A Quantum Diaries Survivor

Jeff pointed out to me today the remarkable world wide telescope, a site where you can download a software created by Microsoft to browse the heavens as if you were commanding a powerful telescope. The constellations are not maps, but actual pictures, into which you can zoom as much as the images of the digital sky surveys (SDSS and others) allow.

My jaw dropped as I started using the software, which you can download and install on your computer, and which works pretty much like google Earth - downloading the region you are visualizing from the internet. A nice feature is the appearance of a frame of thumbnail pictures around the zoomed area, highlighting the most interesting celestial objects present there. If you click once on each pic the relevant object is highlighted on the map; clicking twice will allow you to download full-resolution image of the object directly from the online databases, including Hubble images.

What I find amazing, however, is the fact that browsing the night sky becomes a thrilling experience at your fingertips in front of the computer. The realism is perfect - these are pictures, in pure google earth style. However, while we never have the need to find a feature on the Earth surface by hovering over it in our real life, that is exactly what we do when we observe the night sky: so the learning experience provided by the program for a user who wants to get better at locating celestial objects is invaluable.

Above you can see a screenshot of part of the WWT window, which I centered on the Deer Lick group of galaxies - NGC7331, a milky way-like galaxy which is the largest member of the group, is on top. Below you can see Stephan’s quintet - a group of five small galaxies of 13th-14th magnitude which is among my favorite targets in deep-sky observing sessions. By zooming in (below), you get to see stars fainter than 18th magnitude, at a resolution comparable to that of  a meter-class instrument. Amazing!

I highly recommend downloading the software. Learning to locate objects will become a wonderful pastime!

Just a link to a post by Gianandrea Giacoma on the site of the sci.bzaar.net workshop, an event about which I wrote here, here and here.

In the post, Gian uses very kind words to introduce a video on my thoughts on the need of horizontality in scientific blogs. I already posted a link to my video yesterday (beware, it is in Italian - I will try to find the time for an English version though, or at least provide a transcript in English), but the one on the sci.bzaar.net site does not need to be downloaded before playing - a huge bonus since you might get bored halfway through (oh well, damned if you do. It’s just 7 minutes).

On Saturday, May 15th, a conference called “sci.bzaar.net” will take place in Milano. It will bring together a restricted group of researchers, psychologists, bloggers, designers, physicists, writers, philosophers, computer scientists and web experts, who will discuss scientific divulgation, production of knowledge, and open culture in the academic world.

I will not be there in person, but a video I produced for the event will be shown - and I will connect with skype or some other means to take questions. You can see the agenda of the workshop here.

In addition, I produced for the web site of the event another short video where I discuss the importance of horizontality in a blog aimed at scientific divulgation. Unfortunately, I only have a version in Italian so far (the event is aimed at an italian public). I will paste below a writeup as I have the time, but if you are interested you can see me in the 7-minutes video here (beware though, it is kind of heavy - 500 Mbytes!).

Here is a selected list of interesting links from blogs I read:

• Bee at Backreaction has the most complete list of reasons why you should not be bothered by the LHC destroying the Earth. Instructive, entertaining, to the point. With useful furthering of the matter in the comments thread.
• Peter at Not Even Wrong has two interesting posts out. In one he reports about Witten’s take on dark energy. In the other the question on what string theorists would do if their pet theory was proven wrong is discussed. Don’t miss the comments thread.
• Carl at Mass explains in detail why the current cosmology does not explain the angular correlations in the fluctuations of cosmic microwave background for large angles, while a changing speed of light would fit the data better. Controversial!
• Lubos at the Reference Frame discusses whether a theory that makes no predictions is to be preferred or disfavored, in relation to one that is more predictive. He also has a poll. Let’s all ask him to add a bullet, “A and B are equally unlikely because they are both favored by Lubos”,
• Jester at Resonaances has a short but poignant post on how to be a good crackpot. Recommended.
• Kea at Arcadian Functor has reached lesson 182 in category theory. Her explanations make you believe you know those things, and there are a bunch of graphs you cannot miss. Esthetically pleasing.
• Chad at Uncertain Principles has one of his imperdible dog dialogues out. Highly recommended.

Although ten short meaningless posts won’t outvalue a longer thoughtful one, for today I stick with the former. So let me just paste here a link to a post about me at sci.bzaar.net, the site of a workshop I will attend virtually next week.

In a few days I plan to provide the site owner, Gianandrea Giacoma, with a couple of short videos where I discuss some limits of blogs in the context of scientific outreach. If I am not too lazy I will produce an English version of those (the event is for an italian audience).

If you just visited this blog (that is as I post this message, between 11.40 and 11.50PM on May 1st), you have a 10% chance of having generated its 500,000th view. Sorry, no red carpet, band with trumpets, or prize.

I believe about a third of the visitors are colleagues with some degree of parenthood -meaning they work in the same field I do, or similar ones. The rest are a 50-50 mix of non-physicists who are just interested in science, and occasional visitors who are not likely to hang around.

While I do enjoy the increased interaction I obtained in these years with fellow physicists, particularly theorists and people from whom I have a chance of learning something new, the class of readers that are dearest to me are the non-physicists who try to understand physics. It is to them that this blog is mostly aimed at.
Of course, I not always manage to write something that is both at the right level and interesting enough for them, but I do try to.

