Dan’s Diary

Inside Macintosh

2011-10-08T11:07:00.005-06:00

The web is currently flooded with eloquent tributes to Steve Jobs. I’ll chime in with a personal footnote.

In 1985, when I was a graduate student at Stanford, I bought my first Macintosh computer. Like so many others, I was stunned by its elegant graphics-based interface. Like fewer others (though quite a few at Stanford), I had to learn to program it.

The programmer’s manual, Inside Macintosh, was still a work in progress and hadn’t been officially published. But in response to the tremendous demand, Apple put out a “promotional edition” printed on cheap paper in a typewriter font, bound in a thick volume resembling a phone book. For a short time you could get a copy for only $25, and my check was in the mail as soon as I learned about the offer.

My original Mac is now long gone, but I still have that promotional edition of Inside Macintosh. Paging through it brings back a flood of memories.

Most of the manual, of course, is nuts-and-bolts technical details—what programmers would now call “API reference” material. But as you study it, a bigger picture comes into view: the exquisite care that went into the design of the Mac operating system, built from the inside out with the user in mind. The enthusiasm of the Mac development team occasionally bursts out in a word like “remarkable” or “amazing” amidst the manual’s otherwise dry prose. Even though this edition of the manual was hastily assembled and printed, someone made sure it had a full-color cover with that classic minimalist line drawing of a Mac.

The most important chapter of the manual, up at the front, is titled User Interface Guidelines. Rather than describing the operating system from a programmer’s point of view, this chapter instructs the reader on the underlying principles of Mac software, and firmly invites the reader to conform to these principles:

“The Macintosh is designed to appeal to an audience of nonprogrammers, including people who have previously feared and distrusted computers. To achieve this goal, Macintosh applications should be easy to learn and to use. To help people feel more comfortable with the applications, the applications should build on skills that people already have, not force them to learn new ones. The user should feel in control of the computer, not the other way around. This is achieved in applications that embody three qualities: responsiveness, permissiveness, and consistency.”

These words were revolutionary in 1985, and they made a lasting impression on me. Even today, most programmers need to pay more attention to them.

More generally, Apple has set an example for creative people everywhere: Don’t settle for mediocrity and mere functionality. Always strive for excellence, and be sure to incorporate the joy of the creative process into your work. Patiently refine every detail of your creation, while staying focused on its ultimate purpose.

That was the ethos that Steve Jobs brought to Apple, and to so much of the world.

The Probability of Zero

2011-10-04T11:34:00.008-06:00

Good news: Ogden has had zero homicides so far in 2011 (probably).

Bad news: Journalists don’t understand statistics (still).

“Killings down in Ogden,” proclaimed the headline across the top of Sunday’s front page, with a great big zero on one side. Pending a final ruling on whether a fatal July shooting was accidental, Ogden has probably gone for nine months without a murder or automobile homicide. This isn’t just great news; it’s historic.

The article falls short, though, in discussing the possible causes of this unprecedented drop in killings. Relying entirely on statements from the police chief and the county attorney, the article mentions three possible contributing factors: a new police “Crime Reduction Unit” created four years ago; a year-old injunction against the city’s oldest street gang; and a shift over the last several years toward handling gun-related crimes in federal court.

Of course, all of these factors could very well be contributing to a long-term reduction in crime, and the lack of recent homicides could very well be part of that long-term trend. But statistically, you just can’t tell.

You see, Ogden’s homicide rate was already pretty low. According to a data table printed on page 5, Ogden hasn’t had more than four homicides in a calendar year since 2001. During the last nine years, the average number in any nine-month period was only two and a half.

With this data and a simple formula from elementary statistics, we can answer the obvious question: Given this average rate of homicides, what’s the probability of getting zero homicides in any given nine-month period? The answer is one in e^2.5, where e is the famous mathematical constant 2.718 (approximately). Do the math and you find that the probability is about one in 12. (Note that e^2.5 means e times e times the square root of e, or about 2.7 times 2.7 times 1.6.)

I’m assuming, though, that each homicide is an independent event. In fact, some homicides occur in related groups. If the average number of independent homicide groups during any nine-month period is only 2.0, then the probability of getting zero in such a period is one in e², or about one in 7.

If these probabilities still seem rather low, remember that the zero didn’t have to occur this year. Now that the average homicide rate has been at this level for about a decade, we’ve had ten one-in-seven chances so far to get zero homicides during the first nine months of a year. In other words, we were over-due.

It’s understandable that the police chief and county attorney would attribute the lack of homicides to their own efforts. It’s also human nature to look for simple cause-effect relationships. But at this point, the most natural explanation for Ogden’s zero homicides in 2011 (so far) is a mere statistical fluctuation. The article doesn’t even mention this possibility, and it should.

What can’t be explained by mere statistics is the long-term trend. Homicide rates across the U.S. have steadily declined for the last two decades, and Ogden appears to be following this trend. Social scientists have proposed a host of possible reasons for the decline, including better policing and increased incarceration rates, but also including our aging population, changes in immigration, shifts in the illegal drug trade, and availability of abortions (resulting in fewer unwanted children). The even more striking decline over the very long term is probably a result of improving economic conditions, gradually changing attitudes toward killing, and/or increased acceptance of government as the enforcer of laws.

Let’s hope these long-term trends continue, but let’s not jump to conclusions based on local short-term fluctuations.

Supernova!

2011-09-22T17:18:00.005-06:00

Thanks to some prodding from my astronomy students, I've now seen my first supernova. Practiced finding it two nights in a row, then invited students and friends for a supernova party up in the mountains last night. Most worthwhile.

Oddly, I couldn't find a good image online that showed what it actually looks like through the eyepiece of a small telescope. (By small, I mean my 10-inch Newtonian reflector, or the 6-inch reflector that one of my students brought last night.) Most of the photos online are exposed to bring out lots of detail in the Pinwheel Galaxy, over-exposing the supernova itself.

So in an attempt to help others who are looking for it, I just whipped up this simulated image using Stellarium and Photoshop (click for a larger version):

The circle shows a 1.5 degree field of view, which is typical for a small reflector using a low-power eyepiece. The smudge in the center (which is actually much fainter than shown here, even from a very dark site) is the galaxy. Look for it with averted vision. The point of light closest to the center of the smudge, oriented at about two o'clock in the image, is the supernova. This is the orientation you'll see in a Newtonian reflector eyepiece at the best viewing time, soon after dark.

Other web sites, like this one, can help you point your telescope to the right part of the sky.

The supernova is already starting to fade, so hurry and look while you can!

The Space Shuttle: Inspiration or Distraction?

2011-07-06T21:32:00.004-06:00

The news sites are devoting quite a bit of space to this Friday’s final launch of the Shuttle. Perhaps the best discussion I’ve seen is Dennis Overbye’s essay in the New York Times.

The Salt Lake Tribune, understandably, is covering the story from more of a local perspective, emphasizing the Utah jobs and educational opportunities that have depended on the Shuttle over the years.

One of the quotes in the Tribune, though, was over the top. A Utah State University student, whose research has been tied to the shuttle program, said the following:

“Without having a space shuttle or have something that America can send Americans up in, we don’t have anything that can inspire the next generation. I’ve been watching a lot about the Apollo program, and it was awesome that we could build that and then the space shuttle. But now, we have nothing.”

Upon reading this, I left a comment suggesting that this student become just a tad more open-minded about what he considers inspiring. And as an example, I picked NASA’s most important scientific mission: the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Most Americans have never heard of the JWST, because no humans will be flying on the rocket that launches it. But it will be an immensely powerful instrument, probing the early stages of the formation of planets and galaxies, peering billions of years back in time. Anyone who can think for even ten seconds should find that far more inspiring than a publicly funded billion-dollar amusement park ride, only a couple hundred miles above earth’s surface, repeated 135 times.

Then, a few hours later, I saw something on Cosmic Variance about the JWST now being in jeopardy. I won’t try to defend the cost overruns and mismanagement, which are rightly being compared to the SSC. But if JWST gets canceled it will be a genuine tragedy for this generation and the next.

I’ll be watching to see if the Utah newspapers even cover the story.

Corrupt or Incompetent?

2011-05-20T13:10:00.005-06:00

That’s the question the world has been asking about the authorities in Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was living not in a remote cave, but in relative luxury in a suburban neighborhood an hour from the capital and within walking distance of the military academy. Were the government and the military protecting him on purpose, or were they so inept that they honestly didn’t know he was there?

Similar questions come up continually in politics, and also in the corporate world and wherever else humans create institutions that are capable of being corrupted:

Did the Bush Administration lie to us about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, or were the intelligence reports honestly mistaken?
Did the SEC know for over a decade that Bernie Madoff was running a massive Ponzi scheme, or were its regulators too blind to notice?
Ogden’s mayor pulled off an audacious fraud prior to the 2007 election, but no public authority or mainstream journalist will say that it was wrong. Is the old boys’ network that corrupt, or are they all just too stupid or lazy or preoccupied with other duties?
Tens of thousands of Utahns regularly operate off-road vehicles on public lands where motorized travel is supposed to be illegal, but only a tiny handful are ever charged. Are the Forest Service and BLM rangers willfully looking the other way, or do they just lack the resources needed for enforcement?
Grade inflation runs rampant at America’s schools and universities, where a large fraction of the graduates lack even the most basic literacy and numeracy skills. Are the teachers and administrators incompetent, or do we maintain the status quo because all we care about is keeping our own jobs?

My answer is that these are false dichotomies.

None of these failures are completely due to corruption, and none are completely due to incompetence. Instead, individuals and institutions are typically afflicted with a mixture of both.

In Abbotabad, I would guess that local law enforcement knew about the suspiciously secretive compound but didn’t know who lived there. National-level officials must have suspected that bin Laden was in the country but they probably didn’t know where. Most information was in the form of unverified rumors, and nobody worked hard enough to sort out truth from fiction. Everyone had legitimate fears that bin Laden’s supporters would punish those who asked too many questions. As one former CIA officer put it, “Willful blindness is a survival mechanism in Pakistan.”

In Ogden, the stakes are lower but the attitudes similar. Local businesses and reporters need to stay on good terms with the mayor, so they don’t ask certain questions. Prosecutors don’t seek out evidence of government corruption, and can always rationalize that the evidence they already have isn’t quite enough to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Everyone has good reasons to choose the status quo over the risk of political turmoil.

In fact, the stability of our institutions requires that they be effectively blind to a wide range of crimes and injustices. Most of the human beings who are part of these institutions gradually learn the “rules” about what questions to ask and not to ask. Those who are too principled and too diligent rarely get promoted to positions of authority, and usually end up leaving to find other work—willingly or unwillingly.

Why, then, does justice sometimes prevail? Simply because the world is full of different institutions with different missions that can check and balance each other—and because all institutions must be somewhat responsive to public opinion. Bin Laden was held accountable because the U.S. military and CIA are more powerful than their counterparts in Pakistan (and because the U.S. ultimately decided that getting bin Laden was more important than working with our Pakistani “allies”). Madoff was held accountable when his scheme finally collapsed and too many other powerful people got hurt, triggering enforcement mechanisms that respond primarily to power. In Utah, the news media have embarrassed public land managers into taking some minor steps toward better enforcement of motorized travel restrictions.

My point is that these success stories are not business as usual. The same institutions—and even the same individual leaders—have spent far more effort maintaining the status quo than fighting it. Call it corruption or incompetence if you like, but it’s really an intricate mixture of both that has naturally evolved in the institutional ecosystem.

Back to Blogging

2011-05-05T20:10:00.006-06:00

My time management has deteriorated to the point where personal blogging no longer fits into months when school is in session. But with grades turned in, tulips blooming, and the summer stretching ahead, it’s time for an update:

I’m extremely proud of my Modern Physics students for their awesome final project presentations.
Though all we have so far are tantalizing hints, I’m convinced that great discoveries in fundamental physics are just around the corner.
The Utah Transit Authority never did give me the data I requested regarding the proposed Ogden streetcar project. Fortunately, the city council seems to be headed in the right direction.
Our very silly mayor won’t be prosecuted for his fraudulent political fundraising, but he won’t run for reelection either, and his Wonder Dome seems to have collapsed.
The Ogden Sierra Club’s open records lawsuit seems to be winding down.
This year’s historic building scavenger hunt is underway.
The buffalo grass is getting a late start on turning green this year.
But the myrtle spurge is already blooming and ripe for uprooting.
Made the annual pilgrimage to the Selman Ranch to see the sharp-tail grouse do their dance. The snow on the ground didn’t seem to bother them a bit.
I don’t trust the stock market, so I’m investing some serious money in home upgrades.
Sadly, Ogden recently lost a colorful character and dear friend.
Also sadly, Dad is slowing down and no longer able to carry out his “ministry”. I’ll be going to see him again soon.

