Imprisonment

A quick summary of the news from this morning:

Imprisoned by the Universe: There is a great article by Dennis Overbye of the NYTimes this morning about dark energy, the stuff that makes the universe accelerate outward, and what this means for the ultimate fate of the galaxy (not planet, which will be long since gone, or humanity, whose future is a mystery trillions of years from now). I'd only add that measurements of dark energy are convincing, but theoretically difficult to explain, and we may yet overhaul our basic cosmological model in the future should a better theoretical grounding come along.

Imprisoned by the Government: Yesterday, a military court basically overturned the whole trial system set up to deal with detainees at Guantanamo, based on the case of a boy who was captured when he was 15. See either a good analysis piece from the NYTimes, or if you really want, a piece that basically just repeats the Bush administration spin from the WaPo.

Imprisoned by outdated moral notions: For all that FoxNews is indecent by design (see below for more on that), the government's treatment of their broadcast network, among others, has certainly been indecent. Thankfully, the courts have thrown out some ridiculously hefty fines imposed on the networks when celebrities used naughty words at live awards ceremonies. There is a boring wrap-up in the WaPo (they just can't win today), and a great one in the NYTimes:

But the judges said vulgar words are just as often used out of frustration or excitement, and not to convey any broader obscene meaning. “In recent times even the top leaders of our government have used variants of these expletives in a manner that no reasonable person would believe referenced sexual or excretory organs or activities.”

Adopting an argument made by lawyers for NBC, the judges then cited examples in which Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had used the same language that would be penalized under the policy. Mr. Bush was caught on videotape last July using a common vulgarity that the commission finds objectionable in a conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. Three years ago, Mr. Cheney was widely reported to have muttered an angry obscene version of “get lost” to Senator Patrick Leahy on the floor of the United States Senate.

Imprisoned by the bonds of racism: If the charges against him are true, the Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) will be going to jail for a long time for corruption and being stupid enough to hide $100K in his freezer!?! If so, honestly, good riddance to him, for being a stain upon our government, and if he takes fellow Dem Allan Mollohan of West Virginia along with him supposing the latter is guilty, all the better. Corrupt Democrats are corrupt officials first, and we are better off without them. Still, only FoxNews could manage to make their own faults the story when describing a 16-count indictment. It seems that FoxNews can't tell black representatives apart, even when one is the current head of the House Judiciary committee and has a moustache, and the other one is not and does not. Idiots.

Imprisoned by our own shortsightedness: What do you do when NASA satellites keep finding evidence of global warming, which is inconvenient for an anti-science administration trying to deny the existence of said phenomenon? Apparently, you cut the funds for the program!

Imprisoned by preconceived notions: Newspapers apparently don't like Google News, because, um, well, I really don't understand. It actually drives their online traffic, and they want to look the gift horse in the mouth, then slaughter it and eat it. See a wise graduate student destroy the arguments of a journalism professor here, and puzzle over the vagaries of the tenure system.

Imprisoned by themselves?: It seems that the Justice Department interprets civil rights and voter rights to mean trying to make sure that minorities don't vote, by any means necessary. Congress is investigating. Perhaps they can sic the DoJ on themselves?

There's not been a day, one hasn't gone by, when I don't think about the day he didn't die

Thankfully, while the current administration seems intent on making sure that all our news is bad news (how exactly did nuclear allegations about Iraq, Iran, and North Korea all turn out wrong anyway?...), they are as incompetent with regard to this task as they are to all the efforts they undertake. Today actually brought us two lightly related bits of good news, to offset the cratering of the stock market, the politically motivated firings of several US Attorneys, the first signs of the military taking some responsibility for the Walter Reed debacle about four years too late, etc.

It appears that there is some very encouraging news in the fight against malaria, one of the world's true preventable health crises.

A new, cheap, easy-to-take pill to treat malaria is being introduced today, the first product of an innovative partnership between an international drug company and a medical charity.

The medicine, called ASAQ, is a pill combining artemisinin, invented in China using sweet wormwood and hailed as a miracle malaria drug, with amodiaquine, an older drug that still works in many malarial areas.

A treatment will cost less than $1 for adults and less than 50 cents for children. Adults with malaria will take only two pills a day for three days, and the pill will come in three smaller once-a-day sizes for infants, toddlers and youngsters.
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Sanofi-Aventis, the world’s fourth-largest drug company, based in Paris, will sell the pill at cost to international health agencies like the W.H.O., Unicef and the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

As to the medical charity, they should be pretty familiar to you, since they are the February/March Rooted Cosmopolitans Charity of the Month, Médecins sans Frontières, a.k.a. Doctors without Borders. They even got the company to agree not to patent the drug, so generic versions will be legal worldwide. Let me suggest that this is an even better time to support their efforts. Your $25 may save up to 50 children's lives, by my count. Seriously, how can you not give at that rate of return on your money?

Further good news on the malaria front comes by way of a study performed in Uganda:

San Francisco and African AIDS researchers reported Tuesday that they had virtually eliminated malaria in a group of highly vulnerable, HIV-infected children simply by providing them with a daily dose of antibiotic and having them sleep under an insecticide-treated mosquito net.

