More coccolithophores!

This follows up on yesterday's post. Only this time, the photo is a little closer to home.

(from Emiliania Huxleyi's home page)

When scientists follow cobblers

On the Wikipedia site for goodness of fit

Goodness-of-fit actually refers to the degree to which a shoe conforms to the wearers foot. The term was co-opted by academicians in the early twentieth century, and is used to describe the the degree to which you can force your preconcieved notions to be upheld by the results of your statistical tests (aka. the anti apriori approach).

A world within a world

This shot was taken by a NASA satellite.

It, along with probably thousands of fascinating images, are available at NASA's EarthObservatory site. Each shot has a great explanation of what it is you're looking at.

Personally, I love the ones like this. Swirls within the ocean visualized by phytoplankton. Undersatnding the dynamics is complicated because the lifespan of the eddies is different from the lifespan of the phytoplankton that make them dramatically visible. Nonetheless, you can see the ocean being "stirred" (I can trace lines in and around the swirls) as well as the ocean being "mixed" (where did that swirl go, anyway?) You will see the same thing if you stir your coffee and then put milk in it.

Incidently, these phytoplankton are probably a specific kind called coccolithophores and more specifically, Emeliania Huxleyi. This is what they look like under the microscope:

Now here is where things get kind of fascinating, I think. The top figure has a scale bar 10 kilometres. The bottom one has a scale of microns. There are 1 billion microns in a kilometre.
--
1 billion! To put that number in perspective, if you had 1 billion pennies, you'd need more than forty 40-foot containers to store them. So think of how many of these little guys must be in that picture.

Also, those little plates on the the coccoloilthophore are called coccoliths. They are made of calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) and, to make a long story short, it is thought that the export of the their shells into the sediments is a way to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere. So if the ocean is going to be the vector by which carbon dioxide is removed from our atmosphere, it is possible that we'll need to count on our friends in the satellite photo to do the dirty work.

busy

Sorry it's been quiet for the last few days...it'll probably stay like that this week. I'm hunkered down for a little while. After another realization, it looks like I'm now turning this into a review paper and a methods paper (but still one paper).

Translation: Too much work, too little time.

(picture borrowed from PhD Comics)

Monolithic actions

This is too funny. An emeritus scientist at the Geological Survey of Canada was apparently dismissed (but quickly reinstated) because he felt it was stupid that "Canada’s New Government" should replace "Government of Canada" in official correspondence. Somewhat embarrassing that something this ridiculous has been published in Harper's.

(Via Rick Mercer's Blog.)

A stirring thought

So, after that last post, I thought I should give something a little lighter.

I can't remember where exactly I found this image (somewhere on the NASA site, I think), but it is absolutely phenomenal.
There are a lot of neat things to point out:

First off, what are all those colours in the ocean?
That's an estimate of how much chlorophyll (and kind of how much phytoplankton) are present. Based on the colour of the ocean viewed from space, some smart people have come up with ways to estimate the ocean's chlorophyll content.

See that yellowish oval south of the Bay of Fundy and east of Cape Cod?
That's Georges Bank. Due to some very neat physics that I won't get into, the waters there get well mixed and trapped over the bank. This results in a productive hot spot seen in this image.

See those grey swirls just off the Labrador coast?
I'm not positive on that one but I think that's ice! Ice being stirred and sheared. If you zoom in, it looks amazingly similar to those colours in the ocean. (I remember once I got an exam question that said nothing more than "Ice is a metamorphic rock. Explain." I wish I had this picture.)

See that donut-looking lake in the middle of Quebec?
If I remember correctly, that's from a meteor impact. The middle rebounded but edges were depressed enough to make that lake.

See the clouds making a ring just east of Newfoundland?
That's a low pressure system. You can tell because the "spinning" is in a counter-clockwise direction which, in the northern hemisphere, means a low pressure system.

Okay, I could keep going here, and maybe I will later on, but that's it for now. I just think this image is very cool.

