In search of the non-obvious
On Tuesday the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments on what should be considered obvious when older inventions are combined for a patent application. Lining up on the side of loosening standards are Microsoft, Intel and other companies that have sprung up more recently. Opposing them are companies like General Electric that hold strong patent positions. See detail on this case — KSR versus Telefex — at CNET news. All of you scientists and engineers working in the USA had better keep an eye out on this war in court. It may cause quite a shakeup in the aims of R&D.
Meanwhile, at a more personal level, many of us will be looking for that perfect gift for the person who already owns everything. Obviously it must be something that is not obvious. For example, how about Smittens — specialty mittens that allow you to hold hands while walking or sitting? I saw this featured in one of humorist Dave Barry’s gift guides. His 2006 recommendations came out today in the Miami Herald column “What’s behind Santa’s Ho-Ho-Ho”. If I had season tickets to a team that supported tailgaters, I’d ask Santa for a Cruzin Cooler. How about two coolers for your favorite couple, one for him and the other for her, along with a set of Smittens for them to cruise hand-in-hand around the parking lot?
Exercise reduces fatigue — a counter-intuitive effect
My RSS feed from the Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog alerted me to news from ScienceDaily about overwhelming evidence that regular exercise increases energy levels. Professor Patrick O’Connor, co-director of the University of Georgia laboratory that analyzed 70 randomized trials on 6,807 subjects, said:
When people are fatigued the last thing they want to do is exercise.
However, the positive effect of exercise on energy was very consistent — seen in over 90 percent of the trials studied by the UGA researchers.
I feel sure this is true to some extent. I certainly feel charged up after doing a half-hour cardio-workout on my Endurance E4 elliptical. This machine features nothing very fancy for display. It only provides exercise — pure and simple at low impact.
For less anecdotal support for the hypothesis that exercise reduces fatigue, see this report from the University of Oslo. If you feel otherwise — drained by exercise, consider stocking up on a supply of jelly beans. Possibly these ‘sports beans’ ward off fatigue. I advise some skepticism if the findings prove positive, because according to ScienceDaily the study is funded in part by The Jelly Belly Candy Company. See their tasty-looking product at ZombieRunner.
Mercury — a transitory mote in the eye of the sun
On Wednesday residents of my hemisphere saw (?) the planet Mercury transit the sun. This happens only about every decade. One really couldn’t see Mercury because it is so small relative to the sun, which burns far too brightly for the naked eye to withstand. I watched the transit live from an astronomer’s view (Kitt Peak, Arizona*) via the webcast by San Francisco’s Exploratorium. The funny thing is that a speck in their Meade 16 inch reflector’s optics showed up more prominently than Mercury itself. For a perspective on how small this planet appears from earth (only 1/200th the diameter of the sun) see this photograph from VisualUniverse.org. Nevertheless, when Mercury first hit the edge of the sun, the astronomer directing the webcast said the he and his colleague were doing a little “happy dance”! 🙂 By virtue of owning an 8-inch Meade reflector, I am a very amateurish astronomer myself. Seeing Mercury was a rare treat worth savoring. Here’s something really rare that’s reported at Wikipedia: On July 5, 6757 residents in Eastern Siberia can watch the simultaneous occurrence of a solar eclipse and a transit of Mercury. If you want to see this, I advise you go there now, drink a barrel of vodka, set your atomic-powered alarm clock 4751 years ahead and, finally, bury yourself in the snow. Good luck and mind the mastodons!
*Located by red star on map showing zones of visibility. For great views of the telescopes, background narration and the transit itself, click the RealVideo link to the saved webcast.
Drinking twice as much reduces heart attack by factor of three?
After suffering a mild heart attack (an oxymoron!) a few years ago, I asked the cardiologist if it’s true that a glass of red wine a day keeps the myocardial infarctions away. He said “yes.” What about white, I wondered. “That works too,” said he. Encouraged by this, I wondered if beer might work too. The answer was affirmative. Next I questioned whether two drinks might be even better. After that got endorsed by the cardiologist, I quit while I was ahead. I’ve enjoyed one glass of beer or wine, and occasionally a second helping, every day since. Life is good!
Today I was heartened to see in the HeartCenterOnline Newsletter that a study by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston indicates that two drinks daily help men avoid heart attack. At first glance at the following detail I thought I ought to have more than two drinks:
“There were 9 heart attacks in a group of 714 men who drank more than two drinks daily, and 34 in a group of 2,252 who drank less than two a day.” Unfortunately, if you do the math and calculate the percents by comparison, this statistic becomes a lot less compelling for those who like their liquor. I am holding the line at one drink every day for sure and two at the most, but only when I want to really live it up.
Sound from Sand: Rock Music?
