This is your spider on drugs:
Any questions?
Category: Science
What Happens When You Leave a McDonalds® Happy Meal
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Which is fresh
And which is a year old
Nonna Joann investigates.
She actually blogged the developments, or lack thereof, over a 1 year period.
I have to agree with her, food is supposed to decompose after being outside for a year.
Anti-Vaxxers Handed Another Well Deserved Defeat
A 3 judge panel has ruled that there is no scientific basis for claims of a link between thimerosal and autism:
In a further blow to the antivaccine movement, three judges ruled Friday in three separate cases that thimerosal, a preservative containing mercury, does not cause autism.
The three rulings are the second step in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding begun in 2002 in the United States Court of Federal Claims. The proceeding combines the cases of 5,000 families with autistic children seeking compensation from the federal vaccine injury fund, which comes from a 75-cent tax on every dose of vaccine.
Understand that there is a fund, which can, and does pay out for things like allergic reactions, and judges ruled that there is no factual basis for this at all:
In the three cases brought against the government, by the parents of Jordan King, Colin R. Dwyer and William Mead, all three special masters used strong language in dismissing the expert evidence from the families’ lawyers.
The master in the King ruling emphasized that it was “not a close case” and “extremely unlikely” that Jordan’s autism was connected to his vaccines. The master in the Dwyer case wrote that many parents “relied upon practitioners and researchers who peddled hope, not opinions grounded in science and medicine.”
This is judge speak for, “Get out of here, you nut jobs.”
Now, if only we could get Jenny McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, Jr. off of Huff Po before they do any more damage.
Somehow, I Think that This is Another Nail in Stealth’s Coffin
As I have before, I think that increases in computing power may have the effect of making stealth less effective.
Well, Wired has an article about a new and very powerful algorithm for imaging, called compressed sensing, which uses the simplicity as a way to enhance images, the example they give is a non-military one, specifically the need to image the bile ducts of a small child to see if they were blocked, which required that he be heavily sedated and that his ventilator be shut down so as to keep him still.
With conventional imaging, it would take over 2 minutes and risk brain damage to get the resolution required, but with the new algorithm, it took only 40 seconds.
While this is an interesting possibility for many areas, I can see how this technique, when combined with data from multiple sensors could give a high resolution solution for an air defense system.
In fact, going around the web, you see examples of single pixel cameras producing decent imagery.
These guys see the primary application being low power, and non visible light, where massive arrays become impractical, but I think that military applications will come, and anti-stealth is a likely direction.
Another Earthquake?
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Opening up like a broken zipper
Taiwan, 6.4 on the Richter scale.
We got a whole lot of unzipping along fault lines.
FWIW, I still don’t think that the Mayans were right.
Damn!
Turns out that Star Trek is impossible.
At 99.999998% of the speed of light, the the radiation from interstellar hydrogen striking your ship will fry you like an egg:
Professor William Edelstein of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine explained to New Scientist that while interstellar space has just a couple of hydrogen atoms per cubic centimetre, as the crew of the Enterprise hit the gas pedal, a compression effect would greatly increase the number of atoms hitting the spacecraft.
As the spaceship reached 99.999998 per cent of the speed of light, “hydrogen atoms would seem to reach a staggering 7 teraelectron volts”, which for the crew “would be like standing in front of the Large Hadron Collider beam”.
This is a very bad thing, because humans in the path of this ray would receive a dose of ionising radiation of 10,000 sieverts, and as Bones McCoy would doubtless confirm, the lethal dose is 6 sieverts.
The result? Death in one second.
And I was so looking forward to green alien dancing girls.
Well, I guess that there is always recombinant DNA technology.
Another Report on How We are Destroying Ourselves-
It appears that methane is leaking from the arctic permafrost at rapidly accelerating rates, and methane is a significant contributor to the greenhouse effect.
Of course, it also includes one of my pet peeves:
The discovery follows a string of reports from the region in recent years that previously frozen boggy soils are melting and releasing methane in greater quantities. Such Arctic soils currently lock away billions of tonnes of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, leading some scientists to describe melting permafrost as a ticking time bomb that could overwhelm efforts to tackle climate change.
