This article is really interesting and touches on a lot of bits of science I find fascinating even though I don't work on them.

( Does the brain feature built-in noise? )

I felt a rush of elation when I read this. It reminds me of my wonderful friends and the freedoms they deserve, and of how proud I felt to be living in the Bay Area on Valentine's Day 2004. Here's the article from the New York Times, and just for you some photos that always make me cry.

( California Court Affirms Right to Gay Marriage )

This is hilarious, especially the animation. It's actually the basis of some really silly litigation. I love how all the commenters are trying to be the wronged townspeople in a science fiction movie.

"Most engineers forget that matter is made up of atoms" - said jokingly (one hopes) by the professor in my graduate-level materials science class

I am enjoying the nanomechanics class a lot, especially the lightning coverage of elasticity and deformation we just did, which wasn't a review for me since I had never seen the material before. And for some reason it came to me, as I was looking around and realized for the bajillionth time that the other girl in the class had dropped out and I was the only female there--one of the most valuable things I carried with me out of my childhood was the idea that I could do anything if I worked hard. It sounds really cliche, I know, but it was something my parents told me (mostly) and I heard in Girl Scouts a lot. And I think it accounts for a lot about the speed that public education pre-college runs, because there's a lot of wasted space that isn't filled because parents are afraid of overtaxing their kids and the kids are told it would be too much. It also is a big factor in women's scarcity in science/technology/engineering/math (STEM fields, it's called) because from a very early age, women are told that it is unfeminine to enjoy these things, and women are bad at them. And by the way, both women and men are told STEM fields are really hard and only really smart people can do them. A lot more people could pursue these careers if they weren't pushed away like this, and we aren't doing ourselves any favors in terms of public science education by telling everyone that it's too hard for laypeople to understand even basic science. This is where intelligent design comes from.

I wish I remember the reference, but I saw a study awhile back where they took a group of black students and a group of female students, divided each group into two, and gave them all competency exams. Half the black students were told, "Traditionally black students do poorly on language exams, though that is statistical and doesn't necessary apply to each of you," and the other half of these students were told, "Students who work hard and pay attention can improve exam scores," then both groups took a language test. Half the female students were told, "Traditionally female students do poorly on math exams, though that is statistical and doesn't necessary apply to each of you," and the other half of these students were told, "Students who work hard and pay attention can improve exam scores," then both groups took a math test. I hope you are not surprised by the fact that students who were told that were told that hard work pays off outscored the ones who were demotivated at the beginning. Just being told that you can work to achieve whatever you like, and while some subjects are more work than others none are out of your reach, makes a huge difference.

That actually reminds me of another study, in which students who were told that they were gifted did more poorly than students who were told they must have worked hard to get so smart, especially when given the opportunity to retake an intelligence test and improve. Students told they are gifted tend to view poor performance as a sign they are not gifted, and become discouraged, whereas students told they must work hard only view it as a setback.

I'm not sure where I am going with this, except to say that a lot of the trends in our society are directly correlated to messages we send to young people. When I tell someone what I do and they say, "That is so hard, I could never do that," it makes me kind of angry and kind of sad, and they probably don't believe I'm sincere when I say, "You could."

Legislation to encourage companies to reduce carbon emissions is really important, because the damage is too long-term for the free market to have incentives for it. But it's amazing how careful you have to be about what strategies for reducing emissions you push.

( Bog barons: Indonesia's carbon catastrophe )

I am a fan of Al Gore, and I certainly think he would have been a much better president than we currently have. And his recent work to try to inform more people about climate change has been admirable, especially given how difficult it is to reduce scientific discussions to the level where laypeople will both understand it and find it interesting. I don't think he should run for president again, simply for reasons of electability, but I do think he would do a good job were he elected.

But... why did the Nobel committee award a peace prize for work on climate change? I agree that it's work that makes the world better, but connecting it to peace is tenuous at best, and I didn't think the peace prize was supposed to be a 'good job on whatever' award. Perhaps they are sending a political message that this is an important topic, and in that case I would agree with nekrenas that it makes the IPCC look like it has political motives, which is a bad thing for a scientific organization. The coupling of anti/pro-climate change to political preference is one of the worst things that has happened in terms of fixing the problem, because people stop being rational about the data and just decide based on party line. So if the Nobel committee's goal is to have something be done about climate change, this seems counterproductive. And it just isn't a peace issue... the prize last year that went to Grameen for the microloans was more appropriate, since even if it isn't about conflict resolution it's something that improves the lot of poor people in third-world countries, which most definitely does contribute to peace. A lot of the conflict due to climate wouldn't be that affected by climate change. Exacerbated, sure, but I don't see it as a peace issue, and it seems strange to award the prize this way.

