by cloudier

I’m trying to find my neighbour’s lost cat, but he hasn’t told me what it looks like. After a couple hours of looking, I’m pretty sure his cat isn’t white, because if it was white I would have found it by now. It’s also possible that his cat got eaten by a cougar and isn’t here at all, but I really hope that isn’t the case. I heard some noises in the corner of my back yard, so I think his cat might be somewhere over there, but it’s possible that all I heard was the wind blowing leaves around.

The “everything you need to know about the Higgs boson” thread

2797

by cloudier

Tell us something you are aware of due to your field of science, that ‘normal’ people do not know, and that has an effect on your life and behaviours. – reddit

Nuclear Engineer:

Nuclear energy is one of, if not, the safest sources of energy available.

As such, I hate the yellow media that essentially makes up stories to get more ratings, and misinforms the general populace.

Every time I meet someone, I have to spend at least 30 mins explaining that the knowledge I gained in five years of university study, far out weighs the intern who misquoted an official and filled the rest of the article with factless speculation

link

You know what would happen if we just took our waste from nuclear reactors and dumped it, unprotected, into the ocean in deep water? The answer is absolutely nothing because salt water is very good at disapating radiation. The ocean water and sea floor surrounding the Bikini Atoll 1 year following the underwater and above ground nuclear tests were completely clear of radiation. Now the Atoll itself was horribly contaminated and what did they do about that, they bulldozed the contaminated top soil into the ocean, again the radiation disapated very quickly and caused no damage.

The biggest risk in nuclear material storage comes from keeping. It on land. If we were smart we would put it in solid containers and drop it into the marianas and forget about it forever, absolutely no worry about damage, especially considering the very small amount of waste produced by breeder and TRISO reactors, which both reuse waste material and produce a tiny amount of unusable waste.

link

A person’s food preferences, like his or her personality, are formed during the first few years of life, through a process of socialization. Babies innately prefer sweet tastes and reject bitter ones; toddlers can learn to enjoy hot and spicy food, bland health food, or fast food, depending on what the people around them eat.

When I suggested that IFF’s policy of secrecy and discretion was out of step with our mass-marketing, brand-conscious, self-promoting age, and that the company should put its own logo on the countless products that bear its flavors, instead of allowing other companies to enjoy the consumer loyalty and affection inspired by those flavors, Grainger politely disagreed, assuring me that such a thing would never be done. In the absence of public credit or acclaim, the small and secretive fraternity of flavor chemists praise one another’s work. By analyzing the flavor formula of a product, Grainger can often tell which of his counterparts at a rival firm devised it. Whenever he walks down a supermarket aisle, he takes a quiet pleasure in seeing the well-known foods that contain his flavors.

Why McDonald’s Fries Taste So Good

From the perspective of a computer scientist:

Even the tiniest things you do on a computer, the tiniest nudge of a mouse or a single key-press have so much computation involved (whether directly or indirectly) that it will make your head explode if you try to narrow it all down. As such, whenever I see coworkers at the office fanatically shake their mice and mash their keyboard when their outlook isn’t opening “fast enough” it makes me palmface. To give you an idea of what may be involved:

• You move the mouse a tiny bit
• The mouse senses movement via the laser/ball and sends the information to the USB port on your computer
• The USB controller processes the signal and sends a signal to the CPU to stop what it’s doing and process the USB data that just came in
• The computer saves all the things (ie. register data) it was currently doing in the CPU to return to after it has processed the data from the mouse
• The OS has to go through various levels of abstraction from generic USB drivers to specific drivers for your crazy 20-button world of warcraft gaming mouse to actually even know that the cursor on the screen is supposed to move at all
• The OS moves the cursor and then processes what should happen upon reaching its new position (i.e. have you hovered over a new window? should an action be taken?)
• etc. etc. etc. etc.

