Jul
22
Kip!
Filed Under Astronomy and Space, Heroes of Science and Skepticism, Physics
I meant to write about this shortly after the talk so I wouldn’t forget stuff, but of course here I am over two months later trying to remember all the mind-bending (and space-time bending) things he discussed.
Kip gave a lecture at UT back when I was a student (c. 1993?), so that was the last time I heard him speak in person. This time he came after being invited by two undergraduates, one of whom was my department’s recently-selected Rhodes Scholar Sarah Miller (we’re all quite proud of her!) and he made a point of mentioning that the reason he accepted the invitation was because it was students who asked, which I thought was very cool.
The talk was a good overview and synthesis of where we’ve come from and where we are going in the study of some of the weirdest parts of physics and cosmology. He started with an overview of relativity, black holes and the big bang and evidence for all of these. He spent a bit of time covering the search for gravity waves (which I think is what he talked about back in the 1990s when I last saw him) and the plans for upgrades to LIGO. He also spoke to the future areas of research for the primarily student-populated audience, especially areas like inflation and grand unified theory.
I’ll leave you with a picture of the man himself, holding a black hole:
Jul
21
Picture of the Week #2
Filed Under Picture of the Week
In honor of yesterday’s anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing, here is a photo from the National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Apollo Boilerplate Command Module. I visited the center in September 2006, which was my first visit to the new facility, which is amazing to an air and space junkie like me.
From the information plaque at the museum:
NASA built several “boilerplate” Apollo command modules for testing and to train astronauts and other mission crew members. This one is made of aluminum with a fiberglass outer shell and has an actual command module hatch. It was used by Apollo astronauts, including the crew of Apollo 11, the first lunar landing mission, to practice routine and emergency exits. The interior was later fitted with actual or mockup components to simulate the Apollo-Soyuz spacecraft and the five person rescue vehicle planned for use if an emergency developed during the Skylab program.
Boilerplate #1102A is displayed here with the flotation collar and bags that were attached to the Apollo 11 command module Columbia when it landed in the ocean at the end of its historic mission.
Height: 3.2 m (10 ft. 7 in)
Weight: 1,814 kg (4,000 lb)
Manufacturer: North American Aviation
Jul
20
Hello Dolly!
Filed Under Weather
Yes, I know I won’t be the first or last person to say that in regard to the new tropical storm that formed just east of the Yucatan peninsula. The storm is expected to move into the Gulf of Mexico in the next couple of days. Right now the track takes it into Texas at the Mexico border as a tropical storm.
The reasons for this little bit of weather-blogging are 1) I’m a weather junkie and 2) I was born in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and lived there and in Houston for the first 8 years of my life, so keeping an eye on tropical weather was something I got from an early age. Even now, living in central Texas, we still have to deal with tropical weather, and not just from the stuff that comes in from the Gulf. We sometimes get the remnants of Pacific storms coming in from Mexico and dumping lots of rain on us.
Since we’re having a pretty hot and dry summer here this year, a nice soak from a minimal tropical storm wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. Right now the forecast doesn’t take Dolly to hurricane strength, so maybe she’ll turn out to be one of those helpful storms. But of course, we all know how quickly the forecasts for the path and strength of a storm can change!
Jul
18
Won’t somebody please think of the produce?
Filed Under Religion
Well, I wasn’t expecting to get started on pointing to and laughing at religious nuts so quickly in this blog’s life, but sometimes these things just fall into your lap. First there was Ray Comfort and the bananas (I’m linking to a rebuttal video) and now there is this guy electrocuting pickles (spotted via boingboing):
I think this is fruit and vegetable abuse…
Jul
18
Science education in Texas and hearing bloggers speak on creationism
Filed Under Evolution, Science Education
I think “the good, the bad and the ugly” would also sum up the evening. The “good” was the round of applause for Chris Comer and her upcoming lawsuit and hearing some ScienceBloggers speak, “the bad” was hearing more about the big fight that will be coming over the revision of the science standards here in Texas, and “the ugly” is how the upcoming fight is probably going to be.
The two folks from ScienceBlogs were Ed Brayton from Dispatches from the Culture Wars and Josh Rosenau of Thoughts from Kansas. The third speaker was Steve Schafersman of Texas Citizens for Science. Josh wrote up a post about the evening, with photos.
