Category: Science
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New Science for a New Year: The Helium and Lead Observatory
It was October in the void. The white dwarf, Nain Blanc, had been, for some time, slurping up the hydrogen and helium from the vast gas envelope of its partner, a red giant, Géant Rouge. When they were younger, the two stars burned bright in the dark of empty space, tethered by their mutual gravity […]
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Last Lectures at SMU: Alien Life and the Probability of Life
When I delivered Parts 1 and 2 of the last lecture of Physics 1303 (Introduction to Mechanics) on May 2 and 3, 2022, I had an inkling that these might be my last ever lectures to SMU undergraduates. I prepared them with joy and love and care. It was emotionally wrenching for me to deliver […]
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Pandemicland
We are well over the one-year mark on the global COVID-19 pandemic. Progress is uneven. The U.S., for example, spent much of the last year at war with itself over basic scientific common sense. Instead of embracing cost-effective protocols like masking and social distancing, right-wing elements of the U.S. chose instead to paint measures as […]
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1/6
Since Wednesday, I, like most Americans, have been trying to make sense of the events of that day. I find it’s usually best to begin with the facts, so that’s where I will start this reflection. Wednesday was to be devoted to proposal writing. After reading the newspaper, then eating breakfast, and a morning walk […]
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Muon Weather and Seasons
Over the winter break, I have picked up my little muon detector data side project that started in the spring term of 2020. A few days ago, I remarked on how I wanted to take account of “weather” in the data – variations around a daily expectation given seasonal conditions – and “seasons” – long-term […]
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Muon Weather: Fun with a Muon Detector, Analysis Code, and Physics
I am spending some time playing around with the cosmic ray muon data from an instrument in the SMU Physics Department. That instrument is located in the basement hallway of Fondren Science Building. I already setup a “dashboard” of information derived from the instrument, available here: https://blog.smu.edu/saso/projects/muon-observatory/. If you want to learn more about the […]
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A little bit of math: vaccine efficacy
With reports from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna that the preliminary analysis of their data suggests a 95% effective vaccine (one each for each company) [1], I found myself wondering about the mathematics of vaccine effectiveness. There were some small details about how numbers were calculated from the data that were lost to me. This weekend, I […]
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The Horror of COVID-19 in One Chart
There are a lot of idiots on social media. This will come as no surprise to most of you (to the rest … well, chalk up one more). For example, in response to the COVID Tracking Project’s update of weekly COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and death data, this was posted: Of course, such data are public […]
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A Look Ahead: Department of Energy 2021
The Biden transition team has been hard at work preparing for the first real presidency in 4 years. While there will be a lot of work to do to claw out of the abyss created by the previous 4 years of chaos, mismanagement, and willful ignorance of reality, it’s nevertheless a solvable problem. Finding appropriate […]
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Burn the house down
In my thoughts on the close of the experiment with American Fascism, I worried at the end about the damage that would be wrought in the months before Trump is constitutionally required to leave office. Here is a good example on the scientific side of things: www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/11/09/trump-removes-climate-program-director/ UPDATE: 10:46am This news comes on the very […]