Author Archives: Frank - Page 2

Times’ Greenland ice sheet blunder

Posted by on September 23, 2011 No comments | 2,256 views

A couple of days ago NewScientist reported in the article «Times Atlas grossly exaggerates Greenland ice loss» that the Times Atlas is claiming that the Greenland ice sheet has shrunk by 15%. This is of course not true as it would have a significant effect on sea level resulting in a 1m rise in levels, which would be quite noticeable many places around the world.

Now that error was not really my point for writing this, you can read all about that in the article, but the point is that immediately the “warming-denialist” trolls come crawling out from underneath their rocks making comments like:

NewScientist Comments

Not surprisingly it is “Martin” and “Jan” here who gets it spectacularly wrong.

Firstly, this claim is not a “global warming pillar” as the claim by Times is clearly an error, and scientists are also pointing this out in the article. Secondly, the satellite surveillance does a lot more than just photograph the extent of the ice sheets. Modern technology is a bit more sophisticated than that. That comment is purely based in ignorance. But that seems to be the trend amongst these people. First they claim that the erroneous data or claim is a pillar of climate science—which it is not as climatologists would point out, then they further claim that global warming cannot be true based on this first misconception. You don’t need to be a rocket-surgeon to spot the logical fallacy here. Recognize it from the creationsists “god of the gaps” argument? A quick google and a read of different reports on this story shows that the vast majority of the politicised denialists argue in this fashion.

Let me enlighten you numbskulls a bit: One of the main pillars of global warming is the actual data showing … wait for it … global warming! It isn’t that tricky. But then we understand these people’s agenda. If you can deny global warming, you can deny the main suspect cause, human activity. If you can, by hiding your head in the sand, deny that we did this, you can continue your current way of life and ignore the environmental impact of your lifestyle. This is ultimately just selfishness, and so incredibly irresponsible.

Living Without Religion

Posted by on September 6, 2011 No comments | 2,062 views

Just had to repost this video from the Center for Inquiry. Awesome!

livingwithoutreligion.org

In the news – Part I

Posted by on September 3, 2011 No comments | 3,372 views

Since I follow a lot of blogs and news-services online, I thought I’d share some of the better posts from time to time. So here goes part I.

Fan Service: On Losing Patience for Women Kissing
DS9 KissTalking about the Star Trek Deep Space Nine (one of my favourite TV-series) episode Rejoined where a female main character kisses another woman. These characters are of a race called Trill, who live in a symbiosis with a humanoid host. The story here goes that they used to be married in an earlier host or “life” and now meet again. This was a setting that allowed for a controversial scene at the time (1995)—two women kissing on TV. The blogpost makes some reflections on the topic.
Reposted from Skepchick.

Gender Gap Vanishes in Female-Empowered Cultures
Another topic that I have read a bit about lately … and watched a few BBC documentaries on. The biological difference between the brain of men and women. Interesting research showing that the differences may be even less “biological” than we’d think.
Reposted from Skepchick.

Quantum computer chips pass key milestones
So for a technology update. The article describes a new design based on superconducting electrical circuits as a competitor to current set-ups using photons or ions.
From NewScientist Physics & Math.

University of Oslo 200 years

Posted by on September 2, 2011 No comments | 2,281 views

Yesterday my university, the University of Oslo, celebrated its 200 year anniversary …

The University of Oslo has played a pivotal role in many of the major changes in Norway over the last 200 years. How the UiO has changed Norway

The day started—for me at least—with this years Kristine Bonnevie Lecture on Evolutionary Biology, which this year featured an introduction by Richard Dawkins on the importance of communicating science. He made a very inspired and passionate talk on how to communicate science to the public, something he is very good at himself. He also went a bit Feynman on us, describing the beauty and poetry of science. Which obviously is a good thing. Then followed a talk by Elizabeth Hadly who spoke about climate change and its effect on mammals, also a very good talk which I unfortunately missed the middle of due to losing the streaming feed and having to get in to the overcrowded auditorium. The lectures ended with a panel debate and Q&A with the two speakers and the physicist Jim Al-Khalili. The topic was again communicating science, and a lot of good questioned were asked and skilfully answered by the panel.

Also, Dawkins was awarded a honorary doctorate by the faculty of mathematics and science on Thursday together with a number of other people. Full list here (in Norwegian)..

Then followed one party after the other, and an outdoor concert with the Norwegian band “bigbang” and a few other artists. A long and good day :)

CEES LecturesPhoto from the Q&A session at the lectures. In the photo the panel from the left: Jim Al-Khalili, Richard Dawkins and Elizabeth Hadly.

UiO 200Photo taken at the concert later the same evening.

No new physics … yet

Posted by on August 30, 2011 2 comments | 2,564 views

LHCI have left the field of particle physics for computational physics (quantum mechanics in many-particle systems), but I still follow what happens at CERN and the LHC. Especially the blog Résonaances is a good source for updates.

Latest news is that the LHCb detector has not detected any anomaly in the Bs-Bsbar mixing. Bs-mesons are heavy mesons made up of a bottom-quark and a strange-quark. One matter and the other one anti-matter (the only possible way to combine two quarks due to colour-charge restrictions). These mesons however will oscillate between two states. Essentially the quarks swap who is the matter and who is the anti-matter particle through an exchange of virtual top-quarks (mostly) and W-bosons. Current physics predicts that this mixing violates conservation of charge/parity (CP), however so-called new physics—essentially what the LHC was built to find—predicts a larger violation. This has not been found. Which is disappointing. Why the need to find “new physics”? Well, because the Standard Model is incomplete. It doesn’t explain all the phenomena we observe—like dark matter for instance—so we need to figure out what’s missing from the theory.

This is also of course the case for the infamous Higgs. The last particle predicted by the Standard Model that not yet has been discovered. Not that it is far behind the rest. The top-quark wasn’t confirmed until 1995.

The problem with the Higgs is that the theoretical model (electroweak theory) of the Higgs has two unknown parameters. For this reason we don’t quite know where to find the Higgs (essentially how heavy it is). However we have a fairly good idea of how it will behave depending on how heavy it is, so we can look for signs of its presence along the mass axis in the data. The other challenge is that the Higgs resonance is in most cases so weak that it drowns in background “noise” from other more common processes. Or in other words. Many other particles do the same thing as the Higgs. Like the Z-boson. So how do you tell which did what? Well, that is the challenge.

The latest news from ATLAS and CMS is that they have excluded the Higgs from 145 to 466 GeV. The old exclusion was a lower bound of 115 GeV from back when the LEP accelerator was running at CERN and from Tevatron in the US. Tevatron also gave us an exclusion range in the 150-ish to just over 180 GeV range. The new limits now leaves us with the 115-145 GeV window. The Higgs is running out of places to hide … if it exists at all.

The relevant posts from Résonaances: