Hypnosis is Bullshit:

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The 'Dump Recommends: Inception

Great, great movie.  Good performances, great story.  I have only have one complaint.  My comments don't really contain any "spoilers", but don't read ahead if you don't want to.

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One thing I really don't like is when the trailer for a movie gives out most all the best shots in the film.  A trailer should whet your appetite, not exhaust the cream of the visual crop.  I actually expected a little bit more of a spectacle, but most all the best shots are shown in the trailers for the film.  Big no-no.


I also have one comment, which is neither a complaint nor a plug but rather just an observation about the film.  The movie is more of a good heist flick than you might expect.  Sort of like Nolan's Memento, the story is relatively simple; it's just told in an original and powerful way.  Inception can't really be called "simple", but you won't leave scratching your head wondering what the hell you just saw if that's what you're worried about.  The story's mechanisms aren't exhaustively explored or explained, either, so like all escapist entertainment, the movie requires a bit of suspension of disbelief.  It's a great ride, in any case.

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The theme of the film (as you've seen from the trailers, etc) is how a simple idea and how that can take root and turn into something pervasive and consuming.  The movie itself is a microcosm of that: an idea that grows into a powerful experience by the end of the movie.  It grows on you.  Speaking for myself, I already want to see it again.  There are a few levels on which the movie has this recursive quality, which I won't bother trying to exhaust.

Anyhow, go see it.  Support good cinema.  I don't tend to go to the movies much unless they've made their way to the dollar theater, but this one is well worth going out for.

What, If Anything, is Big Bird?

The End of Oil:

The oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico has been sealed off.  This isn't the end, by any means, but it's the first time in some three months that oil has not been flowing into the water.

More here.

Space Wallpaper:

A friend of mine pointed these out:

Head on over here for some fantastic space images captured with Nikon hardware.  Isaac Newton would love to use the one featured above for his desktop.  Although these aren't necessarily intended for wallpaper, that's what I'm going to use them for.

Gene Cernan on Charlie Bolden:

I have a hard time disagreeing with this logic: if NASA administrator Charlie Bolden believes what he has been charged to do by the President, he ought to resign; if he doesn't believe it, he should be asked to resign.



Literally everybody is all over this.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, see the previous post on this subject.  Keep an eye on NASA Watch for more news.  I don't think this one is going away any time soon.

The Tiny Proton:

Umm, I'm not quite sure how to say this, but it turns out that the latest measurements of the size of the proton have come up with a value 4% smaller than we expected (0.841 femtometers rather than something around 0.876).  Now, maybe that doesn't sound like much, but... well, consider the following.

First of all, that's five standard deviations off of the expected value.  On a practical level, that means that of all the variability in every single measurement made of the size of the proton in the history of time, this new measurement is so damned far off that the guys doing the experiment didn't even notice it the first two times (2003 and 2007) they measured it.  Third time's the charm (too bad I couldn't make a relevant physics joke out of that), and they decided to look way outside the expected range.  Voila!

Generally speaking, the variability in major scientific measurements of physical values converges over time as instrumentation improves.  This large of a discrepancy is not something that fits in with previous measurements just "being off a little".  Rather, this is a sign of something significant.  In a popular sense, most have probably heard of the anthropic principle (which I am not endorsing, by the way), and are familiar in passing with the notion that the degree to which the physical properties of particles are "fine tuned" is important to us all not ending up like Ron Silver in that movie Timecop.



Importantly, the difference between previous measurements and this new data was the use of an orbiting muon (around a proton) rather than an electron.  I'm making some inferences, but from what I can tell, the scientists were measuring the transition of the muon between two energy levels (Lamb shift; see the top video to remind you of high school) by putting in energy ("exciting" the muon) with laser light.  The 200 times heavier muon would allow a much more precise measurement than using an electron, sort of like trying to push a fat kid up a slide instead of an infant.  If I said you had to do the pushing with a few cannonballs, you'd have a limited amount of resolution to work with.  Let's say you light the fuse and blast the infant to the top of the slide with one shot; you couldn't really say anything about half a shot, or three-quarters of a shot.  But the fat kid, maybe he takes three or four 'balls to get his fat ass up there.  I won't belabor the metaphor.  The experiment in question actually used something called the Rydberg constant to get the size of the proton mathematically based on the orbital information measured in the experiment (although I can't read the article to confirm this at the moment).