Molecule Sandbox

2010-12-29T11:35:00.005-07:00

Are your children already tired of their Christmas toys and games? Or would you like to see them play with something less violent and more educational?

Vi Hart’s math doodle games can provide countless hours of fun. But another option that you may want to try is the Molecular Dynamics Applet that I created three years ago. It was originally intended for college students, but I soon discovered that small children love it.

The MD Applet is a sandbox for playing with atoms and molecules. Make up to a thousand atoms, large or small, in your favorite color. Watch them jiggle around endlessly, attracting and repelling their neighbors. Add energy to make liquid droplets boil; remove energy to make a gas condense and then freeze into a solid crystal. Start with an orderly arrangement and watch entropy increase. Connect atoms together with bonds, and even build simulated nano-scale machinery.

I don’t spend much time around small children, but Christmas is often an exception. This year I found myself entertaining (and being entertained by) a delightful seven-year-old who kept coming back, asking to play some more with the MD Applet. She asked her deepest question almost immediately: Why don’t they all just fall down and stop?

And in between molecular dynamics sessions, she learned how to draw stars with seven, eight, and even ten points!

Math Doodles

2010-12-21T09:38:00.008-07:00

If you haven’t seen them already, you must watch Vi Hart’s fantastic math doodle videos on stars, squiggles, fractals, and infinite elephants. Browse the rest of her web site too, and be awe-struck at how accomplished she is at having fun.

I’m not much of a doodler, but Hart’s masterpieces reminded me of this modest Escheresque MacPaint doodle that I made soon after buying my first (original!) Macintosh computer in 1985. That was during my first year of grad school, when I should have been putting every effort into those problem sets on quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and solid state physics. Why are we most creative when we’re avoiding what we’re supposed to do?

(By the way, isn’t it cool that I can still open that MacPaint file in Preview? Thanks, Apple! Now please tell me how to open my old MacWrite files...)

Thanks to Charlie Trentelman for pointing me, via Facebook, to a blog post on Hart’s videos by NPR’s Robert Krulwich. And thanks to my old grad school friend Ned Gulley, whose venerable blog featured an entry last year about Hart’s Möbius music box. It’s become trendy to gripe about the Internet and Facebook, but this is the sort of thing I love about both.

Krulwich also quotes from Paul Lockhart’s magnificent tirade about math education, “A Mathematician’s Lament.” It’s not new, but I don’t think I’d ever seen it before. Read it and weep.

Uncertainties in Science and Politics

2010-10-10T19:44:00.005-06:00

Nate Silver is currently predicting that Republicans will gain 47 House seats in the upcoming election—plus or minus 30. In other words, he’s fairly sure that Republicans will gain between 17 and 77 seats, although there’s a slight chance the gain will be even less, or even more.

What good is a prediction when it carries such a wide margin of error? Answer: Far, far better than a prediction with no stated margin of error at all.

Understanding uncertainties, and learning to live with uncertainties, and stubbornly insisting on knowing the uncertainties, is the hallmark of a good scientist. A constant awareness of uncertainties may be the most important thinking pattern that distinguishes the two cultures (“techies” and “fuzzies”, we called them at Stanford) from each other.

If you study physics, we try to teach you about uncertainties through lab exercises. Suppose someone predicts that “g” (the acceleration of a freely flying projectile) should equal 9.8 meters per second squared. You measure its value and get 9.6. Have you confirmed the prediction or not? Yes, if the uncertainty in your measurement is at least 0.2. But if your uncertainly is only 0.02, you’ve disproved the prediction (and perhaps discovered a local gravitational anomaly).

Our introductory physics lab students think they’ll be graded on how close they get to the “right” answer, but they’re wrong. We actually grade them on whether they make a good uncertainty estimate, and on whether they interpret their results correctly in light of this uncertainty.

Perhaps I learned this lesson in undergraduate lab courses myself; I can’t remember. What I do remember, vividly, is my graduate school days at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, when I must have sat through hundreds of seminars on experimental results and their theoretical interpretation. Each speaker would spend a major portion of the talk meticulously explaining how the uncertainties had been estimated. Most of the after-talk discussion would center on whether these estimates were accurate and whether the speaker had, given the uncertainties, drawn the right conclusion. In elementary particle physics, where the experiments cost hundreds of millions of dollars and the data are inherently statistical, you had better interpret your results correctly.

But uncertainties don’t play well in politics. Whenever a climatologist admits that there’s any uncertainty at all in the predicted rise in earth’s average temperature, global warming deniers loudly yell “See! The scientists admit they don’t know what will happen!” Or to take another example from the not-so-distant past: Imagine that President Bush had said in 2002 that he actually wasn’t sure whether Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction, but there seemed to be a 50/50 chance of it. Would Congress still have authorized the war?

Nate Silver is a hero (and an anomaly) because he’s able to look at all the data, make his best prediction, and still be honest about his uncertainties—even when the subject is politics.

I’ll end (once again) with a local political example. A respected economic consultant recently predicted that the middle segment of Ogden’s proposed streetcar system will stimulate $8.5 million of investment if it follows one proposed alignment, but only $1.5 million if it follows an alternate alignment. Ten days ago I asked her what the uncertainty range is on those numbers, and she replied, “Well, you can see that we rounded them to the nearest half million.” I’m afraid I laughed at that point, and tried unsuccessfully to convince her that the uncertainties were many times larger. I knew the numbers had been calculated from property value assessments, and that these assessments can be systematically off by 50% or even more. Worse, I knew that the lists of properties to be included in the calculations had been compiled through a subjective, undocumented process. After our conversation I looked up some of the property assessments and quickly saw that you could increase the $1.5 million prediction to over $9 million by excluding just two properties (out of several dozen) from the list. A fair estimate of the uncertainty would be much higher still.

But economic consultants apparently aren’t in the habit of thinking about uncertainty. Undoubtedly this is because their clients don’t want to hear about it; they just want simple answers. In this case the client was the Utah Transit Authority—a government agency that supposedly represents the people. Ultimately, it is the citizens at large who need to learn to think like scientists.

The Fight Over NASA Continues

2010-09-01T07:08:00.003-06:00

The fight in Washington over NASA’s future has gotten complicated and ugly, like any other legislative battle. I can’t keep up with the details, but the latest development is noteworthy.

The voices of reason have just sent an open letter to the chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology, pleading for more support for new technology, commercial spaceflight, robotic precursor missions, and student research. These are some of the programs that our government has been scaling back in recent years, and may continue to scale back, in order to divert every available dollar to the entrenched Constellation Program contractors.

The letter is signed by 14 Nobel laureates and a list of eminent former NASA officials and astronauts. Will anyone listen to them? I have no idea.

Meanwhile, our local entrenched contractor test-fired a rocket motor yesterday, resulting in yet another article (and yet another cool photo) in the local paper. Of course, the article reminds us yet again of how many local jobs hang in the balance as Congress debates NASA’s future. And what is the purpose of this new rocket motor? All we’re told is this: “ATK hopes its motor will boost a rocket into low Earth orbit, or maybe space.”

Textbook Prices

2010-08-22T19:06:00.011-06:00

Today, on the eve of the start of fall semester classes, Mark Saal’s column in the Ogden Standard-Examiner appropriately takes aim at astronomical textbook prices. And although many of his examples are books for economics courses, he also lists the price of an introductory astronomy textbook!

(Feynman joke: “There are 10¹¹ stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”)

As Saal points out, high college textbook prices are mainly due to the fact that the people choosing the books (the professors) are never the same ones who are paying for the books (the students). Publishers bombard professors with free copies of textbooks and in fact, I doubt that most professors even know what their assigned books cost. (The sales reps certainly don’t volunteer this information.) Under this system, textbook prices have been creeping upward considerably faster than inflation for the last 25 years.

One force that tries to counteract this trend is the used book market. Students have been selling their used books to each other for a very long time. College bookstores take an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” attitude, buying back used books for half price and then reselling them at 75% of the price of a new book. (The difference, 25% of the new price, happens to be the same as the bookstores’ profit margin on new books.) Students who don’t wish to keep their books can save a lot of money under this system, buying a used book for 75% of the new price and then selling it back at 50%, for a net cost of only 25%. Students who want to keep their books, though, still pay 75% of the new price.

Fighting back, publishers do everything they can to suppress the used book market. Mass-produced introductory books are now revised every three or four years, thereby making all used copies of the previous edition worthless. The revisions rarely add anything of value to the content. If publishers could revise books even more often, I’m sure they would—but that’s pretty much impossible. So they now publish most books in paperback, designed to self-destruct after a semester of use (while saving almost nothing in production cost). Another trick is to shrink-wrap a single-use student workbook with the main book, hoping that professors will require their students to have both. More recently, publishers have started providing online extras such as self-grading homework assignments, protected by a password that students have to pay for unless they buy a new book. The password expires after a year, and cannot be transferred to another student.

Being the half-assed crusader that I am, I’ve been fighting this system, in my own small ways, since 1990. I’ve written angry letters to publishers, posted a web article documenting the alarming trend in prices, and even made my own publisher put a clause in our contract to limit the price of my thermal physics textbook. I’ve never required my students to use the shrink-wrapped workbooks or online homework systems. For my own astronomy section, I’ve started writing a free online text (emphasis on started).

But of all the ways that professors can save money for their students, the most promising by far is simply this: Turn the publishers’ tactic against them and let your students use an earlier edition of the book. College bookstores won’t stock superseded editions, because they can’t be returned to the warehouse if they don’t sell. But the Internet makes it extremely easy for students to obtain used older editions, and the prices are rock-bottom.

History’s Greatest Star Map

2010-07-28T23:38:00.003-06:00

Next time you’re out under a clear, dark sky at night, look up and pick out a star at random. Chances are, nobody knew until 15 years ago how far away that star is. Now, thanks to the European Space Agency’s Hipparcos mission, we know.

Your randomly chosen star is probably somewhere between 100 and 1000 light-years away, although there’s about a 15% chance that it’s closer, and about a 10% chance that it’s farther. If your star is one of that nearest 15%, then its distance was probably known, to an accuracy of 50% or better, before Hipparcos. Otherwise, astronomers could have given you no better than a rough estimate of your star’s distance.

Direct measurements of star distances come from the method of triangulation, or parallax: Look at the star from two different directions, and measure its angular shift as you switch viewing locations. It’s the same principle as two-eyed vision, except that in the case of stars, the two viewing locations are on opposite sides of earth’s orbit around the sun--300 million kilometers apart.

Despite this enormous baseline, the angular shifts are miniscule, even for the nearest stars. And for stars beyond 100 light-years, the angles are too small to measure with any accuracy through earth’s blurry atmosphere. So in 1989 the ESA launched the Hipparcos satellite, carrying a special-purpose telescope dedicated to making accurate measurements of the positions of 100,000 stars. By repeating the measurements over a three-year period, the instrument determined not only the parallax shifts but also the steady motions of the stars as they gradually drift across our galaxy. The catalog of results, published in 1997, gives accurate distances and motions for all but a handful of the naked-eye stars, and many, many more.

You can now read about the Hipparcos mission in a new book by Michael Perryman: The Making of History’s Greatest Star Map. Perryman was Coordinating Scientist for the Hipparcos mission, and he does a masterful job at conveying what an immense undertaking it was. Hundreds of scientists spent many years of their careers on Hipparcos, while some of Europe’s most advanced industries fabricated the satellite and its unique optical system. The story also includes high drama, thanks to the failure of the booster rocket that was to put the satellite into its final orbit. That the scientists were able to recover from this disaster and still surpass all the mission’s goals was nothing short of miraculous.

Unfortunately, Perryman’s book has several shortcomings. He tries to do too much, telling not only the story of the Hipparcos mission but also the whole history of astronomy since ancient times--in fewer than 300 pages. Indeed, the main intent of this book is apparently to establish the place of Hipparcos in history, and to properly credit several dozen of the principal scientists for their respective roles. Educating the reader is secondary, and although the book tries to be accessible to non-astronomers (and to wow them with vague superlatives), I fear that most would be overwhelmed by the enormous number of technical details so superficially explained. I learned quite a bit from the book, but I’m already a professional physicist who teaches introductory astronomy. For my own part, I was disappointed that the book didn’t adequately explain how the Hipparcos optical system worked, or even point to a reference where I could learn more. I still have no idea why the system’s limiting resolution was about a thousandth of an arc-second, or how this relates to the diameter of its main mirror (30 centimeters).