Just a few notes and thoughts from the evening:
The travesty of a law supporting “academic freedom” signed by Gov. Jindal in Louisiana is probably going to show up in Texas in January when our legislature meets again. The only way I can see this being derailed would be if a lawsuit has been filed and lost in La. before ours debuts, but I don’t think there would be enough time for that.
Another thing we’ll have to watch for is another round of fighting over the mention of evolution in our state science education standards. This is the current version that caused some discussion last time:
(3) Scientific processes. The student uses critical thinking and scientific problem solving to make informed decisions. The student is expected to:(A) analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information;
So, we have the “strengths and weaknesses”, but at least there is the “using scientific evidence and information” as a caveat.
The section that specifically mentions evolution is this:
(7) Science concepts. The student knows the theory of biological evolution. The student is expected to:
(A) identify evidence of change in species using fossils, DNA sequences, anatomical similarities, physiological similarities, and embryology; and
(B) illustrate the results of natural selection in speciation, diversity, phylogeny, adaptation, behavior, and extinction.
So, it will be interesting to see how this “evolves” in the “creation” of the new standards. (Sorry, sometimes just can’t help myself!)
The other thing that will be interesting to watch in the near future is Chris Comer’s suit against the Texas Board of Education for having to resign for not remaining “neutral” on the topic of evolution, which you can read about at the Wikipedia link up above.
These are all things that I’ll be trying to follow and blog about over the upcoming months.
Jul
14
Picture of the Week #1
Filed Under Picture of the Week
Dome of the 2.7-meter (107-inch) Harlan J. Smith Telescope on at McDonald Observatory, near Fort Davis, Texas. December 2003.
While I am working on some real content posts, I thought I would go ahead and start my Picture of the Week series. I mainly plan to use my own photos to start, but I might slip in a NASA image or something from time to time.
This week is the dome of the 2.7-meter (107-inch) telescope at McDonald Observatory, constructed in the 1960s. The telescope was re-dedicated in 1995 in honor of Harlan Smith, the late Chairman of the Department of Astronomy and Director of McDonald Observatory.
Jul
7
Now, three weeks later
Filed Under Random Geekiness
Yeah, well, so I *thought* I was ready to start blogging here regularly, but I just haven’t managed to do it. It’s not for a lack of things to write about, of course, but rather that other things keep getting in the way. I have a lot more people following my Tudor History blogs, so for the time being they get priority.
I’ve been working on an “about this blog” page and while I’ve been trying to put into words some of the things that I want to talk about here, I realized that something that perfectly sums up at least part of it was right under my nose. Or rather, continuously stuck in my head, because every time this commercial comes on I find myself singing it for the rest of the day. I just love this ad and big props to The Discovery Channel for putting it on their YouTube channel.
Jun
13
It’s not for a lack of things to write about, that’s for sure! As silly as it is, one of the things that kept me from writing is that I was still trying to come up with a design that I liked. The first one I was using was cool, but I wanted something with a neat science-y picture and that had all the various sidebar bits that I wanted. So, after sorting through themes Wednesday night, I finally picked a few to play with. The one you see now is the one I’ll stick with for the foreseeable future. The original theme had a sunset on it, but I knew I wanted something astronomical up there, at least to start. Then it hit me what the perfect image would be - Saturn’s rings backlit by the Sun, as photographed by Cassini. And there is an added bonus in this image. See that little dot in the rings to the upper left? That Pale Blue Dot? That’s you. And me. That’s home. That’s Earth.
May
18
See girls CAN do science!
Filed Under Science Education
… and do it quite well, thank you very much!
Spotted first at Skepchick: Girls Doing Science, Kicking Ass
Not only were all three top winners girls, but 47% of the entrants this year were girls. Woo-hoo! After just finishing the audiobook of Susan Jacoby’s “The Age of American Unreason”, this was just the little pick-me-up I needed. Now if more Americans could locate Iraq on a map… but I digress.
This is one of those news stories that at first glance, I’m very happy to hear, but then upon further thought, I wish it actually wasn’t a big deal.
As part of my job doing astronomy outreach, I was leading a group of girls on a tour of our department and we were talking about how just a couple of days before - for the first time ever - when the commanders of the space shuttle and the International Space Station greeted each other after docking, it was two women shaking hands and hugging. And one of the girls, probably about 12 years old, said “It will be great when that doesn’t have to be big news”, or something close to that. I could have hugged her! Not only was she right, but if more girls her age have that attitude it won’t be a big deal someday.
