Monthly Archives: February 2010

I Want my Apocalypse, and I Want it Now.

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Why are you so terribly disappointing?

Big f–ing deal. We just do not care. It’s all a big disappointment. Hey, I was expecting to be blown away. I was expecting miracles and transformations and multiple twitching orgasms on sight. Do not come at me with tantalizing promises only to reveal that you can fulfill most of them to a fairly good degree, and not far exceed all of them in every imaginable way. We’re Americans, goddammit. Ye shall know us by the tang of our bitter and untenable jadedness.

A typical rant. I was expecting better.

The Word Salad is a Perq

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Oh, I found you a new job

Unfortunately, nobody can possibly be qualified to do it. Ultimatonic field patterning instruments, WTF?

Ultimatons, for the uninitiated (which included me up to five minutes before writing this:

Ultimatons are the energy particles which make up the electrons, the PRIME physical units of material existence (472:1); Ultimatons aggregate into electrons. (475:1)

Ultimatons do not whirl about in circuits within electrons, but they CLUSTER, – or spread, in accordance with their AXIAL REVOLUTIONARY VELOCITIES, which determines:

a. The differential electronic dimensions
b. The NEGATIVE or POSITIVE reactions of the several types of electronic units
The entire SEGREGATION AND GROUPING of electronic matter, RESULT from these various functions of the COMPONENT ULTIMATONIC INTERASSOCIATION

Ah, all becomes clear. The woo runs deep in this one, Obi-Wan.

One Fish, Two Fish

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From Fish to Infinity

I have a friend who gets a tremendous kick out of science, even though he’s an artist. Whenever we get together all he wants to do is chat about the latest thing in evolution or quantum mechanics. But when it comes to math, he feels at sea, and it saddens him. The strange symbols keep him out. He says he doesn’t even know how to pronounce them.

In fact, his alienation runs a lot deeper. He’s not sure what mathematicians do all day, or what they mean when they say a proof is elegant. Sometimes we joke that I just should sit him down and teach him everything, starting with 1 + 1 = 2 and going as far as we can.

Crazy as it sounds, over the next several weeks I’m going to try to do something close to that. I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.

Trust Me

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There’s a lot of information out there, and no possible way to tell if it’s right or not. Whom do you trust?

It’s not really an easy question to answer, because there are so many willing to deceive us and it’s not that hard to do. Lately there’s been a lot of grumblings about how we can no longer trust science and scientists (not that the two are interchangeable). The real problem, I contend, is not that the trustworthiness of science or scientists has changed — we are no more or less trustworthy today that we were yesterday, or last month, or last century. The process is sound, even if the self-correction takes time. But someone not (or insufficiently) schooled in science might not be willing to accept this.

You probably shouldn’t trust anyone, period. The problem is that from a practical standpoint you have no choice in the matter. You can trust things for which you have a baseline of empirical evidence (i.e. experience), and you will not generally trust sources that contradict this experience, and will lend credence to those that do. But if you do not have the requisite experience, that’s not an option. People will trust sources that have given them good information in the past, but this can be a problem — they could be setting you up (a con game of sorts), or you could be trusting them over too wide of a range of topics: the source may be trustworthy on one issue, but have no expertise on another. And ultimately we really can’t trust ourselves, because we often see what we want to see. Our eyes can be fooled. We have a tendency to lend more credence to sources with whom we agree or who give us the answer we want, and less to those with whom we disagree or give us the answer that doesn’t confirm our bias. We deceive ourselves too easily.

Let me show you how easy it is to cast doubt on science, by playing to ignorance of science terminology and methods. Even without bringing quantum mechanics into the discussion.

——

The Large Hadron Collider has been in the news, and scientists for years have been doing similar experiments to “prove” the existence of all of these particles they claim make up the standard model. (Ha, the “standard” model. Like they’d allow anyone to discover something new.) If you look carefully, you’ll find that a whole bunch of these experiments are a sham. The experiments that supposedly show that these particles exist were set up to detect coincidences. And the scientists freely admit this, and even point it out in their discussions! Yet they pretend that this means something significant.

There’s a device in your car — easily accessible to the driver or even a passenger — that will cause the car to accelerate, even if you don’t push down on the gas pedal. The designers know this, and yet they don’t consider it to be a flaw. Despite the fact that misuse has caused countless accidents, they say it’s necessary for the operation of the car for this dangerous “feature” to exist.

Also, did you know that touching the brakes in the right way can cause your car to accelerate? (Even if it’s not a Toyota)

——

I really hope the two examples above are transparent, because if you read a physics blog you probably know enough physics to be familiar with its terminology quirks. But there are people out there who exploit this — anyone who denigrates an element of science as “just a theory,” for example, because the lay definition and science definition are different. Or gets all mock-outraged at a scientist using a “trick” (the chain rule and integration by parts are tricks, too. Nothing insidious or conspiratorial about that, other than being part of calculus)

I don’t have any magic bullet to solve this problem. People will lie to advance their personal agendas and ideologies, if lying can happen without serious repercussions. And that’s precisely what I see in political discussions these days – there seems to be no negative repercussion for just making shit up, and this seems to have spilled over into the popular press when dealing with science (Why is the news media comfortable with lying about science?), and even more so on the op-ed pages. But at least in science, you have a few things working in your favor: a basic competence in science, scientific literacy and critical thought helps keep the charlatans at bay, and the process of science itself does not lend itself to misrepresentation in the long run. There are other scientists out there who are going to try and reproduce or apply any interesting result, and if they can’t because you made up your data, kiss your career goodbye. (If they can’t because they are an incompetent hack with an agenda, well, that’s another story). So while you may not trust an individual scientist, at least the system is set up to be self-correcting, as opposed to other avenues of information.

