Silicon Valley Redneck

Poorly-constructed tests

Yeah, raggin' on Mythbusters again.

Pheromones: basic structural problem.  You want to test the subtle effects of human pheromones, you don't hit the subject with a concentrated nose-full and ask for her immediate, conscious opinion.  You give her a low dose for several minutes, and monitor physiological responses (no, I don't know which ones, let alone how to measure them).

Aside from that... the "choose your favorite" is a poor mode of voting, especially with many options.  I suggest having a slider on each station, initially set to 0, which the subject can move anywhere in the -10 to +10 range.

Blondes: again, basic problem.  A proper blonde is going to be generally melanin-deficient, and will have pale skin and, probably, blue eyes.  Get too far from that and what you have is not a blonde but a woman who has inexplicably bleached her hair.  You can take a pale, blue-eyed woman, put her in a dark wig, and have a convincing effect; going the other way just screams fake!

Also, how many of the test subjects were actual gentlemen?

And yet another thing brings Kipling to mind

A recent experiment shows that very many people can't bear to be alone with their own thoughts.

So... are we talking days on end in a sensory-deprivation chamber here?

Nope.

The challenge is: put away your iThings and sit quietly an an ordinary room for 15 minutes.

Fifteen.  Smegging.  Minutes.

During which time a lot of the subjects resorted to pushing the "shock me" button to relieve the tedium.

Hence the Kipling:

They string a clamorous Magic
To fence their souls from thought

Must be I'm abnormal or sump'n.  'Cause I can certainly keep my mind occupied for way more'n 15 minutes.  Or just blank it and relax for a change.

But I've known plenty of people who absolutely must have a TV going in every room of their homes, every minute of every day... or something similar.  Nonstop stimulation!  I've even encountered some who'd lug ghetto blasters along on backpacking trips.

I think it goes back to the trees, and monkeys living in large, constantly-chattering groups.  Little monkey brains still need the chatter, to reassure them that the tribe is still around.

More lame science

On the latest Pinky and the Brain and the Three Stooges:

1. Ping-pong ball slows down as it approaches the closed end of the (mostly-) evacuated barrel. Duh.  Even without blow-by, there's some air ahead of the ball, which will be compressed.  The packing tape holds it in.  I'd assumed that the evacuated-barrel ping-pong-ball accelerator would have the end closed by some little disc held in place by vacuum (OK, by outside atmospheric pressure), so oncoming pressure buildup would blow it off.

2. I'd also kinda assumed that the logical step after the pressure gun was just to evacuate the barrel of the same old pressure gun.  Did they try that and not show it, or...?

3. In the final encounter of supersonic ping-pong-ball vs. porcine appendage, the high-speed footage made it look remarkably like the air stream was doing most of the damage.  This would be consistent with my suspicion at the beginning: yeah, a supersonic ping-pong ball would be dangerous, but whatever's keeping it supersonic is probably more so.  And, if you're in an environment where a ping-pong ball can continue moving at 1100 MPH for a nontrivial distance, you've got bigger worries than ping-pong balls.

4. If reinforcing materials were allowed for the cannonballs, why not for the tube?  Why not make the cannon out of Pykrete?

A grand opportunity for Science!

Skimming McMegan's latest, I come across this:

A few years back, Oregon found enough money in its budget to add 10,000 people to Medicaid. Because more than 10,000 people wanted to go on Medicaid, it used a lottery to hand out slots ... and thus gave researchers an excellent setup for a randomized controlled trial of the effect that health insurance had on peoples’ lives.

My first thought: yes, but it wasn't double-blind!

My second thought: Obamacare, plus the healthcare.gov fiasco, may offer a golden opportunity for a double-blind study of the usefulness of health insurance / prepaid health plans.

Because, at this point: there's a large pool of potential patients who don't know whether or not they have coverage, and neither do their doctors.

So long as everyone is kept in the dark, this provides perfect conditions for an ambitious study!

