5 Atrocious Science Cliches to Throw Down a Black Hole

I love this Wired article on science cliches.  This will really shed some light on the way you'll read science news in the future.

5 Atrocious Science Cliches to Throw Down a Black Hole

Posted at 10:36AM Jul 22, 2009 by WILSON, JOSHUA in General  | 

Calendar Trivia, Part I

I love time zones and calendars.  I'm reading up on calendars today to re-familiarize myself with the different kinds of calendars different populations use.  Mostly for now I'm interested in:

• How Julian Dates work--they're used in astronomy and I used to understand them, but the details have grown hazy
• How a lunar calendar works, because I have no idea, and I have a friend born in Korea who explained that she has two birthdays to sync up with both that calendar and the Western Gregorian calendar, and I was curious to understand this better
  

I'm reading through Dershowitz and Reingold's Calendrical Calculations and some related papers and websites for this.  I'm learning that there are numerous calendaring systems, and I'm not going to read up on all of them.  They all have different epochs (Day 1s) and different ways to measure years, days, and months.  Some calendars start the day at midnight, some at noon, some at sunrise or sunset.

Julian Date is not the same thing as the Julian Calendar.  It's a pretty simple arithmetic system used by astronomers to get rid of confusion about different calendars.  Every day is Julian Day (JD) [some number], and it increases by one every day.  Today (July 9, 2009) is JD 2455022, which started at noon UT (8am EDT).  Days change at noon because astronomers work at night, right?  Tomorrow will be JD 2455023, and so on.  The Julian Period is 7980 years, after which it starts back at zero.  This will happen on January 1, 3268.  Mark your (Gregorian) calendars.

Julian Day 1 was November 24, 4713 BC.  Background on this in Reese, Everett, and Craun, American Journal of Physics 49, p 658-661, 1981.  (The Wikipedia article on Julian Day is also good and cites its sources. Yay!)  I read a bit of this and it refers to several other sources, so I didn't get the complete picture.  Essentialy, the guy who created the system, Joseph Justus Scalinger (in 1583) used a combination of solar, lunar, and Roman tax collection cycles to arrive at 7980. 

Anyway, astronomers like Julian Dates because it's simple to determine when something is happening relative to some other event.  Astronomers sometimes start with January 1, 1980, which was JD 2444240 and add or subtract from there, (mostly, I think, because their software does), as a benchmark.  So, you can say that something that happened on JD 2443240 happened 1000 days ago.  A lot of what happens in astronomy has no relationship to the length of an Earth year, month, or day, so why get bogged down by it?

Unrelated bits of trivia I thought were neat:

• There are two major kinds of calendars: arithmetical and astronomical.  Arithmetical calendars start from some epoch and proceed by a mathematical formula, plus or minus adjustments.  Astronomical calendars are controlled by "irregular astronomical events", with some additional algebraic razzmatazz.
• The Western world uses the Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII, adapted from the Julian Calendar.  It was pretty much the same, but the Gregorian calendar has more complicated leap year rules.  Any year divisible by four gets a leap day, except for century years (years divisible by 100), unless they're also divisible by 400.  2000 was a leap year, 2100 won't be.
• The Ides of a month comes from the Julian Calendar.  I didn't know it was not always in the 15th.  Actually it's usually the 13th.  If it's March, May, July, or October, then it's the 15th.  It also has the Kalends (the 1st of the month), and the Nones (the 5th, except in March-May-July-October, when it's the 7th).  I have no idea what's special about those four months.

I'll get to the Korean calendar later on.

Posted at 11:39AM Jul 09, 2009 by WILSON, JOSHUA in Thought experiments  | 

Science! is back sort of, maybe, depending

Before I hit the one-year without updating point, I'll proactively post some updates to previous entries.  Will I resume updating Science!?  I dunno.

