ScienceBlogs Channel : Technology

An oldie but a goodie: Stephen Fry on Free Software [Greg Laden's Blog]

Greg Laden none@example.com — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 13:57:03 -0500

Twin Cities Area Install Fest [Greg Laden's Blog]

Greg Laden none@example.com — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:37:06 -0500

Penguins Unbound (the web site for the Monthly Meeting of Linux Enthusiasts) announces the Ubuntu 10.10 Release Party and Install Fest for October 30th, 2010 at 10:00am to 4:00pm at TIES on Snelling Avenue in Falcon Heights (which you may know of as Saint Paul), Minnesota.

Details here.

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Conservation is a Dirty Word [Casaubon's Book]

Sharon Astyk none@example.com — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 09:52:52 -0500

I really liked Asher Miller's HuffPo article on an assessment of clean energy's scalability by three mostly conservative think-tanks. There are so many analyses done out there that simply work from the assumption that magic technology fairies will erase time and depletion and make it possible for us to live pretty much the way we have been.

Unfortunately, the report reminded me a lot of the failed legislative attempt undertaken by Senators Kerry (D-MA), Lieberman (I-CT), and Graham (R-SC) to pass bipartisan climate legislation. The original bill was a watered-down pile of... um, paper... but Graham still wound up pulling his support before it saw the light of day. And even after Kerry ignominiously signaled his belief that he and Lieberman had "compromised significantly" and yet were "prepared to compromise further," the bill still died.

Like the ill-fated American Power Act, this report makes some good recommendations but utterly fails to offer anything that promises to transcend political partisanship or transform the energy landscape with the speed and scale required. A few quick responses:

•The belief that the recommendations included are somehow post-partisan is, at best, naive. Joseph Romm does a thorough job of refuting this claim, so I won't bother to address that piece of it.
•I'm guessing that references to Department of Energy offices being "overly stove-piped, centralized in Washington, D.C.," and "ineffective, even wasteful energy research spending" came from the AEI side of the table. But I agree with the recommendation of establishing a "national network of decentralized energy innovation institutes that can bring private sector, university, and government researchers together alongside investors" -- particularly if those regional innovation institutes were focused on developing regionalized, distributed sources of truly renewable energy.
•The authors promote a "new generation of smaller, innovative nuclear reactors" that can provide "affordable, reliable, zero-carbon power and heat to utilities of all sizes, industrial facilities, and military bases." But unless this new generation of nuclear reactors manages to address many of the limitations that currently beset large-scale nuclear plants--the need for a depleting, non-renewable source of energy (uranium); the use of massive amounts of fresh water (already scarce in many regions and expected to worsen with climate change and population growth); significant requirements of fossil fuels and fossil fuel by-products for production; and tremendous capital costs, not to mention even bigger questions about security and disposal when dealing with a much more distributed collection of reactors--I have a hard time understanding how the authors can view nuclear power as a renewable, cost-effective, or scalable solution.
Most worrying (though least surprising) is the authors' belief that clean energy innovation breakthroughs can drive continued economic growth. This belief reflects two commonly held assumptions:

1.That alternative energy sources capable of replacing conventional fossil fuels either already exist or can be invented. All that's missing are incentives for innovation and/or the political will.
2.That exponential growth of the global economy--fundamentally driven by ever-growing consumption of energy and other natural resources--can and should continue indefinitely. Never mind the little fact that we live on a finite planet.

The rest is mostly a summary of Richard Heinberg's analysis of a number of reports to try and answer the question - can any combination of clean energy technologies support us to 2100. And the answer is predictably (if you've been paying attention) how much we'll have to work with depends heavily on our willingness to conserve for real.

Conservation, in this sense, does not mean trivial conservation - the lightbulb-changing-a-la-An-Inconvenient-Truth style. It means the kind of conservation that we have not seen since WWII - a real and deep transformation of how we use energy. And while it may be possible to imagine a functional, growing economy in a society that is using 50%, 60%, 70% less energy, it will require a great deal of imagination indeed. Far more likely is that the economy will place its own limits on technology usage and availability.

