That said, I’d like to get all Thomas Friedman-y and speculate wildly from a very limited personal anecdote.  Namely, my 6th grader just begged to be allowed to join Google+.  Begged!  Stomping and huffing was involved when the request was denied.  And why?  “All my friends are on Google+!!!!”

I know for a fact that my kid’s friends have parents who would certainly refuse to let them open an account on Facebook.  My theory is that Google+ is such a “failure” as a social media hub that it’s possible for parents to not even know that it’s a social media hub.  Or, if they do, the existence of “circles” as a way of limiting exposure gives parents a better sense of control, making Google+ seem like a more appropriate first step.  And from the kids’ point of view, Facebook is for grown-ups.  Would you want to be on the same social media channel as your mom???  Ew.  Plus, because it’s unpopular with, you know, old people, you don’t have to worry about parents checking your status ten times a day.

In short, I’m starting to wonder.

Edit: And, look what just showed up in the news: “Google+ outranks Twitter as Number 2 Social Network after Facebook“

Luckily, no lives were lost, and while some support buildings were destroyed (including the fire shed, ironically enough), the damage to the telescopes initially appears to be far less than it could have been, thanks to the efforts of the fire crews.   (FYI, Amanda Bauer was doing superb work live-blogging news and images as they became available.  Click here and here, for  the day of the fire, and the day after as the state of the observatory became clear.).

However, as bad as this was, it wasn’t the first time, nor was it the worst.  Almost exactly 10 years earlier, Australia’s Mt. Stromlo Observatory (shown below) was devastated by wildfires, as discussed in this excellent article, where Nobel Laureate Brian Schmidt discusses how at least one of the telescopes threatened at Siding Springs was built as a replacement for one that was lost at Mt. Stromlo.

If you think about it, it’s clear that the peril to astronomical observatories will continue indefinitely.  We typically put optical observatories on mountain peaks, in isolated spots.  While there are a few that are sited high enough to be above the tree line (such as Mauna Kea), the majority of smaller facilities are on lower mountains, and are typically surrounded by vegetation.  The combination of droughts and fire is inevitable, and sooner or later, another observatory is going to burn.

To help you out during this trying time (for the first-world definition of “trying time”), here are a few toy ideas.  All of them have seen heavy use in our house (or have been coveted at friends’ houses) and are great for open-ended play.  In addition, they’ve been just as popular with boys and girls, and have worked for a wide age bracket.

1. Wedgits

This is one of the most deceptive toys we own.  I can’t even remember how we got it (present? random mall purchase?), but it starts off looking like a cube of stacking blocks.  Looks boring, right?  Well, it turns out it’s a deeply nested group of squares with compatible angles that let you build some crazy, crazy stuff.  We have gotten sooooo much mileage out of this, given that it works about as well for 2 year olds as it does with drunk adults.  Only possible issue is the little white pieces, which are small enough to be choking hazards.  But, they also sell a “junior” edition where the white pieces are larger, at the expense of some versatility.  For maximum fun, I’d splurge and get the 2 cube set.

2. Fridgits

A complicated marble run that attaches magnetically to the fridge.  Only downside is that it fails to do one of the key jobs of toys, namely, keeping the kids out from under your feet while cooking.

3. Magna-Tiles

We don’t actually have these, but every time I run across them, I want them badly.  Then I check the prices on-line and don’t buy them.  But I still want them.  Oh, and I’ve heard that kids enjoy them too.

4. Snap Circuits

I’ve waxed poetic about the awesomeness of Snap Circuits before.  The original review still holds. Plus, they have a new edition which has fiber optics!

5. Play Dough

Who doesn’t like extruding?

6. Fractiles

This is less of a toy and more of an art project. Probably not the best gift for a fidgety kid, but a kid with a bit of focus can do a ton with this. Great for traveling as well.

7. Uno

If you have kids with a wide range in ages, get Uno. It’s about the only game where a 4 year old can play with a 12 year old and neither one gets bored.

8. Quirkle

Another game that works well for a broad range of ages. Simple rules, but not boring.  Similar concept as Uno (i.e. grouping of likes), but in a tiled crossword format.

9. Set

One of the most engrossing card games out there.  It looks like it should be easy, but it’s not — which means it’s a better option than your 200th round of “go fish”.  Plus, it requires a kind of rapid pattern matching that kids are frequently better at, which means you don’t have to throw the match to make sure your kids win sometimes.  Trust me — they’ll beat you fair and square.

