Michael Flynn's Blog, page 11

TOF at Boskone

TOF has received his schedule for the upcoming Boskone.  For those finding themselves in Beantown in February.  (Brrr?)  You will likely find TOF at these locales:

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Science Marches On!

Spanish researchers discover the first black hole orbiting a “spinning” star
-- headline, Astronomy Magazine (January 16, 2014)

Stephen Hawking: 'There are no black holes'
-- headline, Nature (24 January 2014)
+++
 And speaking of black holes...
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Post-Darwinian Evolution

A Commonplace Observation It is said that "we humans share more than half our genomes with flatworms; about 60 per cent with fruit flies and chickens; 80 per cent with cows; and 99 per cent with chimps."

This demonstrates something very important.

Namely, how little our genes signify.

Some folks take those percentages to show that humans are not all that different from cows or chimps. Others observe empirically that humans differ tremendously from these others -- you are not reading this on the bovine intertubes -- and wonder whether the genes are a meaningful metric of anything other than physiology.

The great scientific revolutions, Chastek once observed, turned on seeing the significance in things that were negligible within their context. The difference between a circular orbit and the actual elliptical orbits that the planets follow is negligible. The difference between the Newtonian and Einsteinian dispensations matter only at high speeds.  Yet the sliver of difference matters a great deal, even in so quotidian a thing as GPS. So the delta between man and monkey may well be very small genetically speaking -- but no one says we must speak only of genes.
A Glove Thrown DownRead more »

The Oxonian TOF

TOF's essay, "Discovering Eifelheim" has been accepted into the anthology Medieval Science Fiction to be published by Oxford University Press.

This collection of essays will aim to read the Middle Ages through the lens of modern Science Fiction, and vice versa. We ask whether ongoing contemporary discussions about medieval literature and culture on the one hand, and about the SF genre, its history and its future, on the other, can be brought into explosive contact. Contributors will consider where, how and why ‘science’ and ‘fiction’ intersect in the medieval period; explore the ways in which works of modern SF illuminate medieval counterparts; but also identify both the presence and absence of the medieval past in key SF texts. As such, the collection will be divided into two parts: ‘Science and Fiction in the Middle Ages’ and ‘the Middle Ages in Science Fiction’. We believe that Medieval Science Fiction will appeal to anyone interested in the history of premodern science, medievalism, genre studies or, more broadly, finding new and innovative ways of reading early texts.

TOF is a little concerned about that "explosive contact" business and hopes that readers will not be injured in the process.

Fifty Years Ago

Fifty years ago this past week, LBJ declared war on poverty.

Poor people lost.






Fig.1 The official government poverty rate: ominous signs.

Or maybe not...

TOF's first question is: what caused that precipitous drop in poverty rates prior to the War on Poverty. The short answer is that TOF hasn't a clue. Perhaps the wartime economy resulted in poorer households and things were recovering toward normal in the 50s and 60s. Or perhaps the transition from rural to urban was just then running to completion.  (Late Moderns may not realize the extent of rural poverty in the 1940s and earlier.)  Or the general prosperity inherent in being the only large economy on Earth that was not bombed flat in the 40s. Or else the data collection was only just getting started and the numbers are really incommensurable to later measurements.

TOF's second question is: WTF? The War on Poverty seems to have stopped the drop! Since 1967, official poverty rates have fluctuated between roughly 15% and 12% in what looks like a 25 year cycle. There is no secular trend in the metric.

TOF's third question is:
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Sometimes the Mask Slips, a Little

...and sometimes they don't even bother wearing the mask:

Behold the re-emergence of the lebensunwertes Leben!

Happy New Year

The New Year is always greeted with great expectations and the belief that it cannot possibly be as bad as the past year. This belief is the triumph of hope over experience. A brief review of the year:

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Time Out

Another of those ancient college-days poems lately unearthed in moldering drawer.  Traces of high school project to study G.M. Hopkins. Retouched a little. Needs work.
Times

Inflation Put the Hindenberg in the Air

Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy tracked grades at numerous colleges from 1903 to 2006.The plot is here:
Each gray dot is the average grade awarded at one university for one year. (The number of universities included in the analysis has also been increasing.) By 1970 or so, as TOF reads the chart, the lowest university average was higher than the highest such average in the 1950s. This at a time when admissions were increasing for all classes of the population.  One possibility is that college students in the mid-late 1960s got suddenly smarter than their older brothers and sisters. As a college students from the mid-late 1960s, TOF finds this an attractive possibility; but it fails to account for the steady state 1975-85 and the second, slower rise beginning after 1985.

The study authors have this to say:

The rise in grades in the 1960s correlates with the social upheavals of the Vietnam War. It was followed by a decade period of static to falling grades. The cause of the renewal of grade inflation, which began in the 1980s and has yet to end, is subject to debate, but it is difficult to ascribe this rise in grades to increases in student achievement. Students’ entrance test scores have not increased (College Board, 2007), students are increasingly disengaged from their studies (Saenz et al., 2007), and the literacy of graduates has declined (Kutner et al., 2006). A likely influence is the emergence of the now common practice of requiring student-based evaluations of college teachers. Whatever the cause, colleges and universities are on average grading easier than ever before

This Little Light of Mine

...I'm gonna let it shine.  For 112 years.






Bulb-cam keeps live watch on world's oldest light bulb



The longest-lived light bulb is in a fire station in Livermore CA. Live more in Livermore?

From the site:

First installed at the fire department hose cart house on L Street in 1901. Shortly after it moved to the main firehouse on Second. In 1903 it was moved to the new Station 1 on First and McLeod, and survived the renovation of the Firehouse in 1937, when it was off for about a week. During its first 75 years it was connected directly to the 110 Volt city power, (subject to the power outages) , and not to the back-up generator for fear of a power surge. In 1976 it was moved with a full police and fire truck escort, under the watch of Captain Kirby Slate, to its present site in 1976 at Fire Station 6, 4550 East Ave., Livermore, California. It was then hooked to a separate power source at 120V, and UPS according to Frank Maul, Retired City Electrician. There was one interruption in May, 2013, when the UPS failed and it was off for at least 9 1/2 hours. When it was plugged back in it shined at 60 Watts. It is still brighter, months later, than it's former 4 Watts.