Archive for category Rant/Rave
More unsolicited science museum advice…
Posted by Grg in Rant/Rave, Science Fandom, Science/Geek, Unsolicited Advice on Wednesday, February 25, 2009
A science museum, indeed every type of museum, is all about stories (human interaction) and stuff (interesting objects and materials.) Working with cool items or seeing interesting objects or devices while having an opportunity to interact with other people is what makes museums special, and incidentally different and more marketable, than on-line experiences or other types of for-profit entertainment centers.
At the end of the day, providing interesting opportunities for visitors and museum staff to interact with “stuff” (and each other) is a sure way for visitors to leave your museum NOT feeling stupid.
And that’s just a smart way to run a museum.
It reminds me of two rules I learned in grad school: 1) if your reader doesn’t understand something, you were probably unclear; and 2) you can please more than one type of reader at a time.
The first is obvious, to me at any rate. Anything that can be said, can be said simply enough to appeal to a person of reasonable intelligence. It really depends on being able to get a concept across without piling on confusing terminology, whether that concept is evolution or celestial physics. I don’t believe you can get someone to completely grok quantum physics in five seconds, but they might get the gist that regular old physics doesn’t work so well in explaining how things atom-sized and smaller behave, which is where quantum mechanics comes in. People tend to understand things when you break them down into digestible chunks (or quanta — ha!) of information.
The second, I think, applies to science museums, in particular. I’m not an exhibit designer — and I know nothing about museum pedagogy — but I would think a good exhibit is like a an old Warner Bros. cartoon: the kids don’t get the dirtier jokes, but the adults do. (Good example here in “An Itch In Time,” at the seven minute mark below. It went over my head as kid.) Likewise, I can see where it would be necessary to design an exhibit — to create an “experience” — that appeals kids, adults and science geeks alike. I think you would do that by engaging people in the process. Like Paul, I was impressed with how interactive the recent Star Wars exhibit was. Even my three year-old got into creating LEGO landspeeders.
25 Random Things About Pat Benatar
Posted by Grg in Grg's Reference, Rant/Rave, Science Fandom, Science/Geek on Monday, February 9, 2009
25 Random Things About Pat Benatar
Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note of 25 random things. At the end, you choose 25 people to be tagged. You are to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you it is because I want you to know more about Pat Benatar.
1. Born Patrick Andrzejewski, soon after Patricia Mae Andrzejewski following a coin flip.
2. Was accepted to the Julliard school.
3. Wrote “Love is a Battlefield” after she broke up with her Argentinian boyfriend, at the Battle of Goose Green during the Falklands conflict.
4. Her mother was a beautician who once sang opera at the Met.
5. Her father was a sheet metal worker once tossed out of Shea for spitting on a Met.
6. She once recorded jingles for Pepsi, which inspired her chart topping “Hit Me with Your Best Shot,” a stirring anthem for the Cola Wars of the ’80s.
7. Once got with Roy Orbison until he started “Crying.”
8. Got her first break at an open mic night at Catch a Rising Star comedy club.
9. Can be recognized from Olivia Newton John and Juice Newton by her lack of Newton.
10. Reluctantly took on her husband’s last name Benatar after John Cougar reclaimed her first stage name “Mellencamp”
11. Her first hit was 1979′s “Heartbreaker,” which she wrote after disguising herself as a surgeon and intentionally botching John Cougar’s heart valve replacement.
12. Intentionally recorded a crummy cover of “I Need a Lover” to further spite John.
13. “You Better Run” was the second video played on MTV ever. Rocketing her to stardom among the three people who had cable at the time.
14. Turns out she never really wanted her MTV
15. Her live album, “Live from Earth” was ironically recorded on the surface of a large c-type asteroid
16. After divorcing Dennis Benatar, she married her guitarist Neil Giraldo in 1982.
17. In 1989, she appeared in an ABC Afterschool Special “Torn Between Two Fathers” where she played the wise old owl.
18. A 33rd degree Freemason, the subject of her last big hit “We Belong.”
19. Released three albums in the 1990s, for no apparent reason.
20. Spent fifteen years mastering the Hanzo sword bequeathed to her by her sensei.
21. Invented the thin keyboard tie in 1981.
22. Qualified in the biathlon for the Nagano Olympics. She didn’t compete, feigning injury so she could avenge the death of her sensei.
