’re at it, did nobody appreciate my previous Google joke?)

So I re-read my own World Question Center entry, and (to nobody’s surprise) I thought it was great. I’m my own most sympathetic audience. But in my post here about the WQC, I linked to the entry but didn’t reprint it in its entirely. Which I will hereby do now, because I’m a busy guy and you are busy blog readers who don’t always have the time to click on a link. Being a blogger is hard work.

———————————————

Growing up as a young proto-scientist, I was always strongly anti-establishmentarian, looking forward to overthrowing the System as our generation’s new Galileo. Now I spend a substantial fraction of my time explaining and defending the status quo to outsiders. It’s very depressing.

As an undergraduate astronomy major I was involved in a novel and exciting test of Einstein’s general relativity — measuring the precession of orbits, just like Mercury in the Solar System, but using massive eclipsing binary stars. What made it truly exciting was that the data disagreed with the theory! (Which they still do, by the way.) How thrilling is it to have the chance to overthrow Einstein himself? Of course there are more mundane explanations — the stars are tilted, or there is an invisible companion star perturbing their orbits, and these hypotheses were duly considered. But I wasn’t very patient with such boring possibilities — it was obvious to me that we had dealt a crushing blow to a cornerstone of modern physics, and the Establishment was just too hidebound to admit it.

Now I know better. Physicists who are experts in the field tend to be skeptical of experimental claims that contradict general relativity, not because they are hopelessly encumbered by tradition, but because Einstein’s theory has passed a startlingly diverse array of experimental tests. Indeed, it turns out to be almost impossible to change general relativity in a way that would be important for those binary stars, but which would not have already shown up in the Solar System. Experiments and theories don’t exist in isolation — they form a tightly connected web, in which changes to any one piece tend to reverberate through various others.

So now I find myself cast as a defender of scientific orthodoxy — from classics like relativity and natural selection, to modern wrinkles like dark matter and dark energy. In science, no orthodoxy is sacred, or above question — there should always be a healthy exploration of alternatives, and I have always enjoyed inventing new theories of gravity or cosmology, keeping in mind the variety of evidence in favor of the standard picture. But there is also an unhealthy brand of skepticism, proceeding from ignorance rather than expertise, which insists that any consensus must flow from a reluctance to face up to the truth, rather than an appreciation of the evidence. It’s that kind of skepticism that keeps showing up in my email. Unsolicited.

Heresy is more romantic than orthodoxy. Nobody roots for Goliath, as Wilt Chamberlain was fond of saying. But in science, ideas tend to grow into orthodoxy for good reasons. They fit the data better than the alternatives. Many casual heretics can’t be bothered with all the detailed theoretical arguments and experimental tests that support the models they hope to overthrow — they have a feeling about how the universe should work, and are convinced that history will eventually vindicate them, just as it did Galileo.

What they fail to appreciate is that, scientifically speaking, Galileo overthrew the system from within. He understood the reigning orthodoxy of his time better than anyone, so he was better able to see beyond it. Our present theories are not complete, and nobody believes they are the final word on how Nature works. But finding the precise way to make progress, to pinpoint the subtle shift of perspective that will illuminate a new way of looking at the world, will require an intimate familiarity with our current ideas, and a respectful appreciation of the evidence supporting them.

Being a heretic can be fun; but being a successful heretic is mostly hard work.

Pretty soon, on March 9, we’ll all change our clocks one hour forward to change from standard to daylight-savings time. An absolutely pure misnomer, daylight savings time is nevertheless, to my mind, the greatest success story of mass psychological control there ever has been. Just imagine if the government put out some sort of strongly worded encouragement that everyone needs to get up an hour earlier, starting Monday, and should continue to do so for the next eight months, so as to save energy and have a little more time in the evening when it’s light out. I imagine not many people would comply.

But, what they do instead is to say, “okay, starting early Sunday morning, it will suddenly be an hour later on your clock for the next eight months!” And, magically, just about everyone complies…it’s breathtaking, actually.

