Practical, but not Practical

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The practical joke arms race of Caltech, MIT and … UBC? Extreme Engineering

In this arms race, UBC is the third superpower. One of its most sophisticated feats also took place on the Lions Gate Bridge, in 1988. Electrical engineer Johan Thornton, now a contract engineer in his late 30s, decided that he wanted to make the bridge lights —all of them—blink. Thornton will only broadly describe the hack, but he hints that the low current of the bridge’s daylight sensor was crucial. For hours, people assumed that the blinking bridge lights were broken. Then the crew of a passing cargo ship reported that the pattern was Morse code: “UBC engineers do it again.”

I had no idea. I spent two and a half years at TRIUMF, on the edge of the UBC campus, but don’t recall hearing about any adventures in my time there.

Good Argument, Bad Argument

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Ran across the tube containing Standards in Science Blogging and My Inbox. I’m interested in standards of science blogging, so I gave it a read. The author almost gets it right when talking about the right way and wrong way to support your argument.

There is a right way and a wrong way to buttress one’s viewpoints on controversial issues involving science and society.

The right way is to do a comprehensive search of the literature on the topic and to find a group of peer-reviewed articles that support one’s argument. In a popular article, it’s OK to also quote popular sources, but if the subject is science, the focus should be on peer-reviewed mayerial.

I think you need to take it one step further. Finding articles that support your argument is the lawyer’s way of making a case. The scientist looks at all of the material, or at least a reasonable sampling of it. In any widely-researched area there will invariably be some literature that is unsupportive, contradictory or at least ambiguous, and it is not scientific to cherry-pick results. This is just the nature of, well, nature — you get statistical results, and sometimes those results are the outliers rather than the average.

So make sure it’s carefully-done research (peer-review helps with that). But survey the whole body of it, and make sure the science really is supporting you. There are people who will point to a poorly-done study and build a position from it, oblivious to the fact that it contradicts mounds of other works — these are not good arguments.

I think it that science bloggers and journalists should work toward a standard of ethics that their scientifically-related posts and articles will contain at least a minimal number of links or citations to peer-reviewed material.

Obviously, if blog posts aren’t about science, there’s no such need for literature citation.

I think this is true, remembering the context of discussions of science & society. One also needs to remember the difference between fact and opinion. There are quite a few people out there who post their opinions as if they were facts, or dismiss facts as if they were opinions.

Teleport, Shmeleport

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Today’s xkcd is about quantum teleportation, but the problem isn’t that journalists write the “same disappointed story” whenever quantum teleportation is being reported. It’s that they still report that teleportation is somehow connected to moving matter around, whether they’ve been waved off about it or not; the latter would be because they didn’t vet their story. They are almost Pavlovian (does that name ring a bell?) in their need to include the reference to Star Trek.

That’s only a small deduction in judging the overall message, though. (Especially the title tag, where Randall zings the sensationalization of story titles)

Playing Hard to Get

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Giving your new results away too soon

[W]here do you announce your results first: in the title? In the abstract? In the introduction? Or, in the results paragraph? If you wait to long your paper will become a whodunit and readers will get bored and stop reading your paper. If the clue of your paper is already in the title you might fear that many of your readers will only read your title and will then go on to read the next paper.

It depends on the type of paper, but I think you generally give your main result in the abstract. The paper gives the details of how you did it, context and information about other related research (but not in that order)

Meanwhile, Down Below

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Phone conversation overheard in Hell’s IT department:

Sir, I have to get you to change your password to comply with the new protocols.

It’s to keep our servers safe, sir. We’re at risk. There are a lot of hackers out there.

Well, yes, sir, many of them are hellraisers, and ultimately that’s a good thing, but we were pwned last week and a religious inspirational page was up instead of ours.

It’s computer jargon, sir, never mind. This is about your password.

Sir, we have a great firewall but I’m afraid it’s not good enough anymore.

No, sir, more brimstone won’t help. It’s the internet sir — there are too many savvy hackers out there, and we have to stay ahead of the curve.

Yes, having Al Gore help start it and then look foolish for claiming to have invented it was genius. So was getting him to champion global warming so that lots of people could deny it. But your password sir. It needs to be changed. At least eight characters, with capitals, numbers and symbols.

I know 666 is your number, sir. Everybody knows. That’s the problem.

Yes, eight characters. And to give you a horns up, fifteen characters is coming as soon as we upgrade the server software. And you’ll have to change it every 60 days. Can’t use words in the dictionary. Also, even though I know you will, I must tell you not to write it down.

No, sir, writing it in blood still counts.

