Tommaso Dorigo, a physicist working on projects at both CERN and Fermilab has posted a strong suggestion that the decades old Tevatron accelerator in the US has pipped the European LHC to the post when it comes to the Higgs boson. The signal shows a three-sigma effect according to at least one of his sources, meaning there's a 0.3% chance that it's an experimental error. If true, the readings would indicate a Higgs mass of around 115-140GeV, very much at the lighter end of the theoretical range.
It's all highly speculative at present, with Dorigo himself admitting: "keeping particle physics in the press with hints of possible discoveries that later die out is more important than speaking loud and clear once in ten years, when a groundbreaking discovery is actually really made, and keeping silent the rest of the time.
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
Sunday, 20 June 2010
Evolutionary Image - Can You Tell What It Is Yet?
I've been playing around with evolving images recently, something hacked together with PHP.
The general idea is that the computer keeps trying random changes to an image until it finds a close match to a "target" image. Can you tell what it is yet?
Full story on my PHP Hackery blog...
The general idea is that the computer keeps trying random changes to an image until it finds a close match to a "target" image. Can you tell what it is yet?
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
Solar Flares And Sunspots - Should We Be Worried?
There's been a sudden explosion of "The End Of The World Is Nigh" articles in the press recently, prompted by NASA's recent warning over increased solar activity over the next few years. Planes will fall out of the sky, power grids will go down and the internet will be deleted....apparently, and according to your choice of newspaper.
So what's the truth, and how worried should we be?
There's two main issues here, the recent activity (or lack thereof) on the Sun, and our increased susceptibility to space weather.
Solar Activity
The Sun goes through cycles. That's been known for well over a century, and records of various kinds go back nearly three millenia - the first recorded sunspot observations were in China circa 800 BCE and professional astronomical observations have been carried out for the last hundred and fifty years.
So what's the truth, and how worried should we be?
There's two main issues here, the recent activity (or lack thereof) on the Sun, and our increased susceptibility to space weather.
Solar Activity
The Sun goes through cycles. That's been known for well over a century, and records of various kinds go back nearly three millenia - the first recorded sunspot observations were in China circa 800 BCE and professional astronomical observations have been carried out for the last hundred and fifty years.
This figure was prepared by Robert A. Rohde and is part of the Global Warming Art project.
Solar cycles seem to have a fairly powerful effect on the Earth. Archaeological records using radioisotope measurements, pollen samples and dendrochronology (a fancy name for what is effectively "counting tree rings") have shown some fairly drastic changes in temperature and weather which appear to coincide with solar cycles - the recent Little Ice Age, involving a drop in temperature of about 1C across the Northern hemisphere, occurred in synchronisation with the Maunder Minimum, the red bit on the graph above.
None of this means that solar weather was a direct cause of the change in Earth weather, "correlation is not causation" being an important thing to remember, but given that the Sun provides almost all of the energy driving the Earth's climate it's a strong suggestion that we should be paying close attention to what the Sun is up to.
So what, exactly, is it up to at present? We've recently gone through one of the quiet periods. In fact August 2009 was one of the only sunspot-free months ever measured, and sunspots seem to be a good measurement of solar activity. We should have seen activity pick up a little in the last year or so, in preparation for a peak around the end of 2012 or early 2013, according to the graphs and predictions anyway. That doesn't really seem to be happening though.
The Sun is staying quiet, that's one of the reasons I got so excited recently when I managed to snap a picture of a couple of sunspots. And this is essentially why people are getting concerned, the simple lack of the Sun "doing what it's supposed to".
Does this mean that it's going to stay quiet and we're going into another mini-ice-age? Or does it mean that the Sun is building up to a doozy of a big event? The evidence can point either way...the history of quiet periods is clearly there, so that's a possibility, but the Sun's cycles are also driven in part by a build-up and sudden release of energy, so the quiet spell at the moment could equally well herald a fairly spectacular burst of activity in the next few years.
Long story short, nobody really knows at the moment, and that's what's scary.
