A Break From Studied Foolishness

A sensible response to yesterday's school attack by Chris Rock. (language warning, in case you had not already guessed)

Via The Other McCain

Uranium is a metal

And this particular piece is weapons-grade.

Moving to Mars?

If you are 5-20 years old, in 20 years, you'll be 25-40: just about the right age to start up a new life on Mars. Elon Musk, who made a fortune on Paypal has been building SpaceX, a private space exploration agency. Now he says his goal is to start a colony on mars. He says he'll charge about $500,000. More detail here.

Jan'16: Here are more details - or at least speculation - on the Musk plan, including a Mars-Earth ferrying spaceship, deep sleep for the colonists to reduce consumption during the flight and terraforming assisted by thermonuclear detonations at the poles.

Want to travel at the speed of light?

OK, previous post notwithstanding, you can't. But MIT has a game out where you can see what it would be like to walk at nearly the speed of light. They don't make you walk really fast; instead they make light go really slowly. Popular Science has a description here.

MIT wants people to go beyond. What they are making is the game engine. That is, they do the hard work of the relativistic effects. You can then program your own game in their relativistic world.

Warp Drives

Now significantly less impossible.

Education and Careers

University professors often wax eloquent about the glories of education for education's sake: a noble, but expensive luxury. Students and their parents usually think about education as career training. Here is a list of traditional university majors with a lousy track record for landing jobs.

I notice two things about the list: they are fields people take for the pure love of education and they don't include the women's studies, environmental studies, African-american studies &c. that are the usual butt of career jokes.

OTOH - Good jobs w/o degrees - maybe a good way to follow up that philosophy degree.

Scientist with the Greatest Legacy?

The greatest impact on the world of science would have to go to Newton, possibly Bacon or Aristotle. The greatest benefit to mankind from scientific work? I guess that would be Norman Borlaug.

Who?

Borlaug was a farmer and a researcher into farming practices. His main idea was to adapt the best practices of the western farmer to the third world: first Mexico, then Pakistan and India. His most famous work was to breed a "semi-dwarf" wheat that could be grown strong and full without growing too tall, then falling over and rotting.

In doing so, he allowed millions of people to live who would have starved to death, probably hundreds of millions. He may have saved more lives than were taken by Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot, combined. In the early 70's, the smart set had agreed that mass starvation was a fact of life that could only get worse. Intellectual discussions were how to manage the suffering.

Even as they published, Borlaug had already proven the technology and was implementing the green revolution.

Norman Borlaug passed away three years ago, today. He was 95.

(Or this video has a little more technical content)

Spacing Out-My Intellectual Superpower

Apparently spacing out for a while can boost your brainpower

At least that is the story in the popular media. The study actually shows that people who are left alone after learning something remember better than people who immediately move on to the next thing. (So, no phones/games/electronics in class.) It's my own experience that tells me if I start daydreaming about an idea I'll understand it better

What is Your Science Fair Project?

I never entered a science fair but I have judged a few. Some of my favorites were the boy who tested various batteries to see which lasted longest or the boy who measured the performance of a motor at various loads, voltages and currents.

How about designing a computer program to diagnose breast cancer? Brittany Wenger programmed a neural network to consider nine different pieces of information and make a diagnosis of breast cancer. That won her the international Google Science Fair.

Watching Light Travel

If you thought this was fast...

Professor Ramesh Raskar of MIT has been taking video at a trillion frames per second. (Normal video is 30 fps.) The video from his camera of the bullet passing through the picture above would take a year to watch...just fast enough to see light travel. It turns out that if you can watch light travel, you can see the ripeness of fruit, see around corners and observe relativity.

Of Subprime Loans and University Degrees

Are you thinking about going to university? Beware the higher education bubble!

(US data. I'd guess Canada's is less dramatic but I haven't checked.)

In your great-grandparents' day, you took what life had to offer. Only a few would dream clearly, work hard and be lucky enough to get the education to pursue a dream. If it wasn't exactly your dream, well...close enough. In your parents' day, education was easier. Lots of kids got some extra education whether they had the dream or not. The world needed educated people and it was bound to work out. That degree in Psychology was handy to have even if you ended up selling real estate.

