Download and Print: Evil Mad Scientist Valentines
If you’re anything like us, you’ve at some point come across supposedly-nerdy valentines and thought to yourself, “A real geek would have used an equation to express that sentiment.” And if so, have we have got just the thing for you!
The discussion of jargon has reminded me of a story told to me by a colleague. As this is at least a third-hand accounting, I will cast this as fiction, but based on a (probably) true story, and given that I have either forgotten or was never told the names of those involved, their anonymity is protected. (I am sure I have forgotten some details and it undoubtedly contains some embellishment.)
This story involves a teaching assistant working in an advanced lab class involving electronics, helping the students with their lab projects as needed. A student was having some trouble with his circuit and after unsuccessful attempts to diagnose the problem, went to the TA for help.
Student – “I’m stuck. Something isn’t working right.”
TA – “OK, let’s have a look” (TA checks a few things and then finally traces it to the power supply and opens it up and pokes around). “Ah, here’s your problem: you have a dead cricket.”
At this point the student undergoes an attitudinal phase change: “Oh for &@%#’s sake I am SO sick of all this @!$*& jargon! What the hell is a dead cricket? Can’t you just speak some plain English for a change? You physics people make this all too confusing! What do you mean it’s a dead cricket?”
At which point the TA show the student the power supply, and points to the dead bug — a cricket — that was connecting the + and — electrodes inside and was shorting out the power supply. “I mean it’s a dead cricket.”
With a request to place a red hot nickel ball on a block of ice, and also to satisfy my own curiosity, I do just that
It appears to be warmer than that — it turns red-hot about a diameter in to the block of ice
I wasn’t at the Science Online session that, in the Nth retelling, sounded like it might have turned into “the Sharks vs the Jets at the dance” square-off. But Matthew Francis was, and gives his perspective: In defense of jargon and expertise
Carl Zimmer—a writer I greatly respect, even if he does write about parasites, a subject that makes me squirm—began the pile-on by saying that when a Ph.D. scientist wants to explain something, they often start with a question, then drop a textbook on you. (Ironically, Carl is one of the few people I know who actually wrote a textbook.) Some other people evidently took that as permission to speak ill of all professional scientists and experts. One person stated strongly that experts are all bad at science communication, because they use too much jargon.
I do have some strong opinions on this. I’ve posted on this before and I think there’s a danger in asserting some of the extreme positions on the topic. There’s also the problem of properly defining the problem so that the scientists and journalists don’t just talk past each other. Plus the issue of the job of scientists as compared to the job of journalists.
What constitutes jargon? Some is obvious — when acronyms and abbreviations appear, you might just be a redneck using jargon. In my field of atomic physics I will throw around terms like MOT and AOM, or occasionally speak of a BEC. That’s the terminology of the job, and I don’t expect people outside my field to necessarily know what I mean. (in case you are curious, MOT = magneto-optical trap, AOM = Acousto-Optical Modulator and BEC = Bose-Einstein Condensate). I think it’s pretty obvious that not explaining what these terms mean is a barrier to be avoided. I don’t think that’s the problem. If you’re throwing those terms around while attempting to communicate with a lay audience, you’re not winning.
I believe the issue is at a lower level. I think there’s an element of “I know it when I see it” to other terminology, but where to draw the line is a grey area. To use some examples from physics, are momentum or energy jargon? If I speak of the conservation of either, is there a barrier to understanding which is the terminology, or is it a lack of scientific literacy? This is an ongoing debate and I think that the testy exchanges between scientists and journalists will continue of we don’t resolve what we mean. When do basic concepts and their names or descriptions become jargon?
There is also the issue, as I mentioned, of defining what the job is, and I come at this from the perspective of being a scientist. Most scientists are not hired to communicate their work to the public. That’s an acquired skill. If you want to speak to a scientist, you need to learn the language, just as if you want to go to an area that doesn’t communicate in your language, it behooves you to learn that language. That is would be a good idea to train scientists to do a better job of communicating to the public (and I think it is) is a separate issue. But I suspect most scientists would think it a waste of time: We have a Public Information/Affairs Officer for that! coupled with I want to do research. There has to be a general feeling that such effort has value. Scientists have to prioritize their time, so if this is a desired goal, make sure that such communication is valued by the institutions where the scientists work.
If this communication is in the form of a discussion, we get back to the issue of meeting the scientists halfway. When someone with little to no background in a certain subject wants to pop in and be a part of the conversation, it’s a huge waste of time to expect a scientist to fill all of that background in — imagine someone chiming in on a discussion of an atomic physics experiment but has no idea what conservation of angular momentum is, or someone claiming that evolution is wrong because humans don’t have wings. Or this. In situations like that, I feel no hesitation to “drop a textbook” on someone.
To be fair, I don’t know exactly what Carl meant by the phrase, but I also haven’t seen anything that clarifies the issue on his blog. I would love there to be a reasoned discussion on the subject rather than having people reach for their blamethrowers every time this comes up.
How Etsy Grew their Number of Female Engineers by Almost 500% in One Year
I think it’s great the Etsy found a new way to think about things and realized that the old ways were depriving them of quality people. I hope that others adopt newer ways of thinking as well. (I’m looking at you, my physics brethren, and by the numbers, physicists are more than likely brethren.)
But way down in the story (not quite paragraph 19, but it’s close)
At the time of the talk, Etsy’s had twenty women on its 110-person engineering team, which is a roughly eighteen percent (or a four and half times) increase from the previous year. It’s not quite hockey stick growth, but it’s a huge step forward.
18%/4.5 is 4%, and since we need a whole number, my guess is that there were 3 women out of ~75 the previous year (I assume they were expanding), unless they fired a bunch of engineers as well as hiring new ones, and had 4 out of ~100. The fantastic growth trumpeted by the headline obscures the reality that their starting numbers were craptacularly low and have been improved to merely poor.
