Spotted being worn by a hip young Twilight actor at the recent Armageddon nerdfest in Melbourne. Yes, there were lots of people in costumes from Batman, Stargate, Yu-Gi-Yoh, whatever, but these shoes are what really amazed me.

I honestly can’t tell whether they’re serious. Or how you’d operate them. And the Adidas website is about as helpful as a fox.

Kids today…

By the way, today’s theme is – vaguely – science.

1. The other night NASA smashed a space probe into the Moon. Liking both astronomy and large explosions, I naturally looked it up in the newspaper the next day. What category do you think it turned up in? World news. I think they’ve missed the point.
2. Kirk Cameron, renowned creationist and growing pain, likes to use bananas as an example of intelligent design. How they’re perfectly designed for us to eat, etc., etc. But what about those annoying stringy bits down the side? Which are clearly an anti-eating defense mechanism caught in mid-evolution. Explain that!
3. Zeno’s paradox, dating back to ancient Greece, the notion that before you can move a distance you have to cover half the distance, but before that a quarter of the distance, and so on. You therefore have to cover an infinite number of distances, so motion is impossible. No offence to the ancient Greeks, but that’s clearly ridiculous.

As demonstrated by my effort today in attempting and completing a half marathon. Thank you, thank you. It was difficult, but made easier by weeks of carb-loading, hydrating and whinging.

And I did it as part of the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre’s Run for Refugees team.

You should acknowledge my heroic, ancient Greek confounding effort by donating lots of money to this worthy cause. Please donate online at www.ourcommunity.com.au/giving/appeal_details.form?appealId=1733

Don’t make me smash a space probe into your crater.

But is that really true? My first guess would be “of course not!” But I’m having trouble thinking of txtspk that rhymes better than “C U L8TR L E G8TR”.

Can anyone suggest a better one? A mobile limerick, perhaps? Or maybe we should just change the rules, so that instead of 160 characters, each SMS has to be 17 syllables?

As the kids say*, that would be totally Obama.

* At least so the Sunday Age assures me. But really I’d rather go with the bloke outside the pub last night, who claimed the band inside was “totally off the hook”. Right on.

Sorry it’s taken me so long to write – my stars, you wouldn’t believe the things I’ve been doing.

Actually, I remember back in the days of snail mail (not that they called it that then, but you young kids wouldn’t know anything about it) that I used to start all my letters that way. Hmm, you would’ve thought I’d learned something over the years, but no. Electronic communication just makes you late sooner.

So, what have I been doing? Birthday, Christmas, New Year, Robbie Burns day (no, not really, no haggis for me this year), a record Melbourne heatwave (a good reason to forego the haggis, I guess)… Some sciency reading, including Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, which has got me all fired up about evidence-based medicine and the sorry state of science reporting. And got me into an argument with my osteopath – not really recommended when they’re in a mood to wrench your vertebrae around. I’ve got the bruises to prove it.

Also, Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible, a birthday present I’d been greatly looking forward to. There are a lot of books out these days about sci-fi science, like time travel, teleportation, robots, etc. But to me this one stood out because of Dr Kaku’s genuine physics credentials. OK, yes, it could have done with a bit more editing. And the chapters that aren’t so much physics, like the one on telepathy, which delves into neuroscience, aren’t quite as good. And he has a curious obsession with nanotechnology (UFOs are nanoships built in a nanobase on our moon! That’s why they’re so small!) But yes, there is some really good physics there and well worth the read.

However, it also makes you think about the big picture, like how far away from a Theory of Everything are we really? Let’s just go back to my last post comparing atomic and astronomic scales.

Imagine scaling up an atom to the size of the solar system. What comparative size can we measure with today’s technology.

Well, with quantum mechanics the smallest distance we can measure corresponds to the highest energy instrument we have, i.e. the embattled LHC. When fully operational it should be able to get up to 14 TeV in energy, which can “see” scales of about 8.86 x 10^-20m. At our atom/solar system scale, that’s equivalent to a distance of 8,400 km.

For a Theory of Everything we need to get down to much smaller distances where quantum gravity starts to kick in. This is the famous Planck scale, about 10^-33m. It’s about how big you’d expect a superstring to be.

On our solar system scale that would be roughly 9.53 x 10^-11m. Or about the size of an actual atom.

So I’m thinking we’ve got a long way to go; that’s an awful lot of orders of magnitude for something to happen in. Which is good, because it’ll keep physicists in a job. Just don’t hold your breath waiting for the secrets of the universe, that’s all.