Well... as long as the covered-or-not condition of the subjects can eventually be determined.  Does no good to collect data on individual outcomes unless, after the fact, you can assign each subject to the correct group.

Surprise!

In an utterly astounding revelation, it turns out that modern humanity's ancestry is not pure Cro-Magnon, and that our forebears* were in the habit of fooling around with Other Breeds.

Ya think?

The interesting aspect here is that such matings seems to have been common and produced viable offspring (so, not properly rishathra).

This blurs yet further the concept of "species."  If they can, and routinely do, interbreed...?

And if Those People are properly classified as Homo sapiens, then what's the big deal, anyway?

 

* Well, three of them, anyway.

Science fail

The Chive has a list of Other Uses For Beer.

The compass one?  Totally bogus.  Putting a static charge on a needle won't magnetize it.  Also, needles that will float on beer are few and far between.  A cork is called for, which suggests that wine is more appropriate than beer (and you don't have to wait for it to go flat).

Also, they left out rocket propellant.

Er, wait...

So there's this newly-discovered paleo-monotreme thingy.  Seems it was, back in the day, a platypus with nasty sharp pointy teeth.

Part of its name (Obdurodon tharalkooschild) is explained thus:

The second part of the name comes from an Indigenous Australian creation myth about the origin of the platypus. According to the story, in the Dreamtime, Tharalkoo was a headstrong female duck who disobeyed her parents' warnings not to swim downriver where Bigoon the water-rat could catch her...

Wait.  This is an ancient myth?

I are confoozed.  How long have there been rodents in Australia, anyway?

Update: Duh.  Seems Australia does have indigenous Muridae, including this critter.

Offense, defense, counter-defense...

There was something on Slashdot a couple days back about arming drones with frickin' lasers.  Not for vaporizing targets on the ground, mind you, but so they could zap incoming anti-drone missiles out of the sky!

Only, as an early commenter pointed out, even the little excerpt mentioned that the lasers were for defense against "EO/IR guided surface-to-air missiles," so 'twas pretty clear that the idea was to blind optical seekers.

Now, if you know what type of lasers all the drones are equipped with, protecting your seeker against it is easy.  Even if not, or if they're equipped with different types of lasers, or even with tunable lasers: think auto-darkening welding helmet.  If it suddenly gets bright, make the filter enough darker to prevent damage.

In combination with which: if you're tracking a target, and suddenly get dazzled by coherent light, follow the coherent light.

Now, if the lasers were attached to "smart chaff" being dropped by the drones, following the light would be counterproductive... but chaff that can track an incoming missile and keep a laser pointed at it is going to be expensive and in short supply.  And you can keep firing dumb rockets at the drones until the dronemaster runs out of money.

Will life imitate my deranged imagination?

A couple of years back, I had an Idea - I don't recall whether I shared here, but since there's no prospect of my pursuing it, I'll go ahead and describe it.

The idea, see, is that you'd engineer strains of bacteria that (a) could live just beneath the surface of human skin, and (b) were bioluminescent, in a variety of colors.

Now put little colonies of them in itty-bitty cages so they'll stay where they're put.

Glow-in-the-dark tattoo ink!

And now... someone's gone and put bacteria in cages.

Though I'd assumed the cages would look more like buckyballs and less like serving dishes for monkey brains.

W.H. Donovan, Gharlane of Eddore...

Science Has Gone Too Far!

Seems a team of mad scientists in Überwald has created a living human brain in a jar.

Even the Gligstith(click)optok would grow their cultured food headless.

Growing little individual human brains from scratch?

That's... disturbing.  Even if they're not putting little bowls of them out as appetizers.

In the latest news of medical science...

Found here, via Insty:

To translate this last study into teaspoons: the finding was that anything between 1-1/2 and 3 tsp of salt per day is just fine, and there were adverse effects from eating more than that or less than that. Most Americans who are not consciously restricting salt fall in this range (1-1/2 to 3 tsp). People who are on low-salt diets for medical reasons are getting as little as 1/2 tsp, and they’re well into the range where dearth of salt is harming them. The worst impact of low salt is on insulin sensitivity. Loss of insulin sensitivity is a big risk factor for all the diseases of old age.

