Screenshot: A Weblog

In a similar vein to yesterday's post on data, I just noticed this NYTimes story reporting that DNA evidence can be fabricated in a lab to match a target, given a sample of their DNA, or their DNA profile from an earlier sample. Even if it seems expensive and cumbersome to start fabricating DNA evidence to frame people, there are some very interesting legal implications here just from this process being known.

While the article says that they were able to fabricate blood that a testing lab processed as if it were from the target rather than the actual source, one thing it does not comment on is whether, with further or different evaluation, it would be possible to detect that manipulation was performed.

Either way, the clock has now started on the race to see which crime procedural show airs a story based around this first....

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I somehow hadn't realized that the International Space Station was visible from Earth, but it is, particularly if you are at an angle to catch the sun's reflection of its solar panels. NASA has a tool to help you figure out when the ISS or the shuttle will be overhead wherever you are - use the "Sighting Opportunities" pull-down menu on the left-hand side to select exactly the town you are in for a list of times and how long it will be visible over the next couple of weeks.

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Science fiction sometimes seems to simply pick between whether it is the robots or the aliens who are going to kill us all, so it is refreshing to see a headline warning us that the robots are killing the aliens. It is actually not a particularly fear-mongering story though. Instead, it is a nice article talking about how the fact that there is has been a complete lack of any organic found on Mars is in fact odd given the likelihood of transfer by asteroids or comets. This had let scientists to speculate that the perchlorates on Mars, when heated, are destroying any organic material that may be there to find. This suggests new ways of looking for organic materials in future rovers that will not result in destroying what is being looked for. There is an interesting mix here of wanting to collect data about Mars as a new environment, but also having to make some assumptions about Mars in order to plan out and revise the data collection procedures being used there.

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Make yourself hallucinate, chemical free! I just have two questions? Who was laying around taping half ping pong balls over their eyes while listening to static? And, on the more science-y side, I wonder if, even if these are chemical-free ways too mess with your brain, there could be lasting side effects of doing these types of things repeatedly? How often would you have to rub a friend's nose before you permanently felt like your own nose was super long?

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I haven't watched 60 Minutes in years now, but Lifehacker has a link to the story below from last week on controlling computers with thought and I was blown away. I've known there was research going on in this direction, but some of what they show here is amazing. Using just surface-level sensors one device can sense the brain pattern of "recognition", allowing people to type or select words based as they are flashed onto a computer screen. The interface for that is pretty cool - I expected from the description a series of letters shown one at a time but instead there is a huge grid of every letter, number, and symbol you might want and they are highlighted on and off very quickly in quick succession. When they get to what is possible if you actually embed sensors in someone's brain, we start to see monkeys controlling robot arms to feed themselves and people being able to drive mechanical wheelchairs with just their thoughts. It's a very well done story - worth watching!

60 Minutes: Brain Power

The Lifehacker entry about the video speculated that while this is being used now to help people who are paralyzed, this technology would eventually reach a point where this was our standard interface with our computer. Clearly there would need to be significant changes - it seems that right now the ability to move objects with thought is accomplished by attempting to move your own arms and the brain interpreting those signals - the monkey has to have his arms restrained for this to work. It is unclear how this would work if you could move your arms. Is visualizing the motions sufficient or are the actual mental activities that take place when you legitimately attempt to move required? It also seems clear that people will be more willing to consider brain implants when it gives them back a lost ability to communicate and interact with the world than the would be simply to streamline their interactions with their computer.

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If you liked Giant Microbes but are really more of a physicist (or a bit of a hypochondriac) you will love Particle Zoo's subatomic particle plush toys. These cuddly interpretations of the basic components of matter are filled with different materials to reflect the differences in weight between, say, a top quark and a muon. The proton/neutron pairing is pretty cute, as are the quarks. I like that they have prefab gift packs of the various meaningful sets of particles that you might want to buy together. The "whole zoo" of 33 particles (quick quiz: can you name 33 subatomic particles?) looks really cool, though also really pricey.

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This is one of those do-it-on-yourself experiments that makes you realize your brain is doing all sorts of processing you have no awareness of.

First, listen to this audio clip: Sine Wave Speech. Listen to it until you either make out what is being said or conclude that you will not be able to.

