Monthly Archives: April 2010

Endorsing the Scientific Method

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Boobquake determined to prove cleric wrong

Dressing immodestly on April 26th, in order to disprove the statement by a cleric:

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,” Sedighi said.

Unfortunately, a single test is not enough, since there may well be an earthquake in close temporal proximity to the event. We need lots of statistics.

Update: Jen recognizes this

And yes, I know I need a larger sample size to make this good science. Maybe I’ll include Mardi gras in my calculations.

Bad Sex

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Saw this in an infographic (I was just looking, really).

prostitution info

Wait, what? The number of men + women arrested doesn’t add up to 100%? Is there a third gender, called “customers?” Or, all customers are hermaphrodites?

Who was Charles Lindberg?

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Who Is College Material?

In all likelihood, therefore, the developmental students had heard the name Charles Lindbergh. It’s just that 90% never cared enough to follow through. They never looked him up in a reference book or on the web. They never asked their parents or teachers. They just shrugged and went on with their lives.

After more than 25 years teaching at the City University and State University of New York, I’ve come to the counterintuitive conclusion that the single greatest predictor of whether a student will succeed or fail in college is not what he knows when he graduates from high school but what he wants to know when he graduates from high school. Intellectual curiosity is more determinative than high test scores or good work habits because it precedes them — indeed, it causes them. The desire to know just for the sake of knowing, to pick up random facts and start drawing connections in your mind, is the hallmark of the lifetime learner.

I don’t think it’s counterintuitive at all. It’s a matter of being able to devise a way to measure it. However, having gotten the WTF? facial expression from many people when a subject like this is broached, I get the impression that the intellectual curiosity trait is not particularly widespread. There are scads of people who treat learning as a burden.

Games People Play

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I don’t play, so I don’t know if the first rule about Farmville is Don’t Talk About Farmville!

Cultivated Play: Farmville

As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks. In other words, the more you play Farmville the less you have to play Farmville. For such a popular game, this seems suspicious.

Colonel Mustard, In the Lab, With a Lead Ingot

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Roman ingots to shield particle detector

Lead is, in principle, a shield against radiation, but freshly mined lead is itself slightly radioactive because it contains an unstable isotope, lead-210. “We could never use it for our experiment, which is exactly about keeping background radioactivity to a minimum,” says Ettore Fiorini, a physicist at the University of Milan-Bicocca and coordinator of the CUORE experiment. After it is extracted from the ground, however, lead-210 decays into more stable isotopes, with the concentration of the radioactive isotope halving every 22 years. The lead in the Roman ingots has now lost almost all traces of its radioactivity.