23. Bernie Madoff lost money to HER.
24. Her 2007 song, “Passion,” could be downloaded, for a time, from a Jell-O sponsored website.
25. Never responded to decades of correspondence with Greg Lester, unless you consider a restraining order a “response.”
The price we pay for the anti-vac movement
Posted by Grg in Grg's Reference, Rant/Rave, Science Fandom, Science/Geek on Friday, February 6, 2009
I’ve been following the vaccine/autism fretfest from a distance, so I chatted the topic up with Ben’s doc, who mentioned how Hib cases, of all things, were on the rise. (One unvaccinated infant in Minnesota recently died. Tragically preventable.)
If you haven’t heard of Hib, that doesn’t surprise me. It causes a form of meningitis. You, and your parents, probably never encountered it. Chances are fairly good that your grandmother, however, might have lost a sibling or a cousin to the disease…or one of the many other illnesses that used to routinely rob us of our children.
As you might know, the current anti-vaccination nonsense that’s spreading through the land began in the UK in ’98 when a Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a study suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and Autism. (We gave the world Intelligent Design, the UK gave us anti-vacs…as much as I detest ID, at least it doesn’t have a body count.)
I haven’t really followed the career of Wakefield. We have our own anti-vac proponents in the US to worry about. UK Journalist Brian Deer suggests Wakefield might have some ulterior motives, this makes for interesting reading.
Of course many controlled, reputable studies since then has cast that link in doubt. If you don’t believe me, I can’t help you more than to suggest some reading, WebMD has a nice lay-friendly FAQ that spells out the depth of research on the topic. You can also read the take of pro-science skepticsyou can read the take of pro-science skeptics here. At this point you are either merely ignorant or actively in denial.
Like I said, this really began in the UK, so it isn’t surprising that we’re seeing a return of preventable diseases like measles.
Confirmed cases increased from 990 in 2007 to 1,348 last year – the highest figure since the monitoring scheme was introduced in 1995.
Health Protection Agency experts said most of the cases had been in children not fully vaccinated with combined MMR and so could have been prevented.
Immunisation expert Dr Mary Ramsay said the rise was “very worrying”, adding measles “should not be taken lightly”.
More than 600 of the 2008 measles cases occurred in London, where uptake of the vaccine for MMR – measles, mumps and rubella – is particularly low.
We’re not immune (heh!), in the US. As I mentioned, there was a Hib outbreak in Minnesota recently, but also pertussis in Philly and measles in California last January. In the latter case, an unvaccinated seven year-old brought the disease back from vacation in Switzerland and spread it around his private school. The scary part is, as you can see in the Cali case, these kids aren’t from poor families without access to healthcare.
Supposedly educated adults, concerned enough with their children’s welfare to send them to private school, were scared into NOT vaccinating their kids. In the 21st century, they made a choice against the medical technology that created an unprecedented wave of good health in the 20th century.
Likely, they believed the autism fearmongering and figured they’d place a safe bet and let “herd immunity” cover their kids. That only works when everyone else plays along. So, it won’t be surprising to see clusters of outbreaks in some of our wealthiest communities as well as among under-served populations.
That doesn’t take away from the essentially parasitic (Amanda Peet took it back, but I think it is apt) practice. Herd immunity protects kids who can’t get immunized (for a variety of health-related reasons) and a small minority of those who did get vaccinated, but for whom it didn’t take.
While all this is going on, there is a huge kerfluffle involving Bad Science columnist extraordinaire, Ben Goldacre, is boiling over across the interwebs. (Quackometer has a nice round-up.) A radio host is trying to use the UK’s anti-free speech libel laws to silence Goldacre. Toss him a couple of quid, if you can. The first time I ever used paypal in pounds. How global of me.
2/8 UPDATE: Wakefield doctored his results, says Brian Deer in today’s Sunday Times.
2/9 UPDATE: The Bad Astronomer has more on recent outbreaks in Australia and Switzerland, where a 12 year-old girl died of measles-related encephalitis.
That reminds me a bit of my own childhood experience regarding opportunistic infections. I contracted osteomyelitis after a bout of chicken pox when I was about four or five. I really ought to corroborate my memories with my mom, I could be wrong…and a doctor, for that matter, I could totally be wrong on this. Soon after getting over chicken pox, my dad found me on the floor one night, crying hysterically because I couldn’t walk. I spent two months in a wheelchair at Abington Memorial. Again, my memories of early childhood are anything are perfect, but I remember spending my fifth birthday — got a landspeeder — at the hospital.