Still, the inadequacies of the book shouldn’t detract from the importance of the Hipparcos mission. Virtually every subfield of astronomy now rests upon a firmer foundation, thanks to Hipparcos.

As an American, I can’t help but notice the differences between Hipparcos and the many equally impressive science missions carried out by NASA. Hipparcos produced no pretty pictures, and made no sudden discoveries. You can’t convey its importance in a ten-second sound-bite. It was designed, built, launched, operated, and funded by people who were focused not on short-term payoffs but on the long-term advancement of science. Such a mission would never have been supported by NASA, an agency that is forced to put glamor ahead of science because its budget is continually threatened by the whims of politicians. Of course, an advantage of the American system is that NASA has become very good at making its results accessible to the general public.

Ironically, it may not be long before the importance of the Hipparcos mission is merely historical. Encouraged by its success and the progress of technology over the last two decades, the ESA is now preparing a successor mission called Gaia, scheduled for launch in late 2012. If all goes as planned, Gaia will measure the positions of a billion stars, with an accuracy a hundred times greater than that of Hipparcos. Its completed three-dimensional star map will stretch across most of the Milky Way galaxy, far beyond the most distant naked-eye stars. Gaia will also discover thousands of planets orbiting distant stars, as well as tens of thousands of asteroids within our solar system. It will gather data over a period of five years, and its results will be published by 2020.

How to Photograph the Milky Way

2010-07-24T22:07:00.007-06:00

This summer I’ve been making quite a few wide-angle astronomical photos, especially of the Milky Way. Here are links to a collection of photos taken in June in the San Rafael Swell, and some other miscellaneous astronomical photos.

When I show these photos to people, they often ask how to make similar photos themselves. Here’s a summary of what I’ve figured out so far. For much more advice on astrophotography, I highly recommend Jerry Lodriguss’s site.

To photograph the Milky Way, you need the following:

A camera. I use Canon’s cheapest digital SLR, the Rebel XS (street price $500). Any other DSLR will probably work fine, except perhaps some of the earliest models which have higher noise levels. There may now be some high-end point-and-shoot cameras that will give acceptable results, but I’m not sure of this; most point-and-shoot cameras can’t take long enough exposures, and even if they could, the noise levels would be unacceptable. Film cameras don’t work well because even the fastest readily available films aren’t as sensitive to dim light as the sensor in a DSLR.
A wide-angle lens. I’ve invested in a Sigma 20mm f1.8 lens ($520), although the inexpensive 18-55mm zoom lens that came with my camera was good enough to get started. If money is no object, get the Canon 24mm f1.4 ($1700), along with a full-frame Canon 5D ($2500); that’s what the pros seem to use, as far as I can tell.
A tripod. I got a perfectly usable one at a discount store for $29.
A dark site. This is the most difficult part for many people. You cannot make decent photos of the Milky Way from a light-polluted city. But here in Utah, there are some very dark sites within a one-hour drive of my urban home. Depending on where you live, you may need to travel farther.

Of course, you also need a clear sky with a view of the Milky Way. From the northern hemisphere, the best views of the Milky Way are in the summer, with the brightest parts in the southern sky.

Before heading out on a dark night, practice with the settings on your camera. Put it in fully manual mode, including manual focus. Set it for a 30-second exposure at ISO 1600, with the lens at its widest aperture (perhaps f3.5 on a zoom lens). Practice turning the display on and off, and turn its brightness down. Set the camera to store images in “raw” format, rather than jpeg. Most importantly, figure out how to manually focus the lens at infinity. Some lenses are conveniently labeled for focusing, but my zoom lens isn’t, so I had to mark the infinity setting (when zoomed out to 18mm) with white tape.

With this preparation, taking the photos should be pretty easy. Turn the display off when you’re pointing the camera (so it doesn’t ruin your eyes’ dark adaptation), then turn it back on to check the settings (30 seconds, ISO 1600, widest aperture) and fire away. It’s hard to compose a photo in the dark, but you can review the composition on the LCD and try again as needed.

After downloading the photos to your computer, use the software that came with the camera to adjust the brightness, contrast, and color balance. With “raw” images you can make some pretty dramatic adjustments without losing quality.

Speaking of quality, there are three factors that limit the amount of detail in a photo of this type:

Digital noise, which gets worse at higher ISO settings;
Lens aberrations, which blur and dim the edges of the image, and which get worse when the lens is opened to a wide aperture (low focal ratio);
The earth’s spinning motion, which turns star images into trails and blurs the Milky Way over time. (In 30 seconds the earth turns by 1/8 of a degree.)

To lessen any one of these problems, you generally need to worsen one of the others. The trick is to make sure that no one of them is much worse than the other two. By all means, experiment with different ISO settings, apertures, and exposure times. I always stop-down my Sigma lens to about f2.8 to reduce aberrations, but stopping-down may not be an option if you’re using a relatively slow zoom lens. I’m happy with ISO 1600, which is the highest setting on my camera. Most of the digital noise disappears when I reduce the photos to screen size, but in long exposures there are always some “hot pixels” which can be manually fixed in Photoshop if necessary.

Even with the most expensive equipment, photos made in this way will not be sharp enough to withstand poster-size enlargements. For example, I’m a big fan of Wally Pacholka’s photos, and I have a framed 36-inch panorama of his in my living room, but it doesn’t show much more detail at that size than in the screen version on his web site.

It’s a nice touch to include foreground scenery in your photos, but if you want more than silhouettes, you’ll need to plan carefully. A small amount of artificial light, from ambient light pollution or even a flashlight, can sometimes illuminate the scenery without ruining the Milky Way. Moonlight is another option, but anything bigger than a crescent moon will brighten the sky too much for a good Milky Way photo, and there are only a few nights each month, and a few hours each of these nights, when the crescent moon is above the horizon after dark. Even then, the moonlight won’t always be shining in the direction you want.

If you don’t want to include foreground scenery in your photos, then life becomes much easier. You can try using a tracking mount to compensate for the earth’s rotation, allowing much longer exposure times. Then you can use a smaller aperture and/or lower ISO setting to reduce problems 1 and 2 above. You can even use a film camera, which is far less expensive but requires additional skills and patience.

Detecting Bad Data

2010-06-30T11:19:00.002-06:00

Political numbers geeks learned yesterday that Research 2000, one of the most prolific national political pollsters in recent years, may have been manipulating or even fabricating much of its data. This news comes less than a year after another national pollster, Strategic Vision, was exposed for probable fraud.

The evidence against these pollsters has come mainly from statistical scrutiny of their published results, performed by heroes like Nate Silver and Michael Weissman. But in most cases, you don’t have to be an accomplished sports statistician or a PhD physicist to detect bad data. You just have to care about numbers, and spend some time with them, and use a lot of common sense.

The sad thing is that in America today, hardly anybody cares about numbers except professional scientists and sports enthusiasts. Journalists, in particular, seem to think that their only job is to report both sides of the story--as if there’s no such thing as a fact. Except sports reporters, of course, who have to be extremely careful with facts and figures.

The good news, at the national level, is that the traditional media usually pick up the fraud stories after the bloggers do the actual work. The New York Times wasted no time reporting the Research 2000 accusations on its Caucus blog. If the accusations hold up, we’ll undoubtedly hear more. (Nate Silver will soon be assimilated into the New York Times. Let’s hope these kinds of stories don’t get suppressed in the process.)

Also, at the national level, there’s often enough honest fact-gathering that the frauds don’t make much difference. No single pollster had much impact on Silver’s bottom-line prediction of the outcome of the 2008 presidential election. The danger arises when everyone is relying on a single primary source, like the military or the White House.

At the local level, relying on a single authority is the rule rather than the exception. The Ogden Standard-Examiner almost always prints the word of local government officials as if it were fact, with no questions asked. Despite the detailed exposés on Weber County Forum, the Standard-Examiner has yet to report that the Ogden government manipulated its crime statistics, or that the government’s revenue projections for the Junction development were fraudulently overblown.

In science, fabricating data is the most serious of all crimes. I’ve given failing grades to astronomy students for fabricating their observations (which is usually easy to detect). There are continual allegations of fraud in medical research, where the financial stakes are incredibly high. Fortunately, the list of significant and documented cases of fraud in the physical sciences is extremely short. Although we physical scientists are just as human as everyone else, we know that our peers will tear our work apart if it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

APOD Celebrates 15 Years

2010-06-16T10:07:00.004-06:00

Astronomy Picture of the Day, one of the very best sites on the Web, is celebrating its 15th anniversary today. My heartfelt thanks go to its devoted authors and editors, Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell--and to NASA for hosting the site.

APOD’s diversity is remarkable. The pictures include straight photographs, highly processed digital images, graphs, and even paintings. They come from professional astronomers, NASA, dedicated amateurs, scientifically inclined artists, and historical archives. The subjects go beyond pure astronomy to include the space program, earth science, and physics. Each picture comes with a short lesson, written by the editors, full of hyperlinks for those who want to learn more.

Although APOD is pitched to the general public, it’s also extremely useful to those of us who teach introductory astronomy, and to any scientist who needs a daily dose of breadth in this era of hyper-specialization.

Among Web sites, APOD is also remarkable for its simplicity: No banners, no sidebars, no drop-down menus, no fancy fonts. This is the Web as it was originally meant to be, where content takes precedence over presentation, and the hyperlinks are inserted by real human beings. The most noticeable change since 1995 is that the pictures have gotten bigger. They’ve also added Javascript rollovers to annotate some photos, and even an occasional video. And there’s now a linked forum where you can discuss the pictures. But simplicity still prevails.

Collected Works from Weber County Forum, Volume 2

2010-06-08T18:52:00.002-06:00

About a year ago I posted a list of my Weber County Forum articles (loosely defined) over the previous three years. Since then the list has approximately doubled in length, so it's time for an update. Here, then, are my contributions since the middle of last June, in reverse chronological order:

New Developments On and Around Malan's Basin Property (8 June 2010)
Powder Mountain MOU Hearing Live Blogging (1 June 2010)
Roosters Celebrates 15 Anniversary (14 May 2010)
A Sunday Tour of Downtown Ogden (10 May 2010)
Ogden City Miscellany (9 May 2010)
100 Ride in Damp Tour de Drome (1 May 2010)
Mayor Vetoes Searchlight Ordinance (23 April 2010)
Ogden's Transit Choices (6 April 2010)
RAMP Funds Dog Park and Adventure Park, Not Velodrome (27 March 2010)
Standard-Examiner: 36th Street Tank Closer to Reality (15 February 2010)
Herbert Can Get More Than $10,000 for Political Favors (11 February 2010); follow-up (19 February 2010)
Live-Blogging the City Council Water Tank Decision (2 February 2010)
Ogden City Council Report (15 December 2009)
Standard-Examiner: Candidates' Final Reports Filed (11 December 2009)
Standard-Examiner Letter: Many Ethical Breaches in Ogden (3 December 2009); follow-up (11 December 2009)
Live-Blogging the Streetcar Stakeholder Meeting (19 November 2009)
Standard-Examiner: City OKs Use of Eminent Domain (19 November 2009)
Bits and Pieces from Last Night's Emerald City Council Meeting (18 November 2009)
Lifties and Smarties (13 November 2009)
Is Candidate Mark Hains in Violation of Finance Disclosure Ordinance? (30 October 2009)
Standard-Examiner: Tax Increment District Extended (14 October 2009)
Live-Blogging City Council Decision on Junction Tax Increment Extension (13 October 2009)
Be Honest, Fair, and Conservative (12 October 2009)
Brief Report on City Council Candidates Forum (6 October 2009)
Standard-Examiner Editorial Board Afraid of Mayor (28 September 2009); follow-up (3 October 2009)
Saturday Evening News Roundup (19 September 2009)
Vision Meets Reality (25 August 2009)
The Junction: What Next? (7 August 2009)
Live-Blogging the Big Veto Override (4 August 2009)
The Junction -- A Good Investment? (29 July 2009)
Junction 101 (27 July 2009)
Live-Blogging the Transit Management Committee Meeting (9 July 2009)
Scott Schwebke Fleshes Out the Budget Veto Story (9 July 2009)
Court Orders Ogden to Explain Status of Missing Records (7 July 2009)
Live-Blogging from the Planning Commission Chamber (1 July 2009)
The Ogden City Run-Around (27 June 2009)
Live-Blogging from the Emerald City Planning Commission (17 June 2009)

Purge Your Myrtle Spurge

2010-05-12T13:37:00.005-06:00

Today’s Salt Lake Tribune has an article about a plant that’s been invading Ogden’s foothills over the last few years. Now I finally know what it’s called: myrtle spurge, euphorbia myrsinites.