(emphasis mine)
Frequently, you have people saying that methane is 20 times more effective at trapping greenhouse gasses than CO2, and while technically true, it leaves out an important fact, that methane’s persistence is far less than that of CO2.
Methane, CH4, has a molecular weight of 16, far less than that of the atmosphere, roughly 30, so it tends to migrate towards the upper atmosphere, where ultra-violet light breaks it down.
Here is the equation:
CH4 + 2O2 ⇒ CO2 +2H2O
Methane’s persistence is far less than CO2, on the order of a 1-2 decades, as opposed to the centuries for a CO2 molecule, which needs to go through the Byzantinely complex biochemistry that is photosynthesis.
So, basically, methane is something on the order of 10% worse, a short period in which that carbon atom part of a methane molecule, followed by a longer period in which it is CO2.
Global warming is real, and methane is an issue, though it is one roughly the same as CO2. There really isn’t a need to go all “20 times” (2nd link) do describe the issue. It is imprecise and disingenuous.
Our planet is going to hell in a hand-basket in either case.
Big Surprise
The Conference Board’s survey of US job satisfaction hit an all time low. 45%, the lowest number since the survey began in 1987.
There is some surprise that, even as workplace safety and things like vacation days have increased, this number had trended downward:
“[That] could spell trouble for the overall engagement of U.S. employees and ultimately employee productivity,” she [Lynn Franco, director of the Consumer Research Center of The Conference Board] added.
The report notes that job satisfaction has steadily declined over the years despite big improvements in the work environment, such as a reduction of workplace hazards and an increase in vacation days.
Simply put, we are at the point where the fetishism of management for screwing with their workers may start hitting the bottom line.
This is basic primate behavior: People know that that upper management’s wages have gone up by more than 10 times, while their wages have stagnated.
The National Geographic noted this over 15 years ago:
Monkeys Show Sense Of Fairness, Study Says
Sean Markey
National Geographic News
September 17, 2003If you expect equal pay for equal work, you’re not the only species to have a sense of fair play. Blame evolution.
Researchers studying brown capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) have found that the highly social, cooperative species native to South America show a sense of fairness, the first time such behavior has been documented in a species other than humans.
The question of whether human aversion to unfair treatment—now shown by other primates—is an evolved behavior or the result of the cultural influence of large social institutions like religion, governments, and schools, in the case of humans, has intrigued scientists in recent years.
The new finding suggests evolution may have something to do with it. It also highlights questions about the economic and evolutionary nature of cooperation and its relationship to a species’ sense of fairness, while adding yet another chapter to our understanding of primates.
……………
Happy Santa Day.
Randall Munro at xkcd is a genius.
From the Annals of the Thoroughly Unsurprising
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Maybe they could use the Amish …. Uhhhh … Never mind
Researchers, looking to “compare men who watch porn with those who haven’t encountered it,” have hit a snag.
They have been unable to find any men who haven’t sampled pr0n:
“We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography,” the Telegraph reported Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse as saying.
“[But] we couldn’t find any.“
I was thinking that they might want to contact members of the Amish community, and then I went to google images, and typed in “hot Amish chicks“. (NSFW)
Deep Thought
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We Can Have Scotch and Water on the Moon
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LCROSS
Image of Plume at +20 after impact
Near-infrared spectrometer data. Yellow areas indicate the water absorption bands
Data from the ultraviolet/visible spectrometer
And we only need to bring the Scotch, because the LCROSS impact data indicates water on moon, and not just water on the moon, but lots of water on the moon.
It appears that we are talking gallons of water in an area the size of a football field, which is by earth standards pretty f$#@ing dry, but is actually enough to be “mined” as a resource.
This is interesting not just because it makes the possibility of a habitation there more interesting, but it also raises the question as to the source of the water.
The usual suspects here are comets, the solar wind, or some hitherto unknown lunar process.