At a vastly smaller scale than Stonehenge, stones ground by natural forces to a well-rounded and relatively regular shape can make very distinctive sounds, which you can hear at song of the Atacama Desert dunes in Chile. According to physicist Stephane Doudy of the Centre de la recherche scientifique in Paris, the volume of sand slides can reach a nearly unbearable 110 decibels — on par with a jet engine. For the complete story of how “self-synchronized avalanches turn piles of sand into musical instruments,” check out Dulcet Dunes by Fenella Saunders of American Scientist magazine. What I find fascinating is that it evidently takes a veneer of salt to make sand sing, so if you really want to hear a tune from a dune, head for a desert that spills into the sea.
Stonehenge blocks demonstrably moved by man — not magic
My youngest brother, an engineer like me and our father, sent us this link showing how a fellow from Michigan, Wally Wallington, single-handedly lifted a Stonehenge-sized pillar weighing 22,000 lbs. I visited Stonehenge in June and learned that, prior to erecting these really large pillars, earlier builders (2000 BC!) put up 80 bluestones, up to 4 tons apiece, that they mined 240 miles away in Wales. These were thought to have been moved magically by the sorcerer Merlin. More likely these were transported much of the distance by raft and overland on rollers as demonstrated by the Millennium project.
I thought the bluestones were the coolest of all that I saw at Stonehenge, but you must look beyond the larger sandstone pillars to see them and appreciate how much older they are. For more on their history, see the Secrets of the Preseli Bluestones by Dr. Colin R. Shearing.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. — Arthur C Clarke
Minnesota Twins beat the statistical odds once again
On May 17 I reported that sabermetrician Clay Davenport computed 200 to 1 against the Minnesota Twins making the Major League Baseball playoffs. Guess what? Not only did they achieve a place in post-season, they won their divisional championship. Granted, it was very unlikely the way the Twins turned their season around, and it was downright surrealistic for them to end up in first after their very last game. As I blogged earlier, statistics be damned by what we now know:
Twins win improbable division title.
One might do well by betting on the Twins when they are down again in future. For example,at the beginning of the 1991 baseball season, odds on 1990’s last-place Twins winning this year’s title were 100-1. They ended up as the World Series champs. Similarly, in 1987 the Twins went all the way in Major League Baseball. Prior to that season I went to Las Vegas for a conference and saw a betting board with odds at 100 to 1 against the Twins winning the championship. Ever since I’ve second-guessed myself for not betting anything — even $10 would have netted me $1000! Unfortunately, I am a man of little faith in the face of such overwhelming statistics.
PS. Post season results were not good — three games and out for the Twins in their playoff series with Oakland. 🙁 This is a triumph for sabermetrics because the Athletics are led by its biggest proponent —Billy Beane.
Economists shave hairs on whether basketball games are fixed: Any bets on who wins?
In my March 26 blog I reported that ‘forensic economist’ Justin Wolfers, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, inferred point-shaving from his statistical analysis of 44,120 NCAA Division I basketball games between 1989 and 2005. This new study by University of Illinois economist Dan Bernhardt disputes Wolfer’s contention that statistics indicate point-shaving on college basketball. Perhaps it’s only natural that superior teams fall short of expectations on their winning margin. According to Professor Bernhardt “the statistical properties that Wolfers identified in his paper seem to be intrinsic to the game of basketball itself, occurring independently of whether there are incentives to point shave, and are not indicative of an epidemic of gambling-related corruption.”
It’s good that this new analysis dissipates the cloud of suspicion about point-shaving raised by the first study.
Longer-term perspective on global warming (and other catastrophes)
On March 16th I blogged about the sharp upturn in global temperatures that some liken to the blade of a hockey stick. The blog provides a link to a graph reproduced by the BBC which goes back 1000 years. Aside from questions about how data are fitted, simple changes to scales and other attributes of the graphs themselves can paint very different perspectives on seemingly straightforward scientific questions such as whether we ought to be worried about global warming. Andy Sleeper shows this in part 7 of his white paper titled HOW TO LIE WITH STATISTICAL GRAPHICS. The color-coded graph generated by the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration is very alarming. However, it only provides 122 years of history and the y-axis scale is restricted to about 2 degrees C. A few figures later in Sleeper’s paper one sees another graph based on 400,000 years of temperatures estimated from core samples of Antarctic ice. It reveals cyclic temperature swings of 12 degrees C! In this context, should a less than 1 degree increase in global temperature be considered abnormal, that is, due to a special cause such as man-made carbon dioxide?
PS. Here’s something to really worry about. The November issue of Sky and Telescope features a heads-up on “The Most Dangerous Asteroid Ever Found” — a 1000-foot pile of rock called Apophis. It will just miss the Earth on April 13, 2029. If Apophis hits a narrow zone — called the keyhole, it will be dragged enough by our gravity to put it on a course that collides with Earth seven years later. One can only hope that NASA’s proposed gravity tractor will pull the asteroid off target and save the planet.