"Tsunami - Caught on Camera"

On the morning of Sunday December 26, 2004, a 9.1 to 9.3 magnitude earthquake erupted on the sea floor off Sumatra, Indonesia.  It was the third largest earthquake ever measured. A massive tidal wave formed, flooding the cities of Bandeh Aceh, Indonesia, and Phuket, Thailand, numerous islands and resort areas along the Thai coast, and devastated the east coasts of India and Sri Lanka, among many other places. Over 225,000 people were killed (and more than a million displaced); it was the deadliest tsunami ever recorded. By comparison, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan killed about 16,000.

Below is the first part of an eight part series on YouTube that tells the story of the tsunami and those who went through it, mostly through survivors and video they took.

 
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

"I am a Job Creator: This is the Country I Want"

On September 29 Steven Pearlstein, a Pulitzer Prize columnist at the Washington Post, published a satirical manifesto of the entitled, called "I am a job creator: A manifesto for the entitled." It's great; in addition to the link above I've taken the liberty of reprinting it below the break since it accurately portrays the beliefs of the self annointed "highly entitled," of whom I personally know many.

And yet not all highly successful businessmen -- or highly successful people -- fall into this mode. James Kwak, who started the software company Guideware Software used by the insurance industry, made a lot of money, and then got a law degree and now teaches law (he also has a Ph.D. and runs the influential economics blog The Baseline Scenario with Simon Johnson, an economist who holds an endowed chair at MIT), wrote a reply of sorts in The Atlantic entitled I am a Job Creator: This is the Country I Want. It's worth quoting -- hell it's worth reading in full:

The 1927 Solvay Conference

Click on the photo to enlarge. I have no idea where I first saw this.

The Solvay Conference in 1927 was the fifth in a series that continues to this day, meeting every three years on a specific topic. Seventeen of the 1927 attendees won Nobel prizes before or after the conference -- Marie Skłodowska-Curie, of course, won twice. This was the conference where the Bohr-Einstein debates began.

Today, October 7, 2012, is, fittingly enough, Niels Bohr's 127 birthday. This month is also the 85th anniversary of the 1927 Solvay Conference. From the pictures it looks ages ago; it wasn't.

The first Solvay conference was held in 1911 in Belgium on invitation from Ernest Solvay, who founded the conference. It's subject was "The theory of radiation and the quanta," a subject that I think it's fair to say remained unsolved. Below the break a photo.

"Mr. Taxi" (for a Saturday Night)

Carved Statues by Morgan Herrin

Morgan Herrin is an artist who carves incredible large scale statues out of wood using, as his choice of material, construction grade 2x4s that are bonded together. An article on him a few years ago provided some background:

While a graduate student at Ohio State University, he went to Rome, where he was surrounded by sculpture that looked like people, not abstractions. Until then, he’d worked with polystyrene foam, making pieces that resembled more permanent, solid materials. Since he was a carpenter, a transition to making figures from wood seemed natural enough.

His material is two-by-fours purchased from a hardware store or lumberyard. “It’s almost a growing thing depending on the conditions, and it kind of has a mind of its own,” Herrin muses. “Especially pine. It’s important to let that happen, to let the material do what it wants.”

I am, frankly, a little in the dark as to how his sculptures are letting pine do what it wants. In any regard, his work is incredible and unusual. Images of his pieces can be seen at the Ada Gallery website (scroll down on his page, the lower images are linked, which is odd) and at Booooooom (where I first saw his work), among other sites that all contain redundant photos of a few pieces.

Useful Charts

Useful Charts is a website of, well, useful charts. The charts tend to be table heavy and not so strong on design (but not so bad, either), but there are still a ton of useful, interesting charts here, particularly on history, English, psychology, astronomy (well, some) and pop sci-fi (but hard science, mathematics, economics, and law ... not so much).

The charts creator is Matt Baker, who has a Google+ account with even more charts (many from others), and a blog with even more charts (even more from others).  On the whole a really great source for graphical displays of information.

4' 10" (148 cms) Basketball Player "Mani Love"

This is Jamani "Mani Love" Swanson:

Beautiful Micrographs from Rob Kessler

As shown on his website, an article at Insight Magazine (pdf but with lovely large images), Design Boom (nice scrollable images), and Faith is Torment (a nice art blog), a series of beutiful micrographic images by artist Rob Kessler (who is principally a ceramicist, though I hesitate to label him) and, of course, the scientists who initially prepared the images.