Devastating Takedown of Super Freakonomics
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Not really such a big patch of territory.
You don’t have to go far for help
I think that the book is an exercise in muddy headed contrarianism: The idea here is if you come to conclusions that are counter intuitive, particularly if they are favor conservatives, you get air time and book sales, and thus academic integrity be damned.
In any case, Professor Raymond T. Pierrehumbert takes a look at the chapter on Superfreakonomics where the authors claim that solar panels will contribute to global warming, and shows that anyone who can add 2 and 2 should never have put out this tripe.
First, he Googles world electric consumption, 16.83 trillion KWH, and figures back to wattage, which gives about 2 trillion (1.921T actually) watts.
Well, with 200w/m for an average area (he used 250 W on the assumption that you place solar cells in sunnier climes), and the current commercial efficiency of 15% that means that one would need about an area equal to 2×1012/(.15 X 250)=5.333×1010 m2=53,000 square kilometers, or a square about 231 kilometers to a side. (top picture).
Wiki has Earth’s surface area as 510,072,000 km2, so this is 0.0105% of the earth’s surface.
Now, you actually have to double this, since you need to account for the fact that at any given moment, half the earth’s surface is in darkness, so it rises to a whopping 0.0210% of the Earth’s surface area.
This is a worst case scenario, particularly since the albedo (reflectivity) of a solar cell is frequently the same as the roof that they are placed on (yes, this is an argument for white roofs in warm climates), but let’s ignore that, and go to his numbers:
So, let’s say that sand has a 50% albedo. [note the albedo of the earth is 0.39, I learned that from the Greek composer Vangelis] That means that each square meter of black solar cell absorbs an extra 125 Watts that otherwise would have been reflected by the sand (i.e. 50% of the 250 Watts per square meter of sunlight). Multiplying by the area of solar cell, we get 6.66 trillion Watts
That 6.66 trillion Watts is the “waste heat” that is a byproduct of generating electricity by using solar cells. All means of generating electricity involve waste heat, and fossil fuels are not an exception. A typical coal-fired power plant only is around 33% efficient, so you would need to release 6 trillion Watts of heat to burn the coal to make our 2 trillion Watts of electricity. That makes the waste heat of solar cells vs. coal basically a wash, and we could stop right there, but let’s continue our exercise in thinking with numbers anyway.
Of course, the problem is not the heat produced by coal production, it’s a trivial part of the equation, it’s the heat trapped by the emissions that are the concern, and it is (go to article) at least two orders of magnitude greater than waste heat.
His conclusion:
A more substantive (though in the end almost equally trivial) issue is the carbon emitted in the course of manufacturing solar cells, but that is not the matter at hand here. The point here is that really simple arithmetic, which you could not be bothered to do, would have been enough to tell you that the claim that the blackness of solar cells makes solar energy pointless is complete and utter nonsense. I don’t think you would have accepted such laziness and sloppiness in a term paper from one of your students, so why do you accept it from yourself? What does the failure to do such basic thinking with numbers say about the extent to which anything you write can be trusted? How do you think it reflects on the profession of economics when a member of that profession — somebody who that profession seems to esteem highly — publicly and noisily shows that he cannot be bothered to do simple arithmetic and elementary background reading? Not even for a subject of such paramount importance as global warming.
(emphasis mine)
He then finishes with a Google map (bottom pic) showing that it is a ½ mile walk to the Hinds Geophysical Laboratory on his own campus in order to confirm these numbers.
It would be even shorter if he cut through campus and the Administration building, though considering that the ethics office is likely located there, he probably wants to take the long way.
(on edit)
I updated the pictures to go with the popup format that I now use.
Given Michael Kinsley’s most recent exercise in mindless contrarianism, where he came out against journalism, I feel compelled to note that this behavior (Michael Kinsley disease) becomes even more toxic and has less intellectual integrity when juxtaposed with Chicago School economic delusions.
My Head Hurts
This is why I never got into high energy physics, because this is too weird for me:
Two physicists recently suggested that the Large Hadron Collider may have malfunctioned because a Higgs boson particle, travelling back in time from a future experiment, wrecked the machine.
