March for Science Tomorrow

It's been a year since the first, million-strong science march took place. In 600 locations across 7 continents, scientists, non-scientists, the curious, the critical thinkers, and the torch-bearers of facts and evidence mobilized and took to the streets to demonstrate that once ignited, science is a light that never goes out. No matter who's in charge. I myself drove to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to join forces with our American cousins who are living through particularly dark days of science reckoning. Thousands of people turned up, and like the marches in so many other cities south of the border, UMichigan's was diverse, welcoming and very animated.

All told around the world, the March for Science became the single largest event of its kind in history. And a year later, not much has changed for science on some political frontiers; in fact, things have gotten far worse in some places. But something has been switched on in the minds of so many people who value truth and equity and honesty. Those people have mobilized since last April. What was a moment has become a movement.

In this era of fake news, bots, and alternative facts, it is more important than ever to be vigilant in upholding a scientific understanding of the world. Science our best hope for the progress of our species. To ignore it is to turn our backs on a defining part of our humanity. It is also fundamental to a progressive, democratic society, as scientifically informed citizens make better decisions for their lives and for society. In virtually every aspect of our lives, we need science. And now, science needs us.

Today, communities around the world are coming together to do it again. Here in Canada, the March for Science is taking place in cities across the country. It is the time to get out, get active, and give back to science. If you can’t march, then volunteer. If you can’t volunteer, then tweet. If you can’t tweet, then post. Every effort helps.

Today is a time that we should all be asking ourselves, not what science can do for us, but what we can do for science. I plan on starting with the march.

Imagine all the People

Made the trek to John Lennon Park while in Havana last week. This is Aleeda Rodriguez Pedrasa, Keeper of the Specs. For the past two-and-a-half years, she has been managing the visitor experience here, watching over the coveted glasses, which have seen several iterations go missing over the years. Not shown: kids' hopscotch over the "Imagine" lyrics inscribed in stone.

If everybody's somebody then no one's anybody

One day in the early 1970s, a band of boardroom execs decided it was wise and prudent to telegraph a message to tv-bound dudes:
“YOU ARE PROMETHEAN”

The Time Keepers

If you were to ask me to recollect the meaning of a "long dash following ten seconds of silence," I would be forced to admit to at least two phrasal connotations:

(i) An uncomfortable memory of a narrow escape from a third-grade spelling bee; and
(ii) The NRC's time signal, which is 75 years young today.

Heard every day on CBC radio, that annoying beeeeeep at end of ten seconds of dead air is the official signal that lunch is over in Toronto, lunch is just beginning in Winnipeg, and it's time to get to yoga in Vancouver. In more technical terms, it denotes exactly on-the-hour time across Canada.

Three-quarters of a century is a long time to be dashing it out every day, but hey, that 45-second program has become Canada's longest-running radio broadcast. And that's a far longer run than my own schoolroom breakaway from the horrors of spelling interrogation. To this day I wonder, is it ukulele or ukelele?

Be careful what you say around the chips

This is such a cool development in acoustics... A team of researchers have developed a visual microphone algorithm that picks up audio by looking for microscopic vibrations in video footage. The technique allowed researchers to recover speech by analyzing the tiny vibrations of a potato chip bag from 15 feet away — with a video camera watching through soundproof glass. It's good enough to capture singing from a bag of potato chips, and musical tones from a potted plant.

Almost, at times, the Fool

It’s hoax day and I can’t stop the marvel at fab fakes in science. Here are a few famous hoaxes for your April Fools reading pleasure:

Zero-gravity day: Anyone planning on taking a leap April 4 to test the zero-gravity proposition? Don’t forget: Gravity is mutual.

Alabama redefining pi: To keep it closer to the biblical value.

Blondes as an endangered species: World Health Organization study predicting that blonde gene would be extinct by 2202.

Piltdown Man: Skull fragments discovered in the U.K. in 1911. The *missing link between human and ape*.

Smart Luggage

A team of four University of Waterloo engineering students have recently invented a suitcase with sensors that can be tracked with a smartphone.

They call it 'casesensitive'. Not only can you know the location of your luggage at any given time, but if somebody has opened it, it will tell you when and where that happened.


http://www.travelandescape.ca/2014/03/university-waterloo-students-invent-smart-luggage-get-lost/

Time of sunrise today: May thru August

The Venusian day is longer than its year. Which means that, on Venus, you can avoid seasonal affective disorder by simply sleeping in one day.


http://www.universetoday.com/47898/length-of-day-on-venus/

Once upon a time the universe had this crazy growth spurt

I can’t imagine a finer greeting than: “Hello. I bring tidings of affirmation and great joy. Your lifetime of work has led to this. We found the proof.”

Watch the joy of Andrei Linde as he is informed of a discovery that confirms his inflationary universe theory. Years from now, you may not remember what is said here, or even what is done, but I bet you will never forget the look on his face and how it made you feel.


http://sploid.gizmodo.com/witness-the-joy-of-the-man-who-predicted-todays-big-ba-1545834924

Dark chocolate is good for your heart. You're welcome.

The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology has published a paper that seems too good to be true: dark chocolate is good for you. No really, science says so. Dark chocolate helps restore arterial flexibility while also preventing white blood cells from sticking to the walls of blood vessels. Both of these are significant factors that contribute atherosclerosis. What's more, increasing the flavanol content of dark chocolate does not change this effect.