Anyway, I know people think chicken pox aren’t a Big Deal, but I’m getting my kids vaccinated anyway.
Hyping the holographic universe
Posted by Grg in Grg's Reference, PR Guy, Rant/Rave on Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Cardiff researchers could herald a new era in fundamental physics
Cardiff University researchers who are part of a British-German team searching the depths of space to study gravitational waves, may have stumbled on 1 of the most important discoveries in physics according to an American physicistCardiff University researchers who are part of a British-German team searching the depths of space to study gravitational waves, may have stumbled on one of the most important discoveries in physics according to an American physicist.
Craig Hogan, a physicist at Fermilab Centre for Particle Astrophysics in Illinois is convinced that he has found proof in the data of the gravitational wave detector GEO600 of a holographic Universe – and that his ideas could explain mysterious noise in the detector data that has not been explained so far.
The British-German team behind the GEO600, which includes scientists from the School of Physics and Astronomy’s Gravitational Physics Group, will now carry out new experiments in the coming months to yield more evidence about Craig Hogan’s assumptions. If proved correct, it could help in the quest to bring together quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of gravity.
I’ve been busy the last few weeks, so I missed the holographic hoopla from Craig Hogan. The idea is — in my likely erroneous inerpretations — that what we know as 3D reality is really 2D information projected from edges of the universe, the cosmological horizon, like a the cover of National Geographic (when we still thought holograms were cool). The Cardiff University is a bit of press release me-too-ism, but that’s largely forgivable (I do it myself sometimes) if a bit tacky (a spade’s a spade).
What I want to know is what are the consequences of living in a holographic universe. Are there any perks? Neat ways to hack reality, for example?
Or will holographic be the new woo word as we get tired of saying “quantum” everything? Only time and Oprah will tell.
Lunar rover at the Inaugural parade
Posted by Grg in Grg's Reference, Rant/Rave, Science Fandom, Science/Geek on Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Looking forward to the return of the New World Order
Posted by Grg in Dumb thoughts, Rant/Rave on Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Sure, the left woo (and these are imprecise terms, people) was active then…but that was when the New Age movement took hold..all about alternative healing, angels, crystals and black t-shirts covered in wolves, bears and/or Native Americans. (I liked the music, I admit. Enya. Those chanting monks. Crap with pan flutes and dolphins humping that they used to sell at World of Science. Good stuff.)
The mainstream culture embraced both in a woo-nami that tempered the worst of either side (Art Bell quickly shut up about New World Order nonsense after McVeigh) and kept the kitsch. It was, in hindsight, a golden era when we knew who the kooks were and what they thought.
What did the The Bush Era get us? Warmed-over preachy message movies and documentaries about current events. Michael Moore documentaries with the subtlety of a day-glo sledgehammer. Bill Maher monologues with the subtlety of a Michael Moore documentary. (And don’t get me started on the Bill Maher documentaries!) The right didn’t do much better, mind you. With their guy in power, it became all about Intelligent Design, bad Pelosi jokes and other low-level, completely ignorable nonsense.
Perhaps the difference was the tone and clarity of the message. The 90s conspiracy nuts frothed about the UN teaming with UFOs to take your guns and bibles. It was fun like your favorite uncle and you couldn’t take it seriously, like your favorite uncle who wears a tinfoil beanie.
The mainstream 2000s conspiracy nuts, however, froth about Big Oil, Drug Companies, Katrina, Global Warming and Dick Cheney, none of which were fun at all. The truth is, I don’t fear corporations or Dick Cheney. The woo left always whined about such things, but I need oil and I need pharmaceuticals. Katrina, in retrospect, the Federal response might not have been as horrible as we thought at the time. Global Warming concerns me, but I’m the kind of guy that sees how technology and reasoned, sane discourse will do more good than hysteria. Dick Cheney, I could do without, of course, but he shot a guy and looked like Burgess Meredith’s Penguin. If it weren’t for starting wars, the Bush Administration would have been enjoyably surreal.
In fact, the anti-Bush conspiracy nuts were notable not just for their unoriginality, but for the surprising way people who should know better latched on to the malevolent Bush conspiracy notion. Its one thing when late night talk radio twits rant about Clinton creating a third term for himself, but it is quite another when the intellectual (and celebrity) elite honestly believe that Bush was going to declare martial law if Kerry won in 2004. (I’m looking at you, Gore Vidal.) So prevalent are such beliefs, that Congressman John Olver of Massachucetts had no qualms about suggesting Bush was going to declare martial law in 2008. For some, the 2000 election was just triggered something in their brains and they were never able to accept that history tumbled along on its own sloppy path without the aid of a cabal of Neo-Conservative puppetmasters.
