Live Granades: How To Generate Scientific Controversy
Four-point how-to list, and an example to make sure you’re clear on the concept.
Let’s see what we can do with this. I know: child safety seats! Properly used, they dramatically decrease kids’ injuries in car wrecks. They’re hella effective. So let’s claim that they really aren’t. In fact, their five-point harness can kill. See, the chest latch rides up and the two shoulder belts tighten until your kid will choke to death.
weird things: and now for something completely ridiculous
[T]his is a video that may well have broken my brain if not for my built-up tolerance to the kind of sheer, unadulterated stupid it contains, so it took me a while to properly reply to the kinds of unholy things Werner did to physics. In the interests of saving your brain cells, I’m only linking to this terrifying video rather than embedding it on this blog. You’re welcome.
It includes the claim that all the mass of the universe could fit into a bowling ball, and that you can basically cross out the mass in E = mc^2.
See also Twisted Physics: A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing
Science-Based Medicine: When homeopaths attack medicine and physics
An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All
This isn’t a religious dispute, like the debate over creationism and intelligent design. It’s a challenge to traditional science that crosses party, class, and religious lines. It is partly a reaction to Big Pharma’s blunders and PR missteps, from Vioxx to illegal marketing ploys, which have encouraged a distrust of experts. It is also, ironically, a product of the era of instant communication and easy access to information. The doubters and deniers are empowered by the Internet (online, nobody knows you’re not a doctor) and helped by the mainstream media, which has an interest in pumping up bad science to create a “debate” where there should be none.
Trial raises doubts over alternative pain therapy for arthritis
“It appears that any perceived benefit obtained from wearing a magnetic or copper bracelet can be attributed to psychological placebo effects. People tend to buy them when they are in a lot of pain, then when the pain eases off over time they attribute this to the device. However, our findings suggest that such devices have no real advantage over placebo wrist straps that are not magnetic and do not contain copper.
Researchers conducted the first randomised placebo-controlled trial on the use of both copper bracelets and magnetic wrist straps for pain management in osteoarthritis – the most common form of the condition.
I’m surprised this is the first study, but not at the results. As I have noted before, the way that magnetic bracelets are advertised to work means that they can’t possibly function.
Stone Age satnav: Did ancient man use 5,000-year-old travel chart to navigate across Britain
When did a chart become satellite navigation?
It’s considered to be one of the more recent innovations to help the hapless traveller.
But the satnav system may not be as modern as we think.
On the contrary. I think the satnav system is precisely as old as we think.
He analysed 1,500 prehistoric sites in England and Wales and was able to connect all of them to at least two other sites using isosceles triangles – these are triangles with two sides the same length.
This, he says, is proof that the landmarks were deliberately created as navigational aides. Many were built within sight of each other and provided a simple way to get from A to B.
Or, settlements were quasi-equally spaced, as the terrain allowed, because most people making a new settlement probably wouldn’t choose a site too close to an existing settlement, for fear of conflict.
Mr Brooks added: ‘The sides of some of the triangles are over 100 miles across, yet the distances are accurate to within 100 metres. You cannot do that by chance.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you could. Given the kind of packing restrictions present, I’d bet a semi-random distribution of sites would yield many such triangles.
(The comment about ET helping out is icing on the cake; I wonder if it the information was offered or solicited)
Color me skeptical. The story, of course, is very skimpy on the science, but let’s look at this. The claim of “9 V (18 W)” is really hard to believe, because P=IV means 2 A of current flowing through the hair, though that will be divided up. Still, the diameter of a hair is thinner than AWG 32 wire (at about 200 microns), which has a current limit of less than 0.1 A for power transmission, and that’s for a good conductor. Hair? Not so much. The pictures show a grid of interconnected hair, which doesn’t have all that much area, so capturing any more than a small fraction of the few hundred W/m^2 of insolation is not in the cards. A 20 x 20 grid at less than 0.2mm per hair is just a few square mm of hair — it can only get you a fraction of a Watt.
Question: why don’t we have our hair generating electricity like this while it’s attached to our heads?
At best, somebody dropped a prefix representing several orders of magnitude somewhere. At worst it’s a scam.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce seeks trial on global warming
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change.
Chamber officials say it would be “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” — complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.
What a bad idea for science.
This doesn’t bring the Scopes trial to my mind, as mentioned in the article — that wasn’t primarily about whether evolution was valid science. This is more like the story of how the Indiana House once unanimously passed a bill to make pi a rational number (3.2; the bill died in the senate). Our legal system doesn’t get to decide what is sound science or not; if it attempts to make such a decision, mother nature won’t care at all and won’t serve any contempt-of-court sentence for disobeying the judge.
