Dark Matter Matters

As a card carrying astro-related blog owner I am contractually obligated to comment on yesterday's kinda-sorta-it-might-be-dark-matter-semi-quasi-announcement by the CDMS II group.

There had been rumors about this thing for over a week that CDMS had some kind of watershed announcement. That they had discovered dark matter (what other important announcements can DM detection projects make?), that they were publishing in Nature today, that a torrent of papers was about to hit the arxiv with analysis of this last night, that they had all learned the true meaning of Christmas and were going to be nothing but kind and generous from now on.

Yesterday, with the hype reaching a fever pitch, they held a seminar on their findings, broadcast online. Unified in the concerted effort to drive everyone crazy in anticipation they began the lecture with about 10 minutes of freshman-astronomy-level rationales for the existence of cold dark matter, before moving on to another 10 minutes of descriptions of things that were important to them but not to us, like the arrangement of the detectors and the way the data was collected. Then she threw in a joke about a spherical cow, and stalled for another 5 minutes. Finally, she got to a slide that said "Results" or something at the top, and the video completely froze. Of all the panicked, oh-my-god-just-tell-us-already, freakouts I can imagine something causing, this was way up there. When I regained consciousness and the video started working again she was on a slide that said "Conclusions," and before I could make out any of the bullet points, the camera quickly panned away and she started taking questions. It was awesome.

Anyhow, in the aftermath of that humbling experience, what actually transpired during those missing minutes has come to light. CDMS detected TWO events. But because of the way they pull events out the noise of other stuff hitting the detector that could appear as a false signal, they'd expect to find about 0.8 events in the time the experiment ran. There is a 23% chance that what they saw was just random noise. I read someone describe this as the least helpful possible result and I have to agree. It isn't enough to be a conclusive discovery, and it isn't enough to say that dark matter definitely ISN'T being seen in this kind of detector either. So unfortunately, not enough for solid results, and not much to come up with a decent parameter space constraint either. It could certainly turn out they did find it, but that will have to wait for later confirmation. Just a lot of build up, a suggestion that we might be on the verge of learning something really interesting, a clue, and then the realization that nothing has been settled and you'll have to keep waiting for answers. Kind of like an episode of Lost.

Links:
Best popular article about this I've seen: Scientific American
Cosmic Variance Liveblog of Yesterday's SLAC seminar.
Basically alright article with a non-sequitur about supersymmetry: NYTimes

Actual CDMS Paper

Evolution

Why does it feel as though stuff like this actually happens? Oh yeah, because it does. Better these guys than James Inhofe at least.

Season's Greetings from a Telescope!

Merry Christmas, from Hubble:

This year, say it in stars! Send your friends and relatives best wishes for the season with our printable holiday cards. Messages of joy and peace are illuminated by the natural splendor of the universe.

Worst Article Ever

I like Slate, but this lady seriously has nothing to offer. Unless you count her frequent attempts to be the worst parent ever. Without ever really meaning to, I've stumbled across her various articles about freaking out because her sons wanted to see Star Wars (she was afraid they might like it), freaking out when her son went unsupervised in the woods of suburban Connecticut for 45 min, and discouraging her son from being curious about how magic tricks work.

Still this is a new low: "My boys love astronomy. I couldn't care less." And that's just the title.

Basically she spends the whole article complaining about how boring space is to her and bemoaning the fact that her boys are always all interested in science, instead of..well, she never really says what. Except maybe some ponderous New York Times article about the 10th year of some couple's marriage -- everyone knows how normal kids really eat that stuff up.

I have never willingly studied a single page of astronomy. My knowledge of the planets begins and ends with My Very Elderly Mother Just Sat Upon Nine Pillows. [...] And yet my boys are in love. They ask for library books about outer space. They had a DVD of the moon landing. They go to the local planetarium. They recite facts about planetary gasses and burned-up stars and black holes and something else called a white hole. "Mom, did you know?" they ask before launching into a minilecture. I never do. Nor, if I'm honest, do I care to find out. The other day, Eli interrupted himself in the middle of a shooting star explanation and said, sagely, "Mom, sometimes you don't really listen to me."

This leaves me with a guilty question: What do you do when your children's interests don't match your own? Do you do your utmost to cultivate genuine enthusiasm and expertise? Do you fake it? Or do you keep the faith with your own passions, figuring you're teaching a lesson about assertion of selfhood and independence?

I am tempted to stray down the last path—is that the one for the lazy, self-involved parent, or is it the proudly resolute one?

Um, lazy and self-involved. Next question?

What kind of quandary is this? These are elementary schoolers. Is she aware of the range of stupid crap they could be into? And she's second-guessing the one that's actually educational? Sure, they're just kids and no one is saying that they're going to do whatever they're interested in now, but having your mother casually dismiss your nascent curiosity in the natural world is not helpful.

And then there's this garbage:

Maybe he'll be a rebel astronomer, and someday reform NASA, or call for an end to manned space missions so that the money can be used to fix Social Security? A mother can dream.

