It’s Caturday, and I have decided to expand my definition once again to include not just animals but also things that aren’t alive that look like things that are alive.

So I present to you angry slippers yelling at you:

What are they yelling about?

"C’mon, man, wash your feet first!"
"Keep us off the cold tile floor you jerk!"
"Store us next to those yakkity flip-flops again and we’ll make sure the cat leaves you a ‘present’ before you stick your feet in us next time!"
"We’re a pair of slippers, not a pareidolia of slippers!"
"Wear socks with us again and we swear we’re calling Stacey London!"

These slippers were a gift from my mother-in-law to The Little Astronomer, which just goes to show you the world’s a pretty funny place if you keep your eyes open and sense of humor primed.

Related posts:

- Xtolocaturday
- Caturday nights all right for fighting
- A foxy Caturday
- Languid Caturday

All the single ladies, all the single ladies…

Whales catch earworms, too, show scientists from the University of Queensland in Australia in a new study. Each breeding season, males start out singing a new tune, which might incorporate bits of golden oldies or be entirely fresh. These new songs are then passed from whale to whale for 4,000 miles, usually starting from the western edge of the Pacific near Australia, a veritable humpback metropolis, to French Polynesia in the east, a comparative hinterland: a possible cetacean case of cultural trends starting in the big city and propagating to the country. Another hypothesis from the Hairpin:

What if Michael Jackson was reincarnated as a whale and is now living off the coast of eastern Australia? 

This MJ-style spread of songs is cultural transmission on a massive scale, a scale that hasn’t been seen beyond humans before. Over the course of 11 years, researchers saw (or rather, heard) these songs ripple across six whale populations and thousands of miles of ocean. One song even turned up in the Atlantic. There are several possibilities as to how, points out Wired Science: “The songs could be carried by ...

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was going to save this for Sunday but I love seeing these things and couldn’t help it. 

Source

FOUND! Image from WIRED (see below)

If you’re looking for a pretty decent planetarium program for FREE.  Give Stellarium a try.  It’s been around for quite a while and it’s improved upon all the time.  You can do a lot with the program including writing your own scripts if you are a mind to.

One of the things I really like about Stellarium is the satellite passes, numerous times I’ve seen a satellite pass over head while at the scope and I’ve gone back and determined what it was.  Very nicely done.

The link is on this page, a wiki page with pretty much everything Stellarium, scroll down the page a little for the download link.  Even if you have a planetarium this is worth having anyways.  Hey, good planetarium programs are like BBQ grills, can’t have too many.

I got an email the other day asking if knew of a site that would allow the viewing of a constellation from the perspective of being in another constellation.  I have seen such a site, but can’t find the particular one I was looking for.  I did find a page at The Astronomy Nexus called the Distant Worlds Star Mapper, which will allow you to look at one star from another.  Just pick stars in the appropriate constellations.

None of the constellations will look the same as they do here as the constellations are nothing more than our human ability to put things into patterns.  There might not be a lot of change in what a constellation looks like within our solar system, but on the much larger scale we are talking about, that’s a whole other deal. If you have a link to a page along these lines pass them along in the comments, I’d like to see them and see if one is the particular one I was thinking of.

Finally there is the X-37B, the secret space plane launch about a month ago.  Well it’s been found and Heaven’s Above has pass data.  The weather here is rainy so I can’t verify their data, maybe this weekend.  If you have decent skies and have a scheduled pass, give it a look.

Tiiny Janus on the A-ring Click for larger. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Cassini spies the tiny Saturn moon Janus.  Want to see the full-version?  Look here.

The press release:

Saturn’s moon Janus obscures part of the planet’s A ring as the Cassini spacecraft looks toward the main rings and the thin F ring.

Janus (179 kilometers, or 111 miles across) appears as a dark oval to the left of the center of the image. A star can also be seen on the right of the image, beyond the thin F ring. This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 21, 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.6 million kilometers (1.6 million miles) from Janus. Image scale is 15 kilometers (9 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

A horseshoe orbit. Image via Phyorg

A new (to us) asteroid has been found and it turns out to be an “Earth companion”.  Not new really the asteroid has been in the orbit for some 250,000 years according to astronomers.

The asteroid, named 2010 SO16 was found by the WISE spacecraft gained the attention of Apostolis Christou and David Asher who apparently noticed something different about this one.

Different indeed, with respect to Earth asteroid 2010 SO16 appears to be in a rare Horseshoe orbit.  Almost weird.

The Royal Astronomical Society explains . . .

I’m still playing catch-up, and I appreciate everybody’s patience.  Today I’m writing about Comet Elenin, which is Jerry’s post.

