Arcane Gazebo

Quantum Construction

I spotted this sign while running in Berkeley this morning, and had to go back for a photo. From the slogan it looks like they're promoting energy-efficient home design, which is commendable; thus they probably want "quantum" to indicate "technologically advanced". But of course, "quantum" also brings to mind uncertainty, which maybe isn't what a contractor wants to associate themselves with. At the very least, I would expect Quantum Construction to be able to give a precise time estimate, or a precise cost estimate, but not both.

However, I assume their creation operators are top-notch.

Wall Street rethinks coal

Via Stoat, the Wall Street Journal reports that some major investment banks are anticipating new regulations on carbon emissions:

Citigroup Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley say they have concluded that the U.S. government will cap greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants sometime in the next few years. The banks will require utilities seeking financing for plants before then to prove the plants will be economically viable even under potentially stringent federal caps on carbon dioxide, the main man-made greenhouse gas.

I'd like to interpret this as an expectation of a Democratic victory in November, but if I remember right global warming is one of the policy areas where John McCain deviates from Republican orthodoxy. Thus it's more likely driven by his success in the primaries, making this kind of regulation more likely no matter which party wins the presidency.

This decision is driven by the political situation but I've often wondered how much the scientific consensus on global warming impacts the investment world. After all, major climate change will cause a lot of economic damage and so it seems like there's incentive for Wall Street to try to limit it. Probably, though, it's a tragedy of the commons where the marginal coal power plant brings more short term profit than long-term costs to the individual investor. (And a lot of the fossil-fuel industry's disinformation campaign on the issue is designed precisely to keep their stock prices up.)

Since I'm looking at some finance jobs, it would be nice to think that I could have a positive effect on this side of things, but in fact my skill-set seems more suited to high-frequency trading problems that don't have this kind of look-ahead.

Just call it entropy research

I thought our lab was a mess, but it could be worse... via Chad Orzel, here's a chemistry professor (at UT San Antonio) whose lab had to be forcibly cleaned by the university:

“Clean your room or get out!” Words from a frustrated parent to a messy teenager? Not quite. The mess-maker in this case was a chemistry professor at the University of Texas, who ignored repeated warnings to clean up his dangerously cluttered lab space. When University officials decided to clean it themselves, the professor caused such a disturbance that campus police had to lead him away in handcuffs. The professor was eventually fired, which prompted a lawsuit claiming that the University retaliated against him and denied him equal protection.

The legal opinion notes that apart from the problems in the lab, the professor's office was an "extreme fire hazard", which still puts him a step below the physics professor here at Berkeley who actually set his office on fire. In any case, this makes me feel better about the disordered state of our lab. We cleaned it only a few months ago but it returns rather rapidly to equilibrium.

(I also want to point out that the legal blogger linked above is evidently a fan of Arrested Development, and has chosen the obvious pseudonym to use on his law blog...)

Academics and sex, or the lack thereof

Via Shellock, there's a fascinating post at Gene Expression on various findings that show that intelligence is correlated with delayed sexual activity. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the post and I encourage reading the whole thing, but I want to point out the results I found surprising. Not because they go against stereotype—they actually confirm "science nerd" stereotypes, but I had convinced myself that these were just stereotypes without much basis in fact. These numbers indicate otherwise: (emphasis in original)

By the age of 19, 80% of US males and 75% of women have lost their virginity, and 87% of college students have had sex. But this number appears to be much lower at elite (i.e. more intelligent) colleges. According to the article, only 56% of Princeton undergraduates have had intercourse. At Harvard 59% of the undergraduates are non-virgins, and at MIT, only a slight majority, 51%, have had intercourse. Further, only 65% of MIT graduate students have had sex.

I was quite shocked that the numbers were this low; I obviously know a lot of grad students, and though I haven't polled them on this subject, I would have guessed a much higher percentage. (I'm not chauvinistic enough to suggest that MIT grad students are less sociable than those at Berkeley—I expect the populations are pretty comparable, at least in departments like physics.)

However, I may be thinking too narrowly in terms of the stereotype of scientists who are virgins because they are socially maladjusted. (There are people like this in the community, but it's a small fraction.) The Gene Expression post lists a number of other possible reasons this could appear as an aggregate effect, and argues for a few of them as contributing factors. (At an individual level, of course, it will be strongly path-dependent.)

One factor that wasn't mentioned there is culture. This could manifest in at least two ways. The first is that a substantial fraction of grad students in technical fields are immigrants from cultures that are much more sexually conservative. Thus, even if these students themselves don't hold conservative views, they may be less likely to have had sex. The second is that the culture in academia seems to me to be less sexually charged than in other spheres. This is not to say that it's sexually restrictive—as the Gene Expression post points out, most academics hold liberal views about sex—but it's less focused on going out and getting laid than, say, the Late Night Shots crowd. Our lab's monthly board game nights aren't terribly conducive to hook-ups (although surprisingly conducive to drunkenness).

Anyway, this might explain the results of the academic polls, but the original post is concerned with correlations with IQ rather than academic achievement. A logical extension would be to look at people in other intellectually-demanding disciplines, like law or medicine. Would the numbers be similar? My guess is no, but I may be stereotyping again.

Bad quantum press releases: this time, it's personal

Scott Aaronson points out an overly-excited press release from NEC, which claims: "NEC, JST and RIKEN successfully demonstrate world's first controllably coupled qubits". This was indeed an exciting development when we published it five months ago. At best NEC has the world's fourth controllably coupled qubits.

That said, the stupidity seems to be limited to the press release, and the paper actually looks pretty interesting, apparently with time domain results that no one else has shown. (I haven't been on the campus network today so I haven't had a chance to read more than the abstract.)

Humans evolved for marathoning?

Here's an interesting theory that humans evolved for distance running:

Modern humans and their immediate ancestors such as Homo erectus sport several adaptations that make humans, instead of some ferocious, furry, or fleet creature, the animal world’s best distance runners.

...

Specifically, we developed long, springy tendons in our legs and feet that function like large elastics, storing energy and releasing it with each running stride, reducing the amount of energy it takes to take another step. There are also several adaptations to help keep our bodies stable as we run, such as the way we counterbalance each step with an arm swing, our large butt muscles that hold our upper bodies upright, and an elastic ligament in our neck to help keep our head steady.

...

Though those adaptations make humans and our immediate ancestors better runners, it is our ability to run in the heat that Lieberman said may have made the real difference in our ability to procure game.

Humans, he said, have several adaptations that help us dump the enormous amounts of heat generated by running. These adaptations include our hairlessness, our ability to sweat, and the fact that we breathe through our mouths when we run, which not only allows us to take bigger breaths, but also helps dump heat.

This ought to settle the long-standing distance running vs. sprinting debate I recall from high school track. We distance runners can just wait for a hot day and then persistence-hunt the sprinters into submission. However, as much as I like this theory, I have to question this statement from its proponent:

“Humans are terrible athletes in terms of power and speed, but we’re phenomenal at slow and steady. We’re the tortoises of the animal kingdom,” Lieberman said.

Um, surely the tortoises are the tortoises of the animal kingdom?

The Day Before the Ides of March

Today is Albert Einstein's birthday. It's also Pi Day, but like T-Rex I prefer Pi Approximation Day on July 22, not to mention Euler's Number Day on February 71.

When I was advised to Google "March 14th" I expected something related to the above, but the first result reveals something else entirely.

March Meeting, Days 2 and 3

I thought about posting last night but this was pre-empted by the fact that the slides for my talk were unfinished (and also the Clarke group dinner). First I want to register a complaint:

This is how physicists (or maybe everybody) fill seating at conferences. The first people to arrive take the seats on the outside of the rows, and then fill in to the middle. This is really annoying when arriving in the middle of the session and having to climb over a bunch of people to get into the one empty seat. I am aware that this is a really lame complaint, but please, fill from the middle!