The study conducted in Kampala, Uganda, in collaboration with researchers from San Francisco General Hospital found the bed net and antibiotic combination reduced the risk of malaria an astonishing 97 percent among the HIV-infected kids compared with a similar group of healthy children who did not receive the antibiotic and most of whom did not sleep under a bed net.
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The antibiotic used in the study is cotrimoxazole -- sold in the United States under brand names such as Bactrim and Septra. The oral antibiotic is produced by generic drugmakers, and can be provided to children for pennies a day. But cost is always an issue in Africa and even the $5 cost of an insecticide-treated bed net is prohibitive for poor families.

Let's do a quick calculation, shall we? The Iraq war currently costs about $200 billion per year, once all costs are factored in. Figuring on two nets per person ($10), we could basically keep about 20 billion people from getting malaria in Africa each year...except for the fact that there are only about 6 billion people on the planet at the moment. Quite literally, in choosing to eliminate malaria or fight a war, we chose the war, and it's not even working out so well...when people try to make moral cases for war, make sure to remind them of these numbers, and then point out the millions displaced and the hundreds of thousands of dead civilians.

A quick update to a point I made about a month ago. Apparently, pressure is growing in Europe to require publicly funded scientific research to be made freely available to the public. According to the BBC:

Last month five leading European research institutions launched a petition that called on the European Commission to establish a new policy that would require all government-funded research to be made available to the public shortly after publication.
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Within weeks, it garnered more than 20,000 signatures, including several Nobel prize winners and 750 education, research, and cultural organisations from around the world.
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For years, the research model has remained relatively static.

In many countries, government funding agencies in the sciences, social sciences, and health sciences dole out hundreds of millions of dollars each year to support research at national universities.

This statement is correct in many fields, but the BBC forgot to note that the revolution has already occurred in several, starting with high energy physics, and now encompassing a significant chunk of the physics world, including the entirety of astrophysics. The vehicle of change was the arXiv preprint server, to which essentially every astrophysics, high-energy physics, condensed matter, and many other disciples' papers are posted either prior to or immediately following acceptance by print journals. As an example, here is the sum of my published scientific output, short of talks that I've given but have yet to post to my personal webpage. There is not a single paper of mine for which you would have to pay for access that could not be gotten for free. Anyone in the world can read them all, not that anyone out there should really want to. Trust me, you don't want to. I don't even want to, frankly. You'll note if you check over there, or you could just take my word for it, that many of these papers appeared in reputable journals, whose editors and referees play a major role in validating the quality of papers. I'm certainly thankful that the published ones had to get an independent reader's approval. Even when the process is a pain, it generally improves the final quality (I'd note to avoid confusion that these revisions can be updated to the "preprint" after the fact, though it is not required).

Honestly, just about any academic field would be better served by this model. The opposition forces, which seem to consist of Nature and possible Elsevier press, are blowing smoke because they have a nice racket going and don't want to even risk it. What's most frustrating about this argument, though, is that many people discuss it as if it were some big theoretical idea, whereas the actual case is that several million scientific articles currently reside on public servers (arXiv has 400,000, and is the third largest that I found with a quick search). Thus you still see arguments like this:

Indeed, soon after the launch of the European petition, Nature reported that publishers were preparing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to counter open access support with a message that equates public access to government censorship.

even though it runs completely counter to the experience of hundreds of thousands of scientists who would be forced to spend literally minutes per paper uploading it to a public archive if they weren't industrious enough to pawn off the task on a grad student. Shockingly enough, and contra Nature if you'll pardon the pun, it is actually useful for scientists to make their work as broadly accessible as possible. In my case, UIUC subscribes to every journal under the sun, but I have no access at home or on the road to anything but the free server, an extremely common problem. This is just not that difficult an issue, frankly. Science belongs to the world, not to publishing houses.

And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth

A quick funny story, and then some follow-ups.

The SETI Program is simultaneously one of the great undertakings of mankind, and likely a waste of time. It is a project that virtually every astronomer is glad to see in existence, but happy not too work on. SETI, the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence, is the program that worked in the book and movie versions of Carl Sagan's Contact, but has yet to produce any real results in reality...until now!

It's not quite what you'd expect. You see, the most visionary component of the current SETI initiative is Seti@Home, whereby they take their data at large radio telescopes, but ship it off to millions of people's desktop PC's to crunch their numbers and report back. It was the first of these programs which are now also used for Protein Folding, cryptography, and any number of other projects. According to an AP story that got posted to Slashdot:

One volunteer, James Melin, a software programmer for a county government agency in Minnesota, runs SETI(at)home on his seven home computers, which periodically check in with University of California servers. Whenever that happens, the servers record the remote computer's Internet Protocol address and file it in a database that people running the SETI software can view.

One of the computers on which Melin installed SETI(at)home is his wife's laptop, which was stolen from the couple's Minneapolis home Jan. 1.

