Happy Birthday BBC News Website

The BBC news website is 10 years old this week. I know I and many others would not know how to live in a world where this invaluable time sink did not exist, partly I know this from the cool graph they have produced showing the growth in traffic to the site over time, you can see it reproduced below, click for big.


There are several interesting things about this graph, one of which is simply the number of page loads a month, right now there are over 1.3 Billion page loads per month and there is no sign of the increase in traffic slowing. Although I am probably responsible for about 1% of those, I still find it a huge number and wonder how they will cope in the future.

The second thing I like is the subtle implicatons about peoples behaviour you can see in the data, you may note for example that there are several dips in the traffic towards the end of a year, most obviously in recent years. My guess that this is the effect of Christmas holidays, when people are forced to go home, and no longer bother to check the news every five minutes as they do when chained to their desks. This of course also tends to imply that much of the traffic is still coming from the western world.

Then there is something I don't really understand unless it is simply a artifact of how they have graphed the data, but it appears that traffic had been increasing rapidly in the days leading up to September 11th 2001, before the attacks on World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. My guess is that they have simply plotted monthly totals which have tended to make it look like there was a rise in traffic pre September-11th, I would imagine that if you plotted daily totals you would see fairly smoothly increasing traffic until September 10th, then traffic would spike dramatically on the 11th before tailing off over the next few weeks, with a few superimposed bumps and wiggles related to events such as the opening of attacks in Afghanistan or new information regarding the attacks becoming available.

I'd love to see the daily totals for this period, I think this could really be useful in determining the most important events in modern history, especially when coupled with information on the most popular stories, though I rather fear that various celebrity scandals would dominate the events.

Everybody Is A Crank

The New York Times has a short article (free subscription required) about well regarded scientists stepping out of their own fields and becoming cranks in another. This has been spurred by James Watsons (co discoverer of the structure of DNA) cranky claims about race and intelligence last week, for Watson however such claims are not entirely unusual and not entirely unexpected given his age (79). The article includes an interesting quote from Sir Martin Rees:

“With my own advancing years, I’m mindful of the three different ways scientists can grow old,” Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom and president of the Royal Society, wrote in an e-mail message. The first two choices are either to become an administrator or to content yourself with doing science that will probably be mediocre. (“In contrast to composers,” Dr. Rees observed, “there are few scientists whose last works are their greatest.”) The third choice is to strike off half-cocked into unfamiliar territory — and quickly get in over your head. “All too many examples of this!” he lamented

I'm just struggling to come up with too many examples of this (any ideas internets?), there must be some, but there is another more interesting route to crankdom for scientists, one which allows you to remain comfortable in your own field: you are mainstream at some point but stick with a discredited theory long after it was given up as a lost cause by everyone else, Halton Arp is the obvious example from astronomy. I find this the more interesting route because it is the most dangerous, the easiest most seductive route, kind of like the dark side of science where you let your ego get the better of you.

I don't doubt that everyone is a crank in some field, I just wonder what my crank field is. I've known some friends that held what I thought were borderline cranky views on areas such as global warming or biology, but I guess its always difficult to spot where your own thoughts appear unreasonable to others. No doubt someone will enlighten me. Do you know where your inner crank resides?

Expanding Earth or Shrinking Brains?

DdH has linked to a very amusing video that he has gotten all excited about. I think the fact that Dave is so excited about it really goes to show that if you are cranky about one facet of science you are probably cranky about a lot of others. The video is by someone called Neal Adams, who thinks that the Earth (and other planets) have expanded over time. He basically is not a big fan of tectonic plates, so he as produced animations showing that if you shrink the Earth the continents appear to fit together.




Like any good crank he mixes in a lot of half truths with a lot of absolute nonsense, there are too many problems to look at now, but here are some of the best that just sprung to mind:

Throughout the video he claims subduction and movement of plates are impossible, yet somehow expansion of the entire Earth is fine. Hmm. There is also the fact that we measure the movement of plates, the obvious example being the laser measurement of the movement of the San Andreas fault.

If the Earth is doubling in size where does all of this extra mass come from? If its just normal matter from space we should have noticed the several tons per acre per day!! that should be falling on us (h/t to this video. Not sure I agree with everything he says but its quite fun.), if its due to some strange change in atoms over time then we could certainly measure that with current instruments. So where does it come from? Er that's not made clear. Then again it is very rare for cranks to think through the implications of their theories.