Note that this list is incredibly simplified and each of those steps involves quite an assload of computation in itself. Computers certainly don’t run on magic, but it is amazing how much processing they do and a lot of people take it for granted.

link

More like, just because you got your PhD doesn’t mean you’re particularly clever or knowledgeable in any area that’s slightly outside your area of expertise. It’s an endurance thing, not a talent thing. I had an advisor whose dissertation was essentially based on drunk people having lowered inhibitions. Very “duh” stuff. Also, the BPA thing is very much like the asbestos scare or DDT scare—it becomes politically powerful and the real science falls by the wayside. DDT killed birds, but it saved and continues to save human lives by reducing mosquito populations. Asbestos is safe in certain applications, and when using certain types of asbestos it’s no more dangerous than fiberglass (which is more dangerous than people think, but still legal). If the World Trade Center towers had been finished before the asbestos scare, they’d still be upright and 100s of thousands of people might still be alive. Aluminum doesn’t cause alzheimers, but people still say it does. Lactic acid doesn’t cause a muscle to be sore, but people still say it does. Etc. Scientists are still people.

link

One thing physics has taught me is that unless you have a heat pump or something all electric heating is the same efficiency: virtually all the electrical energy is converted directly to heat. This is true whether you’re talking a space heater or a computer or a guitar amplifier. It’s funny, someone was asking online about “efficient” space heaters – they don’t exist.

link

One of the fun projects microbiology students do is to swab and culture a common surface (desk, counter, doorknob, etc) and find all the fun growies that are around us all the time, and that we rub our hands on.

So your hands are teeming with random diseases from god knows where. Then you go to the bathroom and put these hands near your urethra (open mucus membrane) and anus.

Washing your hands after you go really is to protect other people from your germs. Washing your hands before you go protects you from other people’s germs.

link

American culture is organized primarily around three edicts. The first is, roughly, “Let me do it myself.” This sets Americans apart from the many European countries I’ve experienced in which people are generally quite happy to let the government take care of things. The French, for example, see the government as the rough embodiment of the collective French brain - of course it would know best, as its the Frenchest thing around.

Americans, in stark contrast, are far more likely to see the government as the enemy, infringing upon their autonomy. This leads to a great deal of misunderstanding, particularly from people who are used to seeing solutions flowing from a centralized authority. Americans, rather, would prefer to leave matters such as charitable giving in the hands of the individual. [1] In 1995 (the most recent year for which data are available), Americans gave, per capita, three and a half times as much to causes and charities as the French, seven times as much as the Germans, and 14 times as much as the Italians. Similarly, in 1998, Americans were 15 percent more likely to volunteer their time than the Dutch, 21 percent more likely than the Swiss, and 32 percent more likely than the Germans.. This alone, of course, does not mean that any one side of culture is more “compassionate” than the other – rather, that such compassion is filtered through different culture attitudes.

Another good example of that contrast occurred when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet received a remarkably chilly reception when they exhorted German ultra-wealthy to give more of their money away. The reaction, with some justification, was primarily one of “why should I give more money to do things that the state, funded by high tax rates, is expected to take care of?” You can come down on this one of two ways – one is that it’s more efficient to leave such things to an organized central body, another is that such a system distances and de-humanizes people in needy situations, and that more efficient solutions are arrived at through direct, hands-on involvement by a multitude of private citizens. Again, my intent is not so much to pick one side as to explain the rather more poorly understood American approach.

link

other links

• Colossal
• Spoon & Tamago
• Stellar Interesting
• peter funch

Re: apply to all

by cloudier

This is a reply to Jeff’s post on how science is based on a belief system. I thought it would be too long to properly explain everything in a comment (in my typically long-winded manner at least) so I decided to write a blogpost.

Science is a human construct: it is a extensive framework of explanations (or hypotheses) of natural phenomena. This natural phenomena includes things like the fact that things fall when they are lifted into the air, the fact that if you burn certain materials in a flame they’ll emit coloured light. These things can occur without science or humans existing but science cannot exist without it. As you probably know after 4 years of junior high school science, these explanations are constructed through experimentation and analysis of the results of experimentation. If subsequent experiments prove these explanations wrong, new ones are formed or current explanations are modified. It’s alright if the current ones don’t explain everything! We can make a new or modified explanation that does. (That’s why scientists still get paid. You’re taught these so that maybe you can figure out what the better explanation is.)