Kessler's work is to colorize the images -- he refers to them as "re-mastered using subtle washes and layers of colour," though I no clue what that means.  I assume he uses photoshop and doesn't tint negatives. The images are electron microscope images, so they are black and white digital images -- electron microscopes can't photograph in color because they do not detect photons, of course. All of the coloring is Kessler's idea of what makes them beautiful and strong images, as well as partly reflecting anticipated natural colors. The samples are "spluttered in gold" according to Kessler before being imaged.

"Cell Biology Animation"

This is a very cool, awesome, wonderful, beautiful, informative, smart website that contains user guided "animations" on cellular processes. It's a short basic cell biology class in a nutshell. There are 21 animations in all, running from amino acids through viruses, and they are available in seven languages. A free tour de force.

The Search for the Higgs Boson

Scientific American has a great article this month on the last days of the search for the Higgs boson, which as everyone not living under a rock which is not also in the Alps on the French-Swiss border knows, likely has been found. The article describes the interesting final lead-up and experimental steps to the discovery.

Only two of the seven detectors at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN are dedicated to this task, the ATLAS and the CMS, which are located on opposite sides of the LHC's large 26.7 kilometer (16.6 mile) loop. In October both detectors showed matching preliminary positive results. The evidence, though, was below the 5σ (1 in 3 million) threshold to claim a discovery. (σ is a standard deviation; 5σ is a very very large deviation from the norm and used to prevent treating an accidental result as a discovery.) In June 2012 new data was compiled with the previous data, and, as finally released on July 4, showed "discoveries" from both the ATLAS and CMS detectors/experiments.  The particle detected has a consistent high mass-energy of ~125 gigaelectronvolt, which is about 133 times heavier than the mass of a proton. Nonetheless, even this data is not complete enough to confirm that the new particle has all of the predicted effects of the Higgs boson, though it's cautiously believed that will bear out.

The Ceramics of Avital Sheffer

Avital Sheffer is an Israeli born Australian ceramic artist whose work has beautiful Islamic inspired forms and surface decoration (well, she calls it "middle eastern" but it's transparently Islamic). Over time her work has become less figurative than her earlier work (but not necessarily less suggestive, as at right) and more lovely.

Sheffer is apparently a handbuilder, which, of course, is fine as far as it goes, yet has always struck me as a very time intensive way to make a pot. Much of her work looks, to my biased eye, like it could be achieved by starting on the wheel or as slab built. Whatever -- her craftsmanship is still stunning.

Not a Positive Review

From a New York Observer review of Guy Fieri's new restaurant in Times Square, Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar:

But if you are like the majority of the patrons, you’ll start with something like the Pepperoni Mozzarella Stix with Marinara ($11.95) or, from the Ain’t No Thing Butta Chicken Wing section, “sweet and sticky firecracker” wings ($13.50), which constitute a fate not even the most embittered wolf could ever wish upon a hen. You’ll quickly move on to the heartier fare, perhaps the Sangria Glazed Shrimp ($24.95), which is inedible, or Guy’s Big Bite Burger and Rojo Ring, made with Pat LaFrieda beef, once a shibboleth for good food and now just another four syllables of nonsense. In all fairness, this burger, which is ingeniously pressed so hard upon the griddle it becomes more of a beef pancake that hangs over the bun like a meat skirt, is genuinely tasty. You may even order the Cajun Chicken Alfredo ($22.95) which, per the server, has about 10,000 calories. Calories are not listed on the menu, by the way, since New York City law requires only chain restaurants to do so. “Thank God,” your server will say, grinning like Mephistopheles and refilling your water.

Guy Fieri was born Guy Ferry but he changed his name to sound more ethnic.  Yes, this is a scathing review. Yes, it is a great read. 

The Nietzsche Family Circus

A website that does the impossible, twice: it makes both Nietzsche and Family Circus funny.

To quote its self-description:

The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote.

Genius!

