Great News for Healthy Skepticism

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I don’t know if you’ve been following the story at all, but there’s been a major breakthrough in the UK for the ability of people to speak out against, for example, claims being made about the efficacy of medical treatments. It is very important, since the UK courts with their strong libel laws, are commonly used by big companies (with deep pockets) as a stick to beat anyone (such as a reasonably skeptical ordinary citizen who is not willing to believe extraordinary claims with little or no evidence for them) who raises questions. Simon Singh, a well-known science writer (whose work I’ve discussed here before) has, after a long battle, won a crucial appeal that may be a landmark for such matters, perhaps galvanizing moves to reform the legal system, and certainly representing considerable encouragement for people to raise their voices in the name of reasonable skepticism.

This is excellent news! BBC story here, Topnews story here. Guardian opinion here.

-cvj

Stairway to Heaven?

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“There’s a lady who’s sure
All that glitters is gold
And she’s buying a stairway to heaven […] “

the_orbitNot that I’m calling Boris Johnson, the [occasional village idiot] Mayor of London, a lady or anything. It just was the best bit of the song I could use for the story. This structure does not exist yet, but it seems that will. What is it? Another Big Thing for people to go up to look over London. Yay. Silly, in many ways, but I will admit that I like it as a piece of mathematical poetry squiggled in the sky. It is by Anish Kapoor. Story here from the BBC, and here from AOL news. Video of announcement from Guardian here.

Now, while looking at the picture above, I noticed something interesting. Is it just me, or is the sky wrong? I don’t mean that it is blue and over London and therefore a Click to continue reading this post →

Wonder

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age_of_wonder_coverOver at Wongablog, Andrew points to a post he did over at Humanist Life in which he reviews “Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science”, by Richard Holmes. This is one of my favourite topics, and it is certainly a book I’m planning to read, although I have not done so yet.

Andrew writes thoughtfully on the book and the matter in general, and so I’ll leave you to wander over there and have a read of it. To tempt you, an extended (I hope Andrew does not mind) extract:

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New LHC Physics Phase Begins!

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cern-first-physicsWell, here we go. It has been a little over 20 years since I’ve been actively working in this field and have been hearing about the promise of this machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and now it is really here, working, and colliding protons at an energy much higher than any previous experiment, promising us to a glimpse of new aspects of how the universe works. It is not guaranteed, of course, but there’s a great deal of hope, and so much of what we know strongly suggests that there’s going to be some exciting things to learn. See the list of related posts below for several bits of background on the LHC, or go to CERN’s website. [Image above right -click for larger view- is a CERN-supplied montage of data/images from the various experiments at the LHC. Caption: 7 TeV collision events seen today by the LHC’s four major experiments (clockwise from top-left: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb).]

Two of the things foremost in people’s minds are on one hand the Higgs (the particle or particles that ultimately give masses to the elementary particles that make up the Click to continue reading this post →

A Short Cut to Mushrooms

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My title for the last post reminded me of a discovery I made the other day (and gave me an excuse to steal a favourite title for this post – know its origin?). I was watering a plant that I’d not tended to properly for a while since I was away on Walkabout, and I noticed, upon looking closely, that it has been under attack by mushrooms!! Wow!

Click on each of the thumbnails below for a larger view:

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Picking Mushrooms

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From Frances Bonahan s colloquiumAha. It’s one of those moments in mathematics press coverage that the journalists love, since all the stereotypes about how weird people working on abstract things can be are able to be brought out and highlighted, and words like genius, prodigy, recluse, eccentric, etc, get thrown about in equal measure.

Yes, Grigory Perelman has being turning down stuff again. You may recall him refusing the Fields Medal four years ago. Now he is refusing the Clay Mathematics Institute’s million dollar payout. Perelman proved the Poincaré conjecture a while back (see this older BBC article about that, along with a non-technical mention of the content of the conjecture – see also here, a related post the picture above right is from), which is on the Clay’s list of Big Problems whose collective heads have a bounty on them. He’s apparently a bit eccentric and the press love it, so most articles I’ve seen are mostly taken up with stuff like the following I saw in the Guardian:

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A Spring Flower

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wise2010-008-med It is Springtime, and it is not unheard of for me to have pictures of flowers, often from my garden, up on the blog (see here). This time, I have a picture of a flower from a different garden. It is the one you can see by looking up. If you look up with the right equipment, you can even see new growth (just like you can in Springtime gardens). In this case, the equipment is WISE (the spacecraft launched in December, recall) with its ability to survey the sky in the infrared part of the spectrum, and the new growth is a cluster of new stars, called the Berkeley 59 cluster. Looks a bit like a rosebud, Click to continue reading this post →

A Return

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gladioliI find myself back in Los Angeles for a bit, putting Walkabout mode on pause. Perhaps to do my laundry, perhaps to chair the committee of the upcoming Ph.D. defense of my student, Tameem, perhaps to be able to sit outside in the early morning sun in a T-shirt and blog over breakfast.

