Jennifer Ouellette has a new blog, not the same as the old blog, at Discovery. Check out Twisted Physics. She promises shorter posts than on Cocktail Party Physics, which isn’t going away.
Rest assured, Cocktail Party Physics isn’t going anywhere. It will continue much the same, staunchly independent and wheezily long-winded.
No word yet on whether we will be able to observe her in a superposition of the two blogs, or what might happen if that wave function collapses.
And that performance enhancing drugs are involved.
NY Times editorial. If Big Brown Wins, Racing Loses
This might sound obvious, but it’s worth stating: horse racing is nothing without the horse. And yet right now the horse’s best interests don’t seem to be paramount in racing.
[. . .]
No one has seriously accused him [current trainer, Richard Dutrow] of doing anything untoward with Big Brown, but he’s been fined or suspended for doping in each of the last eight years, including two instances in January. The Association of Racing Commissioners International report on Dutrow reveals 72 offenses since 1979, 13 of them related to drugs.When a guy like this wins racing’s most prestigious prize, what message does that send to everyone else involved in the sport? It tells owners that they can win by entrusting their horses to a trainer known for bending the rules.
The sport isn’t clean. People cheat, and exploit the ones actually performing.
Yawn.
Continue reading
Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake discovers (among other things) a fine tradition: volunteering in absentia.
Do not oversleep and miss a meeting because the meeting announcement was sent to the e-mail address you don’t use because it’s continually broken, or else you too may draw the short straw in absentia and find yourself in charge of assembling a volume of conference proceedings.
Decisions are made by those who show up. Unpleasant tasks go to those who were conveniently out of the room.
There’s a movement afoot to make the recent “Classic Papers Challenge” a regular event. Suggestions for naming of both the general effort and an alternative term for “carnival” are being solicited. Go on over to Skulls in the Stars and leave a suggestion.
McKee examines story-telling like a biologist dissecting a rat. But after taking it apart, he explains how to build a story yourself using rules that wouldn’t look out of place in a computer programming text book.
[. . .]
Using McKee’s rules they compare the script of the film Casablanca, a classic pre-McKee movie, with scripts of six episodes of CSI (Crime Scene Investigation), a classic post-Mckee production, and find numerous similarities.That’s hardly surprising since McKee learnt his trade analysing films such as Casablanca, so anything written using his rules should have these similarities.
I also note that one of the producers for CSI has a PhD in applied physics. Chicken? Egg? Common cause?
(Not to name drop, but I went to high school with this person, and actually helped, in some small way, with the first script he wrote)
The home of the future, from the perspective of 1939
Microwave ovens, electrical appliances, VCRs/DVRs, heat pumps . . .
The Precipitron, however, eliminates more than ninety-five per cent of such air-borne particles by charging them with electricity and then drawing them off to oppositely charged collector plates. Housewives will appreciate what this means in keeping rugs and curtains clean.”
And good old-fashioned sexism. Honey, make me a sandwich.
However,
Alas, they didn’t get everything right:
“In 1928 the average residential power user consumed 460 kilowatt-hours of current a year and paid an average of six and six-tenths cents per kilowatt-hour. In 1938 he used 850 kilowatt-hours and paid only four and two-tenths cents per kilowatt-hour. This saving has been made possible by increased efficiency in the production and distribution of electric power…..Against the reality of such figures and achievements, one dares not place any limits on the possibilities of electricity in the future.”
I think maybe the Great Depression might have had an effect on the costs, too. According to the westegg inflation calculator, in the US, a product costing 7 cents in 1939 (or 9 cents in 1928) would cost a dollar today. So what’s the problem? Residential electricity today is about ten cents per kWh. The cost has generally gone down over time. There’s a graph here from 1960 onward (figure 3, in year 2000 dollars). I’m not seeing the wrongness of the claim, except for using kWh for current.
