Category Archives: Other science

aka stamp collecting

That Would be a "No"

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Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?

This is a matter of getting the premise wrong. This is the idea:

A Star is Made

“I think the most general claim here,” Ericsson says of his work, “is that a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it.” This is not to say that all people have equal potential. Michael Jordan, even if he hadn’t spent countless hours in the gym, would still have been a better basketball player than most of us. But without those hours in the gym, he would never have become the player he was.

So the mistaken premise is that since world-class practitioners put in a lot of work at their craft, putting in a lot of work will make you world-class. As the logician reminds us, universal affirmatives can only be partially converted. The idea behind the 10,000 hour “rule” is that it gets you to your best, i.e. it’s a local maximum.

Spheropalooza

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A couple of twitter posts showed up close together that wouldn’t seem to be related at first blush: earthquakes and water droplets in space. But they are, because they’re both showing vibrational effects on liquid spheres. The earth is more like a fluid on time scales longer than when you fall and take a tumble.

Here’s a normal mode animation, depicting the earth (and exaggerated by a factor of about a gazillion) showing the various ways it might ring after an earthquake

But as far as vibrational modes go, there’s nothing special about the earth. I know I’ve posted the Alka-Seltzer video, but this video has extra demonstrations and I can’t recall if I’ve linked to it as well

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

The first bulk oscillation looks something like a (0,6,0) mode, or something close.

With the bubbles inside the drop, and droplets inside of that, it’s neat how the combining of droplets (~1:35) gives you more ringing; the total amount of energy in the surface tension goes down as the drop gets bigger — the volume increases faster than the surface area or, put another way, bigger spheres have less curvature per unit area, so they store less energy. That energy has to go somewhere , and that’s into a bulk vibration of the drop. There are a couple of instance of this effect in the video.

And Now, My Beauties, Something With Poison in it, I Think.

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Chemistry of Morphine, Heroin, and Lemon Poppy Seed Cake

You’ve heard the warnings – don’t eat poppy seeds before taking a drug test. The seeds can trigger a false positive reading for opioids, making your potential employer think you could be a heroin addict. A few years back, Mythbusters reproduced the anecdotes, showing that just two poppy seed bagels was enough to make Jamie test positive for drugs. (Other studies have shown the same thing.)

I like saying that I eat poppy seed bagels for the plausible deniability whenever I’m within earshot of my boss.

You'll Only Look Like Stretch Armstrong

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Mind tricks may help arthritic pain

“We were giving her a practical demonstration of illusory finger stretching when she announced, ‘My finger doesn’t hurt any more’, and asked whether she could take the machine home with her. We were just stunned – I don’t know who was more surprised, her or us.”

I wonder how closely this is related to the phantom pain solution of amputees

You Already Knew I was Going to Post This

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WTF: Journal publishes ESP B-u-n-k

This made the rounds a little while back, and the statistics were questioned then, but I link to this recent post because it sums it up well:

As far as I can tell, what Dr. Bem’s experiment has proved is that college students looking at pictures frequently expect porn. Quelle surprise!

Or, perhaps, once they know they might see porn, they anticipate seeing porn.

Cheaters Defy Logic

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Interesting. Many people suck at formal logic, but get much better when the problem is framed in terms of cheating.

Detecting Cheaters

Another way of saying this is that they turn over the “benefit received” card to make sure the cost was paid. And they turn over the “cost not paid” card to make sure no benefit was received. They look for cheaters.
The difference is startling. Subjects don’t need formal logic training. They don’t need math or philosophy. When asked to explain their reasoning, they say things like the answer “popped out at them.”

There’s also this:

People are just bad at the Wason selection task. They also tend to only take college logic classes upon requirement.

I took logic in college because it was a way of getting one of my humanities credits (taught by the philosophy department) with a class that was a lot like math.

How Green is My Valley?

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Earth Observatory Image of the Day: Thirteen Years of Greening from SeaWiFS

From 1998 to 2010, the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view-Sensor, or SeaWiFS, made a simple but elegant measurement: how “green” is the Earth. That is, how much chlorophyll—the pigment that helps turn sunlight into organic energy for plants—is present in the seas and on land. Those measurements offered a window into the planet’s ability to support life. The long, well-calibrated data record also gives scientists one of the best benchmarks to study the planet’s biological response to a changing environment.

The image above shows SeaWiFS data as a global average over the entire 13-year record. For the oceans, the colors represent the concentration of chlorophyll and indicate where phytoplankton most often bloomed since 1998. On the land, data are depicted as a Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), which shows the density of green vegetation. An NDVI of zero means no green plants and a high value (0.8 or 0.9) is a thick canopy of green leaves.