Because Frank E. L. asked me about related issues, I have downloaded all the monthly/regional Czech Hydrometeorological Institute's temperature data from the years 1961-2012 to Mathematica and calculated all statistical quantities I considered interesting.Here is the PDF preview of the notebook.Click at the red tile. Let me describe what I have found.First, I had to figure out the right URLs of the HTML pages that contain the tables in an importable enough format, import them with some sensible formatting options to Mathematica so that they quickly...
Thursday, January 31, 2013
About 150 years ago, people began to do the experiments that would lead to the discovery of the electron.They would study the electrical conductivity of rarefied gases. Finally, in 1896, J.J. Thomson and his collaborators proved that the colorful fog coming from the cathodes is composed of individual discrete corpuscles, the electrons.It just happened that within 10 years, electrons were seen by Henri Becquerel in a completely different context –...
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
This is a purely technical blog entry. Magnus Andersson asked me to create a feed with the climate articles only.Blog posts on this blog are assigned several categories or labels – see "other texts on similar topics" beneath each post or the list of categories or labels in the right sidebar. This feature only appears in the widget-heavy, green template, not in the mobile one.If you have a favorite category, you may find its feed at URLs such ashttp://motls.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/climatehttp://motls.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/weather...
Monday, January 28, 2013
Richard Feynman stressed that we shouldn't make preconditions about how our future description of Nature is going to look like:Lisa Randall, a top phenomenologist whom I know very well, gave an interview to Nude Socialist in which she says that it's an illusion that physics is mostly about the search for the final theory (among other things: read it). To a large extent, her answers are similar to Feynman's.Phil Gibbs wrote that we need to find a TOE, after all.Despite the contradictions in the "spirit" of their answers, I agree with all these three...
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Fun paper: More than 12 years after the LEP collider was closed (now the LHC sits in the same tunnel), the collaborations publish a paper on the search for charged Higgses. That's quite a delay! ;-)On Sunday, I gave an interactive blackboard physics talk in Český Krumlov, an architectonic and historical pearl of Southern Bohemia (14,000 inhabitants today) to a group of a dozen+ of curious, wonderful, young people.I began like this. What is physics?...
Saturday, January 26, 2013
I have "more positive than negative" opinions about both candidates but I voted for Miloš Zeman (*1944, see a sensible story in NYT) in both rounds of the first direct presidential elections because he seemed like a decent enough successor to Klaus to me – and I am not claiming that Zeman is quite in the same category as Klaus (yet). As the de facto founder of a non-communist, major, left-wing party (in Czechoslovakia and later Czechia) that other...
Friday, January 25, 2013
Cool anniversary (1/25): CERN discovered the W-boson (UA1 experiment) exactly 30 years ago, two months after their first W candidate; there was a press conference. Via Joseph S.A pulsar with a button periodically switched by ET aliens in between two regimes, to broadcast a binary message to us, was found. This answers the question "Where are they?" The new question is "What are they talking about?" Via The Register.Lectures on Quantum Mechanics by one of the world's most achieved living physicists may be grabbed from the bookshelves; click at the...
Thursday, January 24, 2013
In the Time Magazine, when Jeffrey Kluger wrote about Ms Fabiola Gianotti, the spokesman of ATLAS at the LHC, as the runner-up for their "Person of the Year", he wrote, among other things:Physics is a male-dominated field, and the assumption is that a woman has to overcome hurdles and face down biases that men don’t.But that just isn’t so. Women in physics are familiar with this misconception and acknowledge it mostly with jokes. This is absolutely accurate in most cases. Pretty much all competent women in high-energy physics whom I met acknowledge...
CNN and its Piers Morgan show just aired a very short exchange of opinionsMichael Brune vs Marc Morano (video)between a defender of the climate alarm (an activist in the Sierra Club, well, its executive director) and the man behind the skeptical ClimateDepot.com website. I think that Marc Morano couldn't be a full-fledged scientist – I mean to actually calculate various things from the observed data, including confidence levels, and other things. It's my understanding he doesn't have the technical background for that.However, when it comes to his...
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