Sadness About the Stars

If we look up on a clear night, far away from light, we see the sky filled with stars, stars that seem, to some of us, anyway, stunningly beautiful, impossibly beautiful except when we look, there they are. Our view is of only a few thousand stars, but we now know there are perhaps one trillion billion stars in the Universe -- maybe more -- stretching away from us for tens of billions of light years. Many of these stars have planets -- we now know that for sure -- most of which are likely just gas or barren rock or ice.  But many -- many, even if but a teeny fraction of the total -- have oxygen, water, and land.  There's a yearning in some of us to see those places, for we suppose they are harbors of wonder.  Yet, real as they are, we will never go there. It is likely no one ever will.

Lonely Little Guy Doesn't Want to Eat You After All, Just Be Friends

According to National Geographic:

Despite its ghoulish name and looks, the vampire squid (pictured, an individual in 2004) isn't a bloodthirsty terror of the deep after all, a new study says.

Instead, the nightmarishly named species browses on "marine snow"—dead plankton, algae, fecal matter, goo, shells shed by tiny crustaceans, and other detritus.

That's so cute! He just wants to eat fecal matter.  According to Wikipedia, "[a]s a phylogenetic relict it is the only known surviving member of its order, first described and originally classified as an octopus in 1903 byGerman teuthologist Carl Chun, but later assigned to a new order together with several extinct taxa." Also, "[t]he vampire squid is almost entirely covered in light-producing organs called photophores. The animal has great control over the organs, capable of producing disorienting flashes of light for fractions of a second to several minutes in duration." And, "the vampire squid is able to live and breathe normally in the [ocean's oxygen minimum zone] at oxygen saturations as low as 3%; a feat no other cephalopod, and few other animals, can claim. ...  If threatened, instead of ink, a sticky cloud of bioluminescent mucus containing innumerable orbs of blue light is ejected from the arm tips."

Vampire squid are the coolest animals ever. I will be your friend, little vampire squid.

The Milky Way is Inside a Massive Hot Bubble of Gas

Illustration from NASA -- but see text

Observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the  European Space Agency's XMM-Newton space observatory, and Japan's Suzaku satellite, suggest that the Milky Way is shrouded in a huge halo of hot gas -- and "hot" here means hot, between 1 and 2.5 million degrees Kelvin. The halo (which is a bubble -- astronomers use "halo" to mean "bubble") is perhaps 300,000 light years in radius or more (the graphic at right shows the Milky Way misleadingly small -- it actually has a diameter of about 100,000 light years, so it should be 1/3 the bubble's radius). The mass of the bubble was estimated by using data from Chandra to measure x-ray absorption by oxygen and data from XMM-Newton and Suzaka to measure total x-ray emission by the bubble and then, based on estimates as to the amount of oxygen in the bubble, calculating the mass the bubble would have.  If this plays out, it will help answer the "missing baryon" problem, which is that a lot more matter was hypothetically created by the Big Bang than is currently observed.

Elmore Leonard's Ten or so Rules for Writing Fiction and Avoiding Hooptedoodle

In a sort-of article 11 years ago in the New York Times (one of a series, as these things often seem to be), Elmore Leonard laid down ten rules he follows in writing fiction (with good, short explanations that I've omitted for brevity, so go see his essay):

1. Never open a book with the weather. 
2. Avoid prologues. 
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. 
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” ... 
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. 
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.” 
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. 
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. 
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things. 
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

There's an 11th rule that's not often quoted: "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." As he explains at the beginning of his essay:

These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules.

There's a simple idea here: in fiction readers usually aren't interested in the real author. A fictional narrator, maybe. But mostly they want an engrossing story.

My God (of which there is none), Obama Was Incredible

Well, the debate has just wrapped, and Obama was all over the place!

Because Randall Monroe

I, personally, always move my pieces closer to the king. By “king” I mean “putting the king in the condition of checkmate before my king is checkmated” and “always” means “always as I see it subject to certain rules of decorum and the amount of sleep I’ve had.”

Randall Monroe Interviewed

The An inspiration for this blog. Yes, I know that's
not the point. We're talking emotional reasons.

Randall Monroe -- what can I say? The guy is fantastic. His webcomic, xkcd, is one of the great things on the internet and one of the great comics of all time ... really. What if?, his new web discussions and analysis of odd questions answered in light of science!, is witty and smart and provides great insight into how to think about problems. The guy seems humane and smart.

