# blueollie

## Science Tuesday (14 May)

Dark energy
Here is a nice synopsis on it. Even better: this is a nice reminder that, if you are not a physicist, your “common sense” suggestions of what dark energy might be (or what might replace dark energy as a factor) have been thought of and dismissed.

Woo and evolution Jerry Coyne takes the Chronicle of Higher Education to task for giving woo notions (with regards to evolution) credibility. My guess: even some academics can’t seem to stomach the notion that “you don’t know what you are talking about” IS a valid reason to dismiss an argument in science. Where it is true that, in some cases, it is valid to entertain different points of view (example) that does NOT mean that all points of view have validity.

Mathematics
It is a current conjecture that there are an infinite number of “paired primes”; that is, numbers $x, y$ where $x - y = 2$ and $x, y$ are prime integers. Until recently, no one has come up with any bound for pairs of primes…at all. Evidently, that has changed (note: Annals of Mathematics is the finest mathematics journal in the world):

It’s a result only a mathematician could love. Researchers hoping to get ‘2’ as the answer for a long-sought proof involving pairs of prime numbers are celebrating the fact that a mathematician has wrestled the value down from infinity to 70 million.

“That’s only [a factor of] 35 million away” from the target, quips Dan Goldston, an analytic number theorist at San Jose State University in California who was not involved in the work. “Every step down is a step towards the ultimate answer.”

That goal is the proof to a conjecture concerning prime numbers. Those are the whole numbers that are divisible only by one and themselves. Primes abound among smaller numbers, but they become less and less frequent as one goes towards larger numbers. In fact, the gap between each prime and the next becomes larger and larger — on average. But exceptions exist: the ‘twin primes’, which are pairs of prime numbers that differ in value by 2. Examples of known twin primes are 3 and 5, or 17 and 19, or 2,003,663,613 × 2195,000 − 1 and 2,003,663,613 × 2195,000 + 1.

The twin prime conjecture says that there is an infinite number of such twin pairs. Some attribute the conjecture to the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria, which would make it one of the oldest open problems in mathematics.

The problem has eluded all attempts to find a solution so far. A major milestone was reached in 2005 when Goldston and two colleagues showed that there is an infinite number of prime pairs that differ by no more than 16. But there was a catch. “They were assuming a conjecture that no one knows how to prove,” says Dorian Goldfeld, a number theorist at Columbia University in New York.

The new result, from Yitang Zhang of the University of New Hampshire in Durham, finds that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that are less than 70 million units apart without relying on unproven conjectures. Although 70 million seems like a very large number, the existence of any finite bound, no matter how large, means that that the gaps between consecutive numbers don’t keep growing forever. The jump from 2 to 70 million is nothing compared with the jump from 70 million to infinity. “If this is right, I’m absolutely astounded,” says Goldfeld.

In a nutshell: Zhang has proved that there exists infinitely many prime numbers $x, y, x > y$ where $(x-y) < 70,000,000$. Seriously, until now, we had no upper bound at all.

May 14, 2013

## Some Science for the end of April 2013

Woo and yoga
Someone asked me how I could like yoga and be down on “alternative (quack) medicine”. Well, there have been some rigorous studies done on yoga and it CAN be recommended for physical therapy purposes (e. g. back aches). Via our National Institute of Health.

Frogs
This Tiger Frog from Ghana is a cutie:

Movies: I want to see this one:

Note: my beef with religion, at least as practiced in the west, is that too many of them require people to accept “miracles” (resurrections, parting seas, virgin births, etc.) on “faith” (sans evidence). So once you “accept” that the laws of science (naturalism) can be suspended at set times, then, well, why trust science with anything? Seriously: if there is, say, water on your basement floor and a pipe joint above that with green on the joint…well…if you didn’t SEE it drip, then maybe the water and the green just appeared because of the work of some devil or pixie? Why not…if suspensions of naturalism are allowed?

My beef is NOT with religions that don’t require acceptance of miracles.
It is my opinion that a deity/spirit/whatever that is interested in humans and human affairs makes no sense, but that is the realm of opinion.

