Fun with time

Devouring time:
[Via Cosmic Variance]

My previous post on watches seems to have been misconstrued as an attack on all things mechanical. So, to establish my street cred as a geek, it looks like I’m forced to post about my favorite mechanical timekeeper: the chronophage.

It’s the coolest clock ever. It runs fast. It runs slow. It runs forward. It runs backward. It stops. It is precisely the right time once every five minutes. The clock is a striking illustration that time is fleeting and unreliable. The escapement features a hideous bug, literally eating the seconds as they pass. The passage of time is terrifying, after all.

This is really a fascinating clock. It would be very addicting to watch.

Technorati Tags: Science, Technology

Mussel Evolution in the Great Lakes

by izik
Zebra mussels hang on while quagga mussels take over:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

The zebra mussels that have wreaked ecological havoc on the Great Lakes are harder to find these days — not because they are dying off, but because they are being replaced by a cousin, the quagga mussel. But zebra mussels still dominate in fast-moving streams and rivers.
[More]

You have to really enjoy something that comes out of the Center of Rapid Evolution. Much more interesting than the Center of Slow Evolution.

Some very nice work revealed that the ability to generate the threads that hold the mussels to a surface is a major indication of what sort of habitat these cousin species can occupy.

The zebra can generate a lot of threads when water flow is great, meaning it can occupy fast moving rivers where the quagga can not. Both of the mussels have tremendous impacts on the Great Lakes environment, removing the major food sources required by fish. So the fish are disappearing or failing to grow.

In addition, the filtering of the water by the mussels produces much clearer water. It may look nicer but the increased penetration of the water by sunlight results in larger algal blooms which can deplete oxygen from the water and again, harm fish.

It seems to me that studying the environments in the Great Lakes is very similar to studying on an island. The environment is generally closed to outside encroachment and so has developed a well defined, stable ecosystem. Thus, when something is introduced that the ecosystems have no defense against, we can observe the perturbations that result quite easily.

Now if we can just figure out what to do about it without causing greater problems. BUt one can certainly see why evolution might be rapid. The selective pressures on the ecosystem must also be rapidly changing.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

Idea Club Topics

[Crossposted at Path to Sustainable]
There have been some requests for more information on the topics in the new Idea Club Topic Poll. So here are some thumbnail explanations:

• New Drugs – New Models – the current approachs for drug development cost a lot of money. Most companies are only interested in producing drugs that will be billion dollar sellers. How can we change the current process to permit important but less profitable drugs to be marketed?
• Getting Away From CAFOs – these are concentrated animal feeding operations – factory farms. There are many benefits from this approach but also many detrimental prospects. What are the alternatives?
• Trucking of Tomorrow – a substantial amount of fuel is used by the trucking industry but little has really been done to make the vehicles more fuel efficient. What are some possibilities?
• Algae for Fuel – photosynthesis is a great way to convert solar power into sources of energy. How can algae be adapted to provide the energy we need?
• Fixing the FDA – the FDA was created to deal with problems of the early 20th Century. How can it be changed to meet the problems of the 21st Century?
• Green Nanotech? - Is there such a thing? What is it and what can it do?
• Resilient Cultures - What was the guy who cut down the last tree on Easter Island thinking? How can a culture deal with huge social shocks and survive? What are some of the tools?
• Energy Wedges – the energy/climate problems can not be solved with a single solution. But modeling indicates that substantial effects can be achieved by a variety of approaches, each occupying a wedge of the pie. What are these approaches and what can we do to make them happen?
• Changing Higher Education - Post Secondary education is still based on a model originally developed in the middle of the 19th Century where finding information was difficult and required years of training by experts. Now finding information is easy. How can colleges be altered to take advantage of what we have learned over the last 150 years or so?
• Open Science – How does scientific research change when all aspects, including daily lab notes, are placed on the Web for all to see? Is this a viable model? How does Open access to published results alter scientific exploits?
• Pandemics and People – Can we prepare effectively for a pandemic? What will it look like? How can we prepare?
• What is a Green Job? - Is this just marketing or is there something fundamentally different about a green job than any other? Should it have different incentives or can a purely free market approach work?
• A Culture of Innovation – How does innovation happen? Is it simply random or can a formal process to support creativity be constructed? What would such a culture look like?
• Sustainable Urban Farms – Growing food in the city on privately owned land is becoming a much more viable possibility. What are some of the options and creative solutions that separate urban farming from traditional methods?
• Citizen Science – At the same time many research efforts are requiring multi-millions of dollars to pursue, with large research operations to support, the cost of many procedures has dropped to much that individual people can become involved in research projects. What are some of these projects and how can a distributed approach to research yield successful results?