The good news is that most of us could cut our energy usage by 50% tomorrow, if we were sufficiently committed. The bad news is that as long as conservation remains off the table, we're not even going to get started.

Sharon

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Boston of the Future Viewed from 1908 [Mike the Mad Biologist]

Mike none@example.com — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 12:12:35 -0500

The Boston Public Library has a really cool exhibit about postcards related to Boston. Here's one I thought was funny from 1908 (based on the postage, I think it's 1908):

I want my own unidirigible! Too bad Boston doesn't really look like this....

If you can't get to the library, the postcards are online here.

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Windows vs. Linux: Boot Time Test [Greg Laden's Blog]

Greg Laden none@example.com — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 10:14:40 -0500

It should not really matter how long it takes to boot your OS. Why? Because a good OS will start up once after a major system upgrade, then stay on forever after unless there is a power failure. If you want to shut down the computer you can hibernate the state to keep all your apps 'running' and files 'open.' You never really need to reboot, so why worry if a boot takes one minute, two, or three?

Unless, of course, your operating system is Windows. In this case, it matters a LOT how long it takes to reboot because you have to reboot the damn thing every time somebody's hat falls off. So, Windows booting time is important.

JH at Linux in Exile has done a number of Windows/Linux boot comparisons. His results to date have always shown Windows to be slower. Many people insist that there are data that show that Windows is always faster. I personally know that Windows is slower because my wife and I have fairly similar laptops, but mine runs Linux and hers is a managed Windows system. When we both turn our computers on at about the same time, mine boots up, I do my stuff, I hand her my laptop and she does whatever web-based things she can do on my laptop, we make dinner, feed the baby and put him to sleep, maybe paint the living room, etc., then her laptop is maybe booted up, almost.

OK, I exaggerate but that's what it feels like.

Anyway, JH has a new test that is slightly biased towards letting one of the two operating systems win the race to boot, and the results shocked me. Have a look.

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Visualizing Marathon 2010 [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]

Joanna Pool none@example.com — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 17:04:06 -0500

Check out one of our Satellite Festivals Happening this weekend! Visualizing Marathon 2010

It is a weekend-long student data visualization competition and they have about 95 students from Harvard, Columbia, SVA, Pratt, Parsons, L'ecole de design (France), etc. attending. The challenge will be announced Friday (Tonight!) at the Opening and it will focus on a complex scientific issue - more specifically - planetary boundaries. This challenge focuses on science and it's all about the merge of science and design, making sense of complex issues through data and design. Pretty Cool!

Read more about the interesting challenge here. It starts tonight at 7pm.

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Water Dance [A Few Things Ill Considered]

coby none@example.com — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 07:46:46 -0800

From the "just because it's beautiful" department, have a look at the image sequence below.

Thanks again to APOD!

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How Technology Can Make Movies Obsolete [Mike the Mad Biologist]

Mike none@example.com — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:56:35 -0500

A couple of weeks ago, I rewatched Memento, a movie about someone who has no long term memory. It's told from his perspective, moving backwards as he learns what has actually happened. His coping mechanisms are writing notes to himself and on himself, as well as a library of Polaroid pictures. It's full of suspense, and you can't really pretend how it ends (or, since the movie moves backwards, maybe that should be begins?). It was Guy Pearce's breakthrough role.

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A techy librarian and an instruction librarian walk into a bar... [Confessions of a Science Librarian]

John Dupuis none@example.com — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 10:10:02 -0500

Ok, not a bar, more like an information literacy class.

I thought I'd bring to everyone's attention a presentation by two of my York University Libraries colleaques, web librarian William Denton and instruction librarian Adam Taves.

It was at Access in Winnipeg a week or so ago:

After Launching Search and Discovery, Who Is Mission Control?

Reference librarians are whiny and demanding.

Systems librarians are arrogant and rude.