Space:

The eye of a super-hurricane at Saturn’s north pole looks like a peaceful red rose in a fresh bouquet of pictures from NASA’s Cassini orbiter. But don’t be fooled: That rosy appearance is merely due to the false colors ascribed to infrared wavelengths.
This storm’s eye measures 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) in diameter, about 20 times wider than the average hurricane’s eye on Earth. The outer clouds at the hurricane’s edge are traveling at 330 mph (530 kilometers per hour), which would be off the scale on our planet. The vortex whirls inside Saturn’s mysterious hexagonal cloud pattern, and it’s not going anywhere.

How do you like this image of the moon taking from space near the earth?

Here is a picture of a solar eclipse via Scientific American:

Miloslav Druckmüller, a mathematician at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic, and his colleagues were on Enewetak as the eclipse’s shadow raced toward them from the northwest at more than twice the speed of sound. This composite of 31 images from the eclipse shows the solar corona, the wispy “atmosphere” of the sun peeking out from behind the moon as well as the cratered, rayed surface of the moon itself.

Back on Earth Again
This species of fish, commonly found in China, Russia and Korea, has been found in New York. It is an invasive species.

Even more interestingly, it can actually breathe outside of water for a short period of time (days) and even hunt.

April 30, 2013

## In Ames, Iowa and…

Well, the drive wasn’t that bad, though I got a bit sleepy during the first disk of The Greatest Show on Earth (by Richard Dawkins). It is a good book; I’ve read it and listened to it once before. But every time I go through it, I learn something different.

I was listening to the introduction and Dawkins discussed the role “essentialism” plays in inhibiting people’s acceptance of evolution. In particular people want to see a particular species as a fixed “kind”; they realize that there is variation within the said “kind” but people want species to be discrete, as in nodes on a graph.

In fact, it might be better to view a species as a type of “cluster” of genes whose boundaries are more fuzzy than sharp; in fact it might look a bit like the map of background radiation (left over from the big bang) except with darker clusters with fuzzy “boundaries” and sort of fuzzy lines between clusters…if one wants to put a time axis, one can make it a dendron type graph.

NOTE I can recommend TGSOE to all who are interested in evolution including religious people. Dawkins throws an olive branch to the religious right from the start.

Posts
I don’t believe it: I agree with Senator Tom Coburn on something: he wants to remove tax exemption stats from the NFL.

Science New experiments which subject iron to the pressures that it is at in the earth’s core suggest that our iron core is roughly the same temperature as the sun’s surface.

Politics
Peggy Noonan tries to compare President George W. Bush to President Barack Obama; tries to say that he was “more humble.” She gets the criticism that she deserves.

Two interesting things:

1. President Obama rose under his own steam whereas President Bush was born into privilege and had the skids greased for him. Yet conservatives whine about President Obama being the elitist?

2. Conservatives can dish it out…but whine and howl when it is given back. I find it odd that they are such cry-babies.

April 27, 2013

## Science, Knowledge (and lack thereof)

Cool Video Dr. Tyson talks for about 12 minutes here. Topics: we (humans) really are a part of the universe….it is possible that earthly life originated on another planet…and for the conclusion: are we (humans) just too intellectually limited to discover how our universe works? Perhaps there are other sentient beings that sees our intellectual level as we, say, see the intellectual level of chimps?

Evolution: This is a type of honest skepticism.
Some top of the line scientists have sequenced the coelacanth genome. The coelacanth is a type of fish that is sometimes misleading referred to as a “living fossil” as its outward features haven’t changed much over millions of years, though perhaps its genome has. The thought is that this fish has had fewer evolutionary changes even at the genome level than other animals. But at least one accomplished biochemist is skeptical though he hasn’t launched an intellectual scientific attack as yet.

The larger point: scientists ARE skeptical people; most (all?) require quite a bit of solid evidence to accept a conjecture or to accept a theory.

Interesting resources for topics
I’ll have to read the rest of these. I’ve finished the first 10 posts about the Higgs boson; now Mano Singham has posted 5 more. You can find a link to all of them here. Singham is a physics professor who knows how to write.

Daily Kos user Major Kong (a former pilot) has a nice series about how airliners work. I’ve read a few; now I want to complete the series.

The United States
We know that the Boston bombers originally came from Chechnya, which is currently a Republic within Russia. But enough Americans thought that they came from the Czech Republic that the Czech embassy had to issue a statement that the Czech Republic is not Chechnya.

