Zero to One-Eighty » science

The top ten podcasts

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 02:03:37 +0000

Astronomy Cast and NASA launches on YouTube go well together

Since I have my headphones pretty much permanently jammed into my head I am able to do the following thing for you: provide you with a list of favourite podcasts, amongst which you may find something quite interesting.

Start here

Infallible opinions follow… (categories from iTMS)
Name & cover	Reason for awesome	Archives
Savage Love	Dan Savage. Everything you ever wanted to know about sex and preferred that someone else asked. Funny as hell. Brought to us by the Tech-Savvy At-Risk Youth. Dan’s voice, also pretty marvelous. (Category: Sexuality.)	iTMS, website (2006–)
Democracy Now!	Amy Goodman. A daily digest of the news that matters with fascinating interviews and debate. People in their own words. Every show a driven, inspiring and unflinching look at national and global events. (Category: News & Politics.)	website (1996–)
Background Briefing	ABC journalists. Consistently the most relevant, well-researched and informative investigative journalism on the radio. Looks at emerging social, economic and political topics. Props to Dan for the recommendation. (Category: News & Politics.) See also…	website (1995–)
This American Life	Ira Glass. Wonderful collections of stories organized by theme. American culture served with humour, pathos, insight and a dash of longing. Occasional collaborations with other journalists. (Category: Society & Culture.) See also…	website (1995–)
The Conversation	Dan Benjamin. Thoughtful interviews with movers and shakers in web and software development with forays into design, production, and online culture. Candid talk that’s low on jargon; well-produced. Dan Benjamin is doing great things. (Category: Tech News.)	iTMS, website (2010–)
All in the Mind	Natasha Mitchell. Fascinating interviews with experts in the areas of psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and the occasional bit of philosophy. The conversations with Thomas Szasz are fantastic. (Category: Science & Medicine.)	website (2002–)
The Bugle (paywall)	John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman. Gut-clenching satirical take on the week’s news. Think hilariously accented, ginger mopped, ancient history major and the guy from The Daily Show. (Category: Comedy.) See also…	iTMS since 2009 (2007–)
Point of Inquiry	Chris Mooney, Robert Price and Karen Stollznow. Formerly D.J. Grothe. Consistently challenging interview program promoting skepticism and science in the public interest. (Category: Social Sciences.)	iTMS, website (2005–)
The Moth	Shorts from performances at The Moth in New York City and on tour. Straight out fantastic live storytelling. Introduced each week by Dan Kennedy, whose own Moth story is particularly good. (Category: Performing Arts.)	website (2008–)
Astronomy Cast	Fraser Cain and Pamela Gay. Program by astronomy experts that’s pitched at a general audience. Though they cover some, um… hard physics stuff. Try wrapping your head around the theory of inflation. Good times. (Category: Natural Sciences.) See also…	iTMS, website (2006–)

Honorable mentions

Coming soon…

Black carbon earth

Adrian Cooke — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:51:11 +0000

“Commonly known as soot” (Image: NASA)

Nothing to worry about here Tony. Climate change freak out dupes, kindly return to your porch rockers and resume whittling. I mean, it’s obviously a conspiracy, and I wouldn’t expect any different from the Greenies. But I just can’t believe that so many scientists have been taken in by it. I used to think scientists were smart and sensible people. I suppose they will come to their senses eventually. Purple skies—yeah right. Good one NASA. Kidders. Bunch of Photoshop junkies. Go launch a rocket!

The ‘One Degree War Plan’

Adrian Cooke — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 05:05:01 +0000

The “Thin Blue Line.” (Image: NASA.)

Paul Gilding on his weblog, introducing a co-authored report released earlier this month on how humanity might approach the problem of not annihilating itself:

We were actually surprised by the outcome of our work, which showed that not only is One Degree and 350ppm possible, it is surprisingly achievable and practical. It certainly requires that we act very soon and that we act with a level of determination and commitment not seen since WWII, but it can be achieved. In recognition of this comparison, we called our paper The One Degree War Plan. It is a plan that shows what humanity can achieve — and we believe will achieve — when it develops a rational response to the climate threat.

