Hellfire Preachers and Snarky Scientists

Every science blogger, tweeter (Twitterer?), and opinionator has been talking about the "Cosmos" reboot in the past couple of weeks. I've withheld comment because I was trying to sort through my feelings on it.

On the one hand, it is obviously well done. Tyson is a good science communicator and the special effects are marvelous.

I have two problems: the history sections, and the science community's gloating.

Dr. Tyson is no idiot. The science, as far as I can tell, is rock solid. Their history, where it isn't outright wrong, is highly deceptive. Tyson tries to soften it with small disclaimers, but a soft spoken phrase is hardly enough to dispel Seth MacFarlane's potent animation, which weirdly makes me think of Sunday School felt characters.

If it were just a conversation with scientists, I'd let it slide. But "Cosmos" is being set forth, and was designed as judging by the scripting, as a kind of science evangelism tool. Which I applaud. But it seriously undermines the credibility of the science message when the creators can't seem to be trusted to confer with a historian when writing the history of science. By distorting the most easily checked part of their program, it makes it far too easy for anyone already skeptical of its message to dismiss the rest, even if the rest is actually solid. It's a lot easier to check up on history than to check up on the science. If they couldn't do that right, they should have left it out, whether or not it was in Sagan's original.

The other thing is really getting my goat is the crowing going on in the public face of science, Twitter and blogs. A hashtag I've seen a little too much of is #CreationScience  and it's ilk.

I have a foot in both worlds. I am a faithful Christian who absolutely believes every word in the Apostle's Creed. I take seriously the Great Commision, even if I am particularly terrible at it. I am also a scientist. I think the universe began with the Big Bang, that life evolved on earth (and possibly elsewhere), that dinosaurs walked the earth long before humans and that geologists are perfectly right in the age estimates of the earth. Whenever I can, I try to correct people's misconceptions and make the case for SCIENCE.

So, dear fellow scientists, I say this with love as a sister in Science--who do you think you are going to win over by mockery?

You know that street corner preacher who yells at people who pass by that they are going to burn in Hell, with colorful descriptions of specific tortures? You know how annoying it is to run across these people? Has a single human being not already inclined to the preacher's theology ever repented and converted because they were yelled at?

Fellow scientists, you are that preacher. Every time you make a snarky comment about "Creationists" or "fundamentalists", you are just passing around a mean joke with your own clic. You want to know why 'they' are distrustful of science? Because this is what they see when they go on your twitter page, your blog, your facebook. They see sarcasm and mockery.

I am a old-earth-creationist/theist evolutionist who technically agrees with you and I feel hurt when I read those comments. Should I have a thicker skin? Sure. But making comments like that cuts deep, especially when coming from what I feel is 'my' community.

Do you think you are going to win over anyone by doing this? People on the fence are not likely to tilt to your side because you insulted them, and people who distrust you are going to run.

No one has changed their mind because they were insulted into it. Very rarely on anything that matters may they be discussed into it.

People are loved into change.

This is not likely to be a popular sentiment among you, my dispassionate brethren. You pride yourselves on logic and reason. But you are also deeply, deeply passionate about your research, your area of expertise, your hobbies. You are wonderful, caring people in real life. I rarely, in talking with you, am faced with the same vitriol that I find from you online.

Social media is a powerful tool. We could be using "Cosmos" to be reaching people who will never again set foot inside a science classroom. But if what they see coming from scientists is hatred, why would they want to change their views? Why would they want to associate themselves with you?

Don't be the annoying hellfire street corner preachers of science

Trying to Not become my grandmother

I am weird about my kitchen. By weird I mean, weirdly protective of it. By protective I mean possessive. Which is to say, besides myself there are about 4.5 other people on this earth I trust to use my kitchen without my right eye getting twitchy. The half is my husband, who I trust to make tea, coffee and microwave things.


The kitchen is my domain. Nearly every other room in the house includes compromises with someone else. If I am not asleep, that is where you are most likely to find me. It is my artist studio, where I create new food, improve old food.