The Effects On Human Civilisation
This is the second issue that needs to be looked at in depth. Let's presume that the Sun is, in fact, building up to a big event. What's likely to happen on Earth as a result?
The last big solar event recorded was the Carrington Event of 1859. Numerous sunspots and solar flares appeared, aurora (Northern Lights) were seen all over the northern hemisphere as far south as the Caribbean, telegraph systems failed across North America and a "coronal mass ejection" (CME) was even observed, basically an explosion on the Sun that sent a huge glob of solar matter streaming towards the Earth.
Sunspots are cool, and CMEs are one of the most spectacular events in the solar system, thankfully mostly deflected by the Earth's magnetic field, which is what causes the oh-so-pretty aurora.
United States Air Force photo by Senior Airman Joshua Strang - Public Domain
The bit we should be concerned about, however, is the telegraph failure. Not because we still use the telegraph system, but because of why it failed and what it became.
The failure was caused, in essence, by the fact that the telegraph system used long bits of wire. When the stream of particles from a solar event hits the Earth's magnetic field it is diverted away from the Earth....but something has to give, and that's the Earth's magnetic field. It bends and warps as it absorbs and redirects the energy, and when you wave a magnet around next to a long piece of wire it heats up. Effectively, the telegraph system started to behave just like an induction cooker, and it was never designed to do that. The wires got hot, current surged through them and fuses blew. Any long piece of wire will do the same - in 1989 Canada lost large parts of its power supply system because of a solar storm.
Whilst we don't have much of a telegraph system these days we do have what it turned into - a worldwide power supply and information transmission system. The internet, phone lines, power supplies, email, computers, banking, trading.....much of modern civilisation is based on long, thin bits of metal wire, and we rely on it in a big way.
A large solar event could, worst case scenario, take down much of our infrastructure and cause damage and economic repercussions that would make the current economic crisis look like child's play. No internet, few communications systems, a massive loss of data...half of the things needed to repair the problem would be lost in the problem itself. Satellites have even bigger problems...they sit right in the middle of the field, so they are still subject to the induced currents but lose some of the shielding. This is a known issue - British company QuinetiQ (formerly part of the Ministry of Defence's research department) specialise in trying to protect orbital systems from this kind of damage.
It's not all doom and gloom however - optical fibres, for instance, aren't subject to magnetic fluctuations like this, and the nature of the internet is such that it will naturally try to route around failures...in fact it was originally designed as a communications system that could still operate after multiple nuclear strikes across the US. Power supplies, too, are designed to back themselves up, although this redundancy has been known to cause "cascade" style outages where system after system goes down trying to pick up the slack from the others.
So in conclusion, should we be scared? Well, no. Concerned? Absolutely. Prepared? It never hurts.
.
Friday, 4 June 2010
Jupiter Gets Twatted Again
For anyone who thinks that planetary impact events are simply the stuff of B rate films with good special effects and a tenuous grasp of physics, here's a little bit of video. It shows a fireball the size of the planet Earth (ish)....
It was caught in the act by an amateur in Australia, Anthony Wesley
(Click the link for a still from a video that shows the actual fireball....OK, it's just a little white dot, but it's better than Hubble managed! )
There's a couple of interesting things about this. Firstly, if that had hit the Earth there probably wouldn't be anyone left at all. In fact the chances of any life surviving that isn't a bacteria of some description aren't good. Forget nuclear weapons, they look like peashooters in comparison. We've had several near misses in the last few years, including a couple of asteroids that passed inside the Moon's orbit, which is a whisker in astronomical terms, or "a bit too bloody close for comfort" in mine.
And you know what? We spotted them on the way out. If they'd hit the first thing we'd have know about it is a bit of a rumble and then the End Of The World (TM).
