Category: Science

  • Leonid Meteors Tonight!

    You should go outside and watch the Leonid meteor shower tonight (Friday Nov. 16, 2012). It will produce many more shooting stars than the normal 6-10 per hour, and if we’re lucky, it’ll be a one-per-second show. It all depends on the density of the stream that the Earth is passing through (see the link).

    What I find coolest about these periodic meteor showers is that you can see exactly which direction the Earth is flying by following the various meteor trails back to their point of origin. The spot in the sky from which they all seem to originate is the direction that the Earth is passing through the cometary leftovers. That’s cool.

    According to the wikipedia post, the Leonids hit the Earth at 72 km/sec, which if you know a bit of orbital mechanics means that the shower stream is orbiting the Sun in retrograde, as that’s the only way a sun-orbiting body can impact the Earth at that speed.

    Like I said, very cool.

    I don’t have a good viewing location around me, but I’ll go out on my porch with my sleeping bag and just hang out watching the sky.

  • Happy Higgs Boson (And Fourth of July)

    Happy American Independence Day! In case you don’t follow physics circles, you may not be aware that the Large Hadron Collider detector teams have announced the detection of a particle that falls within the predicted energy range of the Higgs Boson! This is awesome! ((And they didn’t destroy the Earth doing it.))

    Why? I’ll send you to the Bad Astronomer for the discussion. But this is tres cool (or whatever the Swiss version of that phrase is).

    So, Happy Fourth of July; we know more about the universe today than we did yesterday.

  • Better Titled: “Nationalistic Propaganda Works!”

    Jim Galloway of the AJC had a tidbit this morning:

    Beware: If you go to a Fourth of July celebration on Monday, your kids are statistically more likely to end up Republican.

    The study, out of Harvard, relates the likelihood of identifying as Republican to the amount of precipitation on the 4th of July. They used rainfall data on all the various July 4ths, between 1920 and 1990 to estimate your likelihood of having experienced a 4th of July parade as a child. The found a significant correlation between July 4th Parades and Identification as Republican.

    I love statistics.

  • Attention Roleplaying Travelers: Tetrahedra Pack Best

    Just now coming to my attention: Experiments in packing have determined that tetrahedra (4 sided dice) pack together most efficiently (subscription req’d) when randomly shaken in boxes.

    This news, from last year, is quite cool because how else do you apply the “Role Every Die You Own For Damage” rule unless you can pack your dice into as small a volume as possible?

    Here’s an article from Science Daily talking about the study. They used an MRI to image the boxes!

    Science!

  • Two Sciencey Things

    First off, you may have heard that Benoit Mandelbrot died. Who? Go to the link.

    At that link was this video which is just way stinkin’ cool.

    Mandelbrot Fractal Set Trip To e214 HD from teamfresh on Vimeo.

    And then, this popped up in my feedreader. I have no idea about the science here, but it’s fun to watch.

  • Why The LHC Won't Destroy the Earth

    There’s been lots of noise this summer about the incipient destruction of the Earth by the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. There’s been scientists quoted as saying, basically, “Yes, there’s a teeny tiny chance that the LHC will produce black holes or quantum strangelets or Evil Elmo, but it’s so small as to be negligible.” These quotes are then re-processed as to say “Scientists declare that Elmo may Devour World!”

    This is all silly. But not for the reasons you might think. First, here’s my Declaration:

    I, William M. Ruhsam, Jr., guarantee that the LHC will not destroy the Earth. There is no possibility, at all, that this may occur. I’ll stake anything you care to name on that fact.

    This is not bravado. I have total confidence in this. Why?

    Because it won’t matter one little tiny damn bit if I’m wrong. If I’m wrong, we’re all either sucked into a black hole, blown to smithereens, or eaten by a cosmic muppet. There’s no downside that results in me having to eat my words. Scientists are being too scientific! They’re not examining the consequences if they’re wrong. Consequences = none because we have to be here for there to be consequences.

    So, particle physicists, you have my permission to state boldly that there is no possibility of the LHC wreaking havoc on us. You can say this with certainty, standing up proud. No ethics committee will have time to convene if you’re wrong.

  • Pluto is Two Years Dead

    Today is the two year anniversary of Pluto’s demotion from planet status. I had invited several people to contribute to this event. Chris Schierer has remarked that Pluto is really really small and is very very hard to see. Kim Bosco tells us how Pluto was found and why Kansas is key! Jim Cronen opines about classification and lastly, Steph Sisson has composed a planetary haiku for the event:

    Like your dark namesake,
    return to deepest shadow.
    Retrograde motion

    I also have an opinion and some comments on this event


    You may recall that in 2006, the International Planetary Union decided on a definition of “planet” that did not include Pluto.