The legal system doesn’t argue the same way that science does, which is why this is a common tactic for anti-scientists. Creationists putting Darwinism “on trial” in literature is not uncommon. The absurdity of calling evolution “Darwinism” aside for the moment, these “trials” include appeals to ridicule that might sound convincing to some, because there is much about science that isn’t intuitive. In physics, one could probably convince a lay person that quantum mechanics and relativity are wrong using a legal style of argument, just by pointing out some of the counterintuitive, nonclassical (or non-Galilean) aspects (A single particle goes through both slits? Absurd! Twins can age at different rates? Preposterous!) But QM and relativity are true, regardless of how much they contradict classical experience.
It can’t merely be lining up experts, either, because there is no science so well-established that you can’t find a somebody, somewhere, who has a degree and disagrees with the mainstream. There are physicists who disagree with QM and relativity, just as there are biologists who are creationists (or cdesign proponentsists). The bench isn’t very deep of course (there are more biologists named Steve who agree that evolution is true than all who are touted to disagree), but they are out there. What matters is the empirical evidence, and the people best qualified to tell us this are the scientists who do the kind of work in question, not a judge. True, the judge might/should rule in favor of the scientists in this kind of case, but if he didn’t, that wouldn’t change the fact that smoking causes cancer, evolution is true, photons interfere with themselves, pi is irrational and humans are causing global warming. That’s what the evidence tells us.
physics and physicists: “I’ll Never Use The Skills I Learned In Physics”
zapperz attacks this in a couple of ways, such as the idea that you (can) learn critical thinking skills
The “skills” that one learn out of a physics/science course goes BEYOND physics. It is a skill of thinking things through and systematically. It is the skill in knowing what KIND of evidence is required for something to be considered to be VALID. This is highly important no matter what you do. How do you know that something somebody utters on TV is valid? Most of the time, people are persuaded not based on valid evidence, but based on personality of the presenter and all the bells and whistles. Apply this to the world of politics, where phrases fly off into the air as if they are facts, or as if simply by saying it, it is true. The same can be said with regards to the battle between evolution and creationism. The inability of some members of the public to actually think through something THIS obvious clearly shows that the skill of analytical thinking isn’t there!
That and the other points are certainly important, but I’ll go a step or two lower and look at some actual physics applications. I don’t know precisely what is taught in Physics 140: How Things Work, but I’d guess a few basics involved would let you figure out that the truth about turning the heat down during the day if nobody’s home. “Conventional wisdom” says that it takes more energy to heat the house back up, but the actual physics confirms the conventional wisdom to be wrong. Or a simple analysis to verify that buying a long-life CFL will save you money over incandescent bulbs once you figure out actual energy use, despite the cost-per-bulb being higher. E = Pt is simple physics, but physics nonetheless.
A word of advice for Ms. McMillan: if someone asks you to invest in a device that creates energy, for which you will be able to charge money and make a profit, it may appear to be a sound investment from a financial perspective. But the physics you so casually dismiss guarantees that it is not.
(on a personal note, I’ve found that most of basic finance is pretty easy if you can do physics. Problems in financial literacy and science literacy do share a common problem: math literacy)
There must be 50 ways to leave your lover — Paul Simon
There must be 50 ways to leave your louver — How to Build a Good Louver
There must be 50 ways to leave the Louvre — design guidelines for the Louvre
38 Ways To Win An Argument—Arthur Schopenhauer
Really a list of dishonest ways to appear to win an argument, because they virtually all involve using logical fallacies to distort the opponent’s position or distract from what’s really going on. See how often they are used in politics, though.
h/t to ecoli
A correction from an LA Times story editorial
Solar power: A Friday editorial said that according to the U.S. Energy Department, enough sunlight hits a “100-square-mile” portion of the Nevada desert to power the entire country. It should have said “100-miles-square.”
The commentary: On square miles
I’d argue that “square miles” and “square kilometers” really have no place in popular journalism, because we have little connection to what they mean.
As humans, we never travel a “square mile.” We travel a mile. Or ten miles. If we’re thinking about an area of land, we’re probably mentally walking along two of its edges — which is what the LA Times and the U.S. Department of Energy were doing.
What you mean “we?” While the statement may be true (for some people), I’d argue that it’s an issue of mathematical/scientific literacy. Eliminating the use of area is to lower the bar of what we expect of journalists and readers of journalism. I never travel a cubic meter, either, but use of volume has its place — we don’t need to describe a liter as 10 cm on a side. We’re used to volume measurement, even if we in the US have an overall aversion to metric except when applied to some beverage containers. Why aren’t we used to areas — is it the name? Would “acres” be better, to avoid the “square” business?
The proposed solution includes giving an example, though, and giving a reference for scale is a good idea.