Is there a Perfect Pitch?

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And the immediate followup question is “Should there be?” I’m referring to the story on NPR’s Marketplace the other day about the effects that some women’s voices have on whether they are taken seriously in the workplace. The audio is here, along with a transcript. The article, entitled “Professional women? With little-girl voices?”, is by Ashley Milne-Tyte.

The piece begins with a clip from the recent news, of Monica Goodling (Former Justice Department White House liaison) speaking in her defense during the hearings over the Justice Department firings. She has a noticeably “little-girl”-pitched voice. (I’m sure you remember hearing her during the news or the live broadcasts, and possibly your first instinct was to ask yourself why – in the political feeding frenzy aimed at bringing down Alberto Gonzales from the Attorney General position – the Congressional Democrats were now rounding up and grilling small children. (Or at least that was how it was for me for a split second since I mostly don’t watch television news – I find it too slow and otherwise annoying – and so I heard her on the radio.) It was then announced in the news piece who it was and I thought nothing more of it at the time…)

My own take on this is that it does not matter. You just learn, and move on. Since coming to the USA long ago, I adjusted my expectations about what are considered Click to continue reading this post →

The Two-Body Problem

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Ah, the two-body problem. On NPR’s Marketplace last week, Kai Ryssdal had a piece entitled “Studying ways to help 2-career couples”, covering a “Dual Careers Conference” at Cornell. The audio is here, along with a transcript.

It’s an important issue, (which I’m not going to spend a huge amount of time on here, since I’ve been blogging too much this morning so far), and I’d no idea that there were conferences devoted to it.

From the point of view of academia, there’s one aspect of it which still has not penetrated very far in the minds of many, in my mind. It is one I tried to emphasize when this issue came up during various advisory committees I’ve served on with relevance to matters of hiring, diversity, etc. What’s on my mind is that the two-body problem (as it is jokingly referred to by some) is not always to be thought of as a “problem” from the point of view of potential employers. In fact, if you can work with a potential employee to find employment for their spouse at your or a neighbouring institution, it actually can strengthen your faculty roster in many ways. Aside from the obvious ones, there are the benefits of having happier employees who are committed to setting down roots, rather than an employee who is spending a lot of time travelling to or calling their spouse in another city, wondering every day whether their job is really worth that strain. Retention is a huge issue in managing your faculty. The value of settled employees cannot be overstated if you take the long view for your organization.

Anyway, have a listen to the article (or read the transcript). There’s the usual interview with members of couples who are academics and struggling with the issue, and it’s interesting if you’re not familiar with the matter, or perhaps if you’re in academia, early in your career and wondering about what the job market holds for you. And if you’re currently wondering whether to date other academics or not, don’t be put off (at least not by this issue!). Things are getting better. Employers are getting smarter Click to continue reading this post →

Gotta Love the Arclight!

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silver surfer arclightsilver surfer arclightWhat was he surfing on anyway? Magnetic fields? Or just an all-pervasive Jack Kirby/Stan Lee medium? Or perhaps I’m making the same mistake that Nineteenth Century physicists made, thinking that light waves needed a medium in which to propagate? That’s it! The Silver Surfer needs nothing to surf on… Huh, why did I not think of that before?

silver surfer arclight

Pity the film (which is on in the Arclight’s wonderful Dome, too!) will probably suck like a Dyson.

-cvj

Loud Laughter About To Happen

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This is quite brilliant..! (Be patient… it gets even better as it goes along. Some familiarity with the Star Wars films required for full understanding, I’d say. There are some brilliantly conceived extensions of various scenes, excellent re-imaginings of others, completely new added scenes (the John-Cleese-esque scene is just perfect, for example), and so forth. Hollywood Reporter background story here. ):

  robot chicken star wars   robot chicken star wars   robot chicken star wars

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Back To the Future

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Chesley Bonestell fifties science fiction spaceshipThe BBC Radio 4 program Archive Hour was just brilliant on the weekend. Here is the synopsis:

Adam Hart Davies looks at some of the predictions made in the past by scientists, programme-makers and politicians about how future society and technology would develop. He explores some of the moral and ethical dilemmas arising from mankind’s thirst for new inventions, new technologies and new ways of life.

(Image right: Chesley Bonestell painting for a cover of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1950. See more art from that era at this excellent site.)