The other interesting thing is that Jupiter seems to be a bit of a vacuum cleaner (no pun intended) where the Solar system is concerned. In the brief time where we've had telescopes big and common enough to see this kind of thing there have been several impacts on Jupiter, notably the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet, and another impact almost exactly a year ago:
There's a couple of interesting things about this. Firstly, if that had hit the Earth there probably wouldn't be anyone left at all. In fact the chances of any life surviving that isn't a bacteria of some description aren't good. Forget nuclear weapons, they look like peashooters in comparison. We've had several near misses in the last few years, including a couple of asteroids that passed inside the Moon's orbit, which is a whisker in astronomical terms, or "a bit too bloody close for comfort" in mine.
And you know what? We spotted them on the way out. If they'd hit the first thing we'd have know about it is a bit of a rumble and then the End Of The World (TM).
The other interesting thing is that Jupiter seems to be a bit of a vacuum cleaner (no pun intended) where the Solar system is concerned. In the brief time where we've had telescopes big and common enough to see this kind of thing there have been several impacts on Jupiter, notably the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet, and another impact almost exactly a year ago:
(Image courtesy of http://www.hubblesite.org - public domain)
I'm living in the future...cool.....
Friday, 28 May 2010
Small telescope, small camera, big star...
You have to admit, this picture is cool....
Well, OK, I might have to explain a little....
That's a picture of the Sun. The nearly unimaginably huge ball of hydrogen that's so big it dominates the Universe for several light years. It's so big that the entire planet Earth barely registers as "assorted debris" if you do a quick audit of the Solar system.
Me and my mate Ben B^2 took that photo during a few minutes of downtime at work recently, we both had a few minutes off so we set up a telescope (we sell them, it's a bookshop that does geek stuff too), we added a solar filter (you must use one if you don't want to go blind) and we took a quick snapshot of the Sun.
It's all dirt cheap if you're lucky enough to live in the western world (but that's another post), just £130 for the telescope, £30 for the filter and a free phone in return for a contract. £30 would get you a comparable camera. So, for a total cost of £200-ish we've take a really bad quality astronomical photo.
But Wait! There's More!
If you look closely, near the centre of the Sun, just to the right of centre and up a bit, there's a dark splotch. (Click on the image to get a zoomed version) That's not a glitch in the picture, that's a real, honest-to-goodness sunspot. That's an active region of a star.
It's huge, at least the size of the Earth, probably several times bigger. In fact, there were two to the naked eye, but the pic doesn't have that resolution. Sunspots are important indicators of the "weather" on the Sun, they can be used to predict, for example, the Sun's effect on the Earth's average temperature, quite an interesting bit of data at the moment, Take three or four pictures like that a day and you're well on your way to having data the scientific community will find useful.
And with just £200, that's really quite cool....
Well, OK, I might have to explain a little....
That's a picture of the Sun. The nearly unimaginably huge ball of hydrogen that's so big it dominates the Universe for several light years. It's so big that the entire planet Earth barely registers as "assorted debris" if you do a quick audit of the Solar system.
Me and my mate Ben B^2 took that photo during a few minutes of downtime at work recently, we both had a few minutes off so we set up a telescope (we sell them, it's a bookshop that does geek stuff too), we added a solar filter (you must use one if you don't want to go blind) and we took a quick snapshot of the Sun.
It's all dirt cheap if you're lucky enough to live in the western world (but that's another post), just £130 for the telescope, £30 for the filter and a free phone in return for a contract. £30 would get you a comparable camera. So, for a total cost of £200-ish we've take a really bad quality astronomical photo.
But Wait! There's More!
If you look closely, near the centre of the Sun, just to the right of centre and up a bit, there's a dark splotch. (Click on the image to get a zoomed version) That's not a glitch in the picture, that's a real, honest-to-goodness sunspot. That's an active region of a star.
It's huge, at least the size of the Earth, probably several times bigger. In fact, there were two to the naked eye, but the pic doesn't have that resolution. Sunspots are important indicators of the "weather" on the Sun, they can be used to predict, for example, the Sun's effect on the Earth's average temperature, quite an interesting bit of data at the moment, Take three or four pictures like that a day and you're well on your way to having data the scientific community will find useful.
And with just £200, that's really quite cool....