In your day the guarantee is gone. University is more expensive; lots of people have generic degrees and degrees are less rigorous/less respected. University still makes sense but only if you know why. Trade school makes sense if you know why. starting a business makes sense if you know why. Any one of those could put a big, expensive hole in your life if you don't know why. More than ever, you need to dream clearly.

Teens Who Will be Happy

Nearly every movie or TV show I see aimed at the teen (or worse, pre-teen) audience sends the message that teens are sullen, moody, pouty, self-centered, narcissistic, disrespectful and rude. Worse: they send the message that this is healthy and proper. Any kid who is not narcissistic and disrespectful is a suck, a goody-two-shoes or some sort of deviant.

A new study says otherwise. The most important indicator of how happy and healthy you will be in life is not money, intelligence, grades, image or even popularity. It is connectedness: can you find people nearby to talk to, to help, to enjoy? Do you join clubs? sports are fine and so is the chess club, church youth group or volunteering group. (Even the video games or anime circles work as long as you are talking, not just gaming.) Don't forget mom and dad. It matters.

A Great Leap for the "Quite Poor"

A while back I blogged about a wood stove that promised great benefits for the world's poorest. Today's revolutionary gizmo targets a less poor demographic, though I expect a lot of overlap.

Do you hear people talking about "washing day"? That's because in my grandmother's time, washing took most of a day. That situation is still reality in some places. Worse, drying on a line in humid climates can take weeks and lead to mildew in your clothes and on your children's skin. What can we do about it?

green or Green?

Fires are burning all over Colorado just as they recently were in BC. Ironically, this environmental devastation is an unintended consequence of forestry practices that we adopted in the name of the environment.

Clearing underbrush for example, once a common practice, is often discouraged. Instead rotting, decaying wood is encouraged as a habitat for various forest critters. Unfortunately, it provides a source of fuel to promote forest fires and make them hotter. It also allows the pine beetle to spread, destroying vast forests. Darn those unintended consequences!

A mild pine beetle infestation

Wanna Go Double or Nothing?

Robot plays a wicked rock-paper-scissors. Never trust a robot.

Forbidden History of Unpopular People

Talk of a scientific consensus always gives me a moment of unease. This entertaining video tells of Ignaz Semmelweis, who had some funny ideas that were contrary to the scientific consensus and insulting to his peers.

Contrast with the news last September that an experiment has measured neutrinos traveling faster than light. To do so would violate Einsein's special relativity (E=mc2),The reaction among scientists was anything but hostile. Most people assumed there was a mistake, but couldn't find the mistake. Discussions of what the mistake might be were open and good-natured. In the meantime, the physics community lit up with speculation of what it might mean if it were true. 

Yes, there are ideas in science that are commonly accepted. Call it "consensus" if you like. But science needs to remain receptive to falsifying evidence. If, for whatever reason, a set of principles is not open to challenge from empirical evidence or alternate explanations, we shouldn't call it "science". Instead, we should use the older, broader term: "natural philosophy".

Who Smells Better: Old Men or Teens?

Did you know that people smell different as they age. What's more, people are surprisingly good at distinguishing between old person smell and young person smell. Guess who smells better.

Why I Wish We Taught More Statistics

Ed Yong explains what it means to say that something causes 16% of cancers.
It doesn't mean:

• He can name the cancer victim
• He is certain it causes cancer
• His 16% is higher than someone else's 15%
• 84% of cancer is caused by something else (100-16=84)

I'd like to live in a world where this makes perfect sense to everyone who has finished high-school math.

Shaping Silicon on the Nano-Scale

Shaping silicon on the nano-scale promises a way to make a battery that stores lots of energy and lasts for many charges.

This remind me of the story of Thomas Edison's first long lasting light bulb filament. He took a bit of cotton thread, shaped as he liked and then baked it until all that was left was carbon. If he put a thin carbon wire in a vacuum, he had a reasonably long-lasting light bulb. Ingenuity never grows old.

The Things You Find in Your Basement

Making a nuclear bomb is pretty easy, if only you can get the weapons-grade uranium. Apparently Kodak had 3.5 pounds of weapons-grade uranium sitting in a lab in the basement from 1974 to 2006. It is not enough for a bomb, but enough to make the Department of Defense awfully nervous.

 They used it to check chemicals for impurities.