A native of southeastern Europe and Asia Minor, myrtle spurge has made its way into Utah’s gardens as an easy-to-grow xeriscape plant. But it is also extremely invasive, spreading into natural areas and crowding out native vegetation. Now that we know the danger, we need to get rid of this enemy before it propagates any further. (Colorado has already banned myrtle spurge; Utah is still a little behind the times.)

Fortunately, myrtle spurge is easy to recognize and to uproot. Look for the low-growing succulent plant with gray-green leaves and yellow flowers and bracts at the tips of the stems. Being sure to wear gloves, gather up the multiple stems in both hands and firmly pull the plant up by its root.

You need to wear gloves, because the sap of the plant can cause a severe allergic reaction in some people. Be sure to wash your hands after touching it, and avoid touching your eyes. A reaction is especially likely in people who are allergic to latex.

This morning I made a good first dent in the myrtle spurge infestation just above the top of 27th Street. If a few others help out and we keep following-up, I’m sure we can purge it from this location. I’ve also seen it growing along the Mt. Ogden Exercise Trail, and I’m told it’s widespread in Ogden Canyon. I don’t know if it’s still feasible to eradicate it from Weber County, but now is the time to try.

And whatever you do, don’t plant this noxious weed in your yard!

Science and Nature Reading List

2010-04-28T23:49:00.009-06:00

Now that school’s out, it’s time for summer reading! Here are a dozen of my favorite science and nature books, recommended to students, colleagues, and friends alike. None of them are especially recent, and in fact, many are books that I first read for fun during graduate school, when I should have been working on my thesis. They’re listed below in approximate order by difficulty, starting with the lightest reading and ending with books that require some effort. None, however, assume any specialized background. Of course there are hundreds of other good science and nature books out there, most of which I haven’t read. I can’t promise that you’ll like all of these as much as I do, but I can promise that each of them is of the very highest quality.

Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee. In this classic from the golden era of environmentalism, McPhee arranges for Sierra Club hero David Brower to spend some quality time with three of his natural enemies: a mining geologist, a resort developer, and a dam builder.

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. Essays by a hard-nosed realist about the wonders of southern Utah: juniper trees, snakes, clouds, heat, quicksand, tourists, inhabitants, and the encroachment of industrial civilization.

The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll. My favorite mystery, and all true! A Berkeley hippie astronomer and computer geek discovers that a hacker is breaking into U.S. Government computers. Soon he’s teaching the FBI, CIA, and NSA all about internet security.

Voodoo Science by Bob Park. An entertaining survey of perpetual motion machines, cold fusion, human space flight, and other things that look like science but aren’t. Written in the same spirit as Martin Gardner’s classic, Fads and Fallacies.

Basin and Range by John McPhee. The best geology book ever written, which just happens to be about the place where I now live. Filled with clever juxtapositions of human and geologic time. The three sequels are also good: In Suspect Terrain, Rising From the Plains, and Assembling California.

First Light by Richard Preston. Before the author became famous for writing The Hot Zone, he spent some time hanging out at Palomar Observatory and wrote this delightful book about the astronomers working there.

365 Starry Nights by Chet Raymo. Among the hundreds of guides to the night sky, this is by far my favorite. It offers a mini astronomy lesson for each night of the year, with lovingly hand-drawn illustrations. Its only deficiency is the lack of an index, so I created one years ago.

The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman. A set of seven informal lectures by the great theoretical physicist, just as relevant and insightful today as when they were first delivered in the 1960s. If you like this, you’ll also enjoy Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, which presents four more lectures on quantum physics.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. The big picture of human history and prehistory.

The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg. Still the best book on cosmology, written soon after our understanding of the hot early universe became firmly established.

The Copernican Revolution by Thomas Kuhn. This well-crafted classic on the history of astronomy reminds us that a moving earth was once just as much a threat to some peoples’ belief systems as evolution and global warming are today.

Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. A weighty masterpiece that interweaves art, music, logic, puzzles, puns, language, molecular biology, and artificial intelligence.

Mobile Computing Growing Pains

2010-04-12T23:28:00.004-06:00

The experts have been saying for years that the future of computing is in mobile devices. I ignored them until recently, but now the iPhone, iPad, Kindle, and similar gadgets have gotten my attention. I own an iPhone myself, and I’m beginning to see the potential of mobile platforms for some of my own creative projects. These projects might include textbooks, educational software, and perhaps a trail guide to the local area.

I’ve already written about some of the challenges in delivering a textbook or trail guide on a mobile device. But perhaps the biggest challenge facing any of these projects would be the diversity of competing mobile platforms, and the fact that only a minority of the potential audience owns any one of them.

The obvious solution is to create content in a cross-platform format. This is trivial for a book whose formatting doesn’t matter. But a versatile and attractive electronic format for physics textbooks doesn’t seem to exist, so some custom, platform-dependent coding would probably be required. A good, practical trail guide would require much more coding. And a decent interactive simulation of molecular dynamics or the night sky requires a thousand or more lines of user-interface code.

For several years I’ve been writing these kinds of simulations in Java, which makes them portable to virtually all of today’s desktop and laptop computers--and deliverable over the web. I can’t overstate what a huge advance this is compared to the bad old days when you had to write native code that would run on only one platform. (The native Mac simulations that I wrote between 1985 and 1992 were never widely used, and now they don’t even run on the new Macs.)

Unfortunately, mobile devices don’t run Java applets. Apple’s mobile devices don’t support Java at all. I’m not absolutely wedded to Java, but I’ve been hoping that some kind of usable cross-platform development environment for mobile devices would soon come along. Last week my hopes got a major setback.

Apple has now added the following sentence to its iPhone developer license agreement:

Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++ or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++ and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

The geek blogs are all abuzz over this new rule, and rightly so. It seems to prohibit virtually any sort of cross-platform development tools, and even restricts what programming languages you can use to develop iPhone apps. Bloggers are inferring that Apple isn’t merely trying to maintain the quality of apps; it’s literally trying to make life difficult for any developer who wishes to deploy an app on multiple mobile platforms.

For a part-time, half-assed developer like me, this move by Apple is devastating. I write software not to make money but to reach a target audience. I have no intention of writing software that can reach only the fraction of that audience that owns a particular device. And I don’t have the time or the resources to port software from one device to another.

Eventually, I suppose, the situation will improve--just like it improved for personal computers when Java came along. Until then, I’ll keep deploying physics simulations as Java applets for personal computers. And I’ll keep publishing books in the tried-and-true format that’s universally readable by all.

The Fourth Estate?

2010-03-12T15:27:00.004-07:00

Today Utah woke up to the news that House Majority Leader Kevin Garn has been keeping a secret.

It seems that 25 years ago he had a little naked hot-tubbing encounter with a young woman. That’s no big deal in itself, but it seems that this woman was a 15-year-old girl at the time, and that Garn was approximately 30, and that she was also his employee, and that he was also married, and that when she threatened to go public during his 2002 campaign for Congress, he paid her $150,000 in hush money. Oh, and after he confessed all this to the Legislature last night, they gave him a standing ovation.

But among all the juicy details of this still-unfolding story, the one that interests me most is this: The Deseret News knew all about it 8 years ago, and never printed a word.

Their excuse is that they learned Garn’s secret shortly before the primary election in which he was defeated. They didn’t want to print something so inflammatory right before the election, when voters might not have time to hear and absorb all sides of the story. And after the election it wasn’t newsworthy because he was no longer a candidate or office holder.

They may have been right about not publishing before the election. Depends on how close to Election Day it was, and exactly how much information they had at that time. But there’s no excuse for their suppressing the story even after the election. Garn had then served in the Legislature for 12 years, and a story like this is newsworthy even when it’s about a former legislator or former candidate (just as the John Edwards scandal was newsworthy when it broke). And when Garn joined the Legislature again in 2007, the story became even more newsworthy.

Makes you wonder what else the Deseret News knows that it isn’t telling us.

The behavior of the Deseret News reminds me a lot of how our local Standard-Examiner treats Mayor Godfrey. In his case there have been no sex scandals, but there’s been plenty of lying, cheating, and illegal activity that the Standard-Examiner has done its best to ignore.

When the Press is part of the cover-up, there’s something seriously wrong with our democracy.

iPad Textbooks

2010-03-06T16:34:00.003-07:00

I have no immediate plans to buy an iPad, since it can’t replace either my iPhone or my laptop computer. But as a textbook author, I’m intrigued by the iPad’s possibilities as a book platform.

Following a link from the New York Times, I just read a thoughtful blog essay by Craig Mod on the future of printed and digital books. Mod wisely divides book content into two categories: “formless” (which is trivial to port from one delivery platform to another) and “definite” (which is created with a particular platform in mind, using that platform’s physical features in an essential way). Last year’s digital book platforms--Kindles and iPhones--were fine for formless content, and allow us to foresee a day when these kinds of platforms will be common enough to make most mass-market paperback books obsolete. The iPad, according to Mod, changes the picture by opening up new opportunities for digital definite content.

Mod doesn’t specifically mention textbooks, but they’re discussed in the comments below his essay. Electronic textbooks have some obvious advantages: they’re less bulky; their text can be cross-linked and searchable; they can incorporate multimedia content; and they can link to related content on the web. Also, textbooks are so expensive already that the additional cost of an electronic reading device shouldn’t be much of a barrier.

As an author, I’m attracted not only by these advantages but also by the prospect of no longer having to worry about page breaks. Both of my textbooks were created using TeX, a mathematical typesetting system that mostly frees the author from thinking about form. But inevitably, when a book is full of equations and illustrations, one of the last steps before going to press is to manually tweak the layout to minimize awkward page breaks. Even then, there will be many places where students end up flipping a page back and forth to see what’s on both sides. Electronic books on portable devices won’t show as much information at once, but at least they can (if done correctly) present an entire chapter on a single scrollable page, with no artificial discontinuities.

Unfortunately, the technology for good electronic physics textbooks isn’t yet where it needs to be. For one thing, there still doesn’t seem to be a good way to incorporate complex mathematical equations into electronic documents. In html pages, equations are usually rendered as ugly, low-resolution bitmap images. A pdf document can incorporate equations made of scalable fonts, but you can’t (as far as I know) create a pdf without breaking the document into pages.

Another limitation of electronic textbooks is that it’s hard to scribble notes in the margins. Reading a textbook should be an active experience, during which the student frequently jots down thoughts and questions. (When my thermal physics textbook was published, I made sure the publisher gave it wide margins for students to write in.) Perhaps, though, the iPad can help here. With the right software, a reader should be able to add text annotations to a document using the on-screen keyboard. And with the large touch-screen, it should even be possible to add graphical annotations that include math symbols and sketches.

So even though I don’t yet plan to buy an iPad, I’ll be eager to borrow one and check out the iPad book reading experience.

The War Against Science Escalates

2010-03-04T11:35:00.003-07:00

Yesterday’s New York Times reports that the anti-evolutionists are joining forces with the global warming deniers. I suppose this was inevitable, as both groups share the common practice of believing what they want to believe, without regard for the facts.

Here in Utah we get a strong dose of anti-science every winter during the legislative session. This year our elected leaders have officially proclaimed that global warming is a hoax. They also introduced a bill requiring the health department to produce a video of the heartbeat of an “unborn child” of three weeks gestational age, despite the fact that at that age an embryo does not have a heart. (This bill was later modified to add another week, making the health department’s task barely possible.) If the legislature had political reasons to dislike the law of gravity, they would undoubtedly try to repeal it.

