it’s you girl makin’ it spin, you’re making me dizzy
Go-Pro Camera on a Hula-Hoop. Gotta get me one of these cameras.
Monthly Archives: June 2011
More From the Math Illiterati
Survey: 36% Of U.S. Adults “Not Concerned” With Electronics Power Consumption
Adults in the U.S. could use a little more education on economics and physics, it seems. We’re not drawing the connection between power consumed by our electronics and the cost of our electric bills.
A new survey from the Consumer Electronics Association found thirty-six percent of adults in the U.S. are “not concerned” with the amount of power consumed by their gadgets, gear and appliances. Sixty percent of U.S. adults, by contrast, are concerned about the cost of their electric bill.
I’m not sure where the conundrum is supposed to be. 60% vs 36%. Since that adds up to 96%, the numbers are not such that you could conclusively say that there are people who are concerned about their electric bill and yet not concerned with the amount of power their gadgets draw. I would not be surprised if such people existed, mind you, but this survey does not present any evidence of irrationality in that regard.
DIY Electronic Curmudgeonry
HOWTO make a Joule Thief and get all the power you’ve paid for
This wee beastie is a Joule Thief, a device whose sole purpose in life is to exhaust the power remaining in batteries that are too weak to do anything else. Simply build these and affix them to your “dead” batteries and thrill to the spectacle of the power you’ve paid for being available to you, right down to the last dribble.
Then go out on the porch, shake your fist, and tell those damn electrons to get off your lawn. If you want to skip the curmudgeonly comment, you can go straight to the instructable.
(I use rechargeables, so I have no need of an electron-marrow-sucking device)
Daddies Have Tenure
Experimental Error: Fetus Don’t Fail Me Now
I don’t know how other prospective fathers treat their wives’ pregnancies, but I saw it as a science project. It had a protocol, parameters, a timeline, and even the one item that makes funding agencies happy: a deliverable. I found myself poking at my wife’s abdomen, asking, “Who’s Daddy’s little gestating blastocyst? Who’s recapitulating phylogeny?” If I had published the results in a peer-reviewed journal, the article would have looked like this
There’s some good “talk like a scientist” example in there. Oh, wait: the written sample contains jargon that can be classified as scientific in origin within experimental error.
Why They Bothered
Finally, results from Gravity Probe B
There has been a bit of discussion on theses results already, but I note this one because I liked the summary about why the experiment was done:
Even though it is popular lore that Einstein was right (I even wrote a book on the subject), no such book is ever completely closed in science. As we have seen with the 1998 discovery that the universe is accelerating, measuring an effect contrary to established dogma can open the door to a whole new world of understanding, as well as of mystery. The precession of a gyroscope in the gravitation field of a rotating body had never been measured before GP-B. While the results support Einstein, this didn’t have to be the case. Physicists will never cease testing their basic theories, out of curiosity that new physics could exist beyond the “accepted” picture.
My only nit is that if we are testing the models, they are not dogma. There’s a subspecies of crackpot that rails against science as a religion who appear to miss the whole “experimental confirmation” aspect to science. They paint a picture of scientists who blindly, unquestioningly accept Einstein and it just isn’t the case.
What Would Cesium Do? 'This Will Not End Well' Edition
Just Humming Along
Slo-mo camera envy. The photographer here is using the EX-F1, which has a better resolution, but the camera costs about 5x as mine, so my hummingbird shots aren’t quite as nice.
Just Leave the Beretta, 007
Letters of Note: May I suggest that Mr. Bond be armed with a revolver?
Boothroyd’s long letter continued in a similar vein, filled with incredibly detailed weaponry suggestions for 007. Fleming, delighted to be furnished with such expert advice, immediately replied with the letter seen below, and, as a result of their subsequent correspondence, equipped Bond with a Walther PPK in the novel Dr. No.
Boothroyd’s observation about the Beretta being a lady’s gun lacking stopping power made it into the movie as “Nice and light — in a lady’s handbag. No stopping power” and the armourer was given the name Major Boothroyd.
Looking for a Straw-Colored Needle in a Large Haystack
There’s a bit of buzz about the WHO characterizing cell phones as “possibly carcinogenic to humans”. This is a pretty detailed explanation of what that means, from Ed Yong (I think; the link that brought me here said so, but I don’t see Ed’s name on the page anywhere)
World Health Organisation verdict on mobile phones and cancer
What does that mean?
It means that there is some evidence linking mobile phones to cancer, but it is too weak to make any strong conclusions. Specifically, IARC’s panel said that the evidence that mobile phones pose a health risk was “limited” for two types of brain tumours – glioma and acoustic neuroma – and “inadequate” when it comes to other types of cancer.The Chairman of the group, Dr Jonathan Samet, said, “The conclusion means that there could be some risk, and therefore we need to keep a close watch for a link between cell phones and cancer risk.”
The post goes into some detail about why this is really a non-issue: there is still no proposed mechanism, there are obvious flaws in some of the studies and there are a lot of conflicting results. That last part ties into an important point — the underlying reason that researchers are getting conflicting results is because the system being measured is inherently noisy and the effect under scrutiny is small.
The increased risk‚ from one of the studies (remember, there are others that saw no increased risk), is a 40% increase of those two types of brain tumors, which sounds like a lot, except … you need to look at this in context. Even a substantial increase in a small risk still leaves you with a small risk. We’ve seen this before with traffic analysis, and now we have it for cancer analysis. Matthew Herper has already run the numbers
96% of the U.S. population, or about 300 million people, have cellphones. If everyone’s risk of glioma went up 40% as a result of cellphone use, the number of gliomas in the U.S. would increase by 8,000. That’s a one in 40,000 increase in each person’s risk of glioma, which still isn’t very big.
But the study the WHO is citing only showed the 40% increase in the 10% of people who used cellphones most. I don’t know how many people in the U.S. would now fall into this group, but we’d be talking about maybe hundreds of cases spread out over the whole U.S. population.
We can look at this another way. A fair amount of data has not yielded a statistically significant result. Any signal that exists is still buried in the noise, requiring more statistics, but until you get those statistics, you can’t rule out an effect. What you can do is say that the effect is no larger than some amount, and what is probably the worst-case scenario analyzed above — in the unlikely event the study wasn’t an aberration — yields a very small risk. Which is probably why the collective response of scientists has been “meh”
Great Balls o' Leidenfrost!
[R]esearchers have shown the Leidenfrost effect works very well in reverse. They dropped metal balls heated to different temperatures into a liquid and watched how fast they fell. The chose a room temperature ball, a heated ball that wasn’t enough to make the Leidenfrost effect occur, and a ball heated above the Leidenfrost temperature.
Moving through water vapor is easier than through liquid. There should be some speed where you can’t boil the water quickly enough, though, and you get a transition of the effect in the right-hand tube to that of the middle tube, or something similar.