Now that I've got that out of my system: the last couple days were a blur of superconducting qubit talks. There's a lot going on in this field, and most groups had three or four (10-minute) talks in a row to have enough time to explain all their results. One experiment I thought was very neat was this one from Terry Orlando's group at MIT. In flux qubits like the ones we study, one can measure the temperature by sweeping the flux bias across the degeneracy point and measuring the population of the qubit states. Higher temperatures will give wider curves, as energies further away from the degeneracy point are more likely to be populated by thermal activation. When we measure this on our qubits we usually get something like 150 mK, mysteriously somewhat higher than the fridge temperature (roughly 50 mK).

What the Orlando group did was to apply an analog of laser cooling (as in atomic physics) to their qubit, using a microwave pulse to induce transitions that ultimately cool the system. As a result they were able to see these temperatures (as measured from the widfh of the qubit step) reduced by a factor of 100, from 300 mK to 3 mK. It was pretty impressive; I'm not sure how important it is for quantum computing or whether it's something we should be doing with our qubits, but it's a nice application of techniques from another field.

This morning I gave my talk, which was helpfully introduced by Frank Wilhelm's talk immediately prior, in which he said something like "the really important development for scalability is what Travis Hime will talk about next". So the pressure was on, but I think I did ok. After this was... more qubit talks, but I was mostly decompressing after finishing mine and didn't pay as much attention as usual.

Tomorrow I go to see talks by other Clarke group members, including John himself. And then, an evening flight back to Berkeley.

March Meeting, Day 1

Actually I spent much of today working on my talk instead of going to sessions. The superconducting qubit sessions start tomorrow morning and basically run continuously until Thursday evening. I did go to some talks in the afternoon, though, mostly in D2: Ion Traps for Scalable Quantum Computation. (In some sense this is our competition.)

Ike Chuang, who is a big name in this field, gave the first talk, which laid out the challenges in making a practical quantum computer with ion traps. Most of this dealt with error correction; according to Shannon's theorem (or maybe a quantum information version thereof) it should be possible to build an error-free quantum computer out of qubits that do make occasional errors, as long as the failure rate is below some threshold. Unfortunately in some cases they've looked at this requires a prohibitively large number of operations, as many as 10²⁰. One can try to implement various error-correcting codes, such as Shor's or Steane's, but certain operations that are needed for a universal quantum computer don't work within these codes. And in fact Chuang et al. have shown that there is no stabilizer code that allows a universal set of operations to be performed within the code—one has to decode first before performing at least one of the operations.

The other talks in the session were less abstract, and thus harder to understand (since I'm not terribly familiar with this architecture). The talk by Slusher described a proposal for a VLSI-based scalable ion-trap based quantum computer, which seemed impressive, except I'm pretty sure this is the one Chuang mentioned that would require 440 watts of laser power to operate.

I skipped out on the last talk to go to D8: Superconductivity: STM of Cuprates and see what the group I worked in as an undergrad was up to. However, I haven't thought about STM of cuprates for a while now and only had the faintest idea what they were talking about.

A tempting alternative for the end of the day was Session D33: Focus Session: Quantum Foundations II. It starts out as a perfectly normal session, but somewhere around 4:30 becomes the dumping ground for crackpots. For example:

D33.00014 : Do Particles have Barcodes?

If an elementary particle shown in Fig 2 of gr-qc/0507130 has an UNSTABLE quantum connection to the rest of the universe calibrated by nature in terms of Planck times, as also proposed in my separate MAR07 abstract, there exists a possibility that each particle has a barcode of its own. Instability implies varying periods of connections and disconnections of particles to the universe, which would be equivalent to the varying widths of white and black strips of commercial barcodes. Considering the high order of magnitude of Planck times in a second, each particle and the universe generated by its radiations may have their unique birth times registered in their barcodes. My quest for the cause of consciousness, in MAR06 abstracts, as an additional implication of physics/0210040, leads to the inquiry if these unique parallel universes are like the ones that give rise to consciousness as proposed by some physicists. With all due respect, the attempts to explain TOE of inert matter may not be attempts to explain one step to climb up on a stairway at a time. They may be attempts to explain only half a step at a time to on a stairway made with only integer number of steps. The search for TOE assumes such a theory exists. Mathematics has no barrels to fire bullets that can shoot down a non-existent bird. A Hamiltonian knows no consciousness, a missing ingredient of biology made of particles or vice versa, and of realistic TOE.

The talk after that one describes a theory of Atonic Physics [sic], which sounds like an outtake from Monty Python's bookstore sketch.

The brilliant unintentional comedy of Conservapedia

I don't normally go reading crackpot right-wing sites for my own amusement, but Conservapedia is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. In fact, I'd be certain it's a parody if not for Andrew Schlafly's presence as a major editor. As the name suggests, Conservapedia is supposed to be a "fair and balanced" (in the Fox News sense) alternative to Wikipedia, which apparently suffers from liberal bias. The editors of Conservapedia have helpfully (and hilariously) listed their grievances against Wikipedia, which include such major offenses as:

1. Wikipedia allows the use of B.C.E. instead of B.C. and C.E. instead of A.D. The dates are based on the birth of Jesus, so why pretend otherwise? Conservapedia is Christian-friendly and exposes the CE deception.

and

5. Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English speaking users are American. Look up "Most Favored Nation" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts the spelling to the British spelling "Most Favoured Nation", even there there are far more American than British users. Look up "Division of labor" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts to the British spelling "Division of labour," then insists on the British spelling for "specialization" also.[3]. Enter "Hapsburg" (the European ruling family) and Wikipedia automatically changes the spelling to Habsburg, even though the American spelling has always been "Hapsburg". Within entries British spellings appear in the silliest of places, even when the topic is American. Conservapedia favors American spellings of words.

Now, this project is still fairly new so one doesn't expect to find extended entries on many topics. Nonetheless I was disappointed to find that many entries are... well, "half-assed" doesn't quite describe it. It's more like 1%-assed. A lot of entries consist of a single sentence lifted from an appropriately slanted textbook (sample title: Exploring Creation With Biology). (I want to mention that I hit the "random page" button once to find that example.) And a lot of the more likely fodder for entertainment (such as the entry for evolution) has already been edited by visiting liberals in an attempt to either correct or parody, either of which makes it less funny. Nevertheless, the best examples of teh crazy occur where you don't expect: these guys object not just to evolution but to relativity, and there are some other gems as well. (I'm linking to people who have quoted them, since the original entries have probably changed by now.) I recommend just clicking random pages until you find something good.

Although the temptation to troll the site is immense, I have to agree with those who say we liberals should leave it alone and see what develops. The intra-wingnut edit wars alone should be worth it.