Amidst all this, I recently received the latest Save Our Canyons newsletter, which contains a refreshing essay by SOC President Gale Dick titled “Is Science Just Another Opinion?”. Dick is also a retired physics professor from the University of Utah, so he and I naturally look at a lot of things in the same way. In the essay he insightfully lists possible reasons why so many people reject science:

Flaws in our education?
Sheer laziness?
Fear?
The inability of science to explain why so many terrible things happen to us?
Distrust of academic scientists who come across as arrogant and elite?
Belief that science is the enemy of religion?
Cultural aversion to mathematics?
Reluctance to accept the limitations that science puts on what is possible?
Reluctance to accept the responsibility that comes with scientific knowledge?

There are no simple antidotes to any of these understandable human shortcomings. The only cures are education, hard work, and integrity. All three of these things are part of the difficult process of growing up, when we recognize that we must accept the things we cannot change, work to change the things we can, and inform ourselves well enough to tell the difference.*

Yet Another Planetarium Simulation

2010-02-15T20:40:00.010-07:00

Last November, as another semester of teaching Elementary Astronomy drew to a close, I finally broke down and started writing my own planetarium simulation.

On its face, this was a ridiculous waste of time. There are already dozens, if not hundreds, of planetarium simulation programs that will show you where the stars and planets appear in the sky, as viewed from your chosen location at your chosen time. They run on every microcomputer platform and many handheld devices. Some are extremely sophisticated, with databases of millions of stars, beautiful images, and even the ability to interface with a telescope.

But I wanted something a little different. To be useful to most of my students, a simulation program has to be (a) free; (b) delivered through a web browser, with nothing to download or install; (c) easy for beginners to understand; and (d) convenient for showing the motions of the stars and other objects with respect to earth's horizon.

Sky View Cafe is a great Java applet that almost fits the bill, and I’ve been recommending it to my students for several years. It’s loaded with features and was obviously written by a pro. But its time/date control is a bit awkward to use, so it isn’t ideal for showing celestial motions. Worse, its default full-sky view can be disorienting for beginners, who often have trouble relating the circle on the screen to the domed sky overhead.

Fifty-six years ago, H. A. Rey showed the best way to draw the sky for beginning observers. The illustrations in his delightful book Find the Constellations show half the visible sky at a time, as if viewed through a huge domed window stretching 180 degrees from side to side, from the horizon at the bottom to zenith at the top. I vividly remember reading that book as a child, and I wanted a web applet that gives a similar view of the sky.

I also wanted intuitive, analog controls for changing the time and date, so the sky’s motions would be easy to explore. Inspired by the GoSkyWatch iPhone app, I settled on a circular dial for changing the time of day, with a concentric inner dial for changing the date of the year. I added similar analog controls for setting the latitude and longitude.

To make the motions even more apparent, I included a feature that WSU’s digital planetarium projector has: the ability to show “trails” that simulate long-exposure or multiple-exposure photographs. Besides the familiar star trails, you can use this feature to trace out analemmas and retrograde loops.

This project has soaked up much of my free time for the last three months, but I think it’s essentially finished for the time being. I hope my students--and others who discover it--will find it useful.

Skiing Wheeler Creek

2010-02-11T19:03:00.006-07:00

Without a doubt, Ogden’s best easy ski touring is on the Wheeler Creek trails, below Snowbasin. While the better skiers are risking their lives on higher, avalanche-prone slopes, I find plenty of challenge--and great exercise--on twisting, narrow trails over gentler terrain.

My favorite tour, when snow conditions allowed, was to ascend the East Fork of Wheeler Creek from the Art Nord trailhead to Green Pond. After an initial 1.5-mile climb, the terrain opens out and you’re suddenly rewarded with an expansive view of Mt. Ogden and its satellite peaks. The photo above was taken from that magical spot on my very first trip up this trail, 15 years go. (That’s Jock up ahead.)

The final leg of the three-mile trail to Green Pond is now crossed by the new Snowbasin highway, which has ruined several of the old routes in the Green Pond area. So now the best option is to stop just short of the highway and descend the lovely trail along the Middle Fork of Wheeler Creek, closing a five-mile loop either on the old highway (now unplowed and groomed for skate skiers) or on the more challenging trail that parallels the highway just to the north. Ten of us went on a Sierra Club outing around this loop last Sunday, enjoying it as much as ever.

Fifteen years ago, navigating any of these trails in winter required good route-finding skills and a high tolerance for oak brush. But the Forest Service rebuilt all the trails shortly before the 2002 Olympics, clearing the brush and building excellent bridges across the many tributary creeks. Now the trails get packed down by snowshoers soon after each storm, so navigation is rarely a challenge.

The East Fork / Middle Fork loop outlines a small peninsula of public land, bordered by private land on the east, west, and south. It’s just a matter of time before those private lands will be developed with trophy homes and golf courses. The solitude and sense of remoteness will then be nearly gone, but at least the trails themselves will remain.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-10T17:03:00.007-07:00

If anyone out there has been checking this blog for the last 11 weeks, hoping to find something new, please accept my apologies. Blogging got pushed to the back burner by a combination of the November election, professional duties, holiday travels, and personal matters. In any case, Happy New Year!

Speaking of holiday travels, I again spent New Year’s weekend in remote Boulder, Utah, with a group of accomplished environmentalists. Couldn’t ask for a better setting, or better company, to start the year off right.

Besides enjoying the scenery and getting some exercise, we did a bit of work during our day hikes. On New Year’s Day we documented the existence of a new house that someone has illegally built on BLM land in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. I suppose the builder figured it would be easier to get forgiveness than permission. Let’s hope he gets neither.

Then on Saturday we helped Bill Wolverton in his ongoing war against invasive Russian olive trees in the Escalante canyons. Bill is a seasonal employee of the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and I’m pleased to report that after a decade of work he is winning the war--at least within the NRA boundaries, where he has cleared the Russian olive from the Escalante River canyon and nearly all of its tributaries. Let’s hope that the BLM, which manages the upstream portions of these canyons, will soon step up its weed eradication efforts to match those of the Park Service.

Our small project was merely to cut and burn some Russian olive that Bill had already killed some time ago. This is important not just for aesthetics but also to clear out the thorny brambles for the benefit of hikers and wildlife. First we had to hike through a couple miles of weed-choked canyon down to the NRA boundary, where Bill’s past efforts were immediately apparent. Still, there’s more work to be done, and we built two splendid bonfires to dispose of the cut logs and brush.

Returning to Boulder at nightfall, we were treated to a spectacular sky full of stars. So I quickly changed into dry socks, grabbed my camera and tripod, and ran back out to the road to take a few photos before moonrise (and supper). I first shot a photo of Orion rising and another of Cygnus (and the Milky Way) setting. Then glancing over at Jupiter, I saw a distinct glow around it and realized that, for the first time in my life, I was seeing the famous zodiacal light. Boulder must be one of the few inhabited places on earth where this faint band of light is still visible. I’m already making plans to go back for a star party in warmer weather.

Rockets in the News

2009-10-24T15:38:00.004-06:00

It’s been a big week for NASA in the Ogden Standard-Examiner. Tuesday’s top front-page story was about the imminent test launch of the Ares I rocket, whose booster stage is manufactured locally at ATK. Then on Wednesday, the business section ran a wire-service article on the same subject, complete with photos and graphics--plus a teaser headline at the top of the front page with a picture of the rocket stretching all the way across. The launch is scheduled for next Tuesday, so I suppose we can look forward to at least one more big article.

Meanwhile, buried inside Friday’s paper was another article, with no illustrations, about the release of the Augustine Committee report. This appointed committee of experts has concluded that NASA’s ambitious plans for human space flight are unrealistic unless its budget is increased by $3 billion per year. Even then, the most glamorous mission we can afford within 15 years is to land on a passing asteroid or comet, or perhaps fly past Mars without landing. Oh, and the Ares I rocket is too small for such a mission.

Even Friday’s article devoted only one sentence to the question of why NASA should do these things. At least according to one committee member, the reason is “to interest the American public in new destinations.” I suppose that’s more or less equivalent to “because it’s there.”

The article gave far more space to Congressman Rob Bishop’s reaction to the report, which focuses entirely on what’s in it for his district: jobs at ATK producing Ares and Space Shuttle booster rockets.

I have to congratulate the PR folks at NASA and ATK for playing-up this test launch enough to push the Augustine report off the front page. And I can hardly blame the paper for caring more about jobs in Utah than vague long-term goals.

But I find it sad that human space flight, which once represented humanity’s loftiest goals, is now viewed as little more than another jobs program.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

2009-10-04T21:41:00.010-06:00

My father, Vernon Schroeder, turned 92 today. In recognition of the occasion, let me try to outline his long and fascinating life.

Dad was born in western North Dakota. His parents were Fred Schroeder and Edith Jesperson, children of immigrant farmers. One family was German and the other was Danish, but most of all they were Lutheran.

When he was told, as a teenager, that nonbelievers would burn in Hell for all eternity, Dad decided there could be no higher calling in life than to save souls from such unthinkable suffering. So he decided to become a minister. He went to college in Moorhead, Minnesota, and then to seminary in St. Paul. After a year at that seminary he decided their theology wasn’t quite correct, so he transferred to the more doctrinally pure Missouri Synod Lutheran seminary in St. Louis.

As a minister he was never expected to serve in World War II. Instead he became pastor to a congregation in rural Minnesota for three years. Then he moved back to St. Louis and worked at the Missouri Synod publishing house where in 1949 he met my mother, Dorothy Schneider, the granddaughter of urban German Lutheran immigrants.

A few years after getting married, Dad took a job teaching Old Testament at a Lutheran parochial high school. That fresh look at the Bible convinced him it couldn’t all be literally true, and sent him down the slippery slope from fundamentalism to agnosticism. But though he may have literally lost his faith, he never lost his fundamental goal in life: to save people from suffering.

Years later, after he retired and my mother died, Dad finally had the freedom to pursue his dream of full-time “ministry” on his own terms. So he moved himself from the quiet suburbs of St. Louis to a retirement home in the center of Washington, DC. Those who didn’t know him well were astounded that at age 80 he would move farther away from his sons, to a city where he didn’t know a soul. But for him, it made perfect sense. He had always loved big cities, he was never that close to any of his family, and he wanted to go where he could find plenty of people to preach to, one at a time. Also, as he quipped only half-jokingly, he wanted to attack the world’s evil at its root.

Politically, Dad has always been on the far left. He grew up during the Depression, when it seemed perfectly reasonable to be a fundamentalist Christian and a socialist at the same time. Today his ideals seem incongruous. Like most liberals, he supports workers’ rights, minority rights, and the United Nations. Recently he has also embraced newer liberal causes such as environmental protection, abortion rights, and gay rights. But at the same time he despises the ACLU and its allies for trying to purge religion from the government and the public schools. Though he calls himself an agnostic, he cannot imagine morality without religion.

Dad has spent the last 12 years walking the streets of the nation’s capital, looking for people who will listen to him. He visits congressional offices, other government buildings, and nonprofit institutions, talking mostly to receptionists and security guards. He carries little homemade “tracts” in his pocket and hands them out. He frequently calls and writes to tell me of his ministry’s many dead-ends and ever-present hopes.

He readily admits that his platform is a little vague. We need to get rid of the corrupt corporations and government institutions and churches and over-paid professionals. We need to put religion and morality back into the schools. We need to bring people together in small groups for frequent serious discussion. Ideally, people should live in communes. Let the detail-oriented people work out the details.

Sadly, Dad has never understood my love of abstract science: How is it morally acceptable to spend time solving “problems” that don’t directly affect people? He sympathizes with my local political crusades, but considers them petty compared to the world’s big problems.

And my view of his ministry is equally critical. I wish he were more of a pragmatist and a problem solver, not just an idealist. I wish he could focus his thoughts well enough to gather up the one-liners into a coherent booklet or even a letter to the editor.

Still, he’s doing what he loves, working day and night to show the world that he cares--even at age 92. That in itself is enough to earn anyone’s respect.

Astrophotography for the Rest of Us

2009-09-30T09:31:00.006-06:00

A couple of decades ago, when I was still using a fully manual SLR film camera, I tried some simple astrophotography: Long-exposure photos of star trails from a fixed tripod, and also some “piggyback” photos with the camera mounted on a small motor-driven telescope to track the stars. The results were satisfying but hardly spectacular, and the time required was substantial enough that my priorities soon turned elsewhere.

Then last January, at the start of the International Year of Astronomy, my interest in astrophotography began to return. By then I was using a marvelous little Canon point-and-shoot digital camera, and I was delighted to learn that it would take time exposures as long as 15 seconds. While spending the New Year’s holiday in remote Boulder, Utah (about as far from city lights as you can get in the contiguous 48 states), I decided to brave the cold and try a few shots of the winter constellations.