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
Scientist Infected With Computer Virus (Except He's Not)
Oh good grief, somebody's at it again. The t'interweb seems to be abuzz at the moment with news of Dr Mark Gasson of the University of Reading's Systems Engineering department, who from a first glance at the headlines has infected himself with a computer virus.
Which is, of course, hyperbole, misconstrued and misleading twiffle of the worst kind. Let's be clear about this, he's not got a computer virus.
What he's done is infect an Radio Frequency ID (RFID) chip with a computer virus. These tiny little chips are used all over the place, from tagging pets to tracking goods in shops, and they're very useful. You could, for example, keep one in your wallet and program the lights in your house to turn on when you enter a room. Doesn't have to be your wallet, of course, it could be your pocket, in the brim of your hat, hell, you could be really experimental and inject it under your skin if you wanted. It makes no difference.
And that's what this guy has done, and he's not the first: Professor Kevin Warwick (also of the University of Reading) did exactly that back in 1998. The difference here is that instead of a simple tracking program Dr Gasson has installed a virus on the chip, which like any virus can potentially spread to any computer that talks to it.
That's not new either, remote exploits like this have been known about for years. So what's the news? Well, I suppose it's a way to show your average computer user just how insecure many systems are, that it's possible to spread computer viruses by simply walking around with an RFID chip in your pocket (or arm), but the people who would benefit from this information are also the ones who will take one look at a screaming headline about a scientist getting a computer virus and add it to their "science is bad" list, probably somewhere in between cloning (clones are by definition evil versions of us) and the LHC (going to destroy the world).
Which is, of course, hyperbole, misconstrued and misleading twiffle of the worst kind. Let's be clear about this, he's not got a computer virus.
What he's done is infect an Radio Frequency ID (RFID) chip with a computer virus. These tiny little chips are used all over the place, from tagging pets to tracking goods in shops, and they're very useful. You could, for example, keep one in your wallet and program the lights in your house to turn on when you enter a room. Doesn't have to be your wallet, of course, it could be your pocket, in the brim of your hat, hell, you could be really experimental and inject it under your skin if you wanted. It makes no difference.
And that's what this guy has done, and he's not the first: Professor Kevin Warwick (also of the University of Reading) did exactly that back in 1998. The difference here is that instead of a simple tracking program Dr Gasson has installed a virus on the chip, which like any virus can potentially spread to any computer that talks to it.
That's not new either, remote exploits like this have been known about for years. So what's the news? Well, I suppose it's a way to show your average computer user just how insecure many systems are, that it's possible to spread computer viruses by simply walking around with an RFID chip in your pocket (or arm), but the people who would benefit from this information are also the ones who will take one look at a screaming headline about a scientist getting a computer virus and add it to their "science is bad" list, probably somewhere in between cloning (clones are by definition evil versions of us) and the LHC (going to destroy the world).
Monday, 24 May 2010
Science vs Religion - Move Along, Nothing To See
I've been spending a bit of time reading Jason Boyett's Oh Me Of Little Faith blog today. There's some interesting stuff there, particularly as it's Christian in tone. Now I'm a borderline atheist (quantum theory doesn't disallow god-like entities existing), but I still find religion in general fascinating.
Not in a Dan Brown way, you understand. More as a logical system. Science is just a logical system, one based on maths and observation, and religion is equally a logical system, based on belief. In science you begin with the axioms of maths, and start saying "if x, and y, then z". Monotheistic religions start with the simple statement "we believe there is a god". (I use a lowercase g for the concept, and uppercase for the Christian God)
Both are highly intricate systems, and parts of both are constantly debated by their respective scholars. I'm lucky enough to share a flat with two blokes from a Catholic background and who are both quite happy to argue about things in an intelligent way. There are some remarkably complex bits of thinking in the faith - the infallibility of the Pope for example:
"Surely", Science argues, "the Pope can sit in his magic chair and say something untrue?".
"Like what?", says Catholicism.
"Well for instance, that Pi is equal to three" says science, banging on about a pet subject again.