There are so many things wrong with that statement that I don't even know where to begin. First of all, NASA's budget is insignificant compared to Social Security (or practically anything else the government spends money on). It was $18.7 Billion in 2008, while SS was $696 Billion*. Studies show that Americans overestimate NASA to be one of the largest federal agencies, believing that it receives a quarter of the budget, when in reality it gets less than 1%. Plus a large fraction of astronomers do not favor manned space exploration, other than the role it plays in maintaining space-based telescopes, which are tremendously important.

Eliminating NASA, and all other publicly-funded science for that matter, and spending that money on other stuff would increase funding for social programs by ~2%, does anyone think this would make a huge a difference? This is one of those non sequitur "let's solve our problems on Earth first" (before ever doing science, apparently) statements that stupid people make without considering where their iPods and laptops come from.

Oh, and she cites Gregg Easterbrook. So all in all, not good.

*This chart is pretty good for showing federal expenditures visually.

Possibly the Best Post on Wikipedia

List of cats with fraudulent diplomas

My only quibble -- why "fraudulent"? Are there cats with legitimate degrees?

Shooting things in slow-motion

Slo-mo bullet porn. Videos like this are only quasi-illuminating, but they are certainly hypnotic. I love the way that the bullets appear to behave like a liquid-- presumably the energy of the impact does actually melt them. The world certainly looks very interesting at very high, and very low speeds.



For more slow-motion impacts, see this previous post.

Simply the Best

Best of Wikipedia is my new favorite site. As someone who too frequently has to resist the urge to spend hours link-hopping around obscure wikipedia articles, BoW is a dangerous place. They simply put up a couple of unusual and fascinating articles a day. For those of you with more self-control a sample of some of their recent entries includes:

Gruen Transfer: In shopping mall design, the Gruen transfer refers to the moment when a consumer enters a shopping mall, and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, loses track their original intentions. Spatial awareness of their surroundings play a key role, as does the surrounding sound and music. The effect of the transfer is marked by a slower walking pace and glazed eyes.

Paraprosdokian A paraprosdokian is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect, sometimes producing an anticlimax. For this reason, it is extremely popular among comedians and satirists. An example by Groucho Marx is, “She got her good looks from her father, he’s a plastic surgeon.”

Semantic Satiation Semantic satiation (also semantic saturation) is a cognitive neuroscience phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who can only process the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.

So there you go.

[Comic via XKCD, obviously.]

Wrath!

I think I can scoop Strange Maps for once. Wired posts these infographics of what Kansas State geographers consider maps of the 7 Deadly sins. (Red is sinnier, Yellow is more good)

Greed
Average income compared with number of people living below the poverty line.


Envy
Total thefts (robbery, burglary, larceny, and grand theft auto) per capita.


Wrath
Number of violent crimes (murder, assault, and rape) per capita.


Sloth
Expenditures on art, entertainment, and recreation compared with employment.


Gluttony
Number of fast-food restaurants per capita.


Lust
Number of STD cases reported per capita.


Pride
Aggregate of the other six offenses—because pride is the root of all sin.

So this is sort of a cool little thought experiment, but the methodology doesn't seem right for all of these. Greed, envy, wrath, and lust make sense. But what is the deal with gluttony? Aren't we one of the fattest countries? Why didn't they just do obesity rates? I'm pretty sure there should be more gluttony. And I don't really agree with the criteria for sloth. They should have done something a bit more sloth-related than entertainment spending. How about density of delivery restaurants, or cable subscriptions versus income? Not to mention the laziness of just making Pride the composite one. It would have been better to just use Porsche ownership or bloggers per capita. Not bad though.

As usual, those hypocrites in the bible belt stick out as the region least able to live by the rules they're always telling us we don't follow...

Kansas State University Geography/USACE

How many roads again?

I remember hearing a while ago that Bob Dylan, of all people, was considering recording the voice for a GPS navigator. If his speaking voice is anything like his singing voice, a lot of people are going to end up in ditches.

So I was surprised to find out that there are actually already a bunch of these celebrity voiced gps units. Mr. T (I think he just yells at you)? Gary Busey? Knight Rider? And last of all, and for reasons no one can understand, Curt Schilling.

*Etc

The Freakonomics Blog points out some graveyard humor, describing the origin of this clever headstone juxtaposition.

They belong to chemists buried in the Yale's cemetery. The one on the left of a John Kirkwood, while the right is Lars Onsager, both of whom were brilliant statistical and fluid mechanics. At first glace this looks like the absolute apex of academic one-upsmanship, but as usual, there is a buzzkilling explanation that involves these two guys not hating each other. Kirkwood died pretty young and his widow basically decided to make his headstone a curriculum vitae for some reason. Most people who knew him thought it was a bit odd, but Onsager's wife wanted to do the same for him when he died, but her family talked her out of it. His son Erling wanted to put an asterisk on there, but she vetoed it as being mean-spirited.

