Swans on Tea

If It’s On The Internet, It Must Be True

This past week, formerly unknown actress Elyse Porterfield fooled millions playing Jenny, the Dry Erase girl, who quit in a clever hoax. Right now, I guarantee other pranksters are dreaming up new schemes to fool you again. And journalists, who at one time were tasked with protecting the public from such lies, no longer have the same power to block them.

The media has reporters and editors in place to prevent hoaxes from going public. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Some truth, some crap. I think the author goes too far in painting traditional media as all sweetness and light, full of ethical virtue, and Keepers of the Integrity™. The issue with news is that it takes time to gather the often fragmented bits of information, makes sense of it and check that it’s correct. Even though the transmission of information is much faster these days, the old restrictions on gathering still pretty much apply. So in the days before 24/7 news and online reporting, sitting on a story and letting people confirm the information didn’t have the same implications as it does today. So I think there’s a little bit of confusing this inaction with virtue — they were rarely tempted. The Dry-Erase hoax did get Tech Crunch to bite, after all — they ran the story concurrent with reporters following up, not after.

The snippet about Dan Rather “buil[ding] a career after being first to report on the Kennedy assassination” conveniently ignores that his career at CBS ended after a story turned out to be based on fabricated evidence. And it’s not like the mainstream media never reports erroneous information, and worse, repeats it without checking. Al Gore invented the internet, right?

The speed of the internet helps hoaxes spread more rapidly, but it also lets us check with trusted sources faster as well. In the early days of email we had hoaxes, which continue today, but now there are places to check, like Snopes. And Twitter may be a way that a hoax spreads, but it was also an important conduit for information during and after the attack on Mumbai on 2008. The advantage of places with editors, I think, is that there are resources for multiple channels of information, allowing them to cross-check. The real question is the extent to which they will continue to be tempted to break a story without confirming it, knowing that the rest of internet is out there.

Satanists book a convention center in Oklahoma City to perform a ceremony.

Hey, maybe you want to open up a community center in New York, too?

Solar System to scale

This page shows a scale model of the solar system, shrunken down to the point where the Sun, normally more than eight hundred thousand miles across, is the size you see it here. The planets are shown in corresponding scale. Unlike most models, which are compressed for viewing convenience, the planets here are also shown at their true-to-scale average distances from the Sun. That makes this page rather large – on an ordinary 72 dpi monitor it’s just over half a mile wide, making it possibly one of the largest pages on the web.

sciencegeekgirl: The Magic of the Middle Division: Changing classroom norms (#aaptsm10)

There’s just one more talk that I wanted to share with any of you who couldn’t be there – another delightful presentation from Corinne Manogue of Oregon State University. Corinne is a colleague, we’ve both been working on creating new activities for use in physics courses beyond the introductory courses, though I’ve been focusing on the junior years and she’s firmly planted in the sophomore level. Still, I’ve used many of her activities from the sophomore level to enhance our junior course, and I just find her approach inspiring.

I took a “math methods of physics” class from Corinne (er, Prof. Manogue) back in the day, hence my feeling of oblogligation to link to a post about her.

Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face?
General Jack D. Ripper
Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb

Fluoride in Water Prevents Adult Tooth Loss, Study Suggests

For children whose adult teeth haven’t shown yet, fluoride still improves tooth enamel, the highly mineralized tissue on teeth’s surface. Fluoride also helps teeth damaged from the decay process and breaks down bacteria on teeth.

Climate Skeptics v. Climate Deniers

Excellent discussion of the difference between a global warming skeptic and a denier. I don’t think the author misses anything.

Alas, a much larger number use the term “skeptic” as a re-labeling trick, while wallowing in the standard narratives of distraction and delay, exhibiting patterns described in Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things and Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World. Only now, as more recently related in Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science and in Denialism, by Michael Specter, the trend toward dismissal of science has gone into overdrive, propelled by forces that are intensely political.

So here is the problem: What discrete characteristics distinguish a rational, pro-science “climate skeptic” who has honest questions about the AGW consensus from members of a Denialist Movement that portrays all members of a scientific community as either fools or conspirators?

And if you want to know a few of the shadowy ones behind the deniers, there’s a story in the New Yorker: Covert Operations

SMBC: Why experimental physicists hate theoretical physicists

via

New “Wind Lens” Turbine Magnifies Wind For Increased Power, Reduced Noise

There are a number of stories about this, and for most of them the technical explanation starts and ends with “The structure works similarly to a magnifying glass that intensifies light from the sun — except in this case, the lens intensifies wind flow” or something similar. Which is really frustrating. This story doesn’t, and even provides a link to the university web site, so perhaps we can glean additional information from that.

OK, it looks like this “lens” is a venturi of sorts. I’m neither a fluid mechanic nor an aeronautical engineer; I imagine the compressibility of the air makes this a little different for air than for water. But when you restrict the area of flow, the speed increases. Put another way, by funneling/focusing you increase the energy density of the air, so more energy is present within the area of the turbine and you can extract more energy without making the blades bigger. That much I get. I’m not sure if this accounts for all of the increased efficiency or if there are other effects as well, like improved efficiency by generally having higher speeds. It certainly doesn’t look like you are tripling the capture area from the pictures.

The stories tout this as being great, but I notice that the turbines are ~1 kW, as opposed to commercial turbines which are MW-ish beasts, and the researchers do not say how far this effect will scale up, and in fact caution that it will not. The bits about how these might be less objectionable on aesthetic grounds don’t sway me — there’s no justification that these will look pretty to those who disapprove of regular turbines. So I’m not seeing these as “farms” and >100 m diameters would seem to exclude them as being put up in your yard.

Secrets of the gecko foot help robot climb

A Stanford mechanical engineer is using the biology of a gecko’s sticky foot to create a robot that climbs. In the same way the small reptile can scale a wall of slick glass, the Stickybot can climb smooth surfaces with feet modeled on the intricate design of gecko toes.

If you watch the video, you might notice that they appear to have edited out a section discussing the need for a tail — the only kept the part when they added the tail and tell us the “now stickybot can climb.” It’s too bad, because I think there’s a bit of interesting physics there. It’s mentioned briefly in this video, where you can see a real gecko with its tail pressing against a surface, the hind legs acting as a fulcrum, so that it can move its upper body back toward the surface.

Creating Hell in a Pop Bottle

Some outstanding slow-motion combustion, thermodynamics, and safety advice. Half a gram of water turns into about a liter of Hydrogen + Oxygen. Then, boom!

[W]hen H2 and O2 burn, there is actually a reduction in the number of molecules of gas, which would, if all other conditions were the same actually produce a reduction in pressure, however the temperature of the exhaust gas is not the same, it goes from about 300K to 3000K which in a confined system would increase the pressure from about 1 to 10 atmospheres. This is getting close to the failure threshold of these bottles, and also represents a significant rate of release of energy.- caution is required, and this really isn’t something you should be trying unless you really know what you are doing.

Ask a Physicist: What ever happened to magnetic monopoles?

LEDs not neccesarily eco-friendly

If, by “LED” one means “people.”

While the potential for cheaper energy could increase the quality of life for billions around the globe, it also could mean an increase in energy usage. Tsao says that since the 16th century, with each revolution in lighting technology humans have used more light, instead of using the same amount of light for cheaper.

“Over the past three centuries… the world has spent about 0.72 percent of the world’s per capita gross domestic product on artificial lighting,” said Tsao. “This is so for England in 1700, in the underdeveloped world not on the grid and in the developed world using the most advanced lighting technologies. There may be little reason to expect a different future response from our species.”

So let’s blame the LEDs for human nature and the law of supply and demand.