12 posts tagged “science”

This is in the lobby of the NOAA.  It uses ultrasonic vibrations to generate steam from water without heating it, then pumps it up into this large bowl which you can blow down into or run your hands through.  It doesn't really serve any scientific purpose, really, but it's fun to play with.

The highlight of the tour for most of us was Science on a Globe.  This a six-foot diameter sphere suspended from the ceiling, then four projectors use it as a spherical movie screen to project a globe onto it.  This allows presenters to show any array of global information on the sphere, animated.  The effect looks exactly what you would expect a hologram of the Earth to look like.

Topo maps.

The night side of the topo map shows the lights that are visible form human activity.  Our presenter told us how to recognize the differen types of lights.  White are electric lights - cities.  Purple lights in the ocean (particularly near Japan) are fishing boats using lights to attract squid to the surface so they can turn them into calamari.  Red lights are fires, usually big slash-and-burn operations.  Blue lights are oil rig flares.

A view of the globe seeing the tops of the clouds color-coded to show the infrared spectrum.  Also, the globe-like head of the kid in front of me apparently trying to simulate an eclipse as seen from beyond the dark side of the moon.

An animation showing the formation of hurricanes in the Atlantic.

The next animation I have is a really cool one showing global warming from the 1870's (as based on ice core samples) and projected into the year 2200 (based on computer models), but the clip is bigger than the Vox limit of 50 megs.  When I get back home I'll see if I can work it into a smaller file.  All of the other videos I took were also over 50 megs.  Hmmph!

After Science on a Sphere, the tour took us into a conference room where one of their employees demonstrated on a big screen the NOAA's experimental island in Second Life.  It looked neat, but unfortunately my bandwidth at home just can't handle Second Life.

After leaving the NOAA, we went to the National Center for Atmospheric Research.  It was a much shorter tour and there wasn't nearly as much to see, but their building was neat, and they had a very basic science museum just inside the door.

The building was designed by architect I. M. Pei after visiting Mesa Verde National Park.

A view of the Flatirons Mountains from right outside the NCAR facilities.

Some door archways on the exterior of the NCAR facility.  For comparison, here is a shot I took at Chaco Canyon National Historic Park:

 

Another view of the Flatirons.

Back inside the NCAR facility, a mural showing the different altitudes where various atmospheric phenomena exist.  From this mural, I learned about a type of cloud that I hadn't heard of before: noctilucent clouds.  They are much higher in the atmosphere that other cloud formations, and as such they can sometimes reflect light from the sun back down toward the night side of the planet, making them appear to glow.  I wonder how many UFO sightings such clouds have caused.  They're also interesting because scientists don't yet understand how clouds can form at such high altitudes or why we're seeing them in lower latitudes in the last couple of decades than we used to.

An early air sampler rocket, meant to take samples of air at high altitudes.  This one was used at the White Sands Missile Range.

Finally, since we're going white water rafting Sunday and we forgot to pack hats to protect us from the sun, I bought a couple of floppy fishing hats at the NCAR gift store for Strix and me.

Yes, my face really is that round.  Sad, huh?

It's time for lunch.  More later!

This morning, I got up bright and early, ate some Cheerios, and headed out to a bus waiting to take me and a bunch of other geeks on a tour of some of the scientific facilities in Boulder, Colorado.

Our first stop was the Boulder branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

First, let me say, Boulder is gorgeous.  I will definitely have to go back when I'm not stuck with a tour group to explore it more thoroughly, but I think I may want to live there.

But back to the NOAA.  We first stopped at the security station outside.  A security officer came onto the bus and said that we were all going to have to get off and go through a metal detector, so anything we didn't want to take through the metal detector we should leave on the bus.  Being the good Americans we are, we didn't question this, but did as we were told.  We were all given temporary name badges, and went through the metal detector, then got back on the bus which took us on to the main building.

Now... since we could leave whatever we wanted on the bus and were given an opportunity to retrieve it before going into the main building, can someone please explain to me what the hell the purpose of the metal detector was?  These people need training on how to design a security checkpoint system, because this ain't it.

Anyway, here's my temporary name badge.

Yep.  I should have expired... nine minutes ago now.  Maybe they were on Greenwich Mean Time.

 

A half-size prototype of a weather satellite, suspended from the ceiling just inside the door.

Some neat artwork in the lobby.

Pics from the solar observation lab...

Some neat artwork on the wall outside the solar lab.

The blue and white cylindars are sample bottles full of... well... air.  The NOAA receives 40,000 samples per year from volunteers and organizations around the world, and analyzes them for levels of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, oxygen, etc.

This is the lab where actual weather forcasts are accurately made... or not.

Just two of the several rows of parallel supercomputers used to model climate change and weather patterns.