Annoyed and alarmed that someone could delete the screenplays and novels that his wife, Melinda Kimberly, was writing Melin monitored the SETI(at)home database to see if the stolen laptop would "talk" to the Berkeley servers. Indeed, the laptop checked in three times within a week, and Melin sent the IP addresses to the Minneapolis Police Department.
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Kimberly's writings were safe, and the thieves didn't appear to have broken into her e-mail or other personal folders. But the returned computer contained 20 tracks of rap music with unintelligible lyrics, possibly from the person who stole the computer or bought it on the underground.

"It's really, really horrid rap," Melin said. "It makes Ludacris look like Pavarotti."

Kimberly was more enamored with Melin's detective work.

"I always knew that a geek would make a great husband," she said.

I wholeheartedly agree with that final sentiment. Remember: Seti@Home -- It's like Lojack for your computer.

To update some previous posts, the problems at Walter Reed are now being addressed, since a public s#!tstorm is the one thing that can actually bring about action in Washington. According to the daily update in The Washington Post:

Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army vice chief of staff, used terminology similar to that of a military campaign to describe his plan to overhaul the broken building, including giving it a more "appropriate" name, and the sluggish bureaucracy for outpatient care.

"We own that building, and we're going to take charge of it," Cody said at the Pentagon. "The senior Army leadership takes full responsibility for the lack of quality of life at Building 18, and we're going to fix it."

Cody blamed "a breakdown in leadership" for the troubling conditions but said no one has been fired or relieved of command. He did point to lower-ranking officers and noncommissioned officers lacking "the right experience and the authority to be able to execute some of the missions."

As i remember, based on the past few decades, or maybe even past few centuries, the proper adjective for those who claim to take responsibility for something, refuse to hold anyone accountable, and then pass the buck by blaming nameless inferiors in the organization is "presidential". I should note that the US Army had some warning about potential problems, as Salon published a story about mistreatment of vets with brain injuries TWO YEARS AGO, and again last year!

Speaking about being ahead of the times, or in this case ahead of the NY Times, the video of the Amy Winehouse song "Rehab" that dkon posted on December 28 of last year just hit one of the new blogs at the Grey Lady, as a prescient commentary on the sad tale of Britney Spears from across the pond (though I would note that the misadventures of Pete Doherty and Kate Moss might be more apropos).

Finally, our local basketball team. As I suggested after considering the immensely obvious details, the player who was released from the team after crashing his car into a tree and nearly killing a teammate has been charged with DUI and leaving the scene of an accident. He was at the game we played tonight, laughing it up with teammates, which frankly disgusts me. I'm not suggesting that he is the worst human being on the planet, but he nearly killed a teammate, and then left him in the car while he went off to do God only knows what (it's been suggested that he tried to mask the fact that he was driving drunk). WTF is he doing joking it up with teammates? Innocent until proven guilty, but keep him the hell away from the team and the limelight. While we're at it, not to be racist, but the car he crashed was his grandparents' Lexus...yes, a Lexus. Either his family is more wealthy than I would have suspected, or the University might want to pay its players a bit less conspicuously, lest we get hit with NCAA sanctions.

Racism at UIUC was symbolized by Chief Illiniwek, but as promised, tonight was the last time that a white dude wearing traditional Sioux garb did a dance inspired third-hand by Plains Indian tribal dances to honor the tribes of Illinois who were driven out of the state in the face of the Western Expansion of other tribes being forced out of their traditional lands by colonial genocide. On ESPN, they just showed some girl with "Chief" painted on her forehead bawling uncontrollably at the site of our team mascot's final performance. Seriously, WTF? 100 Americans are killed in Iraq every month, to say nothing of thousands upon thousands of Iraqis. People all over the world are suffering. People all over the USA are suffering...and you are moved to copious tears because our racist mascot no longer gets to perform at halftime. If nothing else can explain why I hold many people in horribly low regard, this is it. Crying, bitching, moaning, and whining over the loss of a mascot is utterly pathetic, just pathetic. Grow the hell up, and stop embarrassing yourself, the university, and all of the people out there who can recognize plain old-fashioned idiocy when they see it. Jesus H. Christ, people annoy the crap out of me sometimes.

Got to keep the loonies on the path

I'll have a great deal to say tomorrow about my current University's decision to dump their racist mascot tomorrow. Needless to say, I'm in favor. For today, some good news on why we will actually win the science wars, if none of the current military ones.

Kansas is something of an interesting state, deeply red and somewhat famous for having something the matter with it. It's also home to one of the most impressive fossil beds in the country, one that proves that the middle of the USA was under water eons ago. Politically, the state has been undergoing an evolution. The governor, Kathleen Sebelius is a moderately conservative Democrat who has made a cottage industry out of convincing moderate Republicans to switch parties and run as Republicans, including the current attorney general (who soundly defeated the wingnut opponent described in the linked article), and the former chairman of the state Republican party. It went little noticed during the landslide election of November, but voters also elected a slate of Democrats and moderate Republicans to replace the crazy religious kooks on the state board of education. As a result, the infamous anti-evolution science standards adopted in 2005 are now history. From The Guardian:

In a 6-4 vote on Tuesday night, the Kansas state board of education deleted language from teaching guidelines that challenged the validity of evolutionary theory, and approved new phrasing in line with mainstream science.

It was seen as a victory for a coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats, science educators and parents who had fought for two years to overturn the earlier guidelines.