An uncertain future

I'm not going to write too much about this, because it can easily become too emotional of a topic. But to keep things short, here's what's been occupying my thoughts.
The NY Times
The Daily Star
Rampurple
From Beirut to the Beltway

And to think that less than two years ago, the country felt more hope than it probably has in the last 30 years. It saddens me to think that it went from this

to this


Well, I guess it's time for me to instead start thinking about this:

Bean-counting the State of the Union Address

As you may know, Bush gave his State of the Union Address yesterday. It took 67 minutes. Out of curiosity, I Perled the manuscript to death to find out what the key points were:

Times that

terror, terrorism, or terrorist were mentioned: 22

Al Qaeda was mentioned: 8

Saddam Hussein was mentioned: 19

Iraq or Iraqi were mentioned: 22

Iran was mentioned: 3

North Korea was mentioned: 7

China was mentioned: 1

Russia was mentioned: 1

America or American was mentioned: 59

war was mentioned: 17

economy or economic were mentioned: 13

congress was mentioned: 14

environment was mentioned: 4

medicare was mentioned: 5

God was mentioned: 4

Bush paused for applause: 77

Bienvenida a Tijuana

So it appears as though currupt police officers in Tijuana have forced a rather unusual situation:

President Felipe Calderon sent 3,300 soldiers and federal police to Tijuana last week to hunt down drug gangs. The soldiers swept police stations and took officers' guns for inspection on Thursday amid allegations that some officers supported smugglers who traffic drugs into the U.S.

That was 3 weeks ago, and the officers still have not had their guns returned. One effect of this move has been that police have been receiving death threats from local thugs. They've been travelling either with the army as their escorts or in large numbers for protection. In search of a reasonable solution, it seems that the Tijuana police department, some 2,000 strong, have issued a total of 60 slingshots to their officers...

!Aye Caramba!

Win your own plane

This offer comes from the same company that brings you Ivana Trump's La Residence in downtown Beirut, which, by the way, looks like this:
All you need to do is buy property in Dubai.

(via rampurple)

Priorities

Overheard while watching the Patriots-Colts game last night...

To me, recording a live football game is like getting someone else to impregnate your wife.

Notable Quotable

Isaac Asimov once claimed,

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'

I stumbled upon one of those moments on Friday, which ends up offering an alternate title for today's post: why I'm spending my weekend rewriting a series of predictive models that I built over the last 3 months

The speed of light isn't really that constant

Okay, now this hit me like a sack of wheat. Somewhere, a long time ago it was ingrained in me that the speed of light is 300,000 kilometres per second. Einstein's theory of relativity is based on the concept that nothing goes faster than light. Once you convince yourself of that, you're off into the world of relativistic physics and you're almost ready to program satellites that need to be sent to Jupiter and beyond. You've bought into the concept that light always travels at the speed of light and that nothing can go faster than the speed of light.

So. I just learned that there are people out there that have been halting light. Now while I concede that you are always taught that 300,000 km/sec is the speed of light in a vacuum, and that it is slightly different in different media (hence Snell's Law), it is still pretty trippy to think that in certain media it is slowed to a snails pace. (Can you imagine light going at under 40 miles per hour? You could pass it on the highway...C'mon light! Step on it or get out of the passing lane!)

The application of this concept is that if you can harness light, you can essentially label atoms for microseconds which is apparently long enough for the information to be used as a quantum microchip. If this ever falls into practice, it would be like handing a calculator to a guy trying to calculate the squareroot of 23409 on an abacus.

...

Oh no, I think I'm experiencing a majorly nerdy geek bomb...

Snow Driving

So the west coast has been hit by some bad snow storms lately, creating havoc among drivers. This video taken from a balcony in Portland shows you how to play billiards with your car on an icy hill:


And, on a related note, this one goes out to Templeton and Lil' Lightnin', for their little fling in the snow last year (their version was a little more successful than what transpires in this video):

What happens when you pluck the ocean?

Have you ever wondered why A440 sounds different on a piano compared to a violin? And then different again on a flute? Well, the short answer seems awfully simple and almost stupid: it's because the instruments make different sounds.

Anybody who has ever played a violin or a guitar or any other string instrument has probably noticed that there are two main things that affect what note comes off a string when you pluck it: the string length and the string thickness. When you pluck the string, the sound you get is due to how the string vibrates, and then how that vibration resonates within the instrument. Most of what you hear is the pitch of the note you plucked. But the richness of the tone of the instrument, that stuff that makes the violin sound different from the guitar, is due to all the other sounds that also resonate.