I also know that kitchens are really common areas and to ban people from using it is weird and awkward. My grandmother never let anyone use her kitchen. Ever. My dad never even learned how to make a pot of coffee while he was growing up, and when we visited as kids we knew that we were not allowed to raid her fridge or even get ourselves a glass of water.

I don't want to be my grandmother is this regard. I really don't. I actively invite people to get themselves drinks, to help themselves to whatever food might be on the counter, and I suppress the urge to do it myself.

But it's hard. It is physically stressful for me to have most people doing  things in my kitchen. Occasionally its because they are doing something bad to my good knives, my good cutting board, or pans. More often it is for little, inconsequential things, like putting the butter in the fridge or putting something away in the wrong drawer. Easily fixable, no big deal things that send my blood pressure skyrocketing.

I know that these things are objectively no big deal. I don't say anything when we have guests over because I know it makes me look ridiculous, and I am trying not to be my grandmother.

But if someone went and rearranged your computer files, or craft box, or your toolkit, wouldn't you get twitchy?

A Hectic Week

This week has been a rather hectic week for me, though not in crazy-running-around kind of way.

Teaching has been more time consuming and emotionally difficult because we had a series of schedule mishaps (including a snow day), combined with a class that seems to need a little more hand holding through the topics than usual. The result is I have to spend more time prepping, and a lot more time grading.

If a quiz is done correctly, it is usually obviously correct.

When it is wrong, it can be obviously wrong (blank page, doodles, completely unrelated equations, etc) or very very creatively wrong, or completely wrong in execution, but correct in the theory, or the execution is done completely correctly, but with the wrong theory. It can be very difficult to grade the creatively wrong quizzes.

In addition to teaching, on Wednesday, I volunteered to host a prospective grad student for the afternoon and evening. It was a lovely time, and I enjoyed it very much, but it did throw my usual schedule a little out of whack.

And now we are awaiting the arrival of the flight bearing my mother-in-law, who will be visiting a week. Her flight is unfortunately delayed, and we aren't sure if we should try to catch some sleep, or stay awake in case things change. We seem to have defaulted to the later.

A fitting end to a hectic, but good, week.

Perspective is a strange thing...

I'm a short woman. I haven't grown an inch since I was about 12, and I actually lost an inch because I spent a good chunk of my early teens lying down in bed, which decompressed my spine and I was very briefly five-foot-two. Standing normally I'm five foot, if I draw myself up to my full height I'm five-foot-one. This is several inches shorter than the average American woman; I'm so short 'petite' clothes designed for the 5'-5'4" woman need hemming for me to wear them.  The world is the totally wrong size for me. The only chairs that my feet touch the ground in are antiques and children's. I can't rest my foot on the floor of the car and press the gas pedal unless I'm in at least a 2 inch heel.

All this to say, I know I'm short.

After years of avoiding heels (you would too if you lived with vertigo/dizziness for years and years) I have finally started wearing them, because they make it easier to drive/reach things/write on a chalkboard, starting with low heels which didn't change my perspective too much. Then last week, I made the final leap and bought some 4 inch stilettos. In the store, things didn't look so different.

I couldn't believe how different my house looked and felt being 4 inches taller.

My first thought was "So this is how normal people see my house".

I also suddenly realized why no one understands when I complain about desk and table heights. They are a perfectly good height for normally-height-ed people.

Absolutely none of this should have come as a shock.

It was absolutely shocking.

And it made me a lot more sympathetic to people who just don't understand when I explain an experience. It is incredibly difficult to see from a perspective other than your own, unless given a chance to literally do so. I can't wait for realistic virtual reality  machines to see what being able to experience, as close to in the flesh as possible, the life of another does to humanity.

Enlightenment through shoes. Who knew?

Everyday Optics: Cosmetic Mirror

Last week, while helping a friend study for the qualifying exam, I posed him this question--explain how a cosmetic mirror works.

For those of you who have never used one, a cosmetic mirror is a mirror that creates a magnified image. Usually they are small and hand held so you can use them to apply things like eye liner and see what you are doing.

I am embarrassed to say, while we had the right instincts in this matter, it took us a day to figure out how to do the ray tracing to prove we were right, so I figured I'd make a blog post out of it.