The decision is the latest in a string of defeats for proponents of creationism, and its modern variant, intelligent design. It reverses the decision taken by the same authorities two years ago to include language undermining Darwinism - on the insistence of conservative parents and activists in the intelligent design movement.

This is very good news all around. It's been noted that the Republican party has both a long-term and short-term crisis on its hands. Going into 2008, they are squarely on the hook for the Iraq war, and unable to convincingly blame anyone else for their mess. Today's vote in the House of Representatives may have been on a non-binding resolution, but several Republicans just made their races in 2008 much tougher. Chris Shays, the last Republican Congressman left in New England, may have just created an all blue region of the country by voting for against the resolution, and thus for the surge. Ditto several Republicans in NY and PA. In the longer term, however, the R's may be just as screwed. They rely on an uneasy alliance between business oriented economic conservatives, who they've been pissing off by being generally as incompetent with regard to the economy as they are with foreign policy, and the religious right, who are basically the only people left in the country who still support the president and the war. Without business groups and their cash, you end up with a vocal group of lunatics running the show who will start to alienate a great deal of the American population. I'm not confident the Democrats are fully ready to take advantage, but at least they are now showing some sporadic signs of life, though they still could show more courage on some politically charged issues.

As an example of the wingnuts who will hopefully be Left Behind soon (it's a pun, get it?), we turn to some Republican state legislators in Georgia and Texas. Georgia state Rep. Ben Bridges recently sent out this um, er, uhh, "interesting" FYI to his colleagues around the country:

“Indisputable evidence — long hidden but now available to everyone — demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion,” reads the letter that went out under Bridges' name. “This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.”

As these kind of screeds go, it's basically three-for-three. Anti-Semitic, as I can only assume that "Pharisees" means Jews in this context. Anti-science just on its face....and to top it off, as anti-English grammar as any document I've ever seen. Seriously, read that quote again. Amazingly enough, a Texas legislator, Warren Chisum, the Texas House Appropriations chair, decided this would be a good thing to forward along, and sent it to all his colleagues. From Talking Points Memo, the inevitable reaction:

The ADL caught wind of the Bridges memo and now Chisum says he's "willing to apologize if I've offended anyone" if anyone got their big nose bent out of shape.

Reports the Dallas Morning News: "Mr. Chisum said he hadn't looked at the Web site and didn't realize that he was distributing that type of material. He expressed chagrin that he didn't vet the material more carefully."

No S#!t, Sherlock. It's generally a good idea to, you know, like read these things before you pass them along. Somehow, neither legislator managed to realize that the website from which the great Big Bang/Pharisee/Kabbala conspiracy theory originated has another rather..."fringe position"...

Barnes' memo [ed. note: the one forwarded by Bridges and Chisum] pointed fellow state legislators to the information at fixedearth.com which rails against the “a mystic, anti-Christ ‘holy book’ of the Pharisee Sect of Judaism” and claims that “the earth is not rotating … nor is it going around the sun.” They've even caught on to the "centuries-old conspiracy" on the part of Jewish physicists to destroy Christianity.

Yup, us crazy Jews and our embrace of the Heliocentric model of the solar system!?! My Sweet Lord, these people are absolutely bats#it insane, and these are state legislators in positions of real power. Just imagine the crazier people who are voting for them...

Transgressing the Boundaries

For tonight's post, we'll cover the death of a company, the death of an economist, and the death of certainty, news of the last of which may be greatly exaggerated.

The company in question is GM, who I've bashed before for their crimes against the planet, and will now bash for crimes against human decency. Their commercial from the Super Bowl, which can be viewed here (scroll down), featured a robot that dropped a small part on the assembly line, got fired, progressed through a series of ever worse jobs, and in the end prepared to commit suicide before waking from a dream. As pointed out by ABC News, among others, GM announced last year that they are cutting 30,000 positions across the country by 2008:

"[The ad] is absolutely disgusting," said Art Reyes, president of United Auto Workers Local 651 in Flint, Mich., and a third-generation UAW member. Reyes said Local 651's membership has been cut in half in the past 18 months because of job cuts throughout the U.S. auto industry.

"Their way of life was affected. Their way of life was destroyed. This just completely glosses over their hardships," said Reyes. "What General Motors has been doing by tapping people on the shoulder to get rid of them, whole plants at a time, it wasn't because of a dropped bolt … we have a qualified work force here."

Way to go, shitheads on GM's advertising team! Remember, you don't have to pay benefits to your laid-off workers if they throw themselves off bridges!!!

Next up is the death of an economist, the legendary Anatol Rapoport. Who, you ask? He's the guy who invented the classic strategy for success at the Prisoner's Dilemma known as "Tit-for-tat", in which you basically act nice to people who are nice to you, and punish those who betray you. For vastly more on the topic, check out Brad DeLong's economics blog, which has a thorough recap of some more recent work. I personally prefer the following quote from Daniel Dennett, quoted here:

The social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport (creator of the winning Tit-for-Tat strategy in Robert Axelrod’s legendary prisoner’s dilemma tournament) once promulgated a list of rules for how to write a successful critical commentary on an opponent’s work. First, he said, you must attempt to re-express your opponent’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your opponent says “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” Then, you should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement), and third, you should mention anything you have learned from your opponent. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

Someday, I might have the patience to try this with ridiculous rightwing wingnut drivel, but don't hold your breath.