Users are clueless and uninformed.

A new discovery layer means that they need to collaborate to build it and then -- the next step -- integrate it into teaching and learning. How should we (reference librarians, systems people, and users) work together to better exploit the possibilities of open source systems so we can focus on discovery and understanding instead of the mechanics of searching?

Bill and Adam basically wrote up their presentation as a play featuring "themselves" and did a dramatic reading of said play in front of the conference audience.

I've read the script but haven't had a chance to get into the audio or video yet.

It's both informative and amusing and best of all, amusingly informative. It definitely dramatizes the techy/instruction divide within the librarian community as well as the the techy vs. "humanist" divide within the culture as a whole.

There's lots of food for thought and a bunch of great laughs too.

An semi-random excerpt from the script:

[ACT 3: Information literacy]

Adam: Well, yes and no. I still need to be able to use sophisticated search techniques. If I wanted Google, I'd just use Google. But getting back to your average undergrad. They need to understand things like who wrote the book - what makes that person qualified to speak on the topic. Who published the book - is it --

Bill: Yeah, but that's really some bullshit, isn't it? I mean, come on. These loftier IL goals, isn't that all just basically stuff from a grade ten media studies course, with a bit of Neil Postman thrown in?

Adam: They had media studies back when you were in grade 10? I didn't want to make things too confusing for you. Getting back to "disciplinary discourse" - how do people in a particular subject area talk to one another?

Bill: I guess --
[Bill continues trying to interrupt]

Adam: How is publishing in high energy physics different than, say, publishing in ancient Greek history? How do psychologists communicate their research to the academic community? Or, and we hear this one all the time, why can't we just digitize all the damn books in the library and be done it with?

Bill: Well, that's because of copyright and intellectual property issues and --

Adam: Exactly. IL Standard 5, Performance Indicator 1, Section d. Wouldn't it be interesting if, when we linked to full-text, there was some little clue as to the conditions of access. Like - "No copyright", or "licensed access secured". Then the catalogue is directly supporting an IL competency. Or another issue, how do you learn from your mistakes? A particular approach is not working well, but may tell you something about how to improve it and how to look for information about a certain --

Bill: Well, I do that all the time. It's basic to systems development and programming when you're debugg--

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Hacking a Google Calendar CLI Tool [Greg Laden's Blog]

Greg Laden none@example.com — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 15:08:23 -0500

I wrote earlier of the very useful command line utility called gcalcli (short for GoogleCALendarCommandLineInterface). Click here to read that post. One of the options is called "agenda" which spits out, by default, the next five days of calendar entries. If you would prefer a different range of time than five days, then you can specify two dates and the utility will give you that set of entries.

But I find that to be a bit of a pain, typing in the dates to start and end the list, when I generally want a quick and dirty "next several days." That, I suppose, is why there is a default of five days. But five days is not a good default. If it is Wednesday, I want to see what I've got on my calendar for the rest of the current week, as well as what is on my calendar for ALL of next week. For me, a better default would be 14 days. With 14 days, you always get a full look at the present week and the next week, plus, sometimes, a bit after that.

One can imagine writing a bash script that figures out what day it is, and then adds enough days that you get an agenda for the remainder of the present week plus all of the next week, but no more days than that. Such a script could make use of bash's ability to manage and manipulate dates as they occur in our periodic system, with 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, work days being a subset of five of those days, etc. etc.

One could also imagine writing a bash script to poke one's eyes out with hot soldering irons.

A simpler solution is this:

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Monday Evening Jams... [On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess]

Isis the Scientist none@example.com — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 23:32:49 -0500

It's been a while since you all received a jam from Dr. Isis. But, this is so, so worthy it hurts.

An evening jam for those of you still in the lab, trying to cure cancer. Read the comments on this post...

My Retinas Have Been Damaged... [On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess]

Isis the Scientist none@example.com — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 17:51:26 -0500

....by looking at this. It is a travesty.