10. Carcassone

This is a terrific first strategy game.  Definitely skews a bit older than Quirkle (I’d say 3rd grade and up is ideal), but just as fun for adults.

Please leave any other good ideas in the comments!

The video shows Christophe Hamel jumping/falling/hurtling off of walls, landing on a trampoline, and then bouncing up to land back on top of the wall — sometimes in a handstand in case there was a risk you wouldn’t be impressed enough otherwise [seen at 1:50+].

My first thought on seeing this video was “It’s gotta be really hard for his mom to watch this.”

My second thought was, “Is it really possible for a trampoline to conserve energy that well?”

Here’s the problem.  In introductory physics, you learn that when something falls in a gravitational field, it turns gravitational potential energy into kinetic energy (i.e., falls down, goes faster).   If that same something then bounces, it proceeds to do the reverse.  To get back to exactly the same height, there cannot be any energy lost from the object — no energy lost to air resistance, or to internal motions in the object.  However, in pretty much every aspect of our real world experience, we know that this perfect energy conservation doesn’t occur, leading to the following:

If you’re talking about a bouncing ball, and you lose some energy deforming the ball during the bounce, no harm, no foul.  But, if you’ve just fallen 2 stories and are trying to bounce back up to the same height, then you’d better conserve every last possible bit of energy you possibly can.

I’ve spent more time than I care to admit watching this guy, trying to figure out if trampolines are really that efficient at changing a person’s direction without significant energy loss.  I think that to first order, yeah, they must be.  At first I thought that he might be extracting energy out of his muscles at the turnaround, but in most of the tricks, he’s pretty much dead dropping on his curled back, not pushing off with his legs.  My second thought was that maybe he was extracting energy from his initial rotation, but in a number of the tricks he’s coming back with more rotation than he left with (although frequently in a tighter tuck, so it’s not clear what’s actually happening with his angular momentum — i.e., I’ve watched, but have not done math).

The one thing that has convinced me that he does not have an invisible jet pack is that he doesn’t really come back to exactly the same height.  His feet do (eventually), but he usually starts the trick from a tall position, frequently with an arm stretched vertically, or with a jump to get some extra height.  Then, when he comes back up, he’s frequently in a tuck or a dive, such that his center of mass is indeed lower than when he took off (though granted, not by much!).  Here’s a couple of examples right from the beginning of the film, with the takeoff on the left and the return on the right:

And another showing an example of the extra vertical takeoff (a bit trickier to see in the stills because of the perspective, but it’s clear in the video that he’s jumped upwards):

I’m relieved that energy conservation is still with us, despite this man’s very fine attempts to do away with it.

While he had been meticulously trained to photograph the moon, making pretty pictures of the Earth from space had not occurred to anyone at NASA. So Anders, with no light meter and really no idea where to start, improvised.

“I had to bracket (the exposure),” he says. “I’m just going click-click-click-click-click, just changing that f-stop up and back. I machine-gunned that mother.”

The resulting picture was one of the most famous from the Apollo program — the classic NASA “Earthshine” photo.  Which, the article reveals, has actually been “printed backwards for more than 40 years because of a NASA mistake”.

There is also the always jaw dropping glimpse into the mindset of the first generation of astronauts:

“I figured there were three possibilities, about equally weighted,” Anders says with the sort of casual tone most people would use to describe a choice of sandwich meat. “One, we could go and have a successful mission — one-third chance — which is what happened. Or, we could go, survive and not have a successful mission — that’s Apollo 13. Or, we could go and we wouldn’t come back; splat somewhere.”

Anders’ assessment: “Pretty good odds.”

There are many more gems in the article, so definitely worth a read.

Back in the day, the image was of the lone astronomer, sitting at their telescope, communing with the universe.  Over time, we got more use to the idea that maybe groups of astronomers might come together to work on a common project.  But still, there were fairly tight connections between astronomers and their data.

Over the last decade and a half, something fundamental has changed.  Data has gotten big. So big, that it’s impossible for any one person to make sense of it.  More importantly, data of these sizes make it impossible to “notice” anything.  The line of research that probably got me tenured was based on “noticing” something interesting in several dozen galaxies.  But how do you “notice” something in hundreds of terabytes of data?

The standard answer these days is (naturally) computers.  Computer science is great at problems like this, and many astronomers are working on the interface of CS these days.  But that said, there are some problems that software is simply lousy at.  So what do you do when your scientific interests run smack into a problem that you can’t code your way out of?

