Archive for the ‘geekiness’ Category
Back from vacation
I do believe a week away was exactly what I needed, and now I’m back. 
I’ll try to discipline myself over the next week or so to actually write about what I did while I was away. To start with though, here’s a quickie for you.
While we were in the “Sky Church” at the Experience Music Project, I started hearing a song that I immediately started humming along with but didn’t immediately place. Turns out it was an artist named Petra Haden doing an almost completely a cappella remake of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Belivein’”. Turns out there was a competition for creating videos to go with that song and the others on the same compilation album, and YouTube has the video for this one. I don’t particularly like the spoken word portion. It doesn’t fit with the hyper-accuracy of the rest of the song, but I forgive it anyway.
P.S.
This song was recorded for an album full of “guilty pleasure” songs. Bonus points for the first person to recognize and comment on the other guilty pleasure song reference in this one.
The redshirt
I feel like just about everyone who reads this site has seen the movie Galaxy Quest. I found it on the TiVo tonight and watched it again. It’s just spot-on brilliant parody.
You all know that, though. This post is about Guy Fleegman, the character in the movie who we learn played the part of “Crewman Number 6″, who was killed in one of the original Galaxy Quest episodes. All throughout the movie Guy is mortified that he’s going to be killed. The rest of the Galaxy Quest cast constantly try to console him, and Guy does indeed make it to the end of the story. As a reward for his help and to prove that he’s an important character, they give Guy a role in the new adventures of Galaxy Quest. That’s all back story. What I didn’t realize until just tonight is that I think the joke goes one layer deeper. I’ll let you guys decide if I’m right.
Guy’s character in the new series is “Security Chief ‘Roc’ Ingersol.” If the new Galaxy Quest series is basically Star Trek: TNG, does anyone else remember the Enterprise D’s first security chief and what happened to her in the very first season?
I could be reaching, but I don’t think I am.
What nice guys already knew…
It’s not like this one’s a surprise, but it’s interesting to see actual research on it…
Bad guys really do get the most girls
Online filesystem service
Here’s your linkfood for tonight. I found an online filesystem service called rsync.net. It’s probably most commonly used for backups, but it could work for a lot more things. I’m considering signing up, simply because it’s so flexible. It’s quite a bit more expensive per GB of data stored than Amazon S3, but they support lots of cool applications for accessing the files.
A Lot More Doors
Tonight I watched one of the random Nova episodes that TiVo catches for me from time to time. This one was titled “The Ghost Particle”.
I’m no physicist, but Nova has a way of bringing even the most esoteric of scientific studies within the reach of normal folks and making them interesting. This episode was all about the neutrino. I found especially interesting the “drama” surrounding this particle over the years. It’s known as the solar neutrino problem, and it surrounded two scientists, Ray Davis and John Bahcall. To shorten things a bit, Bahcall helped develop a model which predicted the number of neutrinos which should be emitted by the sun (and thus how many we should be able to detect here on earth). Davis and Bahcall headed a huge experiment to measure these neutrinos. The problem was that the measurements were showing only about a third of the predicted number of neutrinos.
For years, many people assumed that either the experiment or the predictive model was wrong. Davis kept refining the measurements, but the experiment ran for decades with basically the same results. Bahcall insisted that his model was accurate.
To shorten this up, a definitive experiment was finally run which had the potential to resolve the conflict. It turned out that they were both right. The problem was an assumption in the Standard Model that neutrinos have no mass.
In other words, a scientific theory which had been perhaps surprisingly predictive for many years contained an assumption which had just been proven wrong by experimental result.
I LOVE the following quote. It’s by an experimental physicist and Columbia University professor named Janet Conrad who specializes in neutrinos:
Scientists have searched for so long—my whole scientific career—to find a problem with the Standard Model, and it has been very resilient. And that is why it is so exciting to suddenly come up with this new information that neutrinos have mass, because that doesn’t fit within our theory. And so, it’s like opening a door, and of course when you open a door, behind that, you find a lot more doors.
(from the episode transcript)
To me, this perfectly exemplifies what true science is. Conrad is excited that a longstanding theory has been (partially) proven wrong by real, hard, experimental result. Why? Because it reveals information. It points out new questions that need to be asked. Real science looks for things that are wrong with the current theory. It expects change, and it does not seek to find “truth” so that the “right answer” can be known once and for all. However, it also does not allow established theories to be toppled by just any old hypothesis.
People who back a certain hypothesis which I will not name are fond of pointing out that a theory is not a fact. I wholeheartedly agree. Theory is so much more powerful than fact because of its ability to predict future observations (AKA facts). And don’t you know that John Bahcall was thrilled when he learned that the theory that he helped create was able to predict the results of experiments performed decades later.
A lot more doors, indeed.