http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/archive/2008/08/29.html

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/377821497/the_recent_bigfoot_flapa_littl.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/08/the_recent_bigfoot_flapa_littl.php

I've spent my evening curled up with a wracking cough and nasty pains in places I didn't know I could hurt — I think I sprained my diaphragm — and while stumbling dumbly through the web, I belatedly found the story of the recent Georgia bigfoot. I know, it's last week's news, but I'm feeling a little addled.

Anyway, it brought back old memories. Way back when I was a teenager, I used to build balsa wood model airplanes in my grandparents' attic. It was a good deal: my family didn't have to deal with the smell, I didn't have to worry about my brothers and sisters stomping on a delicate wing, and Grandma would bring me cookies and milk. There was also a stack of my grandfather's manly men magazines to browse while I was waiting for that last coat of dope to dry. I don't know if the genre is still around today, but in the 60s and 70s, at least, there were these magazines like Argosy and Saga that were full of manly stories of manly fellows braving dangers and hunting and exploring, with the occasional woman in a bikini lolling on the beach as the manly frogmen fought vicious sharks, and such like. One of the stories I recall most vividly was the Minnesota Iceman, which the article claimed was the most amazing evidence for the existence of bigfoot ever. There were several accompanying photographs of the poor guy in full color, frozen in a defensive pose, one arm thrown up over his head, with a bright splash of red over one eye, where he had been purportedly shot.

It made an impression. I recall reading up on cryptozoology quite a bit after that, trying to figure out whether it was real or not. I regretfully came to the conclusion eventually that it was a complete fraud, largely because I couldn't find any legitimate scientific sources that had anything to say about it, and even in my teens I knew that Argosy was not a credible source of scientific information. Curiously, I now learn that creationists haven't figured that out; Answers in Genesis uses the Minnesota Iceman as an example of scientific fakery ala Piltdown Man, accusing "experienced zoologists and scientific journals" of going out on a limb for a bogus missing link. At least now I can place their scientific expertise as somewhere significantly below mine…at the age of 15.

The Minnesota Iceman was a fake by a disreputable carnie. What about the Georgia Bigfoot? The lesson learned there is that people have gotten stupider since the 1960s. This bigfoot corpse was a graceless fake that was exposed within hours by the clever dicks at the JREF, and was concocted and promoted by a pair of blustering oafs named Rick Dyer and Matt Whitton, who have taken the unfortunate Southern redneck stereotype and amplified it into an embarrassment. It's a rubber suit stuffed with dead animal parts. If I'd seen the photos of this thing at an impressionable age, I would not have been at all impressed — they were pathetic. The most thorough (if rather rambling) account is at a bigfoot site, and it's damning. The creators weren't just con-artists, they were stupid, incompetent con-artists…and people still fell for it. That's the most depressing part of this story. The frauds don't even have to try anymore, and the suckers line up to give them their money.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080828.html

Fermi's First Light

http://xkcd.com/469/

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/377697565/say_happy_birthday_to_zeno_1.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/08/say_happy_birthday_to_zeno_1.php

His blog is three years old, which as we all know means he has at last emerged from the terrible twos and has reached that period of maximal cuteness. He's a bit disappointed that the California legislature didn't issue an official proclamation, so he'll have to settle for a mere pharyngulation.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/377634755/a_token_of_my_respect_for_you.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/08/a_token_of_my_respect_for_you.php

Once upon a time, I made some unfortunate remarks about knitting, and I felt like I'd prodded Madame Defarge, which is never a good idea.

But really, I love you guys, and here's a whole page of cephalopod craft patterns to show it.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/377582594/theyre_joking_right.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/08/theyre_joking_right.php

The pope has condemned this silly sculpture as blasphemous, and German Catholics are trying to get it removed from display.

They can't be serious, can they? It's kitschy and funny. But really, they're unhappy about this.

The Vatican wrote a letter of support in the pope's name to Franz Pahl, president of the regional government who opposed the sculpture.

"Surely this is not a work of art but a blashphemy and a disgusting piece of trash that upsets many people," Pahl told Reuters by telephone as the museum board was meeting.

The Vatican letter said that the work "wounds the religious sentiments of so many people who see in the cross the symbol of God's love".

Pahl, whose province is heavily Catholic, was so outraged by the sculpture of the pop-eyed amphibian that he went on a hunger strike to demand its removal and had to be taken to hospital during the summer.

So wait…now doing anything with two sticks stuck together at right angles is going to be an affront to "God's love"? I have been told over and over again by pompous wackaloons that I'm on the shock-jock trajectory, compelled to try and top my outrages against religion in an ever-upward spiral of offense, and that it's going to be really hard to top cracker abuse. However, it looks like you can piss off the pope just by playing around with a couple of popsicle sticks.

German and Czech biologists have shown that cattle, along with deer, instinctively stand in a north-south direction. They appear to possess a sixth sense of magnetism.