In this entry, I was talking about my National Geographic Wall Clock.  What you should know is, it was not all it was cracked up to be.  The original clock I got failed to update itself when Daylight Savings Time began last year, to my great disappointment.  I presumed this was due to its location in my house, buried on an interior wall fairly near the television, when the instructions said specifically it should be near a window facing the appropriate direction and not near electrical devices.  So I tried a few other things, like leaving it near a window, or even outside overnight, in the hopes that it would get word from the mother station that time had advanced without it.  No such luck.  Note, there is NO WAY to change the clock by hand.  Because it is advanced technology that will never break so you will never need to manually fix it, like Microsoft Windows. 

Then, a few weeks later, I get an e-mail from the clock manufacturer stating that my clock was recalled because it was faulty.  Apparently something about the new DST rules messed it up, and they were sending me a new one.  So, now I have two clocks: one which recognizes DST, one which denies its existence.  The latter must simply serve as wall decoration and will likely have to be banished upstairs until fall.

In this entry, I listed ingredients I found in a package of vending machine donuts.  Most of them turned out to be advanced emulsifiers, whose purpose is to maintain the integrity of a floury cake product for shipping, stacking, storing, and weeks of downtime until purchase and (regrettable) consumption.  I'm looking to read Twinkie Deconstructed at some point to learn more about industrially processed foods with the hope that I will inspire myself to avoid them forever.  I also want to note that one of the ingredients, xanthan gum, was also found in many lotions.

Posted at 05:10PM Mar 13, 2008 by WILSON, JOSHUA in Thought experiments  | 

Stars named after atrocious dictators? Not catchy

Interesting map of an alternative grouping of stars into new constellations.

My guess is that any number of people have tried to come up with more modern constellations over the years.  Perhaps there are some interesting stories about such attempts.  I can't imagine any attempt would be met with anything but harsh backlash.  The history and mythology of the constellations is half of their appeal.

This will be an interesting research task in the near future.

Posted at 05:10PM Mar 13, 2008 by WILSON, JOSHUA in Anecdotes  | 

Dermatoglyphics

Unverified trivia (from wikipedia, which means copied from somewhere else, only I don't know where):

Dermatoglyphics and uncopyrightable are the longest English words with no repeated letters.

This came up whilst preparing to meet with a forensic chemistry class.  One of my favorite examples of controlled vocabulary is dermatoglyphics.  Which are...?

Answer: fingerprints.  Well, the study of fingerprints.  It's easy to get lost in databases searching for research on fingerprints, because searching for that term will get you all variety of research about any identifying characteristic of anything (e.g., magnetic fingerprints, chemical fingerprints denoting the presence of certain elements).  But not necessarily information about the actual prints from the ends of human fingers.

One way to deal with this is some databases is to use the controlled vocabulary term dermatoglyphics.  I think this one's easy to remember because it's an interesting word and a good example of the benefit of using it versus the common term.  Interchanging the terms in different databases provides different results.  Web of Science will give you decent results searching for 'fingerprints' but better results for 'dermatoglyphics'.  It's very clear what the advantage is within MEDLINE.

Posted at 02:33PM Mar 22, 2007 by WILSON, JOSHUA in Anecdotes  | 

How to Find Chemical Information, Part II

Another highlight from Maizell's How to Find Chemical Information...

Bad synthesis indexing (Ch. 7.7.K).  I knew it!  Searching SciFinder Scholar for synthesis methods can be frustrating because of the number of false hits.  Lots of articles may pop up when you do these searches, but often many never really discuss the synthesis.  I've wondered why this was.  Was I conducting bad searches?  Do I simply not understand the articles?  (I always have to admit the possibility that there's a conceptual gap between my chemistry understanding and the inferences of a chemistry research article.  Always.)  I'm feeling better about my librarian skills now, knowing that there's a reason for this: beginning in 1983 a 'P' designation for preparation methods was included on relevant article records, determined by a computer algorithm analyzing content.  Sounds good--if only it had worked.  A lot of articles would get the P for having something on preparation, and something on your chemical, but not necessarily both at the same time.  And sometimes it was even less accurate. 