Computer simulation only goes so far.  This rather cluttered lab is where actual chemical reactions are tested at various pressures.  When we entered the lab, our tour guide said, several times, "DO NOT STARE INTO THE FLASHING GREEN LASER!"  The first question to be asked by one of my fellow tourists was, while they were looking avidly around the lab, "Where's the laser?"

Got all that?

The air tanks all along the wall are the various types of gasses used in the experiments.  The woman who designed the lab (I can't remember her name right now) won a Nobel prize for discovering the chemical process in which CFCs break down the Ozone.

Okay, I've got a lot more, but it's really late.  More tomorrow.

A story in the December issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry reports that some people with poor self-images actually have a brain disorder that causes them to focus on unattractive aspects of their own appearance.  It's called body dysmorphic disorder, and those who have it utilize the left side of their brain more than normal people when looking at pictures of faces, indicating that they're focusing more on details than on the overall image.

This raises interesting issues concerning vision.  The fact is, most of what we consider "seeing" doesn't take place in the eye; it takes place in the brain, where signals from the eyes are processed and put together into what we hope is a coherent picture of the world.  Our brain has been designed by evolution to process these images in ways that will usually be right, but may sometimes be wrong, and optical illusions are are the result of our brain making "shortcuts" or "assumptions" when processing images.  The bottom line is that we can't always trust that what we see is what the world is really like.

For those who think that seeing is believing, perhaps now is a good opportunity to step back and re-evaluate that position.

The latest Scientific American reports that some diseases may actually be evolutionary adaptations.  We already knew about sickle cell anemia, which, while being a disease, seems to protect the carrier against malaria.  New evidence shows that Huntington's disease may also have some survival benefits, at least for the genes of those who have it.

Those that carry the genes for Huntington disease have more children than the average person, and they are less likely than the average population to get cancer.

It makes you wonder how many genetic diseases have hung around with us simply because evolutionary processes didn't have an "incentive" to get rid of them.

Margaret: Daddy, what is a "might-have-been"?

Dearth: A "might-have-been"?  They're ghosts, Margaret!  I daresay I "might-have-been" a great swell of a painter, instead of just this uncommonly happy nobody - or again I might have been a worthless idle waster of a fellow.

Margaret: You?

Dearth: Who knows?  Some little kink in me might have set off on the wrong road.  And that poor soul I might so easily have been might have had no Margaret.  I'm sorry for him.

Margaret: And so am I!  The poor old daddy, wondering the world without me.

Dearth: There are other "might-have-beens" - lovely ones, but intangible.  Shades, Margaret, made of sad folks' thoughts.

- Dear Brutus, Act II, by J. M. Barrie.

Is it possible that this author of Peter Pan also invisioned, in this lesser-known work first performed in 1917, the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics?

What follows is an extreme simplification of the theory, and is about all I understand of it, not being a physicist myself, and therefore might be wrong.

Elementary particles behave in a random fashion.  How they behave is, by some degree, determined by chance.  For instance, there may be a 10% chance that a particular neutron will decay within a particular second, and a 90% chance that it won't.

The problem this presents for physicists is that in physics thing's aren't really random.  For instance, if you were to toss a coin, you might think that there is a 50% chance that the coin will be heads-up when it stops.  The truth is that chance is illusory, in this and in every case.  The illusion of chance is created by the fact that we, as humans, couldn't possibly know, measure, or calculate all of the variables that will decide whether the coin will land heads or tails.  If we could know everything about the coin, the pressure being applied to it by the person flipping it, the weight variable caused on the two sides by the impressions on the coin, etc., and knew how all of those factors would weigh on the outcome and how to calculate it, it would be theoretically possible to predict with 100% accuracy which way the coin would land every time.  In other words, it only looks random because we don't know all the facts.

But elementary particles are just that - elementary.  They consist of nothing smaller but pure energy, which has no further characteristics.  So, if there is a 10% chance that the neutron will decay, why is it that sometimes it will decay, and sometimes it won't?  Is it true, then, that some parts of the universe are left to pure chance, while everything else has a root cause?  The concept lacks aesthetic appeal to physicists, and is one of the reasons why Albert Einstein didn't like quantum theory, stating famously that "God doesn't play dice."

So enter the Many Worlds Interpretation.  The Many Worlds Interpretation posits that every time there is a chance that a quantum particle may behave one way or another, the universe splits off into two parallel versions of itself, one in which the neutron decayed, and one in which it didn't.  Since these quantum variations are happening around us all that time, that means that based on the theory, there are infinite numbers of parallel universes branching out all the time.

We can think of MWI as positing that universes are "created" every time an elementary particle could randomly do one thing or another, but of course that would require unfathomable amounts of energy to come out of nowhere all of the time.  Rather, these universes exist already, and we are reaching them by following various paths along the probability matrices of the quantum particles.

