Daily Archives: June 14, 2008

Getting My Pants On

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A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. Churchill, inspired by Twain, pre-internet.

Genepax Unveils a Car That Runs on Water and Air

Try again, you sensationalizing hacks. Versions of this story have spread across the web like a bad rash.

Their new “Water Energy System (WES),” generates power by supplying water and air to the fuel and air electrodes using a proprietary technology called the Membrane Electrode Assembly (MEA). The secret behind MEA is a special material that is capable of breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen through a chemical reaction.

If there’s a chemical reaction taking place, then it’s not running on water and air!

As said in the press release

The main feature of the new system is that it uses a membrane electrode assembly (MEA), which contains a material that breaks down the water to hydrogen and oxygen.

Got that? It contains a material that breaks down the water to hydrogen and oxygen. There’s a chemical reaction going on, for Odin’s sake! There are materials that like Oxygen even more than Hydrogen does. Introduce them, let them get acquainted, and they’ll get busy producing Hydrogen. But — and this is very important — the other material will eventually run out, and you’ll have to “refuel.”

To give an example, you can generate Hydrogen with water, Aluminum and Gadolinium (the latter is a catalyst which keeps the Al from forming an oxide layer, which would shut the reaction down, and the reaction is not exactly a “new process”). I don’t know if this is what’s going on here, but something sure is, because in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics.

Update: good takedown over at Good Math, Bad Math

It's Kinda Like 'Where's Waldo?'

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Volunteers asked to help find dead spacecraft on Mars

HiRISE software developer Guy McArthur, also at the University of Arizona, has invited the public to scan these images for signs of the Mars Polar Lander. It’s a huge challenge because although there are only 18 images, each of them is enormous – typically 1.6 billion pixels.

“If your computer screen is 1000 by 1000, that means you need 1600 screenshots to view one image,” says McEwen. “On the HiRISE team, we haven’t put much effort into looking for this – we’re too busy with other things.”

h/t to CD

I Come to a Different Conclusion

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There’s a video out there in the ether that purports to measure time dilation in a car. I’ve already shown that this can, and does, happen, but you need to have some pretty expensive toys at your disposal to make the measurement.

For a good experiment (I’m perhaps charitably assuming this wasn’t just an out-and-out fraud), one would also want to measure the stopwatches against each other to make sure they were running at the same rate, and calibrate them if they weren’t. Ideally you’d want several clocks, but that’s a little advanced for this level of execution. Then, you’d want to make sure that you weren’t perturbing the clocks with different environments, like temperature differences, so make sure you aren’t blasting the AC on the stopwatch. Finally, you’d want to predict the difference to compare it to the measured difference. Ignoring effects from any elevation changes, a half-hour trip at 60 mph is going to give you a dilation of around 7 picoseconds.

My conclusion is that your stopwatches suck.

Don't Fall Behind

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Ketchup

A whole lot about the king of condiments, without getting into shear thinning and thixotropic properties.

It explains why Barenaked Ladies can’t find the fancy dijon ketchup they want in “If I Had a $1,000,000”

What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz’s ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. How many things in the supermarket run the sensory spectrum like this?

The business decision of empowering kids

A typical five-year-old consumes about sixty per cent more ketchup than a typical forty-year-old, and the company realized that it needed to put ketchup in a bottle that a toddler could control. “If you are four—and I have a four-year-old—he doesn’t get to choose what he eats for dinner, in most cases,” Keller says. “But the one thing he can control is ketchup. It’s the one part of the food experience that he can customize and personalize.”

With some multivariable optimization thrown in.

Elements of Music

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Name that tune in three elements

Best song of the 80s? Gold by Spandau Ballet. But it seems that the frilly-collared Spandau boys were far from original in their lyrical choice. According to a survey undertaken by Santiago Alvarez, in the department of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Barcelona, the most popular elements referred to in music are, from the top; silver, gold, tin and oxygen.

What surprises me isn’t that someone did this. No, what surprises me is that the survey appears in a chemistry journal and it’s paywalled. There is a press release that mentions some of the songs.

But . . . Gold is the best song of the 80’s? File that under ‘Things that make you go buuhhhhh!’