Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day:
It’s a false-color image of the Sun in ultraviolet (click for better resolution). Put together using data from TRACE, a NASA Small Explorer satellite. You’re seeing the bubbling gas of the solar corona looping along magnetic fields.
I haven’t had the time to type up the answer to yesterday’s quiz, so instead why not a World Cup open thread? It was pretty easy to discern the pattern in the quarterfinals, where Portugal beat England, Italy beat the Ukraine, France beat Brazil, and Germany beat Argentina — all of the Eurozone squads were victorious, while those nations still puttering along with their local currencies were left to go home and lick their wounds. Hooray for globalization!
But what is it that separates Les Bleus and the Azzurri, victorious in the semifinals, from their opponents? I mean, besides a bluish tinge, a strong wine tradition, almost identical flags, and amazing goals? (And being picked by me to lose?) Eventually it hit me: these were the countries that have been home to Popes! Sometimes simultaneously!
So what will happen in Sunday’s final? Italy has had more Popes, but France has been more of a leader in unifying Europe. A titanic struggle between the temporal and spiritual realms awaits. Allez les Bleus! Forza Italia! (I will, at the time, actually be in Italy, so I’m leaning slightly Forza over Allez, but I wouldn’t bet against that Zizou guy in his last professional game.)
The baleful eye of the establishment media has once again turned our way, and judged us to be sordid muckrakers. Declan Butler at Nature has written about the largest science blogs, and we were happy to find CV in the top five, along with Pharyngula, The Panda’s Thumb, Real Climate, and The Scientific Activist. (Plenty of room to complain about methodologies, but whatever — suffice it to say that prize money was distributed quite equally.) The Technology Chronicles, however, has poked a stick at these would-be science blogs, and found that they succeed not by “politely debating the fine points of string theory” (ahem), but rather by “channel[ing] the static and political undercurrents in their fields.”
Nonsense! We have succeeded by writing about martinis and the World Cup. To cement our reputations as light-hearted bons vivants, today’s post is about poker.
In particular, a quiz. For those of you not addicted to Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Showdown, the game that has swept the public’s consciousness is Texas Hold’Em. It’s just a particular variety of poker, in which each player gets two hole cards that only they see, and then five cards are dealt face-up in the middle of the table. The winner is the one who can construct the best five-card hand out of seven — their hole cards and the five on the board. Complications arise from the baroque betting structure (two players to the dealer’s left are forced to bet on the first round, which is after the two hole cards are dealt; further betting rounds after the first three board cards are dealt, another after the fourth, and a final one after the fifth), but basically it’s just that simple.
So, consider the following three possible pairs of hole cards:
The quiz is extremely simple, and should be easy for experts: assuming you don’t know what anyone else has, or yet what the board cards will be, which possibility is most likely to win at the end of the hand? And (a subtly different question) which is the best Hold’Em hand? Please show your work; answers will be revealed tomorrow. Winners will receive a free lifetime subscription to Cosmic Variance, one of the most popular science blogs on all the internets.
Pandering Frivolity Read More »
Joyeux 4th of July, mes amis américains! I am checking in from Montréal, a temporary stopover on the way back to the U.S. of A. from a brief visit to Quebec City. I was there for Renaissance Weekend, an occasional (five times per year) gathering of the important, demi-important, and merely interesting and/or well-connected to get together and talk about stuff.
I had a great time, and I would be happy to tell you all about it if RW goings-on were not strictly off the record. (For example, I could reveal the amusing story behind how nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler met his wife Rosa Wang, or how I took down a huge pot from Scripps College president Nancy Bekavac when my quad tens demolished her ace-high flush, but rules are rules.) But I am perfectly within my rights to share things that I said myself. I gave a few mini-presentations, among which was one in a series of two-minute lunchtime talks on “What I Would Do If I Could,” a rather free-ranging topic if ever there was one. Other people suggested banning torture, printing people’s phone numbers on their license plates, or moving to a chocolate-based economy. Here was my little spiel:
If I could propose one thing, it would be to do everything in our power to encourage young girls to get excited about science, math, and technology.
As a physicist, I know that my field is only about ten percent women. There is a theory on the market, occasionally suggested by people in positions of power and influence, that an important contributor to this imbalance is a difference in intrinsic aptitude. The technical term for this theory is “bullshit.” I say this not as a starry-eyed egalitarian, but as one who has looked at the data. This is a theory that makes predictions, and its predictions are spectacularly wrong. If they were right, the fraction of women that dropped out would rise at the higher ranks, as the competition for positions became more fierce; that’s not true. The percentage of women scientists would be basically constant from place to place; that’s not true. The fraction of women getting physics degrees would be stable over time; that’s not true. The truth is that women drop out of science between high school and college (and, tellingly, disproportionately more women try to specialize in physics later in college than those who choose physics as a major during their first year). And they do so because they are discouraged by a million small signals that add up to a powerful cumulative message.
We shouldn’t encourage girls to be enthusiastic about science, math, and technology because we need more scientists, mathematicians, or engineers. We should do so because many young girls are potentially interested in technical fields, and this interest should be celebrated, not deprecated. Support to pursue one’s passions is something that everyone deserves, regardless of their chromosomes.