Feel free to vote here or at the website. Voting ends July 1.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Sustainability, Web 2.0

Open Access papers from CalTech

Joint strategy fictitious play with inertia for potential games:
[Via CaltechAUTHORS: No conditions]

Marden, J. R. and Arslan, G. and Shamma, J. S. (2009) Joint strategy fictitious play with inertia for potential games. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 54 (2). pp. 208-220. ISSN 0018-9286
http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20090527-154250949

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Hey, what can you say about a paper with this for an abstract:

We consider multi-player repeated games involving a large number of players with large strategy spaces and enmeshed utility structures. In these “large-scale” games, players are inherently faced with limitations in both their observational and computational capabilities. Accordingly, players in large-scale games need to make their decisions using algorithms that accommodate limitations in information gathering and processing. This disqualifies some of the well known decision making models such as “Fictitious Play” (FP), in which each player must monitor the individual actions of every other player and must optimize over a high dimensional probability space. We will show that Joint Strategy Fictitious Play (JSFP), a close variant of FP, alleviates both the informational and computational burden of FP. Furthermore, we introduce JSFP with inertia, i.e., a probabilistic reluctance to change strategies, and establish the convergence to a pure Nash equilibrium in all generalized ordinal potential games in both cases of averaged or exponentially discounted historical data. We illustrate JSFP with inertia on the specific class of congestion games, a subset of generalized ordinal potential games. In particular, we illustrate the main results on a distributed traffic routing problem and derive tolling procedures that can lead to optimized total traffic congestion.

Sounds like a lot of fun. Until you see this on the second page, when describing how to set up the game.:

CalTech now puts up many of the papers published by its scientists with free access. They even have a newsfeed so I can stay up to date. There is one biology paper that sounds kind of interesting: Decoding face information in time, frequency and space from direct intracranial recordings of the human brain

Here is what is in the RSS feed:

Facile oxy-functionalization of a nucleophilic metal alkyl with a cis-dioxo metal species via a (2+3) transition state

Cache-oblivious selection in sorted X+Y matrices

Adaptive spacetime meshing for discontinuous Galerkin methods

UV excess measures of accretion onto young very low mass stars and brown dwarfs

Submillimeter galaxies at z ~ 2: evidence for major mergers and constraints on lifetimes, IMP and CO-H_2 conversion factor

A shrinking compact symmetric object: J11584+2450?

The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) 2005: calibration and targeted sources

Spitzer mid-infrared spectroscopy of infrared luminous galaxies at z ~ 2. III. far-IR to radio properties and optical spectral diagnostics

Life is so much easier with having to sit with Index Medicus in the stacks of the library.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science

When music makes the movie

by bobster855

I remember sitting in the movie theater seeing the original The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 in 1974. In fact, it is one of the few movies where I really remember sitting in the theater and I can visualize myself watch watching he movie.

That is, for most movies I remember the movie, just the scenes, as if I had visualized them in my head. They are not much more different in my memory that the visualization I have for important scenes from my favorite books. I do not remember my surroundings or where I watched the movie.

But a few movies were so affecting to me that I not only remember the scenes but I remember exactly the theater I was in, what it smelled liked, what the event of watching the movie was like. I can ‘see’ myself sitting in the seat watching the movie. Some of the other movies where the event of watching the movie, of my emotional reaction to the movie, is still as visceral as the scenes I watched are: A Clockwork Orange (first adult movie I snuck into), Jaws, and Star Wars, All have one important element – sound.

For me, music has always been a way to achieve an altered state. I put something like Dvorak’s New World Symphony on the headphones, lay down and I am gone. The ego, I, no longer exists until the music is done. My wife disturbed me one time when I was in that state and it was like being hit with a hot poker to come out of it so fast.

