Portrays a time-starved mother who is willing to throw herself into parenting but also realizes the need to care for her own soul.
DVD Feature Film Review: Where the Wild Things Are
A haunting, innovative, and poignant film about childhood that may have you howling with the Wild Things inside and around you.
High Silicone Content in Steel
Does anyone know if having a high silicone content in mild steel will make it harder to get proper penetration when welding it?
TAM 8 registration is now open! | Bad Astronomy
Registration for The Amaz!ng Meeting 8 is now open!
Wow, what a lineup. Richard Dawkins, folks, as well as a whole passel of skeptical stars. I couldn’t help but notice I’m on that list as well. I’d better come up with a talk.
But I have a little while; TAM 8 is July 8 – 11. Maybe by then I’ll be able to open up on My Sooper Sekrit Project™. And show my tattoo!
So go and sign up. TAM 8 is the Woodstock of skepticism, and has earned that moniker. Man, it’s 5 months away and I already can’t wait!
From Eternity to Book Club: Chapter Eight | Cosmic Variance
Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Finally we dig into the guts of the matter, as we embark on Chapter Eight, “Entropy and Disorder.”
Excerpt:
Why is mixing easy and unmixing hard? When we mix two liquids, we see them swirl together and gradually blend into a uniform texture. By itself, that process doesn’t offer much clue into what is really going on. So instead let’s visualize what happens when we mix together two different kinds of colored sand. The important thing about sand is that it’s clearly made of discrete units, the individual grains. When we mix together, for example, blue sand and red sand, the mixture as a whole begins to look purple. But it’s not that the individual grains turn purple; they maintain their identities, while the blue grains and the red grains become jumbled together. It’s only when we look from afar (“macroscopically”) that it makes sense to think of the mixture as being purple; when we peer closely at the sand (“microscopically”) we see individual blue and red grains.
Okay cats and kittens, now we’re really cooking. We haven’t exactly been reluctant throughout the book to talk about entropy and the arrow of time, but now we get to be precise. Not only do we explain Boltzmann’s definition of entropy, but we give an example with numbers, and even use an equation. Scary, I know. (In fact I’d love to hear opinions about how worthwhile it was to get just a bit quantitative in this chapter. Does the book gain more by being more precise, or lose by intimidating people away just when it was getting good?)
In case you’re interested, here is a great simulation of the box-of-gas example discussed in the book. See entropy increase before your very eyes!
Explaining Boltzmann’s definition of entropy is actually pretty quick work; the substantial majority of the chapter is devoting to digging into some of the conceptual issues raised by this definition. Who chooses the coarse graining? (It’s up to us, but Nature does provide a guide.) Is entropy objective, or does it depend on our subjective knowledge? (Depends, but it’s as objective as we want it to be.) Could entropy ever systematically decrease? (Not in a subsystem that interacts haphazardly with its environment.)
We also get into the philosophical issues that are absolutely inevitable in sensible discussions of this subject. No matter what anyone tells you, we cannot prove the Second Law of Thermodynamics using only Boltzmann’s definition of entropy and the underlying dynamics of atoms. We need additional hypotheses from outside the formalism. In particular, the Principle of Indifference, which states that we assign equal probability to every microstate within any given macrostate; and the Past Hypothesis, which states that the universe began in a state of very low entropy. There’s just no getting around the need for these extra ingredients. While the Principle of Indifference seems fairly natural, the Past Hypothesis cries out for some sort of explanation.
Not everyone agrees. Craig Callender, a philosopher who has thought a lot about these issues, reviewed my book for New Scientist and expresses skepticism that there is anything to be explained. (A minority view in the philosophy community, for what it’s worth.) He certainly understands the need to assume that the early universe had a low entropy — as he says in a longer article, “By positing the Past State the puzzle of the time asymmetry of thermodynamics is solved, for all intents and purposes,” with which I agree. Callender is simply drawing a distinction between positing the past state, which he’s for, and trying to explain the past state, which he thinks is a waste of time. We should just take it as a brute fact, rather than seeking some underlying explanation — “Sometimes it is best not to scratch explanatory itches,” as he puts it.
While it is absolutely possible that the low entropy of the early universe is simply a brute fact, never to be explained by any dynamics or underlying principles, it seems crazy to me not to try. If we picked a state of the universe randomly out of a hat, the chances we would end up with something like our early universe are unimaginably small. To most of us, that’s a crucial clue to something deep about the universe: it’s early state was not picked randomly out of a hat! Something should explain it. We can’t be completely certain that such an explanation exists, but cosmology is hard enough without choosing to ignore the most blatant clues that nature is sticking under our noses.
This chapter and the next two are the heart and soul of the book. I hope that the first part of the book is interesting enough that people are drawn in this far, because this is really the payoff. It’s all interesting and fun, but these three chapters are crucial. Putting it into the context of cosmology, as we’ll do later in the book, is indispensable to the program we’re outlining, but the truth is that we don’t yet know the final answers. We do know the questions, however, and here is where they are being asked.