Now, go listen to this audio clip: Clear Speech. After you listen to it once, go back and listen to the first clip....

Think that it only worked because you heard the "decoded" audio? Go listen to this second piece of Sine Wave Speech...

You can hear other examples and read more about the phenomenon at thisintroduction to Sine-Wave Speech. [via Boing Boing] These examples are meant to illustrate perceptual learning or perceptual insight. Even without getting that far into the explanation, I think it is a remarkable illustration of how good our minds are at identifying patterns and generalizing them based on remarkably sparse data.

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I had a few students express relief yesterday that the world did not end. Being the kill joy that I always am, I pointed out something that the media coverage did not seem to focus on - the risk of the world ending was only supposed to come when they started colliding particles at near-light speeds, which isn't scheduled to happen for a few weeks still. So, if you are inclined that way, keep your panic hats on...

For those interested in knowing a little more about the collider without jumping headfirst into the CERN documentation, I'd recommend checking out this week's PHD Comics: Tales from the Road about visiting CERN. And if you are one of my students thinking about applying to grad school, you might want to click through the archives for a snapshot of grad school life.

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Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the earth yet?

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Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has an entertaining and informative exploration of the monetary density of things, striving to answer the question of what, if anything, is worth its weight in gold. Starting by comparing the value per pound of basic US currency (where we learn that carrying nickles is about as weight-inefficient as carrying pennies) to comparing a variety of non-currency materials. The information is mostly presented in a number of cool graphs, but the source data is provided if you're a data geek. Currency-wise, gold falls between $20 and $50 bills in terms of monetary density. My favorite graph is the one comparing relatively everyday items like Kobe beef, human blood, peacock feathers and Maine Coon cats, all of which generally fall in the monetary density range between dollar coins and dollar bills.

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Via A, this is a really good and entertaining video illustrating the Double Slit Experiment. It's an animated segment of a larger film on quantum physics and discusses both the role of the double slit experiment in establishing wave-particle duality and introduces the impact of the act of observation on what is being observed. Recommended for either physics fans for the entertainment factor or for anyone who wants a low-impact way to learn a little bit about quantum physics.

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Today marks the third anniversary of the Mars rover Spirit landing safely, with Opportunity's anniversary coming up in just a couple of weeks, and the accomplishments of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission in that time are astonishing. Not only have they kept two robots running on the surface of a distant planet years longer than planned, but they've continued to use them to collect valuable data. The rovers have recently had their programming updated again to allow new functionality, including new recognition algorithms based on what we've been able to learn about the surface of Mars so far and what scientists now think they are looking for. To celebrate the anniversary, NASA is sponsoring a Photo Contest on their site asking visitors to vote on their favorite image collected from the rovers from the past three years - you should definitely head over and check them out, especially the final image of a sunset over Mars - beautiful!

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I always enjoy Brian Hayes' Computing Science feature in American Scientist, but his thoughts on the real-world applicability of mathematical proof were both interestinig and laugh-out-loud funny, if you're the sort of person to laugh out loud at angle trisection jokes and spoofs of Socratic dialog. The article also discusses the controversy over the imfamous computer-aided proof of the four-color theorem and the recent Hales proof of the Kepler conjecture. Hayes comes down on the side of computer assistance as a valid and valuable aid, not least as a tool for providing empirical data and aiding intuition. This is supported in part by a broad understanding of the point of mathematical proof:

The special status of mathematical truth, setting the discipline apart from other arts and sciences, is a notion still cherished by many mathematicians, but proof has other roles as well; it's not just a seal of approval. David Bressoud's book Proofs and Confirmations gives what I believe is the best-ever insider's account of what it's like to do mathematics. Bressoud emphasizes that the most important function of proof is not to establish that a proposition is true but to explain why it's true. "The search for proof is the first step in the search for understanding."

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There have been many, many stories about the demotion of Pluto, but I was interested in this story because it;s about a counter-vote by elementary school students to keep Pluto a planet. Which is very sweet, but it's hard to tell from the story if the students really understood that this wasn't just a decision about Pluto, with the vote slogans being things like "Pluto makes the world go round!" and "Boo Pluto!". The vote was not pro- or anti-Pluto. Pluto is still there, after all.