Anyway, there's an excellent interview with him published a few days ago at The Atlantic.

The Atlantic:  So, given the challenges of creating fresh content -- and I know you get this all the time, but I have to ask -- how do you actually come up with new ideas? Especially over such a long stretch of time?

Randall Monroe:  I think, if anything, it's noticing the things that make me laugh and grabbing onto them and figuring out how to write them down. There are definitely times -- and I think this is pretty common among cartoonists -- where you spend an entire day trying to think of an idea, and you're like, "I give up." And then you go and take a shower or run an errand, and halfway there you get an idea.

It's people like this who make me feel both hopeful and inferior.

CGI Effects from "The Game of Thrones" on HBO, Season 2

Some Love for Mitt Romney!?

With the first 2012 U.S. Presidential Debate set to happen later today (domestic policy! so exciting!), I'm here to show Mitt Romney some lovin'!! (Um, no.)

Gangnam Style -- Proving My Continued Asserted "Coolness"

Is this the big thing everyone is talking about? Because I think I finally figured it out, once again demonstrating that I am so cool I am almost algid.  Well, thermodynamicly challenged, anyway. But, my, this is really quite nice:

On the other hand, if you take the music away from Gangnam Style you have this:

All via Blame it on the Voices.

Cool (Hot?) Chemistry Photos

There's something about chemistry labs and processes that I find compelling. Maybe it's the smells, the equipment, the chemicals, the measured transformations, the feeling of alchemy. It hits the intersection of science and romanticism; the desire to both think and do. Anyway, Dark Roasted Blend has posted a series of chemistry porn photos. There's too many close-ups; not enough labs. but it's still pretty.

CGI Breakdown of HBO's "Game of Thrones," Season 1

What is incredible is the fact that this is a television show. Season 2 coming tomorrow.

An Incredible Online Bonsai Gallery

Bonsai Empire appears to be a non-commercial site devoted to bonsai with great galleries of bonsai pictures of different forms, including an extensive one on Japanese gardens, and well as extensive instructional materials, articles, and a forum. The best are very beautiful.

(So you think, "whoa dude, I'd like to grow some bonsai." The best are hundreds of years old. Patience, young grasshopper.)

"Go Mix It!" For Your New Age-y Ambient Sound Mixing Needs

I explained this completely adequately in the title of this post and anything I write now is just surplussage, which is a great word by the way, now leave me alone, I've got to go listen to tribal drums and flute while its raining in the forest.

Photography by Steve Giovinco

Steve Giovinco is a fine art photographer with an extraordinary eye for the places he occupies and their discovery. His photography often occupies a gray area between snapshot and highly orchestrated scenes with the occasional foray into abstraction. Very beautiful in subtle and unexpected ways. 

A Follow-up to Last Month's Hula Hooping Post

I swear this is going to be my last hula hooping post ever or I am going to have to create a hula hooping tag. My admiration arises from my own ineptness. Previously.

The Language of Mathematics

Just a short note that I've noticed that one of the difficulties people have with mathematics is understanding the symbolism. Mathematics, done with rigor, is a different language. It has a unique set of symbols, a syntax, unique terms and common terms with unique definitions, and a loose sort of morphology governing some terms. So, what are the symbols?  Here are some lists:

• A big list from Wikipedia (poorly defined in part, and mixes many branches of math)
• A series of good basic lists from RapidTables
• Latex symbols (used for coding mathematical writing but a good list of symbols as well)
• HTML symbols (as Latex but with HTML)
• A list of mathematical notations used at Wolfram (and, by proxy, Mathworld) (a great resource)

Mathematics has a long history of symbol use depending on the mathematician and journal, which means a long history of symbols being used inconsistently.  Then there is a problem with the way they are taught, which is, in a word, badly.

The use of computers is changing this: computers demand rigorous syntax and symbol use. But computers are also learning how to do math. I predict (probably irresponsibly) that within two hundred years, short of catastrophic changes in the human condition, all mathematical proofs will be performed and checked by computer and all non-trivial proofs (for which there are an infinite number) will have been done for non-esoteric mathematics.