I’d quibble with one or two minor items (primarily around the importance of befriending and/or becoming indispensable to a few key members of the senior faculty) in this otherwise fully superb article on academia and the insane work hours your “mentors” will advise you to undertake even though they, uh, didn’t actually. I will excerpt none of it in the hopes you actually go read it.
Tag: science
Lead, Lead?
Kevin Drum lays out a convincing case that the now-receding crime boom was primarily caused by leaded gasoline (in fact, the pattern repeats itself in country after country: as lead goes out of use in gasoline, crime goes down). Intriguingly, none of the major interest groups seem to care:
Political conservatives want to blame the social upheaval of the ‘60s for the rise in crime that followed. Police unions have reasons for crediting its decline to an increase in the number of cops. Prison guards like the idea that increased incarceration is the answer. Drug warriors want the story to be about drug policy. If the actual answer turns out to be lead poisoning, they all lose a big pillar of support for their pet issue.
Read the whole thing
Note to self: do not release a mole of moles onto the surface of the Earth. Oh, and this is how introductory science, nay, introductory everything should be taught.
Not so much, Neil
“There is an asteroid, discovered in December 2004, called Apophis. Named for the Egyptian god of death and darkness. It was named only after its trajectory was identified to intersect that of Earth… Turns out, in the year 2029, in the month of April… Apophis will come so close to Earth that it will dip below our orbiting communications satellites. And it is the size of the Rose Bowl. It will be the largest, closest thing we have ever observed to come by Earth. The orbit we now have for it is uncertain enough—because these things are hard to measure and hard to get an exact distance for—that we cannot tell you exactly where that trajectory will be. We know it won’t hit Earth, but we know it will be closer than the orbiting satellites. There is a range, a 600-mile zone, called the keyhole. If the asteroid goes through the middle of the keyhole, it will hit the Earth 7 years later. It will hit the Earth 500-kilometres west of Santa Monica. Now, that’s if it goes through the centre [of the keyhole]; if it goes through the centre, it hits the Pacific Ocean, plunges down into the Pacific to a depth of 3 miles, at which point it explodes, cavitating the Pacific in a hole that’s 3 miles wide, three 3 deep. That will send a tsunami wave outward from that location that’s 50 feet high. 5 storeys.”
—
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Revolving & Evolving (via cocknbull)
um.
NASA begs to differ:
Using criteria developed in this research, new measurements possible in 2013 (if not 2011) will likely confirm that in 2036 Apophis will quietly pass more than 49 million km (30.5 million miles; 0.32 AU) from Earth on Easter Sunday of that year (April 13).
Much more at the NASA link.
The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it. The way real science goes is that you come up with lots of ideas, and most of them will be wrong.
Francis Crick, Nobel laureate, and pretty clearly a high percentage of the brains in the team that first described the structure of DNA.
Biology is special that way, [with real success often arriving in mid- or even late-career, after a few false starts and fruitless sidetracks]. It takes years for people to get a feeling for the organism—for how nature actually works. Young people come in all the time knowing a bunch of fancy math. They say, ‘What if it’s like this computational model, this physical problem?’ They’re terrific ideas, but they’re wrong. Nothing works the way you think it should.
David Eagleman, aforementioned graduate student, now running his own lab. Presumably with a few bags of potatoes stashed around there somewhere.
But: yep.
But: yep.
I remember, when he was writing [a computationally modeled neural tissue], he had a sack of raw potatoes under his desk. He would cook a potato in the microwave, put it in a cup, and lean over and bite it while he was typing. It kind of set the tone for my lab for the succeeding decade. It chased away the faint of heart.
Read Montague, recalling his then graduate student David Eagleman and their salad days at Baylor College of Medicine.
I spent many a formative evening which then took the form of seemingly endless years at BCM earning this very same degree. But let’s just say I never saw a sack of potatoes under anyone’s bench. And not because I wasn’t looking.
But: every thesis adviser thinks this way. So you know.
I spent many a formative evening which then took the form of seemingly endless years at BCM earning this very same degree. But let’s just say I never saw a sack of potatoes under anyone’s bench. And not because I wasn’t looking.
But: every thesis adviser thinks this way. So you know.
Two Peanuts Were Walking Down the Straße
Brace yourself for The World’s Funniest Joke:
Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, ‘My friend is dead! What can I do?’ The operator says ‘Calm down. I can help. First let’s make sure he’s dead.’ There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says ‘OK, now what?’
Earthquake 9.0
According to recalibrations of old seismograms by the US Geological Survey (USGS), 11 “megathrust” earthquakes with an 8.5 magnitude or greater occurred worldwide in the twentieth century. Ten of these 11 earthquakes occurred offshore or near a coast, nearly all with tsunami damage. So far in the twenty-first century, five such megathrust earthquakes – with severe tsunami damage in four cases – have occurred offshore.
Proper use of earthquake science advises against an overreaction to the Tohoku disaster, but also spotlights further dangers that policymakers must take into account.
[…]
Aftershock patterns benefitted earthquake forecasting when Ross Stein and his USGS colleagues discovered that the stress increments of past large earthquakes were good predictors of where the next large earthquake would occur. Long after the aftershocks subsided – months, years, or decades after – another earthquake of similar size often broke within the next segment of the fault zone, where stresses had been increased only slightly in relative terms. How time-delayed stress-triggering occurs is a mystery, but it has been documented worldwide.
An irregular series of large, damaging earthquakes shook the North Anatolian Fault in the twentieth century from east toward the west across modern-day Turkey, reaching the Sea of Marmara in 1999 with the Izmit earthquake. Stress increments from Izmit have loaded the fault segment next to Istanbul. The 6.6 magnitude San Fernando earthquake in 1971 loaded the nearby fault that caused the 6.7 Northridge earthquake in 1994. More germane to Japan, the 9.3 Sumatra-Andaman megathrust earthquake in December 2004 loaded the next subduction-zone segment to the south, and this segment generated an 8.6 megathrust event only three months later in March 2005. No prediction can be made today for Japan, but it is safe to forecast a sharply increased probability for a major earthquake on the broad, simple subduction-zone segments both north and south of the Tohoku rupture zone. The segment to the south lies offshore the Tokyo metropolitan area.
Scale and Magnitude
Some accounting matters:
The 9.0 magnitude quake (the fourth-largest recorded since 1900) was caused when the Pacific tectonic plate dove under the North American plate, which shifted Eastern Japan towards North America by about 13 feet. The quake also shifted the earth’s axis by 6.5 inches, shortened the day by 1.6 microseconds, and sank Japan downward by about two feet.
Lemkin 