The question, after all, is what we mean when we say the word "planet". Less well covered than the implications to Pluto were the implications to other celestial bodies to the various definitions proposed. For those students who wanted Pluto to remain a planet, which of those definiteion did they then prefer? Or, as it seems from the article, was that not really the point of the "teachable moment"? I think it's great to tie in actual modern science with a hook that students can get interested in. But I question whether asking students to vote on a topic that they probably don't understand helps support the sciences. I fear they were left with an image of scientists as cold-hearted people who voted poor little Pluto out of the club. Too bad the teachable moment couldn't be that sometimes science has to rule against its preferences, if that is what the data you are faced with requires.

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A mathematics instructor makes an attempt to explain why 0.999... = 1 in their blog, and tackles some of the classic explanations as well as many arguments in the comments [via Clicked]. What interested me most was that the writer was frustrated that people can't accept the arguments, buit buries the real proof of this fact at the end. Instead of laying out from the start the question of what does it mean to say that a repeating decimal is equal to an integer, point out that it has to do with computing a limit, and going from there, the explanation starts with multiplying x=0.9... by 10 to get 10x = 9.9... and subtracting the one equation from the other to find that x=1.

This approach feel vaguely like the kind of argument that actually leads people not to believe the fact is true - it feels like a "trick". And there is a catch-22 in play. On the one hand, we have the desire to educate people with an innacurate mathematical intuition. However, if we show them the proof involving a limit, there is the real risk that they will zone out, feeling that they don't "get" math and limits are hard and so on. So, one falls back on an "intuitive" argument, or in fact here a number of different intuitive arguments. And I suspect the average person feels that sure, these magical calculations show that 0.9...=1, but probably some other magical calculations show that they aren't the same, and there is no real convincing happening, in addition to people becoming even more cynical about "numbers lying".

Which, I guess my point is that I kind of like the Ask Dr. Math approach (linked in the comments of the original post) which just tackles the limit proof head on, in fairly clear terms I think. It would be nice if it said more about a repeating decimal equaling the limit than just it "is understood to mean", because that is the crux of the problem - first understand what it means for the equation to be true or false,and then the truth or falseness falls into place fairly quickly.

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In a bit of timeliness, I share Why Goalies Hate the New World Cup Soccer Ball [via Clicked]. I have to admit that the physics behind how a ball spins is one of those things that has just never made intuitive sense to me, and it surprises me that people are able to actually think out the correct degree and speed of spin for a particular situation on the fly, when I struggle to do so with a pencil and paper. At least in hockey there is only one axis of rotation to worry about!

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If you've been following the Mars Rover news at all lately, you'll be excited to hear that, desipte its broken wheel and having to drive backwards, Spirit has reached a hill that will get enough sun to power the rover all winter. In addition, they think that there may be some interesting science to do in its resting spot, and will be able to keep the rover busy without risking moving it during the short winter days.

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Besides being a good selection, this list of science's ten most beautiful experiments is also a really good presentation of the methodology and implications of the experiments, in brief form. The presentation as a whole also gives some insight, though not in explicit statements, of what it is that make an experiment "beautiful". I suspect this is as hard a concept to communicate to students as the notion of an elegant proof or algorithm.

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Happy Second Anniversary, Spirit, and close to second anniversary to Opportunity as well. Take a minute to sit back and appreciate how mind-boggling it is that we have had two rovers driving around on Mars for the past two years. It is a routine part of life that we've got these exploratory vehicles up there. At the least, go check out the "One Martian Year" slide show they have up.

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Some MIT students performed experiments on the radio wave blocking abilities of aluminum foil hats to determine which design, if any, is most effective in blocking government mind-control rays. Most amusing - the hats seem to amplify mind-control rays. Conclusion?

"It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC."

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Today is the one year anniversary of the Spirit rover landing on Mars, and it's still going strong, as is Opportunity. If you haven't been by NASA's Mars Rover mission page lately, give it a visit. They've accumulated a ton of cool images and information, including a "Top Images of 2004" presentation.

