Dissecting the Problem
A simple way to get the antiscience crowd to come around?
Maybe if those in the media and popular press would stop treating us like a different species, “the people” who we don’t reach would feel less wary about trusting us when the data we generate challenges their preconceptions. Maybe if the media would stop treating everything like a “controversy”, and stop giving free air time for dissemination of misinformation, we wouldn’t have to spend our time debunking crap that was debunked 150 years ago (in the case of evolution) and could focus more on education. Here’s an example; anybody even remotely familiar with the “controversy” surrounding mercury and autism knows who Andrew Wakefield is. He gets mentioned in practically every article and gets the media’s “equal time” treatment, even though the guy is a total slime and we’ve known it for years. How many legitimate medical researchers, on the other hand, get more than a two-sentence quote? How many autism researchers fighting the good fight get profiled to the extent that Wakefield does? If you’re not in the field, can you even name an autism researcher on the other side of the line from Wakefield?
I read this before reading Chris Mooney’s op-ed, but I think this, in particular, is spot-on. One of the many ways the battle is biased against science is the ease by which one can make a false claim, and the difficulty in debunking the claim, because science is complicated. The artificially forced bilateral symmetry common in stories and debates works against us. I don’t know how much of a solution this ends up being, but it is part of the problem.
I think this also ties in with science needing to step up its PR game, though I think there are problems inherent in non-scientists becoming spokespersons; the more links you put between the people that best understand the research and the people interacting with the public, the greater chance you have of simplifying the science to the point it’s wrong. Somebody simply reciting talking points can’t interact and answer questions, which means that Evil Monkey’s point about scientists getting out and engaging the public is the best approach, and we scientists (and administrators who are our bosses) have to recognize the value of outreach. The other thing that bothers me about external PR that strays from the Sgt. Friday script (just the facts) is that appealing to emotion swings both ways. I think it would be much better if a person could sniff out false claims themselves, rather than having to rely on a PR firm to tell you. If you can be convinced by a persuasive but non-fact-based argument that something is true, you can also be convinced that it’s false. And then there’s the trump card — the antiscience crowd often wins the battle not by having great spokespeople, but having ones that are willing to lie, and science can’t go down that path.
One thing that all this ignores, however, is that many of the targets who disagree aren’t doing so because scientists aren’t putting forth a compelling argument. They made up their minds long ago — facts aren’t going to sway them, but neither is a smooth talker with a pretty face. I think that you have to recognize that there are people who will never be convinced — there is no strategy that will work. They are not interested in the facts, or in honest debate, and if what you have to say disagrees with Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, you’re just flat out of luck. Confirmation bias is real.
You Can Do This with Light, Too
I won’t go into the whole primary and secondary color thing, but these colors, when stacked upon each other, create other colors. There is not an orange or green layer. It just looks like it when the red and yellow layers touch and then yellow and blue layers touch. Pretty cool.
The Lumen is Looming
Coming in 2011: New Labels for Light Bulb Packaging
Under direction from Congress to re-examine the current labels, the FTC is announcing a final rule that will require the new labels on light bulb packages. For the first time, the label on the front of the package will emphasize the bulbs’ brightness as measured in lumens, rather than a measurement of watts. The new front-of-package labels also will include the estimated yearly energy cost for the particular type of bulb.
This will allow one to make an easier comparison of bulb’s brightness, but it should be noted that lumen is the unit of luminous flux, which is the brightness as perceived by the human eye. The eye’s efficiency peaks at about 550 nm, and tapers off at the red and blue ends of the spectrum, and the lumen compensates for this. In other words, it’s not the actual amount of visible light energy given off, it’s how bright it looks. This is a trick used in the past by laser pointer manufacturers, when they started coming out with shorter-wavelength (i.e. redder or non-red) devices. Because the eye was more sensitive, they appeared brighter, even though the power was actually smaller. 1 mW of green can be as bright as ~5 mW of red, depending on the exact wavelengths involved.
The Good Intentions Paving Company
Aka the Schmozart effect. And this happens a lot.
‘Mozart Effect’ Was Just What We Wanted To Hear
[E]ven if listening to Beethoven won’t make us smarter, the history of how the Mozart Effect ultimately became fashionable does have something to teach us. It’s a story about careful science, less careful journalism, and of course, death threats.
Design
I found another site that has a slightly more complete answer for how the “fridge of the future” is supposed to work. Nano bio robots upconvert IR into visible light, and send it out of the system. (No, it doesn’t. We call this magic, when we’re in a charitable mood. At other times what we call it involves the biology of used food, sometimes incorporating a male bovine)
But I’ve already said all of that.