Hearing affects our memory as much as sight. Each of these movies has an incredible soundtrack, one that was like nothing that had been used before. Clockwork Orange uses classical music to drive the movie. Jaws has the dread-enducing theme for the shark, and Star Wars does not need any explanation.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 was a pretty workman-like movie with little big scream machinations. It has Walter Matthau for goodness sakes. It feels like it is shot on handheld cameras located right in the action (well, actually, based on the many jiggles seen while driving in New York, it probably was). But it is an emotional blockbuster, setting up tension in ways that are so understated that you almost fail to realize how wound up you are by the end. It does this not only with a wonderful plot and great acting but with a dyscophonous soundtrack that is both irritating and hypnotic. The rhythms are both so wrong, yet so right.

Watch and listen to this incredible video edited to the theme from the Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. Simply listening to it puts me back in the theater. Watching the video makes me want to see the movie again. I think the music helps make this fan’s edit one of the best ‘trailers’ for the movie.

I doubt that the new version will hold up as well.Star power is much more important in this one than acting or tension. Maybe I will be wrong but few movies surprise as much with the use of sound as the original.

Technorati Tags: General

Massive failure?

by Image Editor
The Value of Consistent Science Education Standards:
[Via AAAS News - RSS Feed]

Houston Chronicle Commentary Urges Support for Consistent Science Education Standards

“Voluntary, nationwide education standards in science, along with reading and math, are the next logical step” toward improving K-12 education in America, according to commentary published 10 June 2009 in the Houston Chronicle.

Read “Adopt National Standards to Help Children Compete” by Alan I. Leshner and Jo Ellen Roseman in the Houston Chronicle

The op-ed article, co-authored by AAAS CEO Alan I. Leshner, executive publisher of Science, and Jo Ellen Roseman, director of Project 2061, the AAAS science-literacy initiative, urges Texas, Alaska, Missouri, and South Carolina to join the push for consistent learning goals for all children nationwide.

[More]

I would like hear why science should not be included in these standards along with math and reading. Science is simply an attempt to understand the world around it.It penetrates everything we do, fro taking in a breath, to walking and even forming sounds.

Reading is required to understand what we write, the data that informs our lives. Math is needed to help support the constructs of our society, from balancing a checkbook to building a structure.

But without science we would not have a real understanding of any of those things. Understanding the world around us is, at base, the thing that makes us so different from other animals. It has permitted us to tame animals and develop agriculture so we no longer need to search our food. It permitted us to tame the wilderness and build our cities.

And it has brought us to the levels where we can actually affect the world’s climate. It will be necessary for finding the solutions to this problem.

Yet we do not have a plan for teaching our children about science.

Technorati Tags: Science

Deniers are so tiresome

Groundhog day:
[Via RealClimate]

Alert readers will have noticed the fewer-than-normal postings over the last couple of weeks. This is related mostly to pressures associated with real work (remember that we do have day jobs). In my case, it is because of the preparations for the next IPCC assessment and the need for our group to have a functioning and reasonably realistic climate model with which to start the new round of simulations. These all need to be up and running very quickly if we are going to make the early 2010 deadlines.

But, to be frank, there has been another reason. When we started this blog, there was a lot of ground to cover – how climate models worked, the difference between short term noise and long term signal, how the carbon cycle worked, connections between climate change and air quality, aerosol effects, the relevance of paleo-climate, the nature of rapid climate change etc. These things were/are fun to talk about and it was/is easy for us to share our enthusiasm for the science and, more importantly, the scientific process.

However, recently there has been more of a sense that the issues being discussed (in the media or online) have a bit of a groundhog day quality to them. The same nonsense, the same logical fallacies, the same confusions – all seem to be endlessly repeated. The same strawmen are being constructed and demolished as if they were part of a make-work scheme for the building industry attached to the stimulus proposal. Indeed, the enthusiastic recycling of talking points long thought to have been dead and buried has been given a huge boost by the publication of a new book by Ian Plimer who seems to have been collecting them for years. Given the number of simply made-up ‘facts’ in that tome, one soon realises that the concept of an objective reality against which one should measure claims and judge arguments is not something that is universally shared. This is troubling – and although there is certainly a role for some to point out the incoherence of such arguments (which in that case Tim Lambert and Ian Enting are doing very well), it isn’t something that requires much in the way of physical understanding or scientific background. (As an aside this is a good video description of the now-classic Dunning and Kruger papers on how the people who are most wrong are the least able to perceive it).