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Physics World surveyed readers and compiled a list of The Greatest Equations Ever. The linked article discusses the most popular equations as well as te various criteria which make an equation "great". I'm happy with the placement of Maxwell's equations at the top of the list. [via Critical Section]

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The New York Times on the acceptance (or lack of acceptance) of computer-aided proofs in the mathematical community. This isn't really they type of computer-aided proof I work with, but still an interesting article.

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NASA is launching a space thermos filled with four quartz spheres to try to detect the frame-dragging and warping effects of the space time structure predicted by Einstein. Gravity Probe B will be launched in mid-April. More very cool, unmanned space experimentation.

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For the next week or so, you can see our five closest planetary neighbors lined up across the night sky. The article calls it "a spectacular night show that won't be back for another three decades". The JPL astronomer says:

"It's semi-unique .... They're all on the same side of the sun and stretched across the sky and that's what is kind of pretty."

They couldn't find a slightly more effusive astronomer to quote?

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Almost everybody I know who got hooked on Tetris (including myself) admits to eventually having dreams featuring those falling, spinning blocks. So how cool is it that researchers are using this phenomenon to study the role of dreaming in learning? They found that not only did the dreaming improve performance, but that this was the case even for amnesiacs who didn't remember having played the game the previous day, but how had dreamed about it at night. It's also neat that they report everyone having the same basic dream:

Curiously, thoughts about Tetris not associated with seeing falling pieces were more prevalent before sleep, whereas reports of images were more common during sleep. "What was most striking about the data," the researchers write in the Science paper, "was the strong similarity in reports from different individuals." All the subjects dreamed of pieces falling and sometimes rotating or fitting into empty spaces--and none reported seeing the picture surrounding the pieces, the scoreboard or the keyboard.

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It makes total sense that placebos could have people get phantom side-effects as well as phantom improvements, but it had never occured to me before I read this article, When Placebos Do Harm. The thing I find most interesting is the possibility that extensive discussion of the side-effects of drugs could cause people to experience them even if there is no chemical causation for that individual. The article also has some interesting things to say about how this effect can influence medical studies - if a subject attributes a random headache to a placebo, they may then believe they have evidence they are taking the real drug, and as a result have a stronger placebo effect. The influence of mental state on physical state is so fascinating.

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An interesting article from last week, sure to give you warm fuzzies about drug companies: Antidepressant Makers Withhold Data on Children. Says the article,

The companies say the studies are trade secrets. Researchers familiar with the unpublished data said the majority of secret trials show that children taking the medicines did not get any better than children taking dummy pills. ...

"Conflicts of interest and the company control of the data have thrown out the scientific method," said Vera Hassner Sharav, a critic of the drugs and a patients' rights advocate. "If hundreds of trials don't work out, they don't publish them, they don't talk about them."

A related article yesterday goes on to discuss the FDA panel put together to discuss possible evidence that antidepressants make some children suicidal, one of the study results drug companies aren't exactly advertising. The result was a recommendation from the panel for stronger warnings and continued investigation.

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Whooo! Whooo! Rover rolls onto Mars! I've been watching the daily updates from NASA and JPL, and it's unbelievable how well this mission is going. Right now I'm listening to NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe talk about their proposed new direction to various NASA personnel, and he's clearly working hard to sell the advantages of having a unified direction. He talked a lot about debating over the best way to achieve a specific goal rather than continuing to debate over what goal to try to achieve. It's also the first place I've heard a good account of how the decision to set a goal of returning people to the moon and beyond, as compared to all the other goals, was decided upon. And, having been in on the decision-making process, it's not surprising he's working hard to sell it.

I personally think it's a little odd to be returning to a focus on putting people in space just as our robotic missions are having such fabulous successes. But then again, maybe that's exactly the time to do it - before the fears of risking lives raised after the latest shuttle accident coupled with the realistic ability to use robots instead of people to explore makes us retreat from allowing people to do the exploring. My gut reaction is still that the proposed timetable is too fast, and I'm more enthusiastic about focusing on the current Mars missions and wouldn't want to see work on a new manned exploration vehicle displacing this mission. And I haven't heard much discussion of the exploitation of moon resources and why we feel justified in doing so and how we could do so in a responsible manner.

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Always amusing, the 2003 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded yesterday. Physics, as always, has one of the best winners, with the prize going to a number of Australian researchers for their paper An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces, though the interdisciplinary report on Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans would some in a close second. If you haven't been before, take time to browse the rest of the Annals of Improbable Research website - there's really funny stuff tucked away in there.