2007 March Meeting Abstract

The program for the 2007 APS March Meeting is now up. I have an invited talk this year; unfortunately it's in an early morning session. Here's the abstract:

Session N2: Progress in Superconducting Quantum Computing

8:00 AM–11:00 AM, Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Colorado Convention Center - Four Seasons 4

Sponsoring Units: GQI DCMP
Chair: Robert Schoelkopf, Yale University
Abstract: N2.00002 : Solid State Qubits with Current-Controlled Coupling
8:36 AM–9:12 AM

Author: Travis Hime (University of California, Berkeley)

The ability to switch the coupling between quantum bits (qubits) on and off is essential for implementing many quantum computing algorithms. We have demonstrated such control with two, three-junction flux qubits coupled together via their mutual inductances and via the dc SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) that reads out their magnetic flux states. The flux in each qubit was controlled by an on-chip loop, and the chip was surrounded by a superconducting cavity that eliminates fluctuations in the ambient magnetic field. By applying microwave radiation to the device, we observed resonant absorption in each of the qubits when the level splitting in the qubit matched the energy of the microwave photons. With the qubits biased at the same frequency, the interaction produced an avoided crossing in their energy spectrum. At the avoided crossing transitions to the first excited state were suppressed and transitions to the second excited state enhanced, indicating formation of singlet and triplet states in the coupled-qubit system. The observed peak amplitudes were consistent with calculated matrix elements. When both qubits were biased at their degeneracy points, a level repulsion was observed in the energy spectrum. A bias current applied to the SQUID in the zero-voltage state prior to measurement induced a change in its dynamic inductance, reducing the coupling energy controllably to zero and even reversing its sign. The dependence of the splitting on the bias current was in good agreement with predictions. This work was performed in collaboration with P.A. Reichardt, B.L.T. Plourde, T.L. Robertson, C.-E. Wu, A.V. Ustinov, and John Clarke, and supported by NSF, AFOSR, ARO and ARDA.

On a related subject, I still intend to write a post about the results in our Science paper, but I haven't got around to it yet.

The Man/Volts Relationship

Today's Scary Go Round was highly entertaining for those of us who have to keep the volts happy:

Publication: Solid-State Qubits with Current-Controlled Coupling

As some of you know, we recently had a paper accepted to Science. The paper appears in the latest issue, and is now available online.

I will try to post something in the next few days that explains these results for the non-physicists in the audience. In the meantime, there's this post from March about these experiments (from before we had the major findings), and here's the abstract:

Solid-State Qubits with Current-Controlled Coupling

T. Hime, P. A. Reichardt, B. L. T. Plourde, T. L. Robertson, C.-E. Wu, A. V. Ustinov, John Clarke

The ability to switch the coupling between quantum bits (qubits) on and off is essential for implementing many quantum-computing algorithms. We demonstrated such control with two flux qubits coupled together through their mutual inductances and through the dc superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) that reads out their magnetic flux states. A bias current applied to the SQUID in the zero-voltage state induced a change in the dynamic inductance, reducing the coupling energy controllably to zero and reversing its sign.

NYT Magazine on science fraud

The New York Times Magazine has a piece about another instance of scientific fraud, this time by a clinical researcher:

Poehlman pleaded guilty to lying on a federal grant application and admitted to fabricating more than a decade’s worth of scientific data on obesity, menopause and aging, much of it while conducting clinical research as a tenured faculty member at the University of Vermont. He presented fraudulent data in lectures and in published papers, and he used this data to obtain millions of dollars in federal grants from the National Institutes of Health — a crime subject to as many as five years in federal prison. Poehlman’s admission of guilt came after more than five years during which he denied the charges against him, lied under oath and tried to discredit his accusers. By the time Poehlman came clean, his case had grown into one of the most expansive cases of scientific fraud in U.S. history.

I was initially surprised by this passage describing the alteration of data from one experiment:

The fall that DeNino returned to the lab, Poehlman was looking into how fat levels in the blood change with age. DeNino’s task was to compare the levels of lipids, or fats, in two sets of blood samples taken several years apart from a large group of patients. As the patients aged, Poehlman expected, the data would show an increase in low-density lipoprotein (LDL), which deposits cholesterol in arteries, and a decrease in high-density lipoprotein (HDL), which carries it to the liver, where it can be broken down. Poehlman’s hypothesis was not controversial; the idea that lipid levels worsen with age was supported by decades of circumstantial evidence. Poehlman expected to contribute to this body of work by demonstrating the change unequivocally in a clinical study of actual patients over time. But when DeNino ran his first analysis, the data did not support the premise.

When Poehlman saw the unexpected results, he took the electronic file home with him. The following week, Poehlman returned the database to DeNino, explained that he had corrected some mistaken entries and asked DeNino to re-run the statistical analysis. Now the trend was clear: HDL appeared to decrease markedly over time, while LDL increased, exactly as they had hypothesized.

From this it sounds like Poehlman took potentially interesting data that went against existing hypotheses, and changed it so that it lined up with the conventional wisdom in the field. In other words, he fabricated data to make his results less interesting. This is the opposite of how scientific fraud usually works—consider the Jan Hendrik Schön case in condensed matter physics, where Schön invented spectacular and unexpected results that other groups were unable to reproduce.

But reading further in the article, it makes sense: this is how Poehlman was able to present fraudulent data for so long without getting caught. His results seemed solid enough to be impressive, but not surprising enough to draw too much attention.

The length of time that Poehlman perpetrated his fraud — 10 years — and its scope make his case unique, even among the most egregious examples of scientific misconduct. Some scientists believe that his ability to beat the system for so long had as much to do with the research topics he chose as with his aggressive tactics. His work was prominent, but none of his studies broke new scientific ground. (This may also be why no other scientists working in the field have retracted papers as a result of Poehlman’s fraud.) By testing undisputed assumptions on popular topics, Poehlman attracted enough attention to maintain his status but not enough to invite suspicion. Moreover, replicating his longitudinal data would be expensive and difficult to do.

It's a pretty sad story, and I wonder what medical discoveries might have already been made if this guy had not been obscuring these issues with fabricated data.

Berkeley Physicist wins Nobel

UCB cosmologist George Smoot won the Nobel Prize for Physics today, for his discovery of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background. He shares the prize with John Mather of NASA Goddard. Here's Berkeley's press release, the Nobel press release, and the AP article.

UPDATE: This, of course, was the Science: It Works, Bitches measurement whose data appeared in xkcd.

UPDATE II: Other bloggers writing about the prize: Sean at Cosmic Variance, Chad at Uncertain Principles, Steinn at Dynamics of Cats, Stefan at Backreaction, Andrew Jaffe, Rob Knop at Galactic Interactions, Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science (whose mother worked with COBE and shares some anecdotes).

Maybe I'll try to get some pictures at the champagne reception later today...

UPDATE III: From the physics department reception, when Smoot is asked to make some remarks (this is paraphrased):

Smoot: I've been making statements all day... but now I can say what I'm really thinking, because there's no press.
[Berkeley Chancellor] Birgeneau: There's always press.
Smoot: Yeah, I'm worried about bloggers.

Wouldn't want to disappoint... I did forget my camera, though.

Yet more on gender stereotypes

Language Log is continuing their series of posts on gender stereotypes; I found this one on personality differences interesting. They look at a Science paper which ranks groups of men, women, and individuals with autism or Asperger's Syndrome in terms of an "empathizing quotient" and "systematizing quotient". Men on average score as more systematizing and women as more empathizing but there's a large overlap between the distributions:

Those are the SQ distributions but the EQ ones look similar from the scatter plot. It turns out that one can take this personality test online. I come up with SQ=69 and EQ=32; perhaps surprisingly I am within 1σ of the mean for the male population on both indices.

It's not entirely clear what these numbers say about me, other than that I'm more likely than most to have an organized record collection (alphabetized by artist, and each artist's records ordered by release date, in case you're wondering).

LHC as a black hole generator

Backreaction has a substantial and intriguing post about the production of micro black holes in particle accelerators (particularly the LHC). It's a test for extra dimensions: in three-dimensional space it's not possible to generate enough energy to create a black hole with a particle accelerator, but for theories of gravity involving extra dimensions, gravity gets stronger at short distances and this enters the realm of possibility. WIth crude approximations it's possible to estimate that the LHC could produce one black hole per second.

