Tag: science

I’m left fearing the future of America’s leadership on the world stage of science and technology.
This leadership, as any historian will tell you, drives the economic strength and security of nations. The fall is not from a cliff. More like a slow, downward slide – almost imperceptible from day to day. But as the years pass America will have descended from leaders to players to merely followers as we fade to insignificance, at best hitching a ride on the innovations of others.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History. This is indeed what the far right know-nothings are toying with every time they make temporary political hay on their various anti-intellectual screeds; sadly, Tyson points to an outcome as predictable as it is inevitable. The wages of this sort of systematic denialism of empirical reality are secondary and tertiary status in research and, by extension, our national economic output and potential. Please do check the trend lines of global academic citations of North American science vs. Western European if you doubt me.

Annals of Scientific Publication

It’s not every day one gets to write a paper that includes such excerpts as:

[the] structure would be assembled in space near the sun by an army of robots and built out of space-based materials

while talking about small black holes, Dyson spheres, and the possibility of re-purposing SETI as a means of detecting the telltale gravitational waves of and/or the gamma emissions from poorly collimated exhaust of ships built to these theoretical specifications. But, when you do touch on all that, you generally get to include this line:

In the epilogue, we discuss possible philosophical ramifications of this observation.

Science!

Incidentally, in the 23rd century, Scotty frequently raged about this part of the paper:

A microscopic particle of ordinary matter which drifted into the antimatter would cause an explosion, scattering the antimatter into contact with the ship, and destroying everything for millions of miles around.

while (typically and completely) ignoring this part:

Any electromagnetic force which held the antimatter in would also drive normal matter in.

Best to stay the hell away from the Engineering deck, then. Somewhere on the order of millions of miles away. Good to know. <hand_gestures> Good. to. know! </hand_gestures>

Counting Calories

A recent study conducted in New York (with Newark serving as control) labeled menus with calorie content, and then questioned patrons whether they noticed the labels, and if they did: did they actually use them to make better choices?

As it turns out: not so much:

Those people that did notice the menu labels used them…to buy more calories. Not significant at this point, but disheartening to say the least. Sodium intake also increased.

I guess the answer is to label menus… but lie.

Ummm, huzzah for science!

Drop a Dime

Absolutely fascinating Freakonomics…in which a little scamp of an aspiring economist runs right through the old saw about losing the penny like BJ McKay going through billboards. Turns out losing the penny alone doesn’t really help overall efficiency that much if we assume:

1. Some combination of coins must reach every integer value in [0,99].

2. Probability of a transaction resulting in value v is uniform from [0,99].

You could split some obvious hairs about (2), but (1) seems to me to be the real sticking point on getting rid of the penny: people see it as just another chance for everything to go up in price; everyone assumes they’ll always come out behind on any rounding scheme. And, let’s face it: everyone probably would.

So, what was the most efficient system? Prepare to be Obamazed:

The penny, 3-cent piece, 11-cent piece, 37-cent piece, and (1,3,11,38) are tied at 4.10 coins per transaction.

Now who could possibly argue with that arrangement? I DEMAND it be implemented. But, forseeing the loser, stick-in-the-mud attidudes that he’d receive once he announced that all payments to Death Panels are henceforth mandated to be rendered in 38-cent coins, the little scamp sorted down to some more reasonable options (among others):

(1,4,15,40) is the first “reasonable looking” combination, with 4.14 coins per transaction.
(1,3,10,35) also does well, with 4.16 coins per transaction.

[or, restricting ourselves to multiples of 5]

(1,5,15,35) at 4.50 coins.
(1,5,10,30) at 4.60 coins.

Fantastic. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the “lose the penny!” nature of conventional wisdom, what would you assume is the least worthwhile coin?

Why, it’s the dime, of course.

…losing the dime entirely only costs us ~0.8 coins per transaction in efficiency; it does the least good of the existing coins.

So: a two pronged attack is in order. We couple a bill that removes dimes from circulation whilst putting the serene visage of Reagan or Lord Jesus on the obverse…