Anyhow, it got me thinking about the scale of things. As Douglas Adams famously said, space is big. Really, really big. At the scale of the Melbourne Solar System, the nearest star would be roughly 32,000 km away. That’s already getting pretty hard to picture – to get it more manageable we’re going to have to shrink things even further…

Now, a lot of people have pointed out that the solar system looks a leetle bit like an atom – well, not a real atom of course, with quantum uncertainties and weirdly shaped electron shells, but a classicised version, with electrons orbiting the nucleus much like a tiny solar system…

So, randomly choosing a gold atom as a model (not so random really – I found some good relative figures about gold, but also the sun is vaguely gold-coloured and according to Wikipedia they’ve long been connected), the sun’s diameter at 1,390,000 km is 9.53 x 10²² times the size of a gold nucleus at 1.46 x 10^-14 m. And that works pretty good, because the size of the entire gold atom at 1.26 x 10^-10 m turns out to be proportionally the same size as the heliosphere, the extent of the solar wind and one measure of where the solar system ends.

At this new scale, the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is a mere 0.421 μm away (roughly the size of the tiniest bacteria, but still pretty large compared to an atom). Our entire galaxy then is about 1 cm across. And the nearest galaxy (the Andromeda galaxy) is only 25 cm away. Which makes the entire observable universe, 92 billion light years wide, about 9.1 km in diameter.

Imagine that: a sphere extending roughly between the aforementioned Port Melbourne and Clifton Hill, full of tiny galaxies, each smaller than a fingernail and about a foot apart. And in one of these little golden galaxies, round about Federation Square, there is a single atom with an electron that corresponds to Earth.

Puts it all into perspective, eh?

The voice of Space Girl was provided by the delightful Lisa Cougle, also the character’s co-creator (see one of Space Girl’s comic strip adventures). The robot was played by me (ahem). And the whole thing was put together in about 5 days when I suddenly realised the entry due date was earlier than I thought (and I nearly crippled myself by hunching over the computer non-stop; apparently an occupational hazard of disorganised animators).

The Tropfest theme ingredient for that year, in case you were wondering, was sneeze. Yes, sometimes you incorporate it discreetly simply to prove you shot the film that year, other times you write the whole script around it for a lack of any better ideas.

But the interesting thing here is that since Nose Runner has been on YouTube it’s garnered 174 views and a 4.5 star rating. Whereas the previous one, Psycho Killer: Qu’est-que-c’est, has been on quite a bit longer but only has 35 views and no stars.

Why is this? The current theory is that anyone searching for serial killers or Talking Heads songs isn’t really expecting a mockumentary about some guy’s failed lovelife. But those looking for cartoons about girls and robots in bars… well, they’re pretty much going to get what they expect.

It makes sense, but I’m not totally convinced. What do you think?

How do people find random videos on YouTube anyway?

Of course that’s also a fantastic excuse for a self-indulgent trawl through my old work. Ah, the days when I didn’t know the difference between a best boy and a key grip. Actually, I still get confused with that sort of thing. But at least now I know why they call it gaffer tape.

Anyway, my very first film was based on a script I submitted to the Next Laugh Screenplay Competition at the National Screenwriters Conference 2004. It’s the story of a serial killer – well, a guy who fancies himself a serial killer but hasn’t actually gotten around to murdering anyone yet – and his search for love. With the deliberately grand sounding title Psycho Killer: Qu’est-que-c’est.

Yes, before Dexter (although he actually debuted in Darkly Dreaming Dexter in 2004, so it’s more of a photo finish), Harvey charmed audiences as a serial killer you could identify with. Well, he made the audience laugh when the script was performed in the finals, but he didn’t actually win.

Fortunately my friend and collaborator, Andrew Saunders, was at the performance and offered to help make it into a film. The result was submitted to Tropfest in 2005, but failed to make the selection. Possibly because of the very low production values, possibly because we didn’t really know what we were doing and made it up as we went along, and possibly because the world just wasn’t ready for it. Ahem.

But it did start Squeeze-Brie Productions and led to a series of other films. And now, 3 years later, with the aforementioned rip-off winning hearts and minds, the world might finally be ready. Judge for yourself:

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. Random blog comments, after all, are the sincerest form of validation.

On that theme, what do you think are the chances that the 9/11 Truth people will accept the results of the latest study about the collapse of building 7? Slim? Non-existent?

Ah, conspiracy theories, you just can’t beat ‘em. Any evidence to the contrary is of course a conspiracy itself. Or, even better, that there’s a deeper conspiracy at work, and that they’re just humouring our conspiracy theories to stop us stumbling upon the real truth. So what is that real truth they’re trying to hide? Welcome to the neverending induction of conspiracy theory…

Of course, all right-thinking people know that 9/11 was really caused by flying reptiles. Keep watching the skies!

