dropping knowledge

dropping knowledge is an interesting internet project that welcomes people to ask questions on many topics relevant to current global issues, and then receive answers from a wide variety of people around the world. i love the motivational phrase they use: ask in order to understand, answer in order to share.


they provide a nice 8 minute introduction video, but i'd also recommend exploring the questions and answers for yourself. let me know if any particular question or answer especially strikes you.

a decade of the hubble heritage project

last week marked the tenth anniversary of the hubble heritage project, which consistently presents to the public the most spectacular images produced by the hubble space telescope (HST, read current hubble health status: here). to celebrate, the heritage project people released a beautiful image of the intergalactic landscape referred to as NGC 3324:


(explore a zoomable larger image: here.)

to create the color image, they combined a blue-filtered oxygen emission image, a green glow from the hygrogen filter, and a bright red-filtered image of sulfur gas. oxygen gas illuminated by star light glows in the background, while bright red glowing sulfer clouds and dark patches of thick dust clouds protect the factories of stellar birth that lie within them. this nebulous nursery lives inside a larger inferno called the carina nebula, about 7,000 light-years away from us.

jazz and cosmology

if you're near albany, new york on november 1st, check out the black book project by the ten 27 jazz trio.

"An eclectic mix of original jazz compositions and magnificent images of the cosmos from the Hubble Space Telescope are combined in this unique performance by TEN 27 featuring Monica Wilson-Roach on electric cello and bass, Michael Roach on keyboards and piano, and Paul Borrello on mallet-kat and drums."

according to the american astronomical society newsletter, Monica Wilson-Roach wrote the cosmology-based jazz composition in honor of vera rubin - one of my astronomical heroes! vera's perseverance to study the universe, despite being discouraged from studying science because of her womanhood (princeton said "no thanks" to her and all other women until 1975!), helped create a more benevolent atmosphere for me to pursue my studies today!

From Ken Croswell’s The Universe at Midnight (via cosmic variance):

Vera Rubin was ignored, in part because she was a woman. With a certain amount of pain, she recalls that, when she applied to Swarthmore College as a science major and casually told the admissions officer that she liked to paint, the interviewer said, “Have you ever considered a career in which you paint pictures of astronomical objects?” She recalled, “That became a tag line in my family: for many years, whenever anything went wrong for anyone, we said, ‘Have you ever considered a career in which you paint pictures of astronomical objects?’” When she told her high school physics teacher that she got accepted to Vassar, he replied, “You should do okay as long as you stay away from science.” She would later recall, “It takes an enormous amount of self-esteem to listen to things like that and not be demolished.”

vera rubin contributed immensely to our understanding of the composition of the universe. she provided clear observational evidence that something non-visible existed inside galaxies. in fact, she found that there was 5-10 times more of the non-visible stuff in side galaxies than the visible stuff that produced the light for our telescopes to collect!

to do this, she looked at spectra of many galaxies in order to calculate the speed at which stars orbit around their galaxy centers. the speed of the star around the center of the galaxy is proportional to the distance to the center and how much stuff is between the star and the center. this is similar to planetary speeds - neptune moves much slower around the sun than the earth does because it is much farther away. vera measured the speed of the stars at the outskirts of galaxies and realized they moved way faster than they should, after taking into account all the visible material inside the star's orbit. therefore, something else, something non-visible, something dark, "dark matter" existed inside the galaxy to gravitationally speed up the stars rotating around the edges.


i was lucky enough to meet vera at my first AAS meeting while i was still an undergraduate student. the woman who introduced me made it a point to tell me a bit about vera's history beforehand, and i remember being very excited at that moment! thanks for your inspiration, vera!

an ocean of clouds

it's beautiful how these clouds hitting the mountains create the same wave patterns that an ocean creates as its water reaches the shallow shores.

our moon passes jupiter

did you see the bright object near the moon last night in the sky? that was jupiter. look to the south after sunset to see their close alignment again tonight!

oxford, england - part 2

the adventure continues (view part 1, here) from the top of st. mary's church...


the little gargoyle faces all over the city are sometimes eerie and sometimes funny, but always entertaining.



one lonely pink bulding face.


little people eater....




only 300 years late to meet edmund halley (of comet fame).



scenes about town...





an R2D2 builders club!!!!


