Who Is John Galt?

Given I know that some of our readers and authors are fans of Ayn Rand in some way or another, (I personally haven't read any of her books) I thought I would post a trailer of a movie based on Atlas Shrugged.  I guess this movie will not be playing everywhere (but will be here in Irvine since the Ayn Rand Institute is here) so if you want to see it you may have to be proactive.  A list of locations the movie will be shown is here.

So if you are an Ayn Rand fan: enjoy!  And if you stick around maybe you will be lucky someone will write another post on objectivism.  We have enjoyed some of those in the past.

Father and Son Activity: Let's Send A Camera To Space.

Here is an ambitious father: he, with his son, made a weather balloon carrying a camera up to space to take pictures of the curvature of the earth against the dark background.  This video makes me feel like I am not ambitious enough.

I think my favorite part is when the weather balloon bursts it is at a high enough altitude that the camera actually feels weightlessness for a short time.  Pretty cool!


Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

More Women Earn PhDs Than Men, And Other Statistics.

The Council of Graduate Schools just released their 2009 Enrollment and Degrees report.  I think the thing I found most fascinating is that women earn more doctoral degrees than men!  (This is especially interesting being a graduate in physics where the question keeps being asked in the most politically correct way as possible: "where are all the girls?")

Here are several plots to consider:

As this plot shows women earn more PhDs than men. (And if it isn't clear, click on the above link and read the report in detail.)  Furthermore, this trend seems to hold across most fields.... except the physical sciences/math/CS/engineering fields which does not at all surprise me.

For the curious, the above plot shows how enrollment breaks down by ethnicity and gender.  For some reason the only group to be predominately men is "temporary residents".

The above plot here shows the percentages of doctoral degrees awarded by field.  It looks like engineering and education takes the cake.


Now I will move on to acceptance rates.  For those interested, here are how acceptance rates break down across fields and degree types:

And lastly, the below plot shows how the popularity of fields have been changing recently.  It seems like  a lot more people want to go into health sciences and public administration than just a year ago. (Ouch math and computer science!)

Enjoy!

Crazy Facts About How We Read. (Remix.)

In honor of the fact that I always make spelling mistakes, I am going to repost something I posted over three years ago:

The odds are you can read this:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

This was accompanied by some fine comments:

Nick Nelson said... 

Wow, taht ralely is aznimag. Who kenw taht we raed lkie taht.

Anonymous said...

taht was graet. tnhaks for the inoframtoin. woah. tihs is carzy.

(Still one of my favorite posts ever!)

Detexify Proves That Wonders Never Cease

My office-mate asked me today if I had ever seen "Detexify". I said no. Two minutes later I knew I had to post this on the blog for all to enjoy. I give you "Detexify". It's an online tool that lets you draw a math symbol with your mouse and then shows you the latex commands that produce that symbol.

Let's say, for example, that you wanted to get the latex symbol for real numbers (that funny R with an extra line on the left side), but being a physicist that doesn't think about abstract math all that much (in physics all numbers are complex, some just have zero imaginary part) you can't remember it off the top of your head. Instead of Googling it or searching through table after table of options, simply let Detexify figure it out for you. Check out the screen shot:
Note that I didn't even have to draw the symbol well for it to figure out what I wanted. Technology is wonderful!

How MIT Celebrates PI Day.

Today is PI Day: 3/14.

For those interested, "MIT releases its undergraduate admission decisions at 1:59 pm today.  (That is, at 3.14159)".

How cool is that?

Domestic Partnerships, Housing and UC Irvine

At UC Irvine, it turns out, you cannot live with a member of the opposite sex on campus unless you are either married or officially domestic partners.  That's right, here even heterosexuals can enter domestic partnerships. (I am trying to refrain from saying some joke about how homosexuals should fight this in order to protect the sanctity of domestic partnerships, but I will pass. Maybe call it proposition 8^(-1)?)

Anyways, given that it is way too expensive to live off campus here, people are actually are willing to enter official domestic partnerships in order to split the rent with their friend who happens to be a coed.  In fact, one of my friends just did this today in order to move into a cheaper apartment.

It's amazing what economics will drive people to do!  These partnerships are legally binding and therefore have all the ties that makes.  My friend, and I am assuming he wasn't joking, went so far as to create a prenuptial agreement.  (That's right, "In California, Registered Domestic Partners may also enter into a prenup.")

All to save money on an apartment!

Take Pictures Of Space For Only $150

I want to give credit where credit is due.

A couple MIT students spent $150 on common items anyone can buy and took some breathtaking pictures of space.  See below.

VISA, here is a new commercial to do:

Helium Balloon: $20
Helium to fill Balloon: $30
GPS-equipped cell phone: $50
Camera encased in insulating Styrofoam: $50

Pictures of Space: Priceless.