Disaster Psychology: Protect the Women—If There’s Time | 80beats
According to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, chivalry just depends on how much time you’ve got.
That was the conclusion Benno Torgler and colleagues arrived at by studying two of history’s most famous shipwrecks: The Titanic, where social norms seem to have prevailed and women and children had a better chance of surviving, and the Lusitania, where they did not. The rapid sinking of the Lusitania appears to have triggered the selfish instinct for survival in its passengers, while the slow sinking of the Titanic may have allowed altruism to reemerge.
More than 1,500 people died when the Titanic struck an iceberg in 1912 and sank over the course of three hours in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic. In their analysis, the researchers studied passenger and survivor lists from both ships, and considered gender, age, ticket class, nationality and familial relationships with other passengers. The differences emerged after a closer look at the survival rates [The New York Times]. Children aboard the Titanic, researchers say, were about 15 percent more likely to survive than adults, and women had more than a 50 percent better chance than men to make it out alive.
But while the Lusitania disaster occurred only three years after the Titanic, researchers say that the passenger reaction was quite different. The Lusitania took just 18 minutes to sink on 7 May 1915, torpedoed by a German U-boat just off Kinsale in Ireland, on a voyage between New York and Liverpool: 1,198 died, and it was literally survival of the fittest among the 639 who escaped [The Guardian]. People between the ages of 16 and 35 had the best chance of surviving the Lusitania, the scientists say, not only because there was so little time, but also because the escape was hazardous and the lifeboats rocked violently.
There are many confounding factors in a disaster, but Torgler argues that time was the key. With the Titanic sinking so slowly, he argues, social norms reemerged: Not only did women and children fare better, but upper class people were more likely to survive the Titanic wreck than the Lusitania, which devolved into a mad dash to the lifeboats. However, psychologist Daniel Kruger says that leadership could play a large role, too. The Titanic crew was more successful in maintaining order than the crew of the Lusitania. “People might be in a state of panic, but if they are reassured there is a system in place, they might be more likely to go along with contingency plans,” Kruger said [Los Angeles Times].
The life-and-death drama of events like the Titanic and Lusitania provide researchers a window to further figure out how people behave under pressure. Torgler and his colleagues are studying the reactions to more recent disasters — namely in the use of text messages, including those sent by people trapped during the World Trade Center attacks on Sept. 11 [The New York Times].
Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Titanic’s Ruin
DISCOVER: The Titanic’s Revenge
80beats: Next Global Warming Victim: Centuries-Old Shipwrecks
Discoblog: The Navy’s Old Ships Get a Second Life… As Fish Residences
Image: National Archive
Piping Questions
1- in the o-let branch connection, What is the size (with tolerance) of the opening in run pipe?
2- the attachement between the olet and the run pipe shall be full penetration grove weld?
3- deose the "full penetration groove weld" mean "complete fusion of the run pipe opening at
Chile Quake Shifted Earth’s Axis, Shortened the Length of a Day | Discoblog
The devastating earthquake in Chile that killed almost 700 people probably also shifted the Earth’s axis, say NASA scientists, permanently making days shorter by 1.26 microseconds. But since a microsecond is one-millionth of a second, you may not have noticed.
Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says he has done the calculations. Gross says the earthquake, which measured 8.8 on the Richter scale, moved large amounts of rock, altered the distribution of mass on the planet, and moved the Earth’s axis by about 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches). The change in axis directly impacts Earth’s rotation, and the rate of the planet’s rotation determines the length of a day.
To explain this phenomenon, scientists used an ice skating analogy: When a skater spins on ice, he draws his arms closer in to his body to spin faster, because the speed of his rotation is dependent on the way mass is distributed across his body.
Scientists point out that the duration of a day can change depending on different geological events.
The magnitude 9.1 earthquake in 2004 that generated a killer tsunami in the Indian Ocean shortened the length of days by 6.8 microseconds.
On the other hand, the length of a day also can increase. For example, if the Three Gorges reservoir in China were filled, it would hold 10 trillion gallons (40 cubic kilometers) of water. The shift of mass would lengthen days by 0.06 microsecond, scientists said.
Join Discover Magazine on Facebook.
Related Content:
80beats: Why Chile’s Massive Earthquake Could Have Been Much Worse
80beats: NASA Jet Studies Haiti’s Fault Lines For Signs of Further Trouble
80beats: Where in the World Will the Next Big Earthquake Strike?
80beats: Satellite Images Show the Extent of Haiti’s Devastation
80beats: Haiti Earthquake May Have Released 250 Years of Seismic Stress
80beats: Science Via Twitter: Post-Earthquake Tweets Can Provide Seismic Data
Image: iStockphoto
Travel With Julie
For a great mix of travel experiences, recipes, photographs and good advice, “Travel with Julie” by Julie Gilley is a wonderful site to visit. She will take you on a tour of Italy that you were not expecting. Have your wine glass ready… Oh, and your fork.
