Fluorine: It tastes like burning

This is the first I've seen of Dr. Martyn Poliakoff's Periodic Table of Videos but it's a good one. Each video is about an element, and this one focuses on Fluorine, one of those non-heavy elements that you still don't see very much of because of its extreme reactivity. That reactivity is on display in this as they use it to burn through steel wool and charcoal -- just by squirting it at them, even in cold, liquid form.

Unlike most chemistry, this video comes with a moral: don't mess with fluorine.

[via BB]

Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule

Mr Rodriguez contemplating the
implications of the Supreme Court's
1972 Flood v. Kuhn ruling which
upheld Major League Baseball's
exemption from anti-trust litigation,
despite what many observers
considered an 'overly strict'
reliance on stare decisis
...and Chien-Ming Wang's rash.

While carrying out my usual research on the broader public importance of obscure facits of baseball I happened across this unusual legal article that explains, in excessively footnoted detail, the legal and societal precidents for the adoption of the Infield Fly Rule. For those sociopathic Americans who don't tivo spring training games, or humans who are from that wild and lawless land that isn't America, the Infield Fly Rule states that when there are less than two outs and runners on first and second, the batter is automatically out if he hits a pop-fly that could be easily caught by an infielder -- whether or not the infielder actually catches it. This prevents the defense from intentionally dropping the fly ball to make a double-play. The runners in this situation have no choice but to stand near their respective bags, assuming the ball will be caught, and then in the event that it isn't, would be too far from advancing to 3rd and 2nd to avoid an easy double play. It's baseball's equivalent of the en passant.

The article, (which was published anonymously and later revealed to have been written by then law-student William S. Stevens), describes the invention and evolution of the rule in the 1890's in a scholarly/mock-scholarly tone that apes similar, less light-hearted works with overt formality. A footnote on the word "origin" reads:

6: For a discussion of origins, see generally Scopes v. State, 154 Tenn. 105, 289 S.W. 363 (1927). Genisis 1:1-2:9. But see even more generally Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968); R. ARDREY, AFRICAN GENESIS (1961); C. DARWIN, THE DECENT OF MAN (1871); C. DARWIN, THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (1859).

Stevens mainly describes how the rule developed out of a widespread desire to preserve the 'gentlemanly' nature of the sport, and was later modified with the same goal in mind -- for instance by reducing the role that umpires originally had in enforcing it, whereby they would make a ruling on who was out and where they runners ought to be after the play had taken place. Since this could cause arguments (and a purpose of the rule is to let the game play out with everyone playing to their best abilities) it was changed so that the umpire calls it and gestures during the play, to put everyone on equal footing. Also interesting is his retelling of how the calls for such a rule arose out of a game in 1893 where an infielder intentionally allowed a fly to drop with a runner on first, but only in order to catch the runner because he was faster than the batter. He got only a single out, not two, merely substituting a fast runner on first for a fat, slow one, and this isn't even a situation that the rule applies to! And once this tactic had been realized, similar plays seemed to have the umpire calling out the runner regardless of the fact that there was no rule against intentional drops.


Evidently, there are a number of parallels between the standards that established the IFR and those that formed English Common Law. I'm not an expert on historical legal questions, but the comparisons he makes are fairly broad, so I doubt that they are too controversial. The idea that the academic world was begging for a comparison of these two things is a little more far-fetched, but it's still a great topic, due to the amount of analysis you can do on such an obscure rule.


Still, I can't help but wonder about one thing -- he rightly points out that the nature of baseball has its roots in 19th century English sporting culture, that it's intended goal was more about exercise and camaraderie than competition. The attitudes of this society and era, to "[keep] the rules simple and [allow] moral force to govern the game" is apparent in many aspects of modern baseball. For simplicity there are things like the fact that there are no rules about where fielders can stand (or that there are even any codified differences between them), or knocking over fielders covering a base (as long as you're not unnecessarily violent about it) what constitutes a pitch (the eephus counts), a strike, a fair ball, etc. There are even more examples of moral impulses codified in the rules*: balks, catcher's interference, crowd interference, uproar about sign-stealing, slapping at balls during a tantrum. It's not a rule, but people even get upset about running over the mound when you're not supposed to. Not to mention steroids. Hmmm...a lot of these things are A-Rod related...


Anyway, the thing that I think I disagree with him about is the notion that these attitudes are primarily English. I don't doubt that they were originally, but if that is true, why does baseball, which has been developing in the US for at least 150 years, retain a strong sense that right and wrong are important to the sport while soccer, which was also arose out of this gentlemanly English attitude of fair play (and is most popular there) is more rife with unpunished deception and fake injuries than pretty much all other sports?

"Aside, The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule," anonymous, 123 Univ. Penn. Law Review 1474 (1975).

*The primary counter-example to the moral prohibition against trickery in baseball that springs to mind is the hidden-ball trick, but it's overruled by the opposing desire for simplicity.