Let freedom ring, everybody.
Foreign Correspondent Checking In Read More »
Phil at the Bad Astronomer breathes a sigh of relief that an amendment by Barney Frank to prevent NASA from spending money on a manned mission to Mars has been defeated in the House. I haven’t been following this issue closely, so I’m not precisely sure what the amendment says, but from the looks of it I completely disagree with Phil. If I understand it correctly, the bill would not have cut NASA funding at all, just have prevented it from being used for the specific purpose of studying the possibility of sending astronauts to Mars. There is a huge difference between those two things.
Right now NASA is seriously underfunded, and there are three huge drains on the budget: the shuttle program, the Space Station, and the Moon/Mars initiative, all of which are mismanaged money pits. What is being hurt in all this is real science, which is being cut to the bone — essentially all of the Beyond Einstein missions (to study black holes, dark energy, and inflation) have been delayed, some essentially indefinitely. Studying Mars is interesting and fascinating. Spending money now on the idea of sending human astronauts to Mars is a politically-motivated boondoggle. There used to be a sensible procedure by which priorities were set, in which high-powered National Academy panels would look over the possibilities and use sensible scientific criteria to decide what was both interesting and feasible. The Bush administration has made a shambles of that process, and it has to stop.
Astrophysics in space, the one thing that NASA does well, is being killed off. The Moon/Mars initiative, according to people who know a lot more about the political wrangling than I do, is directly to blame. Sorry to hear that the amendment didn’t pass.
I have been known, now and again, to fret over the moral condition of our contemporary world. On such occasions, it warms my heart to think of the brave warriors of culture who are quick to defend precious institutions against the relativising onslaughts of modernity. Two recent cases in point:
I’m not sure which of these stirring tales brings greater joy to my bitter, cynical soul. But it’s good to know that, now that we’ve successfully dealt with poverty, disease, and war, the important battles over appropriate behavior are being fought with clarity and vigor.
So a lot of visitors have been coming to CV to read Mark’s post on the Physics of Beckham. What’s more, the rest of the blogosphere is thick with commentary on the World Cup — 3 Quarks Daily has Alex Cooley reporting and Jonathan Kramnick grumbling, the Volokh Conspiracy has David Post enthusing and Todd Zywicki critiquing, and Crooked Timber has been hosting rollicking open threads. Who would have thought that people were interested in soccer? It’ll never be as popular as string theory, but there’s definitely some interest there.
Actually, philistine American though I may be, I love the World Cup. And I myself was doing Beckham blogging long before it had become fashionable. The World Cup is everything the Olympics should be, but isn’t. It’s a spectacle of true international importance, featuring a sport that people care about even in the off years, full of compelling personalities and a rich history, in which a country can’t dominate simply on the basis of a superior entertainment-industrial complex. And I have no desire to change the rules of the game to suit my uneducated predelictions. Even though basketball is my sport of choice, I have no problem with the paucity of scoring; just as I can appreciate the ebb and flow of the scoreboard and the drama of big runs and quick turnarounds in hoops, I can also savor the exquisite rarity of goals in soccer, with the attendant ebb and flow of anticipation as scoring chances are mounted and frustrated. I have no problem with the offside rule, nor would I want to see the goal size increased. Nor am I one of those postmodernists who would turn the whole thing into hockey. I don’t even have any problem with the idea that the world’s best team has a star named Kaka, or that the French think they can compete by fielding exactly the same players that won the Cup eight years ago.
That is to say, I am not a hater. So let’s nevertheless admit that there are a couple of things that everyone, from the most clueless newbie to the most knowledgeable expert, can admit are dramatically wrong with the game. And, perhaps, easily fixable.
The first is the refereeing. Not something Americans can feel culturally superior about, as the refereeing in the NBA or NFL is just horrible. But still, the quality in the Cup thus far has been atrocious, and not just because the USA was jobbed against both Italy and Ghana. (Against the Czechs they got what they deserved.) For one obvious thing, there is only one guy out there, expected to police every hidden elbow and maliciously-aimed foot? The notion is absurd on the face of it, and it’s hardly surprising that the difference between an innocent tackle and a game-altering penalty kick is basically a coin toss. (Has anyone before me noticed that the home-field advantage is really quite considerable in these games? They have? Okay, good.) And then you give to these subjective judgments an absolutely tournament-altering power — red cards not only send off a player, but keep him out for the next game, and force the team to play shorthanded for the rest of the match? The situation ensures that the amateur-thespian histrionics after a touch foul for which the Italians are infamous will always be amply rewarded. It’s not an admission of weakness to try to improve this mess somehow; surely nobody wants NFL-style reviews of the calls, but there must be ways (more referees, more latitude with the severity of sanctions) to make the games more fair.
