Luboš Motl, late to the party but in fine form once he arrives, nails down the Motl-Connolley connection at seven degrees of separation, in the process reinforcing the wisdom of my previous use of him as the poster child for coarse discourse. I award extra bonus points for style of presentation.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
An update on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (sub. req.):
Josh Frieman’s cosmic vacuum cleaner seems to be working.
Perched on a ridge in the mountains of southern New Mexico, the big Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope spends its nights sucking down big swaths of sky.
In three months last fall, it found 142 Type Ia supernovas— distant exploding stars that are key to understanding the universe’s expansion.
Hunting supernovas is hard work. Previous surveys bagged fewer than a hundred in a good year. But by capitalizing on the Sloan’s unprecedented ability to sweep across and record vast areas of sky quickly and automatically, Frieman and his colleagues hope to fill in big gaps in our understanding of how the universe works.
“We actually are probing more volume of space than any other supernova survey,” said Frieman, an astronomer at the University of Chicago and Fermilab.
With the Sloan, “You can cover a big chunk of sky,” said Jon Holtzman, a New Mexico State University astronomer working on the supernova project.
“Big chunk of sky” might be an understatement to describe what the Sloan has accomplished.
In its first five years of work, the telescope catalogued an astonishing 215 million galaxies and stars. Scientists then determined the distance to a million of those, building the first true three-dimensional map of a big piece of the universe.
With additional funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and others, the project last summer was extended for another three years, giving scientists a crack at using the powerful telescope to answer new questions about the universe.
Frieman and his colleagues are among the beneficiaries, using three-month runs in the fall of 2005, 2006 and 2007 to try to help sort out puzzling questions about how fast the universe is expanding.
“we’ve built a bomb”
Good story this morning (sub. req.) by Leslie Linthicum and Tania Soussan on fire danger in New Mexico:
Fire experts predicted an early and furious fire season in New Mexico and, boy, were they on target.
Already this season, a dozen big grass fires have burned more than 100,000 acres, including a scorcher in Colfax County last week that blackened 26,500 acres.
With a record dry winter following record wet weather last year, it’s no wonder the state is on fire.
“We built up these tall grasses and now we’ve got these hot, hot windy days,” said Joe Whitehead, a rangeland specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Portales.
“Basically, we’ve built a bomb,” he said.
Big time grass fires now, with the threat of a hot forest fire season in a month or two.
Fractal Fumento
Steve Reuland provides useful context for Michael Fumento’s recent discussion of the liberalization of science. Reuland does by actually reading the study Fumento discusses, and finding (and this is not surprising) that it does not say what Fumento claims it says.
The irony here is that Fumento accuses the study’s authors of slicing out data to make a political point. And then Fumento, with breathtaking audacity, commits the precise same sin.
This is not the first time. (Hat tip Tim Lambert for the fractal joke and the link.)
On Life at a “Failing” School
From Nora.
What Should Journalists Do?
Good comments from James Annan that are both spot on and completely useless, I think, regarding what journalists should do with the latest hot results from Science and Nature:
I think the golden rule to remember is that a new item of research, even if it’s appeared in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal, is not in itself a new “truth” about the world. It is only the current opinion of a couple of researchers working in a particular area. It’s always worth bearing in mind that the researchers themselves might change their minds in a few months and even if they don’t, it is quite possible that the rest of the scientific community will decide they are talking nonsense and either criticise or (what is perhaps worse) ignore the study.
The obvious implication is that I should ignore the hot new paper that everyone’s talking about, and wait a couple of years to see how well it holds up in the long run. It would also be in the best interest of the trees if they’d all agree to stay short and didn’t have to waste all that energy on a big long trunk. But as soon as one grows a bit taller, it shades out the others, they die, and only trees with grow-tall genes make it through to the next round.
So everyone’s going to jump on the Bryden paper, unable to resist the chance for a “Europe in Deep Freeze” headline. Or the chance to blame global warming on trees.
It would be helpful to the whole discussion, I think, if the big journals wouldn’t publish splashy papers that contain small results, like the Bryden and methane papers. Those two papers are interesting examples of the problem – interesting and suggestive results with a lot more research needed to flesh out the details. We journalists seem incapable of distinguishing between such papers and the much more broad and solidified results. (Consider this an invitation to you climate science types in the audience to suggest a recent Science or Nature paper that meets this second criterion – or else argue that there really are no such things?)
Water Supplies in Africa
Apropos a long and predictably unproductive comment thread, a new study published on line by Science today:
Using predicted precipitation changes, we calculate that decrease in perennial drainage will significantly affect present surface water access across 25% of Africa by the end of this century.
I don’t want to make too big a deal of this. I think Vörösmarty et al. were right six years ago when they wrote:
(R)ising water demands greatly outweigh greenhouse warming in defining the state of global water systems to 2025. Consideration of direct human impacts on global water supply remains a poorly articulated but potentially important facet of the larger global change question.
Whatever the global climate change component, natural variability on decadal scales along with population growth and movement pose serious problems.
How Dry Our Winter
From the National Weather Service, a pile o’ facts on New Mexico’s record-setting dry winter.
Connolley-Motl Connected!
Over at NewStoat comes word that a William Connolley-Luboš Motl connection has been found: seven degrees of separation to link the pair.