EDIT: Come on, people, I read Collapse. Give me some credit. I know within the precision of current knowledge how environment and ecological resources affect conflict. But the pragmatist in me thinks that giving the prize to Al Gore, who publicizes an issue whose resolution will have a stronger ecological than strictly human impact, does less good than giving it to a group that is working to resolve conflict now. Give it to someone who volunteers to visit other countries and teach farming that's both sustainable and economically sound. Give it to engineers who are making water yield more crops or creating ways to clean up soil so that it's available for agriculture. Give it to someone who is helping people in a conflict-ravaged area create more resources so that there is less conflict. Give it to someone who is doing active good now, in a more direct and real way. There are many such people, and it seems overly political and unconcerned with actual efforts towards peace to give it to Gore and the IPCC.

As anyone who's been to a museum with me can tell you, I love impressionist painting. And I've always liked JMW Turner, the English painter who arguably was an impressionist long before the actual movement began. The Tate Britain has a huge collection of his paintings, an entire wing devoted to him, because he gave them all his unfinished and unsold canvases upon his death. Jeanine and I saw and loved this collection in London, and when I saw the article below in this week's New Yorker, I thought I'd share it with you, along with some of his paintings. The analysis of the paintings is inspiring, but even more so if you can look at them as you're reading.

The first Turner painting I ever saw, in AP US History: Rain, Steam, and Speed
A postcard I sent to Ben: Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth
Described in the article:
Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying
Staffa, Fingal's Cave
Regulus
The Battle of Trafalgar
The Field of Waterloo
Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons
Disaster at Sea
And one I have in postcard form on my desk: The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up

( the patriot )

It boggles my mind how anyone can not find this incredibly interesting (I'm thinking here of 'physicists' who scorn engineers). But remember how plastics never biodegrade? Well...

Giant microwave turns plastic back to oil

( article text )

Huge props to castallia for finding this article, from the Washington Post, about one of my favorite violinists performing in a subway.

( Pearls before Breakfast )

Hole in the wall computer.

The Women's War.

The first one gives me hope, the second one less so.

This quote, from the NYTimes editorial by Gloria Steinem, really hit me.

"This disease of doubt plays a big role: 81 percent of black voters tell pollsters that a white man will get the Democratic nomination, while only 58 percent of white voters do. Such doubt also helps to explain why women are more likely than men to support Hillary Clinton, but also more likely to say she can’t win."

( whole editorial )

Read this, read it now. A blog started by G.B. Trudeau with entries written by soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A tree grows in the Sahel

Around 1980, Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer in the parched Yatenga region of Burkina Faso, started experimenting with the ancient local tradition of "zai holes" or planting pits, as a way of restoring limited fertility to utterly degraded land. He increased their dimensions to about 10 inches wide and 8 inches deep and stuffed them full of organic fertilizer such as manure and crop residues.

( Read more... )

Weeeird... George Smoot won the Nobel Prize. I remember last year when the prizes were being announced, a bunch of us were at tea trying to guess who at LBL could win one. He was there talking with us (he was pretty much always at tea).

I really wish I was at tea today to hear people talk about this! And I bet there's a free cake or something! Why couldn't he have won last year?

I'm trying to find a French-language news podcast to improve my French listening skills. Does anyone know where I should search for such a thing?

My thinking on this has, like most people's, evolved a lot over the last few years. It's fluttered through all sorts of feelings and emotions, through examinations of freedom of religion and whether profiling is helpful or not, through examinations of freedom of speech, through the questions of when, if ever, the ends justify the means. I feel clear on two points.

The first is an echo of things I've said before, that terrorism is a hateful thing, based on a system of values that deserves nothing but contempt. It's true, in some cases, that people turned to terrorism such as the Palestinians are often coming from extremely desperate circumstances, and have had everything taken from them. Or alternately, the Israelis (who I feel are equally guilty of mass civilian slaughter), who are trying to defend what they feel is their home in a sea of hostility and danger. We must have empathy for that, and lapses born of desperation should be expected. But they are not justified. But when we see hurtful systems of values being adopted elsewhere and being used to hurt us, I think it's essential to first examine our own behavior to look for our own ethical lapses. Where have we committed the same mistakes? Where have we invented our own? We must be sure we are acting faithfully on our own principles beforing accusing anyone else. And I think it's critical in fighting terrorists that we stand by our moral code. Abandoning free speech, abandoning right to trial, abandoning any of our own rights or the rights of others, which we assert are universal, kills the thing we seek to defend. I still believe something I said a time ago that when a person acts towards destruction of life, that person's life is forfeit. But that does not mean we should take it, and break our own code.

