Skeptics

Real World is sucking most of my time at the moment, I’m working on some upcoming entries when I can, until then browse on over to the latest Skeptics Circle over at Salto Sobrius – don’t forget your tinfoil hat!

Science in Action

Astronomy text books have been re-written a few times since I last took an astronomy class (back when the Steady State Theory was leading - OK so I’m dating myself, nothing new, move along now) one of the enduring unsolved questions that has interesting implications (as well as more than a few tenures and seats at various institutions of higher learning) is how galaxies maintain their shape.

Galactic rotation curves

I won’t go in to the messy math details but it boils down to this, either our understanding of gravitational effects at galactic distances is inadequate or there must be several times more mass distributed throughout (and beyond) a given galaxy than can be inferred from observation in order for the galaxies to maintain their spiral shape for more than a rotation or two.

According to our understanding of gravity as described by Newton, the further a given star is from its galactic center the slower its orbital velocity should be. This holds true at the solar system level, where from Mercury out each planet’s (and minor planet’s) solar orbital velocity diminishes according to F=ma, when these velocities are plotted they produce a smooth diminishing curve. However, when the motion of stars orbiting at different distances from a galactic center are plotted something strange happens, at some point the curve flattens and the stars near the edge of the galactic disk have the same orbital velocity as those closer to the center maintaining the spiral structure over many galactic rotations.

Dark Matter

The current leading theory invokes something called dark matter, a so far invisible, undetectable theoretical construct that (allegedly) makes up at least 80% of the matter in the universe – the implication of this is that we can only account for 1 out of 5 parts of the universe around us – that means for every star we see, every planet we can infer there is the equivalent of at least 4 times as much mass somehow hiding in plain sight.

MOND

One heretical alternative named MOND (for Modified Newtonian Dynamics) was explored back in 83 when Mordehai Milgrom published 3 papers in volume 270 of The Astrophysical Journal that were received with thunderous…

Silence

Since then it has been attacked and ridiculed but no one has so far proven it wrong, it has recently attracted some renewed interest and has been expanded by Jacob Bekenstien into a MOND theory called TeVeS – acronym for Tensor, Vector and Scalar that describes how matter and energy react with space and time and can explain the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. First predicted by Einstein and given as the first proof of general relativity when during a solar eclipse the apparent position of a star ‘behind’ the sun was displaced by the amount predicted.

In the next few years one of these two theories will be consigned to the “nice try” bin along with luminiferous aether (although a modern replication of the Michelson Morley experiment with current state of the art instruments would be interesting) and a few academic careers – but that’s what happens in science as opposed to faith.

And the debate continues, a recent paper suggests that the x-ray halo surrounding the colliding galaxies 1E0657-556 (the bullet cluster) is direct evidence of dark matter. The two galaxies are ‘colliding’ (passing through each other) at 10 Million Mph and there are some interesting lensing effects – that some researchers infer as caused by dark matter.

Personally, I have a gut bias against invoking something (dark matter) that can’t be seen or detected, on the other hand Newton’s laws hold up remarkably well and by invoking dark matter can explain the rotation problem - however, if someone tells you that we know all about gravity and the electromagnetic spectrum gently ask them to explain the two slit problem.

However the answer turns out - that is the beauty of the scientific method

Who’s the UbberNerd?

Open challenge – somewhere out there are an elite few who scored higher, I bow to those few

Arising to Janet's challenge – and ably answered by PZ and Orac among others and no I can’t top PZ’s portrait

1 yah, punched cards, learned COBOL, watfour, watfive, FORTH etc but due to the slowness of the hardware any real time work was done in machine code – same with FORTRAN and promptly forgot all of it when no longer needed, although a FORTH program was pointing the telescope up until a few years ago

2 build computers from liquid cooled over clocked game screamers to resurrecting discarded 286 & 386 for Linux projects

3 did the Rings and Dunes in my teens but was more influenced by Eric Frank Russell, Heinlein & Clarke than Tolkin or Herbert