enjoying a few drinks with the family that welcomed me to town!




view part 1 of the oxford series. still a bit more to come....

the science of love, and the future of women

i've been introduced to anthroplogist helen fisher thru a guest post at skepchick by laura davis by laura without labels. laura shares an excellent review of helen's new book, "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love," which i now want to read.

here is helen fisher giving a talk at TED in 2006. i find her 20 minute video to be an inspiring and charming discussion on the ways we romantically love, especially the second half.

a micrometer from here

the name of this video caught my eye, but i thoroughly enjoyed the short film. the artist, amit zakai, describes the film: "my graduation project, at the HIT israely academy for design, is a comic film measuring daily life in single units and multiplying them by powers."

i particularly like (and dislike) the eyeball part around 3:05... it's uniquely done but makes me cringe, as anything in close proximity to the eye does!


"a micrometer from here" (eng sub) from amit zakai on Vimeo.

oxford, england - part 1

belinda grew up in oxford and took me along for a weekend family visit! shenanigans ensued....


belinda drives.

glad i'm not driving.



gorgeous old victorian homes.


evidence of belinda's existential phase of youth!







when belinda first told me the name of this bridge, i heard the "bridge of size." and i thought to myself, "but its not really that big!" then i read the little sign and realized my mistake... the bridge of sighs - oh! that name made much more sense when i heard the story of the original bridge of sighs in italy. still, i dont understand why the british didnt give this one their own, less depressing name!




a couple characters in front of the bodleian library


a rather large key hole!




annoying uber-tourist!

more to come...

fossil fuels

imagine that you're scientist dr. raul cano, on an expedition to find ancient microscopic creatures that might have some kind of medical value. instead, you find an ancient bee entombed inside a chunk of amber 45 (+- 15) million years ago (think jurassic park)! using a somewhat controversial new technique, you extract 45 million year old bacteria and yeast from inside the gut of the bee!!

what do you do?

you brew beer, of course! introducing the fossil fuels brewing company.


i'd very much like to try a pint whenever i visit northern california!

posh fish.

now serving free coke with any kebab!


seen in oxford, england.

TEDprize - james nachtwey

after watching this TED video by james nachtwey, i'm intrigued. he has been a war photographer for the last several decades - a witness to events that "should not be forgotten and must not be repeated." he shares a sobering series of photos and stories during his 2007 TED prize talk:



as the winner of the 2007 TED Prize, he was awarded $100,000 and one wish: "I'm working on a story that the world needs to know about. I wish for you to help me break it in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age."

tomorrow, october 3rd, 2008, the story breaks... and i'm interested in the experience.

jules verne's journey to earth

in this case, i'm referring to the european space craft named jules verne, which just descended from orbit. in march of this year, i described the awesome triple flyby that we saw when jules verne approached the international space station (ISS), just after NASA's space shuttle endeavor undocked from the ISS! it's six months later now, jules verne successfully delivered the supplies it needed to deliver to the ISS, and it was time to return to earth's surface. jules verne was sent thru a de-orbit procedure that allowed it to re-enter earths atmosphere, break into several pieces, and crash the remaining pieces into the pacific ocean! you can watch a video of the event: HERE.

trouble for hubble

bad news, the hubble mission has been postponed until next spring :(

in short, no data is being sent from hubble to earth. NASA thinks they can put together a quick fix while astronauts train to accomplish the news tasks scheduled for the spring mission. a lot of training is needed for the simplest tasks, even for these amazingly capable space walkers! hopefully we'll be able to receive data again in a few weeks, and repair many things in addition to adding new instruments in the spring.

lots of people reporting on this so i'll direct you to other places for more details info:

NASA
dynamics of cats
julianne at cosmic variance
bad astronomy
NY Times

vinyl sound waves

its unfortunate to think how much is created and preserved with current technology, which will probably not be available at some point in the near future as technologies change. the print on old books fades, the floppy disk with my high school english writing project is unreadable, unless i buy a record player i cannot accept the wonderful gift of micheals jackson's bad on vinyl from my mother, all the cassette tapes i collected in college of live shows by various bands are now gone, etc...

here's an art installation by jean shin that nicely summarizes the point.


it's called "sound waves" and was highlighted in a NY Times article. the artist melted old vinyl records and "the resulting structure speaks to the inevitable waves of technology that render each successive generation of recordable media obsolete."

