Monthly Archives: May 2012
The Double-Edged Sword
This Is How Easy It is For Thieves To Steal Everything In Your Wallet
Providence’s NBC 10 took an identity theft expert to the streets to show consumers how easy it is. He slipped an RFID card scanner (you can find them on eBay for as little as 50 bucks) into an iPad case and went to town.
The worst part is there’s virtually no way to protect yourself from scanners other than investing in a special wallet or credit card sleeves that block them. They can read straight through handbags and coat pockets.
Merchants probably love them because they speed up processing. However, the banks issuing the credit cards are still on the hook for fraud, so I have to wonder how much of a problem this really is in practice. As the report mentions, your name and the security code are not encoded.
SFW
A gallery of people getting blasted with air. Save the link, because Googling is probably not going to get you there.
Magnifying the Universe
While other sites have tried to magnify the universe, no one else has done so with real photographs and 3D renderings. To fully capture the awe of the vastly different sizes of the Pillars of Creation, Andromeda, the sun, elephants and HIV, you really need to see images, not just illustrations of these items. Stunningly enough, the Cat’s Eye Nebula is surprising similar to coated vesicles, showing that even though the nebula is more than 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times larger, many things are similar in our universe.
The Evidence is Pretty Thin
The secret molecular life of soap bubbles (1913)
Most of us would look at a soap film image and marvel at the beautiful rainbow colors; others would investigate the optics underlying them. But it took an exceptional physicist, Jean Baptiste Perrin (1870-1942), to realize that these colors concealed something more: direct evidence that matter consists of discrete atoms and molecules!
Today we take for granted that all material objects in the universe are comprised of discrete “bits” of matter, which we call atoms; however, even up until the early 20th century there were still proponents of the continuum hypothesis, in which all matter is assumed to be infinitely divisible.
What Goes Up, Must Come Down
Having a Fling
Grade Inflation
Bad Physics Reporting In Abundance!
Zapperz has the summary of yet another reporting fail (or in this case, a D-) on the subject of quantum teleportation.
No Bones About It
Prime Suspect: Did the Science Consultant Do It?
Synopsis: an episode of Bones does a sendup of the existence of science consultants in TV/movies, followed by some tips on the path to becoming a Hollywood science consultant.
I’ve told one of my stories of being a ghost-consultant of sorts. I got a few free meals out of it, which were welcome because I was in grad school (as well as an annual insight into a few upcoming episodes of Star Trek, useful for impressing my friends), and of course, it’s also the story of someone who made it in that job, for a while — it was a transition to being a writer and beyond.
I recall giving my friend some static when I found flaws in the science, but invariably the response was that the story was more important, and if certain bad science was critical to the plot line, the bad science wasn’t going to be excised from the script. Yes, it’s window dressing; it might be taken more seriously if it was considered bad dialog or a serious threat to suspension of disbelief, but it’s only a shortcoming for the scientifically literate among us. If there were more of us the issue might be taken more seriously.
All The Things I Am Not
As presented by Leonard McCoy, Julian Bashir, and the Emergency Medical Holographic program.