Infrared is Soooo Tasty

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Researchers use infrared cameras to determine taste quality of Japanese beef

At a taste testing held by the two Gifu institutes on Jan. 29th, twenty-four nutritionists, livestock industry experts, and consumers were asked to rank two samples of super high-quality Hida-gyu, boiled quickly in a Japanese hotpot, on ten points, according to the Yomiuri. Of the twenty-four participates, fourteen gave a better ranking to the samples that were determined to have higher levels of Oleic acid by the researchers’ infrared camera technique. One of the institutes’ lead researchers, Tomoyuki Tanaka, told reporters, “I want to improve the accuracy.”

Liquid Glass

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Spray-on miracle could revolutionise manufacturing

The secret of liquid glass is that it forms an ultra-thin film between 15 and 30 molecules thick – about 500 times thinner than human hair. On this nanoscale – a few millionths of a millimetre thick – liquid glass turns into a highly flexible invisible barrier that repels water, dirt and bacteria, yet is resistant to heat, acids and UV radiation but remains “breathable”.

…

The liquid glass is composed of almost pure silicon dioxide, the chemical constituent of quartz or silica, the most abundant mineral in the Earth’s crust. It is quite inert and has no known harmful impact on the environment, unlike many of the domestic and industrial cleaning products its use could help to reduce.

The “easy-clean” properties of the liquid glass could lead to drastic cuts in the amount of potentially toxic cleaning agents used in factories, offices, schools, hospitals and the home, as well as cutting the costs of labour and the amount of time spent scrubbing surfaces.

Things Break, Don't They?

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Chad went an mentioned a buzzword that sets my teeth on edge: deferred maintenance.

It’s not just the economics of academia that suck in this regard. I’ve seen my fair share of it, too. As Chad notes, maintenance is not sexy, and it’s hard to get people not directly involved fired up about it.

Things break, even when Dino and Luigi Vercotti aren’t shaking you down. They break even when you can avoid the overzealous attitude of “If it’s stuck, force it. If it breaks it needed replacing anyway.” And there various approaches you can take to this fact of life —

1. Fix/replace things when they break
2. Maintain the equipment in good working order, so it breaks down less often
3. Try to anticipate when something will break, and replace it just before that happens

If we’re talking about things we really need, the first option is pretty much mandatory. Sure, when the singing fish in the rec room breaks down you can let it slide, but not so much when your lab equipment goes. But the other options entail some prioritizing and risk management. If you can afford to let some apparatus run until it dies, and the downtime while you replace it doesn’t affect you, then your choice is pretty clear, but very often in business and research you can’t let that happen. Broken equipment means some people can’t do their jobs, and other people are probably working overtime getting things working again. And yet, all too often the first response to budget cuts is to cut the maintenance budget.

At first glance, from a beancounter’s bottom-line approach, this looks good, which it’s why it’s so tempting. Money not spent is money saved, at least in the short-term, myopic acasual view, and new equipment does tend to last a while even without doing much to maintain it. So you seem to have saved money. But eventually, the equipment dies before it would have, had it been properly looked after, and now you’re stuck. You hadn’t expected the equipment to die, bureaucratically speaking— there’s no money in the budget for a replacement. You don’t already have a spare widget, because that’s an expenditure, and the goal was to cut the budget.

In business situations, where you deliver a product of some sort, you can at least quantify downtime in terms of lost productivity, and make a business case for keeping things running. But what if that metric isn’t there? There are a lot of situations where lost time isn’t measured (people “steal” budget this way — eliminate a position by shifting work to another department. They look like they’ve saved money, and the extra time burden isn’t accounted for because it’s other departments that are taking up the slack)

Here’s where the really insidious part of the process comes into play. From what I’ve seen (in different bureaucracies), even though run-of-the-mill budget expenses are squeezed, if you can turn it into a crisis you can still get money. Without this widget, your operations screech to a halt, and that’s a calamity, dammit, so you take your case to a higher level, and they search for money to patch the figurative or literal gaping hole that’s appeared. Money is siphoned off from other sources (perhaps, ironically, from other programs cutting maintenance budget), and that saves the day. Until the next emergency.

And nobody has learned anything useful. Systems that run this way have this very destructive feedback loop. The catastrophes get fixed, after a fashion, and few stop to think about how that situation — and the large amount of money spent — could have been averted with less money ultimately spent. And the really frustrating thing is that the people involved in these decisions are smart enough to know that not changing the oil in their car isn’t a viable money-saving tactic, and yet can’t seem to transfer that mindset to the business case.

Ooh, I Just Love those Convective Fingers

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Chemistry Drives Convection

Convection occurs when lower density fluid is located below higher density fluid–the lower density material rises, and the higher density material sinks. The best known case is where the lower density fluid is warmer, but it need not be. Since the 1980s researchers have been studying convection triggered by “autocatalytic” reactions, which are self-promoting. But there has been little study of the effects of more common chemical reactions on fluid flow, which could be relevant to many areas of science, such as the geology of Earth’s mantle.

Anne De Wit and her colleagues at the Brussels Free University (ULB) looked at the general case where two reactants come together to produce a single product (A+B→C). They developed a hydrodynamic model and then performed several computer simulations in which a less dense solution containing reactant A was placed on top of a more dense solution with reactant B. This normally stable configuration was disturbed by the appearance of the product C at the boundary between the two solutions, which led to convective “fingers.”