But the idea of the asterisk stayed in Erling’s mind, and years later, when the children were adding their mother’s death date to the monument, they also added the asterisk and the “etc.” footnote. “When my mother died, my brothers and sister and I, we all agreed it was the right thing to do,” said Erling.

Erling wanted to set the record straight on his family’s motive for including the notation:

The idea was very tongue-in-cheek. It wasn’t done maliciously. It was triggered by the neighboring headstone, but it was not aimed at it.

And all the people involved seem to agree that both of these gentlemen would have found it hilarious. So revenge downgraded to gentle comedy. It kind of reminds me of Jefferson's headstone, that mentions only that he was the author of the Declaration of Independence, and Virginia Statute of religious freedom and that he founded the University of Virginia -- without bothering to point out that he was the President. Which, if you think about it, seems to say to all the other presidents "Oh, you were the president too? That's sort of cool I guess. I didn't think it was worth making a big deal out of..."

Expectation Value = Nerd Humor

Via the other people in my department: these bookends, for the quatumly disposed. A handsome addition to any bookcase.

The folks who made these wrapped rigid paper around some bricks. That seems like kind of a tough method, but throwing one through a window would be a great way of intimidating a physicist.

The Office Doesn't Make Any Sense

The Office makes no sense. The show itself. I can't believe I didn't realize this until just now.

The premise of the show (even though they never explicitly say so) is that a film crew is documenting the everyday life in the office of a paper company. This is, in and of itself, sort of amusing, but it makes for a good comedy format because you can cut in between interviews and you have interesting herky-jerky handheld camerawork. The fact that it is very easy to forget about the mechanism of the show, despite the frequency of characters addressing the cameras, is sort of disturbing since it seems to indicate that we're all so familiar with the style of reality television that we don't even notice it anymore. Nonetheless, the whole idea is that they're being filmed all the time, and there are plenty of instances where someone acknowledges the cameramen, or there is a boom mic, or the characters are trying to get away from the crew or whatever. And Michael Scott definitely acts the way he does because he is on camera. Plus, there are plenty of lines that are responses to obvious questions in the interview scenes, like when they start a line by repeating a question ("Where do I see myself in 5 years? Well..."). Still though, the idea is to make it a fairly subtle thing, to the degree that it isn't clear whether they're being filmed for a documentary or a reality show, and they've certainly done it well enough that we hardly think about it anymore.

Except that it's now so subtle that the premise no longer makes sense. Since they never explain the purpose of the documentary we don't know whether it's for a documentary film or for a reality show. If it was only supposed to be a documentary it would be over by now -- they definitely wouldn't have followed these people around for 5 years and produced like 30 hrs of programming. On the other hand, if it is a reality show, they've been on TV since 2005, why haven't the characters on it gained any notoriety at all? Any show on for that long would have to have amassed some degree of popularity. Plus, even if we're supposed to believe it is a very unpopular show on some low-rent basic cable channel, or that they edit out any references to the program, I'm sure that the people on the show would at least watch it themselves -- which means that by now, they would have found out about all the stuff from previous seasons that they didn't know about their coworkers. Which also hasn't happened. For instance, Ray or Karen would have known about Jim and Pam far earlier than they did.

The British version avoided this of course, because they only made 12 episodes. Ricky Gervais was extremely afraid of "spoiling" his creation. (How it got to be that every decent UK show is like that is beyond me.) Nonetheless, he wasn't so worried about franchising it out to nearly any country that makes TV programs. Everyone knows there's an American duplicate but you will impress people at parties by informing them of the existence of French, German, Chilean and Quebecois versions. That's right, Quebec. Here's they are playing hockey. So I'm not so sure that Gervais' "I don't want to water down my beautiful creation" stance makes any sense. Oh, and the titles of the other shows are great.*

France: Le Bureau
Germany: Stromberg
Chile: La Ofis
Quebec: La Job
Once again, Quebec comes out on top.

Anyways, I don't know how this post ended up getting this long. I guess I just find it amusing that the show is pretty popular, yet no one seems to have noticed that the entire format of the program is no longer reasonable.

*This Slate article from a few years ago about the differences with the non-English speaking versions is pretty interesting.

Don't know much biology

...But I do know that I like these glass sculptures of diseases. The one above is a close-up of a single E. coli (is that how you say that?). Luke Jerram created a number of them depicting viruses and bacteria. The microscopic world is truly a weird-looking place.

"It's great to be exploring the edges of scientific understanding and visualisation of a virus. Scientists aren't able to answer many of the questions I ask them, such as how the RNA is exactly fitted within the Capsid? At the moment, the technology isn't there to answer all these questions for certain. I'm also pushing the boundaries of glassblowing. Some of my designs simply can't be created in glass, Some are simply too fragile and gravity would cause them to collapse under their own weight. So there's a very careful balancing act that needs to take place, between the limitations of current scientific knowledge and glassblowing techniques."

That last sentence isn't a phrase you hear too much.

via Backreaction