Another interesting problem is that he claims that the Earth has doubled in size in the last 65 million years, this is a bit of problem, as by my rough calculations it would mean that 65 million years ago if there was the same amount of water on the Earth, essentially everywhere would be underwater, oops.

After Neals "success" with geology he moves onto Physics, again proving that if you are cranky in one field of science you probably are in the rest too. Enjoy his explanation of prime matter here (sorry can't get it to show in here). Its been a long time since I've seen such a long stream of nonsense, especially without even a token attempt to provide evidence for his claims, the best one being that electrons wrap around a proton in a type of shell, which appears to leave a hole in it, brilliant. Don't give up the day job. Though I think Dave and him will get a long great, perhaps he can make the animations for the Autodynamics film?

Big Autodynamics News

It seems that Pharyngula has noticed my favourite bunch of science cranks, the Autodynamicists. It appears that Dave de Hilster is looking for a little help with his anti-Einstein "masterpiece": Einstein Wrong - The Miracle Year. The subtitle is now a bit of a misnomer, it was originally called that because it was meant to be following the events celebrating the centenary of Einsteins miracle year of 1905 when he did much of his most important work. I think the plan was that the Autodynamics people would prove relativity wrong during the year celebrating his work, things didn't really turn out the way they were hoping. Here is Daves advert.

Feature Length Doc "Einstein Wrong" Looking for Executive Producer

Two Oscar Winning Distributors Wanting a Rough Cut

LONG BEACH, Calif, October 16, 2007 - Bootstrap Productions is currently looking for an executive producer for it's feature-length documentary "Einstein Wrong - The Miracle Year" due out in 2008. The documentary is about a suburban house wife who takes on the icon of 20th century physics to see if in fact relativity is wrong. Shot over the past 3 years, the film has two Oscar-winning distributors interested in the project. The film is directed by David de Hilster who has invested 13 years studying scientists and their efforts to show Einstein wrong. It is co-produced and edited by Andrea Tucker, and Nick Tamburri and is due out in 2008. For more info, go to http://investing.einsteinwrong.com.

Contact:
David de Hilster
Long Beach, California
http://www.einsteinwrong.com

I'm looking forward to seeing the film, even though I know it will be incredibly cringe worthy, the same old canards will undoubtedly be trotted out, that scientists don't challenge relativity because they'll lose funding, that its some sort of conspiracy to hide the truth and that Autodynamics is correct. All of which of course, are false, as numerous posts here and elsewhere have shown.

I'm Back

After a very long absence I am finally back to blogging. My absence was caused by a combination of telescope applications, travel, job applications, writing a paper, moving house and a whole load of other problems which I won't go into right now. Hopefully I get can get back into the rhythm reasonably quickly.

Education Wins Again

Some interesting research into what effect marriage has on peoples feelings of happiness has just appeared. Apparently married men are much happier than single men, not exactly a shock I guess, as are married women, though not by the same amount. The discrepancy seems to have something to do with women being happier in general.

Possibly the most interesting finding however is that men with more highly educated wives are happier:

A married man's chances of achieving a high level of happiness - above a score of seven - are improved by 8 per cent for every extra year of education his wife has. But married women's happiness level is unaffected by their husband's years of schooling.

Women do not care how dumb their husbands are - but they feel happier if the men are smarter than they are, the study shows.

So the 8 years of University I have is not doing anything. Dammit. I wonder if the place of education, or the type of study of their spouse has any effect on mens feelings?

On Health Care - Why The State Wins

A couple of things in the last few days have motivated me to post these musings. The first is that last Tuesday a slight eye infection forced me to visit a GP for the first time in about 6 years, the second is that there seems to be a lot of flap in the States at present over the release of Michael Moore's new film, SiCKO, all about the health care system in the US.

First off I'll admit I'm totally biased, I don't know how any civilized industrial nation thinks they can get by without universal state sponsored health care, the fact that only one such country does so probably indicates that most of the rest of the western world agrees with me here. My perception is also coloured by the fact that whenever I, or anyone I have known has needed the NHS it has been very efficient, this clearly isn't always the case, but its good when as happened to me I walked in off the street and had seen a Doctor within 30mins, no appointment, no problem. It was also reassuring to know that the most I would have to pay would be about £6.90 for any drugs, were they to cost £10 or £10,000.