The result is that, essentially, when you search for the synthesis of a compound, SciFinder returns a list of articles discussing the compound, some of which will be what you want.  You can avoid wasting time reading the wrong articles by first reviewing the abstract and indexing for returned articles, looking specifically for the chemical and its role in the study, but that has always seemed sort of ridiculous and not teachable.  Why not improve the algorithm?  In 1994, they did.  Literature added since then is indexed with preparatory terms only by the document analyst (i.e., a human scanning the article). 

Maizell reports that CAS staff believe the preparation indexing was 99% accurate.  How they arrive at this term is not mentioned, but based on my own experience I find it hard to believe.  Nor is there any indication they fixed all the false indexing created during the Reign of the Synthesis Algorithm.

Good to know.

Posted at 02:26PM Feb 28, 2007 by WILSON, JOSHUA in Maizell  | 

How to Find Chemical Information, Part I

I've been reading through Robert Maizell's How to Find Chemical Information to further my chemistry librarianness.  The book is nine years old at this point and therefore dated in many respects, but most of the concepts and history are valuable.  I'm still learning a lot about chemistry research myself, my own background being more astronomy, physics, computer science, and mathematics.  I figured I'd share some of the interesting tidbits I pick up as I proceed, for my edification and yours.

Translations (Ch. 5.7).  People in all sciences sometimes need foreign language articles.  Sometimes they optimistically think that we can always get an English copy of what's needed.  Having to break their spirit by explaining this isn't the case makes me wish this was true.  When you can't find a translation, there are still solutions to the problem, though, even if you're not friends with a bilingual colleague:

1. Read the abstract only.  Often this is in English, especially if indexed by CAS or another service.  Maybe this is enough to go on.  Or at least enough to know how much time you should devote to finding this article. 
2. Find equivalent journal articles, reviews, or books.  Try patents, too, especially if you're looking for a foreign patent.  Often an English version will appear later.
3. Scan tables, graphs, equations, and figures to pick out some of the relevant portions.  If nothing else, maybe that will help determine where to work with a foreign language dictionary on translation.
4. Purchase a custom translation.  There are services which do this for you for a fee, and it probably ensures more accuracy than doing it yourself with a dictionary.  [Maizell doesn't mention a similar suggestion I usually give people: hit up the foreign language department at your university.  Maybe you can get a student to translate it for you cheaply, or get it for free by having their instructor make them do it!]

Posted at 01:58PM Feb 28, 2007 by WILSON, JOSHUA in Maizell  | 

Whoa

This is fascinating.  Over on Cognitive Daily, they posted the results of a quick experiment in which readers were asked to select a number, any random number they wanted, between one and twenty.  Here were the results:



For whatever reason, an extremely high percentage of the 347 respondents picked 17 (dark blue bars).  By comparison, 347 numbers randomly generated by a computer (light blue bars) were much more evenly distributed.  Significant analysis follows, and several objections to the conditions of the experiment are posted in the comments. 

Mostly I think it shows that humans and computers have different ideas about what "random" really means.  Many readers probably felt like 17 was the least common number in daily life (although if you're a cribbage player, you'd argue that it's 19) so therefore it seemed the most random.  Whereas you can see that 5, 10, 15,  and 20 all got a low response.  A machine wouldn't differentiate the same way.

So speaking of random number generation, every year I participate in a college bowl game-picking pool organized by a friend of mine.  Essentially, it's just a contest between about twenty people to try to pick the most bowl games correctly.  I only vaguely follow college football so I'm out of my depth to begin with, although the pool is comprised of a range of people, from those obsessed with college football, down to people who are completely ignorant.  I'd guess I'm in the 20th percentile or so of participants.  Meaning I have more base subject knowledge (on college football) than about 1 in 5 others.  But I think anyone who's participated in a NCAA tournament pool knows that knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and the person who has followed the game closest throughout the season not only doesn't have an advantage, they probably, in fact, have a disadvantage. 

