Monthly Archives: June 2009
Avoiding the Hobgoblins
and the foolish consistency they represent.
Flying Flux: The Dullness of Details
I think it behooves writers to make technical documentation fun by embedding a few surprises here and there for the unsuspecting reader. Just like how chip designers used to embed artwork in their chips (I’ve done so myself), writers of technical documents should try to slip in a bit of flowery language from time to time.
For example, let’s look at the following sentence:
Original: Jitter degradation is most sensitive to supply noise between 20 MHz to 80 MHz.
[…]
Simile: The 20-80 MHz supply noise’s effect on the clock edges’ accuracy is like a well-endowed woman doing jumping jacks.
Bubbles, Man!
Man when we was kids and we wanted bubbles we had to fart in the tub!
Billy Ray Valentine, Trading Places
Bubbles+Rings= Toroidal Funtime!
It’s a battle between surface tension and pressure. But all in all it bubbles operate on a fundamental principle: laziness. Bubbles form which ever shape minimizes their surface area. This is usually a sphere until force them to have a little fun.
Not Quite the Red Badge of Courage
Via the Heisenbergian one, I discover the Science Scout Merit Badges
The “I blog about science” badge. Obviously
The “science deprives me of my bed” badge (LEVEL II) Two week at Cornell’s Nanofabrication Lab (NNF)
The “broken heart for science” badge I just had to go to grad school …
The “non-explainer” badge (LEVEL I) My mom still introduces me as a nuclear physicist
The “what I do for science dictates my having to wash my hands before I use the toilet” badge. On occasion …
The “works with acids” badge. HF scares me, but I used it at the NNF
The “I’ve set fire to stuff” badge (LEVEL III) ’nuff said
The “experienced with electrical shock” badge (LEVEL III) I remember “locating” the 400V leads to the piezo stack on the confocal cavity while adjusting some optics
The “I’ve done science with no conceivable practical application” badge. TRIUMF
The “I work with way too much radioactivity, and yet still no discernable superpowers yet” badge. TRIUMF again, and time in 5 nuclear power plants while in the navy
The “has frozen stuff just to see what happens” badge (LEVEL III) Ah, the joys of Liquid nitrogen
The “destroyer of quackery” badge. Got my start at talk.origins on USENET
The “inappropriate nocturnal use of lab equipment in the name of alternative science experimentation / communication” badge. If you’ve got it, use it!
Chim-Chim-Cheroo
Soot particles grow inside a flame when tiny, carbon-rich spheres stick together to form larger, tenuous aggregates. As they grow, the particles take on a characteristic branched shape because two colliding clusters are most likely to attach at their protruding “fingers.”
These bushy shapes are conveniently described as fractals–geometric objects whose mass grows as a fractional power of their linear size, rather than the third power that characterizes ordinary solids like spheres and cubes. Theory predicts that virtually all clusters should have a fractal dimension very close to 1.8, and past experiments agree. But a collaboration led by Hans Moosmüller of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, found many clusters with a much lower dimension, characteristic of a more rod-like shape.
Seeing it in Perspective
America’s Sea of Red Ink Was Years in the Making
Breaking down the $2 trillion in deficit since 2000. For all the hysteria about recent events, I find this tidbit interesting (summarized in this graphic):
About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.
If the analysis is extended further into the future, well beyond 2012, the Obama agenda accounts for only a slightly higher share of the projected deficits.
Obama doesn’t get a free pass, though.
“Bush behaved incredibly irresponsibly for eight years. On the one hand, it might seem unfair for people to blame Obama for not fixing it. On the other hand, he’s not fixing it.”
“And,” he added, “not fixing it is, in a sense, making it worse.”
The Effect of Inflation
Intellectual Ventures Lab: Quarter Shrinker
We found out that a local laboratory known as Hackerbot Labs had built a device which uses electromagnetic forming in order to shrink quarters down to the size of a dime. This device would be ideal for us to test our new highspeed video camera and other equipment, while collecting interesting data on how this device is functioning.
Mffle Wffle Hmm?
I was recently eating lunch ‘al desco’. While I was eating-working, a student walked in my office to ask me a question, saw I was eating lunch at my desk, and said “Oh, I’m so sorry for interrupting your lunch. I’ll come back later.”
I was stunned. This has never happened to me before.
I’ve taken to eating at my desk much more in recent times. (Defections of the old lunch crowd left us with less than critical mass, and I can web surf/blog on my lunch break if I’m at my desk) And I get similar treatment as FSP — the assumption that I’m in “may I help you” mode because I’m at my desk.
T or F? F
Remember the important rule of true-or-false questions: if any part of the statement is untrue, then the statement is false.
14-year-old hit by 30,000 mph space meteorite
A schoolboy has survived a direct hit by a meteorite after it fell to earth at 30,000mph.
No, false. There’s no way the meteorite was traveling 30,000 mph when it hit him, nor did it hit him and then form the crater. This doesn’t mean the chunk isn’t a meteorite, nor that he wasn’t struck by it — elements of the story are certainly plausible, and there’s no reason to suspect that anybody is fabricating the event. I suspect it’s a case of a reporter doing a minimum of background fact-checking and seeing that meteors travel that fast in space and just ran with it — no feel for the number being reasonable (supersonic, and many times faster than a bullet) or reconciling the relatively minor injury with this and the creation of a crater.
There’s a fairly thorough discussion of the details over at Bad Astronomy
Let's Teach Adults, Too
And let’s face it: Our culture has lost the ability to usefully disagree. Most Americans seem to avoid argument. But this has produced passive aggression and groupthink in the office, red and blue states, and families unable to discuss things as simple as what to watch on television. Rhetoric doesn’t turn kids into back-sassers; it makes them think about other points of view.
I had long equated arguing with fighting, but in rhetoric they are very different things. An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas the goal of a fight is to dominate your opponent, in an argument you succeed when you bring your audience over to your side. A dispute over territory in the backseat of a car qualifies as an argument, for example, in the unlikely event that one child attempts to persuade his audience rather than slug it.
Teaching kids how to argue properly presumes that the parents know how to argue, which I don’t think is generally the case. But that’s a rant for another post.