Then there were the 9/11 Truther films and websites. They are on a class of their own: outside the mainstream paranoia, and on a completely different level and with shading of anti-semitism. So far out there, in fact, that they can’t be loathed on a absurdly comedic level like any of the Clinton Era New World Order material still floating around the Internet. They are as every bit as religious as creationists. But with creationists, you know the boundaries of the debate. With truthers, however, there are no boundaries, anything is game for their delusions.
So, its a brand new era. Will we see a return to 90s nostalgia? (And, why not, considering who’s in power in Washington!?!) Or will the right wing wooists take on the venom of the truther crowd? Let’s hope not. So far, the best the right can do about Obama is question his birth certificate, his associations with 60s radicals and his Secret Muslim past. At least they aren’t saying he killed Vince Foster…
Holding him to it…
Posted by Grg in Grg's Reference, Rant/Rave, Science Fandom, Science/Geek on Tuesday, January 20, 2009
For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act – not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.
I come from a family full of engineers — including my wife — so I will instinctively applaud the use of government money to fix our ailing roads, bridges and highways. Same too, with energy, provided he includes nuclear and (please) space solar power in the mix (a long shot, for sure).
The other rocket revolution…
Posted by Grg in General stuff, Grg's Reference, Rant/Rave, Science Fandom, Science/Geek on Thursday, January 15, 2009
Here’s the intro, for a taste:
Late one evening in August 2006, Ross Tierney logged on to the chat room at nasaspaceflight.com, an unofficial cyberspace water cooler popular among NASA engineers. Tierney, a wiry 34-year-old space buff in Cocoa Beach, Fla., makes his living selling exquisitely detailed models of spacecraft and launchpads. He had been mulling over the design of the Ares I, the new NASA rocket that’s slated to launch astronauts into orbit after the agency retires the space shuttle in 2010. Though NASA has been working on the Ares I since 2005, the new vehicle won’t be ready until at least 2015. That leaves a five-year gap when there will be only one way to boost U.S. astronauts into space: Rent a Russian Soyuz rocket. And if Russia’s current conflict with Georgia or some other international incident disrupts that arrangement, the U.S. manned program will be grounded.
Tierney wondered whether the Ares I is really the best way to keep the U.S. in the spaceflight business. What if, instead of building a largely new rocket, NASA created a new configuration of proven space shuttle components and placed a crew capsule on top? Sitting on his living room couch, hunched over a laptop computer, he posted the question to the chat room. A dozen replies came back supporting the idea. “I was shocked,” Tierney recalls. “Here I was, just a nobody enthusiast asking a dumb question, and a bunch of NASA engineers are telling me I was absolutely right. They said they’d been pushing the same thing for years and that they’d been threatened with their jobs if they kept talking about it.”
Tierney’s innocent query mushroomed into a credible challenge to NASA and its Ares I, which is already under construction. His original chat network has grown into an underground coalition of NASA engineers and contractors who, working on their own time, have come up with an alternative rocket design they call Jupiter Direct 2.0, or simply Jupiter Direct, because it is more directly based on shuttle components than the Ares I. The dissident moonlighters argue that their launch vehicle, the Jupiter 120, would be more capable and less expensive than the Ares I. Furthermore, they say their lifter could fly in 2013, trimming the impending gap caused by the shuttle’s retirement. As a new presidential administration enters the White House, the insurgent engineers see a chance for change.
Last year NASA released a three-page, step-by-step critique of the Jupiter Direct proposal that challenged its claims. The dispute goes beyond engineering: Detractors’ doubts about NASA’s objectivity and professionalism strike at the foundation of the agency’s reputation. Last October, NASA administrator Michael Griffin felt obligated to defend the agency during a speech at the American Astronautical Society. Regarding press coverage that implied NASA was capable of using “unfairly skewed” data, Griffin asked how it could be “presumed that NASA does not act with integrity … is that what some people really believe?”
NASA bashing is a hobby for some folks, something I really don’t take part in doing. It is a government agency and has its limitations, of course, but the battle is over such a small slice of government money, that there are bound to be these sorts of criticisms. What was that quote about academic politics being so vicious because the stakes are so small? Could that be part of it.