To my astonishment, that little camera recorded 10 times as many stars as my eye could see. Unfortunately, the photos were also plagued by digital noise that severely limited the aesthetic possibilities. I suppose this noise is the digital equivalent of the grainy appearance of photos on high-speed film.

Meanwhile, I had been marveling at the ever-better scenic night photos posted on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day site. Following the links from some of my favorites, I discovered sites like TWAN and The Sky In Motion. These photographers were using digital SLR cameras to make stunning photos showing the sky in great detail behind interesting foreground scenes. The noise levels were acceptable, because DSLR cameras have bigger and better electronic sensors than my point-and-shoot.

A terrific resource for would-be astrophotographers is Jerry Lodriguss’s web site, Catching the Light. One of his technical articles indicates that even some of the cheapest consumer-model DSLR’s can produce excellent night shots. But did I want to spend even $500 for such a special-purpose toy? “Well,” I rationalized, “I’ve already had two astronomy students use DSLR cameras for their observing projects, and I need to learn how to help them when necessary.”

I got the new camera on September 10. Then even I, a professional geek, had to spend a week just getting familiar with all the buttons and menus. I also discovered that to shoot exposures longer than 30 seconds (without a computer connected), I needed to get a $25 remote switch. Finally prepared, I headed up to Ogden’s foothills on a couple of our recent spectacular September nights. The best shots from these sessions are posted here. In short, I'm amazed at what can now be done with amateur equipment and very little effort.

Incidentally, this was the first time I’ve ever been glad for light pollution. Although scattered light from the city brightened the sky (and pretty much ruined any shots facing west), that same light pollution cast beautiful illumination on Ogden’s mountains.

How much further I’ll take this hobby, I have no idea. Certainly I’ll try some photos from a few other sites around Ogden. And I’ll bring the new camera on camping trips, to see what it can do from some darker locations. Perhaps I’ll try to schedule these trips to coincide with favorable moonlight to illuminate the scenery.

But I’m not a professional photographer, so if you want to see really nice photos of the sky, follow the links above.

Innumeracy at the Standard-Examiner

2009-09-09T08:39:00.006-06:00

Today's Standard-Examiner has an article about a small hydroelectric unit that Ogden will be installing at its water treatment plant. According to the article:

The unit is being funded by a $169,000 grant;
It will generate 131,400 kilowatts of electricity;
It will save the city about $10,000 each year.

Can you see that there's something wrong here? A kilowatt of electricity is enough to power an average home, so 131,400 kilowatts would probably power the entire city of Ogden. There's no way such a plant could be built for the cost of a single home, or that the energy delivered annually would be worth less than a new car.

It isn't hard to guess what the "131,400" figure really means: It's actually the number of kilowatt-hours per year. This is a unit of power that would make my physics students groan in dismay, but it's legitimate and even useful when you're thinking about annual budgets. Divide $10,000 by 131,400 and you get an average cost of 7.6 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is about what we pay for electricity here in Ogden.

So what's the plant's output in more conventional units? Divide 131,400 by 365 (days in a year) and by 24 (hours in a day) and you get exactly 15 kilowatt-hours per hour, that is, 15 plain old kilowatts. That's comparable to what your house would use if you turned on all the big appliances at once. And it's reasonable that a water treatment plant would use that much power on a continuous basis.

This isn't rocket science--it's something every educated person can and should understand. Everyone knows what a 100-watt lightbulb is, and most people know that "kilo" means 1000. A typical toaster or hairdryer uses about a kilowatt. A kilowatt-hour is the amount of energy that such an appliance uses when it's turned on for one hour. You need to know this to understand your monthly electricity bill, but few people bother to try.

Why don't newspapers expect their reporters and editors to know what a kilowatt is? Why don't universities expect every graduate to know this? Have we really decided, as a society, that thinking about numbers is only for specialists?

Pfeifferhorn!

2009-08-31T17:21:00.007-06:00

The name alone makes this a compelling peak to climb. (I sometimes pronounce it “Ppppffffeifferhorn” just for fun.) It’s located southeast of Salt Lake City on the ridge between Little Cottonwood and American Fork, about half way between Lone Peak and Snowbird. Summit elevation: 11,326 feet.

We’d been planning this hike since the annual Pfeifferhorn Award dinner last November, when my friend Joan from The Nature Conservancy suggested it. By the time of yesterday’s hike we had each recruited some illustrious company, so it was a grand outing to a grand destination.

With so many terrific hikes closer to Ogden, I don’t get to the rest of the Wasatch Mountains often enough. But the Cottonwood Canyons do offer a few things that Weber County lacks: Summits over 11,000 feet, large alpine lakes, and federally protected capital-W Wilderness. The Pfeifferhorn lies within the Lone Peak Wilderness (Utah’s first), and the route to it passes beautiful Red Pine Lake. In July and August the high altitudes offer welcome cooler temperatures. While ambling over alpine terrain you can enjoy the cute little pikas constantly eeping at you.

This hike isn’t for everyone. You need to be reasonably fit and have pretty good balance to negotiate the steep slopes and large boulders. It also helps to have someone along who has done it before, so you don’t take a wrong turn and get into real trouble. Snow and ice make the hike much more dangerous earlier in the summer.

As we made our way toward the summit, I especially enjoyed watching my friend Jock, an experienced alpine climber who did a winter ascent of the Pfeifferhorn a few decades ago. Now 74, Jock had planned to stop at Red Pine Lake but couldn’t resist going higher. As we traversed the steep boulders he shot ahead, clearly in his element. By the time I reached the top he was already on his way down.

Endorsement: Buffalo Grass

2009-08-18T08:43:00.008-06:00

Lots of folks here in Utah wish they could keep their lawns green without using so much water. My approach, since I became a homeowner, has been mostly to avoid lawn grass completely. I’ve covered a lot of my yard with native shrubs and water-wise perennials.

But it’s nice to have at least a little lawn grass, where you can sit and enjoy Utah’s marvelous summer mornings and evenings. So last year I took the plunge and planted a patch of drought-tolerant buffalo grass in my back yard.

I got the idea from the High Country Gardens catalog, and from one of my colleagues who had also tried buffalo grass. You order it in little plugs, an inch in diameter by two inches deep. The plugs come in flats of 72 for about $40 per flat. I ordered ten flats, which arrived in mid-May 2008. By then I had roto-tilled the ground, raked out the weeds, and mixed in some fertilizer.

The part I hadn’t thought through was this: You have to plant the plugs one at a time. An industrious person could have done it all in a couple of days, but I took two weeks, working about an hour each day. I planted the plugs a foot apart, covering a roundish area of about 600 square feet which my friends call the putting green. Then I carefully watered and weeded and waited. Much to my amazement, the plugs grew and filled in by the end of the summer.

Buffalo grass has two aesthetic disadvantages. First, it spreads by shooting out “runners” that try to find bare ground where they can put down roots. Once the grass has filled in, some of the runners start shooting upward where they look a little messy and make the grass feel stiffer. Second, buffalo grass turns completely brown in the fall and doesn’t turn green again until late spring (around mid-May this year in my case). So a lot of people won’t want it in their front yards, where the neighbors might disapprove.

Meanwhile, the advantages are as advertised: Buffalo grass needs only half as much water as “regular” grass (once it’s established); it needs much less mowing (never growing higher than about 8 inches); it can easily handle moderate foot traffic; and it grows thick enough to keep out most weeds.

It was definitely a worthwhile investment.

A Case Study in Blogging vs. Traditional Journalism

2009-08-11T16:33:00.014-06:00

One reason I haven’t posted anything here in a while is because I’ve been working on a series of three long articles for Weber County Forum, about Ogden’s Junction development. This personal blog was never intended as a substitute for WCF, and most of my writing on local politics will continue to go over there.

But I’d like to comment here on how this episode illustrates the tense-yet-fruitful relationship between blogs and the traditional media. In Ogden the situation is extra simple, because the town has only one daily newspaper (the Standard-Examiner) and only one active political blog (Weber County Forum).

This particular story started as a rumor that I heard about a Taxing Entity Committee meeting that was held on June 25. I could have simply passed this rumor on to a reporter at the S-E, but I’ve learned through experience that they follow up on such things less than half the time. So I got a copy of the meeting minutes from the city recorder and forwarded them to blogmeister RudiZink, who broke the story on WCF on July 14.

During the ensuing discussion in the comment thread under that story, I got curious enough to look up some tax information on the county’s web site. That information made me even more curious.

The S-E finally printed its own story on July 19, and by then I was hooked. So I contacted several city and county officials over the next two weeks, asking question after question until I was satisfied with the answers. My three long-winded articles describe what I learned.

Meanwhile, the S-E has chimed in with three articles of its own that complement mine nicely, taking a closer look at the progress toward finally opening the Earnshaw building, the status of the Junction apartment leases, and the city’s continuing hopes to lure a hotel developer.

So how do the roles of the traditional news source (S-E) and the blog (WCF) differ? In this case, the S-E did a much better job of finding and quoting multiple authorities with different perspectives on the issue. On the other hand, WCF focused on hard evidence (meeting minutes and tax records), in-depth analysis (with tables and graphs), and connecting the dots together. The S-E articles were mostly up-beat, with hopeful promises for the future. WCF documented the broken promises of the past.

In many respects these roles were typical. The S-E hardly ever looks at actual documents or does any arithmetic or produces an original graph or even reminds readers of what was said in its own articles a year or two ago. And WCF hardly ever seeks out a diversity of viewpoints.

In one respect, though, this episode wasn’t typical. Usually the S-E will break a news story, and WCF will follow-up with detailed analysis and commentary. In this case WCF is way out ahead, and the S-E is playing catch-up.

No matter what your opinion of the newspaper and the blog, it’s clear that this city needs both.

Update, 20 August 2009: The Standard-Examiner has continued its coverage of the Junction financial situation with an especially sloppy article that is misleading in several ways and omits some key information. My comment under the article points out several of its shortcomings.

Apollo 11

2009-07-20T08:58:00.010-06:00

I don’t have anything original to say about the Apollo moon landings, but they did influence my life and so this anniversary is an occasion to reflect.

When Neil Armstrong stepped out of the lunar module and onto the moon, I had just turned seven. I barely remember watching the great event on TV, and I’m sure its significance didn’t sink in at the time. My parents were more interested in the other big news of the late 60’s: the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, political assassinations. My brother and I were more interested in whether the Cardinals would get to the World Series.

But as I got a little older, and the Apollo landings continued, I began to show serious geekish tendencies. I bought and assembled plastic models of spaceships. I checked out all the astronomy books from my grade school library, and learned to identify the stars and constellations. In art class I drew pictures of imagined rockets that would take people to every planet in the Solar System. Eventually I grew up and became a scientist.

The moon landings had little direct impact on science. Sure, we learned more about the moon’s geology, but there were no big surprises. The real impact of the moon landings was cultural. Bob Park said it best:

How can Apollo 11 be described? It was a feat of skill and daring unmatched in history. The Apollo moon landing transcended the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union for world domination. It was a source of pride and inspiration for the whole human race, symbolizing the heights that humans are capable of reaching and overshadowing every space mission before or since.

The problem with putting on a great show is that everyone expects an encore. Where shall we go next?

And our Solar System offers no good answer to that question. The next nearest world after the moon is a hundred times farther away. That world is Venus, where the CO₂ atmosphere has created a run-away greenhouse effect, scorching the surface with temperatures high enough to melt lead--and with an atmospheric pressure that would crush a nuclear submarine. Humans will never walk on Venus.

How about Mars? It’s only a little farther than Venus, and much more hospitable: very little atmosphere, and about as cold as Antarctica. Astronauts in spacesuits would be no worse off there than on the moon. The problem is the distance.

It took three days for the Apollo astronauts to reach the moon. Traveling at the same speed, it would take about a year to reach Mars. Ah, but that was 40 years ago. Surely rocket technology has improved exponentially since then, so we can travel much faster...?

Actually, no. Rocket technology was already quite mature by 1969, and the laws of physics don’t permit any major, straightforward improvements. Perhaps we could shorten the travel time to a few months, but nobody has any idea how to get to Mars faster than that. We could probably keep a crew alive on such a long flight, but only at tremendous cost.