The charge of Islamophobia aimed at New Atheists
I’ll be clear from the start: of course Muslims in the United States should have full equality before the law: their schools, mosques, etc. should be treated the same way as Jewish, Christian or Hindu ones. If they want to build a mosque and have the permits, then build it. I decry the protests against these things.

But on the other hand, the behavior of the Islamic republics and the behavior of large groups of Muslims abroad richly deserves criticism and I won’t be deterred by cries of “ISLAMOPHOBIA”. Here is a prime example of what I am talking about: large demonstrations in Bangladesh asking for atheists bloggers to be executed by the state.

Thousands of Islamist protesters marched the streets of Bangladesh’s capital, calling for the death penalty for bloggers who insult Islam. The city ground to a halt as demonstrators demanded the government change the law to punish blasphemers.

The activists gathered in their thousands at Dhaka’s commercial hub on Friday night in protest over blasphemous bloggers who offend Islamist sensibilities on social networks. In a demonstration that lasted well into Saturday, they urged the government to introduce a new law with the provision of the death penalty for those who defame Islam.

As the protesters advanced they chanted: “God is great, hang the atheist bloggers!”

“I’ve come here to fight for Islam. We won’t allow any bloggers to blaspheme our religion and our beloved Prophet Mohammed,” Shahidul Islam, an imam at a mosque outside Dhaka who walked 20km, told AAP [...]

To deny that this is disgusting, backward and barbaric is to be dishonest. And to say that it is somehow atypical in certain parts of the world is also dishonest. From Pew Research:

At least three-quarters of Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan say they would favor making each of the following the law in their countries: stoning people who commit adultery, whippings and cutting off of hands for crimes like theft and robbery and the death penalty for those who leave the Muslim religion. Majorities of Muslims in Jordan and Nigeria also favor these harsh punishments.

The Pew article does contain some hopeful news though:

Eight-in-ten Muslims in Pakistan say suicide bombing and other acts of violence against civilian targets in order to defend Islam from its enemies are never justified; majorities in Turkey (77%), Indonesia (69%) and Jordan (54%) share this view. Support for suicide bombing has declined considerably over the years. For example, while 74% of Muslims in Lebanon said these violent acts were at least sometimes justified in 2002, just 39% say that is the case now; double-digit declines have also occurred in Jordan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Indonesia.

This is an improvement. So maybe there is hope.

April 21, 2013

## I’ve Changed My Mind about some stuff, etc.

Creationism and how I’ve changed my mind
In general, I think that science a religion (religion that makes specific claims of miracles) are incompatible. But sometimes accommodationists write good stuff, and here is an excellent post by Karl Giberson on why creationism is so difficult to root out:

The great power of the anti-evolutionary message embraced by so many Americans comes from the following, all of which are on display in the conversation:
1. Appealing to America’s democratic impulse: At a time when we constantly hear that lawmakers should heed the voice of the “90 percent of Americans who want more gun control,” on what basis do lawmakers ignore the “vast majority of Americans who reject evolution?” Does this constituency have no right to be heard? Must their children be forced to learn ideas in the public schools at odds with their family’s values and rejected by most of the voters?

2. Demanding fairness and tolerance: Isn’t America all about being fair? And what could be fairer than giving voice to other viewpoints with widespread support? At a time when most Americans are demanding gay marriage in the name of fairness, why are we being so unfair to the creationists, excluding their ideas about origins?

3.Promoting freedom for our students: Must education be coercive on the topic of origins? Why can’t teachers present “both sides” and let our “bright high school students” make up their own minds? Will this not encourage critical thinking in our science classes? What is this need to restrict science teaching to just one viewpoint when there are others in play?

4. Appealing to authority: A popular anti-evolutionary website contains the signatures of hundreds of credentialed academics who “Dissent from Darwin.” This is a lot of intellectual firepower. Surely such a large crowd of anti-evolutionary scholars can’t all be wrong.

5. Deflecting criticism: Much has been made of the failure of the creationists to publish in scientific journals. But their ideas are blocked from those journals by editorial and peer referees whose allegiance is to the scientific status quo. New paradigms, like Intelligent Design, are rejected out of hand.