To start with, let's examine the three types of basic mirrors. There is the flat mirror, which is the kind that hangs over your bathroom sink and is the kind of mirror pretty much everyone is familiar with. It can not magnify, either positively (make it bigger) or negatively (make it smaller). So that one's out.

Don't you love my white board illustrations?

There is the convex mirror, which is bowed outward and is the kind you see in gas stations as a security measure. They create smaller, distorted images of whatever is in front of it. So that's out.

No? Too bad.

Lastly, there is the concave mirror, which bows inward. This is the  most complicated mirror, because what it does depends on what region you are in, as shown below.

I do need new markers though....

So this is the kind of mirror we need, and we know we need to be inside the focal point for this to work. That's fine, because you are usually holding this close to your face anyway. However, the image that it creates is imaginary, and that's the part that was tripping us up while we were drawing the ray diagram.

As you can see, to demonstrate the effect we know occurs, we need to trace partially real rays, and partially imaginary rays. The imaginary rays are what we perceive happens, the virtual image that is created 'in' the mirror.

Diagram a la Hecht

So there you have it. How a cosmetic mirror works. Incidentally, this also applies to the image created  in bowl of spoon. See if you can find the focal point!

~AMPH

Great is the mystery of the fridge

Life was weird today. But perhaps nothing quite so weird as my lunch missing from the break room fridge.

Now, I know that this sort of thing is not uncommon is some places, but you have to understand something about this particular fridge.

Nothing leaves this fridge.

When I came to the program, there was a three year old carton of eggnog in the fridge. It lived there for another year after I got there.

Chinese leftovers, hot pockets, soy sauce, this and much more have lived in that fridge for months without molestation.

I leave my yogurt in there overnight, one night, as I frequently do so I don't have to make a time-costly detour on teaching mornings, and it vanishes.

What gives?

Everyday Optics: Rearview Mirrors

I have been helping some friends study for the qualifying exam lately, and part of that has been coming up with problems for them to ponder and answer. As I've done this, I've realized just how much optical phenomena surround us everyday, and just how much of it can be treated in terms of simple geometrical optics. (Why I didn't discover this when I myself was studying is anyone's guess).

Take, for example, your rearview mirror. If you drive, you know this mirror is a good friend. And if you do a lot of night driving, you know that moving that little lever on the bottom forward means you don't have to be blinded by the headlights of the guy behind you. But you probably have not thought about why that works. You are just thankful it does when the idiot behind you has his brights on. 

The way that this works is simple, cool and demonstrates the usefulness of basic optics.

First, let's look at the case of the normal, daytime mirror. In this situation, it works like any other mirror. You have a piece of silvered glass (glass with a highly reflective material on one side) that is angled so that it directed light from objects directly behind the driver's right shoulder into the driver's eyes. 

Yes, I do illustrations on my whiteboard.

From an optical standpoint, there are two reflective surfaces or interfaces. Reflections occur wherever there is an index mismatch, and the stronger the mismatch, the stronger the reflection. How much reflection occurs can be found using the Fresnel Equations.  In the case of a rearview mirror, we have a air/glass and a glass/reflective coating interface. One other thing to note is that rearview mirrors are not like your bathroom mirror, which is made of planar glass. Rather, rearview mirrors are prismatic, which is to say if you cut one in half from top to bottom, you would notice that the glass is ever so slightly trapezoidal, like this:

This allows you to choose which reflection you want to use--the silvered surface reflection for daytime driving, where everything is the same brightness, thanks to sunlight.

Or the first glass surface at night, where you just want enough light to know someone is behind you, because you aren't going to get any kind of detail from the reflected image anyway. Notice that the light still is reflecting off the silvered surface, but now it is being reflected at the ceiling. In fact, if you accidentally leave it in the night position during the day, you'll notice a very faint reflection of what's behind you, and a much stronger reflection of your car ceiling.

Behold! PhysicsGal in her minivan, parked safely in her garage.

Alright, I admit it. Geometrical optics is kinda cool and useful. Only took me...6 years to figure that out? I think I'm ashamed of myself.