(Personally I think the evidence-based nature of science puts it above religious beliefs, which are often based on the inaccurately translated words of random people from thousands of years ago and are subject to much more subjectivity.)

Basically the purpose of science is to use an explanation which is as simple as possible to explain everything.

This leads to Occam’s razor. (The following information is basically pulled from Wikipedia.) Occam’s razor is merely a principle or heuristic, although it is sometimes misleadingly called the ‘law of parsimony’, etc.. Scientists use Occam’s razor when picking between different hypotheses while they are planning an experiment: you should pick the hypothesis that makes the fewest assumptions between hypotheses of equal explaining power. If one theory is more complex but explains more, Occam’s razor recommends picking this theory over another theory that is simpler but explains less. You can’t use Occam’s razor to say the atomic theory doesn’t explain something properly therefore it is wrong forever. You can, however, say that the atomic theory is very incomplete because it doesn’t adequately explain several things. Again, this is fine; scientists paid to figure out why there are holes in our understanding of the universe.

And the “laws” of physics are rather arrogant. How can we possibly prove that the laws of physics apply in outer space? Most (if not all) the experiments regarding mechanics have been conducted on Earth. And I know for sure all mechanics experiments have been conducted within our solar system. Just because it APPEARS to work for the greater universe (ie bending of light due to gravity and what not), we can’t be sure it’s true, simply because we can’t test it.
The rest of the universe could have massively messed up physics, and gravity doesn’t exist, etc etc. How could we tell?

Why isn’t the bending of light due to gravity etc. enough evidence? How else would you explain it? Is it probable that the laws of physics are wildly different to those in the solar system? How would you explain this? Additionally, /invokes Occam’s razor/ would these explanations be more complex than the current explanations while explaining the same amount of results? Right now, there’s no reason to assume that the laws of physics don’t apply in outer space (and further complicate our models – Occam’s razor again!) since we can explain our observations of outer space using current models.

Nevertheless, I think that eventually people will shoot things into space that can test this stuff more accurately.

Conventional current. Do I have to say any more? I mean everyone knows that it’s the electrons from the “negative” terminal flowing towards the positive, as you can clearly see in a CRO. Yet plenty of calculations involve seeing it as electricity flowing from positive to negative. Including freaking voltage. And the force on a wire due to electromagnetic interactions. Everything’s so counterintuitive, and you need to think twice before going “so current flows THIS way in this question…”

Yeah I agree; it’s stupid to use these historical conventions.

And in the event of aliens approaching Earth, are we going to classify them as “alive”? What if they’re not made of cells, but are capable of moving and intelligent thought? Do we just call that super-slime and refuse to give them the title of being “alive”?
Though I guess apart from cells defining life, biology seems very Earth-based, and everything is relative to our own Earth. Not like we can go classifying organisms from anywhere else anyway :L

Lots of definitions in biology are nebulous. That doesn’t mean ‘cell’ is not a useful term though – saying cells is shorthand for an idea: some kind of membrane-bound bit of cytoplasm. The study of organisms using these badly defined words gave us things that we could use, like penicillin, Strepsils and vaccines. Using ill-defined terms also won’t prevent biologists from studying aliens that don’t fit into the definition of ‘life’, so I don’t think it should matter. (Personally I like the entropy definition of life: a system which decreases its own entropy at the expense of the entropy of its surroundings. Plus it sounds and looks cool! 8D)

I realise that I am repeating a lot of what Anonymous said, (by the way, I am not that person,) but I hope that clears up some stuff. (:

Edit: ‘Bending of light’ is evidence; ‘gravity’ is a hypothesis.