Lastly, the death of science, and how exquisite the corpse still looks. About a decade ago, Alan Sokal published an article in a postmodern cultural criticism magazine called Social Text titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", which was quite intentionally composed of several pages of gibberish sprinkled with authoritative-sounding post-modern literature citations. Sokal, a physicist, was poking holes in the outlandish claims made by post-modern, far-left members of the academy who argued that since science was a social activity, it's results were inherently a product of culture and thus "subjective", rather than the objective truth they are often claimed to be. Scientists got very rightfully offended by many of the more extreme claims, in that we would argue that since experiments can be repeated independently in the physical sciences, there is an objective truth to the results, even if the interpretations and broader implications involve a human component. In other words, gravity works if you are male or female, black or white, young or old, and we're willing to drop any science studies professor who claims otherwise off a building to confirm who is right (we'll provide a landing pad so no one gets badly hurt). I would note that while the worst of the anti-science crowd were definitely on the left, they really were on the far left and never had much by way of mainstream representation outside of a few post-modernly inclined humanities departments at academic institutions.

Anyway, Sokal has now teamed up with Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science and blogger at The Intersection over to the right in our blogroll, to write an editorial on how these days the vastly dominant anti-Science trend is coming from the right. From the LA Times:

Such introspection on the academic left has been a heartening sign, and the pronouncements of extreme relativism have subsided significantly in recent years. This frees up defenders of science to combat the enemy on our other flank: an unholy (and uneasy) alliance of economically driven attacks on science (on issues such as global climate change, mercury pollution and what constitutes a good diet) and theologically impelled ones (in areas such as evolution, reproductive health and embryonic stem cell research).

The potency of this combination has become apparent during the six years of the Bush administration, as many if not most scientific agencies of our government have become embroiled in scandals involving the misrepresentation or suppression of scientific information, gag orders on scientist employees, or other interferences with the processes by which science feeds into decision-making. Tracing these intrusions back to their source, we almost always uncover the same pattern: It concerns an issue in which one of the two principal constituencies of the current administration — religious conservatives or big corporations — has a vested interest.

As if to prove their point, a poll of Republican Congressmen finds that only 13% believe in global warming, down 10% from last year!?! In the end, science will win over anti-science, because we have the universe on our side...assuming that some fraction of us manage to survive. Here's hoping.

Every day, every night, all over my whole life through; Just let me be in the dark with you

Yesterday's NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Post-doctoral Fellows symposium was inspiring, like they always are. It's amazing how a bunch of people talking about doing what they love will remind you that you are doing what you love, and how great a privilege it is. I'll try to write more about the life of a post-doc in the future, but for today, I'll go over some of the the bad (silly media coverage) and good (inspiration) that comes with being a scientist.

Bad media; no donut!

For those not familiar with it, Slashdot is one of the leading, if not the leading, techie sites out there. The website name can even be used as a verb: a small website is considered "slashdotted" when Slashdot throws so much traffic its way that it shuts down the server. As a general rule, Slashdot gathers up stories on all sorts of technical topics, posts a link to them with a quick abstract, and allows people to discuss them endlessly. Sadly enough, given that many people out there have a legitimate interest in science, the quality of the posts is often extremely poor. The two most recent ones are cases in point.

How a Pulsar Gets Its Spin: Until now, the assumption has been that the rapid spin of a pulsar comes from the spin of the original star. The problem was that this only explained the fastest observed pulsars. Now, researchers at Oak Ridge have shown that the spin of a pulsar is determined by the shock wave created when the star's massive iron core collapses.

Rule number one for any journalist or media-related site: never quote a press release; it is an advertisement and you are likely being played a bit by them. In this case, the researchers from Oak Ridge, one of whom I've met and both of whom I respect, haven't "shown" that anything is conclusively "determined" by anything else. They've suggested something, and provided numerical evidence, but that is nowhere near as conclusive as the press release would indicate. Like most active research fields, this is still an open question. Science is not a progression of certainties, it is a series of hypotheses with supporting evidence where eventually the claims become strong enough that they can be considered essentially settled, barring future evidence to the contrary. From the paper itself:

This provides a new mechanism for the generation of neutron star spin and weakens, if not breaks, the assumed correlation between the rotational periods of supernova progenitor cores and pulsar spin.

Note the language here: "provides a new mechanism". This is science, in its suggestive glory. Nothing is certain yet, but they think they are on to something. The press release is a media staple, but it is vastly different than science; try to remember that the next time you read another breathless story...like this next one:

Black Hole Found Inside Globular Cluster: Contrary to the prediction of some computer models, scientists have found a black hole resting peacefully in a dense nest of stars called a globular cluster. Previously discovered black holes are either similar in size to a large star, or super massive holes which are millions of times bigger than a star is able to remain stable. This finding indicates there may be an intermediate size range of holes residing within these star clusters.

