Cambridge Photo Blog

Quote of the day:

2006-07-20T12:20:00.000-04:00

Dismissing ‘Sexist Opinions’ About Women’s Place in Science - New York Times: "Science is like art, it’s just something you have to do."

2006-04-27T16:06:00.000-04:00

Elephant seals in La Jolla, CA.

2006-04-27T16:05:00.000-04:00

Well, OK then. (Owens Valley, CA)

2006-04-27T16:03:00.001-04:00

AMNH, NYC.

2006-04-27T16:03:00.000-04:00

Friends don't let friends photograph drunk.

2006-04-27T15:48:00.000-04:00

An old intro geology text I picked up a few months ago, called "The World's Foundations"...each chapter opens with a quote from the Bible.

2005-12-11T14:40:00.000-05:00

Leaving town.

2005-12-11T14:39:00.000-05:00

NYC, on the Upper West Side near Riverside Drive.

2005-12-11T14:37:00.000-05:00

Statue in Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

2005-12-11T14:36:00.000-05:00

Phone sex.

2005-10-29T15:58:00.000-04:00

I got my second costume idea last night, and I'll be going as "The Wikipedia". The costume consists of two white shirts, one long-sleeved and one short-sleeved, a pair of white pants I found at an indian store here in town, and a bunch of sharpies. I found a few that have little rings on them, and I'll hang them off various points of my costume, and I'll attach the full-sized ones by rubber bands. People can write whatever they want all over me. Pretty cool, huh?

2005-10-29T15:55:00.001-04:00

My other costume idea.

2005-10-29T15:55:00.000-04:00

Making my "hasidic bling" for my Hebrew Hammer costume. Those are drafting triangles and I'm painting them silver with acrylic.

2005-10-21T12:29:00.000-04:00

The last thing to do: connect the battery's power cable.

2005-10-21T12:28:00.001-04:00

New battery is in--it's a little smaller than the old one.

2005-10-21T12:28:00.000-04:00

A closer look at the battery and the "motherboard".

2005-10-21T12:27:00.000-04:00

A peek inside: the hard drive is encased in blue, vaguely sticky rubber. The black thingy at the left is the battery. The hard drive is connected to the case with another fragile brown ribbon cable, so I didn't even disconnect it.

2005-10-21T12:26:00.000-04:00

Phoebe needed help replacing her iPod battery. Here's what it looks like open. Note the fragile brown ribbon cable connecting the two halves.

2005-10-20T12:15:00.001-04:00

GSA deserted.

2005-10-20T12:15:00.000-04:00

There's no way I can explain this one.

2005-10-20T12:14:00.000-04:00

Salt Lake City, this Saturday. Too bad that Peruvian restaurant was closed....

2005-10-20T12:12:00.000-04:00

The New Pornographers, left to right: Neko Case, AC Newman, Kathryn Calder (my new rock star crush).

2005-10-20T12:11:00.000-04:00

Dan Bejar from Destroyer at the New Pornographers show last week.

Huh. Losering is back.

2005-10-11T00:28:00.000-04:00

||losering|| a whiskeytown site.

2005-10-06T14:15:00.000-04:00

A closeup.

2005-10-06T14:14:00.000-04:00

Blackberries in the Hudson Valley a few months ago.

Promisicuity formula

2005-10-05T18:12:00.000-04:00

Heh.

2005-10-05T17:25:00.000-04:00

A slightly worse picture of Architecture in Helsinki but you get the idea.

2005-10-05T17:24:00.000-04:00

Architecture in Helsinki at the Middle East last night. Amazing show...trombones, bird whistles, Australians.

2005-10-03T23:57:00.000-04:00

Crazy building down near Copley Square.

2005-10-03T23:56:00.002-04:00

Elm leaves.

2005-10-03T23:56:00.001-04:00

Quiet street.

2005-10-03T23:56:00.000-04:00

More row houses in Back Bay.

2005-10-03T23:55:00.000-04:00

Homes in Back Bay.

Grow Some Testables - Intelligent design ducks the rigors of science. By William Saletan

2005-09-30T11:25:00.000-04:00

Grow Some Testables - Intelligent design ducks the rigors of science. By William Saletan: "So here's what ID proponents are offering to teach your kids: They won't say how ID works. They won't say how it can be tested, apart from testing Darwinism and inferring that the alternative is ID. They won't concede it has to be falsifiable. All they'll say is that Darwinism hasn't explained some things. But that's what the first half of the Dover policy says already."