Naming the Days Feature: Birthday of Dr. Seuss
Ways to celebrate the birthday of Dr. Seuss whose keen sense of play charms children and adults alike
Darth Vader’s Galaxy
Darth Vader's Starfighter? Not quite. Click for larger. Credit: ESO
That’s what NGC 936 is being called by the ESO, quite fitting I’d say! Check out their press release below.
The ESO is also reporting there was no damage to any of the ESO observatories, and that is very good news indeed.
The ESO press release:
Glowing in the cosmos at a distance of about 50 million light-years away, the galaxy NGC 936 bears a striking resemblance to the Twin Ion Engine (TIE) starfighters used by the evil Dark Lord Darth Vader and his crew in the epic motion picture Star Wars. The galaxy’s shiny bulge and a bar-like structure crossing it bring to mind the central engine and cockpit of the spacecraft; while a ring of stars surrounding the galactic core completes the parallel, corresponding to the wings of the TIE fighters that are equipped with solar panels.
This galaxy harbours exclusively old stars and shows no sign of any recent star formation. Bars such as that observed in NGC 936 are common features of galaxies; however, this one is significantly more marked than average. Although a perfect symbol for the dark side of the “Force”, it is still debatable whether this galaxy is dominated, like most others, by a large amount of dark matter.
This image has been obtained using the FORS instrument mounted on one of the 8.2-metre telescopes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope on top of Cerro Paranal, Chile. It combines data acquired through four wide-band filters (B, V, R, I). The field of view is about 7 arcminutes.
Sign of the apocalypse: blood waterfalls | Bad Astronomy
Our planet is a weird place. I can imagine visiting Antactica, seeing nothing but white ice and gray rocks for days on end… but then, how would you react when you saw this?
Yegads! That is a part of Taylor Glacier, specifically the Blood Falls, located in the dry valleys of Antarctica. Apparently, a lake was covered by the glacier about 2 million years ago, trapping the microbial life inside. They have evolved independently of outside life for all that time, and were discovered due to a few leaks from under the glacier.
The water coming out is red due to iron, and is incredibly salty with almost no oxygen in it. The microbes — 17 different kinds have been found there — must use sulfur as a catalyst instead of oxygen, which has never been seen before.
It’s always surprising when an entirely alien ecosystem is found on Earth. It makes me hopeful that when we start to explore other planets, we’ll find life in splendid and incredible varieties. Nature is clever, vast, and has had a long long time in the lab to experiment. If we can find things so alien in a place so familiar, what will happen when we explore a truly alien world?
Image credit: United States Antarctic Program Photo Library
Book Excerpt: Letter to a Godchild
Reynolds Price on his vision of God's expectations of him.
The New Carnival of Evolution Is Up | The Loom
Check out 
Unscientific America Among Library Journal’s Best 2009 Sci-Tech Books | The Intersection
See here. We’re honored to be part of such a distinguished list, along with James Hansen, Thomas Levenson, and other writers we admire.
Answer Skeptics’ Claims with Climate Change Resources
Climate change deniers and skeptics are still out there, but now there are great resources (besides the scientific organizations) such as Skeptical Science and the Climate Crock of the Week videos. One of the latest videos is above, but there are many more, and you can see them all here.
Now you can win any skeptic or denier climate change debate with the 3 resources in this post. Skeptical Science has put together an answer for the 242 skeptic claims it has amassed so far. It’s an amazing and impressive list and you can see the claims and the answers to all with links here. I included many of the arguments from scientists in a podcast on the climate science recently, and you can listen to it at Climate Files Radio.
Research Update: TSI Engineering Assessment Report (part 1) released
Thanks to Eelco Hoogendoorn and a host of valuable community support, our first offical Engineering report is now available for general parusal. You can pick it up from our new (and still in-progress) Research page, or download the PDF directly here.
From the Preface:
Retirement Function
Last day today signed the release paperwork and started leave. Bittersweet sad to go but excited at the new change in direction and really looking forward to our world trip. I will miss the comaraderie and friendship but it is a really small world.Several people spent a lot of their personal time preparing for my send off and I thought it was very well done and I was surprised by the turno
get it india
Arriving to Kolkata via DumDum International airport is an experience Its 11pm walk out of plane to gravel runway towards a distant light called a terminal where 2 rude men in masks sit behind filthy desks checking to see if you have swine flu.Look around guys theres more germs in this socalled airport than any place on earth .
16 days.. and counting
Today is March 1st. Only 16 days to go.. and counting. As well as being very very excited I am also a little concerned that my departure day is charging towards me like Usain Bolt.. and it will be on me before I have completed all that needs to be done. Hmmm. If I were going away for a few months I could just leave stuff and deal with the chaos on my return. My 'voiced' intention is to go for