The Onion had a great piece last week that encapsulates the trajectory of these discussions very well. This will of course be familiar to anyone who has followed a comment thread too far into the weeds, and is one of the main reasons why people with actual, constructive things to add to a discourse get discouraged from wading into wikipedia, blogs or the media. One has to hope that there is the possibility of progress before one engages.

[More]

This same sort of exhaustion occurs when dealing with most sorts of deniers. Reason and reality are usually not part of their world so it eventually just becomes useless to engage, They really do not want to learn about the world or to see what new data have to tell us about reality. To them, data are bad.

To scientists, data are what makes life so much fun. Being able to wrestle understanding away from the complex world around us is one of the most ego-boosting and satisfying things I know.

But to deniers, actual understanding is never as important as their arguments for denying data. It explains why so many of them are lawyers. The argument is more important than the truth. Understanding is completely secondary.

They do not weigh you down with facts. They tire you out with redundant arguments. They say A. You destroy that argument. They say B. You destroy that argument. They say C. You destroy that argument. They say A. You say “Again?”

It gets pretty tiring doing this again and again. But we now realize that if you do not engage with these deniers, they think they have won and try to do something really stupid.

So we have to pick ourselves up and re-engage. But, the Web being what it is . We can respond faster and with more force. Beside, like the old joke, most times all we have to do is respond “#43″ or see the answer at Skeptical Science. We do not have to do it all ourselves. We have help.

Technorati Tags: Science

Laggards for change

by striatic
NoTube:
[Via crosscut.com : Crosscurrent]

Just like in the old TV series The Outer Limits, I am about to lose control of my television set. As a consequence of a government mandate to switch to digital broadcasting by Friday, June 12, my analog set is about to go blank. Like millions of others folks, I haven’t bothered to buy a converter box, a new digital TV, or subscribe to a cable or satellite provider. I’ve been warned for months, but each time I’ve ignored preparing for the inevitable. The talking heads explaining it all just seemed like one more infomercial. Click.

I’m technologically lazy too. I’ve never been able to get my rabbit ears to work very well, so I’ve just gotten used to fewer channels or watching the evening news through a blizzard of electronic snow. Buying and hooking up a converter seems like one chore too many. If the federal government wants to do something for me, how about sorting my recycling or vacuuming the dust bunnies from under the bed?

[More]

I’ve discussed the 5 step process for adopting new innovations and the 5 groups people find themselves in. Here is a great example of the laggard group (recognizing that some are laggards by choice and some by situation). Long after most people has moved to cable or satellite, laggards still get their TV by broadcast. And even after having been warned for 6 months that they will need a convertor box because innovation will happen, even if they do not adopt it.

Some of them may get cable, some may get the convertor box, and some may just stop watching TV. As usual, the laggards isolate themselves from the rest of the group by refusing to follow them as things change.

Sometimes this can be very useful, as laggards retain knowledge that might become important again. Other times it just separates them from the shared connections that the rest of the population shares.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation

New guidelines for concussions, especially for young adults and adolescents

by A Journey Round My Skull
Concussion experts: For kids — no sports, no schoolwork, no text messages:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

When it comes to concussions, children and teens require different treatment, according to international experts who recently published consensus recommendations. The British Journal of Sports Medicine’s new guidelines say children and teens must be strictly monitored and activities restricted until fully healed. These restrictions include no return to the field of play, no return to school, and no cognitive activity.

[More]

The no cognitive activity could be the hard part. For children they are saying that this should be adhered to for more than 7-10 days. No school. No texting. No video games. No TV. I would figure that reading would also be included.

How does anyone have ‘no cognitive activity’ at all for 2 weeks? Does thinking actually damage the brain? Let’s look at the Consensus Statement:

The panel strongly endorsed the view that children should not be returned to practice or play until clinically completely symptom-free, which may require a longer time frame than for adults. In addition, the concept of “cognitive rest” was highlighted with special reference to a child’s need to limit exertion with activities of daily living and to limit scholastic and other cognitive stressors (eg, text messaging, videogames, etc) while symptomatic. School attendance and activities may also need to be modified to avoid provocation of symptoms.