So human space flight has retreated to low-earth orbit, just above the atmosphere. Since 1972, no human has traveled farther from earth’s surface than Cape Canaveral is from Houston. Most of the scientific research that goes on during these orbital missions is aimed at understanding how the human body deteriorates during long periods of weightlessness.

Besides months of weightlessness, astronauts bound for Mars would be exposed to the serious radiation hazards of interplanetary space. And even if these hazards can be mitigated, the risk in such a journey would be tremendous. If anything goes wrong (think Apollo 13), the chance of a successful bailout is inversely proportional to the distance from earth. A failed mission to Mars would be a tragedy not just for the crew, but for all of humanity.

If the real goal is to inspire our children, I think there are better ways. It’s the robotic spacecraft that do NASA’s scientific work, touring the Solar System and peering at the distant universe from above earth’s obscuring atmosphere. Many of the technologies used by these spacecraft, to see and sense and transmit data, have advanced exponentially since 1969. Instead of watching a fuzzy transmission on TV, today’s children can use the internet to explore the surface of Mars or visualize the patterns in the cosmic background radiation.

Let us therefore celebrate human space flight by giving it a hero’s funeral--and get on with the business of exploring the universe with 21st Century technology.

iPhone Astronomy

2009-07-05T17:51:00.008-06:00

When I gave up my Palm Z-22 for an iPhone in March of last year, one of the few things I sacrificed was a free little astronomy app that would draw a chart of the planets and constellations for any date and time.

Third-party apps for the iPhone became available a few months later, and among the initial offerings were four good astronomy apps. They cost $9 to $12 each, but they were far more powerful than what I’d had before. Over the year since then, two of these apps have been greatly improved and three others have been introduced. The most powerful of them now costs $19, but there are good choices for $5 to $6 and one of the apps also comes in a pretty good free version.

I have no idea whether these apps are stimulating more interest in astronomy among the general public, but I sure hope so. They’re affordable, fun to use, and instantly available whenever you find yourself out under the stars wondering what you’re looking at. Although astronomy software for full-sized computers is more powerful still, it’s often more expensive and harder to use--besides being tied to a large, power-hungry device that you can’t slip into your pocket.

The iPhone (and iPod Touch) user interface is ideally suited for this kind of software. On the screen you see a map of the sky, automatically adjusted for your current location. The amount you see at any one time is limited by the screen’s small size, but you can move the map around and zoom in and out instantly, using intuitive finger gestures. The better apps are so easy to use that even if I’m sitting at my computer, I prefer to pull out my iPhone to look up the time of sunset or the phase of the moon or the best time to view the Andromeda Galaxy.

In a modest effort to promote these apps, I decided last winter to write a review of them. Not a quick off-the-cuff review, but a thorough review of all seven apps, with a detailed comparison table and lots of screen shots. Otherwise, how are users supposed to choose among the seven apps--or even know that they have so many choices? (There’s no easy way to even find them all on the iTunes Store, which outgrew its primitive organizational scheme long ago. Astronomy apps are variously categorized under Education, Navigation, and Reference.)

The review project ended up being a little too ambitious, and I’ve had trouble keeping the review up to date. Still, there are hundreds of people out there who have read the review, and I’m getting a steady trickle of email thanking me for it. If a few more people fall in love with astronomy as a result, it will have been time well spent.

Astronomy is just one of many subjects where computing makes more sense on a mobile device than on a bulky computer. Another is trail maps and nature guides, as I mentioned recently. I get the sense that most of us, including the software developers, are still adjusting to this paradigm shift, and I look forward to the next generation of useful mobile apps.

Last Printed Edition of the Outings Guide?

2009-06-23T10:37:00.013-06:00

The Ogden Sierra Club Outings Guide is now being printed. If anyone out there is waiting to buy a copy, we should have them in a week or two.

The changes since the last (2004) edition are numerous but minor. I’ve squeezed in descriptions of three new trails, tweaked the descriptions of many others, and updated several of the maps. The length is unchanged (112 pages), as are the illustrations and most of the page layout.

Shown here is one of the delightful chapter-opening cartoons, which were drawn before my time (1980s or perhaps earlier) by someone I’ve never met (Richard Hogue). It’s an honor to work on a project that so many others have lovingly contributed to over the decades.

Since the Guide went to press, one person has already requested an electronic version of it. This leads me to ponder its future, and the future of books more generally, as the world rushes into the internet age.

Technology has already had a big impact on the production and appearance of the Outings Guide. The first three editions were produced with typewriter, scissors, and tape. Some of the maps were hand-drawn, while others were copied (with permission) from newspaper clippings. A copy shop then reproduced the pages using an analog photocopier.

When I took over as editor in 1998, the production process went digital. I typeset the text (using TeX, the same software I use to write physics books and class handouts), scanned the line drawings, and produced new shaded-relief maps based on digital elevation data. I recall delivering that edition to the copy shop on a Zip disk, from which they uploaded it to their digital copier. In the 2004 edition we switched to FTP and offset printing.

To the end user, however, the format of the Guide is still unchanged: a pocket-sized soft-cover black-and-white booklet, printed on dead trees.

An electronic final version would be environmentally preferable, and would make my life easier in several ways. No more agonizing over the locations of page breaks, or over how much information to try to squeeze onto a tiny black-and-white map. No more running around town making deliveries. No more having to wait until the inventory is depleted before making updates.

On the other hand, the initial creation of a usable electronic version would be a major challenge, in terms of both programming and design. Sure, it’s easy to brainstorm about full-color zoomable maps with links to and from a searchable database of trail descriptions and photos. But I’ve done enough programming and web design to know that producing such a software package wouldn’t be easy.

To their credit, Weber Pathways has put an electronic version of their trail map on the web. As you roll the cursor over an alphabetical list of trail names, the trails are highlighted on the map. You can click on a trail name to see a text description of the trail, and you can restrict the list to trails of a chosen difficulty level if desired. With a bit of patience I can even view this map on my iPhone, if I’m in a location that has service.

But the Weber Pathways electronic map isn’t perfect. The map is extremely small and can’t be zoomed. Nor can you identify a trail by pointing at it on the map. You can’t access the map while exploring the more remote parts of the county. And notably, the electronic version of the map is now out of date, compared to the latest printed edition.

Are there better examples of electronic trail maps? If so, I’d love to see them. But I’m doubtful, because solving one problem would probably create others. A fancier web site could be prohibitively expensive to create and maintain. A stand-alone mobile app could have a slicker user interface, but would be unavailable to anyone who doesn’t have the right gadget.

The long-term maintenance issue is especially troubling. Already, the production process for our Outings Guide has become so technical that I would have a lot of trouble finding another volunteer to take it over. Switching to an electronic Guide would ratchet up the geek level a couple more notches, and might require hiring a professional programmer. And while it’s easy in principle to update an electronic document, in practice it can become a burden and even an expensive necessity, as hardware and software quickly evolve.

Then there’s the question of money. Selling Outings Guides has been our group’s main source of income over the years. But nobody is willing to pay to access a web site, and at least for now, the market for a mobile app of this type isn’t large enough to cover the cost of hiring someone to produce it. (Weber Pathways operates on a much different business model, raising money from charitable contributions and mostly staying out of politics. We need organizations like that, but they can’t do everything.)

The good news is that we’re printing enough paper copies of the Outings Guide to last another four or five years. By then technology will have progressed, and perhaps the right way to do an electronic Guide will be obvious.

I’ll promise one thing now, though: As long as I’m the editor, the Guide will continue to include Richard’s cartoons.

Collected Works from Weber County Forum

2009-06-13T21:50:00.013-06:00

It’s now just over three years since I began blogging on Weber County Forum, and that’s still where I’m putting most of my political writing. Today’s article, on Ogden’s utility rates, adds another to this growing list.

Oddly, Blogspot doesn’t seem to provide an easy way of pulling up all articles by a particular author. So for my own convenience, and that of anyone else out there who might want to see what I’ve written over this time, here is a mostly complete list of my Weber County Forum articles. (With one exception, this list includes only articles—not the hundreds of comments that I’ve posted over the years.)

Ogden’s rising utility rates (13 June 2009)
City council amends campaign ordinance (10 June 2009)
How to lawfully conceal the source of campaign funds (27 May 2009)
Ogden streetcar study update: Has the process already jumped off-track? (2 May 2009)
Southeast Bench Water System Improvements Preliminary Design Report (30 April 2009)
Godfrey administration attempts to defend water system plans (8 April 2009)
Envision Ogden 2007 municipal election corruption update (27 March 2009)
Golf course plans include condos on city and WSU land (20 March 2009)
The Ogden velodrome fantasy (15 March 2009)
Criminal wrongdoing in the 2007 Ogden City Council campaign (3 March 2009)
Campaign finance reform needed right here in Ogden (27 February 2009)
More about the Ice Tower and that “anonymous $63,000 donation” (8 February 2009)
Utah Supreme Court decides in favor of open records (24 December 2008)
The Malan’s/Strong’s clearcutting: What Chris Peterson is really up to (19 December 2008)
This Democrat is supporting Brent Wallis in Legislative District 10 (29 October 2008)
Ogden crime statistics ... without the Godfrey distortions (22 September 2008)
Powder Mountain update: Open letter to the Weber County Commission (11 July 2008)
Decision time looms for the Ogden Ice Tower (29 May 2008)
Ogden City Council work session on transit planning (16 May 2008)
Letter to the Weber County Commission responding to claims about the streetcar (8 May 2008)
Envision corruption (4 November 2007)
Ogden for rent (13 September 2007)
Pure Genius (2 August 2007)
How to promote (and how not to promote) Ogden (29 June 2007)
A classic story of the abuse of government power (13 May 2007)
Administration pushes forward on Peterson land grab (4 April 2007)
My first Weber County Forum comment, on the “tall tales” of the Peterson proposal (2 June 2006)

Although some of these articles were written with the intent that they be placed on the Weber County Forum front page, others were originally posted as comments and were bumped to the front page by blogmeister Rudi. Rudi also wrote some of the titles and did some additional editing, just as a newspaper editor would.

Equal Opportunity?

2009-06-11T06:33:00.009-06:00

At the start of each city council meeting we pledge allegiance to a Republic that provides “liberty and justice for all”. That’s not quite the same thing as equal opportunity for all, but many of us believe America should at least strive to provide equal opportunity. (Does this belief make me a liberal? Perhaps.)

The New York Times has just published two disturbing articles about the lack of equal opportunity in higher education.

First, Reed College (about as liberal as they get) has begun to base its admission decisions on ability to pay. Until now they practiced “need-blind” admissions, then provided adequate financial aid to every admitted student with demonstrated need. Now, as a result of the recession, they’ve decided to reject more than 100 students solely because they can’t afford to pay full tuition, and to accept 100 well-off students who otherwise wouldn’t have made the cut.

(My own liberal arts alma mater, Carleton College, began a similar practice about a year after I graduated--and I’ve protested by withholding charitable contributions to the them ever since. I’d rather see them spend money on financial aid than on fancy new buildings and higher faculty salaries.)

Second, the State of Illinois has launched a formal investigation into whether the University of Illinois (its most prestigious public university) has admitted hundreds of unqualified applicants in response to political pressure from state legislators and university trustees. If the allegations are true, this would be an egregious example of how it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

Fortunately, my own employer can’t possibly suffer from these particular problems. Weber State University admits anyone with a high school diploma. (To borrow a cynical old Tom Lehrer quip, we’ve banned discrimination even on the basis of ability.) Does this mean we provide equal opportunity in every way? Of course not; there’s no way to be completely fair to everyone, and occasionally I hear allegations that students have been given special treatment for reasons such as family connections or gender. But overall, WSU and America’s other colleges and universities uphold much higher standards of fairness than you’ll find in the rest of our society.

Perhaps my background in higher education is part of why I get so outraged about politics, where you can almost always buy better opportunities with either money or political loyalty. Although high-profile corruption scandals draw attention to this system of unequal opportunity, for the most part the system is completely legal.

Ogden’s recent campaign finance revelations are a case in point (and a case that I’ve been obsessed with for the last few months). Just look down the list of Mayor Godfrey’s biggest campaign contributors, and you’ll see a list of people and companies who are doing business with the city. Or look at how the city attorney has the discretion to enforce campaign laws against one political faction but not against another. This is a system based on power, not equal opportunity.

Fortunately, Ogden just took a small, incremental step toward fairness, by passing a new campaign finance ordinance that will limit the largest contributions and provide more complete disclosure. Let’s hope we’ll see many more steps in the same direction.