The second point concerns the loss, the hurt, the tremendous waste. There's a feature in the New York Times right now that talks about families who lost someone; apparently they did a profile 1 year after and have now done a second for many families. You can read a few, and they're interesting, but what's amazing and terrible is to see how many profiles they've done, and realize how small a fraction that is of all the people who were hurt by what happened. Have you seen Munich"? It's well-executed and very disturbing, and I highly recommend it. And after you see it, most probably you'll be moved to feel the way I do, that all this fighting is mostly a terrible waste. I think one always has to realize that whenever a person takes an action, they have from their point of view all the reason in the world to take that action, and from their perspective they are being reasonable, just, and caring. And it's terrible to think, isn't it, about some of the worldviews necessary for the actions we've seen in recent years, both from the Muslim extremists and from our own government. It's foolish to say we shouldn't defend ourselves, but equally foolish to do so in a way that wastes life and hurts our own cause.

It's to the point where I can barely listen to world news any more. I'm not sure what's to be done, other than vote and keep pushing the world with my own small strength in the direction I want it to go.

In an article in the NYTimes about makeup, they give the following statistics:

"In a 2004 poll by the market research group Mintel, 64 percent of American women said they sometimes use foundation, compared with 47 percent of French women; 81 percent of Americans use lipstick compared with 70 percent of French women and 59 percent of Americans use blusher, compared with 43 percent."

81% of American women wear lipstick?! Good God! I think the whole thing is kind of ridiculous. I know some of you women wear small amounts of makeup regularly, in a tasteful way, and that isn't so bad... I dunno, I've never worn any makeup regularly. I've done it on occasion for very nice outings or for performances on dance team and in ballroom (required for the performances), but as a day-to-day thing, it's too much effort. I also like to wash my face some during the day to get rid of dirt and oil, and if I had to reapply makeup... bleah. It isn't like I have particularly great skin either. I prefer the French emphasis mentioned in the article of taking care of your skin and trying to make it look good on its own. It can nearly go without saying that I think it looks a little tacky to wear unnatural-looking makeup.

Of course people try to make themselves look their best, which is why we have so many types of clothes, hair products, etc. I guess I feel that smearing colored products on one's face on a daily basis goes too far. The gender inequality chafes at me too.

EDIT: Now that I've alienated my female lj friends, most of whom use makeup, let me add that this is more my personal feelings. I've always had an aversion to makeup, and am sort of figuring out why in the discussions in the comments. But don't think that I am disappointed in you personally for wearing makeup. :P

One of the problems that my project, SNAP, is having is NASA. NASA is of course supposed to be funding space-based science, but as has been in the news a lot lately, NASA has little money and what money it does have is supposed to be going towards wildly expensive and politically impressive projects like getting us to Mars. This would be okay if the funding matched the promises that our fearless leader is making, but it doesn't, and it means NASA pulling funding from other projects and pushing launch dates back. When I started working on SNAP two years ago, the projected launch date was 2008. Now it's 2016, despite the fact that dark energy research has a lot of support in Washington and that SNAP is the biggest and best-conceived platform to do this research.

So this quote from the House science report was interesting:

"Over the past few years, the Committee has consistently supported the DOE/NASA Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM), a space probe to help answer the fundamental physics question of our time what is the "dark energy" that consitutes the majority of our universe. Answering this question is among the top priorities of the physics community and of the Office of Science, and the Committee strongly believes that this initiative should move forward. DOE has done its part, developing the SuperNova Acceleration Probe (SNAP) as the DOE mission concept for JDEM. Unfortunately, NASA has failed to budget and program for launch services for JDEM. Unfortunately, in spite of best intentions, the multi-agency aspect of this initiative poses insurmountable problems that imperil its future.

Therefore, the Committee directs the Department to begin planning for a single-agency dark energy mission with a launch in fiscal year 2013. The Committee directs DOE to explore other launch options, including cooperative international approaches and the procurement of private launch services, to get the SNAP platform into space. DOE is to report back to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, not later than March 2, 2007, on the cost and feasibility of a single-agency mission, including the use of alternative launch options. The Committee will consider providing further guidance on this issue in the fiscal year 2008 appropriations bill and report."

I think it's very telling that DOE is giving up on NASA for science missions.

There's a lot of interesting science going on right now, which I thought I would share.

Roadmap to Mars: Buzz Aldrin (astronaut but also MIT grad) lays out a potential, complex but fairly interesting plan for putting people on Mars.

Spacecraft Skin Heals Itself: A design for a material based on the human circulatory system which, when punctured, oozes epoxy to alleviate the damage.

China building an artificial sun: Interesting that they're doing this; it may be a good indication of how ITER will go, though the size difference could be significant.

New ion engine revealed: It's only a matter of time before we can build TIE fighters. But should we?? :P (In all seriousness, the tech here is pretty cool.)

EDIT: It's old hat to me, but some of you may not have been following the latest news about Stardust. I'm finding satellite missions more and more interesting these days.

There are a lot of things I love about New Mexico, but this is what I mean when I say it's on the wrong end of every list.

original article

( D.W.I.'s Vex New Mexico, Once Seen as a Model )