The video may be a tad long for some; if you want to get to the good part, it’s at 4:55m which is the normal speed shot, followed by the 500 fps slo-mo.
One can model the process in a reactor, though this is more like a bomb. In reality one would distinguish between the effects of “fast” neutrons (i.e. ones with significant kinetic energy) and thermal neutrons, which are generally of such low energy that the KE’s contribution to the reaction is negligible, but I’ll ignore that here for simplicity and because the analogies don’t really hold up.
If we consider what happens to a ping-pong ball, we can model the behavior. Once you have a ball in motion, it can physically escape from the region, or “leak” out. The probability it does not leak out — the non-leakage probability — is L. Since the walls are not of infinite height and there is a hole in the surface, L < 1.
If a neutron does not leak out, it might hit a trap and cause it to snap. The probability that this happens is f, which we will call the utilization fraction. This depends on the ratio of the probability that the ball hits a loaded trap and causes it to snap, to the probability of just hitting a trap — in this model we would have to count a ball that lost all of its energy before hitting any trap as one that has leaked. (edit: and also include the probability that a ball could cause more than one trap to trigger)
In this example, a snapped trap gives us two new balls, but in general we can model this reproduction factor as some value n. In real fissions, n depends on which fission products you get.
So we have K = Lfn
If K = 1 the system is critical and the population remains constant. If K > 1 the system is supercritical and the ball population increases, and similarly if K < 1 (subcritical) the population drops. Obviously, at the outset of the video K is significantly greater than 1 since we see a rapid rise in ping-pong-ball population, but as the traps "deplete" f drops, because the number of loaded traps is getting smaller. This rapid change in K makes this more like a bomb, where you are trying to get a lot of interactions in a very short time, while in a reactor you'd like to get up to some reaction rate and maintain K = 1 for a long time.
In a real reactor, the number of neutrons is much, much smaller than the number of fuel nuclei, so this depletion is at a much smaller rate. Imagine, though, if we could construct a system that lasted just a little longer. Since the initial rate of ball multiplication tends to be higher, you could "poison" the system by adding a sticky blob here and there that would grab and hold a ball if it struck, but these losses would diminish over time as you used up the blobs. Reactors do this with Boron-10, which quite happily absorbs neutrons, but only once — B-11 is much, much less likely to undergo this "capture" reaction.
Another effect would be to initially lower the wall(s) and let more balls escape, and raise them over time, meaning that your non-leakiage factor is compensating for the drop in the utilization fraction. The changing wall in this case would be the effect of changing the height of the control rods, though in a real reactor this exposes more fuel, making the reactor effectively bigger, but also harder for neutrons to leak out. Real reactors are often designed so that as the reaction rate drops, the water that thermalizes (slows/moderates) the neutrons undergoes a drop in temperature and becomes more dense, which traps more neutrons in the core — another effect which reduces the neutron leakage.
Bose-Einstein condensate created at room temperature
Ayan Das and colleagues have now used a nanoscale wire to produce an excitation known as a polariton. These polaritons formed a Bose-Einstein condensate at room temperature, potentially opening up a new avenue for studying systems that otherwise require expensive cooling and trapping.
More Apollo Robbins
More thoughts from Science Online 2013
Another of the themes that ran through multiple sessions was how to deal with disruption in comments: what to do with trolls. My reason for attending these sessions was not truly blog related — I don’t get the level of commentary where it’s much of a problem. It’s my involvement with Science Forums (dot net!) that led me to the sessions. Some of the sub-text of one of the sessions included how to tell a troll from a cynic or someone who is simply disagreeing, while the other did not, and this inconsistency made the discussions somewhat less useful to me. I make a distinction (and mentioned this in one session) that in the forums there’s a distinction we draw: a troll is someone who is deliberately stirring up trouble by saying outrageous, contrarian things, but a crackpot (or crank) is someone who truly believes the outrageous things they say.
The common behavior of saying outrageous things can make the two indistinguishable at the outset; one possible distinction is the troll’s predilection to appeal to emotion, because an emotional response is what they are after. Lacking that, though, it’s only after some interaction that the differences can be seen: the troll comes up with some new claim to stir the pot, while the crackpot tends to stay on message. The crank, however, (I make a distinction) tends to react emotionally to being corrected and will whine about being personally attacked, but both the crank and crackpot are thoroughly convinced they are right. As an example, someone who shows up on a climate blog and claims that there has been no global warming for the last 15 years may be saying that because they know it will stir everyone up, or because they mistakenly believe it’s actually true (even if they aren’t George Will). After a rebuttal, the troll jumps to the next crap argument, but the true believer continues, on-target. They will not be swayed by mere facts.
In a blog setting it may not be worthwhile to make a distinction — disruption is disruption, and it’s probably best to shut it down so that cooler heads may have an actual discussion. But in a forum, one has an advantage: you can split some types of crackpottery off into its own discussion, and it can be fun trying to pick apart the subtleties of somebody’s pet theory, even though they will never admit to the contradictions you uncover.
There was some discussion about whether it’s better to shut comments off completely, or perhaps just ignoring comments altogether, and that really depends on the goals of traffic and participation. It’s not something I’ve had to worry too much about. Commentary I get is pretty well-behaved, for the most part, and I don’t have an issue with shills (paid trolls) showing up to repeat some message. Aside from Conservapedia, most of physics is pretty controversy-free from that perspective.
Cyberscreen Film Festival Winners (in Brief)
The video contest winners from Science Online 2013. Illusions, animation, a crapload of color-blind monkeys and sharks. Enjoy.