This isn't dangerous, since tiny black holes evaporate almost instantly through Hawking radiation. In fact, it's a nice way to measure some properties of extra dimensions if they exist. However, it's a problem for collider experiments in that information about small length scales becomes inaccessible.

The whole post is worth reading; it's pretty cool even if supervillains looking for a Doomsday Device won't find it useful.

Newsweek on the gender gap at Berkeley

Newsweek has an article on the gender gap in science, and looks at Berkeley's physics department in particular:

To get a sense of how women have progressed in science, take a quick tour of the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley. This is a storied place, the site of some of the most important discoveries in modern science—starting with Ernest Lawrence's invention of the cyclotron in 1931. A generation ago, female faces were rare and, even today, visitors walking through the first floor of LeConte Hall will see a full corridor of exhibits honoring the many distinguished physicists who made history here, virtually all of them white males.

But climb up to the third floor and you'll see a different display. There, among the photos of current faculty members and students, are portraits of the current chair of the department, Marjorie Shapiro, and four other women whose research covers everything from the mechanics of the universe to the smallest particles of matter. A sixth woman was hired just two weeks ago. Although they're still only about 10 percent of the physics faculty, women are clearly a presence here. And the real hope may be in the smaller photos to the right: graduate and undergraduate students, about 20 percent of them female. Every year Berkeley sends freshly minted female physics doctorates to the country's top universities. That makes Shapiro optimistic, but also realistic. "I believe things are getting better," she says, "but they're not getting better as fast as I would like."

Overall the description of Berkeley is positive; they highlight some of the female researchers here and mention policies that the campus is undertaking to improve the situation.

The Female Brain: not a zombie erotica title

While we're on the subject of gender bias: One of my pet peeves is when people employ bogus neuroscience or evolutionary psychology arguments to back up gender stereotypes. This is distressingly common, and especially annoying when it only takes a few seconds to think about it and realize that the stereotype in question isn't even true. Sure, I may know a lot of eccentric people, but I doubt they're genetic mutants just because they don't conform to some "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus" scheme. And of course, these kinds of false or socially-constructed stereotypes are one of the major factors driving the gender gap in the sciences.

Thus it was with some dismay that I learned of the recently-released book The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine, which advertises itself thusly:

Brizendine reveals the neurological explanations behind why
• A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000
• A woman remembers fights that a man insists never happened
• A teen girl is so obsessed with her looks and talking on the phone
• Thoughts about sex enter a woman’s brain once every couple of days but enter a man’s brain about once every minute
• A woman knows what people are feeling, while a man can’t spot an emotion unless somebody cries or threatens bodily harm
• A woman over 50 is more likely to initiate divorce than a man

From what I know about neuroscience, it struck me as extremely unlikely that there are "neurological explanations" for these things, even putting aside the fact that most of them aren't true of people who aren't lame sitcom characters. It turns out that my skepticism is well-founded: Mark Liberman at the excellent Language Log examined the claims in the book, and found that (despite lots of footnotes) there's little to no science supporting them. (There's a collection of links in this post.)

Unfogged's LizardBreath remarks, "I've reached a point with pop-science accounts of how women differ from men, where I firmly assume that any claim that science has shown a physical cause for behavioral differences between the sexes is bullshit." I've been at that point for a while now, too.

NAS Report on Women in Science

A National Academy of Sciences panel on women in science finds:

For 30 years, the report says, women have earned at least 30 percent of the nation’s doctorates in social and behavioral sciences, and at least 20 percent of the doctorates in life sciences. Yet they appear among full professors in those fields at less than half those levels. Women from minority groups are “virtually absent,” it adds.

The report also dismisses other commonly held beliefs — that women are uncompetitive or less productive, that they take too much time off for their families. Instead, it says, extensive previous research showed a pattern of unconscious but pervasive bias, “arbitrary and subjective” evaluation processes and a work environment in which “anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a ‘wife’ is at a serious disadvantage.”

(Via Bitch, Ph.D.) Although the conclusion is unsurprising to anyone who has followed this issue, it's good to see the gender gap getting attention at high levels beyond Larry Summers dismissing it as due to "innate differences". The NYT article is short on recommended reforms, but I don't know whether that is also true of the original report.

The panel included UC Berkeley's chancellor Robert Birgeneau, and the late UCSC chancellor Denice Denton, who committed suicide recently, had also been on the panel before her death.

Back in March we had a pretty good comment thread on this subject.

Shouldn't the companion be named Norton?

Via Dynamics of Cats, the "dwarf planet" whose discovery led to Pluto's demotion has been named Eris, losing its previous informal name of Xena. Steinn responds with an appropriate "Hail Eris!", but then wonders if dwarf planets should have dwarf names.

As a sometime-admirer of the Goddess (one of the patron deities of Kaos Alley), I am pleased to see her recognized here, even if it is a dinky little dwarf planet. (At least it has an appropriately eccentric orbit.) In her honor, I suggest going bowling, eating hotdogs (especially tomorrow), or generally doing something chaotic. Initiates can go here, and click randomly in the table of contents.

Via Pharyngula, the Bad Astronomy blog finds a wingnut who thinks that this naming choice is... a vicious liberal attack on George W. Bush. His argument is based on the fact that the Caltech is in California and therefore must be a major liberal enclave. I would like to propose a slightly more plausible theory, in which the game Illuminati is an accurate representation of world affairs, and the Discordian Society has just added the IAU to their power structure.

Clarke group research in Physics Today

I'm late noticing this, but the August issue of Physics Today has an article (subscription required) about axion detection experiments, which mentions some work being done in the Clarke group:

An amplifier whose noise temperature approaches the quantum limit would dramatically improve the sensitivty and search rate of the axion experiment. To achieve that goal, our collaborator John Clarke and his coworkers at the University of California, Berkeley, developed a new amplifier based on a microstrip-coupled superconducting quantum interference device in 1996. Unlike the noise behavior of heterojunction transistor amplifiers at low temperatures, the intrinsic noise of the SQUID is proportional to the physical temperature, the origin being thermal noise in shunt resistors across the SQUID's Josephson junctions. Cooling reduces the noise until it flattens out within 50% of the quantum limit. Newer SQUID designs with micro-cooling fins that enhance the coupling of electrons to the lattice are pushing these devices closer still to the quantum limit.

Unfortunately the full article is only available to subscribers, but those of you who are APS members can check it out. The quantum-limited amplifier is pretty cool and some groups are looking at using it for qubit experiments as well. Ironically, the vacuum pumps required to cool this low-noise amplifier are really loud, and so having to work in the same room as this experiment is sort of annoying.

Science apparel

Stick figure webcomic xkcd, which was discussed in a recent open thread, is now selling t-shirts. The first one is excellent; I can't decide if the second is cute or just sad (speaking as someone who sometimes needs to make the clarification written on said shirt).

Since this post is too short, here are some other science-oriented webcomic shirts: Music + Science = Sexy from Questionable Content, and Professor Science from Dinosaur Comics.

Types of laboratory scientists

Via Syaffolee, an over-the-top but amusing list of personality types one encounters in a science lab. In fact, I believe I've met most of these people. I've put a lot of effort into not becoming #5 (the obsessive perfectionist with no life), but this probably just makes me closest to #1 (the antisocial weirdo)—although my personal hygiene isn't that bad and I've been more social lately. Of course it's not an exhaustive list, so maybe I need to add to it:

7. The Blogger
He seems quiet, but he's actually telling the world about the latest lab mishaps on the Internet. These scientists prefer highly automated experiments so as to spend more time surfing the web. They're good with computers and publicizing results to a broad audience. They are communicative provided the medium is e-mail or IM, and happy to come to parties if there's a proper Evite or MySpace announcement. If the network goes down they are likely to display withdrawal symptoms.