It's important to note that proponents of MWI don't just like the theory for its aesthetics.  It also solves a number of paradoxes famous to quantum physics, such as the Schrödinger's Cat paradox.  In that thought experiment, a device is set up to kill a cat in a box if a radioactive atom decays.  There is a quantum probability that the atom may or may not decay, and we won't know which it was until we look in the box.  So, until we look in the box, is the cat alive, dead, or some bizarre, mixture of the two, since we don't know yet what the result of the cosmic dice shoot was?  By applying the Many Worlds theory to the problem, the simple answer is that in one universe the cat is alive, and in the other universe the cat is dead.  Looking in the box simply confirms to us which universe we're in.

For science fiction fans such as myself, where MWI becomes interesting is when it is extrapolated to the macro level.  The decaying of a single atom, with the exception of the poor cat, has little effect on whether any of us live or die, or make it to work on time, or even win the Lotto.  Taken in the agregate, however, quantum effects make all the difference in the world, literally.  In other words, every event that happens that could have gone one way or another, came out the way that it did because of a general drift in the quantum probabilities that ultimately effected that event. 

So, if I notice that the light has turned red too late and slam on the brakes, there are a myriad of factors that will determine whether I slam into another car trying to cross the intersection or whether I slide on through, unharmed.  Ultimately, those factors boil down to quantum probabilities, and so in some universes I slid on through the intersection.  In this one, I T-boned someone.  In fact, anything that is possible, no matter how improbable, happens in at least some of the universes.

Dear Brutus explores these ideas, realizing that our choices lay out ahead of us like a myriad branching paths.  We think that we are making a choice, but in fact universes exist in which we take each of these paths, though some universes are more prevalent than others.  The universe we are in now is the result of paths taken, and paths not taken are lost to us forever.

Dearth: Three things they say come not back to men nor women--the spoken word, the past life and the neglected opportunity.

- Act I

Those of you who have read the Golden Compass recently will recognize the theory explained nicely there, as well.  In Dear Brutus, the characters get to visit those "might-have-been" worlds, shades made of sad folks thoughts, lovely, and intangible.

 

Tonight is the night when the dead become living, when we face our darkest fears and confront them, when we ourselves become the things of which we are terrified.

Okay, it's also a night to drink too much and stuff yourselves with candy, but when isn't?

So here are a few Halloween blog treats for you:

If your favorite holidays are Halloween and Easter, just because of the candy...  According to the Associated Press, researchers have shown that people who crave chocolate are more likely to have in their system high levels of a type of bacteria that thrives on chocolate.  So, is it possible that the chocoholic bacteria is what makes you crave chocolate, thus relieving you of all guilt for eating that eighteenth tootsie roll in a row?  No, as any statistician knows, correlation does not prove causation, and researchers are unsure if the bacteria make the people crave chocolate, or if it's just that people who eat more chocolate are creating a happy environment for the pro-chocolate bacteria to flourish.

Attack of the Killer Tomato.  Scientists have created genetically engineered plants that actually consume toxins, according to the National Geographic News.  This could be a boon for cleaning up areas that have ground soil contaminated by pollutants, but environmentalists are concerned about the unknown dangers of genetically engineered plants.  If the genetically engineered plants were to "escape" and reproduce on their own, they may push out native, natural species, and mutate.  Who knows what they could turn into.  If they eat toxins, they'll probably think humans are downright tasty.

Scared of the Federal Government?  Well, now, I don't go in for conspiracy theories, but this one has me worried.  According to Slate.com, earlier this year President Shrub issued a National Security Presidential Directive, the 51st of it's kind, parts of which are so secret that not even congressional oversight committees in charge of national security are allowed to read them.  The parts that aren't so scary that they can't be made public are terrifying.  NSPD-51 is a declaration by the President giving himself the power to do whatever he deems necessary to ensure the "continuation of government" (presumably including the suspension of elections and the end of his term) in the event of a "catastrophic emergency."  He gets to tell us what constitutes a "catastrophic emergency."  Scared yet?

And, in honor of Halloween, I reprint here my favorite scary haiku:

Scrambling from fresh graves
Zombies go in search of brains.
Hell if they get mine!

Originally posted on my old blog on February 24th, 2006:

Now we are up to this morning!  We checked out of the Super 8 and went to the Space History museum in Alamogordo.

A number of rockets adorn the outside of the museum.

A recovered part of a V2 rocket.  It's seen better days.

This is the Sonic Wind II.  It's a rocket platform attached to railroad rails.  A test subject was strapped into the chair and the rockets propelled them forward to a high rate of speed, then the whole platform was stopped quickly to test the affects of rapid deceleration on a human subject.  Where was OSHA?  Who was running this test, Wile E. Coyote?

A sounding receiver.  These were used to receive signals from test rockets.
 
