It’s news like this that make me doubt the government

June 28, 2008 by

In order to survey the impact of massive solar power plants on the environment and wildlife, the federal government is freezing new solar projects on public land for two years! Buying private land is way more expensive for startups than leasing public land.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe the Bush administration has demonstrated more than its share of incompetence. But they semm to have no problem dismissing environmental concerns when it comes to allowing the drilling of oil on public lands, but when it comes to letting the green competetion use that land for solar farms they impose a 2 year freeze to study the problem! Give me a break. This is more than incompetance, this smells like corruption. As a citizen and taxpayer, my vote counts for 1/300 millionth of the US public lands (which I think in this case is mostly desert right? where the sun is always shining.) I say, let them use the land. In fact, let them use it for free and get tax deductions. All of which will help to make this profitable and my energy bill lower and my air cleaner. (Read the story on the NYT)

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Justification of Ockham’s Razor as a principle of reasoning

May 6, 2008 by

Scientists use the principle of Ockham’s Razor as their guide. Ockham’s Razor states that when there are multiple consistent theories are being considered, the choice should be the simplest one. Simple theories have an intuitive appeal, but that is not a justification of Ockham’s Razor as a principle of reasoning. A justification should demonstrate that preferring the simplest compatible theory is better at finding the truth than any other competing strategy.

This article does a good job with great cartoons of explaining why this principle is valid. Very insightful. Here’s the link.

Update: here is an animated older version. The link above goes to the version 2 story board which has not been animated.

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Science Question: If the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace – is gravity’s effect on time the culprit?

January 31, 2008 by

I have been watching the debate about dark energy as a possible explanation of what is causing the universe to expand faster and faster (as cosmologists first discovered 10 years ago). But last night, as I was watching the new series “The Universe”, I was reminded of a particularly interesting facet of Einstein’s relativity theory – the effect of gravity on time. Bottom line of that theory is that time passes slower when you are inside a gravitational field.


This is something NASA has been able to demonstrate by putting atomic clocks in orbit and that the programmers of the GPS satellite system had to take into account to make the system work properly. Clocks (and all other matter) move faster when there is less gravity. Time, as we measure and understand it, passes slower on earth, than in orbit, and it is faster still once you get away from the sun, and even faster when you get out of the Milky Way. This leaves me with 2 questions:

1) If time is passing faster, the further away from a gravitation field you get, wouldn’t that explain why the universe is expanding faster? Eventually, as galaxies get further apart, there is less and less gravity in inner-galactic space, thus (I would assume) time is going faster between galaxies and the “normal” expansion process would be occurring at an accelerated pace. In other words, voids grow faster than matter rich areas of the universe because everything happens faster there. Think of a large balloon that is expanding on a wall of video monitors, some of the videos are playing faster and thus that part is expanding more rapidly. Not only that, be the expansion itself is causing gravity to be less and less on an influence because the galaxies are now further away (more space-time between them). Will time eventually become a run-away engine in the vast emptiness of space? Will the speed of time approach infinity?


Fact: The emptier space is (the less gravity) – the faster time passes.

One way I thought to test this would be to observe the speed of stars (if there are any) or any other matter in the “vast hole in the universe” that was discovered recently. If “emptiness” has the affect of accelerating time, that may be measurable by observing its affect on light traveling through those empty spaces. (objects opposite fast empty holes in the universe would appear closer than they really are)

2) About this time/gravity relationship. I imagine that as gravity approaches infinity as in a black-hole, time approaches zero. If time is slowed down – then what does that say about the spectacular speeds of stars orbiting black-holes? Have those calculations beed adjusted for this? Is there even a mathematical way to express time passing differently in different regions of the universe?

As I type this, it also occurs to me that this may also explain why there seem to be few stars between galaxies – maybe they age and die very quickly. I don’t understand the math well enough to try and calculate the relative difference in the rate of time in inner-galactic space versus on earth – much less in the middle of that billion-light year wide void, but imagine if there is a measurable between the surface of the earth, and 200 miles up in orbit, that a billion-light years of gravity free space might tack on the years pretty quickly.

If any one out there has a science background I would love to hear from you in the comments.

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Decode Your Genome For $1,000

December 7, 2007 by

from Consumerist by Chris Walters
For $1,000, a small California-based company called 23andMe (financed in part by Google) will decode your DNA and tell you whatever it can about your predispositions, health risks, and family traits—for example, whether or not you’re in line for the same heart disease that affected your father and grandfather, which is what the author of the Wired article wondered. (Turns out he’s not, but he’s at a higher risk of developing glaucoma. When one door opens…)

con_dnaexplosion.jpg

For now, companies are offering genotyping—”the strategic scanning
of your DNA for several hundred thousand of the telltale variations
that make one human different from the next.” It will take a few more
years before anyone can offer (or afford) to sequence all 6 billion
points of a person’s genetic code, but in the meantime, genotyping can
provide a lot of the kind of health-related information many people
would love to know.

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