Dark Matter

Recently (I think during my Connecticut visit) I was talking to somebody about whether dark matter is real, or just a kind of fudge factor reflecting something we don't understand about gravity. It turns out there's recent evidence that strongly points to the former case—there really is a lot of weakly-interacting stuff out there that can't be explained by modifying general relativity. Sean Carroll explains at Cosmic Variance.

Cuts from Team Planet

It seems that some astronomers, perhaps lacking cryogens to play with, have been wasting their time on one of the dumbest controversies of the modern era: whether Pluto is technically a planet. Personally, I don't care very much. Tiny Pluto with its elongated and tilted orbit always seemed awkwardly tacked on to the list of planets anyway, and if it doesn't make whatever arbitrary cutoff the astronomers pick, I won't miss it.

However, the passion with which Pluto's status is defended in some quarters is astounding. Do people really attach such emotional weight to the issue? Maybe that glorified snowball has kind of an underdog appeal, or perhaps it's a laudable impulse not to throw the weird one out of the clubhouse. As scientists, however, we must be objective (ha!) and this post lays out the very convincing anti-Pluto case.

(Via Making Light, which quotes a sensible comment from one of Berkeley's own astronomers: “I am not attending the I.A.U. meeting, nor do I care about the outcome of any vote about whether Pluto and Xena are ‘planets.’”)

Measurements of gravity using cryogens [Updated]

This is what Chad Orzel refers to as a True Lab Story:

Condensed matter labs such as ours receive frequent deliveries of liquid nitrogen in one- or two-hundred liter dewars. Unfortunately, most of the Berkeley cond-mat labs are in Birge Hall, which has no loading dock, so that the LN2 dewars arrive on the first floor of neighboring LeConte where they must be wheeled over to their destination by some low-seniority student. Since the Berkeley campus is on a hill, the loading dock at the back of the building is one floor higher than the other entrances to LeConte and all the entrances to Birge. One can push the dewar around the outside of LeConte, but a shorter route is to take the elevator down one floor and go out the side door.

Yesterday the LeConte elevator was out of order, which for most of us would have meant taking the long way around. However, one undergrad, tasked with transporting a full 230L dewar, simply decided to take the stairs.

At about 80% the density of water, 230 liters of liquid nitrogen weighs about 400 pounds, not counting the additional weight of the steel vessel containing it. When rolled onto the stairs, the dewar promptly tipped over and plummeted downward on its side, knocking deep gouges in the marble steps and dragging along the unfortunate student, who inexplicably held on as his cargo began to tumble. Miraculously both student and dewar arrived at the landing without rupturing, but the dewar was still on its side and pressure was building up.

This was the situation when we got the frantic call from the building manager; once enough of us arrived at the scene we were able to pull the dewar upright and release the pressure. This averted any imminent explosion, but now we had a different problem: 400 pounds of liquid nitrogen stranded on a landing between the ground and first floors. Suggestions were floated including emptying the nitrogen out the nearby window, but ultimately we found another dewar which was wheeled to the top of the stairs on the first floor, and the nitrogen was transferred there through a long hose. The empty dewar was then carried up the stairs, a task requiring four men and gouging new (but shallower) grooves in the staircase.

Recalling what happens when a LN2 cylinder does rupture, it's the general consensus that this student is lucky to have survived and LeConte Hall is lucky to still have a staircase.

Photos below the fold [updated with photo of wall damage]:

Continue reading "Measurements of gravity using cryogens [Updated]"

Corrections large and small

Last night I was struggling to reconcile several different measurements of our SQUID's critical current when I saw (via Rob Knop) that astronomers are revising their own estimates of the age of the universe.

This made me feel better, because I just had to account for a few hundred nanoamps and not a couple billion years. On the other hand, their percentage correction was smaller...

Climate Control [Open Thread]

Since I tagged archived posts for the past year, I've put the category listing in the sidebar under the monthly archives. I may tweak the formatting some. I'd also like to tag posts further back in the archive—at least as far as the beginning of 2005—but it may not happen immediately.

I guess it's been a while since I posted an open thread, partly due to not having much to review lately and partly due to pure negligence. I need to listen to some new CDs so that I can get back to my usual schedule of posting reviews. (The new Sunset Rubdown album is good on first listen; I'll probably review it next week.)

An Inconvenient Truth: I finally got around to seeing Berkeley's most popular date movie, in which Al Gore delivers a Powerpoint talk on global warming. I'm not someone who needs convincing at this point, but I was curious to see what he had to say. Maybe it's just that I've seen too many scientific Powerpoint talks, but I thought it was rather disorganized—it seemed to jump around between different topics without a clear direction. The film is interspersed with vignettes from Gore's life, to explain why he's taken up this particular issue; I thought these were mostly just distracting, but for a popular audience maybe it helps humanize the issue. Visually the film is sometimes very compelling (especially the section showing various major cities flooding as the sea level rises—there's a GMaps app where you can try this yourself) but sometimes a little too twee (the polar bear, the frog). Gore is optimistic that global warming can be solved through what seemed like relatively minor improvements in energy efficiency and emissions reduction. Maybe this kind of ending is necessary to convince people the problem can be solved at all, but I'm much more pessimistic. Rating: 2.5/5

Metroid Prime: Hunters: I'm catching up on all those DS games now that I can play them. Unlike the Gamecube predecessors in the Metroid Prime series, this installment is focused much more on deathmatch than exploration. In the single-player mode the various maps are often clearly just the deathmatch levels stitched together, and the layout is more straightforward than is typical for a Metroid game. Combat is faster and more dynamic than in earlier Prime games as well. There's a steep learning curve for the stylus/d-pad control scheme, but once I got used to it I was suprised at how well I could move and aim. The game's biggest flaw is the bosses: a game this combat-oriented should have appropriately interesting boss fights, but instead of coming up with eight different enemies it keeps repeating the same two with slightly different capabilities. Apart from this, the single-player game is pretty solid. Now I just need to round up some opponents for the multiplayer. Rating: 3.5/5

Long-running experiments, or, sub-optimal thesis topics

I'm still catching up on my reading—this is from a Boing Boing post yesterday, so you may have seen it already. Anyway: three very long-running physics experiments. I had read about the pitch drop experiment before, but the others were new to me.

Unmentioned is the fact that the flood levels of the River Nile have been measured for thousands of years, providing the lowest-frequency data on 1/f noise in existence.

Mars, bitches!

Politics is everything with the Bush Administration, and in the latest effort to bring the government in line with the new political correctness, we have:

Earth dropped from NASA mission statement

NASA has reportedly eliminated the promise "to understand and protect our home planet" from its mission statement.

That statement was repeatedly cited last winter by NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who said he was being threatened by political appointees for speaking about the dangers posed by greenhouse gas emissions.

But NASA officials told The New York Times the elimination of the phrase that was used by Hansen was "pure coincidence." The statement now proclaims the agency's mission is "to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."

I suspect the change is not directly related to Hansen, but rather, as the article mentions,

One observer noted results from NASA's increasing involvement in monitoring the Earth's environment have sparked political disputes concerning the Bush administration's environmental policies.

In other words, it's part of the "ignore it and maybe it'll go away" approach to global warming. (Via Warren Ellis.)

Santorum on scientists

Relatively few scientists are Republicans, but there are days when I wonder why there are any at all. Here's a quote from the reliably asinine Rick Santorum:

“[M]ost scientists unfortunately, those that certainly are advocating for this [embryonic stem cell research], and many others feel very little moral compulsion. It’s a utilitarian, materialistic view of doing whatever they can do to pursue their desired goals.”