More New Trails

2009-05-31T20:41:00.009-06:00

Still doing research for the upcoming revision of the Ogden Sierra Club’s Outings Guide, I recently hiked two more new trails.

The first was Ogden’s Birdsong Trail, which climbs the bluff just west of Rainbow Gardens. I had hiked it before, of course, but never in the spring. Although both ends of the trail are infested with weeds, there’s a lovely portion in the middle that winds around a bench area displaying what looks like entirely native plants: sagebrush, green grasses, prickly pear cactus, sego lilies, and a few other flowering plants. If you get a chance, be sure to check out this trail before it gets scorched by the summer heat.

Next I headed to North Ogden to check out a newly opened 5-mile section of the Bonneville Shoreline Trail. This section follows the power line corridor north and west from the North Ogden Pass road, traversing right under the south face of Ben Lomond. Many thanks to Weber Pathways and Rocky Mountain Power for making this trail possible. I’m glad the trail was put in place before the subdivisions climb up to it, which is just a matter of time. Some new water tanks have just been put in, and another is under construction, while work progresses on new roads just below. Haven’t they heard about the recession?

Pedaling the Parkway

2009-05-29T09:01:00.016-06:00

My front-burner project right now is revising the Ogden Sierra Club’s Outings Guide booklet--the pocket-size trail guide that we’ve published since 1975. I took over the editorship 11 years ago with a major update, then made another big revision in 2004 when we expanded the coverage farther into neighboring counties.

But now the Guide is out of print, and it’s my fault. Before printing another thousand copies, I want to make sure it’s as up to date as possible. And there have been lots of changes to Ogden area trails since 2004.

Many of the changes are along the Ogden-Weber River Parkway, a multi-use urban trail that keeps growing every year. To see the latest improvements, I took a couple of bicycle excursions along the Parkway earlier this week.

I wish I knew the whole history of the Parkway. The first segment, from the mouth of Ogden Canyon to Washington Blvd., was newly completed when I moved to Ogden in 1993. I’ve heard that former city council member Glen Holley was one of the people most responsible--but I’m sure there were many others. This portion of the Parkway is still the most heavily used.

Next came a terrific trail segment along the Weber River in Riverdale, constructed in 1996. That year was the centennial of Utah’s statehood, and by then people were talking about a much greater vision: a continuous trail along the Ogden and Weber rivers, connected to the Bonneville Shoreline Trail to make a grand 27-mile loop called the Centennial Trail.

The person who worked hardest on the project at that time was undoubtedly Jay Hudson, who had asked me to join the city’s trails committee two years earlier. Jay was assistant to Mayor Mecham for a while, then retired and kept working on the Parkway.

Pretty soon Weber Pathways, a new nonprofit organization, got into the act. They’ve since grown to become the driving force behind completing the Parkway. I can hardly imagine the complexity of the negotiations with multiple land owners and government agencies, but I’m grateful to everyone (including Mayor Godfrey) who has supported this project.

During recent years, Ogden has pushed the Ogden River Parkway west through the central city and then over the viaduct to the 21st Street Pond. West Haven took it from there to the confluence with the Weber River, then southward up the Weber River and back into Ogden. A new tunnel now connects the Ogden Kayak Park to Fort Buenaventura.

Only one more short segment, near the 31st Street interchange, is needed to connect Riverdale to Fort Buenaventura and all the rest. Thanks to a RAMP grant, that segment will be completed this summer. We’ll then have more than 10 continuous miles of river parkway (not counting several nice side trails), from the mouth of Ogden Canyon to the south end of Riverdale.

Economists could probably put a price on the long-term value of this amenity to our community--and I’m sure it would be at least tens of millions of dollars. To me, however, it’s priceless.

Laughing at Politics

2009-05-27T08:40:00.008-06:00

Last night I had some fun at the city council meeting, reading a modest proposal for how a candidate can conceal the source of campaign contributions. Sometimes politicians are so dense that they don’t understand anything short of ridicule.

Even John Patterson laughed out loud.

Gary Williams told me on the way out of the room that I’m “a petty man”. At least I got his attention.

The writeup in the Standard-Examiner is humorless, of course.

Ogden’s Historic Building Scavenger Hunt

2009-05-24T21:12:00.008-06:00

Time to brag a little: I won a prize in Ogden’s Historic Building Scavenger Hunt!

This annual event, held every spring, is a terrific idea. The city prints up a brochure (download a copy here) with a dozen closely cropped photos of interesting features on historic buildings. Along with each photo is a brief hint. A map highlighting all candidate buildings is also provided. Your job is to go out and find the 12 buildings in the photos. Turn in your brochure with at least one correct answer and you’re eligible for a prize drawing. Get all 12 answers correct and you’re also eligible for the grand prize (a gift certificate to a restaurant and a copy of a Weber County history book). The contest is jointly sponsored by the Ogden City Landmarks Commission and the Weber County Heritage Foundation.

I’ve now participated for three years in a row. It’s a great excuse to get on my bike on a nice spring day and pedal around at a leisurely pace, enjoying the city and looking at amazing architecture that I never would have noticed otherwise. I’d do it even if there were no prizes, though I do appreciate the bragging rights.

To avoid traffic I try to do most of my scavenging on Sundays. This year it took me a couple hours each on two Sundays and a Monday--and I still found only 11 out of 12. (I missed the one pictured above, then went back afterwards and took this photo, which shows a lot more of the building.) But this year’s scavenger hunt was on the hard side, and apparently only a handful of people found all 12 buildings. For whatever reason, my entry did win a nice prize: a $40 gift certificate to a restaurant on 25th Street.

From Foolishness to Fraud

2009-05-20T09:42:00.008-06:00

One of my favorite popular science books is Voodoo Science by Bob Park. Like Martin Gardner’s earlier book Fads and Fallacies, it takes a critical and entertaining look at many things that superficially appear to be science but aren’t. Park’s targets include perpetual motion machines, cold fusion, and human spaceflight.

Most cases of voodoo science involve some level of fraud. Yet the people responsible almost always start out with good intentions. I’m always intrigued by this apparent paradox: How can “good” people commit fraud? Park summarizes the answer in his subtitle: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud.

In other words, what ends up as outright fraud usually begins as mere foolishness. We all make mistakes, and we all want to believe we’re right even when we’re wrong. At first, such a belief is merely foolish. But each time we exaggerate the evidence in our favor, or ignore contrary evidence, we take one more step down the road from foolishness to fraud. Each step down that road makes it harder to turn back and admit we were wrong all along. Eventually, in the worst cases, our dishonest attempts to maintain our position become fraud.

(My students make mistakes all the time, so I frequently remind them that the good scientists aren’t the ones who don’t make mistakes--they’re the ones who routinely check their work and fix their mistakes.)

Park limits his examples to the periphery of science, but it’s easy to find examples elsewhere. Most of us have had the experience of telling a well-intentioned “white lie” and then, faced with further questions, having to choose between telling a bigger lie to cover for it, or coming clean.

Politics abounds with examples of foolishness and fraud. The Iraq WMD allegations come immediately to mind. Here in Ogden, our biggest recent example was the “gondola” proposal. Others that come to mind include (at least in some aspects) Ernest Health, the ice climbing tower, and Envision Ogden.

In science, fortunately, there are mechanisms to correct foolish mistakes and root out fraud. It’s standard practice for scientists to brutally scrutinize new claims, and there are professional rewards for scientists who show that someone else’s results were wrong.

In politics we also have checks and balances: multiple levels of government with multiple branches; law enforcement agencies that investigate the most serious allegations; and the media who are free to conduct independent investigations and report multiple viewpoints. But the mechanisms for correcting mistakes are less effective than in science, for two reasons. First, the underlying subject matter is harder to probe for objective truth. And second, too much of politics is driven not by truth but by power.

Much of the inspiration for our democratic political system came from science during the Enlightenment, and the system continues to improve over time. The more we all participate, the better the system will work.

Cold Fusion and Gondolas

2009-05-20T06:28:00.008-06:00

[I wrote this essay in July 2006, during the height of Ogden's gondola war. The intent was to submit it to the Standard-Examiner as a guest commentary, but I decided against using my professional credentials in such a political way. Now, almost three years later, I guess I can say "I almost told you so!".]

I clearly remember when I first heard the news.

It was a spring morning in 1989. I was a graduate student, finishing my PhD in theoretical physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. When I arrived at the lab that day the hallways were buzzing with the news from Utah.

A colleague filled me in: Two chemists at the University of Utah were claiming to have produced a sustained nuclear fusion reaction in a tabletop experiment.

I'm sure my jaw dropped. Like my colleagues, I instantly knew that if this report were true it would be the greatest technological development since the steam engine. It would provide the world with clean, abundant, inexpensive energy, averting the looming crises of fossil fuel depletion and global warming.

But the mood around our lab was not one of celebration. Instead we were asking each other questions: What was the evidence? How, exactly, could it possibly work? Have they tried such-and-such? Who are these guys, anyway?

Nobody could be absolutely sure the claim from Utah was false, given the minimal and vague information that was available at that time. But in science, as in everyday life, a person soon learns that most extraordinary claims, though they might conceivably be possible, turn out to be false. Our motto is: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

Everyone knows the rest of the story. The initial excitement was tremendous and understandable—given the natural human tendency toward wishful thinking. The Utah Legislature, in a ringing endorsement, even appropriated $5 million for additional cold fusion research.

Yet the extraordinary proof never came. After the press conference announcing their "discovery," Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann refused to answer the many questions that other scientists were asking. They never submitted a description of their experiment and their data to a scientific journal for scrutiny by their peers. They stalled and dodged the questions as long as they could, with a series of excuses that gradually descended "from foolishness to fraud" (as described by Robert Park in his book Voodoo Science).

Meanwhile, working from what little information was available, scientists around the world tried to replicate the experiments. Those with reliable and fully documented results all failed. Pons and Fleischmann eventually left the country; the university’s president also lost his job. The University and the State of Utah became the butts of jokes that are still told among scientists and others worldwide.

Fast-forward to Ogden, 2006. The hallways are abuzz with another exciting idea, which promises to be the most important development in our city since the arrival of the railroad, bringing new prosperity to one and all. I'm referring, of course, to the proposal to build a resort in Malan's Basin and a pair of gondolas connecting it to downtown, financed by a new foothill residential development around a redesigned Mt. Ogden Golf Course.

The extraordinary claims in this case are many:

A small, remote ski area on very steep terrain will be economically viable.
350 condominiums can be built in a narrow mountain valley without creating geological hazards.
The resort will not require a road for construction or emergency access.
A high-tech sewage treatment system will make it safe to discharge wastewater into Malan’s Falls and pack out solid waste by gondola.
Modest-sized homes on Ogden's east bench will sell for nearly a million dollars each.
Moving the golf course onto steeper mountain slopes will make it more playable.
Adding 400 homes and six miles of streets to the east bench will improve our trail system.
Tourists will be eager to park downtown and take a 36-minute gondola ride to the resort.
The gondola can double as a practical means of urban mass transit.

Just as with cold fusion, there's a natural tendency to want to believe these wonderful claims—and we can't be absolutely sure that any of them are false. But again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Even if we generously grant each of these nine claims an independent 50% chance of being true, the odds of them all being true are less than one in 500.

Several other parallels to the cold fusion story are equally striking:

The proposal is being pitched directly to the media and the public, before being scrutinized by experts.
There exists no formal description of how it all supposedly works.
The chief proponents, though not total amateurs, lack the credentials we would ordinarily expect.
The proponents have been elusive, declining to answer technical questions on the record.
A legislative body may be asked to endorse the project before we know whether it's feasible.

Disturbingly, some proponents of the Ogden development project are even taking the first steps from foolishness toward fraud, spreading misinformation about such things as the Snowbasin connection and alternative transit proposals.

Whether this story will continue to parallel that of cold fusion remains to be seen. Let's hope, at least, that decision makers will wait for more facts before giving any endorsements. If they don't, there's an excellent chance that Ogden will become the butt of jokes for decades to come.

Dan Schroeder is a professor of physics at Weber State University. In his spare time he does volunteer work for the Sierra Club and the Ogden Trails Network Committee.

Hello, World!

2009-05-19T07:31:00.003-06:00

This blog is a place for sharing thoughts about stuff I do, from teaching physics to environmental issues to local politics. Basically I need a place for unpolished or self-indulgent writing that I wouldn't put elsewhere. Thanks for reading.