But the real travesty, which I am absolutely convinced must be roundly despised by everyone in their right minds, is the shootout. I mean, come on. Some of the world’s best athletes run themselves ragged for over an hour and a half, with half the planet hanging breathlessly on the result, and it’s decided by a few free kicks from the penalty mark? That’s just insanity. The first World Cup final that I watched live (on TV) was Brazil-Italy in 1994, featuring a scoreless tie after regulation and extra time, the excitement of which was thoroughly destroyed by the shootout decision. This is embarassing, and has to stop. Especially because there is a completely obvious solution: let them keep playing! Sudden-death overtime. Some folks might worry that such an overtime period would just drag on forever. So, fine, let it! It won’t really go forever, because the players will get tired (and their number will be declining due to red cards!), and the ensuing sloppiness will make goals increasingly likely. And the excitement level would be amazing, adding to the drama of the world’s greatest sporting tournament rather than completely undermining it.
So come on, FIFA, do the right thing. Adjust a few knobs here and there on this World Cup thing, you may actually have something.
Fiddling with the World Cup Read More »
The Shaw Prize in astrophysics has been awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt, for discovering the acceleration of the universe by measuring the Hubble diagram using Type Ia supernovae. The Shaw Prize is relatively new, having first been given in 2004, and is awarded in three areas: Astronomy, Mathematical Sciences, and Life Sciences and Medicine. It comes with a total of US$1 million, split between the three recipients. Competitive with, although not quite as much as, the Nobel prize…
Brian was the leader of the High-Z Supernova Search Team and Adam was lead author on their paper; Saul was the leader of the Supernova Cosmology Project and also lead author on their paper. (Get some more inside scoop from Rob Knop.) To most of us, their finding was a complete surprise, as we were all quite familiar with the fine-tuning problems associated with the cosmological constant (the most straightforward explanation for the acceleration). But by 1998, it had become impossible to deny that something fishy was going on — the universe was not the simple matter-dominated flat Einstein-de Sitter cosmology of the standard Cold Dark Matter model. In late 1997 I was asked to give a review talk at a CMB conference in Santa Barbara, on the topic of “every way to measure the cosmological parameters other than the CMB.” In assembling the talk the overall message came through loud and clear, from considerations of the age of the universe, direct measures of the mass density, and properties of large-scale structure. There were plenty of ideas floating in the air, including an open universe (the most obvious choice), warm dark matter, a mix of hot and cold dark matter, or some dramatic features in the primordial power spectrum, as well as the old standby cosmological constant. But only the last of these solved all of the problems with one fell swoop. So when the two supernova groups announced in 1998 that they had direct evidence that there really was a cosmological constant, in the form of an accelerating universe, the community was primed to believe them, which they did fairly quickly. Soon thereafter, of course, improved measurements of the CMB anisotropies indicated that the universe was spatially flat, in perfect accord with the combined supernova and matter-density measurements. If you were to plot the inferred density of both matter and cosmological constant, the constraints from the three different techniques — supernovae, matter dynamics (clusters or large-scale structure) and the CMB — the allowed regions overlapped in perfect harmony.
A preposterous universe, maybe, but I like it.
Shaw Prize for the Accelerating Universe Read More »
A web page presenting a scale-model hydrogen atom (via Cynical-C):
And you thought there was a lot of empty space in the solar system. Well, there’s even more nothing inside an atom. A hydrogen atom is only about a ten millionth of a millimeter in diameter, but the proton in the middle is a hundred thousand times smaller, and the electron whizzing around the outside is a thousand times smaller than THAT. The rest of the atom is empty. I tried to picture it, and I couldn’t. So I put together this page – and I still can’t picture it.
The page is scaled so that the smallest thing on it, the electron, is one pixel. That makes the proton, this big ball right next to us, a thousand pixels across, and the distance between them is… yep, fifty million pixels (not a hundred million, because we’re only showing the radius of the atom. ie: from the middle to the edge). If your monitor displays 72 pixels to the inch, then that works out to eleven miles – making this possibly the biggest page you’ve ever seen.
Okay, we all know that, science-wise, this is utterly bogus. Mostly because the proton and electron are not little spheres of fixed size, as our classical intuitions inevitably imagine them to be — they should be represented by wavefunctions, and the electron’s wavefunction in particular should be spread throughout all eleven miles. Admittedly, an eleven-mile web page that accurately represented the ground-state wavefunction of the hydrogen atom would have been harder to construct (although, hmm, maybe not impossible). And I’m not sure where the “sizes” of the particles came from. The proton really does have a size, about 1.5 x 10-15 m, since it’s a bound state of quarks. But the electron is a point particle, as far as we know. There are various distance scales you can associate to it, but the smallest of these is the classical electron radius, which is about twice the size of the proton diameter. John Baez explains. I don’t know how to get an electron to be one thousandth the size of a proton, unless you’re using masses rather than lengths, which is a big mistake because (in the wacky world of quantum mechanics) lengths get smaller when masses get bigger.
Still, it gives you some feeling for the instubstantiality of matter, as Geiger and Marsden long ago demonstrated. And it’s pretty cool.
The Eleven-Mile Atomic Web Page Read More »
Newsflash: gender equality in science not yet quite achieved.
The girl can do some serious damage Read More »