Exclusive: Man in disguise boards international flight
The third [bag] contained a ‘disguise kit’ which consisted of a silicone type head and neck mask of an elderly Caucasian male, a brown leather cap, glasses and a thin brown cardigan.”
TSA to announce mandatory cheek-pinching as part of airport screening in three…two…one…
Imagine, as I sometime ask, that you are doing an experiment which is very sensitive to external magnetic fields. (Like, oh, I don’t know, an atomic clock). And you find evidence of some stray field gremlin that has taken up residence. Since every previous time this has happened it has been the result of a thermoelectric current, you might be lulled into thinking that it’s the same thing, and fixing it will be a piece of cake. A colleague might even announce something to that effect: “It’s a current. It’s always a current. If there’s one thing you can depend on, it’s that stray fields are always currents.”
Welcome to the phenomenon of the sportscaster’s curse.
The sportscaster’s curse, in case you’re not familiar with it, is a phenomenon seen during sportscasts, in which the announcer will basically guarantee an outcome, which then dooms the effort to failure. The athlete is tagged as “Mister Automatic” in some way, with a mention of how he hasn’t missed a free throw/short putt/chip-shot field goal in X attempts, at which point the attempt clangs off the upright or rim, or lips out of the cup. (I’m sure a fair bit of confirmation bias is present here, since the curse doesn’t strike every time, but I cringe nonetheless if it’s a player on my team being lauded for his reliability)
So this is what happened. After we convinced ourselves that it was a simple problem and a quick fix, as happened earlier, we took all the steps to fix it. These steps include taking off the nested layers of magnetic shielding which make the fountain look like a Russian-doll hot-water heater. (or really just a water heater, because you don’t need to heat the water if it’s already hot)
(Such a device might look something like this)
Nada. No obvious connections. We let it cool down to room temperature to minimize gradients and reassembled, but there was no change in the signal. OK, disassemble again and start checking for some magnetic component. But we’re looking for a milligauss-ish field, which isn’t going to be seen amidst the half a gauss of the earth’s field, so the only real way to do this systematically is to change one thing and reassemble it so we can look at the signal in a shielded environment.
We did that a lot over the past few days.
We finally decided that looking with a magnet might be a good idea — a strong one might stick to the offending component. There shouldn’t be any downside — the nonmagnetic materials aren’t going to become magnetized, and if there is a magnetic part, it will only change the scale of the already-existing problem. The latter is exactly what happened. The magnet didn’t stick to anything, but all of the sudden (after yet another reassembling and degaussing of the shields) the problem was much bigger — we had induced more magnetization, and that made it easier to find the offending component. Kinda like finding a needle in a haystack by being able to make the needle a lot bigger.
It was the salmon mousse a washer on a bolt in the vacuum system. Somehow a shiny stainless steel washer had successfully been hiding among the copper ones, and nobody noticed; it either had acquired a similar-looking tarnish, or because of the shininess it looked coppery when it was in the bin. In any event, transplant surgery was indicated and carried out successfully without a vacuum breach (which is good because losing vacuum would have sucked in all the wrong ways)
Pseudoscience, common sense, and the problem of scale
Fundamentally, this is a problem of scale. What is common sense? It is a body of knowledge derived from common experience. Even toddlers know that objects always fall down not up and objects that are out of sight still exist. These rudimentary scientific observations form the bedrock of common sense. But for something to be common sense, it must take place on a level we can appreciate with our senses. Simply put, common sense can only tell us about events that are common to human experience.
What Is Quantum Mechanics Good for?
Max Born said that by manipulating this wave function that Schrödinger developed, you could tell the probability of finding the electron at any point in space and time. From that, it turns out that the electron can only have certain discrete energies inside an atom. This had been discovered experimentally; this is the source of the famous line spectrum that atoms exhibit and that accounts for why neon lights are red whereas sodium streetlights have a yellow tinge. It has to do with the line spectra of their respective elements.
But to have an actual understanding of where these discrete energies come from—that electrons and atoms can only have certain energies and no other—is one of the most amazing things about quantum mechanics. It’s as though you are driving a car on a racetrack and you are only allowed to go in multiples of 10 miles per hour. When you take that and you bring many atoms together, all of those energies broaden out into a band of possible energies.
I like the point about how in basic discovery, nobody is thinking about applications down the line — Schrödinger didn’t have the diode laser in mind when he was developing the theory
If you went to Schrödinger in 1926 and said, “Nice equation, Erwin. What’s it good for?” He’s not going to say, “Well, if you want to store music in a compact digital format…”
Life aboard the International Space Station
The space station has a permanent crew of six, so the arrival of new faces is a cause for celebration. That said, even the most welcome visitors can cause havoc if they are inexperienced. There is a subtle art to moving around without crashing into anything – or, more annoyingly, others – knocking computers, equipment and other objects off the walls to which they are attached with Velcro pads. One serving shuttle pilot confessed to leaving a wake of laptops and other vital belongings behind him the first time he tried to fly from one room to another. “When you first turn up, you are like a bull in a china shop,” he said. “I had no idea where to put any of it back.”
In time, people hone the skill and can fly down the length of the station, straight as an arrow, without touching anything, except with their fingertips. People sit in mid air, tapping away at a computer, with only a toe hooked under a wall strap to anchor themselves. Then, with a flick of the hand, they’ll float up to another computer and carry on typing there. Getting from one place to another is all the more difficult because up and down (and so left and right) have no absolute meaning. The ability to form a mental map of the space station – and then rotate it in 3D to suit your perspective – is a priceless skill for an astronaut.
The Reverse Geocache™ Puzzle Box
A puzzle box that can only be opened when at a particular location.
Why use a black body radiator as a standard, when no such thing exists?
It turns out that black body radiation provides us with a set of very precise working equations that relate the temperature of an object to the light it emits. Working from the ideal and using Planck”s law, we can predict the energy distribution across the spectrum for a given temperature. The total emitted power is calculated using the Stefan-Boltzmann law. The wavelength of the peak emission, and hence the color that dominates for this temperature, is provided by Wien’s displacement law. Knowing the ideal case allows us to predict or calculate actual values by correcting for the imperfections of actual hot objects.
h/t to ewmon
‘Sleeping on a problem’ may be the best way to solve it
A research has suggested that the best way to solve a complicated problem is to distract yourself for a few minutes with something else or sleep on it overnight.
However, as with most summaries of psychological studies I read, the actual experiment described seems somewhat limited, and the conclusion is an extrapolation from specific to general, without clearly showing that other factors have been eliminated. But that may just be a limitation of the reporting.
Last time it was network packet analysis. Now it’s an acrostic: Student Hides Rick Astley’s Song In College Paper
The computer science student, Reddit user Mayniac182, spent five hours formatting his paper into the acrostic Rickroll