4 I traveled with a Silent 700 terminal, logged on from payphones in airports circa ‘79

5 not much of a D&D or any of the role playing games however at onetime a bit of a FPS junkie and still grab the occasional fractional hour of yoke time on the flight sim

6 ditto on the trinkets although I did have a Revenge of the Jedi poster and a few tidbits from Sprocket Systems

7 At one point in time had all the original Star Trek on ½” eiaj reel to reel video tape, then on Betamax

Speaking of Beta…

8 still have 3 functioning SuperBetaHiFi decks and an industrial beta deck and a few hundred tapes

9 without implicating myself or former coworkers, lets just say we had access to ‘preview copies’ of the original 3 Star Wars, Blade Runner (do androids dream of electric sheep?) Close Encounters and a few others, sometimes before the theatrical release

10 obscure brit SiFi – StarCops – one of the few shows that was technically accurate with regard to space & the moon – had a great theme song

11 comics, outgrew the typical ones once I hit puberty however I have all the FFF Brothers, Crumb, and a few boxes of various underground comics from the late 60’s through the 80’s along with all the Calvin & Hobbs, Shoe, Bloom County and of course Doonesbury

12 I’ve had a three letter @ email address since the mid 80’s and the same domain since 91

Further adventures in air travel

AirTran Flight 47 1 September 2006

With a larger than normal crowd at Atlanta airport the Friday evening before the long holiday weekend Just checking in to the flight was an exercise in standing in lines, once actually checked in there was some minor gate shuffling after the pleasantly brief security check.

Flight was scheduled to depart ATL at 2122 arriving in San Francisco at 2347, which would mean I’d get home about 3am – ‘wheels up’ didn’t actually happen until 45 minutes after that, not too bad for the typical Friday delays

About two hours into the flight the pilot announced that we were diverting to Denver, seems there was a passenger (male, mid 20’s and looked to possibly be Malaysian) who was behaving strangely, he went in to the bathroom with one of his bags and was in there for a long time and making some strange sounds and refused to come out, then they forced the door apparently was sniffing something and had acted suspiciously moving something between his bags, - for some reason he had bags on both sides of the overhead and had pulled the ear buds off the headphones exposing bare wire – this was several rows behind me so I did not witness that incident until they escorted him back to his seat and then kept getting up and getting in to his bags – I’m trying to find something in the news .

All I can find so far is this http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/09/02/saturday/index.html?section=cnn_latest

Scroll to the bottom

We actually landed at 0300 and I think there was only one baggage ape on duty – made it home at 0600

(From the CNN link above)

AirTran captain diverts flight due to 'unruly passenger'

DENVER, Colo. (CNN) -- The pilot of AirTran Airways flight 47, en route from Atlanta to San Francisco, made an emergency landing Saturday at Denver International Airport after a male passenger "was acting in a bizarre manner," Tad Hutcheson, vice president of AirTran Airways marketing and sales said.

During the flight, some of the 99 passengers on the Boeing 737 became "nervous" after a male passenger collected air sick bags throughout the plane and then walked to the front of the cabin, where he then paced back and forth in front of the bathrooms, Hutcheson said.

"He'd go in the lavatory and come out, and go in and come out and the flight attendant said please return to your seat," Hutcheson said. The passenger, however, did not listen to the crew's directions and the pilot was notified.

The captain then requested an emergency diversion to Denver, where he landed at 11 p.m. MT (1 p.m. ET).

The plane sat on an isolated tarmac while Denver International Airport Police boarded the plane, arrested the man and removed all his luggage, Hutcheson said. The man is being held in police custody.

All passengers on the plane remained on board and, after a new flight plan was mapped and the police searched the aircraft and gave the "all-clear," continued on to San Francisco.

Flight 47 is expected to arrive in San Francisco at 12:30 a.m PT (3:30 a.m. ET), approximately an hour and a half late, Hutcheson said. (Posted 2:46 a.m.)

As per my past experiences the news report and personal observation are a bit at odds but at least some parts jive.