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I had vaguely heard that Mars was closer to Earth than it had been for millenia, but I hadn't really paid much attention to that fact before I was outside a couple of weeks ago and was positively freaked out by the red object in the sky near the moon. I've never before been able to notice the red color that people claim they can see in Mars (it's always looked white to me...) so it was the first time I'd ever noticed a star or planet actually having a color, and I found it eerie. Since then, I've been keeping a closer eye on Mars coverage, including checking in at the Hubble telescope's homepage, which has been temporarily taken over with A Rendezvous with Mars special coverage. Definitely check out the video they pieced together of a rotating Mars globe, though all of the images are beautiful. The site also provides convenient links to previous "best images" of Mars, for comparison.

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In one of the cooler PR campaigns I've seen, NASA has built a website posting the e-mail conversations between two LEGO "astrobots" about the Red Rover Mars mission that just launched. While the actual physical astrobots (Biff Starling and Sandy Moondust) can't be launched because they would melt, Biff's likeness has been put on a metal magnetic disk bolted to the exterior of the spacecraft. They've done a nice job forming at least rudamentary personalities, with Biff being an adventurous but fairly unknowledgeable late addition to the team, and Sandy being a dedicated space explorer who will be going on the next mission and right now is e-mailing Biff from the ground about the information details he's missed out on. (And while this does play a tiny bit into the detail-oriented woman versus go-out-and-do-it man stereotypes, they clearly needed to have an information misbalance to play out their dialog as they wanted, so no complaints from me on that count.)

NASA is doing this in part to give a more personal tone to updates on this unmanned mission, but obviously there's a big children's audience here as well. The entries so far get some good information in there, and I certainly plan to keep reading. I do wonder what they have scripted out in advance and how much they'll be trying to reflect exactly what is happening on the mission. With the children's audience, I also wonder if they've thought out what they will do if something unfortunate happens to one of the spacecraft. All-in-all, a really cool project, though - a NASA LEGO astrobot weblog could be horribly cheesy, but this one isn't.[via personal communication]

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Because the news just hasn't been disturbing enough in the past month, the New York Times lets us know Gene Study Finds Cannibal Pattern in humans. If you read the article, it seems that the study actually finds that people have genes which protect them from diseases spread through cannibalism, and the end of the article concedes that this could be explained by eating habits other than cannibalism in pre-historic humans. But it's always good to get that Friday-morning skin-crawl in....

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For those who are claiming NASA accomplishes nothing of value besides being a sort of "extreme-science" for thrillseeking nerds, I suggest you visit Space Research at NASA's Office of Biological and Physical Research (a huge list of technical articles about research out of NASA with nice summaries) or NASA's Earth Science page. I commented in a private forum earlier today that even beyond these results, I have no problem if we haven't seen the fruit of all of this research yet. Arguments against funding pure research when people are suffering are as old as government, as are the arguments for. Personally, I see the quest for knowledge of our world to be one of the admirable and selfless activities our government takes on. For the many criticisms I have of the scientific community, I think it is one of the few truly international communities. I can't think of anything (including going to war!) that the US feels it can only do with cooperation from other countries - except build and maintain the International Space Station. Putting aside the many scientific advantages, I like that there is one national priority we have that we admit we can't do on our own.

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So far, the best on-line coverage I've found of the Columbia tragedy is at Spaceflight Now. They are updating continually on their Mission Status Center page, and you can read back through their coverage of the entire mission and the reaserch being done. [via Eatonweb]

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Researchers in psychology report that hands-free cellphones are no safer for drivers, thus suggesting that the New York law prohibiting use of cellphones without a hands-free device jumped the gun. They actually demonstrate that talking on the phone (of any kind) impares driving more than listening to audio books or talking to a passenger. Even if you think you can talk on the phone and pay perfect attention, you can't. I wonder why that is... Is it a physiological problem of the adio quality of a phone conversation, or something about the context-shift between you and your conversationalist?