6.Currying sympathy: Anti-evolutionists in secular universities or other scientific institutions are forced to hide their views from their colleagues. I was once in a gathering that including several such individuals and they insisted that nobody take any pictures, lest they be identified. If they “come out” they run the risk of losing their jobs, run off by intolerant peers who object to their ideas without considering them. Ben Stein exposed this abuse of Intelligent Design scholars in the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

This rhetorical strategy contains great synergistic power; polls show that Americans are not coming around to accept evolution, even as its scientific credibility has grown to point of certainty. The conservative Christians in the video above have heard and embraced all of these arguments. In their view, they have a strong case and every right to press it.

I know, I know: part of the problem might lie with the accommodationists themselves: after all, if you believe that science can accomodate one miracle, why not others? Via Natalie Angier:

Scientists think this is terrible—the public’s bizarre underappreciation of one of science’s great and unshakable discoveries, how we and all we see came to be—and they’re right. Yet I can’t help feeling tetchy about the limits most of them put on their complaints. You see, they want to augment this particular figure—the number of people who believe in evolution—without bothering to confront a few other salient statistics that pollsters have revealed about America’s religious cosmogony. Few scientists, for example, worry about the 77 percent of Americans who insist that Jesus was born to a virgin, an act of parthenogenesis that defies everything we know about mammalian genetics and reproduction. Nor do the researchers wring their hands over the 80 percent who believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the laws of thermodynamics be damned.

Hey, if you make accommodation for one miracle, why not others? In my opinion, religious liberals are part of the problem.

But here is where I changed my mind
Yes, creationism and intelligent design are dumb ideas that belong on the scrap heap. But so are many other ideas: homeopathy, anti-gmo hysteria, anti-vaccinnation hysteria, birtherism, 9-11 “trutherism”, “the moon landings were faked”, “ghosts haunt places”, “the rest of the country likes idea X if only the public were “educated”", not knowing the difference between a science Nobel Prize and a Nobel Peace Prize, etc.

The longer I live the more I have the opinion that MOST (possibly all) of us have wacky ideas of some sort, myself included. The internet gives us more connectivity for people to express such ideas. Hence, person X who has started a successful business (hard to do) might well believe that the President of the United States isn’t a US citizen and everyone else is lying. Person Y who has done fine charity work might seriously believe that the universe really is 6000 years old. Person Z who also has had some success in life might get vapors if they find that their crops have been genetically modified.

So while I believe that some people really are smarter than others, I also believe that, statistically speaking, the set of people who hold wacko belief X might not be dumber than the population as a whole. They might get some things right that others get wrong.

Personally, I don’t know what my wacky ideas are, and I hope that I someday identify them and lose them.
Yes, I am aware that I have a mild fetish for a certain part of a female’s anatomy but that isn’t a belief; that is just how I am “wired”; I can understand that I am a bit abnormal in that regard. Other hetero males either don’t have it, or have the good sense to keep their mouth shut.

Irrelevant point one:
I noticed that my blog had its hit counts go up from the summer to the late fall of 2008, and again in 2012. Why? Two big events: the Olympics and the Presidential elections. I also had a smaller bump in the fall of 2010 (midterm election time). This makes sense because I often blog about these topics.

Irrelevant point two Often math problems are “easy” until you look at them closely. Seriously. I had smugly thought that during the second half of my sabbatical project I’d look at extending the more modern polynomials to lines embedded in real 3 space. That is harder than I thought; my first obstacle is rather embarrassing: after getting my Ph.D. in topology in 1991, I STILL don’t understand the topology of multiple lines in 3 space…or even multiple lines in the plane…or even in an 2 dimensional band of finite width that extends from minus infinity to positive infinity. Dang.

One issue: given two parallel lines in the plane, is it more appropriate to consider them as disjoint objects, or should I see them having a point at infinity in common; sort of an analogue to:

The above would represent FIVE parallel lines; one for each circle.

I’d have to account for this with a new calculus of some sort. Oh well…if it were easy, someone else would have done it by now.

And…well, IF I can make this work, I’ll have something worthwhile.

Science and Physics
Does this multi-verse talk confuse you? Well, it might be because “many universes” can mean “many things”. Here are three of the most common uses of “multi-verse”: separate universes altogether (bubbles), different dimensions of the same high dimensional space (think parallel planes in 3-space): this is a proposed mathematical model, and a different model to explain quantum mechanics (one universe where this particle decays at time t and another in which it doesn’t.

