DuVernois Blog

Winter cold

Life in a southern town

Well, I'm off of the ice, out of Antarctica. Back to Christchurch, definitely becoming a familiar town for me. A favorite Indian place, a favorite Thai restaurant, and I even found a Halloween costume for next year. Am waiting for a seat on an airplane flying north, to Auckland, and then on to LAX. Haven't been any seats the last couple of days, but hopefully tomorrow...

Though it's a beautiful, green place to stay, I miss people back in the states. And I have to start teaching again in a few days.

Happy New Year from Antarctica

IceStock was held yesterday, though it was windy and bit colder during the day. The ANITA payload is still traveling on its merry, and rather bizarre, course. Back over some ice again, so the current data should be okay. Will bag drag tonight, get weighed and get my luggage into the aircraft packing system.

Probably back in the US by the end of the week. Will be good to see those little gals again!

Christmas on the icy continent

The Christmas celebration is going be this evening, the 24th in McMurdo time, and the 23rd back in the States. The third payload is getting ready to launch. What else is there to report? We rotated the polarization angle of the Seavey by 20 degrees a few minutes ago...

Amended on the 25th, local time: We had a big Christmas dinner last night, lobster tails and Beef Wellington. Then a lot of wine at the coffee shop/wine bar. This morning, back to work.

Better ANITA/Antarctica map

Here.

ANITA is aloft

You can follow its trajectory here.

More on ANITA

I'm headed to Antarctica on less than 12 hours notice. Should be fun, but missing the holidays is pretty sad. But the holiday spirit isn't tied to a calendar date, right?

ANITA launch preparations

The ANITA balloon-borne experiment that I work on, is awaiting launch in Antarctica. You can watch the progress here. More soon!

Something I wish I had gotten involved with when I had a chance

new materials and physical measurements for better acoustic instruments. Had students demonstrating cheap, good, and excellent violins in class back at Penn State. You could hear, feel, and measure the differences. Beautiful stuff.

Though the US government officially does not believe in global climate change...

...they're interested in the increasingly-passable Northwest Passage. The UN climate talks have been looking at the cultural damage that will be inflicted by the ongoing climate change.

It's the environment stupid

Yeah, I know, we're losing two wars at the moment, our rights are under constant threat, and we're dearly hoping that there will be a fair election in the United States, so we're a bit distracted. But, there are some other serious matters to consider...global climate change in particular.

The UK government report from today indicates that we have only a slight chance of avoiding dangerous levels of greenhouse gases in the near future. The economic benefit of dealing with this problem sooner rather than later are also detailed. The Brits are also looking to see why the environment isn't a big issue here at the moment. It's the wars. Let's also note the effect of global climate change on the severity of Atlantic hurricanes and the fact that the world is as hot as its been in 12 000 years.

So here's just about the weirdest thing I've seen recently

Dubya's new ranch of 98,000 acres in Paraguay. Okay, here is where it gets weird. Is that his little hiding spot to avoid prosecution for war crimes? Of does the 2.2 mile long runway (look on google earth) mean he's moving full-time into the cocaine exporting racket? Weirder still is the connection with the Moonies and their purchase of land in the same area. Okay, and then the Jenna connection? Too strange for words.

And the new Bush space program

Politics is probably a better category than physics and astronomy, alas. The new Bushie space policy was announced. It's all about Moon, Mars, beyond, and "access to space." Okay, that's maybe partly complaining about Chinese laser illumination of US satellites (look it up!) and maybe also about a nuclear rocket? What do you think, time to resurrect Project Rover/NERVA? Wait, here it is! Triton from my Dad's old employer, Pratt & Whitney Aircraft.

Additional scary bits? "The policy calls upon the Secretary of Defense to..." Yup, Rummy gets to decide that Astronauts go into space with the food they have, not the food they want. Or air.

Son of Star Wars. Hmmm...filthy lucre...

North Korean nuclear test

Interestingly, the yield is in considerable debate. With a quake magnitude of 4.2 (USGS), I can't derive a yield as low as the South Korean claim of 550-800 tons (TNT equivalent). Such a yield would either be a fizzle (if it has a sharp leading edge in time) or a hoax (using a LOT of chemical explosives). For magnitude 4.2, I get a yield of kilotons, though it depends a lot on geological conditions for which I don't know how to compensate or calculate.

Thumbing around the web, I find Jane's Defense Weekly agrees that it needs to be "2-12 kton" to match up with the 4.2 magnitude. The Russians 5-15 kton. Other reports come in with lower figures and possible fizzles.

Back to space...

Okay, some of the payload items are ridiculous, but so are some on the shuttle launch manifest.

Though it didn't work too well...