I'm used to hearing that atheists are amoral, but hearing this said about scientists is new to me. Well, maybe Santorum doesn't think there's much of a difference. However, it's a pretty sure bet that scientists have a higher approval rating than he does at the moment.

(Via Rob Knop via Mixed States.)

Bush vetoes stem-cell bill

What an asshole. He finally locates his veto stamp halfway through his second term—I'm guessing he was carrying it around in his ass like the watch in Pulp Fiction—and he uses it to crush the hopes of people suffering from illness, all in the name of a completely incoherent claim about morality. (Not to mention the damage to scientific research in the U.S., but in that area it's just the latest in a long line of offenses.) The description of the event makes me physically ill. From the CNN article:

Attending the White House event were a group of families with children who were born from "adopted" frozen embryos that had been left unused at fertility clinics.

"These boys and girls are not spare parts," he said of the children in the audience. "They remind us of what is lost when embryos are destroyed in the name of research. They remind us that we all begin our lives as a small collection of cells."

All this does is emphasize the total incoherence of Bush's position. Unused embryos are destroyed all the time at fertility clinics. If Bush really believed what he claims to believe here, he'd close all these clinics down. It's certainly good that he's not doing that, but it means that this veto isn't a principled moral stand but a crass sell-out. Fuck you, Bush.

Democrats should make sure no one forgets about this veto. Stem-cell research is very popular and any Republican who opposed this bill should never hear the end of it. I can't say I'll be surprised if the Dems don't take advantage of this opportunity, but I can always hope.

Singing Sand Solved

An interesting paper appeared in PRL a few days ago on the phenomenon of "singing sand" (I've also heard it called "booming sand"). Sand dunes in certain locales are known to produce sounds at particular frequencies, with the frequency apparently depending only on the size of the grains of sand. One can take a sample of sand out of the dunes (perhaps in Capt. Sparrow's jar of dirt) and reproduce the sound from it. This was a classic modeling problem in Caltech's Ph 11 class, but in this PRL the researchers actually did some experiments and found that the sand produces self-synchronized waves.

Song of the Dunes as a Self-Synchronized Instrument

S. Douady, A. Manning, P. Hersen, H. Elbelrhiti, S. Protière, A. Daerr, and B. Kabbachi

Since Marco Polo it has been known that some sand dunes have the peculiar ability to emit a loud sound with a well-defined frequency, sometimes for several minutes. The origin of this sustained sound has remained mysterious, partly because of its rarity in nature. It has been recognized that the sound is not due to the air flow around the dunes but to the motion of an avalanche, and not to an acoustic excitation of the grains but to their relative motion. By comparing singing dunes around the world and two controlled experiments, in the laboratory and the field, we prove that the frequency of the sound is the frequency of the relative motion of the sand grains. Sound is produced because moving grains synchronize their motions. The laboratory experiment shows that the dune is not needed for sound emission. A velocity threshold for sound emission is found in both experiments, and an interpretation is proposed.

Some things never change

If quotes are too verbal, you can vote on your favorite fundamental constant at Uncertain Principles. Naturally I put a word in for Φ₀.

Publication: Quantum theory of three-junction flux qubit with non-negligible loop inductance: Towards scalability

Here's the latest publication on Clarke group qubit research, which appeared in Physical Review B at the end of May. Normally I give a non-technical explanation in these posts, but this paper is entirely devoted to working out gory technical details. It essentially goes through how to calculate a priori the properties of the flux qubits that I've written about previously. This calculation had been done for "small" qubit loops—small being defined in terms of the loop inductance but corresponding to a few microns on a side—our qubits are much larger than this (100 microns) and so we needed to figure out the more general solution.

The vast majority of the work in this paper was done by T. L. Robertson; my primary contribution was checking the math and the Mathematica code.

Quantum theory of three-junction flux qubit with non-negligible loop inductance: Towards scalability

T. L. Robertson, B. L. T. Plourde, P. A. Reichardt, T. Hime, C.-E. Wu, and John Clarke
Phys. Rev. B 73, 174526 (2006)

The three-junction flux qubit (quantum bit) consists of three Josephson junctions connected in series on a superconducting loop. We present a numerical treatment of this device for the general case in which the ratio betaQ of the geometrical inductance of the loop to the kinetic inductance of the Josephson junctions is not necessarily negligible. Relatively large geometric inductances allow the flux through each qubit to be controlled independently with on-chip bias lines, an essential consideration for scalability. We derive the three-dimensional potential in terms of the macroscopic degrees of freedom, and include the possible effects of asymmetry among the junctions and of stray capacitance associated with them. To find solutions of the Hamiltonian, we use basis functions consisting of the product of two plane wave states and a harmonic oscillator eigenfunction to compute the energy levels and eigenfunctions of the qubit numerically. We present calculated energy levels for the relevant range of betaQ. As betaQ is increased beyond 0.5, the tunnel splitting between the ground and first excited states decreases rapidly, and the device becomes progressively less useful as a qubit.

Quantum wiki

Via Mason, some guys at Caltech have set up a quantum information wiki intended for the research community. I added a page for myself, a stub page for the Clarke group, and updated their list of blogs to include this page and Mixed States. At the moment there's not much there from the solid state angle, so I may be back to contribute a bit more.

Planetary infestations

Stephen Hawking proposes that humans need to begin colonizing other planets in order to ensure the survival of the species. Now, I don't normally approve of beating up a man in a wheelchair, but I definitely enjoyed the verbal thrashing delivered to Hawking by Chris Clarke:

Let’s say you had a horrible cockroach infestation, and the bugs were trashing your house, spreading filth and eating the bindings of your irreplaceable antique books and breeding profligately and an electrician came to you one day and told you that they were eating your circuit breaker insulation, and you needed to do something about it or your house would burn down.

I don’t know about you, but my first reaction would not be to put a bunch of roaches in a Tupperware container and then release them into a neighbor’s house so that the species would live on.

We are the problem here.

The whole post is definitely worth reading.

Helium is the sweetest of the noble gases.

Slate worries about the dangers of helium. Yes, innocent, inert helium. Apparently, you might pass out and hit your head on something. Maybe next Slate will do an article on the threat of the liquid phase, on the grounds that it's really cold. I once took a spray of liquid helium full in the face—it was cool and refreshing!

Total Request Blog: My research in a nearby possible world

In the requests thread, Kyle asks: If you had to research in a different area than you are now, what would it be? It can be as different as you want, but can't be too similar. At the least you have to be publishing in entirely different journals.

This is an easy one: philosophy of science. I took several great philosophy courses at Caltech (which you might imagine had a scientific focus in its philosophy department) and got really interested in issues of what science is and why it works. I still think about these topics in idle moments and I could definitely see myself doing research in this field if I hadn't gone for something more practical and experimental. Indeed, many of you have had to sit through my digressions on problems like the grue paradox (sometimes presented in Dinosaur Comics form). Imagine if I could get paid to do this—although I'd have to write serious papers, unless there's a Journal of Philosophical Letters as Presented by T-Rex. The downside is that I wouldn't get to play with expensive high-frequency electronics with lots of buttons, and having qubits to experiment on is pretty cool.