The garden is full of weeds and flowers, and all is well with the world, albeit a bit blurry due to my jetlag.

Anyway, a few random things to note:

* * *

mourning_dovesAnother Spring is here, in full force. I once again snort in exasperated laughter at the bizarre claim so very many people make about Los Angeles (Southern California more generally) not having seasons, as I marvel at all the many signs of it screaming for attention. As a random example, I’m observing some mourning doves eyeing me up from nearby as they try to decide whether I’m a threat to their potential nesting sites that they are checking out. Seems that at least one pair is rather impressed with my cluster of strelitzia nicolai and want to move in. I want to tell them that I’m not the problem, but the fact that they’d be in plain sight of the crows/rooks/ravens/winged-Nazgul that pass by here a lot will be. I’ve seen them strike nests in those trees from previous years and scoop up a tasty warm meal.

* * *

Eight hours of jetlag means only one thing: Click to continue reading this post →

Why So Few?

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I’d like to pass on a link (sent to me in email*) to the New York Times article about the new NSF-sponsored study and report (links to it are within) on the under-representation of Women in science and mathematics. Reporter Tamar Levin summarizes it there and quotes a number of interviewees. Sample extract:

The report found ample evidence of continuing cultural bias. One study of postdoctoral applicants, for example, found that women had to publish 3 more papers in prestigious journals, or 20 more in less-known publications, to be judged as productive as male applicants.

Making judgments about an individual’s abilities based on his or her sex is a classic form of discrimination, said Nancy Hopkins, an M.I.T. biology professor who created an academic stir in the 1990s by documenting pervasive, but largely unintentional, discrimination against women at the university.

Have a look.

I note that an email in my inbox just half an hour after the one telling me about the above link was news Click to continue reading this post →

Not Entirely Alone, II

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It has been a pleasure to see the large number of bikes in use in London, and particularly pleasing that it is a wide range of types of people using them as well. bikes_londonThere are many things about London that make it feel even more comfortable to me than ever (high prices of everything not being one of them) and the heavy bike use has to be one of them. Things in that department continue to improve over in my home city of Los Angeles, although I think it’ll still be a bit of time before you get bunches of cyclists routinely clustered at the lights waiting for the green, as in the photo on the right.

brompton_londonAlso great to see, sending a shiver of pleasure down my spine each time I’ll admit, has been the huge number of Bromptons in use in London. (See photo left.) I know it is true statistically that they are among the most popular single type of bike here (of any type, folding or non-folding) but it is still great that there are so very many sightings of them as you walk along the street especially at peak times. That’s something that really still has not taken off in LA. I’ve seen fewer than a handful of Bromptons in almost seven years on the streets here, relatively few folding bikes in total, and maybe only twice have I seen someone else using them in combination with the subway (and I remain the only person I’ve ever seen bringing them on to the bus). It Click to continue reading this post →

Not Entirely Alone

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Does this description seem familiar?

Black scientist, born in 1968. Born in London to immigrant parents. Spent a fair amount of time in their school years convincing teachers to not assume that they are supposed to be in the “B” group in all their subjects by default. Did a physics degree at Imperial College, London University. Now a successful practicing scientist. Doing a lot of science/education outreach as well (was on the radio twice in the last week or so, for example).

All familiar so far, right? Ok, a bit more…

Was on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island discs last week talking about their life and selecting eight favourite pieces of music, a book, and a luxury item they’d like to have on said island (chose telescope).

About to have a daughter.

Oh!

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TwitterBug

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Dear Readers following Asymptotia on Twitter. You’ll have noticed that there have not been any twitter updates since January. I’ve only just noticed that the settings in Twitter Tools were not set right since the last update, and so you may have missed out on two months of juicy blog material. I’m very sorry.

I’ve updated a few posts from the last few weeks to start up the twittering again. Be sure to come to the blog and read up on what you missed. People seem to have been enjoying the Walkabout series, for example. Start reading that post, and if you scroll to the bottom of it, after the comments you’ll see pingbacks from later posts that cited it. So you can read those too… and so on.

Enjoy!

-cvj

The Onion on Science Programming

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Yes, it’s very funny*, and awfully close to the truth as well, at least in terms of the final product. More seriously, it is worth noting that what they get wrong is the blaming of it on audiences. It is actually more about the channels (not just the Science Channel) themselves and the sort of business models they run. We, the scientists who care to, must carry on contributing where we can as well as encouraging and supporting the film-makers as much as we can. It’s not really their fault so much as the people who call the shots at the head of the money food chain. Most of the film-makers I’ve worked with on the many shows I’ve helped with (either in front of or behind the camera, or both) are passionate about the science, are keenly interested in understanding it more so as to tell the story to the public as well as they can, and are capable of doing so. They most often can’t get their shows past the people at the top who believe that the material is too inaccessible or not interesting to the public. (I’ve heard the same complaint from science journalists working in the print media too.) On the other hand, I get recognized and stopped on Click to continue reading this post →