Archive for July, 2013

Time for another Fun Friday!  Here’s my list of stuff too good to throw away but not good enough to warrant its own post:

1)  Need a break from grueling research/summer classes/debugging dodgy code/perusing the course catalog to optimize your Fall schedule/simulating DoTA line-ups/or taking victory laps around the lab?  Play a few rounds of arXiv vs. snarXiv!

The arXiv is a free repository of physics, math, and computer science papers.  This is an online manifestation of the traditions of the “pre-print”, instead of waiting for your paper to be published you sent around early copies to your colleagues at other institutions.  Now anyone can upload anything to the arXiv, including legitimate science from world experts, outlandish speculation, and gibberish.  Following up on the Sokal affair and other attempts to get randomly generated papers published, the snarXiv takes an ever-evolving list of buzzwords in a context-free grammar, and then lets you guess which title is actually real.  As you can see, my ability to pick the real paper is only slightly better than a monkey.

Fun snarXiv facts:

1. The two fakest-sounding real papers are “Highlights of the Theory” and “Heterotic on Half-flat“.
2. My favorite selections from the list of fake-sounding papers are “Charging Black Saturn” and “Baby steps beyond rainbow-ladder“.
3. The average over 750,000 guesses is 59% correct, so (mostly) real science apparently sounds (mostly) like gobbledy-gook.
4. The suggested uses for the snarXiv are:

• If you’re a grad­u­ate stu­dent, gloomily read through the abstracts, think­ing to your­self that you don’t under­stand papers on the real arXiv any better.
• If you’re a post-doc, reload until you find some­thing to work on.
• If you’re a pro­fes­sor, get really excited when a paper claims to solve the hier­ar­chy prob­lem, the lit­tle hier­ar­chy prob­lem, the mu prob­lem, and the con­fine­ment prob­lem. Then expe­ri­ence pro­found disappointment.
• If you’re a famous physi­cist, keep reload­ing until you see your name on some­thing, then claim credit for it.

2)  From the world of engineering (which, as of 1996, is no longer boring), AeroVelo wins the Human Powered Helicopter Competition from the American Helicopter association.  The flight must be longer than 60 seconds, higher than 3 meters, and stay within a 10×10 meter box.  Watch the really, really cool video here.

AeroVelo wins the Human Powered Helicopter Competition

3)  Fox News reports that Neil deGrasse Tyson will host another follow-up to Carl Sagan’s groundbreaking documentary 33 years ago.  Watch the trailer here.

COSMOS: A Spacetime Odyssey

I really like the backstory from geek-movie-critic Movie Bob:

Fox Television gave Seth MacFarlane a big leeway for “whatever he wanted to do” in exchange for keeping ratings-juggernaut “Family Guy” on the air. He decided to spend that clout on two passion projects. One wasn’t too surprising: A new version of “The Flintstones,” which is still pending. The other? “COSMOS,” a 13-part science documentary – a sequel to the legendary Carl Sagan series of the same name – hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Yes. The creator of “Family Guy” is going to run a science documentary on a major network because he can.

4)  And the excellence in science journalism for outstanding headline goes to: “EU boffins in plan for ‘more nutritious’ horsemeat ice cream: ‘Disused’ animal products ideal for sick, elderly”

5) Finally, because science is awesome, here’s how we intend to build the largest digital camera in the world and launch it into space:

Happy Fun Friday!

-Dr. D

NASA Mission Control celebrates the successful return of Apollo 11 lunar landing mission on July 24, 1969.

44 years ago today, the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission returned to Earth by splashing gently into the Pacific 400 miles off the coast of Wake Island.

This is the mission that carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to become the first humans to ever set foot on the moon.   The achievement of reaching the moon with 1960’s technology is simply incredible.  For example, the Apollo Guidance Computer weighed 70 pounds, ran at 2 MHz (about 500-1,000 times slower than an average smartphone), and had 2K of RAM (one million times less than a modern computer).  NASA released this picture of the epic celebration in mission control when the mission ended successfully.

So, that was 44 years ago.  Where are we now?

Well….

Also in 1969, NASA developed a plan for reusable spacecraft called the Space Transportation System, which became unofficially known as the space shuttle.  The shuttles, typically credited for being the most complex vehicles ever built, ultimately flew 135 missions from 1981 to 2011.   But now the shuttle program is officially retired:

History of Flight, from Abstruse Goose
http://abstrusegoose.com/377

Even though humans haven’t been to the moon since 1972, but in the meantime, NASA has gotten to be quite good at launching robots into space.  This blog post is really about three really awesome images from satellites.

1.  If you were standing outside on July 19th, then the Cassini spacecraft took a picture of you.  Of course, it was 900 millions away behind the rings of Saturn, so it might be hard to pick yourself out of the crowd, but nonetheless the JPL was encouraging everyone to go outside and wave.  The picture is staggering:

Picture of Earth through Saturn’s rings from the Cassini spacecraft

2.  This recent NASA Picture of the Day was taken two weeks after a tornado ripped through central Oklahoma on May 20, 2013.  In this false-color image, vegetation is red while roads and buildings are gray.   The tornado track leaves a jagged scar running across the middle of the picture.

Track from the May 20th tornado through Moore, Oklahoma

3.  If zoom in a bit more on Cassini’s picture, we might get something like this:

Texas cities from space

This picture was taken from the International Space Station 240 miles above Earth.  Houston is visible near the bottom-right.  Near the top-middle you get the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex, and I-35 running to left with Waco, Austin, and San Antonio.  Of course, the bright spot to the left of the metroplex is none other than Abilene.

The shuttle program may be over, but we are still exploring space.  Curiosity is waiting for us on Mars–time for a visit!

-Dr. D

We are proud to have students and Faculty at prestigious research labs and universities for summer research projects.  We can be found at our typical summer haunts working at ACU, Brookhaven National Lab in New York, FermiLab near Chicago, and the Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover, Germany.  We also have a new project at the University of Illinois, and two students on summer REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) projects at Illinois and the Colorado School of Mines.

We are thrilled that ACU has produced a new video highlighting our summer research!  Enjoy this Wildcat Video Minute (ok, two-and-a-half minutes):

Notice that this is linked to a playlist on our spiffy new Youtube Channel!

Want to learn more about our research?  Want to know what it is like to be an ACU student at the lab?  No problem, have some DANGO.  Here’s the June issues of our DANGO (the Doings ANd Goings On) newsletter–now with the picture of the week:

• DANGO 2013 – Issue #2
• DANGO 2013 – Issue #3
• DANGO 2013 – Issue #4
• DANGO 2013 – Issue #5

Enjoy!

-Dr. D