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I love groups that use their web page to not just organize themselves but to offer quality content to outsiders. The American Society for Microbiology has a wonderful timeline of what they consider the significant events of the last 125 years, in microbiological terms, with overviews of the "events" and bibliographical links for each one (many to online sources). Nicely done.

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Permanent is an independent (i.e. government-independent) project to travel and settle in space, using materials from the moon and asteroids for development. It's an interesting browse, particularly the information on the legal and political issues of governments and individuals using stellar materials.

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If I had all the time in the world, I could lose days of my life at the new-to-me NASA History Homepage. They've assembled not just the technical details but information on the people, the management of the program, and the politics involved, so you can get a number of perspectives if you poke around enough. I loved looking at the technical diagrams of the various spacecraft, even if I don't really understand them. And they've put tons of their books, reports, and other publications on-line as well. I just wish more of the content was in downloadable pdf (as well as the nicely searchable html) so one could flip through entire documents with more ease.

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A wide review of alternative medical treatments for cancer recently came out of Harvard, indicating that some of these treatments do help, while others don't have evidence for their efficacy. Also important, the review seems to look at how these treatments interact with traditional cancer treatments. I can't find the study itself, unfortunately.

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Galileo (the spacecraft, not the mathematician) made its final flyby before being decomissioned (read, crashed into Jupiter), last week. The JPL Galileo Home Page has a nice description of this final flyby as well as the history of this thirteen year old spacecraft. It will take almost a full year for the ship to complete its final orbit and burn up in Jupiter's atmosphere!

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They're letting just anyone into our orbit now, it seems. Astronomers last week found a new Earth moon, though they haven't determined if it's rock or space-junk coming home to roost. Either way, it's got a 50-day orbit around us. I didn't even know, as the article mentions at the end, that we've already got a natural satellite besides the moon - Cruithne. There's a very nice information page on Cruithne out of the Queen's University Astronomy Research Group. [via Skunkfuckers]

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In a headline that screams to be weblogged, the EPA says toxic sludge is good for fish (though a later article indicates that it was the Army Corps who said it, not the EPA - incidentally, the same group dumping the sludge). In studying the effects of toxic sludge in the Potomac, the report said that since the sludge forces fish out of the now toxic water, the fish go to more remote areas where they are less likely to be caught. The statement that it "protects" the fish is a real misuse of that word. It's sort of a "if you're going to make a hostile environment, make it hostile enough the wildlife just leaves" argument. Furthermore, the statement does not actually show evidence that the fish are successfully relocating - it just posits that this could be the case and suggests this be looked into before dumping is stopped. While I agree that current environmental legislation makes this a relevant fact to consider, to suggest that toxic dumping can be good just because nature may find a way to accomodate the poisons is morally repulsive. [via Sigma Xi: In the News]

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Slowly, scientific evidence is piling up showing that mental state has real impact on one's physical state. A recent study concluded that thoughts can alter the expression of genes, though the causal channel of thoughts effecting hormone levels. This article draws together a number of studies, pointing out that many of the physical effects we see from medication, alcohol, or even environmental influence, may also come from the process of altering gene expression. Which suggests, to me, that we're on the edge of accepting that health care isn't as simple a "disease and treatment" formula as is assumed.

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Not only have experts reconfirmed that smoking really does cause cancer, using a collection of data from many smoking studies, they've found it is even more cancerous than they thought. They also claim to finally have definitive proof that secondhand smoke causes cancer. I know that smokers already know they ought to quit, and I'm sure those irritating "truth" ads just make them want to smoke more out of spite, but if we're taking a public health approach to medicine, support of quiting smoking is way up there as a positive, even in an analysis of overall cost per person.

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As a happy example of the ability to reverse a disturbing trend, over the past decade the number of antibiotics prescriptions for children dropped by 40%, in response, one presumes, to concerns about the increase in antibiotic-resistent bacteria. Antibiotics are wonderful, wonderful drugs which absolutely must be used responsibly. [via Sigma Xi: In The News]

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Though it's gotten some press, particularly in techy circles, after a very negative review from a friend I decided to pass on Wolfram's new book, A New Kind of Science. I appreciated this review of the book, though, which outlines the main arguments in what seems to be a fair manner while still pointing out the book's significant flaws, not the least of which, to me, is the observation that thi 1200 page tome doesn't include a bibliography.

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