Monthly Archives: May 2013

Decisions, Decisions

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I read this bit on McDonald’s Theory recently:

An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!

It’s as if we’ve broken the ice with the worst possible idea, and now that the discussion has started, people suddenly get very creative. I call it the McDonald’s Theory: people are inspired to come up with good ideas to ward off bad ones.

Two thoughts came to mind.

First, this is a variation on the restaurant choice aspect of the dinner diffusion problem, wherein people don’t want to be the one caught making a decision about where to go to dinner at a conference.

The other thing is that, when the author ties this in to the broader decision-making process, it’s partly the blank page syndrome — tasks are more daunting when an empty page is staring at you, and it’s better to just get started, somewhere — anywhere — even if you have to completely revise the work, because you’ve gotten the ball rolling.

But the hesitancy to float ideas in front of colleagues is somewhat foreign to me, and I wonder if that’s simply due to my little corner of science, or if that’s broader. Scientists are used to people trying to shoot down their ideas because that’s how peer review works, so there is a distance between the person and the idea, or there is supposed to be. It’s a bad dynamic to have someone who won’t accept criticism of their ideas and/or gets personally invested in them. Pursuing wrong ideas is a waste of time and resources, so you’d prefer to know the problems with an idea as early on as you can. So not taking the criticism personally makes it easier to bring ideas up. If someone finds a flaw, you fix it and move forward, or if it’s fatal, you discard the idea and move on to something else. (Of course, it’s possible I’ve just lucked into the right situations all these years)

It's All Because of the Wave

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WHEN THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE GOES UP TO 11…

Unfortunately, the uncertainty principle continues to be explained — at least in many pop sci accounts […] — in terms of the disturbance that a measurement causes to a quantum system. This rather frustratingly fails to put across the fundamental essence of the uncertainty principle and can be somewhat misleading for students.

The uncertainty principle is simply an unavoidable and natural consequence of imbuing matter with wavelike characteristics.

“Somewhat misleading” is a tad tame, here. It’s wrong. Even though it’s how he originally framed it, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is not the measurement problem.

The Dream is in a Pipe

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A House Powered by Exercise Will Keep You in Shape While You Keep the Lights On

According to the artist’s statement, “the house offers an ironical model of citizenship for future sustainable societies: the ‘Jane Fonda model of citizenship'” (the fitness celebrity whose initials the home bears) “which defines the ideal citizen as an individual who can satisfy all her domestic energy needs through her own bodily exercise.”

Not a chance in hell, unless we’re talking about a massively scaled-down lifestyle.

Other articles on the topic discuss this as supplying part of one’s energy needs through exercise, and that’s true, but as I’ve explained several times before in this space, it’s silly. Unless you’re going to do the exercise anyway and want to minimize wasting the output.

Trying to do all of the energy is a pipe dream. This is an art project, so it’s pretty clear that little consideration was given to the physics and biology of the matter, but it’s pretty simple: the maximum sustained power output of top athletes is around 500 Watts — that’s what Floyd Landis was able to do for ~4 hours for part of the Tour de France (and, remember, he was doping!) But the average customer in the US uses energy at a rate of around 1.3 kiloWatts, on average, over the course of the day.

Maybe, as the blog’s title says, you could keep the lights on. Especially with CFL or LED technology replacing incandescent lights, and you don’t need it especially bright, and you have the ability to cycle hard for an hour every day, perhaps you could store up the energy to run some lights. If you’re going at a 250 W rate, that’s enough to run a pair of 60W equivalent CFL bulbs for the evening (~5 hours’ worth). 250W of electricity production is around a kW of effort, because of the efficiency of our bodies, so you also gain in your heating bill…if it’s cold outside. If it’s warm, this is extra energy the air conditioner has to remove.

But doing this as a reason unto itself, look at the cost. That kw-hr of energy you burned up is 860 Calories of food, which is the intake of a decent-sized meal (or ~one bite shy of a quarter pounder® w/cheese and medium fries, if fast food makes for an easier conversion). Several dollars’ worth of eating for a dime’s worth of electricity. Just for the lights. There is neither an economic nor a sustainability justification for this.

There’s a reason humans went away from individual labor and used other animals and machinery driven by the sun, wind or stored sun (i.e. fossil fuels) as we grew our civilizations. Offering human power as a substitute is incredibly naive. Or, viewed another way, there’s a reason the world’s population was limited before we made these adoptions. What we do in modern society is energy intensive. Without machinery running on the sources of energy we’ve tapped into, we couldn’t come close to our current lifestyle.

Canada, What Were You Thinking?

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Canada Sells Out Science

[T]he National Research Council—the Canadian scientific research and development agency—has now said that they will only perform research that has “social or economic gain”.
…
John MacDougal, President of the NRC, literally said, “Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value”.

I’m incredibly sad to read this. I worked at TRIUMF in Vancouver for about 2.5 years as a postdoc, and I did witness some bureaucratic beancounter nonsense, but nothing like this.

