Category Archives: science

Another great timelapse of the sky – Auroras!

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Another gorgeous timelapse movie of the sky and the aurora borealis. Shot in Northern Norway:

The Aurora from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

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I spent a week capturing one of the biggest aurora borealis shows in recent years.

Shot in and around Kirkenes and Pas National Park bordering Russia, at 70 degree north and 30 degrees east. Temperatures around -25 Celsius. Good fun.

via Phil Plait @ BadAstronomer blog

Open access policy adopted – The Daily Princetonian

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Last Monday, the University formally adopted a new policy of open access for Princeton-produced scholarly publications. This policy will authorize Princeton faculty members to post their published articles on their own websites, an online University repository or other free archives for the general public.

via Open access policy adopted – The Daily Princetonian.

This is a great piece of news. Too many important scientific papers are locked away behind exhorbitant journal publishing paywalls. The scam is two-way — scholars not only have to pay to get access to other scientists’ work, they have to pay the journal publishers in order to get their own work published.

Open access means anyone can see the work, much of which is paid for with public funding in the form of government grants and such. Open access can once again permit researchers to share their findings and build upon each others’ work.

Good move, Princeton.

Grace and Diversity in Underwater Photography

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These are absolutely gorgeous photos of undersea creatures.

Photographer Mark Laita has taken his superb eye beneath the waves to focus on the extraordinary creatures who inhabit the depths of the vast ocean. The collection which came out of these brilliant images is entitled Sea, and its purpose was to show “the grace and diversity of sea creatures reflected against the surface of their world.” Laita has succeeded in bringing the wonderment of the ocean and it’s mysterious creatures to life by taking these brightly colored subjects and placing them against a stark black backdrop, which helps to intensify the viewing experience.

via Grace and Diversity in Underwater Photography.

Lunar eclipse time lapse

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The lunar eclipse this past saturday wasn’t visible here in the Twin Cities (cloudy). The west coast got the best view. Jeff Sullivan captured about 10 minutes of the eclipse as the moon set behind the Transamerica building in San Francisco in the great 8-second time lapse:

Phil Plait comments:

How amazing is that? It’s no coincidence he got the Moon to pass right behind the narrow pyramid of the Transamerica Building like that. According to the description on the YouTube page, he used some software to find the position of the Moon at various times, including the altitude (its distance above the horizon). Knowing the height of the building, he could then figure out how far away he had to be for the top of the building to be at that same altitude (it’s just a bit of trig). Then it was just a matter of finding a good spot using Google Earth — of course, accuracy is an issue. If the Moon was only 20 degrees off the horizon, then, given the 260 meter height of the building he had to be within about 10 meters of the right spot (about 715 meters from the building) or the Moon would miss. The lower the Moon, the less accurate he needed to be. Still. Nicely done.

via Lunar eclipse time lapse | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine.

A more accurate comparison of average compensations

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Recently, MoveOn.org published an infographic purportedly showing the comparison of various annual salaries of people ranging from welfare recipients to Fortune 500 CEOs:

This is an extremely inaccurate depiction of the differences between these bits of information.

Here is a spreadsheet showing the various numbers indicated in the graph above, and some ratios showing numerical comparisons:

If we take the same representation, i.e. a set of disjoint circles, to show the comparison, using the data above, this is what we end up with:

Mine isn’t nearly as pretty, but you can see where the infographic designer erred in making the comparison. The incredibly huge CEO compensation circle is now normalized to the rest of the circles, assuming the area of the circle represents the compensation amounts. (In the full picture, the diameter of each circle is represented by the normalized compensation ratio.) But this is a truly horrible way to represent data for comparison if one is at all interested in showing things in a way that people can actually make reasonable judgements.

Traditionally, comparisons of single group data are shown via a pie chart:

This might be more useful to see the relationship between the compensation values. However, pie charts are also notoriously hard to accurately reflect data comparisons. People have a difficult time judging the ratios between slices by looking at an area. In this particular set of data, if all you really wanted to show was the disparity between CEO compensations and the other groups, it may serve. However, an even better way to show it to achieve proper visual perception would be as a bar chart:

The data represented above in no way diminish the intended message. CEO compensations are way out of the norm. I hate to see the message be distorted by an egregious use of the graphical comparison of statistics. Such only serves to let those who aren’t inclined to agree to be able to push it off as dire histrionics and point to it as an example of how misleading we are.