Here’s (in part) why portrait photography is so hard: “research by psychologists at the Universities of California and Harvard finds that the same people are rated as more attractive in videos than in static images taken from those videos.”
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Here’s a moment of non-photography blogging: “21st century computer modelling software has enabled a long-lost, trumpet-like instrument called the Lituus to be recreated - even though no one alive today has heard, played or even seen a picture of this forgotten instrument - allowing a work by Bach to be performed as the composer may have intended for the first time in nearly 300 years.: (story)
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If you find yourself with too much free time on your hands, instead of spending it with your imaginary Facebook friends why don’t you head over to Galaxy Zoo and participate in some actual scientific research?
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Of course, if this device is a computer any mechanical watch or clock is, too. Calling it an astronomical clock would be more accurate. But regardless, it’s quite impressive to see the extent of ancient Greek technology.
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Pictured above is Omega Centauri, a globular star cluster that orbits the Milky Way galaxy and that has millions of stars in a sphere 150 light years across (150 light years is a bit more than 34 times the distance of the Sun from the nearest star). On the left-hand side is an image taken by an amateur astronomer (source), and it’s quite typical of what you would have seen with professional telescopes many years ago. On the right-hand side is what you get if you use ESO’s “Wide Field Imager (WFI), mounted on the 2.2-metre diameter Max-Planck/ESO telescope, located at ESO’s La Silla observatory, high up in the arid mountains of the southern Atacama Desert in Chile.” (source; note that I created the little composite above by eye using Photoshop, aligning some of the bright stars; this required rotating one of the images) That’s not even such a big telescope actually.
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… orbiting around the star “Fomalhaut” (not show in center), about 25 light years away from us. (source)
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I like how this simulation/visualization of air traffic over 24 hours (found over at kottke.org) looks like abstract art. And there also is
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“When Jakob Nielsen, a Web researcher, tested 232 people for how they read pages on screens, a curious disposition emerged. […] Nielsen has gauged user habits and screen experiences for years, charting people’s online navigations and aims, using eye-tracking tools to map how vision moves and rests. In this study, he found that people took in hundreds of pages ‘in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.’ It looks like a capital letter F. At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored. It happens quickly, too. ‘F for fast,’ Nielsen wrote in a column. ‘That’s how users read your precious content.’” - story
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“…the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats ‘just don’t get it,’ this is the ‘it’ to which they refer.” - Jonathan Haidt (italics as in original text)
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While looking for something entirely different today I found an archive with unedited scans of the Hasselblad cameras used aboard the Apollo 7 till 17 mission: Go here, and then click on “Full Hasselblad Magazines.” That way, you can look at the contact sheets of the Apollo space missions.
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You’d imagine with the LHC going operational very soon people at CERN would be kind of busy, but it appears that even at such a time, there are still some people with entirely too much time on their hands (hopefully this video will make the oohing and aahing about all that technology stop - if a rap by scientists won’t I’m afraid nothing else will).
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Some juicy new research I just couldn’t walk past (even though I dislike all kinds of sausages, meat or no meat): “According to the researchers, how we feel about a sausage, regardless of whether it’s soy-based or beef, says more about our personal values than about what the sausage actually tastes like. In fact, most people can’t even tell the difference between an ersatz vegan sausage and the real thing.” (source)
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I admit that as an astronomer I’m a bit jaded about astronomy photos, and I’m particularly uninterested in new Mars images (and even more uninterested in the almost comical fuss NASA creates every time yet another little robot going to Mars sends back photos that look like… well… all the other Mars robot photos - give me a break already!). But these images here are really quite spectacular.
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The short answer is “Of course not.” A somewhat longer and more detailed answer is provided by an expert from the reality-based science community, Brian Cox.
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Chances are you have heard of CERN’s LHC experiment, or maybe not. It probably is the most ambitious science experiment ever done (“One of the LHC’s detectors - Atlas - weighs as much as 100 Boeing 747s. Looking like a cross between some improbably big communications satellite and the largest electric dynamo you can imagine, Atlas is the work of 1,900 scientists drawn from 164 universities in 35 countries.” [source]), and if you want to find out more about its goals etc. this is the place to go. Oh, and it’s not going to blow up the planet. PS: It does say quite a bit about the state of affairs of the US media to see something like this, doesn’t it? No serious, self respecting scientist expects the collider to create a doomsday; just like no serious, self respecting scientist denies that global warming is a reality and a gigantic challenge for humanity.
