Alas, I fear I must report that I recently had a major falling-out with some of my friends. We have these sort of events all the time, but this time I managed to catch it on video, which is after the fold…
For those who don’t read the Bad Astronomy blog, I feel duty bound to share an image taken by the HiRISE camera currently orbiting Mars. They caught a picture of several avalanches on steep cliffs on Mars:
It’s also worth looking at the full set of pictures, which shows the wide-angle shots and the zoomed-in shots of two avalanches, giving a better sense of how far the orbiter was when the pictures were taken. Modern technology is quite amazing, isn’t it? (I may have found my newest desktop background.)
A few recent articles got me thinking about the prevalence of crackpot science and medical quackery in modern society, and I thought I’d just write a post with some general thoughts and observations on the subject.
The articles that got me thinking again: McCain jumps into autism controversy, rejects science and evidence, via The Carpetbagger Report, the ‘return’ of the Lizard Man in Lee County, South Carolina, and Bad Statistical Reasoning about Weather and Climate, via Good Math/Bad Math.
Let me summarize each of these reports briefly after the fold, and then speculate what they (and other unscientific arguments) have in common.
CNN has a video reporting that Lee County, SC may be suffering the return of its not-particularly-famous Lizard Man. First sighted in June 1988, a local teen was changing a tire on his car near Scape Ore Swamp when he was evidently attacked by a bipedal green lizard! Via Weird U.S.,
“I looked back and saw something running across the field towards me. It was about 25 yards away and I saw red eyes glowing. I ran into the car and as I locked it, the thing grabbed the door handle. I could see him from the neck down – the three big fingers, long black nails and green rough skin. It was strong and angry. I looked in my mirror and saw a blur of green running. I could see his toes and then he jumped on the roof of my car. I thought I heard a grunt and then I could see his fingers through the front windshield, where they curled around on the roof. I sped up and swerved to shake the creature off.”
The car roof was severely scratched up, and the rear-view mirror damaged, but otherwise no physical evidence was present. A number of other people reported seeing the lizard man, but by August ’88 the sightings had died off. Well, he’s back!
First, a little boasting that will probably impress nobody: I received my limited edition autographed copy of Ramsey Campbell’s 2007 novel The Grin of the Dark! Ramsey Campbell is my favorite horror author and a big inspiration for many of my own horror ventures. I finished the novel last night, and I thought I’d give a few of my thoughts on it.
Quite simply put, Ramsey Campbell disturbs the #@&% out of me! And I mean that as the highest compliment. More below the fold…
“Psychic detectives” are very much in vogue again on television these days. Shows such as Medium and Ghost Whisperer try and entertain viewers with psychic-types attempting to solve crimes and right past wrongs using their supernatural abilities.
The idea of a professional supernatural stalker in fiction is much older, though, and can be traced back to the mid-1800s. I recently decided to go on a “psychic detective” reading binge, and below the fold I summarize a bit of the history of the concept and rate the skills of the various investigators…
In a previous optics basics post, we discussed challenges associated with trying to define the velocity of a localized wave or ‘pulse’ of light. Traditional measurements of the velocity of an object involve measuring how far Δd an object travels in a certain amount of time Δt; then the velocity is simply
velocity = distance/time = Δd/Δt.
But a wave is an extended disturbance, not definitely associated with any particular point in space, and so measuring Δd becomes tricky. If there is a definite feature of the wave (such as a peak), we can define the velocity by measuring how fast the peak moves. If the wave changes shape (i.e. the peak disappears), as happens when waves propagate in matter, it is not immediately clear how one defines wave velocity.
The answer, as discussed previously, seems to be to define a ‘group’ velocity: we can mathematically characterize the velocity of the overall wave signal by
where Δω is the range of temporal frequencies in the wave pulse and Δk is the range of spatial wavenumbers in the pulse. This measure seemed quite good: under most circumstances, the quantity was less than the vacuum speed of light c, and therefore didn’t violate Einstein’s relativity, and those cases where the group velocity was greater than c seemed to always involve a significant attenuation or distortion of the wave.
However, in 2000 researchers Wang, Kuzmich and Dogariu from the NEC Research Institute shocked the physics and optics community by demonstrating* that materials exist for which the group velocity is greater than c, sometimes much greater than c, and the pulse travels at this higher speed without any obvious distortion or attenuation. What was going on?
Still some light posting this weekend, as I’m in the house-buying mode. Something I came across recently, which is a little old but entertaining: an enterprising Norwegian teenager has been recreating, with stop-motion animation and Legos, the entire first Half-Life video game! He’s up to seven parts so far, and they get increasingly entertaining. The video of part 1 is linked below the fold:
Over at The Daily Photon, Andrew Dawes has put up a nice post outlining how to use different fonts in LaTeX: including finding a math font that matches the text.
I find this especially helpful because, in writing Powerpoint talks, I often run into a conflict between using TeXPoint for my LaTeX equations and a pretty font for my regular text. It gets rather annoying having to juggle several fonts in order to make certain that the (inline) equations and variables are comparable to LaTeX’s standard fonts.
This made me laugh. Via The Agonist (through Crooks & Liars), we get the story of the Woessners, professors at Pennsylvania State University. The Woessners (one conservative, one liberal) did a study to investigate why so few conservatives end up as professors in academia. Among their many findings and conclusions, they recommend:
The research led the Woessners to conclude that if higher education wants to attract more conservatives to the professoriate, it should smooth the way financially, offering subsidized health insurance and housing for graduate students, and adopting family-friendly policies for professors.
In other words, to get more conservatives to be professors, adopt very socialist hiring policies!
This is inspiring a bit of a rant in me; if you’d like to see some other reasons why very few professors might be into right-wing policies, look below the fold…
The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas. 
Skulls in the Stars 