Blog Statistics

Joe's post on the record number of posts in July got me a little curious, so I played with a few numbers and did some basic statistics on our blog. We have been going now for 33 months and here's the number of posts per month over that time:
We over the last 33 months, we have averaged 20.42 +/- 12.13 blog posts per month.

We All Have Popular Names

Just how popular are our names? Let's look:

JosephYep, just how the chart should look. :)

NicholasThe 60s revolution made Nicholas a popular choice, not too surprising since Nick is what comes to mind when people mention the 60s.

William
Man Bill, serious competition.

Ryan
Wow, Ryan didn't even exist as a name before World War II if we were to believe this chart. I guess saving private Ryan was really saving the only Ryan on earth. (Bad joke, I know last name, etc...)

Jared
Oh no, Jared is doing good but it looks like we need to act fast to save his species. Another century or two of this is going to be bad news.

So there you go, our names are very popular indeed.

Vi vs. Emacs Poll

Sorry to keep posting about Vi, but it appears so far Vi is preferred over Emacs among Ubuntu users. :)

Intense Marraige Proposal

Opinions on Blog Format

Please comment on this post!!!

I set up this blog a few years ago and am very grateful so many of you have been faithful contributors. Back when I set up the blog, it had a theme if you can remember. Then the theme became depreciated and one day the blog just turned mostly white. This is all fine, but I wanted to ask everyone's opinion:

1. Should we try to pick a theme other than white?
2. Should we do an even more drastic change like move to Wordpress that has more features but doesn't integrate with everyone's Google account I know you all have?
3. Or, this is also drastic, everyone gets their own personal blog and we turn this into an aggregator of everyone's blog.

If you would like a new theme please send suggestions via links. If you want to do something more drastic let me know too. Obviously I want everyone to be as happy as possible.

Furthermore, if you have any suggestions about layout, or if we want to censor Bill's comments just let me know. Being the good LDS person I am I will try to make sure all changes, if any, are supported with a unanimous vote.

We are a spam blog?

I noticed I couldn't make a post and when I went to figure out why, I came across this:

Your blog is locked

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that
your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're
an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated
spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false
positive.

We received your unlock request on December 18, 2007. On
behalf of the robots, we apologize for locking your non-spam blog. Please be
patient while we take a look at your blog and verify that it is not spam.

Find out more about how Blogger is fighting spam blogs.

I cannot figure out what about the blog is making it a spam blog. I know I make controversial posts, but I don't know who or what is spamming. I'm confused. Hopefully we will be back on track from now on.

Beauty of Opinions and Religious Politics

More and more I love reading the opinion sections in the main newspapers of this country. I will give a link to a Washington Post opinion and will print one by the Wall Street Journal:(Dear Wall street journal, I'd read more of your opinions if you would offer them for free ;) )

Washington Post: Un-Mormon and Unchristian

Wall Street Journal: What Iowans Should Know About Mormons

Yesterday, at the end of Mitt Romney's speech, he told a story from the early days of the First Continental Congress, whose members were meeting in Philadelphia in 1774: "With Boston occupied by British troops . . . and fears of an impending war . . . someone suggested they pray." But because of the variety of religious denominations represented, there were objections. "Then Sam Adams rose and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were a patriot."

Were Adams alive today, he most certainly would hear a prayer from a Mormon. It is hard to imagine a group more patriotic than the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But there is reason to believe that voters in Iowa and elsewhere will not accept Mr. Romney's invitation -- put forward implicitly in his remarks yesterday at the George Bush Library -- to ignore religious differences and embrace him simply as a man of character who loves his country.

A recent Pew poll shows that only 53% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Mormons. That's roughly the same percentage who feel that way toward Muslims. By contrast, more than three-quarters of Americans have a favorable opinion of Jews and Catholics. Whatever the validity of such judgments, one has to wonder: Why does a faith professed by the 9/11 hijackers rank alongside that of a peaceful, productive, highly educated religious group founded within our own borders?

Many evangelicals in the GOP view Mormonism as "a cult," or at least not a Christian faith. One Southern Baptist leader recently called it the "fourth Abrahamic religion." I remember, a couple of years ago, sitting in on an apologetics class at a Christian high school in Colorado Springs, Colo., and hearing the teacher describe a critical moment in the history of the Muslim faith, when the rock that now sits under the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem tried to fly to heaven and had to be restrained by Mohammad. Acknowledging that it sounded a little wacky, the teacher added: "Well, it's no stranger than that guy who found golden tablets in upstate New York." The students laughed uproariously at the reference to the Mormons' founding father, Joseph Smith.

Six years ago, I probably could have counted on one finger the number of Mormons I had met. Having lived most my life in the Northeast, my situation was hardly unique. Then, while researching a book on religious colleges, I decided to spend some time at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. In preparation, I picked up "Mormon America: The Power and the Promise" by religion reporters Richard and Joan Ostling. The Ostlings offer a comprehensive account of the church's history and theology, as well as helpful descriptions of the Mormons' cultural and political outlook. "The onetime believers in plural marriage, considered a dire threat to Victorian probity and the entire nation," the authors write, "have become the exemplars of conservative monogamous family values."

