There was a mock-that-which-you-don’t-understand article in New York magazine recently: The Ten Most Ridiculous-Sounding Math Classes Currently Offered at Liberal-Arts Colleges . A pretty good takedown of this exists at Halfway There (found via Science After Sunclipse)
The pride with which some people proclaim their math/science illiteracy is beyond me.
The caveat in paragraph number 19
This is what they found: by the time you get to a story length of 8 to 11 paragraphs, on average, your readers read only half the story. A minority will make it to paragraph number 19, where, on this occasion, a fraction of the readers of the Daily Mail would have discovered that the central premise of the news story – that a new trial had found a 40% reduction in cancer through intermittent dieting – was false.
But it’s not. Lab-Sized Earthquakes Challenge Basic Laws of Physics. Really? No. Invariably, no. A more accurate headline would be “Lab-Sized Earthquakes Advance Understanding of Physics”
A model earthquake on a lab bench shows that a basic assumption of introductory physics doesn’t hold up at small scales. The finding could have a wide variety of implications for materials science and engineering, and could help researchers understand how earthquakes occur and how bad they might be.
And a more accurate lead-in would be rewritten to say a basic assumption of introductory physics class …
In reality, friction is a very complicated thing, and there are two common approaches to complicated things in introductory physics: ignore it, or use a very simple model of it. Which is why introductory physics problems include a lot of frictionless surfaces (and no drag), and when friction is included, a linear model is used. This really should be no surprise — we generally don’t teach them relativistic kinematics in the intro class, either. It’s hard enough to get a grip on the basic tenets of momentum, force and energy without getting into the nitty gritty details.
Other than that, though — interesting stuff.
Sound can leap across a vacuum after all
I saw this retweeted by Jennifer, but sorry — No, it can’t.
When a sound wave reaches the edge of one crystal, the electric field associated with it can stretch across the gap and deform the crystal on the other side, creating sound waves in that second crystal (Physical Review Letters, vol 105, p 125501). “It is as if the sound waves don’t even recognise the vacuum – they just go through,” says Prunnila.
This is the kind of writing that really, really annoys me. Redefining terms in order to sensationalize the material. Sound doesn’t jump across the vacuum barrier — an electric field does, and that’s perfectly cromulent. The electric field causes the piezoelectric transducer on the other side to vibrate and recreate the sound. Neat. But if this counts as sound going through a vacuum, then transmissions using a satellite has to count, too. We’ve been doing this for more than 50 years.
Don’t Listen to the Newspapers
Presented in terms of the climate “debate,” but the thrust is true in general.
97.6% of publishing climatologists, 100% of studies in scientific journals, and every scientific organization in the world now agree that humans are changing the climate.
Compare this to the media coverage of climate change. The majority of articles in respected newspapers like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal give roughly equal time to the “two sides” of the so-called “scientific debate”. Balance in journalism is all very well when the issue is one of political or social nature, but for matters of science, giving fringe opinions the same weight as a robust consensus is misleading. Being objective is not always the same as being neutral.
(emphasis added, just because)
This is a news website article about a scientific paper
This is the part where I quote a teaser from the post.
This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like “the scientists say” to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist.
In this paragraph I will state in which journal the research will be published. I won’t provide a link because either a) the concept of adding links to web pages is alien to the editors, b) I can’t be bothered, or c) the journal inexplicably set the embargo on the press release to expire before the paper was actually published.
This is the part where I tell you that I agree with the linked post, or where I would state my objections if I had any strong ones (or nits, if I was feeling nitpicky).
Cosmic Variance: The New Objectivity
(Science) Reporting as Truth vs. Falsity as opposed to He said vs. She said
If journalists are just mindless stenographers, they can’t be accused of making that particular mistake. But they are actually making a much more serious mistake, abandoning the search for truth in favor of the goal of not being blamed.
It’s hard to argue against this mindset, which is often mis-labeled as “objectivity.” So maybe we should be defending the New Objectivity: the crucial duty of reporters to separate what is true from what is false.
Uncertain Principles: What Uncertainty Means to Me– And You, and the Universe
One of the most (if not the most) commonly maltreated physics concepts in journalism is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
[T]he origin of uncertainty really does spring from the idea of particle-wave duality rather than any ideas related to the act of measurement. It comes from the fact that, fundamentally, the position of a quantum object, like an electron or a photon, is a particle-like characteristic, while its momentum is associated with the wave nature of the object. Mathematically, the momentum of a quantum object is given by Planck’s constant divided by its wavelength (or, equivalently, the wavelength associated with a quantum object is determined by Planck’s constant divided by its momentum).
Perhaps we can start up the group Physicists For The Proper Treatment of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, or PFTPTHUP (which would sound like blowing a raspberry, or Bill the Cat hacking up a furball, either of which could be one’s reaction to seeing the HUP abused in the media)
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.
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.