Everyday Scientist

dexter learns to walk

The Anybots robot lab out here in Mountain View, CA got Dexter (their first dynamically balancing walking humanoid robot) to walk!

Kinda scary: AN UNPOKABLE ROBOT!!! Well, it’s better than poor Asimo falling down the stairs.

Actually, despite my mockery, I think this is wicked cool!

scientific article filtering

The wave of social bookmarking is finally reaching scientific journal articles. What YouTube, de.licio.us, and digg are to stupid videos and strange websites, now biowizard, CiteULike, and BioInfoBank are to scientific articles. (See also my previous post about CiteULike.) I suspect Connotea, with some social features already existing, is on its way to more filtering of scientific articles, too.

I welcome this progress. I find it pretty tedious reading journal tables of contents every day/week, which is necessary to keep up with new ideas that you hadn’t thought of (and thus are hard to search for in a database). Also, with journals such as PLoS One (which publishes anything—whether it’s interesting or not), filtering of journal articles will become more and more useful to pinpoint only articles you’re interested in reading.

The ranking mechanism of these science social bookmarking sites is far from perfect. But it’s a good start. Go check them out and make it easier for me to find papers I want to read!

[Note: My favorite site is still CiteULike. Connotea is nice and probably less buggy, but it seems to progress at a much slower rate, probably because CUL programming is open-source and collaborative. I can’t imagine biowizard really being that helpful in the long run, because it doesn’t have any of the functionality of CUL or Connotea and only applies to biology. I’m going to stick with CUL until someone else wins unequivocally (then I’ll export my library). I’ll update you as things change.]

news update: photonics, publishing, and elephants

Just a few (sciency) news updates today…

Publishing

This month, NPG launches its new (sub)journal Nature Photonics. It might have some cool articles in the future. Also PLoS One launched at the end of 2006 and will be an open-access journal that publishes any submissions that pass very limited scientific criteria (i.e. not including the impact or “coolness” of the paper). Who know? It might even work. If there were a good way of filtering the papers after they’re published, this open-access fad might be the new paradigm.

Invisible Cloak (not)

OK, everyone’s calling it an invisible cloak, but the “metamaterials” technology isn’t really even close. But it just got closer, with Opt. Lett. 2006, 32, 53–55. The authors report a metamaterial with a negative refractive index for visible (780-nm) light. And it’s really cool because … hey wait … where’d you go??

Stupid Elephant Picture

Many newspapers etc. have been publishing a picture of an elephant fetus in the womb (allegedly).

Cool eh? But it’s bogus! (Yeah, I was fooled, too. I saw it in Nature, where they claimed it was “enhanced with computer graphics.” Riiiiight. That should have tipped me off.) Actually, it is a silicon model of this ultrasound image:

I guess that’s cool.

offset your entropy footprint

You’ve probably heard of websites like CarbonCounter.com, where you can offset your personal carbon footprint to help prevent global warming. Well, I’ve created a site that will let you calculate and offset your entropy footprint in order to help prevent a more dangerous inevitability: the heat death of the universe!

Please help before it’s too late.

why don’t people understand dollars and cents?

There’s a strange problem being reported by multiple people on the internets: Verizon cannot (or refuses to) grasp the difference between 0.002 dollars per kilobyte and 0.002 cents per kilobyte—obviously a 100-fold difference. Their confusion is clear: they seem to believe that a fraction of a dollar is called a “cent.” When asked Do you recognize the difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents?, the customer service rep replied, No, they’re the same thing.

For those of us who have ever converted megapancakes per second to picoyummies (conversion factor: 10¹⁸ y*s/p), this seems pretty idiotic (and soooo frustrating). (And it seems that the Verizon customer service people need to be trained to be a little more respectful and helpful, and to listen to their customers.) Plus, this may be a societal problem of the reluctance to think in abstracts (e.g. units). But I also have to be sorta the bad guy and point out that—while not their job to teach the Verizon idiots how to do very simple math and finance—these people who spoke to several customer service reps and managers need to take a little responsibility for failing to communicate effectively.