It is hard to disagree. Mormons marry young and have large families. They don't drink, smoke or gamble. The church does not condone homosexuality. Members give at least 10% of their income to the church and often volunteer more than 20 hours a week in some religious capacity. With no professional clergy, the survival of congregations (or "stakes") is entirely dependent on lay participation. All young Mormon men and many women spend two years as missionaries, their travels funded by their own families. The church stocks soup kitchens across the country and internationally (both its own and those of other faiths) with food from its farms and warehouses.

Rather than behaving like an insular cult, members are integrated into the society around them, sending their kids to public schools and assuming leadership positions locally and nationally. Once Mormons complete their missionary service, they are not obliged to proselytize, so having Mormons as neighbors doesn't mean a constant bombardment with invitations to join up.

But many Americans, unless they've actually had a Mormon neighbor, might find all these rosy facts meaningless, feeling deeply uneasy with some of Mormonism's tenets. A lot of what we call religious tolerance depends on social contact, not theological understanding, and there are only about six million LDS members in the U.S., mostly concentrated in the Western states (though increasingly less so). If you press Baptists, they will acknowledge finding Catholics' belief in transubstantiation implausible at best; Jews like me have a little trouble getting over the virgin birth. But we all get along, for the most part, because we know each other and live similar lives as Americans, whatever faith we profess.

But most Iowans will not meet a Mormon in the next six weeks unless Mr. Romney comes to call -- Mormons make up less than one half of 1% of the state's population. So let me offer a brief snapshot, not in the hope that Iowans will vote for Mr. Romney but in the hope that, if they don't vote for him, their decision won't have anything to do with his religion.

The young men and women at Brigham Young University are among the smartest, hardest-working and most pleasant college kids you will find anywhere. (For better or worse, I have visited dozens of college campuses.) The student body lives by the Mormon principle: "The glory of God is intelligence." Most reside off campus without adult supervision, yet they adhere strictly to curfews, rules about contact with the opposite sex and every other church directive. They are purposeful but seem to enjoy themselves, spending their free time hiking in the sprawling desert. And BYU has America's largest ROTC program outside of our military schools.

This last fact is one I had occasion to think about on my trip. I left for BYU on Sept. 7, 2001, and returned home a week later. On 9/11, the students gathered for a campuswide devotional. The university president tried to comfort the students with "the eternal perspective." My eternal perspective is not the same as theirs, of course. But hearing more than 20,000 young people around me reciting the Pledge of Allegiance made me realize that our temporal perspective is the same. I'm sure Sam Adams would have agreed.

APOD: Future Earth at +250 Ma

Discovered: The asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs

Here is an interesting article out of Boulder Colorado(via New Scientist):

Cosmic detective work has traced the origin of the asteroid that hit Earth 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs.

Astronomers know of more than 40 families of asteroids that are fragments of shattered larger bodies and can calculate when the break-ups happened.

Earlier this year, David Nesvorny and colleagues from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, US, identified a new group which they named the Baptistina family after a 40 kilometre asteroid that is its largest known member. The dinosaur-killer was probably a lost member of this family, formed by a collision in the inner part of the asteroid belt 160 million years ago.

Nesvorny's team has calculated that a 10-kilometre asteroid, one of roughly 300 chunks of the original 170-kilometre 'mother rock', would have collided with the Earth. Other fragments of this asteroid may have hit Venus, they suggest, and could have been responsible for the formation of Tycho, the youngest prominent crater on the Moon.

The composition of Baptistina matches that of impact debris found on Earth, and the researchers calculate that the chance that some other asteroid hit the Earth instead is less than 10%.

NASA To Send Luke's Lightsaber Into Space

This from Slashdot:

"In honor of the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, NASA will launch Luke Skywalker's original Jedi lightsaber into space along with the crew of the space shuttle Discovery. The launch is slated for October."

Scientists Induce Out-of-Body Sensation

This from the New York Times:

Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body — - in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.

When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies.

The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved in the experiments.

Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.

The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.

The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to other-worldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. After severe and sudden injuries, people often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said, and then, just as suddenly, find themselves back inside their body. Out-of-body experiences have also been reported to occur during sleep paralysis, the exertion of extreme sports and intense meditation practices.

The new research is a first step in figuring out exactly how the brain creates this sensation, he said.

LaTeX In Blogger

If you have Firefox you can write with LaTeX on blogger.com posts, including here on The Eternal Universe. This page has a HowTo with a script thanks to http://servalx02.blogspot.com.

Anyways here goes an example: or . Anyways, happy LaTeXing. By the way, remember to open the latex script from the above website for Firefox by going "File->Open" and then selecting the downloaded script. I already put in the css for everyone. (Though it doesn't seem to be working as I still see borders. :( )