The pressure of living on a spinning planet
This almost seems like a force, doesn’t it, something pushing the air around? In many ways it does act like a force, though it depends on whether you’re looking at it from the ground, rotating with the Earth, or from space, watching the Earth spin beneath you. This whole thing was first figured out in detail by Gaspard Gustave de Coriolis in the 1800s, and we name it after him: the Coriolis effect (or, sometimes, the Coriolis force).
It’s not about plastics
Far From Any Lab, Paper Bits Find Illness
While other scientists successfully shrank beakers, tubes and centrifuges into diagnostic laboratories that fit into aluminum boxes that cost $50,000, George Whitesides had smaller dreams.
The diagnostic tests designed in Dr. Whitesides’s Harvard University chemistry laboratory fit on a postage stamp and cost less than a penny.
His secret? Paper.
Are we fooling ourselves with faster-than-light neutrinos?
Excellent follow-up to his first post, to which I already linked (under “other commentary”.
What really caught my eye was the “third option” for possible error, where he talks about the possibility of the pulse changing shape and skewing the measurement and we’re fooling ourselves. Because this is nothing new — it has happened in tunneling experiments and with photons in a medium with anomalous dispersion. Those experiments caused the same kind of headlines about relativity being under siege, but turned out to be a confusion between group velocity and phase velocity (which is not limited to c).
The one difference I see here is that the scientists appear to have measured both the leading and trailing edge which would seem to eliminate the errors you get by measuring the peak and having the peak move around relative to the pulse.
What happens if you hold a slinky at the top end, let it extend, and then drop it?
Two videos: set up and solution, but in the second video another question is asked. As with a previous video in this series, you can click on the answer in the second video to load the answer to the question.
Merton’s description of this community value is a bit more subtle. He notes that disinterestedness is different from altruism, and that scientists needn’t be saints.
The best way to understand disinterestedness might be to think of how a scientist working within her tribe is different from an expert out in the world dealing with laypeople. The expert, knowing more than the layperson, could exploit the layperson’s ignorance or his tendency to trust the judgment of the expert. The expert, in other words, could put one over on the layperson for her own benefit. This is how snake oil gets sold.
The scientist working within the tribe of science can expect no such advantage. Thus, trying to put one over on other scientists is a strategy that shouldn’t get you far.
There’s a bit on hucksterism, and there’s actually a double-whammy here. Not only do you have people willing to misrepresent the science to prey on people unable to distinguish the quantum snake oil from shinola, but in the advertising game Janet mentions they will use anecdotal evidence — they won’t say the gizmo cures your ailment, they will have someone tell you how they used the gizmo and their ailment cleared up. They invite you to draw a conclusion that they won’t state, knowing that most people aren’t scientifically literate to know that it’s intellectual entrapment (inviting a correlation/causation and/or post hoc ergo propter hoc error).
Journalists and politicians are complicit in this game as well, in different ways. When journalists, in their quest for balance, interview scientists on the opposite side of a claim, they give the appearance of a divide that often isn’t there. And there always seems to be some person with credentials — an expert — who will take a contrary position. This leaves us open to people using science in reverse: using ideology to decide what the right answer is for their story or for government policy, and the going out and finding an expert who will support that position.
Driverless car navigates Berlin streets
The vehicle maneuvers through traffic on its own using a sophisticated combination of devices, including a computer, electronics and a precision satellite navigation system in the trunk, a camera in the front, and laser scanners on the roof and around the front and rear bumpers.