It brings to the issue a lot of archival footage of interviews, debates, and other material. There are interviews with many interesting people, including scientists and science fiction writers. The role of science fiction (the really good stuff, not the stuff that’s purely space opera… although sometimes it is hard to know which is which without the benefit of hindsight) is discussed quite a bit too.

There are the usual discussions about mobile phones, communications satellites, and the like, well-known things that were anticipated by writers of fiction, but the programme is much more interesting than that, reflecting upon the impact of various technologies and medical techniques (e.g. heart transplants) and how they were regarded and debated at the time, since they were often seen as either assaults on, or enhancements of (depending upon point of view) our humanity. This discussion is all in aid of reflecting upon us in the present. (Consider carefully the face transplant, for example, and how people react to what that means…)

There’s also very interesting discussion of the moral/ethical responsibility of the Click to continue reading this post →

Nuts and Bolts

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notebook workingYes, part of my job is to sit and think about how the universe works. People hear this, and they wonder exactly what that entails. Well, it entails a lot of things – sometimes there’s the grand thoughts and the thought experiments and the like that you hear of from documentaries and books about Einstein and other famous scientists – but more often that not it is grungy nuts and bolts.

Take yesterday for example. After a week of working on various calculations and chipping away at improving my understanding of how to approach a certain problem, I decided to take Saturday and be outdoors a bit more…see what it was like outside. You know…. Have an actual Saturday Saturday. (I did not end up being booked to do that TV shoot, by the way, so I had a nice clear day ahead of me.)

What actually transpired was this:

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Sundogs

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Yvette (one of our regulars here) let me know about a photograph that she took of a sundog the other day. It appeared on the Spaceweather website (you’ll need to set the calendar there to June 14th to see it in context), and since there may be a few of you (like me) who wonder what a sundog (or sun dog) is, here it is:

sundog by yvette cendes

Yvette also put it up on her blog (which is an interesting and nicely illustrated read, by the way) together with a picture of the broader view showing the nearby sun.

My confession today is that I had no idea that is what those optical phenomena were called! No, really. You’ll also find them called parhelia (the plural; singular “parhelion”)…. they are always near the sun, you see. (Less common are the images that form somewhat further away from the sun (a “paranthelion”), or quite a bit further away (an “anthelion”). These are not, as I understand, properly referred to as sundogs.). I always used to wonder about them (and their cousins, the halos you sometimes see around the sun) when I was a child, but never talked to anyone about them back then (I kept a lot of wondering to myself) and the urge to find out what they were called was never strong enough I suppose. I think I’d satisfied myself that they were caused by refraction in the atmosphere, but again, I’ll admit that I’d never really gone and verified this anywhere. (Same for the effects around the moon you can sometimes see.) So I never learned of the significance of 22o, which is the angle the light from the sun bends through when it passes through the hexagonal ice crystals floating in concert in the upper atmosphere. (The other, further away ones are formed at larger angles.) It was when Yvette said sundog that I went a-Googling (as one does) Click to continue reading this post →

Name That Particle!

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As a followup to the post on Roz Chast’s Symmetry magazine cartoons, I get to tell you* about a fun competition! The prize? A Roz Chast autographed copy of the May edition of Symmetry magazine (yes, that’s the one she did the cover for) and an appearance in a later edition of the magazine!

You can find the entry details at Symmetry magazine here, and I quote:

roz chast on physicsFlerbs? Marteenies?? Tom, Dick, and Harry???

Cartoonist Roz Chast has busted the field of particle physics wide open with her pioneering cover for this issue of symmetry. We say it’s about time: Why limit ourselves to the same old list of particles that have actually been discovered, or at least properly theorized? So here’s the challenge: Invent an elementary particle and tell us what it does in 30 words or fewer. A drawing would be nice, but not mandatory. […]

So go ahead and send in your entries! If you like, come back here and tell us about Click to continue reading this post →

Roz Chast On Physics

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I learned from Often in Error that Roz Chast, whose work some of you may know from the New Yorker, had some physics-themed cartoons in the May edition of Symmetry Magazine (one of them the cover). Here they are (click for larger, then perhaps click again to zoom):

  roz chast on physics   roz chast on physics

I like the one on the left, I have to say. (A pseudoparticle called “poserino” is just Click to continue reading this post →

