Second Sight

The Big Bang and Evolution : when does a theory evolve so much that it deserves a new name

Posted on November 21st, 2008 — permalink

I am currently visiting Colgate University, giving a physics colloquium about dark energy. I’m hosted by my friend Jeff Bary (who’s a first year professor there). Yesterday evening, his class gave presentations about discoveries that they’d researched. A few of the talks touched on the Big Bang. Afterwards, I was sitting around musing with Jeff and the departmental chair, Thomas Balonek. Thom was saying that it’s disingenuous for us to claim that we’re still talking about the Big Bang as it being the same theory that we had all those decades ago. What with the introduction of inflation, cold dark matter, dark energy, it’s changed so much that really it’s not entirely the same theory any more. I argued that the basic picture is the same– the Universe expanded from a very hot, very dense state to its current form– that it warrants having the same name.

I then asked the question: which theory has evolved more, the Big Bang or Biological Evolution? To point a finer point on it, let’s go back to the (say) 1950’s or early 1960’s, when people were arguing about Big Bang vs. Steady State cosmology, before the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, well before the introduction of inflation to solve the flatness and horizon problems. Take what people were talking about then as the Big Bang, and compare to what we talk about today. Has that changed more or less than the Theory of Evolution has changed from what Darwin originally envisaged when he wrote the Origin of the Species?

To be sure, the theory of Evolution is better understood and understood in better detail than the Big Bang theory. They both share the feature that they are theories describing the evolution of a system, not it’s origin (although both the name of the cosmological theory, and the title of the work that started Evolution, both would seem to indicate that they do). We know a whole lot more about both today than we did then. Both have features today that people in the early days couldn’t have anticipated. (I understand the cosmology better, of course, but know, for instance, that DNA and the genetics gives us an actual mechanism for Darwin’s Evolution.)

So, what do you think? Which one has changed more? And is either theory similar enough to what was originally proposed that it deserves the same name, or should we have changed the name by now?

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Miracle Drugs

Posted on November 7th, 2008 — permalink

This morning I woke up and had a headache.

I took a couple of Ibuprofen.

Half an hour later, I felt better.

Is chemistry cool, or what?

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Popular Astronomy Talk in Second Life, Friday 8AM PDT (11AM EDT)

Posted on October 9th, 2008 — permalink

I’ll be giving a talk entitled: “We Are Starstuff: the Cosmic Origins of the Chemical Elements” as a part of the MICA public talks series. The talk will be at the Galaxy Dome in Spaceport Bravo.

Remember, a Second Life account is free!

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Randall Munroe and the Size of the Observable Universe

Posted on October 4th, 2008 — permalink

Randall Munroe of the fabulous webcomic xkcd has a great logarithmic height poster showing the size of everything from folks all the way up through the edge of the Solar System, on to the radius of the observable Universe. As a logarithmic plot, each gap of the same size vertically on the plot represents a doubling of the distance from the surface of the Earth; this is why he can show things of such vastly different scales as people and the whole Universe in the same plot.

But, wait, I thought you cosmologists kept saying that the Universe was infinite! How can this picture show the whole Universe then?

It doesn’t… it shows the observable Universe. Because the Universe is only 14 billion years old, and the speed of light is finite, we can only see things that are as far away as light has had time to reach us from. There is more Universe beyond that, but the light hasn’t reached us from it yet; the part of the Universe beyond our horizon is not the observable Universe.

But wait… if the Universe is only 14 billion years old, then, we should only be able to see things that are 14 billion light-years away… yet the xkcd pictures says the top of the Universe is 46 billion years away. What’s up with that?

(more…)

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Why I am heartened by the failure of the bailout bill

Posted on September 30th, 2008 — permalink

Congress defeated the $700×10^9 bailout bill championed by George Bush. The media are portraying this as a disaster, quoting financial advisors saying that this is a “financial 9/11″ and that boy oh boy are we screwed.

On the other hand, I have to admit on some levels I’m happy to see this. Why?

First of all, this isn’t the financial 9/11. The financial 9/11 was when all the major banks said, “Guys? We’re dead. Please bail us out so our execs can enjoy their golden parachutes without the guilt of a destroyed economy all around us.” What did Congress do after 9/11? Well, too quickly they passed the PATRIOT bill, overwhelmingly voting “yes” because the American people were demanding that we Do Something… even though many (most?) of those voting “yes” on it hadn’t had a chance to know what was in it, never mind think about the implications of it. And the PATRIOT bill was a huge step in dismantling a lot of the basic protections we have against living in a surveillance state.