By the way, some of the bonus prize that some of the various winners (there are actually around a thousand prizes given out) get are a trip to the Nobel Prize ceremonies and naming rights for asteroids. How cool is that?!
Here’s a round-up from Science News
Mar
15
No, not that Lucy… THIS Lucy! The date of March 11 has become a “seeing things with my own eyes that I never thought I would see with my own eyes” day. Six years ago on March 11, I was standing in Pompeii. This year, I saw Lucy.
Yes, we finally did our road trip to the Houston Museum of Natural Science on Tuesday to visit Texas’ most famous 3.2 million-year-old visitor. The exhibit opened last August and closes at the end of April, so we didn’t have a whole lot of time left. I think that waiting a while was a good move, since it wasn’t very crowded there on a Tuesday afternoon during Spring Break. For a while we practically had the Lucy room to ourselves (save the docent and security guard and a couple with a little girl).
Obviously Lucy was the main draw, but she wasn’t the only thing on exhibit from Ethiopia. From pre-historic times, they had some 1.6 million year old hand axes and some nice replica fossils and skulls of other species of hominids from the area. They also had lots of cultural artifacts, especially Christian processional crosses (some of which had some very intricate metal and woodwork on them) and an interesting collection of coins. They also had photos and a model of one of the amazing rock-cut churches in Ethiopia.
We skipped the exhibit movies, although I kind of wish now that we had watched the “introduction to Ethiopia” one at the beginning. I have to admit that I didn’t know a whole lot about the country beyond the fact that it was mostly left alone by European colonial powers (probably due to its long history of Christianity) and that they export a lot of coffee. And of course that it is a rich source of ancient hominid fossils. There was an introduction to Lucy video that we also skipped, mostly since I’ve read both “Lucy” and “Lucy’s Child” and know a fair amount about her discovery. They also had her namesake song - The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” - playing in the outer room. I was mystified that someone actually complained about that in the comment book at the exit. Maybe they missed the connection and just thought the museum was being cute…
The “Lucy room” as I’ve decided to call it, was surrounded by a magnificent mural of human evolution from our probable common ancestor with chimpanzees (approx. 6 million years ago) to early Homo sapiens, with explanatory text below it. Lucy herself was in a horizontal case in the middle of the room, with a full-size life-like reconstruction of her in a case nearby. On the wall next to the original fossils was a vertically-mounted replica with the bones placed three-dimensionally in their correct anatomical position. This was very helpful, since you lose the depth information with the way the original fossil is displayed.
I would have liked to have seen some comparative anatomy in the exhibit. The docent on hand did a good job of describing how some parts of Lucy are more human-like and some parts are more chimp-like, but it would have been nice to have a visual reference. I also think they were trying their best to dispel the “if humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?” creationist canard. Of course, if you know anything about human evolution, that’s a totally silly argument. But I’m guessing that a lot of the people visiting Lucy don’t know that “common ape-like ancestor” is what a scientist would say, not that “man evolved from apes”. So, they seemed to be careful about how they were phrasing Lucy’s place with relation to modern man and apes (chimps in particular). (Although I would point out that the eLucy site does just that… it allows you to pick a bone of Lucy’s and see it side-by-side with a modern man and modern chimp).
I would like to compliment the museum for allowing people to get a really good, close view of Lucy in her case. They could have displayed her in a way that kept the people at a distance or behind ropes, but thankfully that wasn’t what they did. The case was horizontal, about 3 feet off the ground, and you could get right up along side it, lean over it and look through the sides. And I did. Again, and again. I’m not sure how long I loitered, but I decided to drink in as much of the view as I could. The odds of me ever seeing her again are slim so I tried to make the most of the time we had there.
I know there has been criticism and controversy over transporting such priceless fossils, but I’m so glad that Lucy is visiting the States. First, it was probably the only way I was ever going to get a chance to see her, and second, in a nation where a large fraction of people don’t believe in human evolution, or evolution at all, it is important for one of our best pieces of evidence of evolution to be available for people to see with their own eyes. Unfortunately it wasn’t convincing to everybody, judging by the “It’s all lies” statement I saw in the comment book, but the majority of notes were far more complimentary. I don’t know how many people might have their minds changed by seeing Lucy, but even if it is just a few, it’s worth it. And for people like me, it was an amazing opportunity to see in person an important piece of the story of human evolution.
keep looking »