Butterfly Sex

by Squido~

at about 5:45 i went outside to out hills hoist to put up the second batch of my washing and take down the first. as i began pegging my clothes up, i noticed a butterfly on the underside of my new sports bra. upon closer inspection, i discovered two. they were mating. on the underside of the elastic band of my brand new bright orange sports bra. i watched them for a bit. one had the end of its thorax inside the other’s. they were facing away from each other, both seemingly oblivious to the fact that i was there. i told them both that i would take the bra down last and if they were still there by then, i was going to have to evict them.

so i hung my washing and took down the dried clothes for about 15 minutes. they were there the entire time. when i had finished, i went back to the butterflies. i don’t think they moved at all. the wind was blowing quite violently and the bra had been moving quite vigorously with it, but the two had maintained their positions, notwithstanding.

i poked them once and they ignored me. i reached out to poke them again but the one facing me began edging away from my finger before i could touch it. the other one moved with it. i chased them in a small circle with my finger on the inside of the elastic band of my bright orange sports bra. i gave up.

took the pegs off, took the bra down, went to a nearby tree trunk and scraped the two butterfly lovers off with the aid of the rough peeling bark. and they stayed in the same position the entire time. i noticed they hadn’t left a trace on my bra.

that process took at least 15 minutes, and who knows how long they were on there before it? so what i wonder is this: is it intrinsically embedded in the nature of (those two) butterflies that mating, and thus maintaining the survival of their species, outweighs the importance of the survival of the individual creature? know that i wasn’t intending any harm in observing so closely, or even poking them, but were i in their position i would feel threatened and instinctively try to flee. but on the other hand, the butterfly’s most prevalent features are bright, striking patterned wings, undoubtedly to help them attract mates (Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, i think). they are easily prey for birds, bats, spiders, whatever eats them (i don’t really know). i’m not even sure if the two insects i was observing were butterflies or not, but they were black-bodied, had black wings with translucent orange spots and a furry thorax that ended in a yellow-oramge tip (female, as far as i could tell).
one more question bugging me (haha) – why my bright orange sports bra? was it because it was new, orange, or because it provided a convenient shelter? Amongst the washing there, there was also bright blue, fading yellows and reds, white and black, and some colours in between. can butterflies differentiate between colours? are they attracted to some more than others? could they tell that the bra was opened at one end and sense that it was more stable? i think they do perceive colour; why else would some flowers be so bright and colourful? however, i don’t know if they see the same way humans do.

i don’t plan to look into any of this and make a huge scientific research project out of it or anything, but i will leave this topic open to opinions, facts and discussion. contributions are welcome :) (yes, i’m being lazy).

three days’ madness

by bezzle

TUESDAY:

I got up at BEFORE the crack of dawn to get to school.  Had to catch the bus to UWS.  Originally, we were all hardcore studying on the bus (which was quite empty), but I think we began to give up, mostly just due to sheer laziness.  Well, that was what I was doing.

Got to Granville station, picked up people and continued off on the journey to Campbelltown.  

Victor had gotten out his portable speakers, and was playing his music, when he went to the front of the bus to go talk to Richard.  Matt and Ben hijacked the speakers, with Victor still oblivious to the fact that Glee and Baby were playing at a rather loud volume…

The brain bee was held in the school of medicine on the UWS campus, and when we got there all of us really stood out – all the other schools had about three or four students, and there was this mass of about twenty people signing in and collecting free t-shirts :)

Went into the lecture theatre, and everyone did round one of the individual quiz – the questions were on a powerpoint, and it was over really quickly – about 20 minutes!  Forwarded out for morning tea with random tarts and fruit and sandwiches.  The bread is SOOO soft and tasty there.  And the tart had some sort of clear jelly on top that tasted like jam. 

Got some talks from a professor making bionic eyes and some honor/masters students about the joy of science, and then came the team challenge, where Richard, Beryl, Rachel and Vaish were in.  They came third, after the winners Baulko and the runner-up Presbyterian. 

Lunch!  The last third of the line (including me!) got vegetarian lunch boxes, but they were really nice!  The bread (and some Turkish bread too?) was really soft again…ahhh… and quiche!  I love quiche!  And some sort of caramel slice.   :D

Activity after lunch – shocking nerves.  Went into some computer lab, with massive HP touchscreen desktop computers.  Claudia fiddled with the tablet for a bit.  Ben volunteered to be the victim who got their nerve shocked with a current ranging from 8-20mA.  The transformer was connected to the computer, and all the data was automatically entered too.  Was cool.