I find it gloriously hopeful that these recent results were obtained after only eight weeks. Imagine the benefits gained from a lifetime of chocolate indulgence.



http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/…/140227092149.htm

Thank heavens for blue-sky dreamers

Here's a cool little listicle of the five strangest contraptions ever designed in Toronto. Where would we be without people willing to experiment? These are some crazy contraptions, but my heart is with the iconoclasts. I'm still hoping for an Avro-dream revival.

http://www.blogto.com/city/2014/02/the_5_strangest_machines_designed_in_toronto/

Diversity is the spice of life

Word to the wise: If you’re making decisions today (especially *those* kinds of decisions), you should choose the most far-out option. Do it to mix things up a little. Do it for the surprise element. Do it for posterity.

And happy Valentine's Day.

"Mixed genes: Interactive world map of human genetic history reveals likely genetic impacts of historical events"

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/…/140213142305.htm

The Rogue of X-Frogs

Took a trip today to the Canadian Museum of Nature and was fascinated by the frog exhibit they currently have on. So many beautiful creatures, some of them deadly. This little guy is the Blue Poison Dart Frog, mostly found in South and Central America and Hawaii. One of the poisoniest creatures on earth, its glands contain batrachotoxin, a toxin that blocks nerve signals to muscles, causing paralysis and death. It's the Rogue of x-frogs.

Like the Earth slowly reclaiming its swag

I've been really kind of mesmerized by this minute of creeping suspense. Watch a lava flow fully envelop a can of Coke -- twice: First shot with a Nikon D800 and then an old GoPro Hero 2. It's like the 2000-degree molten rock is taking back the precious metals that were borrowed from the Earth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaSjwAu3yrI

An elegant medium, for a civilized age

Last summer, Science published a study from researchers at Harvard who had successfully encoded bits of digital information in strands of DNA. A few days ago, another paper was published demonstrating that researchers had done it again, this time having improved the accuracy, capacity and efficiency of the technique. This recent experiment successfully converted 739 kilobytes of digital data into genetic code, which was then retrieved without a single error. Among the information translated was the entire collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Anyway, it got me thinking about the sonnets and inspired me to revisit several of them. And I am so glad I did because golly they’re good. Four hundred years of distance and they're still relevant. One of them, Sonnet 55, especially stands out to me in light of all of the current public discussions about The Information. It recalls another way of preserving and imparting information... an age-old method, both accessible and powerful. And unlike other media used for recording information, it is not static. In fact, I would say that it is persistent precisely because of its mutability. It is adaptable and interpretive and imperfect. It can't be buried or owned or pinned down. And because of this, it can link people through time and space. What I'm talking about is language.

LV
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents 
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn

The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity

Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room

Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.

- William Shakespeare

I appreciate the reminder to get out and play today.

Check out the awesomeness of this sledding crow.

That Elusive Higgs Boson

Tomorrow at CERN, researchers will announce their latest findings in the search for the last undiscovered particle in the current model of subatomic particles – the Higgs boson. Canadian researchers have a big role in one of the two experiments involved. Perimeter Institute is holding a webinar to discuss the results tomorrow at 12:30 ET http://goo.gl/8kJG0. Also, in Vancouver, TRIUMF will host a public seminar in its auditorium at 2:30 p.m. PT [http://goo.gl/g9YQG].

Why the head should know how the tail is behaving

The next issue of Science News has a good article on predicting financial risk. It covers how traditional models of estimating risk are missing a lot by discounting rare, freak events in their calculations. Gaussian distribution models fail to account for the outliers (the long tail of a probability distribution) that can drastically alter market behaviour. Although a normal distribution model does account for a lot of economic activity, it ignores the rare large freak events, so it doesn’t fully capture reality. Which is where power law models come in.

“Long tails are a mathematical clue that a different kind of behavior may be at play, one that physicists have long been fascinated by. When data follow what is called a power law distribution, the outlandish data points that generate the tail aren’t aberrant freaks; they fit right in.”

Gaussian distribution and power law regimes will predict fairly similar outcomes for unlikely but possible events, such as an event with a one-in-a-hundred likelihood of occurring. But for highly unlikely events, such as a one-in-ten-thousand event, the two models deliver hugely different predictions. The differences can’t be ignored. The article points out that most economists think that current models are too simplistic, but the challenge remains how to reconcile freak occurrences with traditional models based on stability.

La vie est ailleurs

If you haven't yet discovered the most awesome World Science Festival website, I highly recommend you put your evening plans on hold and spend a good few hours checking it out. One of the more recent videos is a three-minute explanation of the Holographic Principle -- the idea that a volume of space, or maybe even the entire universe, can be described as a holographic projection of information encoded elsewhere in a two-dimensional surrounding boundary. Kind of puts a new spin on the old adage, "Life is elsewhere."

http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/2011/08/what_is_the_holographic_principle/

Work-Life Fusion

Doing some research on 20th century art and artists this weekend, I came across some cool photos of Ray and Charles Eames, the great 20th century designers. The couple did some pretty extraordinary work together, even beyond architecture and design, and I was delighted to find their short documentary Powers of Ten (1968) available online.

Narrated by Philip Morrison, the film is a neat examination of perspective, showing the relative scale of the cosmos by factors of ten, from the view of our human world, to the expanse of the observable universe, to up close and personal with a proton.

And for those of you who prefer a more tactile approach to scaling the universe, there's also the Powers of Ten flipbook, which has the special advantage of allowing you to set your own transition pace. Of course it's very easy nowadays to access cool NASA videos of outer space phenomena, but in 1968, when the Eames' film was released, depictions of the universe weren't so prevalent. Nor were extraordinary designing couples like Ray and Charles. So -- today -- as I was reading about this most innovative couple, I was surprised to discover this in their biographical info: They died ten years apart to the day. That day was today, August 21.