Watch the video: it is informative and fun:

April 11, 2013

## Some science and discussion of difficult ideas…

Jerry Coyne charts the acceptance of evolution versus the religiosity of a state. He does make one small error though: not ALL opposition to evolution comes from religion. Some of it comes from the fact that science is hard and many (including non-religious people) who hold a “if it doesn’t make sense to me, it must be BS” attitude. The idea that their inability to understand a concept might be a reflection of their mental abilities simply doesn’t occur to them. They see BOTH scientists AND creationists just making stuff up.

Sandwalk (Larry Moran’s blog) picked this up.
He goes on to talk about a conversation he had with an American:

It also reminds me of a conversation I once had with a well-known defender of evolution. That person expressed serious concerns about a possible second civil war if trends continue the way they are going. (It might not mean war, but the point is that the Union is fragile and there are many good reasons for splitting the country.)

I am not optimistic enough to think that our country will split; I sure wish that it would! Again, I don’t mean a hostile split; I’d prefer completely open borders, common currency and passports, military alliance, completely free trade and free travel between the two states; it would be like we’d have a weak confederation of two super states, each super state with its own Congress and executive and Supreme Court. We’d have two separate tax bases and two Constitutions. That way we could have stronger, more effective domestic government and they could have their theocracy.

Science
Physicist Mano Singham has 10 part series on the Higgs Field; I’ve linked to part 10 because each installment links to the previous one. So you can work yourself backwards; each part is a digestible chunk. It really is a fun series.

Getting Published Hey, if you are willing to pay, you can find a conference to accept your paper for presentation and a journal to publish your stuff. Moral: publish in good journals.

Talking to others Many discount data but instead rely on anecdotes. This is one reason the media got the previous election so wrong and why so many don’t know science. This is an example from economics.

April 8, 2013

## science topics: jet stream and weather, support for gay marriage, ID, isolation, evolution oddities, etc.

Workout notes
Weights only:
rotator cuff
pull ups (5 sets of 10); hip hikes and Achilles exercises
incline press: 10 x 140, 4 x 155, 6 x 150, 7 x 145
abs: 3 sets each of crunch (10), twist (10), sit backs (10), vertical crunch (20)
dumbbell military: 3 sets of 12 x 50
rows: 3 sets of 10 x 65 (each arm)
dumbbell bench: 2 sets of 10 x 65
curls: 2 sets of 10 x 57.5 pulley, 1 set of 10 x 30 dumbbell
pull downs: 3 sets of 10 x 160
I’ll run 4 times a week until I can get over this foot soreness.

Posts
For those interested in physics, physicist Mano Singham has a multi-part series on the Higgs Boson; he is giving you some background for it:

Part: I, II, III, IV, V

Social
There is evidence that being socially isolated harms longevity, even in the absence of feelings of loneliness.

Opinions on same sex marriage: favorability IS going up across the board; no doubt about that. But for a detailed analysis: read Nate Silver’s post:

It is also possible to project how the results in each state might change over time. I assume that support for same-sex marriage will continue to increase by one and a half percentage points nationally per year, which reflects the recent historical trend from both polling and ballot-initiative data. (The way that the model is designed, support might be projected to increase slightly faster or slower than that in individual states based on the number of swing voters.) Thus, we can extrapolate the results forward from 2008 to 2012, and to future years like 2016 and 2020.

Roughly speaking, by 2020, only a few states in the deep south will have less than a majority favoring same sex marriage. The median state support (median of all states) will be about 60 percent. Time is marching on and I hope that Illinois stays ahead of the curve.

Climate
What is driving our crazy weather? Conjecture: we have a steep increase in sea ice, which leads to the water having more heat, which leads to a change in the path of the jet stream, which allows that cold arctic air mass to dip down lower than before (in sort of a sine wave type path).

Biology
Read more at the link; note those green things are…they eyes! The eyes are INSIDE the head!

Read more at Jerry Coyne’s website.