Now the NHS clearly isn't perfect, it clearly isn't even the best health care system around, but I think it is considerably better than a system which is run for profit. Whats more I would argue that if run efficiently any public health care system is clearly better than any private one. For one simple reason, economics, in a public system you remove several layers which are required to add a profit margin to everything they do. For example, in a system like in the US where health care is paid for by purchasing insurance, you have system where if you are ill, you visit the doctor, he does his job, then marks up the cost by ~20% or more to cover the profit margin of his medical group, he then calls your insurer who may or may not decide to pay for any treatment, in any case your premium includes a ~20% markup to cover their profit margin, you then get moved along to a hospital if you require surgery, they also add their own ~20% markup, so you have three layers where you end up paying more for private health care, just so a bunch of rich shareholders get to get richer.

Now people argue that a private health care system is more efficient so you don't notice these markups, because overall the service costs less than the supposedly inefficient state system. This can easily be shown to be nonsense, the US spends %15 of GDP on health care, to provide them a ranking of #37 in the world for health care, France spends %11 of GDP to be #1. Hmm how is that extra efficiency working out for you. It looks even worse when you realise everyone in France gets anything they need, whereas in the States an appreciable fraction of the population has no insurance, so get little or no treatment. So to take the stats at face value, the private health care systems costs you more to provide a worse service, good job. If your a stat fan, in the UK we currently spend around 8% of GDP, to be placed #18. Which anyway you slice it means that the NHS is both more efficient and provides a better service on average to boot. Its important to note that this is of course on average, I'm sure if you have the money in the States you get a good service, the problem is that most people either don't have the money, or are very close to losing their coverage.

There is of course one other major area that nationalised systems can outperform the private sector, in collective bargaining, it always strikes me as amazing that people that support the idea of capitilism (like me) seem happy to allow large companies, Walmart or Tesco for example, to drive down prices by buying in bulk (like me), however when in the States the idea of a similar approach to buying drugs is mooted you hear howls of disapproval (not like me). Apparently cheaper toilet paper is fine, but more affordable life saving drugs, oh no, you have to pay whatever the drug company feels like. If one buying system exists, as does here in the UK, it is much easier for them to say to the pharmaceutical companies, we are going to pay this much, and we'll take 10 million doses. When you have a series of medical groups all competing and serving (comparitively) small numbers of customers, its much more difficult to drive a hard bargain, the drug companies would rather not sell to you then have to cut the prices across the board.

Anyway musings over for the week. Back to work.

Friday Galaxy - 2 - NGC 720

This is a real hot off the press Friday Galaxy, the data for this was only taken last night, in Chile, by those very helpful people at the Gemini-South telescope. I'm using the 12 images they took (4 each of g',r' and i', that's blue, green and red to you and me) to pick out Globular Clusters for spectroscopic follow up.

The image below shows the image produced, there are a couple of odd things about this image. The first is that the galaxy itself is very blue, for an elliptical galaxy this is odd, these are usually known as being red and dead, because they don't form stars. At first I thought I had mixed up the blue and red channels, however in the top left corner you can see a very pretty background edge on spiral and this appears to be just the right colour for a spiral, hmm.

If we assume that the colours are correct and that we are seeing a blue elliptical galaxy, then their are two possibilities: Either some fraction of the galaxy is made up of hot young blue stars, which can't have been formed more than a few Gyrs ago (not that common for ellipticals), or else the galaxy must be very old and lacking in metals. This is one of the major drawbacks of using the colours of astronomical objects like galaxies to tell you about them, there is a degeneracy between the age of stellar populations and the amount of elements heavier than Helium that they contain (their metallicity). Basically things can appear blue for one of two reasons, they are either young, or they have a low metallicity (and are old).



To solve this conundrum will require spectroscopy, which hopefully we will be getting in the next few months. One other interesting thing that appears in this image can be seen in the top left, when you look at the spiral galaxy (shown enlarged below) you can just about make out what appears to be a stream of material trailing to the bottom right. This trail, if real, could be a trail of stars produced by a minor merger event, if I get the chance and have the space when I make up the mask for the spectroscopy I may well try and get a sly spectrum of this just to see whats going on.


That just shows you one of the cool things about astronomy, serendipity means you can find all sorts of interesting things in the unlikliest of places. There are loads of interesting things in the background of deep images like this one, if anyone finds anything interesting in the large version of the image, let me know, you never know I may try and get a spectrum of anything you find that looks interesting enough.

