Fun on the frontiers of astronomy

Want to watch/read an entertaining and inspiring three-part discussion covering the frontier of astronomy? All you need to do is follow this link to the article and videos at Discover Magazine. The participants include Saul Perlmutter, Debra Fischer, Mike Brown and Andrea Ghez, in a panel moderated by Discover's Phil Plait. It's lively, accessible and mind-blowing. Here are a few of my favorite quotes: [Debra Fischer]

We started out with a solar system where many planetesimals were forming, and that evolved into a system where all the stable niches are filled. To me that’s one of the most exciting discoveries in this field.

[Mike Brown]

[I]t’s the small objects that really matter. The small ones are little particles that sit in the outer solar system, and they’re gravitationally swept around by planets. The analogy I like is that these objects in the outer solar system are the blood splattered on the wall after some horrendous murder. I love this analogy—it’s disturbing, but I love it. As Debra just suggested, there might have been additional planets that used to be here in our solar system [but were ejected due to gravitational instability]. The bodies have all been removed.

[Andrea Ghez]

The question that I started off with was, I thought, very simple. It was just “Is there a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way?” But one of the things I love about science is that you always end up with new questions. What happened with my research is that the stars we studied to prove that there was a black hole turned out to be very young. Young stars have absolutely no right to be next to a black hole because a black hole should shear them apart. We have no idea how these stars formed. So that’s one of the major questions we’re trying to address today: “How do baby stars form next to this completely inhospitable object?”

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Why you shouldn’t read important speeches

Liz Coleman, the President of Bennington College, has some terrific ideas about reforming liberal arts education. She presented them at TED in February 2009. Many people will never appreciate Coleman's ideas, however, because she presented them in a long paper filled with redundant and sesquipedalian (!*) terms. To top it off, she chose to read her speech in monotone rather than speaking from her heart. Coleman's decision to read her speech rather than presenting it with spontaneous enthusiasm undercuts the very message of her paper. She violated a basic rule of speech-making: Don't bore your audience with good content deficiently presented. Why can't the highly educated C0leman see this conspicuous problem with her own delivery? Why can't she understand that many people (even the smart sorts of people who attend TED lectures, have lots of trouble paying attention to liberal arts college presidents who read pedantic speeches? For starters, she needs to keep in mind that the Internet audience is not a captive audience motivated by the pursuit of grades. Yes, ordinary Americans need to become more disciplined at being attentive audiences. They need to learn to persevere when difficult ideas are presented, even when those ideas aren't sugar-coated. On the other hand, academics (Coleman is one example of many) really need to get out of their ivory towers and learn to talk to real people without sounding condescending. One suggestion: Coleman should study Barack Obama, who often knows his material well enough to talk off-the-cuff. He has also learned to present pre-written presentations in a fresh, spontaneous-sounding way. I'm not suggesting that everyone can deliver ideas like Obama, but all us can take the time study the various techniques he often uses. Before getting to work studying her new technique, Coleman should carefully watch her TED presentation and ask herself whether her delivery would even keep her own interest. She should ask what so many academics should ask: was her speech designed primarily to move her audience or was it (perhaps subconsciously) designed to show off her own vocabulary and intellectual superiority, amply laced with uppity intonation? If there is even an unintentional hint of these, she's lost her audience. --

*sesquipedalian 1. given to using long words. 2. (of a word) containing many syllables.

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Superorganisms take the limelight

In the Natural History's February 2009 article titled "Could an Ant Colony Read this Book," ecologist Robert Dunn tracks the long-term collaborative efforts of Edward O. Wilson and Bert Holldobler, leading up to their new book: The Superorganism. In their new book, Hölldobler and Wilson

. . . have breathed new life into a notion that intrigued scientists before World War I: that a colony of social insects is analogous to an individual. The concept of the superorganism—which compares a colony’s members to a body’s cells and sometimes its nest to the body’s skeleton—fell out of favor as research increasingly focused on the genes of individuals. Hölldobler and Wilson, building on new insights into the evolution and workings of insect societies, seek to bring it back. To them, “superorganism” is more than a metaphor; it is a unit in the hierarchy of biological organization, falling somewhere between an ecosystem and an individual. And, they argue, it is the most useful level of biological organization at which to examine how pieces are assembled to make a whole—be it an association of bacteria, a single creature, or a whole society—as well as to understand what holds all organisms together, even when the pieces struggle toward independent goals.

According to Dunn (and Wilson and Holldobler), ants and other highly social creatures (such as termites, and honeybees) offer a rare opportunity to study the process by which individuals meld into an unified organism. Other examples include the early symbiosis of mitochondria with an early form of bacteria, plant cells ("which arose when a eukaryotic cell . . incorporated a photosynthetic bacterium") and multicellular creatures in general (e.g., human beings). In each of these examples, individuals gave up reproduction "either partially or completely, to work for their overbearing mother." Wilson and Holldobler point to group selection (and individual selection) as a key component of the evolution of highly social species. "In group-selection models, evolution favors the groups whose member cooperate more effectively, regardless of whether such cooperation helps a given individual (or that individual's kin) reproduce." The key to allowing this process is "communication and the division of labor." Apropos for a book that was five years in the making by Wilson and Holldobler.

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Texas Governor’s creationist yanked from State Board of Education

The Texas Senate yanked Governor Perry's creationist appointee to the State Board of Education.

In a rare rejection of an appointment by the Texas governor, the Senate Thursday ousted Don McLeroy as chairman of the State Board of Education, with his supporters claiming the Bryan dentist was the victim of his strong religious beliefs.

McLeroy is a devout Christian who believes in creationism and the notion that the Earth is about 6,000 years old. He has steadfastly argued that Texas students should be taught the weaknesses of evolution.

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