When there is a crisis, there’s always a push to pass legislation, to Do Something, right away. Sometimes we’re lucky and what is done makes sense. More often, it’s thrashing about in a “ZOMG” reaction. Sometimes, if they are prepared, those with an agenda can push across legislation that would never have been pushed across when calmer heads were able to prevail. This is what happened with the PATRIOT act. According to reports, there’s an oppressive cyberregulation bill waiting in the wings for the “Internet 9/11″ to provide the public sentiment that will allow that to push across.

Probably we need to do something fast to prevent our economy from very quickly imploding. But I’m very nervous about the fast response. I’d like to see us do something right. I’d like to see us recognize that just a bailout without a philosophical shift in the attitudes that led us to this mess would be a huge mistake. I’d like to see us recognize that we’ve done an experiment with deregulation of huge, gigantic companies, and for those who were in favor of such things (which included, at least at times, me) to recognize that, yeah, those ideas have now been shown to be wrong, and sticking to them in spite of the evidence is not rational.

We need more than a band-aid. Yeah, quick action may be needed to keep ourselves out of a horrible depression for the next few years. But we need to think about the next several years, the next few decades, or, heaven forbid, even the next century or two. What we really don’t need is a knee-jerk reaction.. and I fear that that is exactly what the $700B bailout is.

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Astrophysics in Second Life : 7D mapping of the Galaxy with SDSS

Posted on September 27th, 2008 — permalink

Yesterday (Friday Sep. 26), MICA heard its first Journal Club of the academic year. (We’ve had these before, but it was very slow over the summer.) The talk was Mario Juric from IAS Princeton, talking about mapping density, velocity, and metallicity as a function of spatial position within the Milky Way galaxy, using photometric data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

click for a larger image

There were a few conclusions that came out of this. First, unsurprising to anybody who’s read anything about the structure of the Milky Way, the disk and the halo really are completely separate components. The disk appears to have a vertical (i.e. perpendictular to the plan) gradient of metallicity, whereas the halo has a constant (and lower) metallicity distribution. Some density outliers from the smooth background are there, which were known previously, including the Monocerous Tidal Stream discovered by my friend and one-time collaborator Heidi Newberg

However, there were also some surprises. There’s basically no gradient of metallicity radially along the disk. I had previously been under the impression that the disk had a metallicity gradient, with higher metallicities towards the center. One caveat to this: the data does not include the very center of the plane of the disk, so there may well still be a metallicity gradient within the plane.

(more…)

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My deepest emtion

Posted on September 26th, 2008 — permalink

I think is fear.

It’s only natural, of course, living in the USA, because our government currently gets us to agree to do things by tapping into our fear.  But I’m talking about something more personal.  And, it may not really be “fear” as much as “worry”.  The whole “what if” thing.

At the most base level, it’s probably the same “what if” so many people share, and some people much more directly than myself.  “What if I lose my job?”  Then I can’t pay for the house.  I can’t pay for health insurance, which my wife and I need (literally in my wife’s case) to survive.  I know that the stress of that situation would be killer.  I lived for a few years in academia with the near-certain knowledge that I was going to lose my job, and knew the time when it would happen.

Nowadays, I like my job, I like the people I’m working with, I like the day-by-day work of it.  I’m a happier person.  But underneath all of that is my fear.  And, when I see something, or do something stupid, that makes me think that the worry underneath perhaps isn’t as completely irrational as it usually is, it gets very hard, at least for a short period of time, to carry on like a rational human being.

Worrying about the future has always been a week point for me.  Before my academia-induced depression turned to basic out-and-out despair, it usually manifested itself as worrying, worrying that would take over my brain and freeze me up from being able to do other things.  It still comes back sometimes.  And then I kick myself for having done the stupid thing that led me to think that perhaps I really had something to worry about, or for blowing something that I observed out of proportion.