I’d imagine that most of the people that get into the space industry do so because they have that essential space dream. The regular public only taps into it occasionally, whenever something particularly awe-inspiring or tragic happens. There is a hardcore group of people in the space world — and I’ve met a few here and there — that live and breath this stuff. Sure, there are people who behave poorly. There are petty folks as concerned more with the safety of their own project than the collective dream, undoubtedly.
But I can’t help but believe the vast majority of these people are in it for the dream. These are the people who work for NASA, who build space start-ups, who start space advocacy groups, and who, like Ross Tierney, argue so passionately for their cause.
They’re the oddballs looking to pick a fight, and I’m pulling for all of them, regardless of which side they take.
Look at me, I’m getting all misty. Geez…
Reason 1,365 of why I fear the ocean: Cthulhu Frogs
Posted by Grg in Grg's Reference, Rant/Rave, Science Fandom on Thursday, January 15, 2009
Part of an ongoing series of highlighting things that would likely kill you, given the opportunity.
What couldn’t giant rockets revolutionize?
Posted by Grg in Dumb thoughts, Grg's Reference, PR Guy, Rant/Rave, Science Fandom, Science/Geek on Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Giant rockets could revolutionize lots of things: ice hockey, Buddhism, my daughter’s time outs for poking her little brother…
The release does give a wonderful idea of just how big the new Ares V rocket will be. Big enough to lift 396,000 lbs into orbit. That is, as the release puts it, 16 or 17 school buses or, as I reckon, about 200 average (178 lbs) adults (naked and without life support, that is, these shouldn’t be people you actually like).
In any case, yes, this thing should be able to lift a decent-sized telescope to orbit.
Confusing things, somewhat, is NASA’s own verbiage on the topic, according to the Ares V site:
The versatile, heavy-lifting Ares V is a two-stage, vertically stacked launch vehicle. It can carry nearly 414,000 pounds (188 metric tons) to low-Earth orbit. When working together with the Ares I crew launch vehicle to launch payloads into Earth orbit, Ares V can send nearly 157,000 pounds (71 metric tons) to the moon.
What’s even more confusing is all the geekspeak for the new shuttle replacement rockets. I think I got it, though, if you’re curious…
The Constellation Program is the umbrella name for the shuttle replacement.
The Orion is the capsule where the crew (about 4-6 people) sits.
The Ares I is the smaller rocket, capable of lifting 25 tons to orbit and beyond. It looks top heavy, which is fine, but it might shake a bit too much, which isn’t.
The Ares V is the aforementioned biggun.
The Altair is the lunar lander, which will go aboard an Ares V.
The Altair IV is where Dr. Morbius and his daughter Altaira live.
Meanwhile, none of this will happen for a while. The Ares I is set to launch in 2014, I believe. The shuttle, however, stops launching next year (making it very unlikely at this point I’ll ever see a shuttle launch in person).
Taking up the slack — since astronauts still need to go up and down the well — will be the Russians in their Soyuz (people mover) and Progress (thing mover) vehicles, which sensibly sit atop Soyuz rockets. (Seriously, NASA loves naming things.)
In addition, NASA is spending about $500 million or so — the cost of an average shuttle launch — on the COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) program. COTS is, essentially, a service contract to a commercial outfit that will send their own rockets up to resupply the space station.
Two companies recently won the contract: Space X (Elon Musk’s rocket company) and Orbital Sciences Corporation (who seriously have to work on their name if they are going to compete with Space X, a name that is only cool by comparison).
Space X has the Falcon 1 (which has launched before) and Falcon 9 (which hasn’t, but will soon). There’s a Falcon 9 variant called the heavy, which can carry more stuff (but less than the Ares V) They also have a crew capsule called the Dragon, which can carry seven folks and their luggage. I take back what I said, as goofy as “Space X” is, the company knows how to name stuff.
Orbital Sciences Corporation (yawn) has the Cygnus unmanned resupply vehicle and the Taurus rocket (which hasn’t lifted yet, either) I was wrong, the Taurus rocket has lifted, a number of times. The COTS entry is the Taurus II, which has yet to go up.
.
With some luck and skill, both COTS contractors will get their acts together this year and we’ll see some fun by 2010, when Roy Scheider will finally learn what happened to the Discovery.
Anyway, that’s all the geekiness I can manage before the sun comes up.