I hate when that happens.
More Evidence that Rick Perry Didn’t Care that He Let an Innocent Man Die
He might be a murderer, but he has such nice hair. So did Ted Bundy.
So, we are now seeing evidence that Texas Governor Rick Perry allowed a man to be executed without consideration of his likely innocence.
It’s Texas, which means that a governor blithely signing off about putting a needle in someone’s arm with no more than a cursory examination, typically less than 15 minutes, of the record is the standard for Texas, and it is one that Perry’s two predecessors, George W. Bush and Ann Richards hewed to pretty closely.
What is different is that there is now an investigation of the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, where it is now pretty clear that there was no murder, the accusation was of murder by arson, because the fire was not arson.
This is the strongest case seen in some time for actual innocence of a man who has been executed, and the Texas Forensic Science Commission was looking into the case, when Rick Perry’s staff first pressured the panel chairman not to investigate this issue, and then fired half the commission to prevent public testimony by one of the foremost arson experts in the nation.
Meanwhile, it appears that the governor’s office is now in full stonewall mode, refusing to turn over documents showing what evidence he reviewed before denying clemency, and how long he reviewed it.
Let’s be clear, this is Texas. Rick Perry did not review the material in any serious way, because that is part of the social contract down there: You don’t let innocence get in the way of a good execution.
On a purely political note, Rick Perry is getting a serious primary challenge from Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who is criticizing him on his firing the panel, and his actions are stupid.
His real challenge is in the Republican primary, and the Texas Republican Party is about the most antediluvian Republican party in the nation.
From a purely political perspective, as immoral as it sounds, he should not be covering this up. He should be proclaiming from the high heavens that when a Texas jury wants a man dead, he will go to the wall to kill that man.
That would immediately make him the “it girl” of the Texas Republican party.
He already has the hair to be an “it girl”.
Here is a vid of Alison Stewart, who subbing on Rachel Maddow’s show, going over the basics.
I Have No Clue What this Means
Because I’ve yet to find a good synopsis of what exactly Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, actually do, but what ever it is, it won the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Their field of study appears to be how organizations structure themselves, which would seem to me more like anthropology or sociology, but there is always an overlap, particularly given the fact that the idea of the purely rational actor in a market has been challenged by recent events and the relatively new field of behavioral economics.
It appears that one of their discoveries is that competitive markets don’t always deliver the optimal results, and that cooperation frequently beats competition, which sounds to me like it’s straight out of anthropology.
Understand, however, that I have no clue what this actually means.
You did WHAT with my investment money?!?11*
“Saracen pigs! Saxon dogs! Roman cow!!It’s actually a photo of kingbirds harassing a red-tailed hawk at Bonny Lake State Park in Colorado.
The kingbirds are actually pretty lucky.
If it had been a Falcon, they’d be lunch.
Hawks eat things like rabbits and mice while falcons eat birds, and would have seen the actions of the kingbirds as a smorgasbord.
*H/t Bladesmith at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the line.
More From the Geek Goddess
Yes, it’s the lovely Rachael Maddow again, and the video includes British comedian and actor Stephen Fry.
It’s hysterical, and even Rachael cracks up. Watch it to the end, there is a Gingrich comment which is prize.
Rachael Maddow, Geek Goddess
First we have her robot videos:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
And then we have her talking with the health reform bill. No seriously. She is talking with the animated bill from schoolhouse rock, you know, this guy:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
You know, If I hadn’t already found Sharon,* and she did not “bat for the other team,” I’d be sending her some seriously steamy fan mail.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
Our Dumb Nation
So, a band came up with T-shirt, “Brass Evolutions, 2009,” but some creationist whack job parents objected so the assistant superintendent confiscated the shirts, because some parents, “don’t think evolution should be associated with our school.”
Since when did stupid people get the right to make the rest of us stupid?
What the administration should have done was contact the alma mater of said parents, and suggest that their diplomas be revoked.