Morph-osaurs: How shape-shifting dinosaurs deceived us
Science robs my youth. There is no triceratops.
Scannella and Horner say that triceratops is merely the juvenile form of torosaurus. As the animal aged, its horns changed shape and orientation and its frill became longer, thinner and less jagged. Finally it became fenestrated, producing the classic torosaurus form
I ran across this twaddle at NPR: Scientists Take Quantum Steps Toward Teleportation, thinking perhaps there was some new result being described. There wasn’t, and furthermore, it’s a giant turd of a story, hitting all the “highlights” of teleportation reporting, along with the misendorsement of Michio Kaku. This isn’t the first time that Kaku has spouted nonsense about teleportation; it left a bad taste in Chad’s mouth not too long ago.
From the NPR story:
“Quantum entanglement” may sound like an awful sci-fi romance flick, but it’s actually a phenomenon that physicists say may someday lead to the ability to teleport an object all the way across the galaxy instantly.
It’s not exactly the Star Trek version of teleportation, where an object disappears then reappears somewhere else. Rather, it “entangles” two different atoms so that one atom inherits the properties of another.
To use an epithet I learned in the navy: Not only no, but f#@k no. Quantum teleportation does not teleport objects, it teleports information. It is not exactly the Star Trek version of teleportation in the sense that it’s nothing at all like Star Trek. Mentioning Star Trek (or just Scotty, and this story does both) is greatest hit #1 in any teleportation story.
And: Physicists say? Which ones? I want names!
“An invisible umbilical cord emerges connecting these two electrons. And you can separate them by as much as a galaxy if you want. Then, if you vibrate one of them, somehow on the other end of the galaxy the other electron knows that its partner is being jiggled.”
This is what Kaku has gotten wrong before, and is hit #2. Entanglement does not tell you this — it tells you that when you measure particle 1, you will instantly know what state particle 2 is in. You haven’t changed the state of 1, because is wasn’t in an eigenstate to begin with — you’ve collapsed the wavefunction, and gotten all of the information about the state of the system in doing so. Wiggling the electron at that point does absolutely nothing to its formerly-entangled partner.
Kaku’s getting it wrong, and needs to STFU about it.
Hit #3 takes us into crackpotopia
It could one day lead to new types of computers, and some even think entanglement may explain things like telepathy.
What is there to explain about telepathy? That it’s nonsense? You have to confirm that a phenomenon actually, objectively exists before you could even think about trotting entanglement out as an explanation for it. This is a slimy tactic — don’t even address that the phenomenon in question is on decidedly shaky footing, and instead propose that you have an explanation for it. The reader gets the impression, though, that the phenomenon is real and has the endorsement of mainstream science, and that we are merely looking for the mechanism of how it works. And you also used the “some think” schtick. Are you using anonymous sources?
NPR, you got hoodwinked by someone who didn’t know what he was talking about and got really lazy about checking up on he facts.
Last year, gg triggered my Jealousy-o-meter by getting some pictures of hummingbirds, putting my previous effort to shame. I plotted revenge in the form of a plan to get slo-mo footage and was thwarted, though I managed to get a hummingbird moth.
I now claim success. Mwuhahahaha.
On my recent vacation we were back at our old digs, where I had gotten the previous shots on my DLSR, and set up to use my Exilim high-speed camera (EX-FH20 model). We got a visitor within a day, and some more action over the course of the week. Mostly females, though it’s tough to say if it was just one repeatedly visiting or not, and I did spot a male, with its prominent red patch on his throat, on one or two occasions. After discovering that reaching for the camera and turning it on usually scared them away, I went for the option of mounting the camera on my Gorillapod and placing it on the table in front of me, requiring only a click to turn the camera on (it tended to shut off during the wait for a visit to the feeder). I also left it running while I stepped away, and then scanned the footage for evidence of a visit. The drawback of that option is that 5 minutes of elapsed time is more than an hour of footage at 420 fps, and almost three hours at 1000 fps. That’s a lot of data to sort through. The fixed targeting of a tripod caused some missed shots when the bird would hover about a foot away from the feeder, but the alternative was more missed shots. The difference between this and shots “in the wild” is that you know where the subject is going to be — at the feeder — and don’t have to track it as it flies. And you know it will be flying, unlike the many potential subjects who just sit there until you run out of patience and stop filming. That’s when they decide to jump or fly.
I got shots at both of the faster frame rates, along with some stills using the burst mode, which captures 40 frames in a second.
Here’s a sequence of stills from the burst mode, turned into a movie
Now we go to 420 fps
and finally, on to 1000 fps. This last movie is even better at showing the distinct change in the pitch of the wings as the bird moves away from the feeder, hovers, and then flies away. Which is pretty cool.
Note that all three movies should represent between a second or two or so of elapsed time. 420 fps = 14:1 and was 37 seconds long with some dead time at the end, and 1000 fps is 33.3:1, with a playback of 40 seconds. I slowed the frame rate of the stills down to 15 fps when I converted the sequence to a movie, to make it last longer than one second. Even so, the flap rate seems very slow for that sequence — I suppose it’s possible there’s aliasing going on, and/or my settings are different from what I thought they were. Other still sequences show more flapping. The sound they typically make jibes with what I get from the internets, that the beating is somewhere in the range of 20-200 Hz; it was this low-pitched fluttering that was my first indication that a visitor was nearby.
I did get many more shots, but uploading them to youtube is a bit of a pain — the upload generally craps out at least once, which makes me reluctant to try too many large files. I have had limited success with the java option which supposedly lets you restart a stalled upload (finally got the 420 fps movie shown here to upload; I had originally uploaded a shorter clip).
If you want to see how the pros do it, go here. Better shots, but they put in a whole lot more time and have better equipment at their disposal.
UPDATE (8/4): I have uploaded stills to flickr, and will probably add more later