First of all, the author is incoherent. He meant to say all confirmed black holes are either comparable in mass to something ten times more massive than the sun (give or take a factor of a few), or are larger than about a million times the mass of the sun (these latter ones are known as Supermassive Black Holes, and are found at the center of just about all galaxies, including our own). All black holes are stable, regardless of size. The observation here reports on what is known as an Intermediate Mass Black Hole, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of a few hundred to a thousand times the mass of the sun. The leading candidate host site for these IMBH's, as they are known, has long been globular clusters, groups of anywhere from tens of thousands to about a million stars that look like this [click on the link!]. A search of the leading astronomy database returns 77 hits for the terms "globular cluster" and 'intermediate mass black hole" both appearing in the same abstract over the past four years, including one by the author of this paper, my former advisor, and a number of my former colleagues suggesting that there was a growing consensus we'd find black holes like these in place just like where they looked. From what I can tell, the press release botches what could be called the "king of the mountain" phenomenon: the biggest black hole in a cluster tends to eject all the others near it, but nothing can knock out the biggest one, which ends up falling to the center of the cluster, as they found here. The breathless headline is one of the few I've ever seen in the sciences to use a strawman argument, "some computer models", and does it just about as successfully as your standard political strawman, "some liberals suggest that...".

Good astronomy: the wonders of the cosmos

At a discussion today of teaching the night's sky, I was reminded of how nice it is to take a moment now and again to really look at the sky. Many people assume that they live in places too bright to see anything, but they are actually running into a problem of patience. It takes your eyes a little while to adjust to darkness by having your pupils dilate fully. Until they do, your night vision won't be that good. Thus, next time you decide to look up, try to find a spot without streetlights directly in your line of sight, and wait a minute or two. You will find the sky contains a lot more than you thought it did. While it may be tough to see all that much in the middle of a city, I've seen numerous meteors on the North Shore of Long Island (hardly an ideal viewing location), and the view from the Berkshires is absolutely stunning, with the Milky Way visible as a hazy band running across the sky and clusters of stars making it hard to determine which are the Pleiades. Even in a city it is trivial to find a planet or two so long, assuming you can find an open patch of sky to the east, south, or west.

Still, it is dark skies that really seem required for feeling the full distance to our nearest celestial neighbors. In the Berkshires and Arizona, to name two that I've enjoyed, stars feel millions of miles away (this is a radical underestimate), and it is very hard not to feel correspondingly small. This is good for the soul; we go through life with a magnified sense of our importance, humanity's importance, the Earth's importance. Sometimes it is useful to remind yourself that just one star over, no one really gives a hoot. We are transient creatures, on a realtively small planet with a funky atmosphere, liquid water on the surface, and not too much else of note. It makes it all the more impressive that we've managed to come so far so fast (only a few hundred million years of evolution since our ancestors were protozoa). Someday in the future, we might actually travel to one of these, traveling almost one one-hundreth of one percent across the galaxy towards the furthest stars we can clearly resolve on a dark night. It's amazing just to think about it.

Someday flowers will grow there, but first you've got to go there; Oh, you will go to the moon!

There is a surprising amount of debate amongst astronomers and related scientists about which aspects of NASA's mission we actually support. Roughly speaking, there is broad agreement that NASA does a huge public good in supporting the science it does. I'll admit, we are not impartial observers here, but rather those whose living is paid for by said scientific funding. On the other hand, I am not sure if anyone hates the International Space Station as much as astronomers. We tend to consider it a huge waste of time just waiting to spring a leak and become an even greater waste of money. I'll let the following article from the Guardian make the case:

Today, the cost of the ISS has risen to $100bn and counting. It sucks almost $2bn from Nasa's budget every year, essentially to stay mothballed in low Earth orbit. No one expects it to be finished before 2017 and, even then, it will be a mere shell of the plans on the drawing board.

"You're not going to see the space station in the pretty pictures, there will be pieces missing," says Dr Keith Cowing, a former Nasa scientist and editor of the Nasa Watch website. "There won't be as many flights, it won't be resupplied as often. Nasa is either unwilling or incapable of telling anybody with a straight face what the space station will look like."

For comparison, the Hubble Space telescope cost about $2 billion to build, after we include the substantial cost overruns, and has run a few billion more to stay operational, while producing vastly more science than the Space Station ever will. The Chandra X-ray Observatory has a comparable price tag.

The big issue for the coming years, though, is the proposed mission to the moon and eventually Mars. Some astronomers are in favor of this idea. The leading voice I've found on the web is the Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait. He's actually a very nice guy and a very good astronomer, not to mention one of the most amusing and sarcastic guys I've ever met at a meeting (he spoke at last year's NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellows' Symposium); the name of his website refers to correcting the bad astronomy found in movies and on tv. He argues in favor of the lunar component of the mission, based on a need for the exploration component of NASA's mission, but notes the inherent problems facing NASA at the moment:

This brings up two critical points:

1. Money. Where will NASA fund this? As it stands, Bush gave NASA an unfunded mandate to go to the Moon and Mars. NASA bit into this wholesale, saying it could be done. And sure enough, it can, if you’re willing to sacrifice a major chunk of astronomical science. NASA has been doing just that, cancelling many missions and delaying others. This cannot stand. The only option is to increase NASA’s budget and make sure there is oversight that the money isn’t thrown down a black hole (so to speak). NASA’s budget is tiny, and this money can be found.