Evolution deniers
If you are going to try to deny established science, it helps to know what you are talking about. ID types, in general, don’t. No, information theory does NOT disprove evolution. And no, Larry Moran is NOT a creationist, though he ascribes a bigger role to genetic drift and a lesser role to natural selection than, say, Jerry Coyne does. But that is a scientific dispute on mechanisms of evolution, NOT a questioning of whether evolution took place or not. This is (sort of) analogous to the various interpretations of quantum mechanics:

But none of these deny quantum mechanics.

March 27, 2013

## Science: human endurance, basic particles and mimicry

Human endurance: this New York Times story talks about an incredible endurance athlete. The whole story is good; here is one bit:

Born into a Catalan family, Jornet grew up in the Spanish Pyrenees at 6,500 feet, and his gifts are literally in his blood. “When you are born and bred at altitude, you tend to have a higher blood volume and red-cell count for oxygen-carrying capacity,” which translates to better endurance, says Stacy Sims, a researcher at Stanford who holds a doctorate in exercise physiology and nutrition science. Years of daily running and skiing up mountains have further bolstered this advantage. This helps explain why Jornet sweats so little. During exercise, the bodies of very fit people quickly act to disperse heat by, among other things, vasodilation — expanding blood vessels at the skin’s surface where the air can cool the body. A body that sweats less loses less precious liquid from its circulatory system, a major factor in fatigue. In moderate temperatures, Jornet says, he can run easily for eight hours without drinking water.

For me: running at a moderate pace, I usually don’t drink during runs 2 hours or less. Walking: it is about 3 hours. No, I am not that fit and I do need to drink more when I am going very hard.

Physics Mano Singham has an interesting piece on particle physics. It requires a bit of effort to read, but it isn’t technical (though you have to know that subatomic particles are made of quarks and realize that mass of these particles isn’t just the mass of the quarks that make up the particle; the energy adds to the mass.

Human evolution
When we try to date human genetic lineages, the mutation rates are important:

Recent measurements of the rate at which children show DNA changes not seen in their parents — the “mutation rate” — have challenged views about major dates in human evolution.

[...]

The researchers show that pre-ice age hunter-gatherers from Europe carry mtDNA that is related to that seen in post-ice age modern humans such as the Oberkassel fossils. This suggests that there was population continuity throughout the last major glaciation event in Europe around 20,000 years ago. Two of the Dolni Vestonice hunter-gatherers also carry identical mtDNAs, suggesting a close maternal relationship among these individuals who were buried together.
The researchers also used the radiocarbon age of the fossils to estimate human mutation rates over tens of thousands of year back in time. This was done by calculating the number of mutations in modern groups that are absent in the ancient groups, since they had not yet existed in the ancient population. The mutation rate was estimated by counting the number of mutations accumulated along descendent lineages since the radiocarbon dated fossils.
Using those novel mutation rates — capitalizing on information from ancient DNA — the authors cal-culate the last common ancestor for human mitochondrial lineages to around 160,000 years ago. In other words, all present-day humans have as one of their ancestors a single woman who lived around that time.

There is more there; right now there is a disparity between modern family mutation rates and the observed mutation rates of ancient humans (as derived from fossils.

Biological Mimicry
Both the hunters and the prey benefit from camouflage. There is a gecko that resembles a leaf; below is an insect that also resembles a leaf.

March 23, 2013

## Intellectual Lunch Topics (and one topic: not so much)

Mars: in October 2014, Mars will get a close encounter with a comet (“close” in astronomical terms). It might get showered with debris from the tail, or, less likely, get slammed by the main part of the comet. Via Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy column in Slate:

The comet is called C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring), discovered on Jan. 3, 2013 by the Australian veteran comet hunter Robert McNaught. As soon as it was announced, astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey looked at their own data and found it in observations from Dec. 8, 2012, which helped nail down the orbit (I explain how that works in a previous article about asteroid near-misses). Extrapolating its orbit, they found it will make a very near pass of Mars around Oct. 19, 2014, missing the planet by the nominal distance of about 100,000 kilometers (60,000 miles).

Observations taken at the ISON-NM observatory in New Mexico just this week have tightened up the orbit a bit more, allowing for better predictions. Given this new data, the comet may actually pass closer to Mars; another veteran comet hunter, Leonid Elenin, predicts it may get as close as 37,000 km (23,000 miles) of the surface of Mars!