Friday Galaxy - 1 - NGC 524

I've decided to institute a new tradition of posting images of a favourite galaxy on a friday. For the first example I have decided to choose NGC 524, this galaxy is an S0 galaxy that I am working on at the moment.

The images I'm going to show are from archival HST images taken using WFPC2 (PI Brodie project 6554), I have produced a colour image of the galaxy, though I have cheated somewhat, as I only had access to two filters the F555W and the F814W, which I am going to treat as blue and red respectively, I'm then going to use an average of the two as the green channel. The downside is you're pretty much guaranteed to get something that looks red or blue, still this is interesting in itself, as blue galaxies tend to be young and red ones old. So here is the image.



You can see the centre of the galaxy is located towards the top left of the image, the diffuse glow around this is the halo of NGC 524, many foreground stars and background galaxies are also obvious. In this image the galaxy looks fairly boring, a very smooth looking ellipical galaxy, however I had seen some hints of something odd going on in the inner regions in some data I had from the Gemini telescopes and decided to investigate it. What I did was to average the images from the blue and red exposures, as this tends to pick out structures and dust in galaxies, this is because dust tends to absorb different amounts of the two wavebands. What I found was this:


First of all you can see that many objects disappear, this is just because they have similar amounts of flux in the blue and red, the centre of the galaxy however doesn't. You can see that some very pretty spiral structure emerges, so you can see that on closer inspection NGC 524 is being observed face-on, the Milky Way would probably look very similar if you stopped forming stars and then looked at it from above the disc after a few Billion years.

The Dark Sector Revisited

Over at threesigmaresult.com I have started a revised and expanded version of my dark sector series of posts first seen here.

Galaxies, Lenses, Globulars, What More Do You Want?

Welcome to my first post for threesigmaresult! I've chosen to redo a post that previously appeared on my other blog, theobservershunch, I've done this because it was one of my favourites, partly because it has a very pretty pictures but mostly because it describes some research done by some of my colleagues. Enjoy.

Click for VERY Big.

The picture above which was released by the Hubble Heritage Project shows a cluster of galaxies called Abell S0740, the data used to make the picture was collected by a team of astronomers including two of my collaborators/friends at Durham, John Lucey and Russell Smith. There are two versions of the image, one without annotations and one showing zoomed regions of interest. See them both here.

New Blog - ThreeSigmaResult

Myself and CMB have decided to set-up a new blog, this one will be a bit more focussed dealing only with science, so no politics or random distractions. The blog can be found at threesigmaresult.com. The first real post will appear some time tomorrow.

My intention is that any science posts by me will get mirrored here, but if you want to see the full effect of CMB in full flow you'll have to head over to the new blog. Apart from this announcements things should continue as before over here.

Blind Cat Challenge

Wow, I've been busy recently (and ill), work has been hectic what with more telescope time coming our way, conference talks, travel arrangements and writing a paper or two. Now I'm back and getting into the swing of things here is a link to a great time sink that CMB is running over at his blog (and here). The basic idea is that you have to draw a cat in MS paint or the equivalent (using a mouse), but do it with your eyes closed. Its actually pretty damn hard, my effort is below, CMB has now collected over 300 of these efforts and has set up a gallery here, you can submit your own efforts here. The quality is variable to say the least. Enjoy.



What the hell did we do during work hours before the Internet? Seriously, I don't know I'm too young to remember, someone tell me.

Fishing Cats

Not long ago I was talking with some of the members of the group about fishing cats, a type of cat found in Asia that hunts fish, it is a skillful swimmer and excellent fish catcher, partly due to the fact that its paws are webbed. I'm making this post mostly because several people claimed that this weird but wonderful creature didn't really exist and was some sort of hoax along the lines of the pacific northwest arboreal octopus. Well it does exist, its pretty cool and also very cute. With those obvious adaptions for living and hunting in water its also a nice little example of the effect of evolutionary pressures.

Check out the wikipedia article as well as this one from the smithsonian national zoological park. Head here to see them in action. Oh and because I'm nice here's another youtube video of one wandering about.

Want To Be A Crank?

I've just run across this brilliant post over at scienceblogs, setting out how to be the most successful crank you can be, it reads like the DdH/Autodynamics how-to guide to crackpottery. Go on read it, you know you want to. I especially love the suggestion that cranks try to get their papers published in scientific journals.