How I spent my Thursday night:

2005-09-29T23:32:00.000-04:00

Geeking out like a fiend. Let me know if it works for you (it's broken for me right now).

Star Trek and evolution?

2005-09-28T21:14:00.000-04:00

Re: this comment:

"The Chase" (Star Trek: The Next Generation #146): "Picard and Beverly quietly retrieve a partially fossilized sample. Unnoticed, they feed the sample into their tricorder. The mysterious program is activated, and a humanoid hologram recorded billions of years ago appears before them. The hologram tells the surprised group that her race found itself alone in their travels of the galaxy. The genetic puzzle was created in hopes that those races would come together in cooperation and fellowship in order to activate the message. The humanoid tells the group that they all come from this common seed, and implores them to remember this bond." [emphasis added]

Sounds like common descent and descent with modification to me.

Granted, I haven't seen the episode and I'm relying on a summary, but that's what it sounds like to me.

A long letter I wrote tonight

2005-09-28T00:41:00.000-04:00

> my question to Crichton is: how do you do a double-blind
> study with the earth??
>
> grrrr.
>

Thanks for the texts.  You're right, Crichton's testimony does come off like the old guy sitting in his rocking chair: "In my day [or field], we did DOUBLE-BLIND STUDIES! And REPORTED TO THE FDA! And XEROXED AT 11 CENTS A PAGE! You kids don't know how well you have it!  Climate scientists are slackers!"

What a crank.  I wish I didn't still have a soft spot for _Jurassic Park_ (not the movie--I'll never forgive Spielberg for "The Lost World").

The greatest thing about Crichton's testimony is that if you strip it down, he's only talking about two things: a rather pathetic anecdote about FDA/NIH regulations and how medical studies are run, and the Mann hockey-stick graph.  That's quite a lot of words for a man with not a whole lot to say.

The Mann plot is actually a red herring.  He may be correct in his interpretation of the climate over the last few thousand years, but there are many uncertainties in climate proxies (the signal we're looking at can be smaller than the error bars on the measurements--not an ideal situation).  The temperature change is an effect of the addition of CO2 to the atmosphere, so we should really be concerned about how much, and how fast, CO2 is getting pumped into the air, and not necessarily whether this past winter was warmer than the winter of aught-seven, and so on.

Over geologic time scales (>100,000 years), the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is determined by the amount of volcanic eruptions (like Pinatubo or Etna).  The output of CO2 that comes from volcanic eruptions is balanced by the weathering of silicate rocks like granite: as CO2 increases in the atmosphere, rainwater becomes more acidic, which weathers rocks more easily, which transports more carbon to the ocean (in the form of aqueous HCO3--bicarbonate), where it is buried until the ocean plate is subducted and the carbon comes out again in volcanoes.  It can take 5, 10, or 20 million years for one carbon atom to move through this whole cycle...it's an unfathomably long process for most non-geologists.

The trouble is, CO2 concentration may change a lot over tens of millions of years depending on the amount of subduction and eruptions, but it changes VERY LITTLE over a scale of 100-200 years.  The amount and rapidity of CO2 added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution (from ~280 parts per million "pre-industrial" to >380 ppm now) is worrying--the processes that keep things "in balance" don't have time to catch up...they're too slow.

Anyway, the point of this spiel is that it's the amount and pace of CO2 injection that's frightening, even to those of us that know the Earth has changed a lot over the last 4.5 billion years.  I don't give a damn whether this winter will be colder than the last one, because weather on a human time scale (days, weeks) is different from climate (months, years, decades) which is different from environmental change (hundreds, thousands, millions of years).  The questions to ask aren't along the lines of "Will July 16, 2007 be hotter than July 16, 2002 in New Haven, CT?" but rather "How will three decades of very little freezing due to 500ppm CO2 affect the ice streams under the West Antarctic ice sheet?"

So how do we know what will happen?  Your question is the correct one: given that we only have one Earth right now, how can we possibly run double-blind studies on it?  Any evidence we have from the present is basically "arguing from a sample of one"...unless you know something about Earth history.

There's an event in the geologic record that is a close analogue of what we think will happen to the planet given a massive injection of CO2 into the atmosphere, and it's been known by at least three names but now goes by "PETM":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene-Eocene_Thermal_Maximum

This article kind of stinks, and I'm moderately motivated to revise it a little, but about 55 million years ago, the ocean and rock records show a pretty dramatic rise in CO2 over a very short time scale, probably on the order of 1,000-100,000 years.  Which is ridiculously fast.