It is kind of sad, though, that all of us in our society, in or out of academia, spend our lives in fear that we have to hang on to whatever income-earning activies we have or else we’re going to be in trouble, unable to meet our responsibilities, unable to survive.  That at the base there isn’t a drive to make the world a better place, an appreciation of beauty, a wonderful curiosity, but rather simple personal fear that the bottom is going to drop out and we’re going to be in trouble.  No wonder we’re such an on-the-edge society!

Although, truth to tell, I suspect it was worse through most of human history.

All very sad.

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Virtual Starry Night : can a derivative work be original and creative?

Posted on September 25th, 2008 — permalink

Oh, yes. Oh, yes it can.

Watch this:

YouTube — Watch the World

Gave me chills. An amazing piece of work, all the more so because it’s based on a classic piece of artwork which isn’t the sort of thing that you would think would translate well into a 3d environment with crisp rendering.

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Living La Vida Ludic

Posted on September 24th, 2008 — permalink

I was at SLCC a couple of weeks ago. One thing I noticed was that most of the most interesting and exciting stuff going on was related to education. Some of that was self-filtering– that’s where I went– but there’s no denying there was quite an education buzz.

One of my favorite talks was given by Barry Joseph of Global Kids, and was entitled Why second Life Can’t Tip: the Power and Perils of Living La Vida Ludic. I suspect that the whole not-tipping business was in the title to get people to want to come to the talk, but I have to admit that I found that part of the talk less interesting, and perhaps even borderline irrelevant.

However, the concept of La Vida Ludic is something that really grabbed me, partly because I hadn’t seen it layed out clearly and definitively before… yet, in the concepts, I recognized something in the way that I live my life.

Briefly speaking, “ludic” is derived from a latin (I think) word for games. As such, “La Vida Ludic” is the “game life”, or “playing at life.” Barry Joseph talks about how in our culture, we tend to have a very strict separation between work and play. One great example he gave was elemetary school. There’s a place for work– the classroom– and a place for play– recess. If you try to play in the work context, you get in trouble (he showed an image of a kid sitting in the corner wearing a dunce cap). Likewise, if you try to work in the play context, you also get in trouble (other kids harass for being a nerd and bringing boring work stuff into the play environment).

He went on to describe Global Kids’ way of educating kids leaning heavily on work in Second Life, and showed how a lot of the activites they do have serious mixing of work and play… and yet, because of that mixing, the learning may perhaps be stronger than it would have if we were too serious to be willing to include play in it.

I think I have long lived, or tried to live, my life with the philosophy that my work should feel like play. This is why I majored in physics when I was in college; I was going to major in engineering, but physics was just more fun to me. As I became a professional astronomer, I also picked up a hobby as an amateur astronomer. (I didn’t do any telescope observing before my last couple years of college, and only got my amateur telescope after graduating from college.) I’ve always wanted to be doing something that I enjoyed doing, so that at least some fraction of my work would feel like play. (I know it’s inevitable that some of work won’t… but, then again, some of my play (hobbies, etc.) feels like drudgery too!))

One of the reasons moving to Linden as a system engineer was appealing to me was that sometimes I would use adminstering my machines and writing code as a way of procrastinating “real work” when I was an astronomer. Mind you, this was still real work, as it was stuff that needed to be done, but I was more of a computer nerd than one really needs to be as an astronomer. Just as I enjoyed playing with data, as I enjoyed playing with the science in my classes and going on stage to teach, I also enjoyed playing around with computers.

A few months ago, I was at a “MoonLab” meeting in-world (”MoonLab” being the “lab” where those of us who are remote work). Some people were saying how they’ve set aside specific workspace in their homes– some computers dedicated to working, and when they’re at that computer, they’re “at work”. They have other comptuers they play with. To me, this has always seemed unnatural. First of all, maintaining all those extra computers seems like a lot of effort, not to mention costing space. But, beyond that, it just seems unnatural to me.

I’ve long mixed work and play, in my mind, with my time, and in my approach to life. And, it feels more human, more natural, to me to do it this way. When I’ve heard IT policies that strictly prohibit personal use of work comptuers, I think, are these people in touch with real people? I was told that once at LBNL, you weren’t allowed to make even local personal calls from desk phones; you had to go out to a payphone. Hello? Not only is that dehumanizing, it’s inefficient (people spend more time making their local calls). (When I was there, LBNL had a more human personal use policy for comptuers– do as thou wilt as long as (a) you don’t do anything naughty (e.g. porn), and (b) you don’t put an undue load on LBNL resources.) On the flip side, before I moved the Supernova Cosmology Project database from a very creaky and problematic flat file system to a PostGreSQL database, I installed and played with PostGreSQL on my machine at home to understand how it worked. I’ve done data reduction and work on my own computers. To force myself to keep it all separate would be especially hard now that I work from home, but was unnatural even when I worked at LBNL or Vanderbilt.

