a really important question

referencing this post: i used to understand this.

has the large hadron collider destroyed the world yet?

click here for the answer!

windows7

i moved our first computer to windows 7 these last few days.

i decided to do the home theatre pc (htpc) first as this is the least important of our machines, but one we use every day due to it having windows media center for dvr and using the mymovies collection plugin for our hd/dvd/blu-ray rips.

the move was relatively painless. it did take a little while to get media center properly configured to correctly determine what tv channels we have available from the various sources (over-the-air digital, hd local stations on cable, std cable through a cable box).

[really looking forward to being able to record our encrypted hd cable on the htpc. soon!]

one quirk - when wmc looks for the ir-blaster, it requires both ir-blasters to be plugged in, even if you are only using one. strange, and different from vista.

the ability for win7 media center to juggle which tuner is doing what is very nice. with vista you had to configure a tuner to a source, say analogue cable, and even though it could also tune qam digital signals, it was not available to do so. win7 lifts this restriction - today i was recording two qam sources simultaneously while watching one on about a 2 hour delay. awesome!

now it is time to work out when to upgrade the other computers to win7 - high on the list is K's hp touchsmart laptop. anything that helps this heavily used machine run quicker is worth doing. K bought it during the "upgrade to win 7 free" promotion, so the upgrade if free. guess who will be spending the time doing it though???

now that's cool...

the lhc at cern has been cooled to operating temperatue: 1.7°K! as the bbc points out, that is colder than outer space which as we all know (thanks to cobe) is 2.726°K

did you check your power relays today?

headed downstairs this morning to find one of our external a/c units still running. it had obviously been running all night even though temperatures inside had cooled enough that the forced air circulation fan was switched off.

as this happened to our other unit last year i knew the likely cause - a stuck power relay contact in the a/c unit. i was very pleased that i ordered a second relay last year anticipating the second unit of the same vintage having the same problem. the problem was found, diagnosed and fixed in around 30 minutes. not bad at all...

though it still made me a little late for work.

this did not happen

well, what you see in the picture did happen today - a man sat on a saddle on a model of a dinosaur.

what didn't happen as is claimed at the location where this photo was taken is that people were around at the same time as dinosaurs, including adam and eve.

what is a scientific debate?

i have personally measured the distance to a star (vB 10) which shows that it is ~20 light years away. my measurements of parallax using infrared imaging agreed with published data using optical images taken by other people. and this is the crux of science - claims are testable, and there is open disclosure and discussion about the techniques employed and the resulting data.

the reason i was measuring something already known? i was testing my method so that when i applied it to another star (pc0025+0447) with an then unknown parallax that i also measured, i knew that my technique worked. this star was shown to be at least 250 light years away which reduced the likelihood of it being a brown dwarf. yes, i couldn't measure a parallax with certainty, just an upper limit, but that still provided information. this work was a significant chunk of my thesis.

why go to all this bother? well, trigonometric parallaxes are the solid foundation of the distance estimates for objects outside the solar system. vB 10 is only 20 light years away. the nearest big galaxy is andromeda at 2,000,000 light years. light from there has taken 2 million years to get here and can be detected in the right conditions by the human eye. think about that - photons from another galaxy are interacting with you. that's cool.

but some people disagree that this is the case. there is a vocal group of people in the u.s. that apply a carefully selected "literal" translation and interpretation (and as it is carefully selected, i have to use literal with quotes) of documents from around 2000 years ago as a basis to claim that everything is less than 10,000 years old.

what does that mean for the photons that you just received from andromeda? how did they get set in motion? astronomy doesn't have a problem with light coming from andromeda as it has quite a good estimate for the age of the universe (13,500,000,000 years) - a disagreement to the tune of a factor of at least 1,350,000 over the ancient texts.

fortunately, astronomy isn't at the forefront of the attacks from the anti-scientific movement in the u.s., but it clearly could be and has received some sideswipes as part of the main attack on biology.

there is a claim that there is a scientific controversy about the validity of the idea of evolution. a good old scientific controversy would be a wonderfully exciting thing - there would be heated debate about interpretation of data at scientific conferences (i have witnessed these myself in astronomy over types of galaxies). it is very engaging, exciting and generally leads to the parties heading off to get more data on the subject and report back at the next conference or in a journal.

note that i don't say more data to support their idea. i mean more data. science is data driven. if you suppress data to fit your preconceptions/biases/wishes you will be shown up as others verify your results. the fleischmann-pons claim of cold fusion is a clear example of this. if you want to keep your credibility, as i said at the outset, there has to be open disclosure and discussion about the techniques employed and the resulting data.

instead of a fundamental disagreement about a contested theory, biology, and genetics in particular, is wonderfully exciting for another reason. there is so much to be learned now that gene sequencing is widespread! the mechanism for heredity has been discovered and the mechanisms of evolution are broadly understood. geneticists are now filling in the detail with alacrity which is the exciting thing.

which brings us back to those ancient texts. i hope the above gives some context before watching this painful video. this is the first part of a long interview where an ancient text advocate claims there is no evidence for evolution. in the second part she then states that she is "not hidden from the information" with reference to evidence for evolution (about 5m30s in).

i cannot understand such willful ignorance.



thanks, i think, to pz myers for posting this.

gardening velcro - best thing since sliced bread?

say you want to train citrus tree to a wall? you have battens already in place, so how do you persuade the tree to go where you want it.

you can use twine or wire, but yesterday i came across gardening velcro. it's wonderful!