Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

I apologize in advance that this is going to be one of those instances of the blogosphere acting as an echo chamber, but I must at least comment on President George W Bush's latest statements that the so-called ideas of the crackpot crypto-creationist Intelligent Design community should be taught alongside evolution in American schools.

Let me also use this opportunity to hurl insults and invective at investor and "futurist" George Gilder who should be blacklisted for siding with the Intelligent Design crackpots.

There are plenty of worthwhile websites and books recounting the myriad reasons why Intelligent Design is an utterly baseless, unscientific, and just plain wrong piece of crackpot pseudoscience, and why every single one of its criticisms of evolution are either wrong or irrelevant.

Yes, everyone is entitled to an opinion. But not all opinions are equally worthy: expertise counts.

As much as I miss Today and most of BBC Radio 3 (especially Late Junction and Andy Kershaw) when I'm away, it's always a joy to be able to listen to National Public Radio back in the US (it's just not the same streamed over the net).

Especially pleasurable this trip was rediscovering Vin Scelsa's Idiot's delight on WFUV, one of the great public radio music stations in the US (or at least in the New York area). Last week, he interviewed Daniel Wolff, author of 4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land, a paean (or an elegy, really) to that New Jersey seaside town, most famous nowadays as Bruce Springsteen's early haunt, but whose musical history also includes concerts by Frank Sinatra and riots sparked by a performance by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers in the early days of rock 'n' roll.

On the same day the cops are crawling all over London (and Oxford, actually), the US State Department is warning expats like me "to maintain a high level of vigilance, take appropriate steps to increase their security awareness, and exercise caution in public places or while using public transportation. U.S. citizens are also advised to fully cooperate with British authorities if and as needed while they continue their investigations."

And don't forget that eternal vigilance is the price of what passes for liberty nowadays:

U.S. citizens are reminded of the potential for further terrorist actions against U.S. citizens abroad. Terrorists do not distinguish between official and civilian targets. Terrorist actions may include bombings, hijackings, hostage taking, kidnappings and assassinations. Increased security at official U.S. facilities may lead terrorists and their sympathizers to seek softer targets such as public transportation, residential areas and apartment complexes, and public areas where people congregate including restaurants, hotels, clubs, and shopping areas. U.S. citizens are advised to immediately report any unusual or suspicious activity in the United Kingdom to the police or the U.S. Embassy in London.

Yes, it's still "the war on terror", not just the "global struggle against violent extremism"!

A couple of weeks ago, my colleagues in the Boomerang Collaboration, spread out over the US, Italy, Canada, France and the UK, released five papers analyzing the data from the latest flight of the Boomerang instrument, over Antarctica in January 2003 (check this out for information from my fellow Boomerangers on what it's like down near the South Pole).

Boomerang is an experiment which measures the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB (there are some tutorials on the physics behind the CMB here, here and here). Boomerang, along with the Maxima experiment (with which I'm also fortunate to be involved) produced the first high-resolution maps of the CMB back in 2000, measuring the tiny -- one part in 100,000 -- fluctuations around the mean temperature of about 2.72 degrees above absolute zero. The pattern of these fluctuations on the sky lets us measure the geometry of the Universe (which is equivalent to asking the question, What happens to light rays that start off parallel to one another? Do they converge, in which case the universe is said to be "closed" -- curved like a ball? Do they diverge, in which case the universe is "open" -- curved like a saddle, or a Pringle's potato chip? Or, do they stay parallel, making the universe flat? In 2000, these experiments proved what had already been surmised -- the Universe is indeed flat, so parallel lines are indeed parallel forever. Since then, experiments have measured the CMB at higher and higher resolution and accuracy, and allowed us to understand even more about the origins of the Universe.

So why is our new data so exciting? First, we've made some of the most sensitive measurements of the CMB ever made -- similar to our 2000 measurements, but with error bars many times smaller.

Second, and even more exciting, we've measured the polarization of the CMB. In addition to the CMB temperature measured by the 2000 experiments, the CMB is also polarized, which means that the CMB photons tend to point more in some direction on the sky than others. This reflects some of the same properties of the Universe as the temperature, but is a completely independent (and much harder!) measurement. Although the CMB polarization has been detected by the DASI, CBI and CAPMAP experiments, these new results are the full maps of the CMB polarization (although I must disclose that they are still mostly noise; we can only see the cosmic signal by taking averages).

Links to the Boomerang papers here, and on astro-ph:

• The Instrument and Maps
• Temperature power Spectrum
• Polarization Power Spectrum
• The Temperature/Polarization Cross Power Spectrum
• Cosmological Parameters

Over the next few months, stay tuned for more CMB temperature and polarization data from Maxipol, ACBAR, WMAP and more!