This is from the JPL small-body database

Comet Elenin (C/2010 X1) is a fascinating little critter discovered December 10th, 2010, by Russian astronomer Leonid Elenin.  Mr. Elenin was using the International Scientific Optical Network’s robotic observatory in New Mexico when he made his discovery.  Back in December, when the tiny comet was first seen, it had an apparent magnitude of 19.5.  Remember, in order to be visible to the unaided eye, an object must have an apparent magnitude of about 6.5.  An object becomes more visible the smaller the number.  The Sun has an apparent magnitude of negative 26.74, which is so visible you risk injury to your eyes trying to catch a glimpse of it.

Image taken 030411 by Jean-Francois Soulier, all rights reserved

Since little Elenin was just discovered like 20 minutes ago, not much is known about it yet.  It’s believed to be about 3-4 kilometers in diameter, traveling at about 86,000 km/hr.  Elenin will come to perihelion on about September 10th, 2011, and will come closest to the Earth on about October 16th, 2011.  It will pass within about 34,000,000 km (about 21,000,000 miles) of the Earth.  It’s not known how visible little Elenin will be at that time, but if you train your telescopes on Mars around October 15th, you should be able to see it approach and pass in front of the planet as it heads out away from the Sun.

Image by Bernhard Hausler, 030611, all rights reserved

As I said before, not much is known about Comet Elenin, so most information is speculative.  Right now, many astronomers believe Elenin’s previous orbital period of about 4.1 million years (with aphelion at about 0.82 ly, or 51,800 AU) was only recently disrupted, shooting it out of the Oort Cloud into the inner solar system, and giving it aphelion at about 1033 AU.  Now, you realize that when I say “recently”, I mean within the last couple of million years.  Elenin’s current orbital period is believed to be about 11,750 years.

However speculative the information on Elenin’s current orbit, this little comet will most assuredly not pass this way again in your lifetime.  Be sure to mark your calendars for October 15th, grab your telescope, and watch this tiny speed-freak buzz Mars.

Jill Tarter sets the tone at .Astronomy 3

This morning opened with a fascinating talk by Jill Tarter, director of the Centre for SETI Research. Her message was full of perspective, some physics, an overview of Kepler (see the Kepler Orrery here) and some really interesting technical aspects of the data and challenge of data processing in real time with citizen scientists. The challenge is that of setiQuest and it will be tackled at the Google Summer of Code this year. As the numerous favourite quotes from this talk populating the #dotastro twitter stream demonstrate, it was quite a start to the day.

Next came a string of inspiring presentations.

Ed Gomez from LCOGT showed off the great Virtual Sky, presented the upcoming Star in a Box (stay tuned) and invited everyone to take part in agent exoplanet!.

LCOGT uses Linked Data

Mike Peel‘s presentation initiated a debate about the use of Wikipedia in Astronomy. His talk can be found here – and is well worth a read!

Matt Wood, our favourite Amazon Technology evangelist enthused us with his Amazon web services and, as sponsor of the conference, gave us a bunch of vouchers to use the hack day tomorrow and for the rest of the meeting.

Before lunch, Chris Lintott attempted to give a talk without mentioning the Zooniverse and almost succeeded. His talk, about why the internet is terrible, touched upon how the internet is influencing the way we think. While some agreed that social networking around interests reduced serendipity, others argued that social networks led to more serendipitous discoveries of interests. The debate goes on…

Full room for the first morning

Everyone was enthusiastically tweeting on at least two devices simultaneously and we were trying to ustream the meeting to the point of breaking the network… Sorry #dotastro followers. 90 connections were not enough for 40 odd people this morning. The issue was subsequently fixed.

After a copious lunch with a memorable series of deserts, the afternoon took off with three parallel unconference sessions.

Live coding with Processing

Twitter is another way to follow #dotastro when the afternoon sessions are not broadcast.

The ‘Citizen operated spacecraft’ session was led by Michael Johnson and covered topics such as low-cost space exploration devices, the consequences of making space exploration affordable for citizens, the ethics of bringing space within citizens’ reach, what benefits there are to citizen space exploration (outreach and education, engineering skills, contributions to science) – and a controversial debate of exploration vs science. Each of these topics being worth a blog post on its own, we are looking for volunteers from the session to share their notes with us…

In the Processing 101 session, participants learnt to start playing around with Processing, an open source visualisation language and development environment based on Java that allows to create animated interactive powerful visualisations. After going through a live coding Hello World example in the form of a growing white circle on a bright red background, everyone was let loose. An image annotation app and an image-to-audio app were developed in the session, among other cool bits of code. Hopefully the game will continue at the Hack day tomorrow afternoon.

Another session led by Norman Gray focused on Linked Open Data. The two areas of focus were – the semantic web in practice and – the machine-readable web. At the session, the question ‘What is it for?’ was addressed. The suumary is that making the web machine-readable should be easy to use but it is tedious to implement. Norman predicted that the machine-readable web will come about when people with lots of data will want to make their data available to others.

Kinect in motion

Jonathan Fay demonstrated the World Wide Telescope (WWT). He imported data from various origins and visualised them in the WWT. The WWT is now interfaced with Astrometry.net and myKepler.com etc. and allows users to do much more with their own images and their own data. Tomorrow at the Hack day, we will have a demonstration of how the WWT can be used using Microsoft’s Kinect technology. Let’s go surf in outer space!

Megan Schwamb led a discussion about the future of large data-driven astronomy. Parsing, searching, doing science with big data require new methods. The debate led to a discussion on how to get more support and recognition for astroinfomatics and astrostatistics and what career paths are there for the astrosoftware engineers of today and tomorrow. There was also a discussion about the limitaions of models to compare data with and how human intervention is still crucial to discover what we don’t know is there to discover.

The last unconference session was about Gloria, a Spanish networked telescope project organised by the Montegancedo Observatory. Gloria involves the establishment of telecommunication standards for networkable telescopes such that astronomers (amateur and professional) can make their telescopes available for remote observations and how those without access to telescopes can carry out observations remotely.

All the participants are invited to share their photos and other digital memorabilia to the .Astronomy flickr group

Longevity is the key (Jill Tarter)

Technology may well outlive it’s civilisation (Jill Tarter)

Stephen Hawking worries they [ET] will come and trash the place [Earth] (Jill Tarter)

Neither me nor Stephen Hawking know anything about alien psychology (Jill Tarter)

I couldn’t find any astronomy under BBC wildlife but… (Mike Peel)

Use Wikipedia as a starting point, not as the end (Mike Peel)

People are the most expensive and important people so we should optimise for productivity (Matt Wood)

I will try to give a talk without mentioning the Zooniverse … Oops! (Chris Lintott)

Am I the only person in the room without a Mac? (Chris North)

How do you do research without constantly learning new tricks? (Sarah Kendew)

METI: Meddling with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Carolina Odman-Govender)

Not all data is in the Virtual Observatory. Not all data will ever be in the Virtual Observatory (Thomas Robitaille)

We have successfully take the Fourier transform of a biscuit (Cory Lehan)

Earth’s kind of boring (Jonathon Fey)

Academics are people too (Karen Masters)

Is there an internationally recognised gesture for Moon? (Markus Poessel)

Sexpectations: Male College Students’ Views about Displayed Sexual References on Females’ Social Networking Web Sites.

“STUDY OBJECTIVE: Sexual reference display on a social networking web site (SNS) is associated with self-reported sexual intention; females are more likely to display sexually explicit content on SNSs. The purpose of this study was to investigate male college students’ views towards sexual references displayed on publicly available SNSs by females. DESIGN: Focus groups. SETTING: One large state university. PARTICIPANTS: Male college students age 18-23. INTERVENTIONS: All tape recorded discussion was fully transcribed, then discussed to determine thematic consensus. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: A trained male facilitator asked participants about views on sexual references displayed on SNSs by female peers and showed examples of sexual references from female’s SNS profiles to facilitate discussion. RESULTS: A total of 28 heterosexual male participants participated in seven focus groups. Nearly all participants reported using Facebook to evaluate potential female partners. Three themes emerged from our data. First, participants reported that displays of sexual references on social networking web sites increased sexual expectations. Second, sexual reference display decreased interest in pursuing a dating relationship. Third, SNS data was acknowledged as imperfect ...

1) First, a post from the past: Let’s talk about sex…ratios (evolution that is).

2) Weird search query of the week: “clinical flirtation consumer reality”

3) Comment of the week, in response to

If it happens tonite, here’s what I suggest listening to at midnight:

Drink on these lyrics:

Lets paint the town
We’ll shut it down
Let’s burn the roof
And then we’ll do it again

I recall years ago reading Spencer Wells discuss how important it was to sample “indigenous people”* before they were swallowed up by the cresting panmixia. Of course panmixia has to be conditioned on the fact that the vast majority of Han Chinese are stilling reproducing with other Han Chinese, and so forth. But it seems plausible to argue that the great agricultural Diasporas are only today swallowing up the residual of marginalized groups outside of the farming frontier. These populations which expanded from agricultural hearths over the Holocene may only be a shadow of the genetic variation which was once extant after the last Ice Age, as the thinly populated landscape was fractionated into endogamous networks as a matter of necessity rather than preference.