Supernovae aren't standard candles

Interesting! With strong implications for previously reported, and future planned (SNAP), projects which measure the Universe in SN explosions.

What does second-hand cigarette smoke and global warming have it common?

Some of the same folks bankrolling the "scientific" opposition to them. What a strange world!

Today's good guy: Wal-Mart!

Who would have ever guessed? Wal-Mart is launching a plan to try to sell 100 million compact fluorescent lightbulbs to its customers. This sort of scale distribution could have a quite measurable energy-use reduction nationwide! (Horrible confession: I have a stack of CFLs that I haven't installed yet. I know, I know, but I just haven't gotten to it.)

Global warming in easy units

Spring is arriving 6-8 days on average earlier than it did 30 years ago and Autumn about 3 days later. I think those are more striking figures than the 1-2 degrees of temperature change. We have a week's work of change at the beginning of the summer and 1/2 a week at the end.

The continuing struggle of science & education against theocrats & ignorance

Lawrence Krauss has a decent, albeit brief editorial in the New York Times after the Kansas School Board skewed back towards reality. I'm not sure in what forum his disagreement over "scientifically inappropriate attempts by some scientists to discredit the religious faith of others" appeared. Will have to take a look. Though I can see tactically why scientists might feel that, I think that it is hypocritical to argue for a reasoned, scientific approach in all matters other than other people's theology. The logical holes are there along with the incoherence of major religions, their ahistoricality, and their pernicious nature in practice (and perhaps in theory). I see little benefit in doing this, but little harm either. Deeply-held beliefs, whether sensible or not, are not likely to be changed by simple logic.

Just the other day, we see an evolving piece of the religious attack on reason and science. Due to a "clerical" (hmmm...that has two meanings...) error, evolutionary biology has disappeared from a federal list of university majors approved for federal student grants. Yup, follow the link and you can still (8/25/06) see the missing line, a blank line, for 26.1303. What a coincidence.

Perelman declines the Fields Medal

This is the gentleman who appears to have proven the Poincare Conjecture.

Rare clouds over Antarctica

Nacreous Clouds photographed from Mawson Station.

From a slashdot discussion of research outside of academia

> Defense Labs and National Labs: the political forces are too strong for blue-sky research to happen there.

Definately take the politics out - I once worked in defence research lab, specialising in weapons technology. My pet area is killing groups of people as quickly as possible (outdoor specialist). My team came up with some breakthrough ideas, but the g-men said it was too abstract, too blue sky, too arty-farty.

It pretty much came down to "it can kill lots of people, but unless it can start production in my state next quarter and be killing brown people within the year, it's a no-go.", my favourite excuse (shot down because the office favourite's conventional design had a cool looking model): "Your laser is great, the people are out of the way, but now the oil fields on fire.".

Get politics out of war!

I laughed, I cried, and I closed the webpage.

As the US continues to lose out in bandwidth...

As consumers we gave the telecoms the money to do this during the Clinton years. They pocketed the money, told the FCC to get lost, and give us DSL. The French are doing something rather different. And everyone else gets the cool cell phones too!

Physics and comics

Though it has seemed to me to be inherently a silly topic, this article at least has fun with it. And the Superman movie? I thought it was incoherent with just a few good visuals. Though the drive-in experience is always good. Without a few beers, I suspect the movie would have been duller.

Al Gore's presidential moment

Okay, truth be told, he's had several presidential moments and we all know that's a few more than the current occupier of the oval office. Still, what to say about An Inconvenient Truth? I saw the movie over the weekend and came away with a string of opinions and a fear that someone would note that I had driven to the movie theater rather than walked...

• The science looked accurate. Scientists in the relevent field agree with a few minor caveats. Still, it's an interesting experience to hear a politician get facts straight.
• The animated bear and frog are just ridiculous.
• Not a bad powerpoint (or Keynote) presentation. I suspect that the interns/staff has a lot to do with it.
• Apple advertising! (Thanks Anne for the thought.) If this movie gets the US working towards lowering carbon emissions, someday Apple will use it in an ad.
• The bear and frog? Drop them in the director's cut.
• The whole human interest bit with Gore's son, hit by a car, reeked of cheap manipulation. The story of his sister (who died as a smoker of lung cancer while the family farm grew tobacco) was much more effective.
• There's a decent review of what's happening here from the New Haven Advocate.
• And the NYT talking about geoengineering "solutions" to ameliorate the global climate change.

Geoengineering mention in the Times

Dealt with a healthy dose of skepticism, after all if Ed Teller supports it, it's not likely to be a good idea. Still, in good American fashion it would be the technological solution that would let the good-old boys drive their gas guzzlers.