    The IAU members gathered at the 2006 General Assembly agreed that a “planet” is defined as a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

    The clinching criteria was the (c) item. Pluto doesn’t have a large enough mass to have “cleared the neighbourhood”. Unfortunately, as several people have pointed out, if Mercury (a planet) were transported to the Kuiper Belt, it wouldn’t be a planet anymore. The definition is fundamentally arbitrary and therefore hasn’t much scientific usefulness.

    This has implications for the ongoing search for “planets” in other solar systems. To date, most of the discovered extra-solar (“not in our solar system”) planets have been large ones. Jupiter-sized or so. These fit anyone’s definition of planet. Several planets close to the size of Earth have also been located. Soon, as techniques and technology improve, even smaller bodies will be found. We’re going to have to pigeon-hole these orbiting piles of rock and ice into our preconceived definitions of what is a planet, and what is not. People will think differently of a planet then they will a moon, or an asteroid, or a Kuiper belt object, or whatever. Don’t forget that the moons Titan (orbiting Saturn) and Ganymede (orbiting Jupiter) are both larger than Mercury, although less massive. Don’t tell me that your school teachers didn’t concentrate more on Mercury than they did Titan or Ganymede because I’ll know you’re lying.

    These preconceived notions, while not detrimental in and of themselves, can lead to dangerous blindspots when performing that grandest of tasks: science. While I have faith that eventually these blindspots are exposed and examined, wouldn’t it be better to not force astronomers, astrophysicists and other scientists to pre-ordain orbiting bodies into the categories of “planet” or “not-planet”. A more all-inclusive term is needed for the various piles of rock, ice and gas that circle their central furnaces. “Planet” should probably not be used anymore in science, with an exception:

    For the purposes of Grade School science instruction, I think that we should call the most recent 9 planets (including Pluto, for historical reasons) the “official” planets of our solar system and then discard the term in later science instruction, explaining that “planet” is only a convenient label for several large bodies that circle our sun and that it is not a scientific term.

    Pluto isn’t a planet anymore, alas. It still has a large place in the hearts of those of us who care.

  • I've Been Taken To Task

    I posted on Friday about vaccines and my opinion of parents who don’t do use them.

    Ginger Taylor responded (and snarked at me for not approving her comment fast enough). She makes some points, to which I respond.

    I want to know what you, my regular readers, think. Am I being a mouthpiece for corporate pharmaceutical or does the science hold up?

  • Fay

    People don’t pay attention to the weather outside their immediate vicinity unless it’s a catastrophic incident that makes national/international news. Thus we have Tropical Storm Fay, which isn’t bothering me personally at the moment but sure is causing headaches for my neighbors to the south (although I used to live in one of the flooded towns).

    What’s interesting about Fay, from a strictly academic standpoint, is the degree to which it has snubbed its nose at the best efforts of forecasters. SciGuy has the lowdown on the latest.


    If you don’t want to read about Fay, you can see the evolution of the AT-AT

  • Bigfoot! A.K.A. "Fleecing Gullible People"

    Don’t forget that today is the Big Reveal™ of the big foot carcass that was found/shot/planted in the north Georgia mountains. I commented on this yesterday.

    Today, however, I clicked over to the alleged big foot finders’ scam artists’ website searchingforbigfoot.com. Alas, I was horribly disappointed. I was hoping that if you’re charging $1,000 a slot for positions on a big foot expedition, at least you could have an attractive website. Despite the design, there is a wealth of information about the creature on the site. For example:

    A body that may very well be the body of the creature commonly known as “Bigfoot” has been found in the woods in northern Georgia.

    Next time I turn in a traffic report for consideration by my client, I’m going to use the phrase, “this traffic report may very well be an honest representation of the development in question. You be the judge!”

    I’m not going to nitpick everything on the website, but this keeps popping up:

    DNA evidence and photo evidence of the creature will be presented in a press conference…

    Gosh, no one has ever manipulated photos before, and while I’m not any kind of biologist or forensic specialist, what kind of “DNA evidence” is this exactly? Will this prove that the creature has DNA at all? Or will it demonstrate that it’s a large biped? I honestly don’t know if someone can determine what a creature is from its DNA. I posted a question over at Pharyngula about this. I’ll update when there’s an answer.

    Update: Thanks to Llewelly and Ranson for helping out. Apparently, yes, you could do a determination with DNA that a sample is a primate and run some comparisons, but still, what is this really going to teach us? They’ll probably say that this DNA sample is “98% consistent with human DNA” or something like that. It could be chimp DNA for all we know.
    So, if you’re interested, the Big Reveal™ is today at noon (pacific time, I assume). We’ll see what comes about. My bet is “nothing”. Or “nothing that can’t be faked up by three guys with some time.”

    Here’s the info on the reveal as posted on their website.:

    Date: Friday, August 15, 2008
    Time: From 12Noon-1:00pm
    Place: Cabana Hotel-Palo Alto, 4290 El Camino Real
    Palo Alto, California 94306
    (A Crown Plaza Resort)

    I just love the “(A Crown Plaza Resort)” parenthetical remark!