The exact physics of that difference in sound becomes very complicated very quickly. For example, most violins look more or less the same, but can sound drastically different from one another. It is because of subtle differences that every violin sounds different. Science describes these differences using tools called eigenvalues and eigenvectors. If you took first year Algebra in university you were probably exposed to these things, and you probably hated them.

In a nutshell, the reason instruments sound different from one another is because when you play a note, a whole bunch of other sound waves (lets call them modes) are also emitted from the instrument when it resonates. Which other sound waves (modes) are excited, and how loud they are relative to one another, is what makes a piano sound different from a squealing toddler. As luck should have it, these modes must obey the rules of some specific mathematical equation. Solving the equation may be quite simple for something like a drum, but can get very complicated for something like a violin. This is because the equation takes into account the shape of the object and its composition (e.g. if it is made of plastic or wood or crystal). Not just any random mode will satisfy the equation, only very specific ones do. These very specific modes are called eigenvectors and each one has an eigenvalue associated with it.

If you ever saw the movie the Red Violin, you might remember scenes where million-dollar isntruments are being tested with equipment resembling oscilloscopes. The scientists there would basically be examining how the instrument resonated, or in science-babble they would be determining what its eigenvectors were.

Q: So why are you writing all this, who cares, and what does it have to do with the ocean?

Well, often when people ask me what I do, I have a hard time explaining it. On the bus home yesterday I came up with an analogy to plucking strings on an instrument. Lately I've been fitting my ocean data to the eigenvectors of the Saint Lawrence Estuary near Tadoussac. You see, the tides "pluck" the ocean at specific frequencies, but then physics causes all these other waves to resonate as well. The speed and shape of the resonated waves are governed by the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the water column, constrained by Newton's second law and the assumption that matter is not created or destroyed. By knowing which eigenvectors to look for, I've been trying to find specific waves in my data, separate them from everything else in my data, and then figure out which bloody direction they're going.

Will Moore's Law Be Broken?

Found on iTWire (via Slashdot):

Nano-scale architecture developed in the research labs of Hewlett-Packard could beat Moore's Law and advance the progress of of microprocessor development three generations in one hit. The new architecture uses a design technique that will enable chip makers to pack eight times as many transistors as is currently possible.

From my basic understanding, Moore's Law is an empirical relationship showing the number of transistors within a state-of-the-art computer chip (which is what controls how fast your computer is) doubles every two years. Hence, if you bought your computer two years ago, the new computers are twice as fast. If this report is true, we'll be getting an unexpected 6-year jump in computer speed...

Time for a Coffee Break

I just spent two minutes looking for my coffee mug. When I finally found it, it was about two inches from my keyboard, upon which I have been typing for the last two and a half hours. It was sitting where it always sits, it was in plain sight, and there was nothing else around it to clutter my vision or camouflage it.

Now I just hope I can find the coffee pot.

Well, if you want my opinion...

Zogby International has released results of a recent poll it took in Lebanon. The poll examines, among other things, opinions of the recent war between Hizbullah and Israel. (A PDF of the results are here.) Perhaps not surprisingly, the results show divisions of opinion along religious lines.

Who was the big winner?
Almost all major groups felt Hizbullah had won the war. A large proportion of the Shiite population felt the Lebanese people won the war. Only the Christian demographic, who's opinion was essentially split equally, felt Israel won the war.

Who was the big loser?
According to the Shiites, it was Israel. According to everyone else, it was the Lebanese people.

Post-war attitude towards Hizbullah
The Shiite population has a more positive view, everyone else has a more negative view.

The poll also asked about the general situation between Israel and the Palestinians, the war in Iraq, and Iran. (via Abu Aardvark.)

On a note related to the recent Hizbollah-Israel conflict, it seems Israel is judging that it lost the conflict. The IDF cheif has stepped down and there are calls for the resignation of the prime minister and the defence minister.

Personally, I do not see any clear winner and I feel the Lebanese people were the real losers. Huh, that's what the poll predicts I would think...