All I can say is, "PhysioProf! My dear, sweet PhysioProf? How could you?"

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Blogging groups and ethics [Confessions of a Science Librarian]

John Dupuis none@example.com — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 10:25:11 -0500

The latest Cites & Insights (v10i11) is out and in it Walt Crawford explores some of the recent developments in the blogging landscape in a section called The Zeitgeist: Blogging Groups and Ethics. It's a very good overview and analysis of what's going on both in the science and librarian blogospheres.

It's well worth checking out. Some highlights:

Blogging Groups and Ethics

Do you blame Roy Tennant when the Annoyed Librarian writes posts that undermine librarianship and libraries?

I'm guessing you don't. Whoever the Library Journal incarnation of the Annoyed Librarian might or might not be, I'm certain Roy isn't part of it. But his blog is part of the same group--the group of paid blogs on the LJ website. Does that result in guilt by association?

The ScienceBlogs Flap

A three-day wonder? Not so much. I didn't pick up on it until mid-July, and the consequences of that briefly present ad/blog continue through this writing, at least indirectly. A few items:
Some SB bloggers left or threatened to leave, making their reasons very clear. It appears that more than a quarter of the Sciblings departed within a day or two, including some of the highest profiles. Many have now joined new science blog groups, one of them--Scientopia--formed as a collective of science bloggers, many if not most of them bloggers who left SB. You'll find a good set of early links on departures and changes at coturnix.wordpress.com/2010/07/10/the-pepsigate-linkfest/ and an interesting piece of inside-baseball humor at phylogenomics.blogspot.com/2010/07/pz-myers-will-reveal-his-decision-on.html.

Dorothea Salo founded a new blog, The Book of Trogool, on SB during the brief period I was there--and wrote "Small fry, blogging networks, and reputation" on July 8, 2010 at that blog. At the time, she and her cobloggers hadn't made a decision--but eventually they did. She has much to say about blogging within librarianship--and it's sobering, if not directly related to this flap:
[L]ibrarianship is a very difficult profession to blog in. It doesn't like blogs or bloggers, or social media generally, much less trust them or those who engage with each other and the world using them. Because libraries and librarians feel beleaguered, they especially don't like discourse critical of libraries or librarianship in social media coming from one of their own. Library vendors aren't fond of critical discourse in librarian blogs either. For individual librarian bloggers or public social-media figures, this has absolutely meant trouble at work. I'm one example, but very far from the only one--and I earned my problems more than most folks I know in similar straits.

This leaves the beleaguered library blogger who wishes to continue to blog with a few options. One is to be part of a group blog to create strength in numbers; In the Library with the Lead Pipe is a sterling example (and a fabulous blog; if you're interested in libraries from the inside, this is not one to miss). Another is to adopt some of the trappings of the formal library professional literature, such as length, exclusivity, and beta-reading-oops-I-meant-peer-review. ItLwtLP does this as well. A third option is to find a blog home with enough accumulated strength of character and good reputation as to afford some protection--and now you know why I chose ScienceBlogs.

Should Liblogs Have Groups?

Would a liblog group make sense? How would it work? What advantages would better-known and lesser-known liblogs see in a group? How would it be administered? What would make it worthwhile--for bloggers and for readers?

I don't have answers. Maybe there aren't any. Apparently lots of readers had the ScienceBlogs "last 24 hours" page as a home page of sorts, going there to see what's new in science blogging. When I want to see what's new in liblogs, I bring up Google Reader (I much preferred Bloglines, but that's gone away), usually finding 40 to 80 posts over the last 24 hours--from a range of some 500 blogs. Would I switch to a group page? Would you?

Awards and Lists

Some of us who appear on these lists believe that the lists primarily exist so that we'll link back to them, thus bringing lots more people to these sites touting for-profit colleges. I've never provided that link love but many have, and quite a few who aren't on the lists seem to think the lists are meaningful and link to the posts.