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.
2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.
3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.
4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.
5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.
6. The discoverer has worked in isolation.
7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.

If you try them against such phenomena as, say, homeopathy, dowsing or bigfoot, you’ll find them remarkably accurate. But how about something more substantial like… climate change denial?

Pretty good, actually. Point 1 is right up there, as the space devoted to climate change scepticism in the media is famously way above that in the scientific literature. And 2, the sceptics love to blame that powerful environmental lobby, particularly the IPCC, who have vested interests in making huge profits out of… canvas bags? Native trees? Those laundry ball things?

Point 3 might sound unlikely, after all thermometers aren’t exactly obscure. But if you think of all the people arguing over squiggly lines on graphs, claiming that if you turn them a certain way and squint just right they show the Earth is cooling…?

The next couple I’ll take a hit on – anecdote is mostly the other way (more on that later), you could hardly say it’s a belief that’s endured for centuries (unless you take “everything is normal” as the core belief) and they’re not exactly working in isolation. And I’m not entirely sure about point 7, but I’d be tempted to put the cosmic rays causing clouds stuff in there, even though there may be some real science there.

So I say they score at least 3.5 out 7, which is pretty damning. Climate change scepticism = bogus.

But hang on! What about the other side? They’re totally legit – or are they?

I won’t complain about pitching to the media, because the genuine publishing came first. But point 2… Every time a sceptic speaks up, the first attack is always on the basis of who funds them (hint: Big Oil), not on the actual science. And yes, bias can lead to bad science. But everyone’s funding has to come from somewhere, right? And if the science is so bad, shouldn’t it be possible to point that out?

Then there’s the “evidence is anecdotal”. Again, yes there’s genuine evidence for climate change. But what really sells it to the public is glaciers, polar bears and bees. Farmers leaning over their fence, staring dejectedly into their dusty paddocks.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m on your side. But I do feel that if you use the tactics of bogus science you’re opening yourself up to criticism on those grounds, and risking hurting your argument as a result.

Take another example: one of the other big arguments for the reality of climate change is “scientific consensus”. After all, there were over 2500 scientific reviewers of the 4th IPCC Assessment Report (thanks, Wikipedia). But then that’s why their opponents started their own petition, with the famous 31,000 dissenting scientists. Of course, to be a “scientist” you have to declare that you have a Ph.D., M.Sc, B.Sc., and M.D., that sort of thing. And only 40 of those 31,000 actually claim to be climatologists, so no, not terribly convincing.

But the point is, if you’re going to argue the validity of your case by the number of people who agree with you, then you’re opening yourself up to exactly the same counter argument.

When the pamphlet 100 Authors Against Einstein was published, the man himself famously said: “If I were wrong, one would be enough”. Ultimately, it’s the science that matters.

Alright, rant over for now. But this is a topic that interests me greatly – the interaction between science and the rest of the world, and how scientists sometimes hurt their own cause. Expect more of this in future.

In the meantime, for good, hard climate change science I recommend realclimate.org. Or, if you just want something to get angry about, nothing beats Andrew Bolt, Australia’s last great climate change denier. Although Mr Pipik gives him a run for his money.

The best explanation I’ve ever heard (and thanks for the reminder, Alison) is that by Professor David J. Miller of University College, London. So best, in fact, that in 1993 it won him the grand prize of a bottle of champagne in a challenge by the then British Science Minister, William Waldegrave, Baron Waldegrave of North Hill.

The prize was for the best one-page explanation of what the Higgs Boson is. Now, I encourage you to read Professor Miller’s full explanation (with cartoons!), but if your’re a busy professional who needs a slightly shorter version that doesn’t talk about “a lattice of positively charged crystal atoms”, here’s how it was told to me:

Imagine a room filled wall-to-wall with members of the British Conservative Party. They represent the Higgs field, which fills the universe wall-to-wall in the same way.

Next, imagine Margaret Thatcher enters the room. She is soon surrounded by party members, all wanting to ask her questions. They impede her progress, slowing her considerably as she tries to move through the room. This is how the Higgs field adds mass to particles and slows them down as they move through the universe.

Now, what if instead someone starts a rumour that she’s about to enter the room? The rumour itself moves from person to person, visible as little knots of Conservative Party members talking excitedly. These are Higgs Bosons – they’re just excitations of the Higgs field.

So really, at the Large Hadron Collider they’re looking for nothing more than a rumour. About Margaret Thatcher. Your homework now is to discuss what would happen if she were to turn up herself…