Battletrek Generatica

Some awesome bootleg covers that require no commentary:

A good-hearted tween comedy! [via Nerdist]

And this [via GammaSquad], which looks like it would probably be way more awesome than real Phantom Menace:

Some Reminders

-Like all (science) graduate students, I am woefully behind everything happening in the world of entertainment. So even though it's probably not news to anyone normal, I was surprised to find out recently that there is a Facebook movie coming out soon. I can't think of anything other than this:

Facebook/off

And as usual I can remember the wild early days of Facebook where that "Too close for missiles, I'm switching to guns" tag-line comes from. Back before they started changing everything and letting in all the riff-raff who didn't go to Elite East-Coast Colleges.

I'd also like to point out, as I usually do in these circumstances, that the guy who founded facebook dated my ex-girlfriend's suitemate when we were freshmen at our Elite East-Coast Colleges. The only thing I remember about him was that he made an incorrect, but still lame, joke about trigonometry while playing frisbee in the common room. He said tangent when he should have used sine...or nothing. Also, that that girl dumped him shortly before he created that website and became a billionaire.

-I found out a few days ago that the expression "kid gloves" deals with gloves made from the skin of young goats -- not the kind of kids who are young humans. Please adjust your speech accordingly.

-I am sure that I have learned many other delayed or otherwise interesting things recently, but I've been busy doing astronomy stuff, and more importantly, programming, so that I can reduce images without having to think about each step of the process manually. For some reason, scientific (or even basic) programming is not yet part of any physics curriculum, though it seems like the primary thing many of us spend out time on. I've had to learn how to use various things, but never formally, and almost always in the context of "figure out how to do this for your job." It seems as though somewhere around your 3rd or 4th year of undergrad, professors start assuming that you know how to use most command-line programs, or write code in fortran or C, despite there never being any (even suggested) instruction on these things. Plus, many intro comp-sci classes tend to cover topics that are mainly useless to science majors. I wish my college had had some kind of "Unix-study abroad" style immersion program where that was the only way they let you communicate. (Hey, at least we'd get to travel...) I've gradually gotten proficient, but it's a lot more painful when you don't know how to phrase your (surely) stupid questions to get an answer out of the internet. Fluent or not, at least the end result is pretty:

Happy 4th of July!

Odds and Ends

• As Seen on TV: A Tribute to Doing it Wrong

• Super Mario Brothers with real time accompaniment. Includes sound effects! I think hiring a guy to play for you like this is how to play Nintendo if you are extremely rich. (Mario 3 is also featured here)

• Lastly, there is so little reason to bother with the World Cup -- the most complicated part of the sport seems to be the ranking system whereby they determine exactly how many draws are needed to move on to the next round, which teams that actually win their games deserve to be eliminated, and how many you have to lose before advancing.
  
  Nonetheless, everything involving North Korea is a candidate for humor, and they're seized the chance by hiring Chinese people to pose as fans for their games. It sort of makes sense that they're not going to allow actual North Koreans to leave their impoverished Stalineque nation just to attend a soccer game. On the other hand, it would look bad to have no one cheering for them, hence the idea of sitting, like, 100 identically-dressed Chinese guys in the crowd and paying them to cheer.
  
  

Tipping the Scales

Powers of Ten from Heinz Legler on Vimeo.

A cool interactive take on the indelible 1968 Powers of Ten film (above) (or this a cheap, probably pretty expensive, Morgan Freeman-narrated knock-off). I've never actually heard anyone use the term "Yoctometer" but I support anyone wanting to.

It is an interesting fact that the divisions between different areas of science is based mainly on the scale they study. You could reasonably argue that everything important having to do with chemistry, for instance, takes place between roughly 10^-7m and 10^-9m. Counting molecular stuff, biology gets everything from the 10^-7m to 1 m scale or so. Physics, of course, is everywhere...

The Scale of the Universe:

What YOU Need To Know About Space Combat

Cool post by an aerospace engineer about the kind of stuff we all know we spend more time contemplating than we ought to, Gizmodo considers The Physics of Space Battles:

First, let me point out something that Ender's Game got right and something it got wrong. What it got right is the essentially three-dimensional nature of space combat, and how that would be fundamentally different from land, sea, and air combat. In principle, yes, your enemy could come at you from any direction at all. In practice, though, the Buggers are going to do no such thing. At least, not until someone invents an FTL drive, and we can actually pop our battle fleets into existence anywhere near our enemies. The marauding space fleets are going to be governed by orbit dynamics – not just of their own ships in orbit around planets and suns, but those planets' orbits. For the same reason that we have Space Shuttle launch delays, we'll be able to tell exactly what trajectories our enemies could take between planets: the launch window. At any given point in time, there are only so many routes from here to Mars that will leave our imperialist forces enough fuel and energy to put down the colonists' revolt. So, it would actually make sense to build space defense platforms in certain orbits, to point high-power radar-reflection surveillance satellites at certain empty reaches of space, or even to mine parts of the void. It also means that strategy is not as hopeless when we finally get to the Bugger homeworld: the enemy ships will be concentrated into certain orbits, leaving some avenues of attack guarded and some open. (Of course, once our ships maneuver towards those unguarded orbits, they will be easily observed – and potentially countered.)

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?