Is this an ethical issue? I'm not sure. I've seen enough dead and nearly-dead blogs on some lists to suspect they're not the result of painstaking current evaluation and research (and, frankly, I'm unwilling to buy that some of those on the April 2009 list could be part of The top 50 liblogs, if such a beast existed). I regard it as a form of linkspamming; others clearly do not.

*snip*

I like the idea of "Library Blog Huzzahs." I'm generally unhappy with "The Top X Blogs" lists on for-profit educational affiliate blogs. I don't believe there's any way to avoid rankings and grades: that's the way the world works, and I've done my part. But my liblog studies specifically point out blogs that stand out in one particular metric; there isn't, and shouldn't be, any sense of "these are the best blogs" or "these are the most important blogs." Indeed, one metric that I've carefully avoided listing blogs for is Google Page Rank (I say how many liblogs have high values, but not which blogs those are), and that avoidance will continue.

Blogging Ethics and Considerations

Should you think about ethical considerations for your blog? Probably, at least once in a while. Should you state those considerations? Couldn't hurt--as long as you're telling the truth. Should you pledge to follow somebody else's set of ethics--and display a badge or ribbon or something to indicate that pledge? That's a different issue entirely, one that comes up from time to time and always makes me uneasy.

*snip*

Did I mention mommyblogs? Meredith Farkas wrote "This is not my blogosphere" on November 22, 2009 at Information Wants To Be Free discussing these blogs and the extent to which they're being corrupted by compensated reviews, that is, bloggers being paid (by a company) to try out a product and write about it. When she read a post with a disclaimer about being a "compensated" review ("paid" is such a harsh word), she was stunned to find that comments weren't from people horrified by the practice--they were people wanting their own freebies and compensation.

Is Blogging Journalism?

Just to make questions of formal blog guidelines more complicated, consider that question. Is it? Some bloggers claim it is--and if it is, shouldn't they be expected to follow at least as rigorous ethical codes as professional journalists?

Eric Schnell asks "Do conference bloggers and tweeters need to follow media rules?" in a June 4, 2009 post at The Medium is the Message. He notes a report from ScienceInsider that Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is amending its policy for meetings to require that scientists who are bloggers follow the same rules as reporters--which, among other things, requires that they get a presenter's OK beforehand if they plan to blog or twitter about a presentation. Schnell quotes a scientist-blogger, Andrew Maynard, on his own considerations and thoughts on the issue. Maynard doesn't believe that bloggers and Twitterers are generally acting as journalists--but does suggest reasonable guidelines for when it is and isn't OK to tweet or blog. It's a complicated issue, particularly given conference presentations that discuss unpublished research results: Is it inappropriate for a blogger to write about such results, but legitimate for the researcher or their institution to issue premature press releases?

And much, much more. Go on over and read the whole thing -- it's a very worthwhile snapshot of the current environment.

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Biotech Foundations: Biotech VC Larry Bock Uses Start-up Spirit in Science Fest [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]

Joanna Pool none@example.com — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 17:00:00 -0500

Thanks BioWorld for the article on the USA Science Festival! Read more here:

By Trista Morrison
BioWorld Today Staff Writer

Editor's note: Biotech Foundations is a new BioWorld Today column that recognizes biotech-related nonprofit organizations, as well as those founded by biotech industry luminaries. Tell us about your nonprofit at newsdesk@bioworld.com.

Former biotech venture capitalist and entrepreneur Larry Bock knows how to turn an idea into reality. He's had a hand in founding dozens of companies, including Athena Neurosciences Inc. (bought by Elan Corp. plc.), Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., Ariad Pharmaceuticals Inc., Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc., Illumina Inc. and many others.

Now Bock is applying biotech skills - like fundraising and running virtual operations on a shoestring budget - to the nonprofit world. His USA Science & Engineering Festival, an annual celebration aimed at getting Americans excited about science, kicks off this week.

"Society gets what it celebrates," Bock explained. "We celebrate Brittney Spears, and we get a lot of Britney Spears wannabes." But as Bock was founding biotechs, he became concerned that it was nearly impossible to fill scientist job openings without going overseas. Americans just didn't seem to "get" science.

