Swans on Tea

I’ve posted several links, with tongue-in-cheek titles, to “obvious” science. But in reality, such science in necessary.

‘Duh’ science: Why researchers spend so much time proving the obvious

Scientific studies quantify results, which is important. Even if you know an effect is there, knowing how big the effect is and what variables change the results and by how much gives you insight into how to attack/leverage the phenomenon. Also — and the article only mentions this in passing — conventional wisdom isn’t always right. It’s necessary to do studies to confirm that actions are having the outcomes we think they are, even if nine times out of ten they do. One of the more famous examples is the conventional medical wisdom that peptic ulcers were caused by stress or spicy foods, and how that colored their treatment. Because that conventional wisdom was challenged, we learned that most of these ulcers are cause by the Helicobacter pylori bacterium.

Helium Hokum: Why Airships Will Never Be Part of Our Transportation Infrastructure

[A]irships got left behind. Why? They have an Achilles’ heel. No, it’s not the weather, hydrogen, or the materials of the day—and it’s not some conspiracy or a crewman with a bomb on the Hindenburg ruining it for everybody. Like a lot of things, the facts are simple and scientific, and thus boring—unless you’re intrigued by simple scientific facts. Either way it’s this: airships are inefficient.

The purpose of transportation is to get a thing from one place to another. The measure of any vehicle’s efficiency—be it by land or by sea or even by air—is how much it carries vs. how hard you have to push it and how fast it goes. At the end of the day, we all want to get it there fast, and we all want to get it there cheap.

The short clips of McBain throughout the early years of the Simpson edited together to form one short movie!

Where to Live to Avoid a Natural Disaster

Corvallis, OR is the metro area with the lowest risk of natural disasters in the US.

Small quake and drought risk; little extreme weather.

In the six years I lived there we did have a drought and an earthquake (Magnitude 5.6, ~ 30 miles away), so it was more exciting/dangerous when I was there. Lots of cities in the northwest rated as low-risk.

The time-lapse starfield has been edited to show the rotation of the Earth from the point of view of the stars.

Skulls in the Stars: Water has properties that are positively electrifying!

Why is water so strongly attracted to static electricity? It turns out that the answer is somewhat complicated, and the complete explanation was a bit of a minor mystery for nearly eighty years!

Tunny code-breaker rebuilt at Bletchley Park

The entire machine was rebuilt using spares from BT telephone exchanges that were remodelled in the 1980s. All of the engineers that worked on the rebuild were ex-BT employees and had contacts at other museums, and so could lay their hands on the components, Whetter added.

More info on Colossus/Tunny

Fingerprints Go the Distance

Slightly smaller than a square tissue box, AIRprint houses two 1.3 megapixel cameras and a source of polarized light. One camera receives horizontally polarized light, while the other receives vertically polarized light. When light hits a finger, the ridges of the fingerprint reflect one polarization of light, while the valleys reflect another. “That’s where the real kicker is, because if you look at an image without any polarization, you can kind of see fingerprints, but not really well,” says Burcham. By separating the vertical and the horizontal polarization, the device can overlap those images to produce an accurate fingerprint, which is fed to a computer for verification.

I’m guessing that what they mean is that the light source is polarized and the cameras have polarizing filters in front of them to see the two components. Reflectivity generally depends on the polarization and angle of the incident light; the whole reason that polarized sunglasses are effective is that light scattered off of a surface tends to be polarized parallel to that surface, and at Brewster’s angle absolutely none of the perpendicular component will be reflected. So it seems reasonable that detection of the two polarizations improves the contrast of the image you get. Light at normal incidence will reflect the polarized light with no change, but light scattered off of the valleys will mix in some of the orthogonal polarization, which gets picked up by the other camera.

Close-up of a mosquito drinking her fill, getting fat

Backreaction: The cube of physical theories

To our best present knowledge these constants are indeed constant, but you can imagine varying them and ask what happens to the theory then. In many cases this corresponds to some physical limit. For example, if your theory contains terms in v/c, where v is velocity, then the limit of velocities small compared to c (i.e. non-relativistic) formally corresponds to taking c to infinity, ie 1/c to zero.

Americans say ‘no’ to electrics despite high gas prices

Nearly six of 10 Americans — 57% — say they won’t buy an all-electric car no matter the price of gas, according to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll.

That’s a stiff headwind just as automakers are developing electrics to help meet tighter federal rules that could require their fleets to average as high as 62 miles per gallon in 2025. And President Obama has set a goal of a million electric vehicles in use in the U.S. by 2015.

I’m assuming that journalism school covered metaphorical statements and the author used “stiff headwind” as he meant to.

That statistic presumably means ~40% are open to the idea. The US adult population is more than 200 million people, so in what world is a group of 80 million potential electric car drivers less than the 1 million needed to reach that goal, thus representing that stiff headwind?

Way down at the end, it is noted that

Nissan interprets the poll numbers as a good sign, pointing out that “as many as 40% are considering driving electric vehicles.”

While math is the obvious problem here, I don’t think it’s the larger issue, which is that of spin. The author/headline writer wanted to cast the story in a negative light and so they leveraged the existence of a slim-margin majority to make a statement. People resisting change really isn’t news. I wonder if they had done a poll around 1900 about the enthusiasm for driving an automobile, what kind of results they would have gotten.

Chad’s been doing a series on non-adademic careers for scientists, and the first in this year’s batch: PNAS: Amy Young, Saponifier

It’s a noble effort , reminding people that there are many options outside of the professor-begetting-another-professor path, which is not sustainable, but the reason I really took notice was that this brought another topic onto some sharper focus, namely my position that everyday cooking/baking — when one simply follows the recipe in the cookbook — is not science. A lot of cooking, I think, doesn’t get past the level of I cooked too long and it’s burned/dried out, which is barely dipping your toe into the soufflé of science. (And Jennifer seemingly disagreed with this position, but it turns out it was mostly semantics — that cooking, done properly, is not about blindly following recipes is something with which I agree. The issue is blindly following recipes.)

Here’s the relevant part of Amy’s soap cooking approach that isn’t always followed in food preparation

If I hadn’t had the importance of keeping a proper lab notebook drilled into my head in my formative years, I would never in a hundred years be able to keep up with all the product lines I’ve got now. (Which colorant did I put in this one, again? And how much? Wait, wasn’t this the fragrance that made the soap seize up on me last time? I should probably try a lower temperature. And so on.) It may be six months or more between making batches of a given kind of soap, so keeping track is vital. Not to mention the product development phase, in which the thing just doesn’t work right, and I have fifteen different things to try varying; I’ve talked with colleagues who run similar businesses, and they seem to operate in a “just change stuff until it works” mode, rather than changing one element at a time (even if I run a dozen or more iterations simultaneously) so as to know which thing or combination of things created the desired effect. It’s invaluable in crafting the more complex items.

This really shows the systematic approach; it’s important to know what cause leads to which effect, and to quantify what you’ve done.