The point is, I make all of my picks via random number generation.  I've tried different methods in the four years I've played, all lacking scientific validity.  Here's a summary of my methodology:

Year 1: Random number generation by MS Excel
Year 2: Combination of Excel and polling my roommate (whom I perceived as lucky) for random numbers
Year 3: Asking friends to gather numbers from random.org, which I compiled and gleaned results
Year 4: Random number generation by Google spreadsheet

This last year I finished in 2nd place in the pool.  Second place!  Picking entirely randomly, going only by meaningless numbers generated by Google spreadsheet software, I out-picked nearly the entire field.  Year 1, the other year with no human intervention, was similarly successful--in the top three I think.  The worst year was Year 3, which required the most human participation.  Even though the numbers were random, I asked people to gather them.  I finished last, easily.  Year 2 was somewhere in the middle.

What I'm saying is, if you're in an NCAA tournament pool with me this year, beware Google spreadsheet!

Posted at 09:56AM Feb 09, 2007 by WILSON, JOSHUA in Thought experiments  | 

DST is the new Y2K

An interesting calendar problem has cropped up thanks to new Daylight Saving Time (DST) rules.  It's being extended by 4 weeks starting this year, beginning 3 weeks earlier and ending one week later under provisions of the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005.  Our campus calendar system, and presumably several other electronic clocks and calendars, need a patch to be made aware of the change.

So for the window of time between March 11 (when it now starts) and April 1 (when it would've started under the old rules), we might have some calendar havoc as schedule meetings don't post at the right time.  Luckily we have a good IT department that seems to have fixed it. 

Although I'm glad to see a proactive shift to save energy--is there a good reason not to do this?--this is almost certainly bigger news for IT folks than for others, since most people have no idea when DST starts or ends anyway, we just change our clocks when they tell us to.  They are also kind enough to do it over a weekend so if you somehow miss it you'll probably figure it out sometimes Sunday.  Still, I'm frankly amazed the whole scheme works.  There must be some social science jargon for events that work simply because everyone agrees to play along, but I'm afraid I lack the vocabulary.

Speaking of clocks, I got this spiffy National Geographic wall clock for christmas:

Traditionally styled and always accurate, the clock synchronizes each night to the U.S. atomic clock in Colorado and self-adjusts for daylight saving time, leap seconds, and other time changes.

That's right.  Leap seconds.

Posted at 10:38AM Feb 07, 2007 by WILSON, JOSHUA in Bits of news  |  Comments[1]

Why are you here?

Over the weekend I attended the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference.  It was a great program and I learned a lot about the current state of science blogging.  My biggest conclusion is: why are you here?  If you dig science bloggery, you need to hit ScienceBlogs, truly the world clearinghouse on science blogging, and home to numerous excellent writers, bloggers, and scientists.

One project I've been working on of late has been the PAMS reference wiki.  It's been sort of chugging along as I've been thinking about exactly how I wanted to use it, but my interest in the wiki was greatly renewed during the conference after a talk by Dr. Jean-Claude Bradley of the UsefulChem Project.  He's doing some really interesting work, with a commitment to open source science.  I really like the interactivity and ease of wikis, and recognize that wikipedia is the default first stop for information needs for a significant portion of internetters these days, no matter what the topic.  Which is to say, it's easy and relevant and most everyone likes it, so as a librarian I'm totally on board.    For professional research, the library is still (easily) the place to go, but eventually the two concepts are going to merge.  I'll be fascinating to see exactly how.

Science! will probably continue to be home to interesting anecdotes I come across, but I don't anticipate posting any more frequently than I do now, unless I am hit with some kind of repurposing brainstorm.  Mostly ScienceBlogs, The Annals of Improbable Research, and Modern Mechanix cover what my first thoughts were about this blog, and the PES News blog covers most of the new happenings in the library relevant to what I'm doing.

Posted at 12:08PM Jan 23, 2007 by WILSON, JOSHUA in General  | 

The Open Laboratory

The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006 is now available at http://www.lulu.com/content/631016



Looks interesting!