the observable universe

the observable universe - xkcd style. fantastic, from top to bottom!

space welcomes the chinese taikonauts

china has become the third country to develop an independent space program to put its "taikonauts" in space (the others being the US and russia). you can watch a video showing the first chinese space walk, which is interesting. something i noticed in the video is that the chinese space mission control center seemed a little... tight, didnt it?

here's NASA's mission control center in houston:


here's the russian mission control center:


and here's the chinese one they show in the video!?


is it just me? they seem rather tighly squeezed into those rows! or is this not the real control center?

writing about the LHC

chris wilson at slate wrote a great article called: atomic prose - Why can't science journalists just tell it like it is when it comes to particle physics? he eloquently describes the challenges faced by journalists while covering the workings of the large hadron collider (LHC), and ultimately, how they have failed.

some excerpts i particularly enjoyed:

No one ever said writing about particle physics was easy—the field of quantum mechanics shares a kind of proverbial inscrutability with rocket science, and nonscientists are understandably reluctant to dig in. But the best way to meet that challenge is to address it head-on, with clear analogies and straightforward language. The puzzles of the subatomic world—and specifically, the quest for the Higgs boson, a particle theorized to endow all others with mass—are interesting and entertaining in their own right; dressing them up in florid language only adds another layer of confusion between the author and the reader.

...

On the whole, the best writing about physics for a general audience seems to come from physicists, not journalists. This isn't due to the fact that physicists understand the subject matter better—if anything, people who spend all day in the lab are often the worst at explaining the big picture. Rather, they're better at writing about physics because they don't try so hard to make you care. They don't believe their readers must be seduced with colorful wordplay or end-of-the-world melodramas. Journalists writing popular treatments of subatomic physics could take a lesson from the scientists: Tell it straight and have a little faith that the subject matter itself—a major advance in our understanding of the cosmos—can generate its own wonder and excitement.

he also shares yet another gem from richard feynman's impeccable ability to describe complicated phenomena...

Feynman was fond of comparing the process of exploring the atom to smashing two pocket watches together and then trying to figure out how they worked by examining the debris—an analogy that neatly captures how particle physics is a distinctly forensic exercise.

carnival of space - 72

this week's carnival of space is hosted at twisted physics - unravelling our strange universe.

i contributed an entry showing the relative sizes of objects in our solar system and other well-studied stars.

this doorway is no more

this doorway is no more! it has ceased to be! it has expired.
this is an ex-doorway!!

seen in oxford, england.

shuttle to hubble delayed

complications resulting from hurricane ike has delayed the target launch date for space shuttle atlantis' STS-125 mission to work on the hubble space telescope. now we can forward to october 14, 2008 at 10:19 p.m EDT.

in light of the atlantis launch delay, the shuttle endeavour's STS-126 supply mission to the International Space Station has also been delayed a few days. now they will try to lauch endeavor on november 16 at 7:07 p.m. EST.


you can read a bit more from nancy universe today, who also found the wonderful picture above, released by NASA, showing both shuttles on the launch pad: Atlantis and Endeavour on pads 39 A and B.

pin hole cameras

seeing these creepy pinhole cameras at boy of blue indistries reminded me of a cool post by julianne at cosmic variance a while ago describing the
effects of pin hole cameras found naturally in every day life. dont know if i'd like to use the skull-version of the ancient pin hole camera, but it looks cool and is functional!



"a 4”x5” camera made from Aluminium, Titanium, Brass, Silver, Gem Stones and a 150 year old skull of a 13 year old girl. Light and time enters at the third eye, exposing the film in the middle of the skull."

LHC - down for the count

...at least until the spring of 2009, anyway.

considered by most to be the most complicated piece of technology ever created by human kind, it's no wonder that a couple technical glitches finally suspended operations at the large hadron collider. as a press release from CERN revealed yesterday, a large helium leak and a faulty electrical connection have stopped scientists ability to slam proton beams together at amazingly high speeds! well, they actually hadnt started the collision phase yet, but now they wont be able to try again until at least next spring, while they fix the present malfunctions!


the image above is a small hint at things to come. it shows "the debris of particles picked up in the detector's calorimeters and muon chambers after the beam was steered into the collimator (tungsten block) at point 5." cool!