And I’m back to ATL on Monday…

Odd Jobs

Traveling this week, Atlanta

On one of my few forays outside of “TV” I worked for an analytical instrument company that made some interesting lasers and laser based instruments (this is late 70’s) – with one YAG model you could get several watts of power – continuous, they also made a flash lamp pumped tunable dye laser that depending on frequency could give instantaneous peak power levels of a few thousand watts – one cool trick with that one was to tune the beam to a maximum absorption frequency of a specific ink and ‘zap’ that and only that ink away – the paper would twitch as you actually creating tiny explosions as the pulses would vaporize the ink.

This was before practical solid state lasers so they all involved glass tubes - either gas or a rare earth doped rod or liquid die – the smallest one I had was an alignment laser that was about the size of a large beer (think Fosters) and required AC power – and was just the thing to drive our cats crazy, I could have them climb half way up the wall trying to catch the beam – or hit the stop sign from a block a way – just as a car approached late at night.

Actually did some real science, we measured the distance to the moon a few times with pulsed laser, some of the Apollo landings left what are known as corner reflectors, they return a reflected image in (almost) any direction directly back to the source, we’d mount the laser on the scope and track the moon and (once we found one) measure the time between the outbound flash and the reflection – divide by the speed of light and there you go.

The tricky part is the ‘beam’ is only a few meters in diameter – at most, and each pulse is only 20 meters long or so, so hitting the reflector is as much luck as it is skil.l

It took several ‘negative results’ evenings before we got our first hit, once we had recalibrated the tracking and made minor adjustments to the scope mount we could get consistent returns once we found the reflector but finding them is difficult.

Television History part one

HDTV Production Truck

For all of you out there who work in or watch “TV” did you ever wonder who invented it? A brief, non technical history and minor Who’s who of the folks who helped couch potatoes everywhere.

Now, obviously today’s TV in all its digital high definition, PVR’d and PVP’d glory is the result of hundreds of different inventions and developments - most of them by corporate teams. But there are a few who developed the initial inventions that made the dream of Distant Vision – television possible.

As early as 1827 Sir Charles Whetstone describes image scanning and also coins the term microphone (audio, that bastard stepchild of video that makes it work) – this was 50 years before Emile Berliner actually gets around to inventing one.

Baird & Televisior

Various mechanical devices were developed in the early 1900’s cumulating in 1925 with the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird’s Televisior producing the first recognizable face and in 1927 Herbert Hoover was the first American president to appear on “TV” – the camera is actually a mechanical device with spinning wheels and the display is square-pixel flat-panel video screen.

But arguably the one man who brought television out of the 19^th century mechanical world into the electronic 20^th century is a self taught math wiz whose work in a small lab on Green Street in San Francisco laid the foundation of all subsequent developments in electronic television including computer displays. Yet I’m willing to bet most readers (all three of you) have never heard the name, Philo T. Farnsworth.

This Saturday (19 August 2006) marks the 100^th solar orbital anniversary of his birth

- Thanks Philo, it sure beats digging ditches!

The Mercury News

The definitive Philo site

Another unknown name is the man who lead the team that developed the first commercial Video Tape Recorder that is the direct ancestor of your TiVo. Yes PVR’s are a lot smaller and have a much better user interface than the 1000 above but at the basic level they are identical in the core function, that is to record and play back synchronized pictures and sound – one name from that team almost everyone will recognize even if most under 40 will think of the musician not the engineering student who worked on the team led by Charles Ginzberg

- the engineering student? Ray Dolby who goes on to found the company that bears his name and provides the audio processing that gives us “Dolby AC-3 5.1 surround sound”

- the musician? Thomas (Blinded me with Science) Dolby

And no, despite rumors to the contrary, I’m not in the picture above

article from Mercury News link above - reposted with permission

Philo Farnsworth, TV's invisible inventor, was born 100 years ago

By Frazier Moore

AP Television Writer

NEW YORK - Fish don't know they're living in water, nor do they stop to wonder where the water came from.

Humans? Not much better, as we share a world engulfed by television. And the deeper our immersion becomes, the less likely it seems we'll poke our heads above the surface and see there must have been life before someone invented TV.