How much CO2?  I know several grad students who would give their right eye to know that for sure.  We do know that it caused the surface ocean to warm ~8C in a few thousand years and stay that way for about 100,000 more.  Nobody knows what caused it (those grad students would give their left eye and possibly left arm, too, to know that) but it might have been a catastrophic volcanic eruption that we don't have a record of or some weird ocean thing (too complicated to explain right now).

Anyway what I'm trying to say is that there's this weird event that looks like a pretty good model for what we're doing right now: injecting a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere over a short timescale (few thousand years) that causes the Earth to be out of balance for 100,000 years.

There's no major extinction in the rock record at this time (except for some ocean organisms called foraminifera) but the world was A LOT warmer before this event than it is now.  There were no glaciers outside of high mountains, there were no polar ice caps, alligators were living in the Arctic circle, and subtropical trees (like Metasequoia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasequoia) were growing at 80 degrees north latitude.  When your starting point is warmer, you'd expect land organisms to tolerate a relatively quick warming.  Today, what with all the ice we have locked up in Greenland and Antarctica, the changes of a 1-5C warming have the potential to be more catastrophic.

It's late and I should get to bed, but here would be my two-point response to Crichton:

--The Mann graph is a red herring, and if you knew something about atmospheric chemistry and plate tectonics you would be scared pantsless at the time scale on which the CO2 problem will be resolved by the Earth alone;

--We have done a double-blind study on the Earth, and it shows that a relatively small change in CO2 on a short time frame can throw the system out of whack for at least 5,000 human generations.

Thanks for the testimony, H!

2005-09-27T18:18:00.000-04:00

Another shot of Cordaites wood.

2005-09-27T18:17:00.000-04:00

More 'scope work this afternoon. This is a longitudinal-radial section of Cordaites, a Paleozoic ancestral conifer. Scale bar is approximately 20 microns.

Evolution Lawsuit Opens in Pennsylvania - New York Times

2005-09-26T23:29:00.000-04:00

Evolution Lawsuit Opens in Pennsylvania - New York Times: "Intelligent design is not science, has no support from any major American scientific organization and does not belong in a public school science classroom, a prominent biologist testified on the opening day of the nation's first legal battle over whether it is permissible to teach the fledgling 'design' theory as an alternative to evolution.

"To my knowledge, every single scientific society that has taken a position on this issue has taken a position against intelligent design and in favor of evolution," said the biologist, Kenneth R. Miller, a professor at Brown University and the co-author of the widely used high school textbook "Biology.""

Word.

Some chords from "Always Love" by Nada Surf

2005-09-26T21:02:00.000-04:00

Off their latest, The Weight Is A Gift.

Don't have the lyrics and haven't figured out the bridge yet, but the verse and chorus basically are:

capo 2

intro: Am

(Am)To make a mountain (C)of
Your (G)life is just a (F)choice
(Am)But I never learned (C)enough
To (G)listen to the (F)voice that told me

(Am)Always (C)love
(G)Hate will get you (F)every time
(Am)Always (C)love
(G)Don't wait 'til the (F)finish line

The bridge sounds like: Am C F C
("I've been held back by something, yeah....")

Corrections? Additions?

2005-09-25T16:01:00.000-04:00

A parliament of brushes.

2005-09-25T16:00:00.001-04:00

Art store in Central Square.

2005-09-25T16:00:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite lines from Lord of the Rings: "Oooo! Mushrooms!"

2005-09-25T15:59:00.001-04:00

Mariachis? In Cambridge?

2005-09-25T15:59:00.000-04:00

A church that was evacuated by the local Loyalists/Tories in 1775 and occupied by George Washington for a while. Still in use, apparently.

2005-09-22T09:53:00.000-04:00

Point Loma in the morning haze.

2005-09-22T09:49:00.001-04:00

Four grad students supervising a plankton tow, but look at the water!

2005-09-22T09:49:00.000-04:00

The clip on my harness, and all that was keeping me from a very cold bath.

2005-09-22T09:47:00.002-04:00

Turned around and looking at the boat.

2005-09-22T09:47:00.001-04:00

View from the bowsprit; clipped in and hanging on.

2005-09-22T09:47:00.000-04:00

The deep blue sea off La Jolla.