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“Researchers have found a way to generate the shortest-ever flash of light – 80 attoseconds (billionths of a billionth of a second) long. […] The light pulses are produced by firing longer, but still very short laser pulses into a cloud of neon gas. The laser gives a kick of energy to the neon atoms, which then release this energy in the form of brief pulses of extreme ultraviolet light.” (story)
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“When you look at a painting, what do you think you process first - the painting’s content or its style? According to Dorothee Augustin and colleagues it is the content of a painting that we register first, with dazzling speed - within 10 ms (less than a hundredth of a second) - while processing of a painting’s style comes later, from 50ms onwards. […] The research also shows that even people without any expertise in art are impacted early on by the artistic style of a painting. ‘If we consider style the characteristic of art,’ the researchers concluded, ‘this characteristic needs some time to unfold - but still, it unfolds quicker than you may think.’” (story)
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“Astronomers have observed for the first time the thunderclap of x-rays that announces a star has exploded into a supernova [called “2008d”]. Researchers monitoring spiral galaxy NGC 2770 [seen in a mixed optical/UV view in the top two images], approximately 88 million light-years away, observed a brief but intense flash of x-rays [bottom right image] in early January, followed by a prolonged afterglow of visible and ultraviolet light - the hallmark of a supernova. Although the x-ray outburst lasted only seven minutes, it flashed 100 billion times brighter than the sun in that time. Based on that brightness and the duration of the flash, researchers conclude that the star (SN 2008D) was approximately 20 times the size of the sun and was blown apart by a shock wave expanding outward at 70 percent the speed of light.” (story, square-bracket comments by me)
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One of the most impressive presentations I’ve seen in a while: Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor describes experiencing a stroke herself (thanks, Michael!).
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This via The Frontal Cortex (the blog, not mine): “My friend “Jason” (not his real name) is one of thousands of amputees living with a huge secret. Years ago, after a lifetime of anguish due to having an extra hand - essentially a birth defect in his opinion - he took the radical step of amputating this hand just above the wrist.” (story)
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Pulsating stars (so-called cepheids) have long been used as one of the best means to determine distances in astronomy. Needless to say, the devil is in the details. A team of astronomers has now studied the star “RS Pup” to measure its distance using light echoes - light from the star bouncing off surrounding material. If you’re interested in this, have a look at the press release or even the actual publication. But regardless of how interested you are in this, you will definitely want to watch the movie the researchers made, with time compressed into seconds, the star pulsating visibly, and material ejected from the outer layers of the star streaming into space (the black line masks the star so its brightness won’t overpower the camera).
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Today’s Man is a documentary that I just watched twice (on the two different PBS channels “basic” cable has to offer in Western Mass). I can only recommend it - it’s about a young man who was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome (“People with Asperger’s, which is a form of autism, tend to be highly intelligent - often geniuses in certain subjects - but are unable to pick up on social cues.” If you’re wondering why I’m so interested in this subject matter, have a look at this page).
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“Twenty subjects tasted five wine samples which were distinguished solely by their retail price, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the subjects were told that all five wines were different, the scientists had actually only given them three different wines. […] Not surprisingly, the subjects consistently reported that the expensive wine tasted better. They preferred the taste of the $90 bottle to the $10 bottle, and thought the $45 bottle was more delicious than than the $5 wine.” (story) - Leicas take better photos?
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“Our need to feel as though we know ourselves is so strong that unexpected success can leave us feeling anxious and undermine our future performance.” (story) I have no way to prove this, but I am pretty sure that this also applies to photography: When you are working on finding your style or on sharpening your skills, getting new results can cause the same problems as those reported in the article.