Anyhow, something is amiss.  Most likely, this is not the sign that everything we know is wrong, or that the powerful equations of quantum mechanics are all wrong (as evidenced by the 20th century).  Rather, this is probably a sign of some new interaction between muons and protons we haven't seen before.  That means new particles, and new physics.  Wahoo!

Note: I can't link you directly to the report from Nature, because you can't access the information because we live in a stupid, fucked up world.  I haven't even had the chance to view it through my university subscription yet, but here's the link anyway just in case.  The best I can do are secondhand reports from io9 and ArsTechnica.

Want to See: Inception

Early reviews are in.  Here's the roundup.

The Poincare Conjecture:

The above video is too artsy-fartsy to be of any real use, but it looks cool and gives at least enough information for you to conclude that the famous Poincare conjecture is a problem in topology.  I can't do justice to the interesting history of this problem, but I recommend you check out this book: The Poincare Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe.  The problem itself can be stated rather simply, however.  If you consider what most of us would call a sphere, the surface of that sphere has the quality of being "simply connected", the explanation of which is seen in the following figure.

A string stretched across the surface (topology deals with surfaces, which is why you'll see this referred to as a 2-sphere) can be shrunk down to a point without breaking the string or crossing the surface.  The Poincare conjecture asks whether this is also true of the surface of a 3-sphere, or what you might objectify as a 4-dimensional hypersphere.

It's just come to my attention that cranky mathematician Gregori Perelman, who proved the conjecture, has been awarded and subsequently declined the $1 million dollar prize offered by the Clay Institute.  This leaves six remaining Millennium problems, and no conceivable way for any living scientist to appear more bat-shit crazy than Perelman.  Except maybe Ted Kaczynski and the insane mathematician guy in Revolutionary Road.  Must be something in the calculus that does it to you.

Good Grief, Charlie:

It's real easy to take this and run with it.  On the one hand, you've got NASA administrator Charlie Bolden saying that Barack Obama charged him with facilitating our relationship with Muslim nations as perhaps his foremost function, or some such shit.  On the other hand, I understand the idea of pandering to one's audience and the necessarily collaborative nature of space exploration.  But, still...

Any embellishment on Bolden's part aside, that there should even be the consideration of using NASA as a mechanism for bridging relations between the United States and the Middle East (exhibit A being the video in question) speaks to how precious little the beaurocrats in Washington imagine they have to work with.  Are they really so limited?  So divorced from any resonable context?  Is somebody passing the buck?  Or is this just, in politi-speak, "due dilligence" being given in some comprehensive strategy?  Dumb, is what it is, given how I can imagine it would incense not only people like me, but also the very Islamic nations we're "reaching out" to.  I think the knee-jerk reaction has to be that surely there are more appropriate avenues to connect with the Muslim world than using NASA as an emissary for finding common ground, while politicially our countries continue the mutual behaviors of what may well become another Cold War.

I love Charlie Bolden, but shit, let's try to keep our eyes on the ball, here.  How about spending your time bridging the gap between NASA and the public at large, which is widening by the day with all the furor caused by the cancellation of the Constellation program?  How about creating a cohesive vision for the future of space exploration?  You know, space shit.  Anyway, talk is still cheap.  Remember when NASA inspired us by its actions rather than its rhetoric?  A thousand interviews never equals the impact of an Apollo.

Most of the rest of the interview is typical of what we get whenever Bolden is interviewed, and, I think, appropriate to his capacity.  But, in the words of Dirty Harry, "a man's got to know his limitations".