Rambles Blog at Star Chamber

Four years ago, I picked up a copy of the new SEED magazine (tagline: “Science is Culture”). I was unimpressed and convinced that it would speedily vanish. I was wrong. I still think it’s an odd mix of a magazine and rarely buy it, but beyond the magazine, the parent Seed Media Group has built an impressive stable of science blogs under the name, er, ScienceBlogs, or Sb for short. It’s sort of Nick Denton-esque cluster of blogs in which the scientists come across as unfiltered outspoken lively characters. I realized they must be onto something when I saw that science writer Carl Zimmer, whose blog I follow, pulled up his tent stakes at Corante and moved to Sb.

The kind of blogs hosted at Sb fill an important role that, for people like me at any rate, has long been vacant. They tell you what the real deal is with scientific papers that are in the news. I don’t have subscriptions to Science or Nature, so I never get farther than the abstracts, but now I have a way to find out what a geneticist thinks when someone publishes about the mingled heritage of humans and chimps. Fun. This motley collection of blogs authored by working scientists comes closer than the magazine to SEED’s stated goal of connecting science to society.

They always tell you not to point your camera toward the sun if you want good pictures, but every now and then you get lucky. Take a look at this APOD picture of sunspots in ultraviolet light: APOD: 2006 June 11 – Sunspot Loops in Ultraviolet

It’s incredible to think that this is what that bright thing up in the sky looks like all the time (assuming you had great big ultraviolet eyeballs). Ordinarily, astronomical photos of the sun tend to flatten the solar disk, but somehow this picture makes it look like you’re coming in for a landing. It looks like the very pit of Hell.

Solar closeups are getting better and better these days, and, relative to snapshots of dusty garbage heaps on old asteroids, they always seem to suggest a profound and dynamic malevolence. I know Mr. Golden Sun is our friend, but this picture reminds me of Sauron’s lidless eye. I love the tiny Earth shown to provide a sense of the monstrous scale of the sunspot. Here’s some more good stuff from SPACE.com, complete with labels and arrows indicating where the lovely twists, canals, and hairs can be found. Which is to say BIG HOT APOCALYPTIC twists, canals, and hairs.

Naturally, real scientists need to distance themselves from this kind of emotional response. Even so, sometimes a scientific debate can benefit from a show of emotion. Al Gore is making waves right now by getting people rattled by the case for global warming. But did you know that, our problems aside, the sun has got a nasty case of solar warming? I feel strangely comforted by the fact that something is going wrong somewhere in the solar system, and it’s NOT OUR FAULT.

I have become accustomed to pictures from around the world. Even the lush, lovely, well-taken photos from exotic places.

Here is something rarer and more emotionally immediate: well-recorded sounds from around the world. The Quiet American is a collection of raw and remixed sounds by San Francisco traveler and artist Aaron Ximm. We hear extremely processed sound all the time. Like processed food, it gets a little same-y after a while. I find it very satisfying to listen to the short tracks on the Quiet American for the sonic equivalent of fresh brightly colored vegetables and spices. From Nepal, for example, we have the sounds of the forest (mp3) and of a stream high in the Himalayas. Or maybe you fancy the sounds of a Burmese ox cart? Lovely!

As a big fan of Frank Capra’s Bell Science films Hemo the Magnificent and Unchained Goddess, I have a soft spot in my heart for fifth-grade level instructional films. This goof on that genre is a good one. The set-up is a little long, but the last sequence is worth the wait.

(spotted on Wired.com’s Table of Malcontents)

Have fun making silly signs with the sign generator from Atom Smasher. It’s well implemented and surprisingly entertaining.

Planets don’t look like stars. Their light is strong and steady, unlike the pale twinkling of their starry neighbors. Once you know what to look for, it’s easy enough to spot them. But since they wander around relative to the stars (“planet” literally means wanderer), it’s not always easy to tell one from another.

I often find myself looking at the evening sky and saying “I know that’s a planet, but which one is it?” To answer this question, I built the Sky Clock. It shows where the sun, moon, and five visible planets are situated relative to earth. The inner ring is occupied by the sun, the next is the moon, and third ring contains the planets. Outermost are the constellations of the zodiac, the backdrop against which the planets move. In a sense, this is view is a throwback to a pre-Copernican world: it shows the sun going around the earth. But at the same time, this is the true experience we have as humans standing on this planet. Stargazing is profoundly and inescapably geocentric. To a good first approximation, the sun goes around us, not the other way around.

The result is an accurate representation of where the planets can be found along the ecliptic, which is the great circle the sun traces through the sky on its yearly journey. For the accuracy, I am depending on the ephemerides.com site sponsored by JPL. This tells you where in the sky to find each of the planets. Then I use my rudimentary PHP skills to draw the map. Everything in the brown part of the diagram (roughly speaking) is below your feet. The sun is directly beneath you at midnight. Everything in the blue upper part of the diagram is in the sky, though of course anything that shares the sky with sun can’t be seen. As for the letters in the triangles, E and W do stand for east and west respectively, but N stands not for north but for nadir, while Z is for zenith, these being the lowest and highest apparent parts of a stars daily travel.

UPDATE: Shame on me for not testing before shipping. I didn’t realize that the “transparent” backgrounds on my PNG files (the small planet images) were not in the least transparent on Internet Explorer. I developed it on Firefox, and it looked fine there. However I found a dandy JavaScript fix written by Bob Osola that, on my computer at least, makes it look presentable again on IE. Let me know if it still looks broken on your browser.

Here’s an example of the fun that can be had with an open API:
Relate-a-zon is a game you play with the Amazon catalogue in which you hop from a starting product to a target product through as few as possible intervening stepwise related products. I found it difficult and frustrating (I kept ending up in self-referential cul-de-sacs), but I can see how you can develop a skill for it. As these game hints suggest, it’s more subtle than you might first think.

They supply all the missions right now. What they ought to do is let people create and share missions. For instance, how hard would it be to get from hobbit to Babbitt? Or from humbug to Humbert?

John Singer Sargent once said, “A portrait is a picture with something wrong with the mouth.” You try to make a picture exactly like someone, but something smells “off.” A few days ago I read a nice piece by Clive Thompson about the related concept of Uncanny Valley and computer games.

The Uncanny Valley theory goes like this: suppose you want to render a human face, and you have a magic machine to help you. This machine has a knob on it that goes from “cartoon” to “photo-realistic.” As you turn the knob up toward realistic, the aesthetic effect on the viewer does something surprising. Instead of looking more and more familiar as it gets more photorealistic, at some point it starts to look downright disturbing. It almost looks like a person, but something’s gone wrong. In fact, it resembles a zombie-like abomination. This is the bottom of the Uncanny Valley.

The steep plunge from cute to creepy is something you’d think most game designers would like to avoid, but in fact there are some beautiful (as in awful) examples of it in action in recent games. Look at this, if you dare, and ask yourself how this got into a shipping product. Or maybe they actually want the Mary Smith character to look like a bucktoothed female impersonator doing Cher. If so, they could have had a lot more fun with it. At any rate, this video clip is the gold standard for the Uncanny Valley.

As the Italians say, make it realistic, ma non troppo.

The best visualizations tell a perfectly compelling story without the need for much setup. All you really need to know is that you’re looking at Federal Express flights arriving at Memphis on a stormy day.

Watch the video, and then add your own biological analogy here.