First, let’s recall that over the long term “effective population size” is defined by the harmonic mean. Concretely, a population of 1 billion can be far more genetically homogeneous than a population of 1,000, if, those 1 billion only recently expanded from far smaller populations. Imagine a toy example of two populations, A & B. They both begin in generation 1 with a population size ...

The stem cells formed a sac that then folded in half
a couple days later (see image above, courtesy of Nature),
forming the optic cup.

What’s the News: Give a blob of cells the right environment—lots of nutrients, special chemical signals, and a comfy gel cushion—and they just might grow you a body part. In a feat of bioengineering, scientists at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Japan have grown a retina from mouse embryonic stem cells. Remarkably, much of the development happened spontaneously, indicating that even undifferentiated cells have a blueprint in mind. Researchers hope the work will someday yield transplantable retinas for people with diseases like retinitis pigmentosa.

“When I received the manuscript, I was stunned, I really was,” commented human molecular geneticist Robin Ali (via Nature News). “I never though I’d see the day where you have recapitulation of development in a dish.”

How the Heck: Supported by a gel that mimics cells’ natural environment, the stem cells were immersed in a bath of chemicals that directed their growth into retinal cells. Just as in normal embryonic development, over the course of about a week the cells organized themselves into ...

What’s the News: With Congress yet to pass a budget, the country is facing a government shutdown unless lawmakers reach an agreement by midnight tonight. In addition to shuttering many government offices, the shutdown would likely cause present serious difficulties for federal government-funded research.

Difficulties Such As…

A wide range of government-backed research—from biologists studying stem cell lines to oceanographers gleaning climate information from maritime sensors—wouldn’t be funded during the shutdown. The delay will ruin some experiments, and leave others with large gaps in their data. One stem cell researcher estimated the shutdown would cost his lab $10,000 per person, and told NatureNews, “One day is tolerable, three days is a killer.”
Scientists working on NASA’s IceBridge project—a study using special aircraft to survey ice in Greenland—would get on their planes and (dejectedly, one assumes) head back to the States.
Clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health would be stopped or, at best, slowed. The NIH Clinical Center has an estimated 640 trials, 285 of which are for people suffering from cancer—but those studies would stop taking all new patients, including one child flown to the NIH Sunday on a Miles ...

I’ve been getting lots of emails and tweets about a young man named Jacob Barnett, a 12-year-old who is apparently a math genius. He’s been getting a lot of press lately because he’s tackling some pretty heavy problems in astrophysics, including relativity.

I want to be clear that from the videos on YouTube and such, he does appear to have an extremely advanced grasp of math and science. I also think he has a lot of promise! However, science is more than just learning the equations. It takes insight that generally comes with time. Happily, Mr. Barnett has that time, and has a big head start with the basics.

Steve Novella tackles that issue very well at Neurologica, and I don’t necessarily disagree with anything he wrote there.

But I do want to talk briefly about the way Barnett’s story has been told by some media. I first saw it at Time magazine’s site, with the headline "12-Year-Old Genius Expands Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Thinks He Can Prove It Wrong".

Barnett may very well be a genius, and may very well rewrite a lot of physics… as, no doubt, future generations of genius scientists will. But one ...

The 3-sigma bump reported by Fermilab on Wednesday has garnered a lot of attention. Understandable, since it might be a precious sign of particle physics beyond the Standard Model — but it’s also just a 3-sigma bump, and usually those go away.

Via Matt Strassler and Lisa Randall, here’s a set of plots that helps indicate exactly how hard this game really is. The plots can all be found on this web page at CERN. In comments Matt and Peter note that they were made by Tommaso Tabarelli de Fatis, as explained on Tommaso Dorigo’s blog. Here is the original plot from the CDF paper:

We’re looking at the number of events that produce a W boson and two jets, as a function of the energy of the jets. The bottom plot is all the data, while at the top they’ve subtracted off most of the Standard Model background, leaving only the predicted red curve from WW/WZ events. You see the extra little bump around 150 GeV, that’s what’s getting everyone so excited. It’s unlikely that the data are a good fit to the prediction; the “KS (Kolmogorov-Smirnov) probability” is given as 5×10^-5, which means that it’s not bloody likely.

But, just for giggles, let’s imagine that the energy of the jets wasn’t measured very accurately. Obviously the experimenter worked hard to get it right, and I would trust their judgment over my own any day, but you never know. Jets are complicated things with many particles in them, you can imagine being off by a bit.