2005-09-20T00:26:00.000-04:00

Last one for the night. Might have posted it before, but don't really feel like checking. Cue the Stones: You can't always get what you want....

2005-09-20T00:23:00.000-04:00

Less caffeine and more sleep, methinks.

2005-09-20T00:22:00.000-04:00

AEGIS cruiser? Maybe something like this.

2005-09-20T00:18:00.001-04:00

Knotted.

2005-09-20T00:18:00.000-04:00

View from aloft.

2005-09-20T00:16:00.001-04:00

Matched pairs.

2005-09-20T00:16:00.000-04:00

The colors remind me of a Northern European Renaissance painting.

2005-09-20T00:15:00.001-04:00

The aquarium at Scripps.

2005-09-20T00:15:00.000-04:00

Cuyamaca Rancho S.P.

2005-09-20T00:14:00.000-04:00

More pictures from the boat trip.

Forgotten NY

2005-09-13T17:28:00.000-04:00

Here's a cool site I just found, it's called Forgotten NY.

2005-09-13T00:14:00.000-04:00

This picture says it all.

2005-09-13T00:13:00.000-04:00

Pillar structures (Eocene) on the beach. From bottom to top: compressed and deformed soft sediment (mudrock? diatomite?); conglomerates and sands from the submarine fan; concretions from dewatering of the soft sediments.

2005-09-13T00:11:00.000-04:00

Back from a little trip. I've never seen a sky like this during the entire two years I've lived in Cambridge.

2005-08-30T21:57:00.000-04:00

I like the tangle of branches in this photo. It was taken in Morningside Park and something gives it a fisheye-lens quality, I'm not sure what's responsible.

2005-08-30T21:56:00.000-04:00

116th St. and Morningside Dr., looking west toward the Hudson.

2005-08-30T21:55:00.000-04:00

Harlem, as seen from the top of Morningside Park.

2005-08-19T00:03:00.000-04:00

I meant to post this a few days ago, it's part of my thinking outline for a paper. There's also a cool robot I drew while I was waiting for MATLAB to run a program.

Comment of the week: from /.

2005-08-16T00:05:00.000-04:00

Siberian Permafrost Melting:

"CAN YOU SPOT THE REAL SCIENTIST? (Score:5, Insightful)
by MillionthMonkey (240664) on Friday August 12, @01:24AM (#13301230)

GOOFUS has a PhD.
GALLANT has a PhD in a field unrelated to his research.

GOOFUS gets little respect as a scientist outside the scientific community.
GALLANT gets little respect as a scientist inside the scientific community.

GOOFUS drives a beat-up old car.
GALLANT drives a BMW unless his chauffeur is driving.

GOOFUS wears street clothes to work, maybe a lab suit on occasion.
GALLANT wears three piece suits at all times.

GOOFUS is employed by a "university", a "hospital", or a "laboratory".
GALLANT is employed by a "Coalition", an "Institute", an "Association", a "Foundation", a "Council", or a "White House".

GOOFUS earns $30000 per year unless they cut his funding.
GALLANT earns $200000 per year but makes his real money from speaking fees.

GOOFUS lives anywhere in the country.
GALLANT lives in a wealthy area near Washington DC, but may have additional homes elsewhere.

GOOFUS may sometimes be filmed standing in front of big melting icebergs.
GALLANT may be filmed sitting in front of a bookcase or standing behind a podium at a $2000 per plate fundraiser, although there may be ice melting in his drink.

GOOFUS is a dues-paying member of several scientific grassroots organizations.
GALLANT is on the payroll of several scientific astroturf organizations.

GOOFUS gets summoned for jury duty but is never picked as a juror.
GALLANT claims "the jury is still out" on evolution or global warming, since he considers himself to be on the jury.

GOOFUS maintains the world is five billion years old.
GALLANT isn't really saying, but creationists distribute his pamphlets all the time.

GOOFUS claims the world is warming as a direct result of human activity.
GALLANT either claims that climate change doesn't exist, or if it does, that humans have nothing to do with it.

GOOFUS and his graduate students do the dirty work of collecting raw data and looking for conclusions to be drawn from it.
GALLANT does the dirty work of discrediting GOOFUS by manipulating his data in Excel with statistically invalid techniques.

GOOFUS writes scientific papers and grant proposals.
GALLANT writes the nation's environmental legislation and a column for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

GOOFUS draws scientific conclusions from the data he collects that usually come out in agreement with the scientific consensus.
GALLANT paints the scientific consensus as being entirely political in nature and enjoys comparing himself to Galileo.