More information from the editor here:
http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/01/the_science_blogging_anthology.php

Posted at 11:53AM Jan 17, 2007 by WILSON, JOSHUA in General  | 

2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference

Consider attending the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, coming up Saturday, January 20. This is a free, open and public event for scientists, educators, students, journalists, bloggers and anyone interested in discussing science communication, education and literacy on the Web.

All information on the conference can be found at http://wiki.blogtogether.org/blogtogether

I'm going!

Posted at 02:48PM Jan 04, 2007 by WILSON, JOSHUA in Bits of news  | 

Santa's Relativity Cloud

It would be wrong not to point out breakthrough research being done on this campus.  See The Science of Santa.

And there?s really no need for Santa to enter the house via chimney, although Silverberg says he enjoys doing that every so often. Rather, the same relativity cloud that allows Santa to deliver presents in what seems like a wink of an eye is also used to ?morph? Santa into people?s homes.

Posted at 12:58PM Dec 12, 2006 by WILSON, JOSHUA in General  | 

Mythbusters

Science! heartily endorses Mythbusters, of which the New York Times says:

It may be the best science program on television, in no small part because it does not purport to be a science program at all. What ''Mythbusters'' is best known for, to paraphrase [co-host Jaime] Hyneman, is blowing stuff up. And banging stuff together. And setting stuff on fire. The two men do it for fun and ratings, of course. But in a subtle and goofily educational way, they commit mayhem for science's sake.

The core mission of the show is to test urban legends and folklorish tales of incredible feats to determine whether they could actually happen.  You know, with science.  For example, they devoted a recent episode to testing the mentos and diet coke phenomenon, changing variables, constructing power nozzles, and trying to set height records.  In another episode, they tried out a bunch of cat burglary movie cliches: assembling suction cup building-climbing apparatus, cutting through glass doors without setting off alarms, and trying to hack laser burglar alarms, just to name a few. 

It's rarely the most thorough investigation, but they have the budget, time, and engineering expertise that most of us lack.  So they can try stuff like building personal jet packs.  A lot of things naturally get blown up or broken--in the last episode I watched they tested (and confirmed) the effect of a compressed gas tank nozzle getting broken off.  In their controlled test they dropped a metal weight onto the valve, snapping it off, and launching the tank-turned-propelled-missile into a cinderblock wall, which it went cleanly through.

Anyway, it's on the Discovery Channel.  Best show on TV*.  Check it out sometime.

*Other than the Venture Brothers.  But that's about SUPERscience, not regular science.

Posted at 03:53PM Nov 29, 2006 by WILSON, JOSHUA in General  |  Comments[2]

Somehow makes even The Lord of the Rings seem short

It is hard to overemphasize the shocking suddenness of life's proliferation in the seas and on the lands of Earth.  Suppose some galactic civilization had evolved on planets of stars older than the sun, and they had sent out a dozen expeditions to visit Earth, spaced evenly throughout Earth's history.  The first ten expeditions would have found only lifeless craters, lavas, sand dunes, and highly eroded river channels on Earth's land surfaces.  The eleventh expedition would have arrived 380 My [million years] ago and would have found the land mostly covered by flourishing Devonian forests.  The twelfth expedition would find us.

From William K. Hartmann & Ron Miller's The History of Earth.  Recommended as a highly readable summary of the geological and biological evolution of the planet.  Mostly geology, since that's actually most of Earth's history--6/7ths of it, in fact, without any life whatsoever.  Human history is even more absurdly short, about 10,000 years, compared to 4,500,000,000 years of Earth history.  Which is to say the Earth has been human-free for 449,999/450,000 or 99.9998% of its existence.  (By comparison, dinosaurs were around for something like 150,000,000 years--15,000 times as long as us.)

Anyway, if at this point in your life you're not completely blown away by the staggering scale of geologic time, this is a nice book to fix that.

Posted at 11:26AM Nov 25, 2006 by WILSON, JOSHUA in Anecdotes  |  Comments[2]