Of course I understood what the wronged customers were saying, but I’m well educated in math (just as they seem to be). I would have used the same tactics, analogies, and examples that they did. And I would have failed to convey the problem, too. Especially without the help of a blackboard, time, or patience (on either end), clarifying the difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents might be an impossible task. But I’m still disappointed that the well educated customers failed—and failed again and again using nearly identical tactics.

So maybe the bad Verizon math scandal is a wake-up call for both sides—the educators and the desperately-needing-to-be-educated-even-just-a-little—that, if at first you don’t succeed, try again a different way.

Oh, Snap!

Remember a while back when some guy used fractal analysis to study Jackson Pollock paintings and made a world of bold proclamations, the most important of which was the claim that fractal analysis can be used to refute provenance? Not so much. Apparently all it takes to become the master of “the language of nature” is 5 minutes and photoshop.

Now all that needs to be done is configure our laser jet for a 10×15′ canvas, and I’m richer than L. Ron Hubbard. No flying DC-10 spaceships required.

(Xenu prefers fractional dimensionalities)

bethe talks

Cornell has some cool videos of Hans Bethe talking about quantum mechanics. Here’s his intro: “Quantum theory is the most important discovery of the 20th century. And it has been presented to the public in a completely distorted way, what you hear normally has very little to do with quantum theory.”

There are three 50-minute talks, so you can watch them while waiting for the laser to warm up, the cells to divide, the coffee to percolate, or whatever you do…

watt webb visit

Sorry I’ve been absent. I’m hosting professor Watt W. Webb for a few days on his visit to Stanford, which is quite a bit of work. But it’s worth it, for sure: Webb is a nice guy and a great scientist.

view from ACS in San Francisco

And then there were 8…

Well, the IAU has now decided that Pluto is a planet no more. Resolution 5A passed, which officially demoted the now “Plutonian object.” I have to say I’m very pleased with the outcome. As a scientist, nothing gives me greater pleasure than making children cry. I wonder if it’s too late to get a refund on the New Horizons program…

If I may, a tribute to the far-off, icy land:

Folding in Style

The folding-at-home package has been ported to Sony’s much anticipated PS3 console. The point? None! But, it’ll make Vijay’s group happy and its always nice to see some of our peers get street-cred in the popular media. I hear their groundbreaking cell architecture is a ~10x improvement over your typical PC!

Ah, the irony – this is probably the only software out there that can leverage the PS3’s sweet sweet cpu cycles. Now, if I could only frag more of those proteins … sigh … here is some eye candy:

The official press release from Folding at Home and some coverage from Engadget.

future of biology

Neal sent most of the Chidsey Lab a link to an interesting Charlie Rose interview from last night. It’s loosely about the great Biology discoveries of the past – Darwin, Watson, etc., the merging of chemistry with biology in the 20th century, and the future direction of biology. Check it out – an hour long, but definitely worth watching. Thanks go to Josh “da Man” Ratchford for forwarding it.

Charlie Rose Interview

First Empirical Detection of Dark Matter

Well, after giving everyone a taste of what is to come today, NASA has finally let the cat out of the bag. During the observation of a collision between a pair of clusters, the observers were able to resolve the separation of baryonic and non-baryonic matter by comparing the luminous and gravitational profiles.

Source

RC humans

This sounds really fun. I wanna get myself an RC human. I would make him go do my laundry.

The real proof that this is a useful technology will be when they can remotely control a human to control an RC car. That will be true progress.

stanford chem’s new website

We have a new website design, and it’s OK. The old site wasn’t so great (I mean, who is that guy?)—we weren’t really even trying. Now it’s a little better. I mean, the pictures with the silly words (Understanding) should go. But all in all, I think it looks better and is organized in a more obvious manner.

Constest: Which chem dept has the best website? Personally, I think my alma mater at least beats Stanford Chemistry.