Like 74 other bloggers, I was fortunate enough to receive a free sample of Stormhoek Wine, and I was looking forward to finally bringing it home for a taste.

Unfortunately, due to the confluence of my own forgetfulness and the incompetence and/or larcenous tendencies of an unknown party, the bottle never made it home. I left it, safely (or so I thought) bundled inside a knapsack on the luggage rack during my train journey from Paddington to Oxford. Arriving, I grabbed my work-bag with my laptop and various papers along with a sack of groceries. Within about 30 seconds of leaving the station I had recognized a nagging feeling: I had left the wine on the train, already departed from the station. So I trudged to the Lost Property office, gave them all of the information, and fully expected to have the wine (and the nice bag it was in!) back the next day.

No such luck. It didn't make it back to Oxford station. So they told me to contact First Great Western Link trains, who (it turns out) had just changed the number of their Lost Property office. Eventually, in the event, they told me to contact Central Trains, responsible for Worcester Station, the final destination of the train. No luck there, either. But maybe it's back in Paddington? So I left a message (that's all you can do) at Paddington's Lost Property office. Still no satisfaction.

So what happened? It could have been taken by a fellow passenger -- but it would be a pretty bold move. It could have been confiscated by one of the train companies and disposed of with extreme prejudice -- not entirely unlikely in these times when an unknown knapsack might arouse a great deal of suspicion (especially one with a strange styrofoam cylinder inside!). Or -- and I admit with with all respect and apologies to the vast majority of people working the rails that I think this a likely possibility -- it was taken by someone emptying the trains and not given in to the Lost Property office.

Finally, then, my apologies to Hugh and Stormhoek who went through a lot of trouble and expense to get me my bottle, only for me to lose it. I look forward to actually paying for a bottle and trying it.

(On a related note, here's a story on a company using science to take some of the mystery out of wine.)

The ΛCDM Model requires two pieces of unknown physics. One is 'Λ' and the other is 'CDM'

-Tom Shanks, at "Open Questions in Cosmology", a meeting being held at the Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik in Garching, Germany.

I'll explain later.

I've already gone on and on about arxiv.org and the revolution in scientific publishing that it has begun in fields like cosmology: public access to essentially all recent research to anyone with an internet connection. Last year, they added RSS (aka "feeds") -- ahead of the curve on the latest internet buzz -- making it faster and easier to access the latest submissions. Now, they've added “trackbacks” which enables the arxiv to keep track of references to individual papers in blogs or other sites (although it only seems to be available on the main US site, and not the international mirrors). This is yet another step on the way towards using the internet not just to store our papers, but to actually facilitate scientific discussion. Usually, trackbacks go in hand with comments, but perhaps those are better handled in dedicated forums like CosmoCoffee and Physics Comments rather than the inevitable free-for-all that would result by hosting them right at the arxiv.

(Actually, I've just noticed that this has been in place for a while, at least: my blogging software has been automatically “pinging” the arxiv since this post and this one last month.)

Also, I've added yet another bit of internet buzz to this blog -- the “tags” you can see below. These are just a set of keywords that are indexed by sites like Technorati in the hopes of creating a classification scheme (a “folksonomy”) from the ground up, rather than imposing one from on high, like the Dewey Decimal System or Yahoo's Web Directory which predated internet search engines. Instead of “cleaving nature at the joints” (everyone's favorite quote when discussing this) we just nudge everything into its own heap.

Update: Mac users who want to stay up-to-date with the arxiv can play with this “dashboard widget” which will keep the current offerings right on your desktop.

Thanks to the fine blog-reading folks at Orbital Wines, the owners of Stormhoek Wine in South Africa, the sad story of my missing wine was noticed -- and the bottle has been replaced! (Alas, without a cool personalized label, but I think I deserve some penalty for my forgetfulness.) I look forward to imbibing this fine bottle of Sauvignon Blanc as soon as I'm back from my next road trip... If it lives up to the comparisons with Cloudy Bay, (famous for its vegetal scent, shading almost to the infamous “pipi du chat”) it should be very nice indeed.

They've also offered me more free wine in recompense for some lectures on astrophysics. Lush that I am, I'm likely to accept... Come to think of it, I can invite them to a meeting I'm helping organize in Durban, South Africa, next year. Hmmmm....

Update: I'm a case study for Hugh's attempts at wine marketing. Remember, markets are conversations (or, drunken parties in this case?).