Miscellany

As you may have heard, Stephen Hawking has been rushed to the hospital after falling very ill. He has been struggling with a chest infection for several weeks, and has had to cancel some public appearances. A press officer from Cambridge University later added that he has improved, and is now in comfortable condition.

Not much to add, except that we all hope for a speedy recovery, and that is back writing papers and giving lectures before too long.

Update: Associated Press, reporting from another statement released by Cambridge, says Hawking is expected to make a complete recovery.

On 10 a.m. Pacific time this Thursday, Los Angeles will be hit by a major earthquake. And how do we know this? Because it’s a pretend earthquake. I just received the following amusing/frightening email:

On Thursday, November 13, the Caltech community, along with millions of other Southern Californians in homes, schools, businesses, government offices, and public places, will participate in the Great Southern California ShakeOut Earthquake Drill. At 10 a.m., everyone is encouraged to drop, cover, and hold on for 120 seconds in simulation of a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault. Throughout the day, Caltech will conduct emergency preparedness drills on campus. Audio and video earthquake recordings, which have been created for use in your drop cover and hold drill, can be downloaded at http://www.shakeout.org/drill/broadcast.html.

Yes, the The Great Southern California ShakeOut. Complete with sound effects, suitable for downloading. Kind of like a good old-fashioned nuclear bomb drill. Just part of the price we pay for being able to eat outside in January.

Now that the election is over and the LHC is delayed, for the next six months all of our posts will be about puppies. Let’s start with a live webcam.

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Puppies!Read More »

I have a birthday coming up, and this is definitely going on my Amazon.com wish list.

That is Swiss pilot Yves Rossy, flying at a height of about 6000 ft across the English Channel in his personal jetpack yesterday. He reached speeds of up to 125 mph before releasing his parachute and landing in England. Via.

This would make my morning commute quicker. More science would get done, and the world would benefit. Let’s start taking up a collection, right?

Everything I know about the global financial system comes from cartoon stick figures. Still, this doesn’t sound good. (Via, via.)

Nouriel Roubini | Sep 13, 2008

It is now clear that we are again – as we were in mid- March at the time of the Bear Stearns collapse – an epsilon away from a generalized run on most of the shadow banking system, especially the other major independent broker dealers (Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs). If Lehman does not find a buyer over the weekend and the counterparties of Lehman withdraw their credit lines on Monday (as they all will in the absence of a deal) you will have not only a collapse of Lehman but also the beginning of a run on the other independent broker dealers (Merrill Lynch first but also in sequence Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and possibly even those broker dealers that are part of a larger commercial bank, I.e. JP Morgan and Citigroup). Then this run would lead to a massive systemic meltdown of the financial system. That is the reason why the Fed has convened in emergency meetings the heads of all major Wall Street firms on Friday and again today to convince them not to pull the plug on Lehman and maintain their exposure to this distressed broker dealer.

The Fed doesn’t want to simply bail out Lehman Brothers, as they did Bear Stearns, for a bunch of reasons — including, it appears, that it doesn’t set a good precedent to keep failing out banks that take crazy risks and then fail. Also because Lehman is in worse shape than Bear — insolvent, not just illiquid.

So will anyone step in and save Lehman? Signs point to no.

Unable to find a savior, the troubled investment bank Lehman Brothers appeared headed toward liquidation on Sunday, in what would be one of the biggest failures in Wall Street history.

Should we be surprised to learn that many of Lehman’s problems stem from worthless mortgage-related assets, known colorfully as “toxic waste”? Probably not.

Lehman put itself on the block earlier last week. Bad bets on real-estate holdings — which have factored into bank failures and caused other financial companies to founder — have thrust the firm in peril. It has been dogged by growing doubts about whether other financial institutions would continue to do business with it.

Everything is connected, which is why we can’t just let bad banks fail and to hell with them. My cartoon-based knowledge of the economy doesn’t accurately predict what will happen if banks start falling like dominoes, but it can’t be good, right?

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.”

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.

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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.

I do so love the internet. Anyone who has gone to pick someone up at the airport knows that planes don’t always land at their scheduled times. So nowadays, of course, you can check the web page for the appropriate airline and find out whether the plane is delayed or on time.

But you know what would be even better? If you could call up a Google map that showed the flight plan and current location of the plane.

And now you can! At least, for Delta flights. Do any other airlines do this? And if not, why not?

Wait, I answered my own question, using — you guessed it — the internet. Just go to Flightstats.com (obviously), where they will apparently give you a map of whatever flight you want. And if you’re bored, you can just pick a random flight! And then you will be, if not less bored, at least somewhat bemused.