In Joseph’s talk, he talked about how doing things in Second Life naturally leads to a Ludic life. After all, Second Life does use technology that you primarily see only in a gaming environment. Many people are still under the misapprehension that Second Life is in fact a game. But even though it’s not, there’s no doubt that there are playful aspects to it. I sometimes go around as a dinosaur…. Sometime soon I’ll post some photos I’ve taken here of work meetings, and the morphologies with which people show up to those meetings.

The sad thing is, our culture and legal system is fundamentally hostile to the ludic life. I suppose I could write some fraction of my computer, laptop, office space, etc., off of my taxes, but I never will do so… for to do so legally, I would have to strictly use it for work and not also play, and that would put more of a damper on my lifestyle than any tax break I would get would be worth. I got into trouble because the first time I did a play in-world, I billed myself as Prospero Linden– figuring that since we’re all encouraged to be in-world and interact in-world, this could only be good press. Besides, it was just me doing stuff. But, alas, I got reprimanded for that, because it’s a work account and when I’m using it I’m representing the lab. And they’re right; the business could be held responsible for things I do in that form… but, unfortunately, it also means that one has to keep one’s work and one’s play separate.

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Prospero Linden’s Rez Day

Posted on August 6th, 2008 — permalink

If you look at Prospero Linden’s profile, you will see that his rez date is 2007 August 6. What this means is that today is the first day of my second year of employement at Linden Lab.

I’ve already done the navel-gazing introspective about the life-changing decision I’ve made. A such, I won’t blather on that any more here. Instead, I’ll just pop up a few images to celebrate and mark the day.

My primary non-Linden Second Life account is Prospero Frobozz. His appearance has not changed much since he was first created in November of December 2006 (eight or nine months before I would start as a Linden). His rez day is actually February 2006, but because of issues I was having at the time with the 3d drivers in my Linux box (which I didn’t bother to fix until much later), I didn’t actually log into Second Life until the end of the year. I deliberately designed Prospero Frobozz to look something like me (although a lot sleeker). It wasn’t long before I found a skin that had a beard that looked right, and I’ve been using that skin ever since (together with mesh hair that has a bald spot):

Although, despite advice to the contrary, I did not intend to hide my alt’s or real-life identity associated with Prospero Linden, I decided not to make him look like me. Indeed, vaguely motivated by the appearance of Julian Lopez-Morillas as Prospero in the 1980 Berkeley Shakespeare Festival production of The Tempest, which I saw may times (getting in for free by volunteering as an usher). That was long enough ago that I didn’t remember details, so I settled for “tall with curly black hair”. The very initial Prospero Linden on his rez day looked like this:

However, by now I was more clued in to Second Life than I was on Prospero Frobozz’s rez day, and fairly quickly I found an appropriate freebie skin (at, if memory serves, Men In Action), and purchased an outfit to fit the “Prospero the Wizard” theme:

Prospero Linden retained this appearance for many months (although acquiring a number of different outfits), although occasionally I would appear as something else. In particular, I established a tradition (sometimes violated) of going to the “Moonlab” meetings in a triceratops avatar created by Flea Bussy. (The “Moonlab” is what Linden calls the laboratory where all the not-an-an-office Lindens work… we’re on the Moon.)

Prospero Linden obtained his current appearance at the March, 2008 Conceirge party. As part of the festivites, Dee Linden had random drawings for residents who “won” a half-hour of a Linden’s time, to do with them as they pleased. (Well, within reason.) I was won by Barbie Starr, and she said that she’d always wanted to do a Linden makeover. This was actually all win for me, for I came out with a much more attractive avatar than I’d had previously. It actually took closer to 90 minutes than 30 minutes, but it was good. One thing about the current Prospero Linden is that he is huge… extremely tall. People comment on that when they see me next to somebody else in-world. This is Prospero Linden’s current apperance (standing in front of the land where he holds his office hours in Teen Second Life):

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