I won’t argue with that, sir. It’s a pain in everyone’s rear. But if it’s any consolation, these policies are being adopted topside, so if it’s any consolation, you can say they are using the security measures from hell.

Yes, sir, I know “alphanumeric of the beast” doesn’t have the same ring to it. Maybe PR can help you with that sir. Goodbye, sir.

Life is a Cabernet, Old Chum

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Using NMR to check the fitness of wines (Don’t bother with this, for multiple reasons, if they have a bottlecap instead of a cork)

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Makes Sure Wine is Fit For the Queen of England

When wine hits 1.4 grams of acetic acid per liter it is considered bad. Although the average bottle of vinegar has around 12.50 grams acetic acid per liter the difference is nothing to take lightly. NMR measures acetic acid in wine down to the tenth of a gram.

Up to 10 percent of wine spoilage comes from the oxygen-alcohol blend. Cork taint, from the 2, 4, 6-tricloroanisol molecule accounts for the other main contributor of wine spoilage. Though NMR is only used in locating oxidation based spoilage, it is still a major breakthrough in the wine world, especially when it comes to auctions.

Auctioneers say as many as 50 percent of the vintages pre-1950 auctioned at places like Christie’s or Zachy’s, where $2000 bottles are the norm, are spoiled. Augustine says that when it comes to exquisite wine the importance of protecting the investment is up to an individual.

And Tyler Colman asks, “Why use a cork in the first place?” when dealing with wines that are a little lower in cost.

Drink Outside the Box

Although some sommeliers may scoff at wine from a plastic spigot, boxes are perfect for table wines that don’t need to age, which is to say, all but a relative handful of the top wines from around the world. What’s more, boxed wine is superior to glass bottle storage in resolving that age-old problem of not being able to finish a bottle in one sitting. Once open, a box preserves wine for about four weeks compared with only a day or two for a bottle. Boxed wine may be short on charm, but it is long on practicality.

Mythological Physics

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Cryptophysicists

One major difference between cryptophysicists and cryptozooligists is that the public is generally able to perceive that the latter are outside the mainstream. Everyone knows from daily experience that there probably aren’t yeti or sea monsters hanging around. Modern physics is abstracted enough from everyday lives and intuition, though, that many people, including some journalists, honestly can’t tell when someone’s waaay out there.

I think people are more familiar with mythology than physics, and the results of relativity and quantum mechanics being so downright weird, it’s harder to say what’s possible and what isn’t. Which makes cryptophysics and crackpottery harder to discern from each other, and from established science. Credulous media doesn’t help.

I wonder if things like string theory have made this worse. No, I don’t — I’m sure it has.

Equivalent to Pigs Flying

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Bee explains The Equivalence Principle

That is what Einstein explains in his thought experiment with the elevator. If you are standing in the elevator (that is just a local patch, theoretically infinitesimally small) you can’t tell whether you are pulled down because there is a planet underneath your feet, or because there is a flying pig pulling up the elevator.

We're Awake … But We're Very Puzzled

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Gender issues in science. Nerd Girls at Bad Astronomy, which begat smart = sexy at Cocktail Party Physics, which begat Flirt harder. I’m a physicist at sciencegeekgirl.

There’s some really interesting commentary to go along with the posts.

I have the sneaking suspicion that this topic is one where it is impossible to be right; there is no position one can take that won’t piss someone else off. Given, then, that I’m already in trouble, I will blithely assume that this is simply a Boolean state.

On “geeky” vs “girly,” Jennifer Observes with the very first comment on Phil’s blog,

What we really need to get over is this silly “either/or” tendency…

which I think is spot on, and it’s a bit surprising to me to see later remarks to the contrary — things to the effect of it’s great how girls can like science and girly stuff, too, and stereotypes such as “shopping is for girls.” I thought stereotypes were bad, hence the title of this post, and my comment that some people will get PO-ed no matter which side of this argument you’re on. Unless it’s just a big conspiracy to confuse me.

The other comment that came up a few times was that if we try and deny the significance of physical attraction we’re fighting a few million years of evolution. It’s true. Men have evolved to be responsive to visual cues. However, along the same timeline, humans have also evolved bigger brains and developed language and culture, and so response to visual stimuli does not give you the excuse to be a jerk.

He Helps Us Get High

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August 18, 1868. Jules Janssen “invents” helium. (At least, according to principal Skinner. “Curse the man who invented helium! Curse Pierre Jules César Janssen!)

Janssen was observing an eclipse and measured an emission line with a wavelength of 587.49 nm, which didn’t correspond to any known element. Norman Lockyer also observed the line later that year, and as it could not be reproduced in the lab, proposed that it was a new element, which was named after helios, the sun.