The authors are releasing this work “for general public reaction and comment.” They outline their take on the current status of climate change, and predict what the global public response will be between now and 2020. From the paper’s (PDF) introduction:

Given the physical momentum for change already in the climate system and the continuing lack of action on the scale and with the urgency required, it is now too late to prevent major disruption and damage in the decades ahead, as a result of inaction over the past several decades. We believe there will now be an ecological and economic crisis, of a scale that is significant in the history of human life on earth.

But we certainly do not believe it is too late to prevent the collapse of the global economy and civilisation.

One of Gilding’s main arguments is that the modern world remains steadfastly organised for industrial production, “endless” economic growth and increasing consumption, and that for humanity to take genuinely effective steps to avert runaway warming (that would likely destroy the civilisation) will require a coordinated reorganisation of social and economic systems around the world.

Randers and Gilding compare their survival strategy to the allied mobilisation during WWII, and military metaphors (“war plan”) are, well… we’ll see if that works, and if not I suspect they’ll adapt. Also, I don’t think that their invoking of governmental responses to the financial crisis as an example of reactive capacity will go over well in the U.S. But that’s a minor quibble, I suppose.

One degree and 350 are the new symbols, and what they will come to signify — hope, propaganda, doom, deliverance, fate, Armageddon — is yet to written, though whatever the answer I’m starting to think it will happen in my lifetime.

See also: The Great Disruption, Background Briefing, June 14, 2009.

Black carbon earth

Putting things off

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 04:49:12 +0000

When things are growing outside, Elena’s in charge of the usable plants like fruits and vegetables, and I’m in charge of curb appeal. I love red geraniums, so during the summer I bought some and stuck them in two big pots on either side of the front stoop and they grew and they bloomed and they brought happiness.

Months passed.

So those pots were still there, yesterday afternoon, when I got home from work. I had noticed, the day before, while shovelling appallingly heavy ice from the front path, that each vessel had developed both a magnificent, domed crust of hard ice, and some decisive splits running from top to bottom. They looked, on close inspection, like two large, cracked terracotta eggs.

You know as well as I do that I had been meaning to move them for some time. Mainly it was that I didn’t know where to put them. Every time I thought about moving them I had trouble visualising what to do. I was thinking of two different places, both unsatisfactory. They’re also really heavy.

A week ago, an article called “Motivating Minds:”

A team of researchers led by Sean McCrea of the University of Konstanz, in Germany, reckon they have found a piece of the puzzle. People act in a timely way when given concrete tasks but dawdle when they view them in abstract terms.

I saw those cracks in the pots and immediately decided to deal with them. They were even heavier because of all the ice. But there was only one place to put them now (garage), so the decision was made. When they thaw out they are going to melt all over the concrete, the hard specifics of which seems to be exactly the kind of thing that getting things done requires.

For the time being

Large Hadron Collider broken

Adrian Cooke — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:44:17 +0000

Not necessarily related to glitch, but quite awesome. (Image: CERN/Michael Hoch.)

CERN‘s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project hit a roadblock in September:

The fault occurred just nine days after it was turned on with Cern blaming the shutdown on the failure of a single, badly soldered electrical connection in one of its super-cooled magnet sections. The collider operates at temperatures colder than outer space for maximum efficiency and experts needed to gradually warm the damaged section to assess it. “Now the sector is warm so they are able to go in and physically look at each of the interconnections,” Mr Gillies told Associated Press.

Colder than space? For real? Have the engineers seen the movie Contact (spoiler alert) where “the nations of the world” attempt to build a gigantic Machine at Cape Canaveral that will allow a single traveller to visit the stars, but then it falls apart rather badly because of a religious nutter? Humanity’s dreams are saved by a secret Japanese experiment to build a copy of The Machine in a remote stretch of Hokkaido. I’m not saying Japan has its own LHC, or that the country is not cooperative. But who is building the VLHC?

Seriously, though. I hope they get the first one working.

Edited to add: CERN’s CDS Invenio document server is interesting, and pretty manageable from a user perspective. It runs on a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Python) and is licensed under the GNU GPL. Like Fedora, another open source digital object repository system (I poked it with a stick a few years ago with Allynn), this one complies with the OAI Protocol that allows sharing of metadata between different repositories.