Which brings me to the Andromeda Project. For the past 2-3 years I’ve been running a ridiculously huge Hubble Space Telescope (HST) program to map out a big chunk of the Andromeda galaxy (see here for the project web site, here for a more friendly introduction, and here for more technical details than you’d ever want to know).  The project is great — we’re measuring several dozen properties of more than 100 million stars (or, as I prefer to think of them, 0.1 billion stars), using light from the ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared.  But we’ve easily passed into the new world of Big Data.

There are countless projects we’re hoping to do with these data, and for those that deal with individual stars, we’re in great shape. But, we had one big problem.  Stellar clusters.

Stellar clusters are groups of stars that formed from the same gas cloud, at the same time, with the same chemical composition. They are probably the dominant birthsites for young stars, and are incredibly important for understanding all sorts of things about the life cycles of stars.  However, they are a remarkable pain to try to find with a computer.  Believe me, we’ve tried.  And tried. And tried some more. But in the end, nothing works as well as humans.

So what to do? Well, at first we had 8 PhD-level scientists spend months looking at a small fraction of the data. And while that worked, there was a lot of other important stuff that those 8 PhD-level scientists could have been doing instead.

Luckily, we found a solution, through collaborating with the Zooniverse crew.  The idea behind the Zooniverse is that anyone can be a citizen scientist, with a little bit of training and the right kind of project.  Finding stellar clusters was perfect for this approach — the data is gorgeous, the problem hard but not impossible, and the routine task is straightforward and actually rather fun. The Zooniversians worked closely with my team to make an unbelievable web site that makes searching for clusters simple for anyone.

At this point, we’ve been live for less than a week.  In that short space of time, many thousands of people from all over the world have performed several hundred thousand searches for stellar clusters in our library of Hubble images.  As a scientist, I’ve been blown away by people’s enthusiasm for the project, and the careful work they’ve done.

However, we’re nowhere near finished.  If you have a little time on your lunch break, please click on through to http://www.andromedaproject.org and give us a hand!

So, I have a new blog at my personal site, which I’ll update as the spirit moves me. I’ve imported copies of all my previous blogging to there, so it doesn’t look completely empty right from the start. Add me to your RSS feeds if you like.

But don’t un-follow Cosmic Variance! The rest of the crew is dedicated to stepping up in my absence, so this will continue to be the go-to place for fun and eclectic blogging about physics and astronomy and whatever else.

I love these folks to death, and wish them all the best — I’ll even be leaving comments now and then. Enormous thanks to Julianne, Mark, John, JoAnne, Daniel, and Risa for sharing this space with me over the years. And thanks to Discover, and in particular Amos Zeeberg and Gemma Shusterman, for keeping the gears running smoothly for most of my tenure here. It’s been an honor and a pleasure.

Brubeck loved to experiment with unusual time signatures, a tendency that culminated in his masterpiece album, Time Out. The tune played above, Blue Rondo à la Turk, is predominantly in 9/8 time, with the beats broken mostly into a 2+2+2+3 pattern. But things aren’t quite so simple, as Wikipedia explains.

The best thing about Brubeck’s experimentations was that they never sounded formal; they were highly musical and fun to listen to, seemingly flowing without effort unless you tried to really focus on what was going on. He was a much-beloved figure in jazz, and will be sorely missed.

Update: An anecdote from Russ Gershon on Facebook:

I heard him tell a story of when he was on the cover of Time in the late 50s. He was at a hotel with Duke Ellington (they were playing in the same jazz festival, maybe Newport). When Brubeck learned about the coverage he immediately went to Duke’s room and apologized that it was him and not Duke who first earned Time’s cover.

Here is northern California artist Ned Kahn’s piece, covering the side of a science center in Switzerland with thousands of pieces of aluminum, whose orientations adjust in response to the wind.  If I could find a way to have this video on infinite loop, I would… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVyo5ICl5-I#!

(And, of course, having some problems embedding video with the new site…sigh. Here’s the link: Click here)

Last night I had the privilege of once again appearing on the Colbert Report to talk with our nation’s leading pundit about the frontiers of modern science. I can’t seem to embed the video (shakedown, remember?), but here’s the clip. I’m not sure you’d want to use it to help explain how the Higgs mechanism works, but I think we had fun. The joke about “massive” at the end makes sense only if you know that Colbert has a running gag, referenced earlier in the show, in which he has been trying to get people to say “massive” as a synonym for “cool.”