I didn't take any good pictures inside the museum.  It was mostly rocket models and other non-photogenic displays.  We were going to go to the IMAX theater, but it was sold out due to a large group of school children who came in right before us.

Originally posted on my old blog on February 24th, 2006:

After breakfast, we headed toward Cloudcroft and up an extremely curvey set of roads to the solar observatory at Sunspot, New Mexico.  We were disappointed to see that the museum at the observatory was only open on Saturdays and Sundays, but we did get some good pictures of the outside.
 
On the way, we stopped for some great pictures.

The Mexican Canyon Trestle, an abandoned railroad trestle.

A sign posted at the roadway, unnecessarily stating that the trestle is closed.  This was in case the missing rails and the absent sections didn't clue you in.

A view of the White Sands from an overlook in the mountains.

Stina taking pictures from the overlook.

It got considerably colder as we continued up the mountain.  The observatory is at about 9,200 feet, according to our GPS, so the air was a little thin, too.

A sundial mural on the outside wall of the Solar Observatory museum.

A sundial outside the museum that would tell us exactly what day of the year and time of day it is... if the sun weren't hidden by clouds.

A solar observatory first used in the Antarctic.  Moved here for display.

There were several different observatories on the grounds.  This one had a sign that dubbed it "The Big Dome."  I realize these are astrophysicists, not geometry teachers, but shouldn't it be called the Big Cone?

There was a small visitors' observation room where we could see the scope inside the Big Dome.  It wasn't in operation, of course, but here it is through the dirty glass of the observation room.

The Tower Observatory, up the hill from the Big Dome.

Views off of the mountain from behind the Tower Observatory.

A pic of Stina.  She took a pic of me, too, but I looked cold and panting from thin oxygen, which is probably because I was.

A smaller observatory at the top of the hill.  For some reason, they named it "Hilltop Dome."

An intersection of two roads on the Observatory grounds.  It's the intersection of Coronal Loop and Solar Physics Drive.

We stopped at the side of the road to let our brakes cool for a while, and saw this.  The sign is actually pointing to a much nicer buidling up the road, but I liked the image.

A very old car next to the Hostel.  In the enlarged view, you can see that they have decorated it with Christmas lights.  I like people who make the best out of what they have!

A view down Karr Canyon from another roadside overlook.

Stina about to be crushed by giant boulders.

Images from another overlook.

Originally posted on my old blog on Sept 28th, 2004:

 

I listened to this in audiobook format.  It is the abridged version of a full-length non-fiction work.  The author, Ray Kurzweil, is a computer expert specializing in, among other things, speech recognition and rendering software.  This is generally an overview of where the author thinks computers are going over the next hundred years.  His predictions are fairly astounding, but for as astounding as they are they are well reasoned and he backs them up not only with current trends but with the underlying principles that indicate that those trends may continue.

The only complaint about his predictions are that they seem perhaps a little too quick, if only for his first set of predictions which are for the year 2009.  This book is copyrighted 1999, and I'm sure at that time it seemed safer to make bold predictions about 2009 than it does today.  Now, only five years away, it seems unlikely that everyone will be wearing computers built into their clothes and that all computers will be completely wireless by 2009.  Certainly some people will be using wearable computers, and some computers will be completely wireless, as those technologies exist now, but I don't believe they will be the norm.  I also don't believe that virtual reality environments will be as common as chat rooms are today in a scant five years, primarily due to bandwidth restrictions that I don't think we'll be ready to shuck anytime soon.  Computers get faster and more powerful all the time, and at a fairly steady and predictable pace.  The Internet improves more slowly, and in stages that plateau for years at a time.  When improvements come, they are not universal (for instance, a lot of people are still using dial-up, even though cable or DSL have been available for years now).

This over-optimistic view of 2009 would seem to cast doubt on his other predictions, as well, but perhaps it's too early to tell.  The time-frame for his predictions aside, however, I think the majority of his predictions will come true.  I reserve judgment on nanorobots as described here and in many works of science fiction, but in his own area of expertise - computers - Kurzweil paints a very believable view of a future much different from our present.

I just read Inkshell's post comparing science and poetry, and thought I would repost a poem from my old blog that uses scientific concepts for its imagery.  I seem to do this from time to time, being both a scientist and a writer (amateur on both counts).  Science speaks to me, and it makes me think of things in ways I hadn't thought of them before, which is practically a definition of poetry.

Orbit

There is a certain distance from a black hole,
They say,
Where light is bent in a perfect circle,
Each ray
Orbiting the singularity forever.

In that orbit,
A ring could be built
In which you could walk
In a seemingly straight line
But always end up back where you started.

But, of course, we can do that here
On solid ground
Without any of that
Messy space travel
And time dilation.

But ending up in the same place you started
Isn't always so bad.
Write a bit on the wall,
And you can learn something new
Each circuit of the journey.

Paxton Daryl Branson