Um.

I've been on a de facto low-salt diet since college, when I started doing my own grocery shopping and, for example, took to buying unsalted butter because my buttered toast was coming out too salty for my taste.

I don't eat much processed food, preferring to buy ingredients and do my own cooking.

So let's have a look at some labels, shall we?

Looks like, in warm weather, I get around 500mg of sodium (mumble mumble... about 1.3 grams of salt, roughly 1/4 tsp) from milk.

I buy and use salt.  This here canister says: serving size 1/4 tsp (1.5g); servings per container 491.  I'd normally go through such a container every couple of years... with a fair bit of it used for non-food purposes. So, call it about a pinch (1/8 tsp, 0.75g) per day, maybe.

So, absent the occasional salty snack, I'm way down there in salt consumption.  If this latest news is right, I'm perhaps not getting enough... and, yes, I've been having loss-of-insulin-sensitivity issues for some time now.

Maybe not getting as much iodide as I should, either.

Oh, and if I drink water instead of milk I tend to get a strange, electrolytes-out-of-whack feeling.  Which, now as I think of it, could be sodium-related.

It probably wouldn't hurt to start keeping lightly-salted nuts at my desk again.  Or Sun Chips.  Just gotta keep an eye on that blood pressure, just in case added salt really does aggravate it.

At last...

I'd long been wondering when Grant would get around to this one:

On the latest Mythbusters - the JATO-car "This time for sure!", which deviates ever further from the original yarn, while retaining the Impala - he's finally hooked up a computer-game steering wheel and pedals to the RC box, to allow driving the 1:1-scale RC car like a car.

There's still the matter of having a totally separate radio-command system for firing the rockets, but I'm guessing that's a COTS secure system made for HPR or possibly blasting.

Oh, and on the Science! front?  They keep bandying about a conversion factor for thrust to horsepower.  There's no such thing.  The units are non-equivalent.  Thrust is force (pounds, Newtons, dynes: mass times acceleration, e.g., kg*m/s^2); power is force times distance per unit time (horsepower, Watts, BTU/hour, e.g.: kg*m^2/s^3).  Yeah, you could assign a rocket a horsepower rating based on fuel consumption or (almost equivalently) heat output, but that ain't how horsepower ratings work (though if you used BTU/hour instead, it would make sense: treat the rocket as a heater).

And in the department of I could'a told you that: if you're going for maximum range with your rocket car, and you're not giving it fins like a Cadillac (nor RCS, nor engine gimballing, nor active aerodynamic control surfaces, nor any other way of keeping it pointed straight), best results will be obtained by timing Brennschluß for just before the car leaves the ramp.  Not a couple of seconds later.  If memory serves, they'd already seen the nose-comes-down-leaving-the-ramp effect (because Gravity, duh) in at least one earlier episode (possibly involving an old TV show about hazardous ducks or something), so it should be no surprise that the thrust vector, immediately post-ramp, would be Highly Suboptimal.

Alarming new discovery!

It's possible to make U-233 from thorium!

Uh, guys?  I found that bit of enlightenment in the open literature quite some time ago.

Like, when I was a senior in high school.

And we walked fifty stadia to school every morning, keeping watch for saber-toothed tigers.  That's how long ago it was!

Terrorist EMP menace!

Well... that's the buzz, anyway.

Suppose Iran, or some non-state actor, got hold of a nuke and a way of lofting it?  All it takes is one little nuke in the upper atmosphere to knock out everything electrical in the U.S., right?

Um.  Let's take a look at an actual EMP event, shall we?  Starfish Prime caused significant disruption (not total destruction) of electrical and electronic systems 900 miles away.

And that was a 1.4 MT bomb.  Not a 14 KT fission bomb; a bloody great fusion bomb.

So... to create widespread destruction... our hypothetical enemy needs to use his hypothetical fission bomb that any serious industrial power ought to be able to build (but many seem to struggle with)... and use it to light off a megaton-range H-bomb, which is not widely regarded as being an easily-built item even given the fission trigger.