That’s pretty dang close. But this gets even more interesting.

Surf to the article to read more; since the comet’s path might be altered by things like venting of internal gasses, the exact path is impossible to predict.

After a century of studying their tangled mathematics, physicists can tie almost anything into knots, including their own shoelaces and invisible underwater whirlpools. At least, they can now thanks to a little help from a 3D printer and some inspiration from the animal kingdom.

Physicists had long believed that a vortex could be twisted into a knot, even though they’d never seen one in nature or the even in the lab. Determined to finally create a knotted vortex loop of their very own, physicists at the University of Chicago designed a wing that resembles a delicately twisted ribbon and brought it to life using a 3D printer.

After submerging their masterpiece in water and using electricity to create tiny bubbles around it, the researchers yanked the wing forward, leaving a similarly shaped vortex in its wake. Centripetal force drew the bubbles into the center of the vortex, revealing its otherwise invisible, knotted structure and allowing the scientists to see how it moved through the fluid—an idea they hit on while watching YouTube videos of dolphins playing with bubble rings.By Lizzie Wade

After a century of studying their tangled mathematics, physicists can tie almost anything into knots, including their own shoelaces and invisible underwater whirlpools. At least, they can now thanks to a little help from a 3D printer and some inspiration from the animal kingdom.

Physicists had long believed that a vortex could be twisted into a knot, even though they’d never seen one in nature or the even in the lab. Determined to finally create a knotted vortex loop of their very own, physicists at the University of Chicago designed a wing that resembles a delicately twisted ribbon and brought it to life using a 3D printer.

After submerging their masterpiece in water and using electricity to create tiny bubbles around it, the researchers yanked the wing forward, leaving a similarly shaped vortex in its wake. Centripetal force drew the bubbles into the center of the vortex, revealing its otherwise invisible, knotted structure and allowing the scientists to see how it moved through the fluid—an idea they hit on while watching YouTube videos of dolphins playing with bubble rings.[...]

The video is showing a trefoil knot.

Nature I am not a big fan of whale hunting. But this hunt gave scientists a chance to examine the head of bowhead whale. It turns out that the whale has a very large, “penis like” organ in its mouth; it is capable of holding a lot of blood. Reasons? One conjecture is that it helps the bowhead whale keep its head cool (though it swims in cold waters, it carries a LOT of blubber). This organ also has lots of nerve endings, so it might be a “how much food is in the water I just swallowed” sensor.

Technology

Social

On the other end: this is one reason I am not a big fan of “concealed carry” laws:

MARCH 4–Angered that a Walmart employee refused to honor a “dollar-off” coupon, a Florida woman allegedly retrieved a handgun from her car and waved the weapon at several store employees, police allege.

I’d love to see the data which compares “heroes” with guns to this sort of behavior. Which is more common? I have a guess, but no data to back it up.

March 5, 2013

## Before the snow gets too bad…

Yes, our overall snow fall is down, but we are getting unusual “clumps” of it. In other words, if $\mu$ is our mean “snowfall per week” during a winter and $\sigma^2$ is our variance in “snowfall per week”, our $\sigma^2$ is much larger than the traditional, whereas the $\mu$ is smaller.

In other words, less snow overall, but more snowstorms between periods of no snow.

Workout notes Walking and stretching. I haven’t done it yet. However, right now, my lower back and butt are what is limiting me. This photo:

Oh sure, this appeals to me for the usual, expected reasons. But notice how tense her butt is; whatever she is doing is really working the butt in ways I need to work mine. So I’ll have to give these exercises a try. I have an exercise ball and both gyms that I use have them too.

If I want to train for running and walking, I have to get my butt (and back) in shape; literally.

Posts
No, we won’t win the House in 2014, but maybe, just maybe, some of the Republicans will be more willing to compromise on at least a few things.

Physics This is an interesting article about trying to find out a wave function (polarization states of a crystal); the idea is to do 2 consecutive measurements but to do the first in a “weak” way that doesn’t affect the quantum state (e. g., doesn’t cause the wavefunction to collapse) and to do a stronger measurement the second time. Each time this pair of measurements is done, record, and over time build up a statistical model.

I am not an expert and have no idea how this will work over the long haul.

March 4, 2013