The other thing that bothers me about this is that it’s part of Electrolux’s Design Lab competition, and I think they should be embarrassed to have included it. Design is not just aesthetics. If something serves no other function than to evoke a response based on how it looks, it’s art. We like art because it’s pleasing to the eye, or it arouses a certain emotional reaction, or make you think (or some combination thereof). But this wasn’t an art competition. It was a design competition, ostensibly meaning you want the best design. Design brings with it an additional requirement: it has to work.
Design incorporates a lot of things, and it’s not like experimental physicists are routinely mistaken a great designers. We tend to swing to the other end of the spectrum; if it works, who cares what it looks like? We’re the only ones who are going to use it, so why make the controls intuitive? Our experiments typically involve duct tape, parts held together with bits of wire and cables everywhere, and few labels. If you want design, you need to talk to an engineer — s/he will make it work, and do so in a more efficient fashion, put it in a box and make it (somewhat) easier to use. We than measure the quality of design by the attractiveness of the package and the level of user-friendliness, and great design is hard because you are trying to optimize for multiple variables, with often conflicting constraints — one demand might be that it’s small, but another requirement needs it to be big, etc. It’s hard to do all that. But the unspoken part of all of this is that the box has to do what it’s supposed to do — if it doesn’t meet spec, we tend to get mad and demand it be fixed, or give us our money back.
So an item that can’t possibly work can’t be an example of good design. It shouldn’t even get in the door.
Rubber Tree Plant? Pshaw!
Ants Use Their Own Velcro to Catch Supersized Prey
They’ve got really high hopes.
A. andreae colonies live in trees, and individual ants line the underside edges of leaves, jaws open and outstretched. When an insect lands, the ants seize its legs, holding it down until other ants dismember the pinioned prey.
In the new study, the researchers held weighted threads in front of the ants. Instinctively, the ants bit and held. Without losing its grip, the average worker could hold on to 8 grams, or some 5,700 times its body weight. In proportional terms, that’s like a house cat holding on to a humpback whale. Passing insects don’t have a chance.
Something about the numbers don’t add up for me, though. This puts an ant’s mass at a milligram or two, and that seems very small.
No Cross-Dressers They
Do bosons ever masquerade as fermions?
Bosons can pile on top of one another without limit, all occupying the same quantum state. At low temperatures, this causes such strange phenomena as superconductivity, superfluidity and Bose-Einstein condensation. It also allows photons of the same frequency to form coherent laser beams. Fermions, on the other hand, avoid one another. Electrons around a nucleus stack into shells instead of collapsing into a condensed cloud, giving rise to atoms with a great range of chemical properties.
…
“If just one pair of photons out of 10 billion had taken the bait and behaved like fermions, we would have seen it,” English said. “Photons are bosons, at least within our experimental sensitivity.”
I'll Bet They've Got SCMODS
The Physics of the Blues Brothers
At the time the movie was released, it had more car crashes than any movie in history and was only surpassed by the sequel. They bought 60 police cruisers to repeatedly destroy and kept a 24hr body shop to repair them. They went through 13 “Bluesmobiles,” to do all the stunts. Some were retrofitted with tiny one gallon gas tanks for jumping, others modified for speed and one took a mechanic several months to rig just so it would fall to pieces in the final scene. While they might not seem so impressive in our age of rampant CGI, all the stunts in the movie were real.
Don't Make Them Feel Self-Conscious
Weird Antimatter Particles Discovered Deep Underground
Don’t call them weird — they aren’t. They violate parity, but that makes them special. As far as I can tell (and it isn’t easy, because the press releases and web pages do a kinda crappy job of this), the so-called geoneutrinos are electron neutrinos, given off in decay chains of heavy elements in the earth’s interior. More specifically, they would be antineutrinos, since the decay chains typically involve alpha and beta-minus decays, and the latter give off electron antineutrinos.
In other words, the particle is not new. The name distinguishes them from solar neutrinos, but I think it also adds confusion to the mix, especially when the distinction isn’t made clear. Unnecessary jargon isn’t a good thing.
What is interesting is that the scientists are trying to use this as a diagnostic for learning about the earth’s interior.
The researchers hope that by studying geoneutrinos, they can learn more about how decaying elements add to the heat beneath Earth’s surface and affect processes like convection in the mantle. Whether radioactive decay dominates the heating in this layer, or merely adds to the heat from other sources, is an open question.