And then they need a missile capable of delivering that H-bomb (close to a ton, for a well-evolved design in 1958; likely much more for a first try) around 250 miles above the middle of the U.S.  And, if it doesn't have the range to do that from their own territory, they'll need a place to launch it from - maybe a cargo ship; I don't think Cuba would want to play that game this year.

And, looking at the effects described for Starfish Prime, just one of those bombs would create a Big Annoying Inconvenience.  What did the feller say about striking at a king?  We'd have plenty of resources left to track down the perpetrator and retaliate memorably.  A successful, properly crippling attack would need several H-bombs, and several missiles, and... well, basically, we're looking at Russia, or China, or just maybe France or England being able to pull it off.

And, somehow, I don't think anyone's been testing H-bombs without us and the Russians noticing - nor the big missiles, for that matter.  So, the sneak attack by a new Power would involve a bunch of untested hardware.  How good do we think their mathematicians and rocket plumbers are?

Denialism

Sometime during my recent episode of workery-swampery, I saw something go past on Slashdot about a push to get Climate Change (i.e., catatonic anthropomorphic manbearpig) put on the same footing as evolution, and deniers roundly denounced in all public schools.

Because the two are just exactly the same, you know.  And we've all heard what modern biology has to say about evolution:

1. New species descend from older forms through the accumulation of random variations, subject to the pressures of reproductive fitness in their local environments.
2. Therefore, we must establish a global single-payer health-care system under the auspices of the United Nations, and anyone who disagrees is a denier and guilty of crimes against humanity!

Er, wait.

 

Ah, so that's where he's spending his summer vacation.

Apparently, there's a HUGE CYLINDRICAL ALIEN SPACESHIP right near Mercury, revealed by a recent coronal mass ejection.

Except that the spaceship itself need not be huge, nor cylindrical; that could just as well be the shadow of the protective field of a much smaller craft.  Say, something the size of a police box.

Yeah, it's just the TARDIS, right where the Doctor parked it on April 22.  Another fortnight or so, and he'll get bored and go find another adventure, just wait and see.

Or, wait: does Mercury have a magnetic field?  That hole in the CME doesn't look quite right for a planetary magnetic field (though I'm not sure of the perspective), but a big black magnetic anomaly (like the one We Weren't Told About a decade ago) lying on the surface might just do the trick.

 

Trust your instruments, Luke!

Another back episode of Mythbusters: walking, swimming, or driving in instrument meteorological conditions (well, blindfolded).

Surprise!  The human inner ear is not a precision navigational instrument.  It's good for short-term balance, but not inertial navigation.

This is why pilots learning to handle IMC need to be taught to ignore their feelings and watch the attitude indicator and gyrocompass, which are precision navigational instruments.

Somehow, this aspect wasn't even mentioned.

Also not mentioned, when the Three Stooges were playing with Tannerite ("binary explosive"): how's the stuff behave if you set fire to it, as might happen in a car crash with gasoline and running engines present?  'Twon't detonate, sure, but will a trunkload of the stuff deflagrate enthusiastically enough to pass for an explosion?  This ought to have been demonstrated: "Look, here's a jar of the stuff, mixed, and we set fire to it, thus.  No earth-shattering kaboom."  (Given its relationship to flash powder, I'm not confident that a complete lack of kaboom would be the outcome.)

Oh, and Mr. Voiceover Guy?  Safety before mixing is a general property of binary explosives.  Safety after mixing is a property of Tannerite and some others... but there are plenty more that, once mixed, will go blooey at the slightest provocation.

 

Pigs 9; British bipeds 4.

Late lunch hour was time to watch some Mythbusters; today, the "tossing pigs out of helicopters" edition.

As is often the case, I'm bothered by their treatment of the main myth: "It's sometimes possible to dodge a bullet fired at a distance" somehow morphed into "It's sometimes possible to dodge a bullet fired at a distance from a modern sniper rifle."