Phil’s take on this is spot-on. But beyond saying that research pays off, making this policy short-sighted, is the fact that in basic research, you don’t truly know what you’re going to find! That’s what this research is — an attempt at discovering the unknown. There is no way to guarantee some kind of specific commercial benefit from the undiscovered, but the point of funding discovery is that someone will eventually think of ways to exploit newly-found knowledge! Overall, there will be economic gain as a result — that’s the way it has been for a long time. There’s no reason to think this has suddenly stopped.

You Keep Using That Word…

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Something I ran across last week was the so-called periodic elements of star wars ep. IV, V, and VI

It’s very pretty, and a lot of effort obviously went into the graphic presentation of it. However, that’s apparently where the effort stopped. What’s wrong with it?

It’s not periodic.

The periodic table has such power because of the similarity of properties and the trends one can identify — it was gaps in the layout that helped identify some of the elements. Those properties are completely missing on this table — any you might glean have got to be there purely by accident.

A truly periodic table might, for example, put all the Jedi into a column. All the droids into another. The pilot identifiers (Red/Gold/Rogue), too — they shouldn’t be in a row.

There are other tables out there like this — where the creators seemingly mistake “periodic” for “collection” or something like that. It is a table, and if you happen to have around a hundred names or so to put on it, you might think it would be clever to geek it up in this way. But when you actually want to represent it as or call it a periodic table, what you’ve shown is you weren’t paying attention in chemistry class.

Chinese DIY Inventions

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Chinese DIY Inventions

One visible sign of China’s recent economic growth is the rise in prominence of inventors and entrepreneurs. For years now, Chinese farmers, engineers, and businessmen have taken on ambitious do-it-yourself projects, constructing homemade submarines, helicopters, robots, safety equipment, weapons and much more. Some of the inventions are built out of passion, some with an eye toward profit, (some certainly safer than others), and a few have already led to sales for the inventors. Gathered here are recent photos of this DIY movement across China. [39 photos]

Some of these are pretty cool.

The Power of Thermodynamics

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Short, but dramatic.

It gets hot, the rails want to expand but since the rails are clamped down to the ties, nothing can happen…until the ties start sliding. The rails are apparently welded together, and there must be a good reason for doing this and not leaving an expansion gap every so often — rails weren’t always welded. It may be that a gap causes problems for higher speeds. Or maybe it’s as simple as shorter lengths of rail being too easy to steal, and the disaster that ensues when a train encounters a missing rail.

OK, wikipedia tells me maintenance is cheaper and it allows for higher speeds and a smoother ride. Plus they mention flash butt welding. Tee hee.

Pay Lots of Attention to the Scientists Behind the Curtain

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One of the things I think about from time to time is the uneven representation of scientists, and physicists in particular — how often a biology/life sciences person is portrayed as representing a generic scientist, and within physics, how often particle physics is offered up as being representative of all physics. I think part of that can be gleaned from following the money. (In the US, federal funding (pdf alert, table 2) for life sciences is about half of all research spending at more than $30 billion. Physical sciences clocks in at under $6 billion) The other part comes from the sexiness of the work. Particle physics is big bucks and large collaborations, and is played up when the media latches onto “god particle” phrasing, or someone screws up a timing calibration and the shimmering spectre of superluminal neutrinos appears. Stories that can be written and appeal to people without too much of the gory detail of the actual physics appearing.

I am not alone in this thinking. Backreaction: What do “most physicists” work on?

The field I work in myself, quantum gravity, is among the over-represented fields. If you believe what you read, the quest for quantum gravity has become the “holy grail” of theoretical physicists all over the planet, and we’re all working on it because the end of science is near and there’s nothing else left to do.

Bee breaks down the numbers and finds

[This] tells you that “most physicists” don’t even do high energy physics, certainly not quantum gravity, and have no business with multiverses, firewalls, or “micro-landscapes of black holes”.

An Unfortunate Coincidence

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I read Joe Hanson’s post The Evolution of Tyrannosaurus rex this morening (i.e. yesterday, relative to this appearing) about the correction of the posture of Mr. T as depicted in various media over the years.

[T]he tail-dragger myth persisted, and in 1988’s The Land Before Time (which, let’s face it, is where most of us first formed our images of dinosaurs) Sharptooth was frustratingly upright

I remember thinking that I’m not going to face it, because it’s quite possible our first glimpse of dinos, including an upright T. rex, was (as it was for me) in a movie was as a stop-action clip made possible by the wizardry of Ray Harryhausen.

And, later in the day, it was announce that Ray had passed.

So here’s a video, which includes an upright, posturically-incorrect, rexie, along with similarly-depicted Allosaurs, Ceratosaurs and Sceraptosaurs.

[A] compliation of every Ray Harryhausen animated creature in feature films, presented in chronological order.

Read the complete creature list at http://www.harryhausen.com

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