The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition?
The physics, and statistics, of flipping a coin.
The 50-50 proposition is actually more of a 51-49 proposition, if not worse. The sacred coin flip exhibits (at minimum) a whopping 1% bias, and possibly much more. 1% may not sound like a lot, but it’s more than the typical casino edge in a game of blackjack or slots. What’s more, you can take advantage of this little-known fact to give yourself an edge in all future coin-flip battles.
All Sorts: A Linguistic Experiment
All Sorts is a collection of collective nouns that may or may not have found their way into the Oxford English Dictionary. If you think that a charismatic collective is far superior to a dullard ‘bunch’ or ‘flock’ then this is the place for you.
It culls them from tweets, grabbing anything that is of the form “a this of thats”
a theory of scientists
a pratfall of clowns
a radiation of physicists
a melting pot of ukrainian nuclear physicists
a rant of bloggers
an array of geeks
I think tensor of geeks is better, but the only way to submit suggestions is to tweet. Alas, I don’t tweet. So I leave it to someone else to fix this, or proffer a test tube of chemists, or a thrust of geologists, or whatnot. (or a what of knots)
Water Striders. Filmed in slow-motion, of course.
There’s actually a bit of physics here, starting with the obvious, the reason they don’t sink: surface tension. Water is polar, so the molecules tend to attract each other, making the surface act like a series of springs and able to support small masses, up to the point that the attraction is overpowered.
Once the strider starts moving, we can see some more physics in action:
The water strider is actually hard to see in this picture — it’s a little above and the the left of center. The black dots are a shadow of sorts. The insect would not cast much of a visible shadow if it were on a flat surface; it’s small and light will tend to diffract around the legs. But what’s happening here is that the feet make an indentation in the water and it turns the now-curved surface of the water into a lens. And the lens is concave, so the light diverges and leaves a dark spot because light has been directed away.
The water strider has been moving, and this disturbs the water. We see the waves from this disturbance and the interference as two separate waves pass through each other.
Once again, you’re seeing the effects displayed on the creek bed, rather than the surface.
The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get
(1): The longstanding facts
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In reality, these longstanding facts provide the true foundation of journalism. But in practice, they play second-fiddle to the news, condensed beyond all meaning into a paragraph halfway down in a news story, tucked away in a remote corner of our news sites.
An interesting piece with which I basically agree; I’v noticed the problem of he absence of basic facts numerous times, especially on the 24-hour news shows. I’ve had the misfortune of tuning in a few hours after the breaking news was fist reported, and all I was fed was what had happened or come to light in the last hour or two, as if I was watching the whole time. Surely if you can repeat the same story every 15 minutes, you can give some background and context to it.
A picture gallery and a tribute to all the fantastic cat-ladders of the world.
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Right now the website contains approximately 730 pictures.
Chad’s guest post at the X-Change Files
[T]he first thing I want to do is take issue with the question’s phrasing. While it’s commonly believed that scientists lack communication skills, that’s very far from the truth.
It is almost impossible to be a successful scientist without also being a good communicator. Communicating results to other scientists, through conference talks and journal articles, is critical for scientific success. Additionally, most research funding is obtained through applications to granting agencies like the NSF or the NIH, and successful proposal writing is all about communication.
So, it’s simply not true that scientists lack communication skills in any absolute sense.
A modest proposal for improving football: the ‘time-in’
If you’ve ever noticed that football games slow to a predictable crawl at the end of each half, the time-in is the rule for you. The idea is simple: When the clock is stopped, for whatever reason, a coach could call a “time-in,” and force the clock to start up again. Think of it as the antimatter version of the timeout.
The time-in is so powerful that I recommend it be strictly rationed: each team would get only one time-in per season. The possibility of a sudden time-in would loom large in every coach’s mind at the most tense points in the game, introducing just enough concern and uncertainty to make the game different. Timeworn clock-management strategies would no longer be a given. And yet, for the average viewer on a Sunday, the game on the field would still be your father’s football.
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Of course, this assumes that the time-in is used that game. If it hasn’t been used yet, it affects the game in a different, but more subtle way: the opposing team will simply have to assume that it might be used. Coaches would enter the realm of game theory: how do we calculate when it’s the best game to use it? And what if the other team is expecting us to think this way?
Giant rat-eating nepenthes plant named after David Attenborough
Nepenthes attenboroughii, a previously unknown variety of pitcher plant discovered on a remote mountain in the Philippines, is so big that small rodents could be trapped inside and slowly dissolved by flesh-eating enzymes.
It apparently doesn’t actually say, Feed me.”
Matt does the wave. Faster than The Wave and The Speed(s) of a Wave
edit: and Light Sprint