Reality Calls

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american inventor logoIn a bizarre twist, after a satisfying day of calculating I switched on the television, accidentally pressed a wrong number, and ended up on ABC just as a program called “American Inventor” was starting. I’m not really up on all these “reality” format shows, so I’ve no idea how long this has been in existence, but I must say that it was good to see a program in this format that was primarily about using one’s brain, inventiveness and engineering/construction skills! The format is a bit too gimmicky for my tastes (I’m not partial to all the fake drama and overwrought background music), but that’s probably because I don’t watch much of this sort of thing, so I probably won’t be a regular viewer. But again I must say it was good to see that such a show exists. Perhaps there are more that I don’t know about. It seems that I just saw the phase where they filter out all the silly ones (and goodness were some silly!) and pick the finalists from each city who get $50,000 worth of development money. They did LA and SF in this show, and apparently they’ll be doing the North East next. Questions you might be able to help me with: Do all these shows have a British judge on the panel to play a sort of mean guy? Is it a sort of requirement? The one other such show I’ve seen, American Idol, has that, and like a good theorist I am extrapolating wildly from two data points.

logo for design squadSeeing a reality show based on some intellectual skill actually reminds me. Even though I got a reminder from some of the people behind the show, I’m embarrassed to say that I completely forgot to tell you about the show on PBS for youngsters aged 9 – 12 called “Design Squad”. From the “about” part of their site:

Borrowing from the hugely popular reality competition format, DESIGN SQUAD is aimed at kids and people of all ages who like reality or how-to television. Its goal is to get viewers excited about engineering!

Over 13 episodes, eight high school contestants tackle engineering challenges for an actual client—from building a machine that makes pancakes to a “summer sled” for LL Bean. In the final episode, the top two scorers battle for the Grand Prize—a $10,000 college scholarship from the Intel® Foundation.

I think it has now concluded, but you can watch all 13 episodes online here. Did anyone see it? (I did not.) What did you think? You can get more involved with Design Squad by following up on this part of their website.

Design Squad was co-sponsored by the IEEE, which is excellent to see. So will the American Physical Society (and other science societies) be doing something similar, one wonders? It’s a potentially good way of getting people interested in participating in science – on prime time television. We could, for example, have members of the Click to continue reading this post →

New Toy Tool!

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Trying to calculate all day long. Lunch break. During this moment of procrastination, I thought I’d tell you about the product of yesterday’s procrastination. At some point in the morning I decided that I was not thinking straight about aspects of my computation (like what it all means), and that this could be helped by having a bigger space to work on that I have at home right now.

I don’t know about others, but sometimes in addition to the need to change venues during research thoughts, I also need to change the medium I’m writing on. So at lunch I went shopping and after visiting far too many stores (art supply for one part, office supply for another) to get the right things, look what I got (see left picture)!

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Otherworldly Top Ten!

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extra solar planet GlieseAfter reading an article about how the “trickle of planet discoveries” as become a “flood” -referring to the many discoveries of extrasolar planets that are being announced these days, since they first started being discovered in 1995 1988/9 (there are more than 200 known now)- I looked at space.com’s “top ten most intriguing extrasolar planets”.
[Update: First detection of extrasolar planets is probably more accurately to be dated 1988/9. The first confirmed one was in 1995, but the planet Gamma_Cephei_Ab, detected in 1988(9) by two separate teams, took until 2002 to be confirmed. See e.g. here for more. Thanks commenter molliska!]

Have a look at that interesting article about the pace of discovery, and then when you’re done, peruse the top ten here. You’ll find:

  • 10: 51 Pegasi b, the first confirmed (see above update) one found, 1995;
  • 9: Epsilon Eridani b, the closest known one (only 10.5 light years away);
  • 8: the class of planemos, the extrasolar planets which are not orbiting any stars;
  • 7: SWEEPS-10, a “zippy” planet, that orbits its star every 10 hours as opposed to our sluggish 365.25 days;
  • 6: Upsilon Andromeda b, a planet which is tidally locked to its star so that it presents only one face to it all the time. So one side is always super hot, while the other is very cold;
  • 5: The youngest one known (it’s been in existence a bit less than a million years), orbiting the star Coku Tau 4;
  • 4: PSR B1620-26c, the oldest one known (12.7 billion years…wow!);
  • 3: The “shrinking one”, HD209458b, that orbits so close to its star that it’s Click to continue reading this post →