But what time is it really? This week, on February 29 we have a Leap Day, a once-every-four-years event. Actually, it’s not once every four years; we skip it every hundred years, except we don’t skip it every four hundred years. That is, 2000 was a leap year, but 1900, 1800, 1700 etc. were not. We’ve been doing this since 1582 when Pope Gregory introduced the new calendar to keep Easter from drifting, slowly but surely, away from the spring equinox, that magical moment when the earth’s axis makes an angle of 90 degrees to the line connecting the center of the sun with the center of the earth. On the spring equinox, the length of day and night are equal everywhere on the earth (at the poles the sun remains on the horizon all day). In the Gregorian calendar, the average calendar year is 365.2425 days, because this is the average number of days from one spring equinox to the next.

If you ask the average person on the street, though, just what “one year” means, though, they’ll most likely say “it’s the amount of time it takes the earth to go around the sun”. What they are probably thinking is that the imaginary line mentioned above from the earth to the sun sweeps out a full circle in one year; this is called a sidereal year: the time it takes for the sun to appear in the same place against the backdrop of the fixed stars. They’d be close, but no cigar: the earth’s axis, which is tilted at about 23.5 degrees to the plane of the earth’s orbit, is actually not fixed in its direction in space. The earth rotates on an axis which precesses, similar to that of a spinning top with one point fixed. It takes 26,000 years to go al the way around and come back roughly where it was. And so, in fact, the calendar year (also called the “tropical year”) is about 20 minutes shorter than the sidereal year. (You can easily calculate this yourself: it’s 1/26000 of a year!)

Our Gregorian calendar will keep the spring equinox quite close to March 21 or so, but eventually our familiar winter constellations like Orion will eventually become summer ones, and the North Star will appear to move in ever-widening circles about the celestial north pole.

If you dig further into all this you quickly see that the day, which I am sure you’ll find people to tell you is “24 hours” has a similarly ambiguous definition. The sidereal day, the time it takes the earth to spin once on its axis, is 23 hours, 56 min, 4.1 sec., just less than the solar day of 24 hours. Not surprisingly, after you think about it, this difference is close to 1/365 of a day, since as the earth goes around the sun, one full orbit is in effect a day. (If the earth were not rotating, then there would be one solar day per year.)

But is a day even exactly 24 hours? It turns out that for various reasons, the earth’s rotation speeds up and slows down over long periods. The second was redefined in 1967 to be the time it takes for 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom. This is the basis for our measurement of time in the SI system of units. As a result, we no longer define the second as 1/86400 of a solar day, and we need to add in a leap second every so often to account for the fact that the earth’s rotation is slowing by about 2.3 milliseconds per day per century, and we chose the year 1900 as the reference for the second. This means we are now accumulating one leap second every 430 days or so. We’ve added leap seconds at about that rate since the first one in 1972 (always at midnight on New Year’s Eve).

So now we have International Atomic Time (TAI) with no leap seconds, and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) which have drifted apart by 33 seconds since 1972. We need both systems, since we want a simple way to calculate accurate time differences without having to take into account leap seconds, but we want noon to stay when the sun is high in the sky. The US Navy is on it, don’t worry.

Except for that one-hour daylight “savings” time…

Actual footage of U.S. Senator Arlen Specter questioning National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell as part of an inquiry into whether or not the New England Patriots sneakily videotaped their opponent’s sidelines. An issue, we can all agree, of world-historical importance.

Brad DeLong disentangles the messages that a (male) professor sends by wearing a tie. (Inspired by this sad little diatribe, properly mocked here.)

I have found that wearing a suit and tie is very effective if done occasionally with non-math-oriented students. It tells them that I care because it shows that I have taken sufficient time to prepare and teach the class even though I am a busy person whose schedule requires meetings with:

• some powerful political figure,
• some powerful economic figure,
• some powerful university administrative figure, or
• some TV interviewer

With math-oriented students, however, a tie tells them that I spend too little time thinking about isomorphisms

Cf. Focus. Professors were once students.

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.

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.

Craig Barrett, the chairman of Intel Corporation, doesn’t mince words. In a scathing op-ed piece in the SF Chronicle, he describes the high-tech industry view of the dreadful state of funding for basic science research in 2008, due to the last-minute earmarking by the congressional appropriations committees.

“At a time when the rest of the world is increasing its emphasis on math and science education (the most recent international tests - NAEP and PISA - show U.S. kids to be below average) and increasing their budgets for basic engineering and physical science research, Congress is telling the world these areas are not important to our future.”

Mr. Barrett, thank you!