In any case, I thank all of you who visit this blog occasionally or regularly for giving me the encouragement and the stimulus to make this site worth the time I spend making it better and keeping it -hopefully- interesting and informative. I also use this occasion to encourage any of you who has something potentially worth a post, to submit it to me. You can get a feeling of what guest posts here may be by looking at the “guest post” page up here.

This blog has been on air for more than two years, and it is time (one reason will be clear in the next post) to have a look at some of the information wordpress offers to its members concerning incoming traffic. I am not so interested in the volume of visitors as much as in what they are looking for when they come by, and I have thus always found very useful the yardstick provided by the “Search engine terms”: what people typed in the google search box to be directed to my site.

Let us first of all look at the all-time data, before attempting to provide warnings for caveats and the like.

1. “tommaso dorigo”, 5857 searches
2. “placenta”, 2089 searches
3. “azores”, 1907 searches
4. “quantum diaries”,  1672 searches
5. “bubble chamber”, 1563 searches
6. “steven hawking”, 1408 searches
7. “funny road signs”, 1314 searches
8. “lisa randall”, 1062 searches
9. “bed”, 959 searches
10. “quantum diaries survivor”, 949 searches
11. “dorigo blog”, 880 searches
12. “vegetable porn”,  743 searches
13. “barmaid”,  739 searches
14. “funny street signs”,  578 searches

and then we later also find

21. “how to do a tracheotomy”, 434 searches

23. “particle collision”, 412 searches

30. “pegah emambakhsh”, 315 searches

36. “fellatios”, 235 searches

43. “top mass”, 195 searches

44. “michel platini”, 195 searches

and

50. “tomasso dorigo”, 175 searches.

Now, let me try to make a few points about the naked and outrageous data I displayed above.

First of all, by reading the above list one might be tempted to believe that the blog is not about physics. Wrong. The conclusion is based on a biased trial function, if you pass me the french. People in the web search for a lot of different things, and only a tiny minority looks for physics: so, as embarassing as it is, I get more people looking for fellatios than for top mass measurements.

Another thing to note is the fact that by posting pictures a blog does increase its traffic. This is a slightly concealed datum in the list above, but it becomes clear if you find out that people looking for “placenta” were drawn to my site because I did post a picture of one -and I think there are not so many pictures of such a peculiar mass of flesh and blood. The same thing is clear if one notices “bed” and “azores”, which both are due to my posting pictures of those things in the past.

Other miscellaneous hints:

• I am not the only one in the world who misspells Stephen Hawking’s first name.
• Same goes with tracheostomy
• And tragically, the number of people who misspell my own first name are about 3% of the total. Not a negligible signal.

Overall, it is a bit depressing to see the naked truth that many of your visitors came by by accident, and will never show up again -if not for another accident. But this is the internet. A community where people do what they like, and sometimes -rarely, but it does happen- try to learn something.

This just to post a couple of links concerning yesterday’s talk by Ray Orbach at the Fermilab Ramsey auditorium: an article on the event and a video of his presentation.

I have been invited by David Orban, a friend and fellow blogger, to speak on the divulgation of Science next May 17th at the Scuola Politecnica di Design in Milano, at a meeting called SCI(bzaar)NET. The event, organized by Gianandrea Giacoma, is described in its web site as (my translation)

“Subjects active in the net meet in a new way to ponder on the challenges that Internet poses to scientific divulgation, production of knowledge, and Open Culture in the academic world.”

The meeting will have three main threads:

1. The hunger of scientific outreach: scientific research and the fast technological evolution are increasingly becoming, as is evident to all, among the main factors of change in the world and in our daily life. For these reasons a growing number of people, fascinated and awed, feel the need to understand and make their own opinion on the matter.
2. Production of knowledge: if internet is historically connected to the academic world, on the other hand one cannot claim that the majority of researchers as indivudials and the italian University institutions have adopted these new instruments for a more advanced presence online and a more effective handling of knowledge, students, researchers, and professors.
3. Open Culture: the growing impact of legal, economical, organizational and cultural scenarios of a diffusion of Open Culture in Universities under the pressure of internet.

I will contribute with a video, because I unfortunately cannot be there in person… On the following morning I am leaving to New Mexico for PPC 2008;. I am planning to post the video here, with a transcription (the language of the meeting is Italian…). The subject of my talk will be “Fare divulgazione scientifica con un blog: opportunita’ e limiti” (doing scientific outreach with a blog: opportunities and limits).

UPDATE - the name of this post has been modified according to the request of G.Giacoma on 4/23, reflecting the final name of the event.

Just a note to post here the permanent link to the proceedings of a conference I attended in Corfu (Greece) three years ago. This is a long (32 pages) report on “High- Physics: from the Tevatron to the LHC“, now published in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series [Tommaso Dorigo 2006 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 53 163-194]. I think I did post a draft of the paper on this blog a couple of years ago, but then I forgot to post the final version as well.

The paper is a bit dated in some parts, where the most recent (back then) results from the Tevatron are discussed; however, some parts -especially a discussion of the usefulness of Tevatron data for LHC physics- are still readable IMHO. Also worth noting is the fact that the acknowledgments section mentions the late Riqie Arneberg, a friend who passed away last fall, who had accepted the offer I had made to all readers of this blog to proofread the manuscript, and contributed in several places to the clarity of the text.

The publisher has now made available online all its 100 open access volumes through the JPCS home page. Of course I salute this contribution to the free diffusion of science with enthusiasm.