Defeating a sliding-chain lock with a rubber band.
Leonard Pinth-Garnell Meets Merriam and Webster
Zapperz reports on the Bad Glossary of Particle Physics Terms
The sad thing in all of this is not that they got it wrong. I would not expect a reporter to get all of this correct. The sad part is that (i) no one bothers to fact-check them and (ii) they don’t have a expert staff or a physicist on call to give this a quick glance. How difficult can it be? It just shows a total lack of respect for this area of reporting.
Don't Know the Words
The Amazing Hummingbird Hawk Moth
If you’ll recall, I got some slo-mo film of a hummingbird moth last summer.
The $64,000 Question
($64,000 being “big money” ages ago, before anyone who wanted to be a millionaire had a chance to be able to become one via a game show)
The context of the quote is really not all that important, though if you read the article in which it appears, an opponent of the recent U.S. healthcare legislation admits he’s unfamiliar with all the details he’s opposing. He says, “I can’t tell you exactly what the deal is.”
Then comes the money shot:
If you can’t tell us exactly what the deal is, why are you opposing it and fighting against it?
This applies to pretty much everyone who is in opposition to some scientific tenet, and especially to situations where the argument has gotten political. Anti-relativity cranks? They don’t understand relativity — invariably they will insist on a preferred reference frame or absolute simultaneity. Screw nature and what we actually observe. Quantum theory? Nah, God doesn’t play dice. Everything secretly really has a trajectory. My classical solution is just as good at solving this one problem. QM just can’t work that way, experimental evidence be damned. Evolution? Nope, the world is just 6000 years old. I’ve got a book that says so, Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs and besides, evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. Global warming? Bzzzt. Inhofe built an igloo after it snowed in Washington DC. It hasn’t warmed since 1995. Besides, Al Gore is fat.
This is painfully common — some of the loudest, angriest critics of the Affordable Care Act are also some of the least informed, most confused, embarrassingly ignorant observers anywhere. In this case, Cassell has become a national joke because he’s repulsed by a health care reform plan that he fully admits he doesn’t understand.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so pathetic
This turns into a template
This is painfully common — some of the loudest, angriest critics of the [Area of Science] are also some of the least informed, most confused, embarrassingly ignorant observers anywhere. In this case, [Name] has become a national joke because he’s repulsed by a scientific theory that he fully admits he doesn’t understand.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so pathetic
And that’s so true. It is pathetic that people can oppose something they don’t understand. They just know it’s wrong, dammit; who cares if they’re tilting at windmills? That they’ve been lied to, and they uncritically accepted (and perpetuate) the lie, because they can’t be bothered to think and/or become informed. We’re tempted to laugh, but there’s that sickening thought that these people vote, and the people they vote for think they can reshape scientific truth by decree, in order to align it with some ideology they possess.
So try and reveal the real truth of the matter:
Ask them what the deal is, and if they can’t tell you exactly what the deal is, ask them why they are opposing it and fighting against it. I fear it will do little good with people who refuse to think or become informed, but it’s worth shot.
Rube-y Goldberg Tuesday, Shaken-not-Stirred Edition
Don’t know what you’d do if you wanted a Screaming Viking, with the cucumber bruised.
What's Wrong With This Picture?
US Military Developing Poop-Powered Nuclear Reactors
Um, unless you’re crapping U-235, no.
What DARPA wants is a deployable reactor that can provide electricity, plus use locally available material — like poop — to make “mobility fuel” (e.g. biodiesel)
For the purposes of this RFI, DARPA/STO is interested in nuclear powered generator design concepts that produce both electricity and mobility fuel. The total energy output of the generator design should support an electrical load of 5 to 10 MW in addition to producing 15,000 gallons/day of fuel from indigenous hydrogen and carbon feedstocks.
Not a Peep Out of You!
There are several important implications indicated by these [low pressure] results:
1. Peeps are poorly equipped as fighter pilots, supporting the Supreme Court ruling that banning peeps from the cockpits of F-16 planes in combat does not violate the Anti-Discrimination Act of 1992. (Orville & Wilbur Peep vs. US Government, 1994)
2. Peeps should exercise caution when ascending after deep-sea diving excursions, as sudden decreases in pressure may exceed the structural integrity of visceral parenchyma.
3. This may explain the tragic demise of the Col. Lewis Peep expedition which attempted to reach the peak of Mt. Everest in the spring of 1856. It is important to note that these data do not exclude alternative theories suggesting that the group was devoured by a pack of diabetic mountain lions. (Schroedinger, Heisenberg, & Bohr, 1922).
And it Weighs the Same as a Duck
Mieke Meijer came up with the idea to use piles of discarded daily newspaper making it into a renewed material. The layer of paper appear like lines of a wood grain and the rings of a tree just like a real wood when the Newspaper Wood is cut. It can be cut, milled and sanded and generally treated like other type of wood.
Come on Down!
Pigeons outperform humans at the Monty Hall Dilemma
Pigeons, on the other hand, rely on experience to work out probabilities. They have a go, and they choose the strategy that seems to be paying off best. They also seem immune to a quirk of ours called “probability matching”. If the odds of winning by switching are two in three, we’ll switch on two out of three occasions, even though that’s a worse strategy than always switching. This is, of course, exactly what the students in Hebranson and Schroder’s experiments did. The pigeons, on the other hand, always switched – no probability matching for them.
In short, pigeons succeed because they don’t over-think the problem. It’s telling that among humans, it’s the youngest students who do best at this puzzle. Eighth graders are actually more likely to work out the benefits of switching than older and supposedly wiser university students. Education, it seems, actually worsens our performance at the Monty Hall Dilemma.
Pigeons are also unwelcome at casinos, but this may not solely be due to their immunity to the gambler’s fallacy.