The physics of Built To Spill

And while I'm thinking about timescales, yesterday iTunes reminded me of the relevant Built To Spill song, "Randy Described Eternity". The song starts out like this:

Every thousand years
this metal sphere
ten times the size of Jupiter
floats just a few yards past the earth
You climb on your roof
and take a swipe at it
with a single feather
Hit it once every thousand years
`til you've worn it down
to the size of a pea
Yeah I'd say that's a long time
but it's only half a blink
in the place you're gonna be

It's a cool metaphor, but the physicist in me has a few questions for this Randy guy if I ever run into him:

1. Wouldn't the gravity of the metal sphere crush the Earth into a thin paste? Or crush itself into a neutron star? Jupiter's diameter is 142,984 km, so the volume of the sphere in the song is about 1.5x10²⁷ m³. Assuming the metal is iron near room temperature, and without accounting for gravitational compression, the mass of the sphere is 1.2x10³¹ kg, or 6 solar masses. I believe this is actually a little bit above the threshold to become not a neutron star but a black hole. On the other hand, maybe "size" means volume rather than radius, so that the mass is only 6% of a solar mass. In this case I don't think it turns into a neutron star, but gravity at the surface is still formidable. A quick calculation yields about 338 times Earth's gravity (at the surface of each object), unless I made a mistake.
   
2. Even ignoring the gravitational binding, would a swipe from a feather be enough to knock a non-zero number of atoms off the sphere? Maybe I could model this but it seems slightly difficult. Someone should do an experiment with a feather, some iron, and an atomic force microscope (or similar instrument).
   
3. Suppose the feather does knock some atoms off the sphere. Where do they go? If the metal sphere has gravity, of course they'll accrete right back onto the sphere. But if not, won't they pile up on the Earth? Given the size of the sphere that could be a problem. On the other hand, if there's magically no gravity from the sphere, maybe the individual atoms won't be affected by Earth's gravity either and they'll fly off into space.
   
4. Won't the momentum imparted by the feather strikes affect the motion of the sphere over time, as well as the motion of the Earth? Will the thousand-year period change after enough swipes?

Clearly this song raises more questions than it answers. If I ever teach an elementary physics course, I should totally assign a problem based on these lyrics.

Slow and fast timescales

Having just finished reading Spin (which I reviewed below) I found myself thinking about timescales. The novel did a good job of bringing long timescales into perspective, but what about short ones? In the book, the ratio between Earth time and solar time was about 10⁸, one hundred million years outside the earth to each year in the Spin, or 3.17 years every second. This was an enormous ratio, with any timescale relevant to human civilization passing by in less than a day. It was mind-boggling to read about in the book. But I realized that I was sitting in the lab doing a diagnostic measurement in which I watched the response of a SQUID to an applied microwave field, and my software was acquiring about one point every second, at nanosecond resolution. That's a ratio of 10⁹, ten times greater than the ratio in Spin. I usually don't think much about how long a nanosecond is, but it's really astonishingly short—as far removed from normal human timescales as stellar lifetimes.

It's not just in my lab—with gigahertz processors in wide usage, much of modern technology runs on nanosecond timescales. (And Windows still manages to be frustratingly slow at times, with billions of clock ticks in a second to work with.) Faster timescales are a bit harder to get to, at least in semiconductor electronics. The pulse generator I use in qubit experiments has a time resolution of 5 picoseconds, which always impresses me until I remember that the accuracy is only 250 ps. There's some research into a faster electronics technology using superconducting circuits and flux quantization, called Rapid Single Flux Quantum (RSFQ), which I believe gets to picosecond timescales. Berkeley professor emeritus Ted Van Duzer has been involved in this.

Anyway, I'm not sure I have much more insight into fast timescales than slow ones, but at least they're more accessible.

Serial psychoceramics

How not to earn credibility for your crackpot physics theories: spam them to physics graduate students, in paragraph-sized pieces sent every few hours, with subject lines like "Stephen Hawking died Today". And ask for monetary donations. For your amusement, here is the latest installment in the continuing series:

Subject: Stephen Hawking died Today (4-24-06)

The number two search Yahoo (4-24-06) result for "wave-particle duality" http://alpha.qmul.ac.uk/~zgap118/ states that:


"Light is a deformation of electric (E) and magnetic (B) fields in an area of space."

Maxwell states that light is not a substance but a process going on in an ether which forms an electromagnetic wave structure of light (Maxwell, vol 2, p. 765). Maxwell's ether does not exist in a vacuum yet light propagates in a vacuum which is proof that Maxwell's structure of light does not physically exist.

Maxwell's structure of light is represented with a continuous electromagnetic field structure where the planes perpendicular to the axis of propagation form a continuous electromagnetic field structure. A finite segment of the electromagnetic plane, of Maxwell's structure of light, forms an infinite number of positions. Each position, on the electromagnetic plane, forms an electric field; consequently, an infinite number of electric fields forms an infinite total energy. Maxwell's structure of light is not physically possible.

Maxwell, James. "The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell". Dover Pub. vol. 2. Edited by W.D. Niven. 1965.

I think at a minimum one should try to pass calculus before trying to overthrow Maxwell. I'd be eagerly awaiting the next episode (due sometime this evening) but I already instructed Thunderbird as to the appropriate destination of these messages.

The pro wrestling school of abstract composition

Via Christine Dantas: Now this is an abstract. From astro-ph/0604410:

Occam's razor meets WMAP Authors: Joao Magueijo, Rafael D. Sorkin

Using a variety of quantitative implementations of Occam's razor we examine the low quadrupole, the ``axis of evil'' effect and other detections recently made appealing to the excellent WMAP data. We find that some razors {\it fully} demolish the much lauded claims for departures from scale-invariance. They all reduce to pathetic levels the evidence for a low quadrupole (or any other low $\ell$ cut-off), both in the first and third year WMAP releases. The ``axis of evil'' effect is the only anomaly examined here that survives the humiliations of Occam's razor, and even then in the category of ``strong'' rather than ``decisive'' evidence. Statistical considerations aside, differences between the various renditions of the datasets remain worrying.

Yes! I need to write more papers which use words like "demolish", "pathetic", and "humiliations" when describing the effects of my research on competing theories. Also, I am not sure whether I am amused or horrified that there is an "axis of evil" effect in astrophysics. (According to the paper this is "the embarrassing statistical anisotropy exhibited on the largest angular scales" in CMB data.) Who knew Bush was making contributions to this field?

Colloquium Blogging: Silly Edition

Today's colloquium was Steve Chu, Nobelist and director of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, giving an account of his biophysics experiments. However, rather than report on this I'm going to share a thought I had in the middle of the talk. At one point he was describing a standard optical tweezers technique in which ribosomes are engineered to stick to a tiny glass bead, which can then be manipulated with a laser beam. I was thinking there was something familiar about this, and I realized you could make a game out of it in which you have a biological sample with lots of components designed to stick to the bead, and then roll the bead around with the laser beam to pick them up... yes! Optical Trap Katamari Damacy!

On the other hand, I don't think the King of All Cosmos would be impressed by a 3 μm katamari.

Innovations in Masculinity Quantification

Chad Orzel directs us to Dylan Stiles, who demonstrates what bored Stanford chemists do with laboratory equipment. The Man-O-Meter Challenge is unlikely to catch on in this lab, since most of our pressure gauges are permanently attached to vacuum systems, and don't measure overpressure anyway. However, considering my winning record at Lloyd House blow-pong, I expect I would do quite well at this. (This is probably not something I should admit.) I wish I had a comparable story to tell from our lab, but while we have been known to misuse tools such as the implement we refer to as the Grabby Hand of Science, we've never accomplished a repurposing quite as interesting as the Man-O-Meter.

Also, I don't think I'd heard the term "manometer" before; we always just say "pressure gauge". Is that nomenclature a chemistry thing?

Wednesday Schrodinger's Cat Blogging: Coupled Qubits

The slides for my March Meeting talk, "Variable Coupling of Two Flux Qubits", are now available online. As promised, below the fold is a non-technical explanation of the results presented there. This work builds on the single-qubit work, about which I posted in August; it may be helpful to review that post before reading the following.

