Category Archives: Science & Technology

My Favorite App – Google Sky Map

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Google Sky Map

On my last vacation my wife and I dined nightly with the sound of the surf under the glorious Mexican night sky. Sorry, no app for that – yet. However, I’ve been in Los Angeles for nearly three decades where the city glare and atmospherics make star-gazing a rare treat.

 

We all know the names, Sagittarius, Taurus, Ursa Minor, etcetera, but how many can you actually identify? After twenty-five years of marriage, I’m still trying to impress my wife like a college kid. So I authoritatively point out Ursa Major and Polaris. “And all those other stars you see are, uh, all the other stars, or possibly planets or maybe a galaxy.” My wife was underwhelmed.

This trip I had a secret weapon. I pulled out my Android with Google Sky Map, and aimed the smart-phone at the sky. The screen then presented an augmented reality of what I we were looking at. It displayed the the same sky except with annotations and graphic indications of constellations.

What makes this app fascinating is how it works. It uses GPS and time to locate the “where and when” of your position on earth. The app also uses the built-in compass and accelerometer to determine where the phone is aiming. As you sweep your phone across the sky, the screen smoothly pans with it, displaying the information I needed to sound like an astronomy PhD. It has a neat search function, too. Enter “Jupiter,” for instance, and an arrow will direct you right to it. Other features include the ability to turn on and off layers such as constellations graphics, planets, stars, galaxies, horizon and meridian grids.

Google Sky is free and only available to android users. So I also tried out a couple of similar apps available on iPhones. The most similar to the Google Sky was The Night Sky, which I downloaded for a buck.

The Night Sky had some features not found on Google Sky. First was the ability to track orbiting satellites which I thought was kind of cool. The second was the optional swooshy space music. How can you not love that? You could also toggle between sky view and globe view which seems of greatest interest to satellite trackers but since this isn’t 1958 with Sputnik up there, I got bored pretty quickly. It also lacked the layer controls, meridian grid and search function of Google Sky.

Star Chart Screen Shot

Another iPhone option, and the most feature rich of the three, was Sky Chart which I downloaded for $4.99. In addition to having all of the same features as Google Sky, Sky chart could place a ghosted image top of the constellations which was very cool. Another nice feature included the additional information that one could summons for the celestial body. “Hey Honey, wanna know the altitude of Jupiter?” She didn’t.

Of the three, I preferred the graphics of Google Sky when viewing individual celestial objects. The stars are displayed nicely with a relative brightness to each other, making it easier to identify them in context. The planets, moon and sun had tiny images to represent them making them instantly identifiable. Sky Chart uses background images to show the Milky-way and other celestial “cloud” formations that some may appreciate but I felt that they interfered with legibility and I often found myself wishing I could turn this off. Star Chart’s trump card, however, are the ghost images that overlay the constellations. So if that is your primary interest, this is the way to go.

Which ever one you go with, they all represent why technology is so damn much fun. This is an app which is just as perfect for your first date as it is for your 400th.

Have a favorite app? Post it in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.

Study: Conservatives’ Are Loosing Trust In Science

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Trust in science has dropped by 25% since 1970 among those who identified themselves as conservative. This is the conclusion of Gordon Gauchat’s paper that appears in American Sociological Review. According to the study: 

To summarize the main empirical findings, this study shows that public trust in science has not declined since the 1970s except among conservatives and those who frequently attend church.

 

Interestingly, conservatives were far more likely to define science as knowledge that should conform to common sense and religious tradition. Relating to the second pattern, when examining a series of public attitudes toward science, conservatives’ unfavorable
attitudes are most acute in relation to government funding of science and the use of scientific knowledge to influence social policy. Conservatives thus appear especially averse to regulatory science, defined here as the mutual dependence of organized science and government policy.

Apparently there has been little or no shift in the trust of science among those who self-identify as moderate or liberal.

The Rolling Bridge

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I love bridges and will be posting a particularly nice one from time to time.  I also like all things mechanical. If it has some gears and grease, chances are it’ll catch my eye. So what happens when you have a uniquely mechanical bridge. Awesome! This was conceived by British designer Thomas Heatherwick,designed by SKM Anthony Hunt with Packman Lucas. The pictures speak for themselves:

Does Wealth Really Make You Unethical?

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Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution) challenges a recent article that appeared in Wired, Greed Isn’t Good: Wealth Could Make People Unethical. The Wired article summarized research that supports a common belief, that upper class wealth puts you at risk of being more unethical than the rest of us.

As an individual’s wealth and status rise, so does their tendency to be unethical, concludes a new study of the relationship between socioeconomics and ethics.

The study included seven different experiments that spanned real-world and laboratory settings, from rude San Francisco drivers to test subjects given a chance to take candy from children.

Tyler Cowen argues that we need to be cautious in how we interpret the studies. He does concede the following initially:

Of the seven tests, two of them showed that people driving more expensive cars are more in a hurry and more likely to cut off others or not yield.  That’s not praiseworthy, but hardly a major moral condemnation.

But he also highlight the potential flaws in the remaining study. These studies are not, in fact, on upper class individuals. Rather it is on the projected feelings of people toward upper class individuals and that is a huge distinction.

Several of the tests involved people being asked to imagine they were high class, not actual “high class” people themselves.  To that extent we are testing the lower class view of the upper classes, noting that I would not use those terms as given.  One of the tests showed that social class did not matter once we adjust for a person’s attitude toward greed.   A positive attitude toward greed is positively correlated with social class, but it was also easy enough to “prime” the lower class individuals to feel the same way, suggesting that extreme context dependence will hold here.

He offers up alternative conclusions including, “…that high-status people cheat more at games and less at many other activities, including those of real life.  (They are also in more of a hurry on the road.)”

Chimps Have Cops Too!

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An article posted in The Science Daily says that chimpanzee groups have members who basically act like police.

Anthropologists now reveal that chimpanzees mediate conflicts between other group members, not for their own direct benefit, but rather to preserve the peace within the group. Their impartial intervention in a conflict — so-called “policing” — can be regarded as an early evolutionary form of moral behavior.

It is probably still a bad idea to call a cop a “hairy ape” then next time you get pulled over, though.

The Universe is Big, Really Big

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“The Universe is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it all is. You may think it’s a long way down the road to the corner-store chemist, but compared to space, that’s peanuts.” – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

If you have a joint laying around now would be a good time to light it.

Some astronomer thought that it would be cool to aim the Hubble telescope at an empty patch of space (of no particular interest) and produced the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photographs.

About this image:

  • Every point of light is a galaxy, not a star. Each galaxy has about 4-5 billion stars.
  • There are approximately ten-thousand galaxies in this image.
  • This image shows as much night sky as you would see through a hole the size of a quarter place 75 feet away. (About 1/10th the diameter of the moon as seen from earth.) This represents about one-thirteen millionth of the of the area of the sky.
  • You could move the Hubble to ANY point in the sky, and the image would look almost exactly the same. Looking at the universe is like looking at waves on the ocean from the the deck of a ship: every wave may look slightly different than the next one, but if you look at them all, you can’t tell one from another. (Thanks, Paul)
  • The most distant galaxies in the picture are about 13 billion light years away. That’s about 75,323,499,264,000,000,000,000 miles away. One light-year is the distance light travels in a year. Light travels at around 186,282 miles per second.