"Well that couldn't happen", counters Catholicism, "the conditions for ex cathedra teaching require a judgement on doctrine concerning faith or morals, abstract geometrical thought isn't included so it wouldn't be a legitimate argument involving infallibility. Here's a very long Wikipedia article discussing the philosophy of papal infallibility, with forty odd footnotes and thirteen references, read them all and get back to me when you've finished."
Science then traditionally mutters something about Galileo and everything kicks off.
[EDIT: I just realised I wrote Catholicism with the voice of British comedian Bill Bailey...take that as you will...)
Religion is consistent, when interpreted carefully. We science types often get too hung up on the vocal minority who insist on taking everything in Book X literally, when there's fascinating people out there like a Jesuit neurosurgeon I had the pleasure of knowing, or the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Both sides need to learn that disagreement with the initial axiom, "we believe there is a god", is OK.
Honestly, it's fine, once we've done that we can discuss the hypothesis of me going to Hell, which, at metaphorically the end of the day, is really interesting in implication. I'm not going to take it personally, because I don't believe it will happen, and it brings us neatly around to Pascal's Wager. There are interesting people on both sides, we need to agree to differ on the god thing, sit down with a mutually acceptable beverage, and have a chat.
And interesting chats are what Jason Boyett does well on his blog. There you go, a full circle argument involving Pi and a Pope. Worked quite well I thought.
As a last aside, Jason posts a funny piece concerning Michaelangelo's interpretation of God's choice of nightwear. Seriously, God's wearing a pink nightie, I'd never really noticed it before. So here's a science based reply, Michaelangelo might have been doing an anatomical sketch on the side...
Not in a Dan Brown way, you understand. More as a logical system. Science is just a logical system, one based on maths and observation, and religion is equally a logical system, based on belief. In science you begin with the axioms of maths, and start saying "if x, and y, then z". Monotheistic religions start with the simple statement "we believe there is a god". (I use a lowercase g for the concept, and uppercase for the Christian God)
Both are highly intricate systems, and parts of both are constantly debated by their respective scholars. I'm lucky enough to share a flat with two blokes from a Catholic background and who are both quite happy to argue about things in an intelligent way. There are some remarkably complex bits of thinking in the faith - the infallibility of the Pope for example:
"Surely", Science argues, "the Pope can sit in his magic chair and say something untrue?".
"Like what?", says Catholicism.
"Well for instance, that Pi is equal to three" says science, banging on about a pet subject again.
"Well that couldn't happen", counters Catholicism, "the conditions for ex cathedra teaching require a judgement on doctrine concerning faith or morals, abstract geometrical thought isn't included so it wouldn't be a legitimate argument involving infallibility. Here's a very long Wikipedia article discussing the philosophy of papal infallibility, with forty odd footnotes and thirteen references, read them all and get back to me when you've finished."
Science then traditionally mutters something about Galileo and everything kicks off.
[EDIT: I just realised I wrote Catholicism with the voice of British comedian Bill Bailey...take that as you will...)
Religion is consistent, when interpreted carefully. We science types often get too hung up on the vocal minority who insist on taking everything in Book X literally, when there's fascinating people out there like a Jesuit neurosurgeon I had the pleasure of knowing, or the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Both sides need to learn that disagreement with the initial axiom, "we believe there is a god", is OK.
Honestly, it's fine, once we've done that we can discuss the hypothesis of me going to Hell, which, at metaphorically the end of the day, is really interesting in implication. I'm not going to take it personally, because I don't believe it will happen, and it brings us neatly around to Pascal's Wager. There are interesting people on both sides, we need to agree to differ on the god thing, sit down with a mutually acceptable beverage, and have a chat.
And interesting chats are what Jason Boyett does well on his blog. There you go, a full circle argument involving Pi and a Pope. Worked quite well I thought.
As a last aside, Jason posts a funny piece concerning Michaelangelo's interpretation of God's choice of nightwear. Seriously, God's wearing a pink nightie, I'd never really noticed it before. So here's a science based reply, Michaelangelo might have been doing an anatomical sketch on the side...
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