It's a problem that has attracted plenty of media attention of late. Last month, the National Academy of Sciences reported that China has replaced the U.S. as the world's top high-tech exporter and is second in biomedical research. And this year's crop of Nobel Prize-winning scientists included three researchers working in Britain, one in Japan and two in the U.S. - one of whom is a Japanese citizen and the other of whom has retired to the Philippines. (See BioWorld Today, Sept. 27, 2010, and Oct. 7, 2010.)

Bock wanted to find a way to get Americans excited about science again, and a family vacation in Europe provided the inspiration: science festivals. So last year, Bock launched his own science festival in his hometown of San Diego. The month-long event attracted about 250,000 people, and the grand finale day brought in 100,000. Afterward, one of the scientists staffing a booth told Bock, "For the first time, you made me look cool in front of my kids."

That was the "ah-ha" moment, according to Bock. He realized his idea had promise, and this year he expanded it nationally, with events in 50 cities leading up to a grand finale Oct. 23-24 on the National Mall in Washington.

The first two weeks of the festival focus on community events: sending scientists to speak in schools, hosting teachers' workshops and presenting evening lectures on topics like evolution and global warming. But the big excitement is the grand finale: 1,500 booths where the public can solve a CSI-style crime using DNA analysis, learn about the chemistry of Thanksgiving dinner, or play a 3-D game that goes inside the immune system. There are role models (professional cheerleaders turned scientists), edibles (DNA from Twizzlers and marshmallows), hands-on experiences (build molecules from LEGOs) and plenty to satisfy the inner geek (the physics of superheroes) - as well as 75 performances, including an appearance by National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins' rock band.

The festival is backed by engineering firms such as Lockheed Martin as well as biotechs like Life Technologies Corp., Johnson and Johnson, Amgen Inc., Celgene Corp., Illumina Inc., Agilent Technologies Inc. and others. Bock said many biotechs got their technology from universities and understand the importance of reinvigorating the system with fresh young minds.

And for his part, Bock said many of the lessons he learned from biotech have transferred well to the nonprofit world. "I could at least go up to an investor and promise they'll get a lot more out of it than they put in," he said.

Bock runs the USA Science & Engineering Festival like a biotech start-up: He has a business plan, and he provides regular updates on that plan to his sponsors. He also maintains virtual operations - his group has no offices and no infrastructure, and it outsources functions like logistics and public relations.

One major difference between running a nonprofit and running a biotech is employee motivation. In biotech, "I could always incentivize people with equity," Bock said. While there are no stock options for the science festival, Bock still believes in paying competitive salaries to get the best people on board, reasoning that one really good employee is more effective than 10 people sharing a job for partial salaries. But Bock admits he is "amazed how incentivized people are just by doing good."

For more information, go to: www.usasciencefestival.org

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CHECK OUT THIS BOOTH! Turning Dreams into Reality: TRON Legacy with National Academy of Engineering and Disney [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]

Joanna Pool none@example.com — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 15:00:00 -0500

Check out this booth at the Expo!

Get Transported into the visually stunning digital world of Disney's upcoming theatrical release TRON: Legacy and examine where movie fantasy and the 21st century's real Grand Challenges for Engineering intersect. You'll see how 3-dimensional scanning and printing are bringing the real and the virtual worlds closer together. You'll learn how virtual reality is shaping the practice of medicine and try your hand at brain surgery...on a computer generated replica of a real patient! Finally, you'll take a trip into the TRON digital grid through an incredible light drawing experience created especially for this exhibit.

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Very Large Tourism [Universe]

Claire L. Evans none@example.com — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 12:00:00 -0500

The author, dishing.

To get to the National Radio Telescope Observatory, you have to be committed.