2. Public outreach. When Gordon says "more specifics" I think he means that NASA needs to be more upfront on costs (they specifically avoided talking about how much a Moon base would cost in a recent press conference), but I think this could also be interpreted as simply having NASA make some sort of case for going to the Moon.

I am becoming increasingly frustrated over the NASA administration’s weak attempts at getting the public behind them on this. After years of work making plans on a new rocket to get us to the Moon, a new lander, and all that, they had and still have precious few actual webpages about why they’re doing this.

I completely agree with his first point, but I'm not sold that the second one is really the proper focus. NASA's budget is indeed small compared to the overall government budget, but this is true for most scientific research, and there is no guarantee that a budget increase is coming any time soon, especially given the current administration's complete inability to manage the federal budget. Even if NASA does get an increase, it is liable to be on the chopping block the next time the government faces a pinch. For the meanwhile, I think we have to assume that science funding will be competing against more practical engineering missions until it is proven otherwise. As to public relations, sending people into space really does sell itself. All kids love NASA and space shuttles, and always will. The public just doesn't view it as pork, even when it is.

Matt Yglesias had something to say on this topic as well today (as did I and a bunch of others in the comments). He sees private space exploration as advantageous over government-run version:

I'm not one of these "open outer space to more private-sector activity and we'll have colonies on Titan in seven weeks" people but it does seem to me that there's probably a sufficient mix of legitimate commercial uses for space and rich eccentric space enthusiasts (and, of course, there's the intersection of the two: providing space-related commercial services to wealthy eccentrics) to keep human activity going out there without giant subsidies to the aerospace industry.

Here is the problem in a nutshell. NASA has a long history of letting aerospace contractors run huge cost overruns on everything they build. Not all of this money is "wasted" per se; it pays salaries and gets reinvested in the economy in part. Still, it's just not an efficient use of money most of the time especially compared to science funding. At the moment, we want to go to the moon because it will help us to get to Mars, and getting to Mars will help us to have gotten to Mars. The deadline is over a decade away and liable to change, meaning that money spent on designs will be followed by money spent on redesigns, and then re-redesigns, all while our goals keep changing. The current administration has an unhealthy liking for military domination of space (I'm not kidding, Rumsfeld intended to have celestial military preparedness!), but hopefully this will change in the future. if they really wish, they can always fight unnecessary wars in order to fund the aerospace companies, but they need to spend the NASA budget more wisely. Men were sent into space by private companies in order to win the $10 million Ansari X-prize (that's 1/10,000th the price of the space station), and it took no more than a few years to accomplish the feat. By scaling up the prize money and the goals, we have the potential for further breakthroughs in either manned or unmanned exploration at a fraction of the cost (and no overruns, since it's a prize). As crass as it may sound, there are numerous money making opportunities for companies that successfully develop space-based technologies (who wouldn't buy a moonrock?), and the financial incentive exists to motivate the field at the moment, using technology vastly more modern than the 20-year old shuttles and space station (think of 20-year old computers, and it explains a lot about their problems). This allows NASA to free up their money for scientific missions, like space-based observatories (NSF covers ground based ones, typically), as well as the robotic technologies we'll need to take the lead any place we'll eventually want to send people. Remember, at first you can only send a couple of people anywhere out in space, and they're not going to be able to build any kind of substantial structure themselves.

I know this may slow down the progress of manned space exploration in the short run, but it does account for the fact that the government can basically screw up anything it gets its hands on. In the long run, private industry works faster than the government, especially when you can make it compete with itself. It will undercut US hegemony, but that is a feature, not a bug. Simply put, the current state of NASA, having its resources increasingly drained away in order to make good on a throwaway line from a three-year old state of the union address, is untenable, and it's time to admit failure and find a new path for the future. This lesson, needless to say, can be generalized for other policy fiascoes...

No cigar, no lady on his arm, just a guy made of dots and lines

Next time you see a constellation ride across the sky, try to picture to yourself just how far away those stars are. It's humbling, and does a good job of giving life some perspective. But how far away are they, you ask...how can we be so sure? It turns out that this kind of measurement forms the cornerstone of modern astronomy, and the technique to do it has been known for centuries. It was used to determine the size of the solar system itself in 1672, and first turned to distant stars in 1838. The method is parallax, and it can best be tried at home if you have a finger and a distant object. Close one eye, and take your finger and hold it in front of the distant object. Keeping the finger still, Open the closed eye and close the open one. Note the position of the finger, which should have moved. If you can measure the difference in angle between the two places you saw your finger, you have measured the distance to it, assuming you know how far apart your eyes are. A good picture of the process can be found at Wikipedia, or by searching for "parallax".

