Cool Science

I'm a real sap so while this has nothing to do with science (except featuring a couple of exceptionally geeky people), I totally dug this story.

While Red Sox fans are wondering when they will starting winning again, here's a diversion : is there any chemistry in baseball? Well, let's leave the steroid controversy alone - it's too obvious and easy a target. Here's one oddball article with a loose chemistry reference. Also, a popular quantum mechanics trick is to use the DeBroglie relation to find the typical wavelength of a fastball. I'm lazy, so you can see here that a 90 mph fastball as a wavelength of just 10^-14 meters. But this stuff is pretty standard fare.

Not to worry, there is something a little more exotic and stimulating here : the stitching on the baseball. Chemists care a lot about symmetry - the symmetry of molecules can have profound consequences for their properties. As noted on one chemist's web page the stitching of a baseball has a very complex symmetry which could trick you into thinking that it would be possible to have the stiching in two different ways (let's say left- and right-handed). But in fact it's almost an optical illusion - there is only one way to stitch a baseball, and it's a symmetry form that somebody for some reason called an "Antipot" (here's a nice page that shows Antipot symmetry - scroll down a bit to get right to it).

Posted by Dave at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Can RF be used to dissociate water into hydrogen and oxygen gas? Well this guy thinks he's done it and this is all over the various news organizations. The key is salt water, and presumably the right power and frequency of RF. RF heating of salt solutions is no surprise and is well known - but purportedly generating hydrogen is surprising and some skepticism needs to be applied. If true, the main benefit would be in delivering energy in a much cleaner and environmentally friendlier fashion. Thermodynamically it will be a loss since it would have to be viewed as a cyclic process (dissociating water followed by combustion to reassociate it) and every real cyclic process is lossy by definition (second law of thermodynamics).

And it's a rough segue but i've got to put in a good word for the awesome headphones that I've been using for something like 10 years now (wow). They're the Grado 60's and they're incredibly rich and detailed and have surprising bass. They follow the open air design so everybody else will hear your music too. In the last several years I added a second pair, the Grado 80's. Their sound is crisper and even more detailed but interestingly not quite as rich as the 60's. I love going back and forth between them. These two headphones are some of the best buys I've ever had and I decided it was time to write about them.

Posted by Dave at 01:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Some projects start with no hope but you forge ahead, chip away (insert favorite cliche here) and finally you get them running, and in hindsight you wonder what the fuss was about. That's really satisfying. This is the standard m.o. in research. But there is a more unusual type of project. It starts off with a beautiful preliminary result that falls in your lap - seeing something new for the first time that nobody has seen before - but then it becomes instantly near-impossible. And you realize nature just decided to let you have that tantalizing sneak peak and not to let you near any more information that might shed more light on that little glimpse that drew you in. I have some of both types of projects going on, but I'm a little obsessed about the latter, rarer type of project. Sometimes nature pulls the old bait and switch; taking the bait is easy, but then the hook sinks in and you'll have to fight with everything you've got to break free with your prize. Maybe I shouldn't post after late nights in lab...

Oh, and just for kicks here's an awesome pic of a boomerang trajectory

Posted by Dave at 01:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) is doing some interesting things. They still offer affordable individual subscription rates. And they are trying out a mixed publication format in which some articles are open-access. There are some thorny questions about the mixed format, but to be fair to PNAS they're trying out new ideas to improve fairness and access when it comes to publicly (sp?) funded research. The quality of the articles is particularly high and PNAS has shown that interdisciplinary publishing can still be highly successful in this age of extreme specialization.

As I mentioned in the previous post, some of the current ideas for open access have the potential to be as problematic as the current publishing environment, and I think that if I have been complaining about these things a lot, that I have a burden to propose an alternative. I think it's time for professional societies to reclaim the realm of scientific publishing. Anecdotally, I would suggest that some or more of todays woes trace back to when societies, tired of running publications and presumably seeking more revenue, sold them to commercial publishing houses. I can only guess what discussions led to these decisions, but almost certainly all parties probably believed that the free maret would, if anything, decrease journal prices. The price-gouging and other bad behavior (buying all journals in a given discipline in order to eliminate competition) were likely unanticipated. It's time for professional societies to come in to play again - start nonprofit journals again. That's why I started the post with a comment on PNAS. Maybe I am naiive the workings of such things, but here is a journal doing a lot of good things in my eyes (PNAS is free to over 140 developing countries) to make science accessible, and I believe that's because it remains solely under the direction of its parent society.

As another good example, the American Chemical Society publishes an impressive suite of high quality journals and offers them at fair and reasonable rates, especially the web editions.

So that's it : highly successful journals that are showing good stewardship of science in the public's interest because the society is at the helm.

Posted by Dave at 12:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)