So here is the same plot, just scaling the jet energy by two percent:

You see that makes a lot of the excitement go away. The KS probability is now 9×10^-2, which essentially means … the bump has gone away. If we scale by 4%, it goes away almost entirely:

Now the data fit the Standard Model very well. If we keep cranking up the supposed error, we stop fitting again, because the data at very low energies begin to go astray:

There is an animated version of the plot which is fun to look at. Nobody is saying (I don’t think) that this is certainly what’s going on; it’s just an illustration of how difficult this game really is, and why people shouldn’t get too excited about three-sigma events. A little bit of excitement is good, and descending deep into cynicism is bad, but patience is really warranted. Let’s collect more data and see what happens.

[Note: this post was published prematurely, then deleted, and is now back.]

Michael Nielsen gave a great talk at TEDxWaterloo about the idea of “open science”:

There’s a great deal of buzz about “openness” in certain sectors of the science community; largely this has passed physics and astronomy by, because we’re already pretty darn open. It’s hard to image something more open than arxiv, where everyone puts their papers up for free even before they’re published in a journal.

But Michael’s talking about something much more ambitious: opening the process of creating science, not just publishing it. For experimentalists this would be difficult, for obvious reasons. (You think people who sweat to build an experiment are going to invite the public in to take a whirl?) For theory it is also hard, but the reasons are more subtle.

The point is that credit in science is given out on the basis of getting your name on published papers. In the arxiv era, the papers don’t necessarily have to appear in a traditional journal — but that’s a topic for another day. The model is set in stone: you have an idea, you work out its consequences to the point where it’s publishable, and you write a paper. Without that last step, you’re not going to get any credit. (Very occasionally you will see references to “unpublished work” or “private communication,” but it’s rare and not really for big-ticket ideas.)

So if I had an idea, I would either work it out myself or start working with students or collaborators. I certainly would not go around publicizing an undeveloped idea; I wouldn’t get any credit for it, and someone else could take it and develop it themselves. I might give seminars in which I mention the idea, but that’s only recommended once it’s to the point where a paper is on the horizon.

Michael and others want to overthrow that model. Their shining example is this blog post by Tim Gowers. Gowers is a mathematician who proposed attacking an open math problem right there on his blog, by asking for comments from the crowd. If they succeeded, they could publish a paper under a collective pseudonym. He next chose a problem — developing a combinatorial approach to the Hales-Jewett theorem — and, several hundred comments later, announced that they had succeeded. Here’s the paper. Buoyed by this success, people have set up a Polymath Wiki to expedite tackling other problems in this way.

Could this work for theoretical physics? I don’t see why not. But note that Michael spends a lot of his time in the talk pointing out the obvious — crowdsourcing doesn’t always work. I could easily imagine ways in which such a project could fail; too much noise and not enough signal, everyone with good ideas deciding they would rather work on them by themselves rather than sharing openly, etc.

Might be worth a shot, though. I’m thinking of suggesting some ideas here on this blog and seeing whether we get any useful input. Let me sleep on it.

What’s the News: Scientists found that periodic fasting may decrease the risk of coronary artery disease and diabetes, and also causes significant changes in heart-disease risk factors like cholesterol, blood-sugar, and triglyceride levels, which hadn’t been linked to fasting before. “We’ve shown it is not a chance finding. Fasting is not just an indicator for other healthy lifestyles,” says lead researcher Benjamin Horne of the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute. “It is actually the fasting that is working to reduce the risk of disease.”

How the Heck:

In the first recent study on fasting and heart disease, the researchers surveyed people in Salt Lake City, where a majority of citizens are Mormons and fast once a month for 24 hours. They discovered that the people who answered “yes” when questioned whether they abstain from food and drink for an extended time had a lower rate of coronary disease and diabetes.
In the second study, scientists monitored 230 people ...

What global warming?

What the weather’s like affects some people’s beliefs about global climate change, a new study found: On hot days, they’re all over it, but on cold days, they’re not so sure.

This is not impressive, people. It’s called “global,” meaning not just what you personally felt when you walked out the door this morning. “Climate” also means something different from “weather”, and “change” could mean things will get warmer, colder, or just plain different. On unusually chilly days, these climatically labile folks are 0 for 3.

If only that was the worst of it. A string of studies have shown that people are comically bad at consistently thinking, well, anything when it comes to climate change. Even miniscule differences in what we’re up to at the moment or how we’re asked can have a big effect on what people think of climate change and what they’re willing to do to help. Here are five more ridiculously simple things that get people to change their minds:

What’s on TV. I’m sure you all remember the 2004 hit film The Day After Tomorrow, in which global warming throws Earth into a new ...