After came the team challenge final, and the individual final.  The team placings ended up the same as what they were before, and the individual one was won by a Baulko guy, with a Presbyterian girl coming second and Jim coming third (good job :D).  Note the order was the same ==

However, the prizes were pretty neat.  Teams who came second and third got 2gb ipod shuffles, winners nanos.  Individual division third got shuffle, second nano and first a touch.  They all got a brain textbook too.  The poor guy who came first has to study this massive textbook for the next stage (nationals?).  Ahh, the price for coming first…

Bus home…

WEDNESDAY:

Science and Engineering Day!  Got to Macquarie Uni quite early, waited till the thing actually started (our school was the only one there in the beginning…wondering if we were gonna end up going against ourselves…) and off to activities!

I was in a full day activity – mission to Mars.  Involved building a ‘buggy’ that would traverse an extremely bumpy surface – the highest bumps were 4cm tall O__O  So that took the whole day, and we didn’t do too bad (Tree, Sandra, Steven Phan and me).  OOOOH orange tree!  TEEHEE SORRY.

At the end of the day, bridge tests!  Just at the end, our school got usurped by Roseville College in points, so we came second and got a glass trophy and a framed award that had a picture of some students from last year ==

I think it was cool how all of us joined together in playing a game of sit-down volleyball – even the scorers joined it :D

Caught a bus to Epping with Sydo.  On the way, a large group of boys in school uniform got on.  And then Syd noticed Timothy O_____O  He’s a former classmate, who I hadn’t talked to/seen since the end of Year Six.  We shiftily watched as he boarded our bus and walked past out seat, ending up just a seat away across the aisle (but people were in standing in between because the bus was packed).

So we both loudly debated whether or not to say hi – Sydo on the affirmative, as she’d feel ‘guilty’.  I thought he wouldn’t recognise/remember us.  Soon, Tim says hi to Syd, who he does remember and they start a conversation. 

Soon we’re at Epping, and we all disembark.  Timothy begins to walk away, Syd rebukes me about how I should have said something.  I say that he won’t recognise me.  So Syd runs up and pushes me over, and asks Tim – “Do you know her?”.  To which he goes “Errrr….”, and I helpfully supply “Hi, I’m *insert name here*.”  His eyes widen and looks shocked.  ==”

Syd cracks up.

So far, this fits in with my previous meeting with a primary school classmate.  Beginning of the year, I said hello to Annie and she didn’t know who I was either.  “You look familiar… do I know you? Charmaine?!”  I introduce myself.  “OHHH…!”  [note: not the Charmaine from our school]

I conclude my face is much different from my Year Six days.

TODAY:

First day of school for the term!  Started off with a nice 1.6km run in nippy noodle weather.  Urgh.  I should have known several weeks of inactivity would take some sort of toll.  Did some more fitness testing.  Had a sub for English and breathed a sigh of relief – I hadn’t finished the assignment.  Recess was intense – had to find Julia/talk to the head of science about the speech in two periods time/write the speech/fix up commerce project/do maths enrichment.  So was also very glad when we didn’t have to present our comm today, so spent the time writing a very hasty speech.

During assembly, sat at the front with Johnny and Rachel, who were talking about brain bee, and Tree, who was doing the speech about science and engineering day with me.  He’s awesome.  Talking in front of the whole school is a bit weird.

Today was such a horrible day stress-wise, so when I found out today is 7/11 one dollar day (Kettle chips, flavoured milk, mother, Cornettos, donuts and other baked stuff all one dollar!) I decided to take the opportunity to *reward* myself.  My normal walk to the bus stop (on which 7/11 is en route) was joined by a mob of people eager to get bargains too xD

By some stroke of luck, the counter had NO QUEUE when I got my double choc Cornetto.  Except for three Cumbo guys, who kept buying packets of Kettle chips ==  They kept taking armfuls of packets, and running back for more.

Got home happy as I ate my icecream on the way.  Except it dripped on my shoe.

MAJOR NEWS

ONE MANGA IS SHUTTING DOWN AS OF NEXT WEEK.  WHATTTTTTTTTTTTT.  IT’S MY FAVOURITE MANGA SITE!  IT’S SHUTTING DOWN!!!  WHAT.  O_________________________________o WHERE AM I GONNA TAKE MY MANGA READING OBSESSION?  BUT THANK YOU, ONE MANGA.