Archive for category science
Speed of light exceeded (astounding!)? Or was it measurement error?
This morning I read this NY Times news that European physicists measured neutrinos at 0.0025 percent above the speed of light. If so, it may be only a matter of time before you can send yourself a telegram to not do whatever you did that you’ve always regretted and, by the way, to please invest a thousand dollars in Microsoft, Facebook or the like (depending on the timing).
Years ago I visited Mount Wilson Observatory in California with my son Hank. See me pictured by their two domes that house 60 and 100 inch telescopes; respectively. This was the center for landmark experiments on the speed of light as detailed in this Wikipedia article. Obviously measurement error made this a very difficult.
Being a skeptic, and seeing that a similar experiment* found neutrinos whizzing about at the speed of light, but not beyond that, I was going to advise caution. However, Hank gave me the heads up to today’s xkcd cartoon (click the image to make it bigger and more readable). I think this guy has got a better idea.
*Done with a group at the Soudan Underground Laboratory here in Minnesota. They first did physics experiments there, in an abandoned iron mine, in 1980. I featured this in a retro young-adult techno/adventure/mystery/thriller called The Secret of the Wolf Ring (Amazon, Kindle Edition).
Eggs-plosion in the aftermath of Easter
Posted by mark in science, Uncategorized on April 30, 2011
I’ve become accustomed to hard-boiling an egg for my breakfast so I was pleased to see a surplus of Easter eggs after celebrating this holiday last Sunday. My dexterity for shelling eggs is not a-pealing (ha ha) so I decided to try an eggs-periment: Microwave an Easter egg just long enough to heat it up and loosen it up for eggs-traction. If I’d have quit after my first try of 15 seconds, I may’ve succeeded. But the egg just didn’t feel hot enough so I added more time. Kapow! The eggs-plosion left nothing more than a millimeter of shell intact. The uniformity of organic matter throughout the inner surface of the microwave oven was very interesting, I think – quite impressive.
Although I consider this to be a very successful experiment, it’s one that I don’t feel needs to be replicated. My colleagues at Stat-Ease have provided a number of suggestions for another eggs-periment such as boiling the Easter eggs in vinegar or baking them. This creates a looser shell, they say.
Feel free to provide other ideas, but keep in mind that disaster seems to lurk behind me whenever I try an experiment. My failures tend to be quite spectacular. But, on the other hand, that’s what makes experimentation so eggs-citing!
Kitchen pantry science – fun experiments to do at home
Several months ago I watched a neat demonstration by kitchen-pantry scientist Liz Heinecke on how to write secret messages. All you need are cranberries, water, baking soda and some paper as detailed here. Liz, a mother of three, provides many fun experiments (“simple recipes for real science”) to try at home. I think it’s a great way to get kids interested in science. However, be forewarned, she’s got a masters degree in bacteriology so some of her ideas might grow on you. ; )
This reminded me of a parent who worked as a microbiologist for the FDA. She did a show-and-tell for a Cub Scout den that I led 20 years ago. One of her items collected from FDA was a can of vichyssoise (leek-potato-onion soup traditionally served cold). It had been tested positive for botulism. We were told that if opened, this container of bacteria could sicken all of the inhabitants of New York City. After hearing this, I vowed to always boil canned soup.
Science can be as easy as baking. I want to encourage parents to open up their kitchen cabinets, stir up some science with their kids, and feed those hungry minds.
– Liz Heinecke, kitchen-pantry scientist
Statistics-driven scientific methods slammed again
This December 13 article published by The New Yorker adds fuel to fire for deemphasizing significance testing as the criterion for accepting purported advancements in science. It’s well worth reading for anyone with a stake in statistics, despite raking over the same coals seen in this March 27 Science News article, which I discussed in a previous blog.*
“A lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise.”
- Jonah Lehrer, author of “The Truth Wears Off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method”
Evidently much of the bad science stems from “significance-chasers” – those who hunt out findings that pass the generally-accepted p-value of 5% for hypothesis testing. Unfortunately a statistically-significant outcome from an badly-designed experiment is of no value whatsoever.
PS. I credit blogger William Briggs for bringing this article to my attention. His attitude is provided succinctly by this assertion: “Scientists are too damn certain of themselves.”
*Misuse of statistics calls into question the credibility of science March 28, 2010.
A fruit fly by any other name is still a fruit fly
A good example of what South Korean educational system produces (see my previous blog) is their first astronaut, bioengineer Yi So-yeon, who was featured in this article Tuesday by The Korea Herald . During her mission at the International Space Station she completed a number of experiments, including one that involved the assistance of 1000 fruit flies.
If I were an astronaut going up with so many flies, I’d shake the container just before lift-off to get them up in the air and lighten the load. I heard about this trick from my next-door neighbor – a bee-keeper. He loaded up too many hives in his truck and it went over-weight, but he beat the inspectors by banging on the side with a hammer as he drove onto the scale.
Having segued to bees, here’s a heads-up about a study done by a group of 8- to 10-year-old British school children from Blackawton Primary School. They trained a bunch of bees to go to specific-colored and/or patterned targets by selectively rewarding them with sugar. This experiment met the standards of the Royal Society, which published the results in this Biology Letter. Also see these kind comments. Wired Science provides a ‘dumbed-down’ version with photos, that is, an executive summary 
here.
“We discovered that bumble-bees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from. We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.”
- Children from Blackawton
PS. Some folks think that drosophila melanogaster is a misnomer for this little critter that mysteriously spring up from discarded apples and the like. “The fruit fly’s name is likely to change to Sophophora melanogaster if results of a new evolutionary analysis are accepted” according to this April 2010 bulletin from the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. Who made them lords of the fruit fly?