That invisible someone was Philo T. Farnsworth, who was fated to live and work, then die, in sad obscurity. Now, on the centennial of his birth on Aug. 19, 1906, his invention plays an increasingly powerful role in our lives -- with less chance than ever of him being recognized.

How ironic! In this media-savvy age, not only should his name be as widely known as Bell's or Edison's, but his long, lean face with the bulbous brow should be as familiar as any pop icon's. He should be the patron saint of every couch potato. Instead, we regard TV not as a man-made contraption, but a natural resource.

Nonetheless, it was Philo Farnsworth who conducted the first successful demonstration of electronic television.

The setting: Farnsworth's modest San Francisco lab where, on Sept. 7, 1927, the 21-year-old self-taught genius transmitted the image of a horizontal line to a receiver in the next room.

It worked, just like Farnsworth had imagined as a 14-year-old Idaho farm boy and math whiz already stewing over how to send pictures, not just sound, through the air. He had been plowing a field when, with a jolt, he realized an image could be scanned by electrons the same way: row by horizontal row.

The prodigy at his plow had already made a fundamental breakthrough, charting a different course from others' ultimately doomed mechanical systems that required a spinning disk to do the scanning. Yet Farnsworth would be denied credit, fame and reward for developing the way TV works to this day.

Even TV had no time for him. His sole appearance on national television was as a mystery guest on the CBS game show ``I've Got a Secret'' in 1957. He fielded questions from the celebrity panelists as they tried in vain to guess his secret (``I invented electronic television''). For stumping them, Farnsworth took home $80 and a carton of Winston cigarettes.

In 1971, Philo Farnsworth died at age 64.

But his wife, Elma ``Pem'' Farnsworth, who had worked by her husband's side throughout his tortured career, continued fighting to gain him his rightful place in history, until her death earlier this year at 98.

Fleeting tribute was paid on the 2002 Emmy broadcast to mark TV's 75th anniversary. Introduced by host Conan O'Brien as ``the first woman ever seen on television,'' Pem Farnsworth stood in the audience for applause on her husband's behalf.

It was a skimpy challenge to the stubborn misconception that the Radio Corporation of America was behind TV's creation. This is a version of history RCA was already promulgating as its president, David Sarnoff, was plotting to crush the lonely rival who stood in his way.

Ultimately, Farnsworth would go head to head with RCA's chief television engineer, Vladimir Zworykin, and a vast company whose boss had no intention of losing either a financial windfall or eternal bragging rights. With that in mind, Sarnoff waged a war not just of engineering one-upmanship, but also dirty tricks, propaganda and endless litigation.

In 1935 the courts ruled that Farnsworth, not Zworykin, was the inventor of electronic television.

But that didn't stop Sarnoff, who courted the public by erecting a wildly popular RCA Television Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair and, after announcing that the RCA-owned National Broadcasting Co. would expand from radio into TV, transmitted scenes from the fair to the 2,000 TV receivers throughout the city.

Thanks to Sarnoff, money woes and the lost years of World War II (which put TV broadcasting on hold), the clock ran out on Farnsworth's patents before he could profit from them.

Now, few even working in the industry that Farnsworth sparked know who he is. But one who does is Aaron Sorkin, the playwright, screenwriter and creator of ``The West Wing'' (as well as ``Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,'' a TV drama that probes the inner workings of a fictitious TV series, which premieres next month on NBC).

A decade ago, Sorkin briefly considered scripting a Farnsworth biopic. Later on, he opted to write a screenplay that instead would focus on the battle between Farnsworth and Sarnoff.

Then he decided a play would be the better form for this tale. The result, ``The Farnsworth Invention,'' will have a workshop production at California's La Jolla Playhouse next winter, with a possible New York staging in fall 2007.

It's unlikely such a theater piece will make Philo Farnsworth a household name. But as Sorkin wrote in a recent e-mail, ``The story of the struggle between Farnsworth and Sarnoff seemed like a nice way to invoke the spirit of exploration against the broad canvas of the American Century.''

The struggle between them was fierce and unfair. But in his sad fashion, Farnsworth won: The force unleashed as television was his doing, however blind the world may be to what he did.