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“Computer servers are at least as great a threat to the climate as SUVs or the global aviation industry.” (story, via the incomparable bldgblog) That’s bad (and, if you think about it, unsurprising) news. But then there’s a way for you to do something useful with your computer: “Climateprediction.net is the largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century. To do this, we need people around the world to give us time on their computers - time when they have their computers switched on, but are not using them to their full capacity.” If you look around on that site, not only do you find a plethora of information on the science side, you also get to see the results - it’s serious science, the first results were published in Nature. And after you have installed the program you don’t even have to do anything.
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Found at things magazine: Karl-Hans Janke spent the final 40 years of his life in a psychiatric hospital, suffering from paranoia, schizophrenia, and possibly autism. His doctor noted the main symptom of his illness was “manic inventing”. You have to see the catalogue of a show about his work to believe it - note that most of the German texts appear in English translation a few pages later (unfortunately, the quotes by Wernher von Braun - which make you question his sanity - aren’t translated).
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Most people will be familiar with echolocation (even if they have never heard of the term), because they have know how bats manage to fly at night: Bats emit a sound and then use the echo of that sound to navigate. Turns out humans can develop the same technique. Amazing.
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Unlike many - if not most - other branches of science, astronomy is in the very fortunate position to provide beautiful images almost effortlessly. Point your telescope at almost any position in the sky, and out pops something spectacular. In fact, you can even point your telescope at a spot where seemingly isn’t much going on, and you get one of the most important cosmological images ever made (even though for laypersons, this particular image looks a bit boring). The folks at the Space Telescope Science Institute know this very well, of course, so every week or so, they release some new eye candy. The Hubble Space Telescope gallery is well worth the visit - just check out the Sombrero Galaxy in full resolution. I’d also recommend looking through ESO’s image archives - have a look at, say, the radio galaxy Centaurus A. For those more interested in pretty pictures from the solar system both the Galileo and Cassini-Huygens space mission image galleries hold a plethora of amazing images.
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“Can it really be true that men and women understand language in different ways? Nonsense, says Deborah Cameron in this second extract from her new book - the supposed miscommunication is a myth.”
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“In March of 1985, Clive Wearing, an eminent English musician and musicologist in his mid-forties, was struck by a brain infection […] affecting especially the parts of his brain concerned with memory. He was left with a memory span of only seconds - the most devastating case of amnesia ever recorded.” (story)
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Sometimes, it’s quite nice to look at something entirely different, something remote from one’s usual interests. I found two immensely interesting articles on insects today, so I’ll just share them. For those who just love fruit flies (don’t we all?) there’s brain-scanning the fruit fly. And for all the bee lovers out there, check out how bees kill predator hornets.
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“People who are narrow-minded and dogmatic have a poorer working memory capacity, which is what makes it harder for them to process new information. That’s according to Adam Brown who tested 212 university students on a verbal working memory task.” - story
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Via Pruned come photos of Super-Kamiokande, a gigantic underground neutrino detector. With scientific faith now replacing religious faith in many parts of the world (certain restrictions apply), is it a surprise to see certain images? (Of course, Gursky fans will be familiar Super-K.)
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“The Sokal Affair was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of a then-non-peer-reviewed postmodern cultural studies journal called Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a pseudoscientific paper for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal’s words: ‘publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.’” (source) You can find all the details at Alan Sokal’s website. Hmmm, “liberally salted with nonsense” and “sounding good”…
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This list is not only quite informative, but also holds quite a few lessons. If you find yourself agreeing to what I just wrote, that might just be a case of confirmation bias.
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For reasons that will probably be obvious I find the research mentioned here quite interesting. When I’m extremely tired, my brain’s switch that controls which language to use ceases to work properly, usually much to the amusement of my wife. And it’s also quite interesting that when I swear I automatically mix words from both languages (German and English) - I guess in that case the switch does get circumvented altogether.
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Was the Antikythera Mechanism the world’s first computer?
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While the spacecraft bound for Pluto, the just demoted former planet, has an incredibly goofy name, its cameras are quite excellent. And yes, this is a real movie. I’m afraid learning about the resolution of the cameras on board of the spacecraft might shatter people’s obsession with “Megapixels” - but that’s just to prove that it’s not the number of “Megapixels” that determines whether you get a good photo, it’s how you use the camera.