Businesses are following the government and cutting R&D funding

That saves money, right? For a while, then you find yourself without new innovation and technology. But all of that was going to be improved with those tax cuts for the superwealthy, right? :)

Silly patents

At Patently Silly dot com. The cordless jump rope (why bother?) and the "cylindrical object" (rock) skipping on water are my current favorites. Another beautiful demonstration of (some) failures of the patent system.

Tracking rainfall by cell phone signal strength

,a href=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4974542.stm>As water absorbs microwaves relatively well.

LIGO in the news

The search for gravitational radiation.

The radioactive boy scout

I know I've recommended the book to many people. But online is a short, but sweet, version of one boy's coming of age. With radioactive isotopes.

The measure of Congress's support of alternative fuel vehicles

House Speaker Hastert left the press conference in a hydrogen fueled vehicle. Then stopped and boarded his SUV to drive a couple of blocks to the Capitol.

Twenty years ago, Chernobyl

We're doing nuclear physics in the class I'm teaching at the moment. There's been a lot of news recently in the public fights over the deathtoll (the UN vs. Greenpeace estimates for example).

Bush, the nuclear blunders

It's clear now how the Iraq distraction has harmed us in the pursuit of bin Laden, with North Korea's nuclear weapons, and now with the standoff with Iran. The US is immeaurably weaker today than when Bush decided to launch a war of aggression with Iraq.

Major changes to the odds of scientific breakthroughs

Previously the gamblers had badly underestimated the chances of scientific answers to a number of interesting, outstanding questions. Of particular note is the now 4:1 odds on the discovery of the source of the highest energy cosmic rays.

A sad and sober popular article on NASA's budget

We all know the shuttle and the space station are disasters and that science and exploration (by unmanned crafts) are the way ahead. This article also argues for an Earth-centric NASA mission. Studying the planet from space. Certainly the anti-environmentalist loonies in the Bush regime don't want to see much of the Mission to Planet Earth results, but as the article notes, the science would return significantly after the end of Dubya's constitutional terms.

The profitable world of climate change denial

The Hall of Shame of scientists and journalists seduced by the money of the CO2 lobby. Hey, wait a second, instead of a living wage doing physics, could I too get money from the coal lobbies? I could mumble about solar cycles or something and try to minimize the crisis. Wait, that would be wrong.

This older Harper's article shows that the current cast of characters has been around for a while... Since 1995 at least.

You can also see them at work in the Wall Street Journal...spreading FUD.

"The Larch. An ancient Greek constellation made up entirely of stars too faint to see with the naked eye"

Interesting popular coverage of seeing things in telescope images...

"Intelligent observers see a cow in this picture."

Iran's bomb

Next week's New Yorker has an article from Seymour Hersh claiming the US is getting quite close to making a decision of military action in Iran. That article is being referenced around the world noting that the use of nuclear weapons is under consideration.

April is National Poetry Month & Math Awareness Month!

Comining the two...Fibonacci Poems!

Evidence of the lack of effect of prayer

What a surprise! No effect if the prayer subject doesn't know about it, and a slight negative effect if they do know about it. Truly I think we could have used some simple logic to show this as well.

Unexpected Antarctic warming

Though at some level it's got to be expected by now, unexpectedly large climate changes.

Nature & Encyclopedia Britannica

The Nature study which compared the Wikipedia and Britannica is criticized by the latter party. It's an interesting business, was looking at the pdf's from both organizations attacking and defending the study (follow links at the Beeb site to find this bits). No conclusions from me exactly, but there certainly looked like an intellectual divide as much as anything else. See what you think.

Avian flu

The City Pages here locally has an excellent article on the bird flu which is clearer than anything I had previously read about the real risks and issues with the H5N1 virus. Important reading I think.

Probably the end of "bubble fusion" for now

Purdue is investigating the only person who claims to have observed fusion products from sonoluminence.

Syrofoam-eating bacteria

The bane of biodegrading may be no longer.

Nuclear power redux

NPR devoted an hour recently to nuclear power, though it wasted some of that time with a cold fusion bit. Got to have that "on one side" and "on the other" thing going.

I'm certainly in favor of sensible ways of cutting back greenhouse gases which would include nuclear power, but a British panel looking into this concluded that building new plants would not yield a significant carbon dioxide benefit to outweigh its risks. It's an interesting argument---the risks included not only the obvious, and vexing, long-term waste problem but also the rigid hierarchical power-distribution structure from nuclear power at a time when micro-generation seems to be increasing.

The end to ground-based optical astronomy?

Global warming and increased airliner travel.

Atwood (yep, one and the same) makes long-distance signing (of books) a possibility

It's a pretty weird tale of an author tired of exhausting book signing tours. And a science fiction solution.