Well, first, you have to be in New Mexico -- about an hour's drive south of Albuquerque, in the plains of San Augustin, to be precise, a Pleistocene lakebed bordered by the northern end of the Chihuahuan Desert and dotted with arid shrubs. Despite being some 6,970 feet above sea level, it feels like the basement of the world, wide and flat and under the massive Southwestern sky. Driving to the Observatory, the home of the famous "Very Large Array" of radio telescopes, is an exercise in patience. The repetitive landscape unfolds past the car windows at 80 miles an hour (the speed limit is 65, a Dadaist joke that no one seems to adhere to); with every rise you crest, you half-expect the fantastic vista to suddenly reveal itself, a sea of telescopes casting shadows on the parched Earth. For an hour, it doesn't.

After 50 miles on a two-lane highway, though, the payoff finally arrives: a colossal garden of 27 antennas the size of small houses dotting the desert like giant aluminum flowers. They couldn't look more out of place: they're extraterrestrial relics, futuristic Tiki gods, as grand and baffling as the Moai of Easter Island. Their technical operation is no less impressive. As a multi-purpose instrument, the telescopes of the Very Large Array can be configured four different ways; combined electronically, their data gives the resolution of an antenna 22 miles across, as sensitive as a dish 422 feet in diameter. The VLA, as it's called, has observed black holes and protoplanetary disks, sleuthed out Mercury's molten core, measured the speed of gravity, and probed the dark corners of the Universe. In 1989, it received radio communications from Voyager 2 as the spacecraft bolted past Neptune and into extrasolar space. And it, you know, starred in a certain Robert Zemeckis movie...

The scale of the desert plays with your sense of perspective as you pull up into parking lot abutting the visitor's center, a shoddy-looking building flanked by porta-potties. The dishes, which looked reasonable from the highway four miles away, seem actually preposterous from up close. They are huge. Blanched white, they all point in exactly the same direction: up.* Each dish is only a part of the larger system, and their synchronized operation is part of both their visual appeal and their usefulness to scientists. Whether scrunched together or arranged widely across the basin -- an effect not unlike a camera focusing and unfocusing -- together they can peer into the distant cosmos.

A hot desert wind blows everything not bolted down away. The displays in the Very Large Array's little on-site museum seem to be five years, maybe a decade, behind the times: one panel excitedly compares the storage capacity of the control center's magnetic tape to "a floppy disc on your PC." Outside of the visitor's center, a wind-and-sand-ravaged sign warns of poisonous snakes. This is the Wild West of astronomy.

Leaflets and poster boards at the VLA visitor's center repeatedly emphasize that these telescopes are not exclusively used for SETI research. "We don't look for little green men," the literature sneers. Still, telescope time has been lent out for SETI efforts occasionally -- most notably to double-check the "WOW!" signal in the mid-1990s. Thanks to the new Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, however, SETI won't need to poke around New Mexico for telescope access much longer: they'll have a large-scale telescope fully at their disposal (the SETI project there, once completed, will be able "see" transmissions from 1,000 light years away).

The Very Large Array self-guided walking tour is a half-mile loop peppered with chatty placards and bugs the size of oranges. At one stop, two white "whisper dishes" display the focusing properties of a parabolic dish, a classic kid's science trick. Further along, you can peek at the visiting scientists' quarters -- double-wides, basically -- and inspect the railway tracks by which the telescopes, with a special lifting locomotive, are picked up and moved to their various configurations, allowing "aperture synthesis interferometry with a maximum baseline of 22.3 miles." Everything else, including almost all of the antennae, is off limits, whichis fine -- it looks fantastic from a distance anyway.

*At least when I was there. Signs below the pedestrian-accessible 'scope indicated that the dishes might suddenly swivel all at once to follow some astronomical object, like rubber-necking spectators at Wimbledon. I was not privy to such a sight.

Supplemental Reading:

How Radio Telescopes Work, from the NRAO website

Contact, by Carl Sagan

Contact, the Robert Zemeckis film

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Finally a Beer for Astronauts [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]

Joanna Pool none@example.com — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 08:00:00 -0500

Thanks to one of our sponsors Engineering.com for helping us get the word out about the Festival. They will be at the Expo on Oct 23-24th even! They will be interviewing Bill Nye the Science guy and following them on engineering.com.