So, it is just cognitive rest until the symptoms go away. Here are the symptoms they discuss:

The suspected diagnosis of concussion can include one or more of the following clinical domains:

Symptoms—somatic (eg, headache), cognitive (eg, feeling like in a fog) and/or emotional symptoms (eg, lability).
Physical signs (eg, loss of consciousness, amnesia).
Behavioural changes (eg, irritability).
Cognitive impairment (eg, slowed reaction times).
Sleep disturbance (eg, drowsiness).
If any one or more of these components is present, a concussion should be suspected and the appropriate management strategy instituted.

No cognitive work until the symptoms go away. The thought of a teenager stuck at home who can not use their cell phone, watch TV or play video games is pretty harsh.

Of course, this makes sure the teen does not malinger in order to stay out of school. The old ‘You can stay home but you can not text, play video games, read, watch TV or think’ approach.

Technorati Tags: Health

The idiocy of deniers

by jitze

So…soap bubbles must be designed!:
[Via Pharyngula]

You’ve probably noticed that as a soap bubble thins, it acquires a rainbow of iridescent colors across its surface. Or perhaps you’ve noticed that a film of oil on a mud puddle shows beautiful colors. These are common physical properties of thin film interference.

The way it works is that light entering a material with a higher refractive index is both reflected and transmitted. Some of the light bounces back with a partial phase shift, and some of it passes through. In a thin film, it passes through but doesn’t travel far before it hits another boundary, for instance between the film and the water underneath it, and again, some of it is reflected and some transmitted. This second reflected beam of light, though, is out of phase with the first, by an amount that depends on the thickness of the film. What that means is that certain wavelengths will be shifted in such a way as to reinforce the first reflected beam, generating constructive interference that will make that wavelength brighter. Other wavelengths will be shifted the same amount, but they will be out of phase with light in the first reflected beam — there will be destructive interference, and that wavelength will be damped out.
[More]

I just like to link to some of the idiotic things put forward by people who have no real understanding of the subject they are talking about. It does not matter whether it is evolution, cosmology, climatology, politics, economics, etc.

The call of the denier is almost always the same. An almost complete inability to actually deal with objective facts in a way that conforms to reality. In most cases, they are anti-science and anti-rationality. I would guess that many view the Age of Enlightenment as something to forget as quickly as possible.

Let us hope that their power diminishes rapidly.

Technorati Tags: Science

Just a little oversight…

How can we manage climate change risks in the private sector if companies won’t say what they are?:
[Via ClimateScienceWatch]

Two closely related reports released this week by Ceres reveal that major corporations are largely failing to disclose to investors their risk exposure to climate change consequences and policy developments, typically sharing “minimal information” on how climate disruption is likely to impact their bottom lines. Ceres, along with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and the Center for Energy and Environmental Security (CEES), analyzed company filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and discovered that major oil and gas companies, coal companies, electric utilities, even insurance companies (whose bottom line is highly vulnerable to climate change impacts) scored low points in reporting their overall vulnerability to an altered environmental and economic climate.  Wouldn’t it be better for businesses and investors/shareholders alike if everyone came clean and we earnestly got down to the business of reducing risk to our environment and economy, simultaneously?

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You can download the reports at the Ceres site. This is interesting since many companies have boilerplate in their fillings reminding investors of all sorts of possible adverse events that could occur to affect the investment. Leaving out climate change seems to be a pretty big hole if, for instance, your company is in the insurance business. In fact, the only insurance companies to address climate change were all non-US companies.

If the SEC would provide some sort of guidance here, then things might progress a little better. I would expect that no company wants to be the first to address this issue in depth if none of its competitors are going to do similarly. Actually discussing this in a filing when no other company will could perhaps put the company at a competitive disadvantage.