Breaking the last undeciphered Nazi German naval coded transmissions

They aren't especially significant transmissions, but there still something quite cool with finally deciphering these M4 Enigma transmissions. Let me also note, that since I went through a phase a year or two ago when I did quite a bit of reading on the U-Boat operations during World War II, that the "knife-edge" of victory over the German submarines is a myth.

Even when the Germans were winning, they were barely able to sink ships faster than they were being built, and they never were intercepting more than a percent or so of the ships bound for England. Clay Blair's two volumes (Hunters (1939-1942) and are certainly the definitive works on the Battle of the Atlantic. No knife-edge. No near thing. The U-Boats were suicidal operations by 1942 and even when they were most successful, were a small effect. There never were enough submarines to have a serious effect on British transport. And with the radar and cipher advantages, and by 1942 with the US also in the war, the contest was extremely uneven.

See what happens if you fail college E&M?

You go around making stupid statements.

Class email

A good piece in the NYTs on emails to professors about their class and learning. I've definitely been struggling to deal with the volume of email from a large lecture class.

Mathematics proofs getting to be very difficult to verify

Something along the lines of "the accelerating pace of everything" or some such.

First computers, aka, you always remember the first time

Discussion of your first computer. First computer I used, TRS-80 Model I, first one I saw someone use, Altair.

The two degree "cap" in global warming might have worse consequences than previously thought

Read through the BBC coverage of the new global climate change report. The Greenland ice may be more perilously balanced at low dT than previously thought.

An excellent bit on myths of Challenger (20 years on)

The myths article appears here. And the top level 20th anniversary stories are here.

So, I was walking home from school, we had had exams that day and I was finished for the day. When I got home my mother had heard it on the radio. I remember the next day watching the footage again and again in school and noticing when someone decided to add the explosion sound to the tape. It wasn't delayed at all. You saw the explosion and heard the bang. I remember that faking of the news video almost as much as the whole tragedy at NASA sort of thing. Columbia bothered me a lot more---probably by being closer to NASA and the space program at that later date, and also understanding it as the end of the era. (Or maybe of the error of the shuttle.)

Sea levels rising

Though 30cm doesn't sound like much initially, do think about Bangladesh.

Modern diesels

Maybe coming to America sometime soonish... Once the last memories of GM's attempt at diesel cars in the early 1980s is completely erased.

Physics by blog

The "dark energy is evolving" results and discussion in blog format. An interesting approach to the science.

Global warming

2005 was warmest Northern Hemisphere year on record. Second hottest worldwide.

Highest CO2 levels in the past 2/3 million years. Some correlation or connection, 'ya think?

Tamiflu useless for the avian flu

As it turns out.

Europe facing up to the (complicated) effects of global climate change

As the Gulf Stream may be a time-evolving phenomena. Remember how far north Europe is?

A shocking lack of effectiveness in tinfoil beanies

Finally! The study that we've all been waiting for. How effective are tinfoil hats at blocking the government's mind control and mind reading radio frequencies? Not very is the word! Back to the drawing board. Perhaps ferrite plates and absorber foam are in fact required.

Some of the best amateur astrophotography that I've seen recently

Pretty darned impressive I think.

Pluto gains two moons

Probably anyway. The Kuiper Belt appears more interesting and complicated than before.

Blue Gene/L supercomputer in the news

Top 500 lists are now covered in the BBC news!

An end to the mini-nukes program

Perhaps at least partly because the scheme doesn't work?

And that's a no to Archimedes' death ray

With television money they went ahead and demonstrated that it wouldn't work.

Nuclear weapons policy petition

For the physicists reading this, something to look at, and perhaps sign, if you're so inclined.

Implosion World!!!

Beautifully filmed destruction. Sort of like a Republican-friendly Survival Research Labs performance. Sort of.

DARPA Grand Challenge

The autonomously driven vehicle in the desert race (ADVITDR) has been successfully completed. Remember last year's race with no one gettting anywhere at all? Anyway, check out some of the details:

Discussion at slashdot.org.

And the DARPA website for the challenge.

Or here for a non-flash version.

Getting around dark matter?

I still need to read the paper, but it implies that dark matter is not required to fit Galaxy rotation curves.

Arctic ice...going...going...

Less Arctic ice again this year. The graph speaks for itself. On the plus side, the Arctic ice is mostly floating ice so it won't affect sea levels. Bangladeshis worry about the south polar regions rather than the north.

Serge Lang, RIP

What did you use as your Algebra text? Though he was more famous for his files and politics than for the books except within the math community.

First of the new GPS satellites launched

The big news for civilian users is the second frequency for non-military use. It'll help resolve ionospheric propagation errors and improve accuracy as a result.