illuminating science

Would you kill a baby polar bear, rather than let it become reliant on humans who raise it?

I don’t see the dilemma, but animal activists say it’s better to kill the baby, abandoned by its mother, than to rear it in captivity. Hmmm.

Well, the launch was pretty amazing - watching the webcast, and seeing the second stage separation and the main fuel tank falling back towards Earth…wow! (The fuel tank had a parachute, and (supposedly!) has splashed down in the ocean.) We had a small crowd in my office watching it.

Unfortunately, somewhere during the second stage burn, there were some strange oscillations, which apparently shut down the engine, and it now looks most likely that the rocket re-entered the atmosphere before reaching a stable orbit. (This is a polite way of saying that it crashed down to Earth and most likely burned up in the atmosphere. D’oh!

Still, they sound very happy - they’re one of the few organsisations that have gotten a rocket into space, and are celebrating. They say they’re happy enough with the launch that they probably won’t do another test flight before actually taking a payload up (the US Military’s TacSat 2 spacecraft!)

A very cool day for space exploration!

Update: 8m35s until the next launch attempt! They’re retracting the holding arm!

Update: The main engine pressure was less than 0.1% below the safety, and the computers tripped the launch! All is still good, so they’re going to try again! Looks kind of windy from the webcast, but I presume it’s fine for their purposes!

Update: The launch has been aborted, just after main engines started! We reached time zero, had some pyrotechnics, then some sort of automatic abort. Best quote from the webcast: “Oh f**k”. Also, “Look at all that water down there”.

SpaceX, a company workin to cut the cost of getting into space by 10, is going to be launching Falcon 1 in less than 10 minutes! Check out that live coverage, or check out the webcam!

Go go go!

Today is Pi Day, at least in America - March 3rd is written 3.14, the first three digits of pi. Of course, I’m really hanging out for 2016, when it will be 3.14.16!

There are lots of ways to celebrate, but the best of all has got to be to sing The Pi Song. It’s a joyous celebration of all things circular. (Or, at very least, a fun way to be scientific and musical at the same time!)

Well, it’s official! As of 23rd of February (backdated!) I am officially Dr. Joel Gilmore.

Woohoo!

My thesis, titled “Quantum dynamics of electronic excitations in biological chromophores: Models for the influence of the protein and solvent environment”, doesn’t quite obey thesis title conventions, but it does have a colon. It looks very nice in gold embossed font on my black bound thesis.

The corrections I had to make to my thesis were relatively minor, the big one being actually changing the title of my thesis! What I was really impressed with was how useful the examiner’s comments were; I know I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but sometimes reviewers for journal articles are a little, er, less than helpful. But both my PhD reviewers were generous with their praise (ahem), but also offered some useful improvements to my thesis. I think the thesis was definitely better after taking on board their suggestions, which I’m happy about.

So far, I haven’t found any typos, which I’m also happy about!

Tomorrow, I’ll post a (reasonably) “non-technical” summary of my thesis, which I added in after enough of my friends commented they didn’t understand any of it, including the introduction… Feedback always welcome!

This is almost too cool for words - stopping in for a quick chat with ALICE, I found this fantastic YouTube movie of morphable 3d faces. Two researchers, Volker Blanz and Thomas Vetter, have taken 3D laser scans of 200 heads, both male and female, and combined them into a single, all powerful face. (Well, okay, a single face anyway). Simply by turning a dial, they can generate any type of face they want - male, female, bony, fat, smiling, frowning, and more.

Better yet, they can use this morphable model to recreate faces out of photos - actors, the Mona Lisa, pretty much anything. It gives them a 3D model of the person’s face, which blends seemlessly into the photo, but can now have any expression, or shape that you want, or even a different posture! I’d just love to get my hands on this software for a play. In the future, they’re going to do rapid laser scans of people speaking, so that they might even be able to animate their faces!

You can see an article about their work here (direct link)