If you want your manuscript (it may make you sound smarter to call it your "treatise" or "monograph") to actually get published, try something like Medical Hypotheses. Journals with an impact factor of less than 1 might actually be desperate enough to publish something cranky, especially if you can jargonize it enough to make yourself sound smart, or create enough fake data to trick the editors. If it has to do with global warming consider a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed. The Creation Research Quarterly is perfect for anything disproving some facet of evolution, geology, astronomy, or physics. You don't have to be a creationist for them to like your crank theory, anything that pokes holes in dastardly consensus science is a victory.
Then try journals that don't require real experiments, rigorous trial design, peer review or anything that actually indicates actual science has been done. Other cranks in your "field" may have started just such a journal - like the Journal of 9/11 studies. There are about as many places that will publish crank work as there are crank ideas, don't stop trying! If you get your ideas published in such a journal claim victory! You have mainstream acceptance and a publication record now.

Physics Essays anyone?
Or how about how to deal with dissenters:

Accusation: "You haven't published in a real peer-reviewed journal"

Response: Either say "Peer review is just an old-boys network for peon scientists to pat each other on the back", or accuse journal editors of persecuting you. Compare yourself to Galileo.

Accusation: "You don't have solid proof"
Response: Either restate what you said already, restate it slightly differently, call your accuser a name, or suggest they are part of the conspiracy to hide the truth. Compare yourself to Galileo.

This just reminds me of the autodynamics page where they have a picture of Carezani with Einstein, Newton, and Galileo fading off behind him.

I'm sure you'll all be able to spot some of your favourite cranky behaviour in the post, it certainly saved me the time an effort of going an writing a post along those lines.

Milky Way Behaving Badly

Head over to Space.comfor a story about the dark side of our well behaved galaxy's nature, its being throwing its weight around and generally being a bad neighbour. The story is all about the streams of stars that are being found trailing around the Milky Way, these trails are thought to be the shredded remains of dwarf galaxies or globular clusters that wandered too close to the MW. Below you can see some of the streams uncovered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The streams are detected by looking at the colours and positions of a huge number of stars over as large an area as possible, doing this it is possible to pick out groups of stars with the same sort of colour, implying that they probably formed at the same time from the same material.


Some of the streams have been associated with known GCs or dwarf galaxies, basically these objects lie right in the middle of the stream, in the pictorial representation at the top you can see the original dwarf with its tails of stars which spread out both in front and behind it in its orbit of the MW. Over time the streams will stretch further and further, getting progressively thinner and more tangled, until they form a diffuse halo of stars around the MW.

This kind of research is interesting because the current theories for the formation of galaxies predict that there should be many more dwarf galaxies around the MW than we see at present, one solution is that many of them have simply been torn apart by the MW and their stars spread into the halo of the galaxy. If enough of these streams are found this could help solve this so called "missing satellite problem".

More Unusual Nature

After yesterdays story about the gay flamingos acting as surrogate parents the BBC seems to be trying to outdo itself, now they have a story about a shark which has undergone (?) parthenogenesis, that's a virgin birth to the more religiously minded. The shark had become pregnant, despite being kept separate from any males for at least 3 years, genetic testing has since proven that the offspring was produced without any genetic material from a male.

It just goes to prove Jeff Goldblums (as Ian Malcolm) line from Jurassic Park, "Life will find a way", or words to that effect.

Flamingos

The BBC has a great story up now, about a couple of gay male Flamingos acting as surrogate parents to a chick. You can find the story here. Apparently they had been trying to steal other birds eggs to raise, and after seeing a nest abandoned the keepers decided to give them the abandoned egg to raise. In another curious part of the tale it turns out that male Flamingos can also produce milk, from their throats, so they can feed the chick until its beak develops enough for it to filter feed.

Video Round Up

In a similar vein to the previous video, here is a round up of some videos I have come across recently.

First Bill Maher lampooning fundamentalists:


Next:
Jon Stewart on the latest F*$%-Up by the US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez


Finally:
A great video with a nice bit of science, the helicopter blades in this video are rotating with a frequency which is some (integer) multiple of the one that the video works at, so every time the video records an image the blades have made at least one full rotation and appear at the same place, making it seem that the helicopter is hovering without any support.

Comic Interlude

Crooksandliars had this video up as a celebration of the comics 70th birthday. Being British I have no idea who George Carlin is, but he seems pretty damn funny. If you're of the strongly religious persuasion I would probably avoid it.