Redacting my fashion statements

The Accidental Hipster

It’s lonely at the cutting edge, when you’re sharper than a blade
Finding ways to show you’re fresh. Not slicing lemons into lemonade
The woes of keeping up to date, it wears me out to stay ahead
Watch the crowd behind me now. They’re looking like they’re so-so sedate

I just want to be past it, not their only wannabe chap
My hopes, if I ever dashed them, laying down my old chequered cap
I’m redacting my fashion statements, nothing left to be seen
Being left behind is simple, once a hipster. Now a has-been

Knowing that my empty cup is no longer half as full.
Ripping through a paperback, not ripping up the neighbourhood
The shapes of the fashionista, caterwaul(k)ing with the crowd
No longer strutting in the glare, I’m stay at home and so house proud

I just want to be past it, none of this wannabe chap
My dole, if I ever cashed it, throwing down my old cloth cap
Tearing up early adoption papers easiest thing I’ve seen
Being left behind is simple, once a hipster. Now a has-been

I’m redacting my fashion statements, nothing left to be seen
Being left behind is easy, once a hipster. Now a has-been

The Accidental Hipster

Words and Music – Dave Bradley
Guitar and Vocals – DB

Dear creationists, evolution is not confusing

TL:DR – The infamous “March of Progress” diagram is not a scientific illustration of human evolution, although creationists haul it out repeatedly as some kind of evidence that evolution is wrong.


Creationists often tell their flock that there are millions of “chimps” and millions of people, and ask: “Where are the millions of in-between species?”. Trouble is, there is no “chimp” in the diagram, the creature depicted on the left represents an ancient, long-extinct human ancestor, as do all the species in between, from which modern humans evolved. That’s the basic flaw in the creationist’s critique.

march-of-progress
More important than their delusion about the “chimp”, is that no scientist takes this diagram seriously anyway, and never did. Evolution is not a march of progress from an inferior species to a superior one. Evolution is simply about animals surviving to reproductive age and producing offspring fit for any changes in environmental conditions. All of your ancestors had at least offspring that surivived and had its own.

Rudolph Zellinger who painted the picture to illustrate anthropologist F. Clark Howell’s 1965 book Early Man apparently never intended the diagram to be taken to show a linear progression, although of course, that is how it appears and how many people have take it in countless pastiches since.

Human evolution is the result of many a convoluted turn over millions of years illustrated in this “family tree” which shows the common ancestor, a forest ape, from which several species, chimps, modern humans and gorillas, ultimately evolved. There are numerous dead-ends, but there is a direct line back from today’s apes (including ourselves) to that common ancestor 8 million years ago.

 

This year’s bright young thing

You will have seen the news recently that a new supernova has appeared in the sky. This one is quite close, a mere 12- million light years (more than 1020 kilometres from Earth. I reported on it at the time for SpectroscopyNOW

SN2014J-supernova

“Astronomers have planned observations using the Hubble Space Telescope operated by NASA and the European Space Agency as well as NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and Swift missions in order to glean as much information about the recent supernova flare-up SN 2014J, in galaxy M82 as possible.”

I now have some additional thoughts from team leader Steve Fossey of the UCL group that first spotted this object in the night sky while simply doing a telescope student workshop because it was a cloudy night. I asked him what’s next:

“Results from the AAVSO website indicate it has peaked and is starting to fade. Typical fade rates for these objects are about a factor 2.5 every fortnight. While this requires urgent observations now, this actually means that we will be studying this object for a long time to come, and it will remain visible in amateur and small-telescope imaging for many weeks for sure. Professional facilities will follow it for months (and it is well placed in the sky to do so),” he told me.

He points out that there is an urgent need to observe the development and evolution of the SN as the shock wave and radiation field interact with the surrounding circumstellar medium. “One critical matter is the question of when ‘first light’ occurred, as this helps to constrain the size of the supernova progenitor – we expect a degenerate star such as a white dwarf, but of course this can never be directly observed (unless it were so close that this would be apparent in pre-SN imaging – but not in this case). The early light-curve shape also helps to investigate the nature of the expanding fireball – there is a paper just out on arxiv (Zheng et al., 2014, http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.7968) in which so-called “prediscovery” data have been used to pin down the time of first light – and it implies a very rapid early rise in brightness, much faster than simple scaling arguments for the brightness of the expanding fireball imply. This is not well understood (see Zheng et al.)”

Fossey suggests that searches for evidence for the putative companion will be sought through pre-explosion imaging data, such as in archival Hubble Space Telescope images. He adds that, “The Swift UV and X-ray observations are crucial also for detecting the impact of the explosion on the putative companion star, and on the surrounding interstellar and circumstellar medium (CSM); the CSM is especially important, since an X-ray detection or limit can be related to the nature of the putative companion – whether a giant star, solar-type star, etc. – since those objects can be expected to have blown material into the CSM over their lifetimes. If no detections are made (and as your piece notes, there has never been an X-ray detection for any previous type Ia SNe), the detection limits may provide evidence for a double-degenerate scenario where two white dwarfs have merged. It all depends on how tight those limits (or detections) are.”

“UV spectroscopy from Hubble will also help to prove the elemental composition of the fireball as it expands and becomes more transparent, allowing us to see `deeper’ and understand something of the fusion processes which took place when the progenitor detonated,” he told me. “And gamma-ray observations will help constrain the amount and distribution of nickel-56 in the ejecta, which will help us understand the nature of the WD structure and detonation mechanisms. It’s all very exciting!”

Weights and measures

UPDATE: Now, there’s a coincidence, it’s just been announced that NPL has been officially deemed the birthplace of atomic timekeeping by the European Physical Society, EPS.

Sciencebase reader Clayton W from Canada was keen to find some obtain up-to-date and accurate physical and chemical constants that wasn’t just the US NIST page. He is currently tutoring some high school and higher chemistry and physics students, and wanted access to better resources than the data tables provided.

First acronyms that came to mind were NPL, ISO, SI, IUPAC and IUPAP

  • National Physical Laboratory, NPL
  • International Standards Organisation, ISO, or these days International Organization for Standardization*
  • Systeme Internationale, SI, Bureau International de Poids et Measures, BIPM
  • International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry, IUPAC, see also Gold Book.
  • International Union of Pure & Applied Physics, IUPAP

chilli-scales

Then, there’s the Merck Index, now operated by my alma mater Royal Society of Chemistry, which was always a useful resource for finding named reactions (Dies-Alder, Heck etc etc) and common abbreviations, chemical structures, constants and conversions. I have a Tenth Edition print copy of the Merck Index from 1983 on my desk, which originally belonged to former RSC editor extraordinaire, the late Eddie Smith and was handed on at some point in the distant past. There’s also the so-called Rubber Handbook, which isn’t what you might think, rather it’s the century-old CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

*Wouldn’t that be iOS?

Country Roads – a short story

Countless psychology theses have been written about creativity under pressure, deadlines pushing people to new heights, the fight or flight adrenalin panic that opens the floodgates for a stream of consciousness to come gushing out. Obvious it seems that after a momentary panic revolving around a dark and wet night, one’s teenage son, the police and a third-party apparently moving too fast in their car that panic kicks in. Everything else is put on hold until teenage son arrives home with not a scratch on him nor the car, but the adrenalin still needs to be burn out. And, so, the writer writes:

country-road-short-story
Country Roads – a very short story by David Bradley.