Check out this video some of the other things happening on engineering.com. Things like: smallest Violin, Italian Robots, beer for astronauts, and more

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October's Calendar Image: From the Research Annals [The Weizmann Wave]

Weizmann Science Writer none@example.com — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 04:04:15 -0500

We don't mean to kvetch, but the new website we promised back in June is still as elusive as cold fusion. Scientific research, of course, is going strong, and we even continue to write about it, but no one can read about it on our website (and therefore, we can't offer links to articles on the newest findings).

In the meantime, here is the October image from our 2010-2011 calendar:

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Transportation: The Leading Edge [Casaubon's Book]

Sharon Astyk none@example.com — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 18:16:10 -0500

Anthony Perl says America doesn't have to wait for Congress in order to reduce oil consumption from the transportation sector.

by guest blogger Molly Davis

**my second and last blog entry from the ASPO-USA conference**

Discussions on Capitol Hill over the need to reduce fuel consumption often end up offering solutions that require significant movement on the part of policymakers. Pass a climate bill that puts a price on pollution? Pass an energy bill that mandates a high renewables supply? Pass a transportation bill that shifts highway funding to public transit? Easier said than done.

But Dr. Anthony Perl, co-author of Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil, in an ASPO-USA panel today, suggested that the government could use its existing authority to make major strides in reducing oil dependence.

Perl's talk focused on transportation, which he said is critical to heading off a peak oil crisis, in part because transportation leads all other sectors of the global economy in its dependence on liquid fuels, but also because it's so interrelated with other sectors.

"Because [transportation]'s so embedded in so many other processes and elements in our economy, if we're not able to deal with that leading edge, we're in trouble," he said.

Perl discussed a plan, laid out in his book, for establishing a new "transportation redevelopment agency" that he says wouldn't require authorization from Congress.

That's important because -- as he pointed out -- he doesn't have faith that the current Congress can accomplish the level of change needed. He's not alone in that thinking. The surface transportation law expired in 2009, and House efforts to pass a new, game-changing bill stalled under an overwhelming lack of enthusiasm in the Senate.

"I think we are at a fork in the road, and if we're going to survive this decade's coming challenge, then we're going to have to fast track a transportation system that can perform without oil," Perl said. "I can't see a way for us to get through the transition smoothly or even without a breakdown of our current living arrangements unless we have significant ability to move people and freight without oil."

Perl's proposed transportation agency would set the goal for the overall system, deciding how much to reduce liquid petroleum use over a certain period of time. The agency would then estimate current transport activity and energy use, anticipate future available transportation modes and their associated energy use, then develop a strategy for meeting the goals. Over time, the agency would follow up by continually improving the estimates and strategy.

In his talk, Perl also pointed to the development of high-speed rail as a solution that America can already start working on without passing a transportation bill.

Part of the reason we can do this, he said, is that China is paving the way by significantly expanding its own high-speed rail infrastructure -- and thus driving down the costs for the rest of the world.

"Five years from now there's going to be a blue light special on high-speed rail in the world because China will have built the capacity," Perl said. He added later, "If we start planning now, and if we don't get hung up at least in the short term on trying to reinvent what they've already done, we can take a page out of their book."

**follow my thoughts on science and policy at http://twitter.com/mollettante**

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How to restore the gnome panels to their default state after you mucked them up [Greg Laden's Blog]

Greg Laden none@example.com — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 11:04:56 -0500

Not that you would ever muck them up, but just in case:

Get a terminal somehow (alt+F2 if you must). Type this in:

gconftool-2 --shutdown

gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel

(or, both if you like)

Then,

rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel

pkill gnome-panel

that sounds like a lot of violence and killing and stuff, but it should work. Both of your panels will reappear like magic. If not, go here and complain because this is where I learned it!

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