So better leadership from the SEC would be helpful. I wonder how long that will take.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Sustainability

Video from Japan’s moon probe

Kaguya’s jaw-dropping Moon video:
[Via Bad Astronomy]

Kaguya is a Japanese spacecraft that has been orbiting the Moon since October 2007. It is equipped with several detectors, but also — brilliantly, in my opinion — two HD cameras. The footage below is not a simulation: it’s real imagery of the Moon! Make sure you click the HD …

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This is one of the reasons I why I keep Bad Astronomy on my RSS feed and check it everyday – to see such wonderful movies and pictures. These are really fascinating videos and it is wonderful to be reminded that the United States is not the only country capable of producing amazing data about our solar system. One of the commenters encapsulated my feelings almost exactly:

You know, I’m sitting here just marvelling at the fact that I can watch hours of high-quality videos of the Moon’s surface. This would have been pretty much science fiction only thirty years ago. Now it’s “Hey, nice video – is there any more?”
Science is bloody marvelous -and I’m bloody glad to be living at this time!

But then to find out that the mission of the craft ends in two days! It has been there for almost 2 years but hardly anything in the US media about its impending crash.

A search of Google news for ‘Kaguya’, ‘Selene’ or even ‘japan moon’ turns up only 4 hits (as of 6-8-09). They all appear to be blog hits showing similar videos as Bad Astronomy. I wonder if they will even mention it on the 10th. This seems to be a case where the only reporting going on is coming from blogs. Perhaps the MSM will pick it up in time for a short feature.

In the meantime, you can learn more at the project’s website.

Technorati Tags: Science

Idea Club Topic Poll

As you can see to the left, we are taking a poll to determine the topics for the next 6 months of Idea Club. Please chose your top 6 picks. The voting will continue until the end of June.

Technorati Tags: Sustainability

Through the looking glass

by Mental Halitosis
“I suggest you look on this as an opportunity, not a burden.”*:
[Via Unscrewing The Inscrutable - .]

I try and keep an open mind about things, avoiding falling into the trap of allowing others to define my reality as much as possible. Because sometimes if you define things for yourself you can turn what is ostensibly a limitation into an advantage.

And so it is that I find the following approach towards air travel to be . . . ingenious.

Only the first fifteen minutes or so are necessary to understand his approach, and for those who want just the gist of the matter here’s a summation from his website:

- Abstract -

Many of us attend cons and other events which involve the transportation of computers, photography equipment, or other expensive tech in our bags. If our destination if far-flung, often air travel is involved… this almost always means being separated from our luggage for extended periods of time and entrusting its care to a litany of individuals with questionable ethics and training.

After a particularly horrible episode of baggage pilferage and tool theft, I made the decision to never again fly with an unlocked bag. However, all “TSA compliant” locks tend to be rather awful and provide little to no real security. It was for this reason that I now choose to fly with firearms at all times. Federal law allows me (in fact, it REQUIRES me) to lock my luggage with proper padlocks and does not permit any airport staffer to open my bags once they have left my possession.

In this talk, I will summarize the relevant laws and policies concerning travel with firearms. It’s easier than you think, often adds little to no extra time to your schedule (indeed, it can EXPEDITE the check-in process sometimes), and is in my opinion the best way to prevent tampering and theft of bags during air travel.

Basically, it comes down to using a secure hard-sided case for all your valuable items, and including a firearm in that case. This requires a non-TSA-compliant lock, knowledge of the relevant laws (available on his website or from the TSA), and filling out the necessary paperwork when you check in for transporting a firearm (it doesn’t have to be a valuable firearm or even an actually functional one). Some additional hassle up front, but your possessions will be a lot more secure.

[More]

That’s right. Your luggage is more secure if you are transporting a firearm, even if it is not functional. You can put what you want in the same case, lock it up, declare it and no one with TSA will open it after it has left your possession.

So, don’t try to protect your luggage with those “TSA-approved” locks that anyone can open. Transport a weapon and you can keep everything safe.

Is that weird thing to find out? The best protection against stolen luggage could be a gun. But not one you are holding. Just an unloaded, non-functional revolver (or even better, a flare gun as mentioned in the video) you place in your bag, allowing you to use the best locks around.

Technorati Tags: General

Flashmob wedding

Flashmobs are the rage, with a recent one based on MC Hammer, which is a lot of fun to watch. But a really sweet one is this wedding in Virginia, held in public with people being notified by cell phone to attend or just happening to be walking by.

The Dr. Seuss poetry is a nice touch. And the crowd seemed to really enjoy the ceremony.

Technorati Tags: General