After studying Google Earth satellite images of cattle herds, along with their own observations of roe deer, the researchers realized that the animals routinely stood along a north-south axis.

"The magnetic field is the only common and most likely factor responsible for the observed alignment," write the researchers in a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Our analysis ... clearly provides the crucial proof in favor of the Earth's magnetic field being the responsive cue."

http://feeds.infosthetics.com/~r/infosthetics/~3/377559063/emotionally_vague_survey_results.html

http://infosthetics.com/archives/2008/08/emotionally_vague_survey_results.html

a collection of mainly graphical results from a research project that focused on revealing how people feel anger, joy, fear, sadness & love. a simple survey asked 250 participants between the ages of 6 & 75 years from 35 different countries to graphically represent these emotions on a set of human silhouettes. the resulting drawings were compiled in layered Photoshop documents. in addition, participants could express emotions textually or choose appropriate colors. the text results were analyzed on frequency, while the color choices determine a DNA-like frequency pattern.

[link: emotionallyvague.com]

see also: personality DNA test & Playboy centerfold averaging & Google Project.

http://feeds.infosthetics.com/~r/infosthetics/~3/377540274/2008_presidential_election_in_blogosphere.html

http://infosthetics.com/archives/2008/08/2008_presidential_election_in_blogosphere.html

an online information dashboard that summarizes & graphs the Internet activity relating to the 2008 presidential elections, in an attempt to compare the similarities & the disparities between the mainstream media & user-generated content.

perspctv's current graphs include the "CNN national poll of polls", news mentions, blogosphere mentions, Twitter mentions, a US electoral map & Google Trends-based timelines comparing the names of the candidates.

[link: perspctv.com|thnkx toshio]

http://rss.sciam.com/~r/ScientificAmerican-News/~3/377519871/article.cfm

In 1925 British adventurer Colonel Percy Fawcett disappeared into the wilds of the Amazon, never to be heard from again after going there in search of a lost city he called Z. But decades later, a city of sorts--actually a series of settlements connected by roads--has been found at the headwaters of the Xingu River where Fawcett went missing in an area previously buried beneath the dense foliage in what is now Xingu National Park.

View slideshow here. [More]

http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/2008/08/google-maps-doh.html

news

1. The RTE editor has been greatly improved, and is now using the latest (2.6.3) version of FCKEditor. This means that modern versions of Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari should all work. Please comment with any problems that you find. Please clear your cache before trying this feature as it might not properly detect updated javascript files.
2. Basic accounts are back, as discussed in lj_2008 and news in recent weeks. Logged-out visitors will now see ads on Basic journals but the experience for logged in users will not change.
3. We're bringing strikethrough back. Last year we changed the visual display of deleted and suspended usernames from a hyperlink with a line through the name to a non-hyperlinked bold font representation. We've reverted this change, returning deleted and suspended usernames to a struck-through and clickable state.
4. New comment subscriptions are no longer displaying empty comment strings.
5. LJ names with leading or trailing underscores are no longer automatically eligible to rename their account for free. In these cases, a support request is now required in order to request a free rename.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/377478485/popsci_book_meme.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/08/popsci_book_meme.php

Jennifer Oullette has put together a pop-sci book meme (and John Lynch has joined in). It's the usual thing, a long list of books and you're supposed to highlight the ones you've read, this time with the theme being that they're all about science somehow. I detect a physics bias in Ms. Oullette's choices, however, despite the excellent beginning — and it's to that I ascribe my poor performance. That and some weird choices: since when is Neuromancer pop-sci? Stephenson's Baroque Cycle or Cryptonomicon or Snowcrash would be better choices if we're going to throw fiction in the mix, or Sterling's Schismatrix. If we open the door to SF, though, the howling hordes will pour in and we'll never get anything done.

Anyway, here's my copy of the list:

1. Micrographia, Robert Hooke
2. The Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin
3. Never at Rest, Richard Westfall
4. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman
5. Tesla: Man Out of Time, Margaret Cheney
6. The Devil's Doctor, Philip Ball
7. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
8. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye
9. Physics for Entertainment, Yakov Perelman
10. 1-2-3 Infinity, George Gamow
11. The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene
12. Warmth Disperses, Time Passes, Hans Christian von Bayer
13. Alice in Quantumland, Robert Gilmore
14. Where Does the Weirdness Go? David Lindley
15. A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
16. A Force of Nature, Richard Rhodes
17. Black Holes and Time Warps, Kip Thorne
18. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
19. Universal Foam, Sidney Perkowitz
20. Vermeer's Camera, Philip Steadman
21. The Code Book, Simon Singh
22. The Elements of Murder, John Emsley
23. Soul Made Flesh, Carl Zimmer
24. Time's Arrow, Martin Amis
25. The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson
26. Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman
27. Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
28. The Curious Life of Robert Hooke, Lisa Jardine
29. A Matter of Degrees, Gino Segre
30. The Physics of Star Trek, Lawrence Krauss
31. E=mc², David Bodanis
32. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Charles Seife
33. Absolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold, Tom Shachtman
34. A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, Janna Levin
35. Warped Passages, Lisa Randall
36. Apollo's Fire, Michael Sims
37. Flatland, Edward Abbott
38. Fermat's Last Theorem, Amir Aczel
39. Stiff, Mary Roach
40. Astroturf, M.G. Lord
41. The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
42. Longitude, Dava Sobel
43. The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg
44. The Mummy Congress, Heather Pringle
45. The Accelerating Universe, Mario Livio
46. Math and the Mona Lisa, Bulent Atalay
47. This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin
48. The Executioner's Current, Richard Moran
49. Krakatoa, Simon Winchester
50. Pythagorus' Trousers, Margaret Wertheim
51. Neuromancer, William Gibson
52. The Physics of Superheroes, James Kakalios
53. The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump, Sandra Hempel
54. Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, Katrina Firlik
55. Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps, Peter Galison
56. The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan
57. The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins
58. The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker
59. An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears
60. Consilience, E.O. Wilson
61. Wonderful Life, Stephen J. Gould
62. Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard
63. Fire in the Brain, Ronald K. Siegel
64. The Life of a Cell, Lewis Thomas
65. Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Timothy Ferris
66. Storm World, Chris Mooney
67. The Carbon Age, Eric Roston
68. The Black Hole Wars, Leonard Susskind
69. Copenhagen, Michael Frayn
70. From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne
71. Gut Symmetries, Jeanette Winterson
72. Chaos, James Gleick
73. Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos
74. The Physics of NASCAR, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky
75. Subtle is the Lord, Abraham Pais

Jennifer did suggest that we make additions, so let's beef up the biology a bit with a few more off the top of my head (OK, McPhee and Rudwick are geology…but that needs bolstering, too!).

http://blogs.ethz.ch/kowalski/2008/08/28/can-lp-be-the-same-as-lq/

A fairly standard question that students are asked after a course in real analysis (involving Lebesgue integration) is to show that there is no inclusion between L^p spaces on R with respect to Lebesgue measure. This is usually done (sometimes by hinting or prompting) by considering for which values of α and p the functions

are in L^p (after truncating either for |x|<1 or for |x|>1, to avoid divergences).

Once I was present as observer at an oral examination for such a course, and the professor in charge had raised this question more or less by asking

Is it possible that L^p is the same as L^q, if p is not equal to q?

where the meaning was clearly, implicitly, the one above; and I wondered (aloud) if the answer was the same in a more abstract way: is it possible that L^p(X,μ) be isomorphic to L^q(X,μ) if p is different from q? This is a question that makes sense for general measure spaces, of course, and one where one must be careful to specify what “isomorphic” is taken to mean. In the algebraic sense, this is a question of cardinality only, and doesn’t seem very interesting, but isomorphism as topological vector spaces seems much more natural. Note that the answer is not immediately clear for the classical Lebesgue spaces over R: even if there is no inclusion, there might exist some clever linear renormalization map that sends (for instance) a square-integrable function bijectively — and continuously — to an integrable one.

But still, the answer is (not surprisingly) “No”, provided the only obvious reservation is made: if L^p and L^q are finite dimensional, then they are isomorphic as topological vector spaces, as is well known (they are not necessarily isometric, of course). But otherwise, we have

Theorem. Let (X,μ) be a measure space, and let p and q be real numbers at least 1 such that L^p(X,μ) has infinite dimension. Then L^p(X,μ) and L^q(X,μ) are isomorphic, as topological vector spaces, if and only if p=q.

I think this goes back to Banach, at least for the classical spaces of functions on R (if I understand correctly Chapter XII of his book Théorie des opérations linéaires). For the general case, although I didn’t find a reference, this must be well-known since it is a direct consequence of the computation of the type and cotype invariants of such Banach spaces. (The only reason I actually had the idea to look at these is that I was browsing pleasurably into the nice book of Li and Queffélec on the geometry of Banach spaces, where type and cotype are described in detail; this is overall very far from what I can claim any expertise to…)

Indeed, for an infinite dimensional Banach space of the form L^p(X,μ), it is known that

where the (best) type (denoted type(E)) of a Banach space E is defined to be the largest real number p such that

for any n>1, any finite sequence of vectors x(j) in E, and some constant M>0 (independent of n), where

denotes the sequence of Rademacher functions. Dually, the cotype is the smallest real number q such that

for some constant m>0. The results above on the type and cotype of L^p spaces are explained in Section III.3 of the book of Li and Queffélec.

These definitions show that the type and cotype are preserved under continuous linear isomorphisms, so if we have infinite-dimensional spaces L^p(X,μ) and L^q(X,μ) which are isomorphic, their types and cotypes must coincide, i.e., we must have

which means p=q.