Continue reading "Wednesday Schrodinger's Cat Blogging: Coupled Qubits"

Long Form [Open Thread]

My trip back from Baltimore took about 12 hours longer than it should have, but I eventually made it back. Despite attempts to catch up on sleep I still feel like I'm recovering—it was a busy week.

V for Vendetta: This is a powerful movie that mostly does a good job blending action/suspense with a political message. The setting is a near-future Britain which has slid into fascism after the deterioration of Iraq and some high-casualty terrorist attacks. (Meanwhile the United States has fallen into anarchy and civil war.) The plot centers around the masked-and-caped V, who pursues a personal vendetta against certain government officials, while working on a larger plot to overthrow the entire government in the spirit of Guy Fawkes. It wouldn't be correct to say that V is the hero of the movie—he's morally ambiguous at best and commits at least one act I found horrifying. However, the government he's fighting against is so much worse that he sometimes seems good by comparison.

The movie can be didactic at times, and the message is delivered in a heavy-handed way. However, I think the time for subtlety is past: the government we have right now is detaining citizens without trial, torturing innocent people, and asserting unlimited executive power. It's refreshing to see a movie that stands up and says straight out that we, as a citizenry, should not tolerate these things. I certainly don't think we need to blow up any buildings, and Guy Fawkes is the wrong model for this sort of thing, but the basic notion that the people have a right to replace an unacceptable government translates well to the ballot box.

As for the film qua action movie, it's generally well done. There is a thread of paranoid tension running throughout that works well to keep up the suspense—this is one of the ways that the politics reinforce the action. A sequence early-on in which V takes over the state-run television studio is especially good, and the climactic fight scene at the end is the sort of thing the Wachowskis excel at. There are a couple of points where the exposition/recapping becomes excessive and the suspense wanes, but it picks up again afterwards.

Anyway, I liked it. (Remember when I wrote short capsule reviews in the open threads?)

David Goodstein: Out of Gas: This book is Goodstein's effort to explain the interrelated problems of peak oil and climate change to a non-technical audience, and in doing so he explains the physics of energy and the historical development thereof. He sets forth a mostly pessimistic picture, anticipating oil supply problems in the very near future and associated social turmoil. Unfortunately I think he too quickly brushes off the economic arguments about alternative energies becoming more cost-effective as the costs of fossil fuels increase. I don't think this solves the problem but it should make the situation better than he expects. (One of the frustrating things about reading peak oil commentary is that physicists are frequently naive about economics, and economists naive about physics.) His treatment of the basic physics issues surrounding energy production is very good, however, and I would recommend it to a non-technical audience for that reason.

In the end, I am still not sure just how worried I should be about peak oil, but the answer is clearly non-zero.

Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not: This is the hot band over in Britain right now, and musical Anglophiles will find their sound pleasing. Imagine the drunken swagger of the Libertines with the guitar sound of Franz Ferdinand, and you have a good approximation. This CD hasn't quite achieved the heavy rotation of certain other recent British additions to my collection, but it's still pretty good. The major single seems to be "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor" but several others are equally good, like "Fake Tales of San Francisco".

More Postdoc Commentary

Since this is becoming a theme around here, I'm linking to another perspective on the postdoc experience, this one embedded in a rant about public perceptions of scientists.

This is not reality. If you want to do science, you're in the lab. You're in the lab a lot. Sometimes you forget what the sun looks like. You gotta pay your dues. That means laying your intellect bare for harsh criticism for years on end. Committee members and advisors constantly challenging you. Who the hell do you think you are? What makes you think you can succeed in this field?

The underlying point seems to be that the academic career path selects for scientists who are dedicated and intellectually rigorous, although this is not explicitly stated. The author's "job description" for a neuroscience postdoc is amusing. (Via Pharyngula.)

Innovations in LN2 Storage

It sounds like an Aggie joke: a Texas A&M chemistry lab had a liquid nitrogen tank with a leaky pressure relief valve, so some clever individual solved the problem by replacing the valve with a metal plug. This ultimately transformed the chemistry lab into a rocketry lab.

The cylinder had been standing at one end of a ~20' x 40' laboratory on the second floor of the chemistry building. It was on a tile covered 4-6" thick concrete floor, directly over a reinforced concrete beam. The explosion blew all of the tile off of the floor for a 5' radius around the tank turning the tile into quarter sized pieces of shrapnel that embedded themselves in the walls and doors of the lab. The blast cracked the floor but due to the presence of the supporting beam, which shattered, the floor held. Since the floor held the force of the explosion was directed upward and propelled the cylinder, sans bottom, through the concrete ceiling of the lab into the mechanical room above. It struck two 3 inch water mains and drove them and the electrical wiring above them into the concrete roof of the building, cracking it. The cylinder came to rest on the third floor leaving a neat 20" diameter hole in its wake. The entrance door and wall of the lab were blown out into the hallway, all of the remaining walls of the lab were blown 4-8" off of their foundations. All of the windows, save one that was open, were blown out into the courtyard.

Fortunately no one was working in the lab at 3 am when it went off, so no one was hurt. However, this certainly redefines the concept of blowing up the lab. I'll have to keep this story in reserve in case I need to explain an accident to my advisor. "Did you hear about the guys at A&M who plugged their nitrogen tank and destroyed the building? Aren't you glad I only broke a vacuum pump?"

Via Uncertain Principles.

Colloquium Blogging: Steve Koonin on the Energy Situation

Some of you know Steve Koonin from his days as Caltech's provost. He's now chief scientist at BP International, and gave the colloquium at Berkeley today under the title "A Physicist's View of the World's Energy Situation". The talk was extremely interesting and seemed like a very realistic assessment. Some of the points I took away (in a bit of random order):

• Koonin estimates peak oil in about 30 years. Asked about the more alarmist estimates of 10-20 years, he basically says that BP has better data about the oil supply.
  
• On the other hand, there is 200 years worth of coal left in the ground.
  
• Coal is the worst fossil fuel for carbon emissions, but technologies exist to mitigate this.
  
• Oil in the US is mostly used for transportation, coal and natural gas for electric power.
  
• Energy use in transportation is very inefficient, but efficiency needs to be coupled to conservation: car engines improved efficiency by about 25% in the 90's but most of this went into heavier and faster cars rather than better gas mileage.
  
• Koonin first downplayed the evidence for climate change, then stated that he is 90% confident that it is happening and went on to treat it as a serious issue.
  
• However, based on projected fossil fuel use he feels that large quantities of CO₂ in the atmosphere by 2100 are unavoidable, and we should focus on adaptation rather than prevention.
  
• Renewable energy is very far from being a realistic replacement for fossil fuels.
  
• There are two large numbers relevant to global energy use: the per capita energy consumption in developed countries (the USA is an outlier, but other developed countries are within a factor of two) and the population of developing countries. Efforts by Europe, the US, and Japan to control emissions only offset the effects of growth in China, India, etc. by a few years.
  
• The word "fusion" did not appear in the talk. A number of questioners brought it up and Koonin stated that it was at least 50 years away from replacing fossil fuels. "First you have to get it to work."
  
• In the extreme long run (200+ years, once fossil fuels are exhausted) Koonin predicts fusion and solar will be the dominant energy sources. Currently solar is much more expensive than almost all other sources of energy, but this is a materials problem and can potentially be solved.

The talk will eventually appear here as a webcast. I've been increasingly interested in energy issues lately and I found it to be a fascinating look at how the oil companies (or at least one of them) look at these things. Next week while I'm traveling I'll read Out of Gas and see what Koonin's fellow Caltech prof David Goodstein has to say about this. (Goodstein is clearly more pessimistic.)