Triple backflip on a bike, including the helmetcam fotage.
New Zealand BMXer Jed Mildon has created action-sports history today by landing the world’s first Triple Backflip at the Unit T3 Mindtricks BMX Jam in Taupo, New Zealand.
Science Literacy in the Age of Tornadoes
A Twist on Climate Change, Risk, and Uncertainty
In this country, we teach kids that science is a collection of hard facts. We teach them that scientists come up with a hypothesis—an idea that might explain some aspect of how the world works. Scientists then test their hypotheses and find out whether it’s correct or not. If it’s correct, then it becomes something that children must memorize. That story is true. But it’s also vastly oversimplified. It gives people the impression that every scientific question can be answered with “yes” or “no.” And if it can’t, then the real answer is probably “no.”
That perspective might work okay when you’re sitting in a high school science lab, studying the digestive system of a fetal pig. But it doesn’t work as well in the real world. And it leaves people completely unprepared to understand something like climate change, and how we assess the risks associated with it.
I note that “That story is true” is correct, but we would be better off if it weren’t. That’s one of the common themes in any discussion in the blogohedron about scientific literacy and science education: reducing science to a list of facts misrepresents the essence of science and also tends to kill enthusiasm for learning science.
That’s not to say that facts aren’t a part of science and science literacy. I think you can distill literacy down to three components — facts, concepts and procedures. You can’t do much without remembering a few facts, and you need to have a basic grasp of some concepts in order to see how those facts fit together. That’s part and parcel of any discussion/vote on what the most important element of scientific literacy — everyone trots out their favorite “must know” tidbit.
Uncertainty is inescapable in science, and you have to account for its presence in interpreting any scientific result, which is a concept that needs to be included in the list of what comprises basic science literacy. We have to fight the attempts to turn it into a pejorative, since a common implication is that any uncertainty means that we know nothing — a world is portrayed that’s black and white, with no tolerance for shades of grey.
Why Doctor Obvious Still Has a Job
I’ve posted several links, with tongue-in-cheek titles, to “obvious” science. But in reality, such science in necessary.
‘Duh’ science: Why researchers spend so much time proving the obvious
Scientific studies quantify results, which is important. Even if you know an effect is there, knowing how big the effect is and what variables change the results and by how much gives you insight into how to attack/leverage the phenomenon. Also — and the article only mentions this in passing — conventional wisdom isn’t always right. It’s necessary to do studies to confirm that actions are having the outcomes we think they are, even if nine times out of ten they do. One of the more famous examples is the conventional medical wisdom that peptic ulcers were caused by stress or spicy foods, and how that colored their treatment. Because that conventional wisdom was challenged, we learned that most of these ulcers are cause by the Helicobacter pylori bacterium.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles … and Airships?
Helium Hokum: Why Airships Will Never Be Part of Our Transportation Infrastructure
[A]irships got left behind. Why? They have an Achilles’ heel. No, it’s not the weather, hydrogen, or the materials of the day—and it’s not some conspiracy or a crewman with a bomb on the Hindenburg ruining it for everybody. Like a lot of things, the facts are simple and scientific, and thus boring—unless you’re intrigued by simple scientific facts. Either way it’s this: airships are inefficient.
The purpose of transportation is to get a thing from one place to another. The measure of any vehicle’s efficiency—be it by land or by sea or even by air—is how much it carries vs. how hard you have to push it and how fast it goes. At the end of the day, we all want to get it there fast, and we all want to get it there cheap.
Mendozaaaaaa!
The short clips of McBain throughout the early years of the Simpson edited together to form one short movie!
It's Official: Corvallis the Most Boring City in America
Where to Live to Avoid a Natural Disaster
Corvallis, OR is the metro area with the lowest risk of natural disasters in the US.
Small quake and drought risk; little extreme weather.
In the six years I lived there we did have a drought and an earthquake (Magnitude 5.6, ~ 30 miles away), so it was more exciting/dangerous when I was there. Lots of cities in the northwest rated as low-risk.
Always Demand an Inertial Frame of Reference
The time-lapse starfield has been edited to show the rotation of the Earth from the point of view of the stars.
The Odd Couple
Skulls in the Stars: Water has properties that are positively electrifying!
Why is water so strongly attracted to static electricity? It turns out that the answer is somewhat complicated, and the complete explanation was a bit of a minor mystery for nearly eighty years!
A Colossal Undertaking
Tunny code-breaker rebuilt at Bletchley Park
The entire machine was rebuilt using spares from BT telephone exchanges that were remodelled in the 1980s. All of the engineers that worked on the rebuild were ex-BT employees and had contacts at other museums, and so could lay their hands on the components, Whetter added.
If You Build it, Fingerprints Will Come
Slightly smaller than a square tissue box, AIRprint houses two 1.3 megapixel cameras and a source of polarized light. One camera receives horizontally polarized light, while the other receives vertically polarized light. When light hits a finger, the ridges of the fingerprint reflect one polarization of light, while the valleys reflect another. “That’s where the real kicker is, because if you look at an image without any polarization, you can kind of see fingerprints, but not really well,” says Burcham. By separating the vertical and the horizontal polarization, the device can overlap those images to produce an accurate fingerprint, which is fed to a computer for verification.
I’m guessing that what they mean is that the light source is polarized and the cameras have polarizing filters in front of them to see the two components. Reflectivity generally depends on the polarization and angle of the incident light; the whole reason that polarized sunglasses are effective is that light scattered off of a surface tends to be polarized parallel to that surface, and at Brewster’s angle absolutely none of the perpendicular component will be reflected. So it seems reasonable that detection of the two polarizations improves the contrast of the image you get. Light at normal incidence will reflect the polarized light with no change, but light scattered off of the valleys will mix in some of the orthogonal polarization, which gets picked up by the other camera.