GOOFUS is heavily trained to be a skeptic and to treat information from all sources with a skeptical mind.
GALLANT is heavily marketed as a skeptic but reserves his skepticism for GOOFUS.

GOOFUS isn't paid much attention by the press since his opinions are commonplace among scientists.
GALLANT holds maverick opinions for a scientist which keeps him busy running from one balanced talk show to the next.

GOOFUS has no PR skills.
GALLANT leverages his PR experience all the time, although he has access to paid PR staff.

GOOFUS claims the sky is falling and we have to take painful steps to reduce CO2 emissions now.
GALLANT claims the free market will take care of it and recommends solving the problem by conning Zimbabwe out of their pollution credits.

GOOFUS advises his kids not to go into science.
GALLANT advises the president.

Ain't it the truth.

2005-08-10T23:23:00.000-04:00

Black cherries on top of the hill. That's all for now.

2005-08-10T23:22:00.001-04:00

Fern and poison ivy country. Woo hoo!

2005-08-10T23:22:00.000-04:00

The white is a slime mold, the little leaves are from Norway maples...a mini-ecosystem that's growing on a log somewhere out in the country this morning.

2005-08-10T22:23:00.000-04:00

A fire alarm on the street. I can't walk by one of these without being seized by the juvenile urge to pull it "to see if it works." Further proof that my mental age hovers near eleven.

2005-08-10T22:22:00.000-04:00

A home under construction in Somerville, last Sunday afternoon.

2005-08-10T22:20:00.000-04:00

Shakespeare in the park last Saturday evening. They did "Hamlet" but staged it modern, complete with guards onstage carrying what looked like M-16s (I didn't see the banana clip for an AK, so that's what I'm guessing they were). Not bad overall, and it was free, so we had a good time.

Quote of the day:

2005-08-09T18:04:00.000-04:00

Let's put it this way: if you need to ask a lawyer whether what you do is
"right" or not, you are morally corrupt. Let's not go there. We don't base our morality on law.

Linus.

2005-07-31T12:54:00.001-04:00

The Post Office Annex, LA. Another beautiful old building.

2005-07-31T12:54:00.000-04:00

Bad public art...there's a similar sculpture defacing Penn Station in Baltimore, and this one is just as ugly. It's four people with lots of little holes in them (bullet holes?) and it just looks nasty and cold and mean and somehow preachy at the same time.

2005-07-31T12:52:00.002-04:00

More of Olvera Street.

2005-07-31T12:52:00.001-04:00

Rather graphic sculptures, from a store in Olvera Street, LA.

2005-07-31T12:52:00.000-04:00

Inside a shop, Olvera Street, LA.

2005-07-31T12:51:00.000-04:00

Olvera Street, LA. All that remains of the old Pueblo Los Angeles, now it's kind of tourist-trappy but with lots of great Mexican food.

2005-07-31T12:50:00.000-04:00

Union Station, LA. One of my favorite buildings in the entire world, but I didn't have time to go inside.

2005-07-31T12:49:00.002-04:00

Train derailment, near Casa Grande, AZ.

2005-07-31T12:49:00.001-04:00

Desert sunset.

2005-07-31T12:49:00.000-04:00

Storm with rainbow.

2005-07-31T12:48:00.001-04:00

Thunderstorm, through a windshield.

2005-07-31T12:48:00.000-04:00

Approaching sunset, a bit south of Flagstaff, AZ.

2005-07-31T12:47:00.001-04:00

"If a coyote is not afraid of you, be afraid of it."

2005-07-31T12:47:00.000-04:00

Grand Canyon, AZ.

2005-07-31T12:46:00.000-04:00

This doesn't need a caption.

2005-07-31T12:45:00.002-04:00

For sale, Williams, AZ.

2005-07-31T12:45:00.001-04:00

Route 66. Williams, AZ.

2005-07-31T12:45:00.000-04:00

Best breakfast in Northern Arizona. Old Smoky's, Williams, AZ.

2005-07-31T12:42:00.000-04:00

Somewhere north of Phoenix, AZ. Saguaro and sagebrush country.

2005-07-31T12:41:00.000-04:00

Houses in the hills, CA. 7-25-05.

2005-07-30T22:32:00.000-04:00

Back at home. More pictures later.