This and That

• Katy B�rner from the project "Places & Spaces: Mapping Science," who came with her poster exhibition to our 2008 conference on Science, Society and Information Technology, has written a book called "Atlas of Science: Visualizing what we know." I haven't read it, but there's a review in a recent issue of Nature which most of you probably can't access, and another review in Seed Magazine which will give you an impression of what the book is about. If you have an interest in visualizing data and/or the structure of scientific communities and the process of knowledge discovery, this might be interesting for you.


• A PS to my post on Cosmic Strings that summarized a recent study on the gravitational wave emmission from Cosmic Superstrings' cusps. According to the study's results, the presence of extra dimensions would suppresses the signal, possibly too much to be observable. In a new paper, O'Callaghan and Gregory have now studied the signal from kinks, claiming that the suppression is not as pronounced as the one from cusps.


• Some months ago, during one of my hospital stays, I received another inquiry seeking permission to use one of my figures for what I thought would be an illustration of some essay on gravitons. My reply was essentially "yeah, whatever," just in some more words. I now was sent a link to the result, a digital book, in French, called "Du LIVRE de Mallarm� au livre mal arm�." The website is here, and you can download the ebook here. It looks to me like a collection of sciency philosophy essays. My figure appears in section "14.59�" - whatever that might mean. If your French is better than mine, please let me know in the comments what this compilation is all about!


• Here's an article I filed in the category "Complete Bullshit:" Daniel Sarewitz in Slate claiming, in a nutshell, that it's a problem Republicans are represented among US scientists in a smaller percentage than among the US population: "No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science," he writes and goes on to make a case that "the scientific community should be willing to investigate and discuss the issue" because this situation is clearly politically incorrect. I had the intention to get upset about this article, but it's so completely bullshit it's not even worth the effort, so I just let you read it. Don't miss the comments.


• Something to laugh: And the state of the union is... salmon!

This and That

• In partnership with CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American, Google is introducing the first global online science competition: the Google Science Fair. It is open to students around the world who are between the ages of 13-18. More info at the Google Blog.


• If you haven't yet played around with Google's Ngram Viewer, you've missed a great opportunity to waste time. Ngram allows you to search Google Books for words or expressions and display the results, normalized to the total number of books, as a function of the year. You find some great examples here. Also interesting is "absolute" vs "relative" ("relative" took off in 1900 but has dropped sharply since 1980, while "absolute" is constantly in fashion since 1800), "abortion" vs "adoption" ("adoption" is almost constant since 1900, while "abortion" rises in the mid 60s, but interestingly falls again since the mid 90s.), "love" vs "war" ("war" surpassed "love" around 1920 and peaks during the two world wars. Since then, it's been on the decline but still ahead of "love"), "God" vs "science" ("God" has on the average been decreasing since the early 18-hundreds, though it's slighly increasing again since 1980. Science has constantly been on the rise, but still hasn't caught up with "God"), and nobody wrote "hello world" before the first programming languages came up.


• Have a look at our night sky in different wavelengths with the Chromoscope. See here for a video tour. [Thanks to Steven!]


• Wiley's journal on Environmental Microbiology annually publishes some amusing referee's comments. Some examples: "This paper is desperate. Please reject it completely and then block the author�s email ID so they can�t use the online system in future.", "I started to review this but could not get much past the abstract.", "I agreed to review this Ms whilst answering e-mails in the golden glow of a balmy evening on the terrace of our holiday hotel on Lake Como. Back in the harsh light of reality in Belfast I realize that it�s just on the limit of my comfort zone and that it would probably have been better not to have volunteered." Makes me wonder if the prospect of one's comment getting published encourages referees to write such things?


• Something to laugh about: The customer is not always right. [Thanks to Andreas!] Example:
  
  
  Bank employee: �And how would you like that $500?�
  Customer: �In one bill.�
  Bank employee: *trying to be nice* �Would five hundreds do?�
  Customer: �No! One bill!�
  (Employee gives her five hundreds, and she throws them back. Supervisor comes over.)
  Supervisor: �Problem?�
  Customer: �Yes, he refuses to give me what I want.�
  Supervisor: �There is no $500 bill.�
  Customer: �Yes there is!�
  Supervisor: �Not since the late 1800's ma�am.�
  Customer: �I remember seeing it!�
  Supervisor: �Then might I say you look great for your age!�

This and That

• In my post It comes soon enough I speculated on some future developments, among them:
  
  �I've been thinking... that... it would be possible to grow meat suitable for consumption without having to bother with the whole animal. [A] century from now, we'll have factories with organ bags that resemble nothing like animals at all.�
  
  In an interview of Time Magazine with Ray Kurzweil I read last week:
  
  �We'll grow in vitro cloned meats in factories that are computerized and run by artificial intelligence. You can just grow the part of the animal that you're eating."
  
  For the complete interview, see 10 Questions for Ray Kurzweil


• If you want more evidence that I have my thumb on the pulse of time: In my post Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated? I remarked on the the predictability of complex systems:
  
  �You don't need to predict the dynamics of the system. You just need to know what parameter space it will smoothly operate in so optimization works.�
  
  A recent article by Seed Magazine quotes Tom Fiddaman who, in collaboration with MIT and the Sustainability Institute, examines the policy implications of dynamic complexity in climate and economic models:
  
  �You are in a sort of dance with this complicated mess,� he says, explaining that it is impossible to determine the individual steps of this �dance��and this is in some sense the error of current thinking. Instead, we need to be able to construct robust solutions that provide general guidelines for what style of dance we should be doing. They need to be flexible and capable of withstanding the inevitable unpredictable behaviors of complex systems.
  
  The whole article, titled Knowing sooner, is a very recommendable read.


• I just learned that since July 1st, fast internet access is a legal right in Finland. Don't have much to say about it, just find it noteworthy.


• Most concise paper ever: Unsuccessful treatment of writer's block.


• I spoke to a science writer about What's at the center of black holes - and then forgot about it.
  
  �From a theoretical point of view, the singularity is something where something becomes infinitely large,� said physicist Sabine Hossenfelder at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics. [That's not what she wrote, but what I actually said.]
  
  No one can be sure that their singularity doesn't describe a physical reality, Hoss[en]felder told Life's Little Mysteries. But most physicists would say that the singularity, as theorized by equations, doesn't really exist. If the singularity was �really real,� then it would mean that �energy density was infinitely large at one point,� exactly the center of the black hole, she said.
  
  However, no one can know for sure, because no complete quantum theory of gravity exists, and the insides of black holes are impossible to observe.


• My recent paper with Xavier Calmet and Roberto Percacci just got published.

I wish you all a nice weekend and don't forget to light the 3rd candle.