One word of wisdom about water slides. I used to ride “Der Stuka” at Wet ‘n Wild in Orlando (which is “only” 23 m tall) back when I was stationed on the USS Disney World there. The collective wisdom was that you needed to clench while sliding lest the ride turn into “Das Enema” . ‘Nuff said.
Monthly Archives: September 2011
Nerdstracting
Not All Men are Created Prequel
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
Perpertuum Mobile: The Quest for Perpetual Motion
In terms of the laws of physics, at least as we understand them in the early twenty first century, perpetual motion machines are impossibilities. However, a wide variety of machines, theories and devices have been developed and proposed over the years. Here’s a look at some of the more interesting ones here at Dark Roasted Blend.
Motivated by Wanting to Understand the Punchline
Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?
What People Don’t Get About My Job: From A(rmy Soldier) to Z(ookeeper)
I am an engineer. Most people are scientifically and mathematically illiterate. Consequently, most people cannot fathom how much pleasure and delight I derive from my work. Of course I am also lucky to have a great job with great coworkers. But the pleasure of analyzing, say, the overall efficiency of a combined heat and power facility is hard to describe.
Well, this is partially true. My wife actually gets irritated that I never mind going to work. She does not feel exactly the same about her job.
I also wish children could understand how much fun I have. Because we need more engineers in this country for sure if we hope to remain globally competitive.
That goes for scientist, too, as far as I’m concerned.
What the Heck is it, Edgar?
What is public science, and why do you need it?
Here’s the truth: the NIH has funded research that led to 130 Nobel Prizes, and recently funded research that led to the first cancer vaccine. Here are some highlights from the research they funded in 2010 alone. And the NSF has sponsored research that led to 180 Nobel Prizes. Over the past few years, NSF has contributed to research that has made major strides in health, energy efficiency, and exploration. The NSF funded one of the very first web browsers in the 1990s, and is currently funding the development of next-generation robotics. NSF and its sister science agencies are investing in technologies that could one day transform the world.
To sell this idea, I think you have to paint people who are against science funding as being against progress. It’s important to note that it takes time for research advances to work their way into commercial products or otherwise be useful. To pick an example from my area of work, Norman Ramsey won (half of) the Nobel Prize in 1989 “for the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks” but the invention was based on microwave/radar work in WWII and the paper on the topic came out in 1950. And yet the technology that it enabled, atomic clocks, became the basis for worldwide timekeeping in 1967. Among other things, atomic clocks enable high-speed communication and GPS. Industries that make billions of dollars a year, but it took decades for the various technologies to come together, mature and be applied. Choking off funding for research puts at risk future discovery that could have the same level of impact. We may not feel it immediately, but it will affect us eventually.
That's the Best, Hand Down. Or Feet Up.
The downside, as it were, is that mistakes would tend to hit you in the face. This beats the hell out of the juggling my grad-school housemates did.
Because Graham is on Holiday and Chun Yao's Dead
Despite the fact that this is satire and thus includes some level of exaggeration, it does do a rather nice job of highlighting some of the frustration of science outreach. Not everything can be condensed down into an information mcnugget or two, and there are subjects where you really need a decent background in physics to understand what’s going on, even at a superficial level. That frustration comes to a head when you meet someone who thinks that advanced science should be understandable to them even without any background schooling, and those same folks seem to be the ones who hold you at fault when they don’t understand. (They also seem to conclude that it’s wrong if it doesn’t make sense to them, but that’s another level of frustration)
h/t to Schrödinger’s hat
Say It Loud, Too, So I Understand
Slow Down! Why Some Languages Sound So Fast
[S]ome languages seem to zip by faster than others. Spanish blows the doors off French; Japanese leaves German in the dust — or at least that’s how they sound.
But how could that be? The dialogue in movies translated from English to Spanish doesn’t whiz by in half the original time, after all, which is what it would have to do if the same lines were being spoken at doubletime.
…
Vietnamese was used as a reference language for the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists to be very information dense) given an arbitrary value of 1.For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable is, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and the slower the speech thus was.