The results might have been very different if they'd used a different bullet-flanger.  A Trapdoor Springfield, say, or Brown Bess, or even a .44 Magnum with a high-muzzle-flash load, rather than the latest high-velocity, low-signature technology.

And you'd think, after the pig toss, they'd have headed off into the sunset talking about making sausage....

 

Wha...?

Slashdot links to this tale of magnetical horrors in homes in Ohio.  Goin' to the State Supreme Court, forsooth!

The horrors:

Their TV screens were distorted. Cordless phones ran into interference. Computer hard drives were corrupted.

Er, wait.

TV screens distorted: well, maybe, if it's a strong field and you have an old CRT TV.  Flatscreen, no way.

Interference with cordless phones: bullshit.  There's just no freakin' way a static magnetic field will interfere with a cordless phone... unless it's strong enough to pick the thing up by its steel parts.

Hard drives corrupted: just how strong is the field we're talking about, here?  Strong enough to pick up hammers?  'Cause a field that'll mess with the data on a disk platter is going to have some pretty dang obvious effects on any ferrous objects in the vicinity.

I say the plaintiffs are flat-out lying about these purported effects, and diffidently suggest that the actual field strength inside their living space due to the magnetized joists is less than the Earth's natural magnetic field.  Easy test: walk through the house with a compass.  Does it mostly point somewhere near north?  You don't have an alarmingly strong artificial field.

Most likely they've fallen under the influence of some snake-oil peddler who detected feeble fields in the vicinity of the joists and has now convinced them that their lives are in danger, so they're making up unlikely or impossible phenomena, which the courts have so far failed to recognize as such.

 

Evolution and such

I'll start this out with a stunning revelation:

I don't believe in evolution.

To paraphrase Terry Pratchett: that would be like believing in the postman.

What's the point of believing in something that's patently true?  Evolution doesn't require belief, any more than gravity requires belief.  It just goes on by itself, regardless of what anyone thinks of it.

As for the truth of evolution?  Well, I've put enough time and attention into studying the subject to conclude that the evidence for evolution as an ongoing process, and as the origin of (currently extant) species, is thoroughly persuasive.  I have a strong suspicion that there are multiple mechanisms at work, some of them not yet understood, but evolution per se is about as well established as a scientific fact can get outside the tidy, repeatable physical sciences.

OK, now: hands up all those who have put in the effort to grok evolution for themselves.

Those who still have their hands down, and who believe in evolution: do you have any actual basis for your belief?  Or do you just believe because someone told you it was true?

There's a point here, when it comes to evaluating politicians' attitudes toward science.  Truly understanding the evidence for evolution, and its importance to modern biology, isn't something you pick up on the way through the public school system.  You have to spend a good many hours of your adult life studying the material.

So: suppose you're a busy politician, or indeed a busy person of any trade.  Why would you spend time studying biology?  Does it have any direct relevance to your career, or your daily life?  Does it, like attending church, offer opportunities for social networking?

Of course not.  So chances are, any position on evolution taken by a politician is based on second-hand opinion, same as for most other people.  Evolution, unless you're a biologist, is a prime candidate for rational ignorance.  There's just no compelling need for most people to understand the subject in any detail.

And, no, I'm not in any way suggesting that creationism be taught in science class, any more than Communism should be taught in economics class.  Science class is for fact-based science, in which category evolution qualifies (if taught properly), while creationism most assuredly does not.  (On the other hand, I think biology teachers should be prepared to give a coherent explanation of the evidence for evolution, not just to answer the inevitable creationist questions with "Shut up, kid.")

Update: The Royal Society, in a desperate attempt not to be mistaken for a moose, has come out in favor of showing respect for creationism.

The statement quotes Reiss saying, "Creationism has no scientific basis."

He goes on to say, "However, when young people ask questions about creationism in science classes, teachers need to be able to explain to them why evolution and the Big Bang are scientific theories but they should also take the time to explain how science works and why creationism has no scientific basis.

That sounds about right to me.