Reaching your boiling point
Our marketing director emailed me this motivational video called “212° the extra degree.” this motivational video called “212° the extra degree”. It says that at this temperature water boils providing the steam needed to accomplish things. The idea is that only one degree of heat makes all the difference.
I get it. However, being a chemical engineer with an interest in being accurate about physical processes, I had to be troublesome by pointing out that here in Twin Cities at over 800 above sea-level the pressure drops enough that on average the boiling point drops to 210.5 F. But setting this aside and focusing only on the 1 degree between water and steam, one must keep in mind the huge difference of simply heating up water versus making it change state, the is, the heat (or enthalpy in technical terms) of vaporization.
Thank goodness that our marketing director had become accustomed to working with a bunch of engineers, statisticians and programmers who, when one asks “Could I talk with your for a minute?”, immediately set the timer on their digital watches for precisely 60 seconds (the the nearest one-hundredth).
Coincidentally, while vacationing in Wisconsin’s Door County, I enjoyed a fine demonstration of how hard it can be to bring a quantity of water to a boil. It’s a tradition there to throw a bunch of fish in one kettle and vegetables in another and cook them up with a wood fire. However, as I learned and experienced from a somewhat dangerous vantage point, a pitcher of kerosene provides the final heat needed to accomplish the boil-over. My eyebrows needed a bit of burn-back, so that’s OK.
Misuse of statistics calls into question the credibility of science
Posted by mark in science, Uncategorized on March 28, 2010
The current issue of Science News features an indictment of statistics by writer Tom Siegfried. He pulls no punches with statements like this:
“…a mutant form of math has deflected science’s heart..”
“Science was seduced by statistics…”
“…widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more like a crapshoot.”
“It’s science’s dirtiest secret: …testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation.”
“Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous…”
Draw your own conclusions on whether science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics by reading Siegried’s article Odds Are, It’s Wrong.
My take on all this is that the misleading results boil down to several primary mistakes:
- Confusing correlation with causation
- Extrapolating from the region of experimentation to unstudied areas
- Touting statistically significant results that have no practical importance
- Reporting insignificant results from studies that lack power to see differences that could be very important as a practical matter.
I do not think statistics itself should be blamed. A poor workman blames his tools.
Test and evaluation of the Great Panjandrum – a spectacular failure for weaponry
Posted by mark in history, science, Uncategorized on March 23, 2010
When time becomes available – mainly while I do cardio-exercise on my home elliptical, I’ve been watching a classic 26-episode BBC series on The World at War that my oldest son gave me. It’s extremely compelling – rated 9.7 out of 10 by over two thousand voters at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).
This morning I watched the chronicle of D-Day. Being that I just returned from the Annual National Test & Evaluation Conference by the National Defense Industry Association (NDIA), it was interesting to see what the boffins of Britain invented to defeat the defenses put up along the Normandy beaches. Perhaps the most amazing device was the Great Panjandrum, a rocket-propelled cart, which according to this write-up for Wikipedia was developed by the Admiralty’s Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development. (One wonders about the “miscellaneous” bit.) The clip I viewed on the spectacular failure of the Great Panjandrum can be seen (along with other incredibly-inept military devices for D-Day) in a video on British Secret Wartime Follies posted in this article by UK’s Daily Mail. Check it out!
PS. The Brits continue to come up with the most audacious inventions, such as this flame-throwing moped developed as a deterrent against derelict drivers competing for motorway lanes.
Beware of bugs bearing backpacks
Posted by mark in science, Uncategorized on March 3, 2010
I am attending a conference sponsored by the National Defense Industry Association (NDIA). They provided all of us participants a copy of the latest issue (March) of their publication National Defense. While wiling away the time listening to some long-winded higher-ups I paged through the magazine and admired the weaponry developed to keep our war-fighters supported to the max. However, on page 17 a very odd picture caught my eye – a cockroach carrying a radiation sensor on its back! A researcher at Texas A&M reports that these bugs are ideal for sweeping potentially contaminated areas, ideally in teams of twenty. They can be operated remotely via devices that stimulate their leg muscles.
There is one problem though: Cockroaches cannot crawl backward. One had better hope that none of the bad guys wear pointy-toed cowboy boots, because they will be ideal for killing the sensor-bearing bugs that become stuck in the corners.
Skepticism versus cynicism about science experiments
Eric Felten’s latest “De Gustibus” column in Wall Street Journal reports New Episodes of Scientists Behaving Badly. It details various scandals, for example the retraction of a landmark publication linking autism to childhood vaccines. This creates a great deal of cynicism such as that expressed by this parent of a kid she helped on a science project:
“The experiments never turned out the way they were supposed to, and so we were always having to fudge the results so that the projects wouldn’t be screwy. I always felt guilty about that dishonesty, but now I feel like we were doing real science.”
Ouch!
Coincidentally, Stat-Ease received an email from someone who goes by the pen-name “The Pyrrhonist.” (I see a trend here: I need to work on a scholarly-sounding moniker.) While researching pyrrhonism, I came across this skeptical quote by a Greek named Carneades who set the stage for his countryman Pyrrho:
“Nothing can be known, not even this.”
That’s tough to get around!
I truly believe that some degree of skepticism is healthy, such as judicious use of the null hypothesis for assessing the outcome of experiments. However, it’s not good for experimenters to abandon all standards by succumbing to an attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust of the integrity or professed motives of others – the definition of cynicism (according to the Free Dictionary).
So, be skeptical, but not cynical.