Anyway, this technique was used in1672 to find out the distance to Mars, which in turn allowed us to figure out the size of the entire solar system. You will notice that this discovery had to wait for the era of colonization, since it required Giovanni Cassini to send a colleague to French Guiana in the Americas while he stayed in Paris. This is also one of the many, many examples of the advantages of seniority in the sciences, as it will shock you to no end to learn that 17th century Paris was considered a more comfortable place to reside than a boat to South America. In any case, the measurement established the distance to Mars, and in doing so the distance to the sun as 140 million kilometers, or 86 million miles. It turns out that it is actually 150 million kilometers (93 million miles), but what's 7 million miles between friends. For comparison's sake, the moon is 239,000 miles away, or about 1/400th the distance.

It would prove to be over a century and a half before the distance to the next nearest stars were measured. In 1838, Friedrich Bessel measured the distance to the star 61 Cygni, finding it to be 11.4 light years away, or 3.5 parsecs (or about 60 trillion miles; nearly one million times further than the sun). Parsecs, as the name suggest, are the distance at which a star has a parallax angle of 1 second of arc. A star 3.5 parsecs away has a parallax angle of 1/3.5=0.28 arcseconds, or about 1/100,000 of a degree! The same year, two other astronomers measured the distances to the stars Vega and Alpha Centauri, the latter of which is the closest star to Earth besides the sun, located at about 1.3 parsecs, or 4.4 light years away. In all of these cases, the star whose distance was being measured was considered "close", like your finger in the experiment above. The "distant" stars are actually much farther away: the star Deneb, among the 25 brightest in the sky, is over a thousand parsecs away, and the furthest visible to the naked eye are a couple times further than that. With telescopes, we can see bright stars located most of the way across the galaxy, but more on that next week.

Today, we can measure the distance through parallax to hundreds of thousands of stars, of which we know the distance to about 7,000 to within 5 percent thanks to the Hipparcos satellite. This may seem like a lot, but it represents only our local neighborhood in the galaxy. Still, these distance determinations are critical, since they provide us with unambiguous measurements that span light years. Next week, we'll extend our reach a bit further extending outward to cover the entire galaxy.

Most of what I wrote here can be investigated further by going to wikipedia and following the links there. For basic science, it really is an invaluable tool. Give it a whirl!

Einstein's down on the beach staring into the sand, 'cause everything he believes in is shattered

In theory, I am a scientist (that's actually a pun, if you think about it). As some may have noticed, I tend to delve frequently into politics. Now, these two fields are certainly not totally distinct, given that the vast majority of science funding comes from the government via science agencies like NASA, NSF, and NIH and certain departments of the government, Defense and Energy being the primary ones for physicists. Suffice it to say, one need not follow politics too closely to be a scientist, and vice versa, though there are the rare exceptions (Rush Holt in particular). Economics, on the other hand, is certainly more central to political discussions, but like any physical scientist, you will have to forgive me if I view any theoretical economics statement with a bit of suspicion until it is well-proven by actual data. Oddly enough, a discussion of this very topic appeared recently on both science and politics blogs, motivated by the following quote:

Consider how differently the public treats physics and economics. Physicists can say that this week they think the universe has eleven dimensions, three of which are purple, and two of which are twisted clockwise, and reporters will quote them unskeptically, saying "Isn't that cool!" But if economists say, as they have for centuries, that a minimum wage raises unemployment, reporters treat them skeptically and feel they need to find a contrary quote to "balance" their story.

You will not be too surprised to find that I disagree with this in multiple ways. First of all, his main economics point may very well be wrong. The reason why goes to the heart of my main philosophical complaint against economics: complicated systems are hard to generalize like that. No self-respecting physicist would

1. claim anything more than a relationship, noting the rough size of the statistical errors,


2. fail to indicate if there are exceptions or modifications to the rule that need to be noted, or


3. make such a claim without a great deal of supporting data, including independent means of validating the relationship.

Our economist friend failed all three, essentially because he assumed his decidedly oversimplistic model of human behavior was inherently correct. Speaking as a theorist, I can safely say that while I may be confident in my results, they exist solely at the level of supposition until they are experimentally verified. Going back to the silly example from the quote, if a string theorist claims there are eleven dimensions (and some believe this is probably the case) , he cannot claim it as fact until he either uses it to explain observations that were previously unexplained, or makes a testable prediction for future experiments. Of course, just to pile on the economist, there will be no end of possible interviewees willing to argue with our friendly string theorist, as physicists love to argue about these things. If a journalist fails to find outside sources to discuss the issue, then blame the journalist. I think what happened here, actually, is a confusion between a news article that has to meet journalistic standards of public skepticism with a scientific press release, which is at heart an advertisement for a scientist's work.

Perhaps more crucially, our enterprising economist may someday be hired to make decisions that affect millions or billions of people, and if he does it based on theory alone you get some kind of publicly harmful nonsense like supply-side voodoo economics or the more public failures of the IMF. Our string theorist friend will get a nice research grant from the NSF that pays for an additional post-doc or grad student or two, helping to educate the next generation of scientists, and will find that numerous colleagues are trying to confirm, falsify, modify, or extend his/her model. Put simply, physicists should be humble in trying to explain the workings of the universe, and economists equally humble in trying to explain the workings of humanity. Those who ignore this principle risk their own reputation, and in the case of economists working in public policy, the livelihoods of millions of people worldwide. That is why skepticism is incredibly necessary, and should be welcomed, not kvetched about.