Though the [Federal Helium Reserve (FHR)] still holds more helium than any other stockpile by far, its stores are rapidly diminishing. Since 2003, the US Bureau of Land Management has been methodically selling off the FHR’s hoard (and repaying the $1.4 billion debt) in compliance with a 1996 Congressional act that called for phasing out the reserve by 2015.
Echoing years of complaints from the scientific community, in January the US National Research Council (NRC) released a report condemning the liquidation of the FHR as a shortsighted blunder that has thrown the global market into turmoil and hindered scientific research.
Better This than a Zombie Army
The “Ghost Army” was a unit that used deception to imitate or cover the actions of real units during WWII. There is a documentary being made.
Mason’s platoon was attached to General Joe Collins’ VII Corps as an experiment in deception. Their assignment was to set up dummy artillery emplacements, about a mile forward of the 980th artillery, to draw enemy fire. I was kind of scary says Mason. Task Force Mason stayed with the 980th Artillery for 28 days. Their efforts to draw fire succeeded as they were attacked by both German artillery and aircraft. Luckily, there were no casualties. The experiment was judged a success. There would be bigger operations–and more danger–in the Ghost Army’s future.
Overflow
April 1 posts.
New Most Accurate Atomic Clock
Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he’s from the future
Science, Nature Team Up on New Journal
Update:
Monolith Action Figure
like a previous April Fool product, I wonder of this will turn into a real product, not just available on Europa, based on consumer demand. I’d buy one. Might be tougher to do with the Canned Unicorn Meat, though.
A Day Early, a Dollar Short
NBC’s Today show breaks the story on internet trolling. I’m not kidding; I heard the teaser on Wednesday morning at the gym, so this wasn’t an April Fool’s day prank. Trolling: The Today Show Explores the Dark Side of the Internet
Um, Today? It’s your landline, corded phone ringing. I think it’s USENET from 1993 calling to say, “Nothing new here.” Now go work on that new story and tell us all about chatrooms, and work your way up to facebook. In a few years, you can “discover” Twitter.
Programming Your S.O.
A brief, yet helpful, lesson on elementary resource-locking strategy
I explained as politely as I could that separation of concerns is one of the most fundamental of all the principles of system design, and that for me to reschedule my own tasks and take on other agents’ responsibilities would be a gross violation of encapsulation. I explained that, instead, when she accepted the get-the-boys’-drinks interrupt, she should have relinquished her lock and passed the cheese back down to my end of the table before going swanning off off on the drinks mission.
Sadly, she was COMPLETELY IRRATIONAL and started talking as though I was some kind of selfish jerk who just wanted the cheese.
Live by the programmer’s POV, die by the programmer’s POV.
If You See Someone Drowning
Laugh out loud. Then Call 911.
Not an April Fool Prank
There’s an option in my tax software to brag on facebook that I’ve completed them. People do this?
Lab Chicken
I recently spent a while unwrapping and eating 64 slices of American cheese about a hundred individually-wrapped connectors, which is a pretty mindless way to spend a few minutes, although it’s better than mindless paperwork or training. Because I lost at lab chicken. Twice in one day, in fact.
Lab chicken, or some variant of it, is an informal game that’s been played out in all places I’ve worked. In its current form, it consists of trying to get someone else to do some tedious task of yours, through either luck or some cunning non-Baldrickian plan (in that it actually works), but not through overt threats or bribery. To the uninitiated, it might seem like an exercise in procrastination, but procrastination in and of itself does not usually invite participation and competition. (Procrastination is often its own reward — not doing an unpleasant or silly task, and often enough, the powers that be change their mind and cancel or scale back what was required. Plenty of positive reinforcement, even without the dispensing of food pellets.)
It’s common practice in our group that when you order something, you are responsible for unpacking it. This usually works quite well, because if you order something you are often the one who is going to use it — a replacement part, flange for a vacuum system, optics or something related — you ordered it because you need it to move along with your project. But sometimes you order parts in large quantities, because you are thinking ahead to the next several months of assembly. So the box may sit on your desk, waiting, until someone actually needs one of the components, and then they are forced to actually unwrap the rest and put them away. That’s what happened to me. I needed a certain connector and was handed the box of “many,” and ended up putting them away.
My other “loss” was when I went to sit down to assemble my little project. Someone had stored several cardboard boxes in the space below the lab bench where I was going to work. Taking a single box down to the recycling bin is a waste of time, so the challenge here is to pile the boxes up until it gets cleared. Since we had some sneetches coming through later on, the pile had to be eradicated. So I got stuck with that task, too.
Heavy, Man
Built of Facts: A Brief History of Light
A nit (nit being the quanta of disagreement or concern):
Water waves and sound waves need something material to “wave”. Physicists assumed there was a thin and invisible medium called luminiferous aether permeating the universe, and that light waves were oscillations of this substance. But in 1887, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley were able to do a very careful experiment to measure the speed of light as the earth moved through the aether as it orbited in space. Their experiment came up negative. There just wasn’t any aether.
M&M were attempting to ultimately confirm the speed of the earth moving through the ether, via changes in the speed of light, and the reason they knew they had to do this measurement is that way back in 1725, James Bradley had measured stellar aberration — the apparent shift in position of a star due to the motion of the earth, which manifests itself in measurements taken at different times of the year. If the earth were somehow at rest with respect to the ether, there should be no aberration, so this option was already eliminated when the models of electromagnetic wave propagation were being hammered out. The M-M experiment was the experiment that showed we weren’t moving with respect to it, because being at rest wasn’t an option for explaining the null result.
A Different Kind of Science
Not everybody gets to do tightly controlled experiments in the lab. It’s still science, though (provided you do it right). Can you apply it to the study of history? Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson think you can.
Natural experiments: Working in the history lab
In Snow’s case the difficulty was not that manipulative controlled experiments were impossible or illegal, but that they were immoral. In other sciences, manipulative controlled experiments are impossible, so, for example, astronomy, evolutionary biology, epidemiology and historical geology all use natural experiments. If you are studying planets, volcanoes or glaciers, you cannot manipulate them. The same goes for dinosaurs or other things that existed or happened in the past, so manipulative experiments are ruled out in such historical sciences as palaeontology, too. In social sciences such as economics, political science and sociology, manipulative, controlled experiments are ruled out on all three grounds – they are either impossible, or they are immoral or illegal. Investigators have no choice but to test hypotheses using naturally occurring experiment-like variations.
Yet there is one field where natural experiments could be used but seldom are: most historians resist them. That is odd because, after all, many of the sciences that use natural experiments are deeply historical.