The Inconvenient Truth

Last night, I finally got around to watching An Inconvenient Truth. I have to admit that I had not been expecting it to be so good. Gore does an absolutely phenomenal job of taking the key points regarding the science of climate change, and distilling the information down to a form that is very easy to understand - even intuitive. Sure, there's some politcal and personal commentary, but that's not the meat of the presentation. None of global warming issues he discusses is really on flimsy scientific ground. He doesn't always give you the "how we know" but most of the time he does. If you have not yet seen this movie, you should.

Amazing Rescue

Wow!

Some quick thoughts:

Never give up (as the searcher or the searchee). Attitude is everything in these scenarios. Chances are that if this woman had given up, she would not have been found alive.

Lost people almost always travel further than you intuitively expect. For that reason, proper SAR techniques (which are used in surprisingly few places) will use past statistics to allocate search resources.

It's always an emergency, even after 3 weeks. Though she was in decent shape when the brothers came across her, she was severely hypothermic when the rescuers got to her. It's probably a good thing that the rescuers flew in as soon as they could.

somewhat disconcerting...

So, maybe everyone already knows this, but I just found out. I was thinking a little about climate change, and the common perceptions and misperceptions about it. With that in mind, I thought I'd see what information is immediately available...and entered "climate change" in google.ca, then hit "I feel lucky". The top hit is the Government of Canada site which I've copied and pasted in its entirety right here:
Classy, eh? The best part, if you look at the fine print at the bottom, is that this page has been like this since June! I guess we should just avoid talking about the elephant in the room.

legit?

Thank you xkcd.

What's black and white all over?

So you know that riddle, why don't polar bears eat penguins? (If you don't know the answer, I'll leave it for you to solve. But below are a few hints...)

In today's Guardian, there is an article about these guys who are trying to ski across Antarctica. It's an interesting adventure story type deal, and the protagonists seem to fit the stereotype, even having an "Ovary Award".

But I digress...

Somewhere near the end of the article, is a little blurb about how this is not a purely selfish endeavour.

The team ... has spent time scouring the horizons for penguin colonies. If penguin numbers are great enough, the continent may have enough natural food to support a limited number of polar bears in an ambitious relocation programme to save the Arctic bears from the perils of climate change.

Okay, so a couple of points...

• Don'tcha think that maybe qualified bird spotters who can quantify what they are seeing should do this job?
  
• Am I the only one that feels that, you know, since we're just about done screwing up the polar bear's habitat, maybe we shouldn't just accelerate our meddling with the antarctic ecosystem?
  

I mean seriously...do these people know anything about the antarctic? Did they research penguins at all? Maybe they should go see March of the Penguins, and imagine a Polar Bear stumbling upon that colony of emperor penguins balancing their eggs on their feet during their over-wintering...

The kid's got moves

Man, back when I was 13, I barely had a wrist shot...



(via my friend Ross)

Abstract Message

Lately, I've been listing to music I haven't heard in a long time. Today is an example of that. I've been taking in music from Q-Burns Abstract Message. During most of the time I spent writing code for my Masters thesis, I also listened to Q-Burns Abstract Message. I could have a CD on repeat for 6 hours and not notice the time go by. Several of my roommates started to put his music on when they were doing all-night projects in their architecture program. It's that kind of rave-like D.J. music that makes time pass quickly while somehow helping you zone into whatever you're doing.

Today is another coding day, and I felt like seeing what Mr. Burns is up to these days...

It's different from what he was pumping out in 1999, but it still good background music if you're deep in computer code.

So....Mabel, huh?

Mhmmm. Maybe I should explain.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, there is point at a party when Gatsby meets two women that are already in conversation. The reader is priviledged to this segment of their gossip:

"So I says to Mabel, I says... I'll continue this later."

Gatsby and one woman have a quick back and forth and Gatsby leaves. As he leaves, the ladies' conversation starts up where it left off:

"So I says to Mabel, I says..."

But that's all that is known.

Then, not much of consequence happened for seventy years. But then...in a Simpson's Episode, the same dialogue is shared by Bart and Lisa, where Homer sits in for Gatsby.

Then somewhere along a long and twisted road, Mabel was born.