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“The energy relationships to be created at CERN correspond to the state of the entire universe around one ten-trillionth of a second after the big bang (so according to what we know it’s not a simulation of creation - that happened around ten to the power of minus twenty seconds earlier). Whether such an investigation into our material origin can have any significance for us is hard to say.” - story
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For me, this is a bit too much on the side of things that made the book “The Da Vinci Code” a bestseller, but it’s quite entertaining anyway: “itÂ’s a compelling thought: that this magnificent temple, built 1400 years before Copernicus ever saw it, designed by a pagan, Sun-worshipping Roman emperor, and later transformed into a church, may have had secretly encoded within it the idea that the Sun was the center of the universe; and that this ancient, wordless wisdom helped to revolutionize our view of the cosmos.” (interview)
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“A network of artificial nerves is growing in a Swiss supercomputer — meant to simulate a natural brain, cell-for-cell. The researchers at work on ‘Blue Brain’ promise new insights into the sources of human consciousness.” - story
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One of the many clearly somewhat irrelevant facts about me is that while I am working as an astrophysicist now, I started out as an experimental high-energy physicist, back at what used to be LEP. More precisely, I got my undergrad degree in that stuff and then went on to get a Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics. The only thing that I remember fondly from the LEP days is when I got the chance to actually see the underground structures that housed the experiment and that now are used for the next generation particle accelerator, called LHC. There’s a brief and somewhat unspectacular article in the NY Times about LHC today, but the photos that accompany the article are quite nice - even though standing in the gigantic underground dome, 100 m (300 feet) below the surface, is an experience that no photograph can convey. To get a better feeling for the scales, have a look at this photo (which shows this detector under construction), and this shows the tunnel with the “beam pipe” - if you stand in the tunnel it’s really quite impressive; it’s so big that it curves only very gently.
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“Imagine that all the people on Earth […] could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. […] Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust. […] All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here.” - story
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“Gilles Trehin is an autistic 28-year-old. Since the age of 12, he has been designing an imaginary city called Urville, named after the ‘Dumont dÂ’Urville,’ a French scientific base in Antarctica. He has created detailed historical, geographical, cultural, and economic descriptions of the city, as well as an absolutely extraordinary set of drawings. His Guidebook to Urville will be published later this year.” - story (also see this page)
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It seems the question is not whether the polar caps are melting and whether sea levels will be rising but what the size of the effect will be. The current edition of Science Magazine features some alarming stories about this. The map above shows what’s left of Florida when the sea level rises by 6 meters (or 18 feet for people who still don’t get proper units). The red bits are under water. Similar maps show equally desastrous effects for cities like New York or London. For the tech savy, there’s a podcast. Needless to say, none of this is going to have any effects on the fools that comprise large parts of the Republican Party. And why would it? Given they gave a damn when New Orleans got flooded why would they care about Florida or New York City?
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Conspiracy theories, irrational fears of “the government”, and the belief that Earth is constantly being visited by “unidentified flying objects” (UFO’s) from outer space are as American as apple pie. Needless to say, all of these contain just enough actual facts that they’re not outright dismissable - even though it basically just takes about ten seconds of thinking about them to get there anyway.
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“A bitter debate about how to teach evolution in U.S. high schools is prompting a crisis of confidence among scientists, and some senior academics warn that science itself is under assault.” - story And speaking of “intelligent design”, this article exposes “ID” for what it is: Monty Pythonesque nonsense: “So, this is my theory, which belongs to me, and goes as follows. All intelligently designed things are brought about by an intelligent designer through a process of intelligently conducted design.”
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Have a look at these pretty spectacular photos from inside the eye of hurricane Katrina.
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“Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: ‘Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.’ Science mines ignorance. […] Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the effect that creationism or ‘intelligent design theory’ (ID) is having, especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons, under a new name.” - full story
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Here’s a bit of propaganda about work I’m involved in: “The Virgo consortium, an international group of astrophysicists from Germany, the UK, Canada and the USA has just released first results from the largest simulation ever of cosmic structure growth and of galaxy and quasar formation.” (source) Make sure you watch those movies, they’re utterly spectacular. More images and movies here.
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