Conscientious | Science

Moving faces considered more attractive

2012-03-25T15:40:43Z

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."

'Lituus - Bach's Forgotten Horn Gets Recreated In The 21st Century'

2009-07-22T18:43:10Z

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)

Galaxy Zoo

2009-02-18T16:02:53Z

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?

]]> The idea behind Galaxy Zoo is simple: Galaxies come in different shapes (and sizes), and for scientists to be able to understand how they formed and evolved, they need to know about their shapes. With data now being collected by robotic telescopes the number of unclassified galaxies is huge, and since having a computer classify them is still way too complicated, over at Galaxy Zoo you can get an account and then classify them - as one out of many thousands of volunteers.

Apart from doing some actual scientific research (without a degree - hey, this almost sounds like spam!), you get to see what galaxies really look like - of course, those NASA propaganda images are always pretty and all, but the reason why they're pretty is because if NASA showed you what most galaxies (or the images of galaxies) looked like you'd want your money back.

Oh, and there is a very realistic chance that you might even find something cool, such as galaxies colliding etc. As an added bonus you even learn how painfully boring scientific research can really be.

2000-year-old 'computer' recreated

2008-12-17T17:08:28Z

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.

The difference a camera and telescope make

2008-12-02T18:00:59Z

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.

]]> The difference is quite striking, though, especially if you look at a couple close-ups:

or

The last image is aesthetically a bit more interesting, but it's the center image that's the killer: A look at the cluster's center (crop done by eye). These days, you can actually resolve individual stars in the center of globular stars clusters! If you wan to see the cluster in all its glory download the 8040 x 7560 pixel - 72MB full-resolution image.

Spot the planet...

2008-11-13T20:32:39Z

... orbiting around the star "Fomalhaut" (not show in center), about 25 light years away from us. (source)

Two nifty visualizations of global data

2008-10-06T18:13:49Z

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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A visualization of earthquakes covering three months (this one has sound).

'Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind'

2008-09-25T13:17:43Z

"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

]]> PS: The irony of this all is that you won't be able to properly read the whole article if its contents is true.

PPS: This all makes me wonder whether I should compile my Conversations with photographers into a proper book. Any publisher interested?

What Makes People Vote Republican?

2008-09-12T17:15:41Z

"...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)

Apollo Space Missions Contact Sheets

2008-08-15T21:13:06Z

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.

LHC Rap (no, really)

2008-08-04T17:15:40Z

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).

Vegetarian Sausages and Subjectivity

2008-07-28T15:41:44Z

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)

Images from Mars

2008-07-16T19:02:19Z

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.

Will our planet be destroyed by the LHC?

2008-07-01T18:10:47Z

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.

]]> Key statement (edited down to the relevant bits): "it's absolute utter nonsense. It's the biggest pile of [Laughs] shit that I've ever heard in my life. [...] right there are two things to say; one is that it's legitimate to ask the question. Every time you go to a new frontier and research be it biomedical research or high-energy physics, the question that should be legitimately asked - is this dangerous? Is there any risk at all? [...] So then what about black holes? Well it's just possible; there are extra dimensions in the universe and they set up just right that you could produce mini black holes at the LHC. That would be one of the signatures of extra dimensions. Now it's extremely unlikely [...] point because you know it requires the extra dimensions in the universe - but anyway; fine. You can make them. If that's true then black holes are made in cosmic ray collisions with the upper atmosphere everyday because cosmic rays have energy far in excess of those that the LHC can create. So that means that [...] there are black holes up there raining down on the earth all the time and they don't do us any damage. [...] Well the probable reason that we haven't disappeared into a mini black-hole is because they don't get created. Well let's assume that they do; the next thing is that we have this prediction by Stephen Hawkings that they will decay away by a process called Hawkings Radiation which I might add is a much sounder theoretical basis than the extra dimension theories by which you could create these things. [Laughs] Anyway what if Hawkings Radiation doesn't happen? [...] Then you read on the web [...] what happens if these black holes fly straight through the planet before they have a chance to eat it? Where is the one that the LHC could be created and just sit there and perhaps sink to the center of the earth? It turns out that when you do the calculation the black holes are so small that even if they didn't decay and they just sat there they wouldn't come close enough to any matter - because matter is basically empty space - to dissolve and to eat the matter and to grow so they wouldn't do any damage. [...] the final piece of wonderful evidence [...] is that you look up into the sky and you see white dwarfs - some neutron stars - very, very dense stars. Cosmic rays are hitting those with energy greater than those seen at the LHC so if you can make black holes, black holes will be created on that surface. It turns out that they're nuclear dense - these stars, so the black holes are not going to fly through there; they're going to sit there and they're going to eat away and they're going to eat away much quicker than they could eat away the earth because the matter is much denser. So people have calculated how many neutron stars or white dwarves you would see in the sky if this were happening. If they were getting eaten by little mini-black holes and it turns out that there'd be very few indeed - in fact probably pretty much none [...] there are layer after layer after layer [...] of tests and some of them are observational and some of them are theoretical and it turns out that it's utter nonsense."

'The edge of understanding'

2008-06-30T17:15:24Z

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.