Category: Science

If you liked the chessboard you will also enjoy the Dragon Illusion.  A video at the link shows you what the illusion looks like but it’s more fun to make a dragon for yourself using the PDF (provided at the link) and some scissors and tape.  You will be amazed!

Thanks to Mitch Berkson for the link.

As scientists discover more about the "epigenome," a layer of biochemical reactions that turns genes on and off, they’re finding that it plays a big part in health and heredity…

The epigenome can change according to an individual’s environment, and is passed from generation to generation. It’s part of the reason why "identical" twins can be so different, and it’s also why not only the children but the grandchildren of women who suffered malnutrition during pregnancy are likely to weigh less at birth.

"Now we’re even talking about how to see if socioeconomic status has an impact on the epigenome," Szyf said.

The link is mine, but read more here.  Here is further explanation.

Today we have crayons called "Inch Worm," "Jazzberry Jam," "Tropical Rain Forest," "Manatee," "Bittersweet" and "Razzmatazz."  Or have you noticed you can’t understand half of the ice cream flavors these days?

Miller and Kahn discovered that there’s method — and perhaps even profit — to this maddening name game. In one test, 100 students taking part in an unrelated study were told that after they had finished the research task they should select jelly beans from six containers as a reward for their participation. They were told that each container held a different flavor of jelly bean. Half the students saw containers labeled with ambiguous names ("white Ireland," "moody blue"), while the other half saw those same containers with more specific descriptive names ("marshmallow white," "blueberry blue"). As the researchers had hypothesized, students took nearly three times as many jelly beans on average from a container that bore a vague name as from one that carried a specific name. In another study involving 60 students, participants were told to pretend they were ordering sweaters from a catalogue. The sweaters in question came in various colors, and these shades were described either ambiguously or using common descriptive names. Again, the students clearly preferred the vague names when making their buying choices. A third test turned up similar results.

Why does ambiguity seem to sell? Miller and Kahn theorize that, without real information, consumers try to understand why the product has such a jazzy name and fill in the blanks with imagined desirable qualities.

Here is the full story.  Here is another summary.  Here is the paper.  Here is one researcher’s home page.

Thermodynamics lets us make engines, refrigerators and much more.  But why does it work?  The usual answer is that physical changes are deterministic (i.e., one-to-one), and the early universe was highly ordered (i.e., flat).  But why was the early universe so ordered?  Various new fundamental principles have been proposed to explain early order, but so far these have not been fruitful.

A century ago Boltzmann suggested that the order we see (billions of light years of flat space) is a rare random fluctuation in a much larger universe.  One might hope that observer selection could explain why we see such a rare event; only if there is a big fluctuation can there be observers to see it.  But observer selection predicts a fluctuation just big enough to make one observer.  This is the “Boltzmann’s brain paradox;” the order we see is much larger than is needed to explain just your brain.

Andreas Albrecht explains that while technical problems remain, it now seems hopeful that inflation is the missing key here (along with assuming the universe is large).  Since early order is required to create inflation, inflation cannot by itself explain the order we see.  But inflation can eliminate the difference between brain-sized and visible-universe-sized fluctuations.  A fluctuation that creates inflation is more likely than one that just makes a brain, and any fluctuation big enough to make inflation creates order on the scale we see.

Perhaps we now just need ask: why is the universe so big?

Well, sort of human, compared to other existing robots, check out the photos.

Research has shown that bosses tend to crack
more jokes than do their employees. Women laugh much more in the
presence of men, and men generally tell more jokes in the presence of
women. Men have even been shown to laugh much more quietly around
women, while laughing louder when in a group of men.

Read more here.

Here is the best short discussion I have seen to date.  You can follow intelligent rants on this issue on Autism Diva.

Type in your zip code and look at it here.  Here is my mother’s night sky.  Here’s mine at home, if only Fairfax did not have so much light pollution…

Thanks to Eric Rasmusen for the pointer.

If there is life on Titan, we might know soon.

BoingBoing serves up a menu of extremes.

Earlier I wrote, "We will soon need a new word for people who eat meat but not animals."  Most of the suggestions I got were awful (no, not your suggestion that was great).  Seriously, thanks to everyone who wrote.  Here are a few that I thought especially interesting.

From Brock Cusick, synthetarian.   I like it but I fear that synthetic still has negative connotation and we want a word that will be adopted by those who practice it.

From Chris Rasch, Cultivore, Cultivarian or Ameglians (scroll to Dish of the Day.)

From Travis Corcoran, Soylent-atarians.  Also good but a mite obscure.

In the end my choice is for VeggieTechie or VT, as in I’m a VT (also good for putting on restaurant menus).  Thus in the hopes of scoring a Google cascade:

Definition: VeggieTechie – a person who eats vegetables and synthetic meat but not meat harvested from an animal.

In the meantime AntiGravitas has another question, Is it cannibalism to eat vat-grown human meat?

Relative to seat belts, maybe not.  Read Levitt and Dubner on this question.

Laurie David, comedy developer turned environmental activist, writes in the Huffington Post:

Last week at the G8, President Bush restated his favorite global
warming canard: that mandatory curbs on fossil fuel pollution will “cripple the U.S. economy.”

WELL, WHAT DOES HE THINK GLOBAL WARMING WILL DO TO THE ECONOMY!?!?
 
I wish there was an even bolder bold on this computer to emphasize how
insane this logic is. Non-stop flooding, killer heat waves, energy and
food shortages: what will these do to the economy?

Actually Laurie, and PGL of Angry Bear who links to David, the best study of the issue indicates that global warming is most likely a net benefit to the US economy.  Carbon dioxide and greater temperature makes plants grow faster.  The author, Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn writes:

Climate change is likely to result in small net benefits for the United States over the next century. The primary sector that will benefit is agriculture. The large gains in this sector will more than compensate for damages expected in the coastal, energy, and water sectors, unless warming is unexpectedly severe. Forestry is also expected to enjoy small gains. Added together, the United States will likely enjoy small benefits of between $14 and $23 billion a year and will only suffer damages in the neighborhood of
$13 billion if warming reaches 5C over the next century. Recent predictions of warming by 2100 suggest temperature increases of between 1.5 and 4C, suggesting that impacts are likely to be beneficial in the US.

Speaking personally, I have undergone a greater shift in mean temperature by moving from Canada to the US than will occur in 100 years of global warming and I like it!  My fellow Canadians, still stuck in the frozen north, will be glad to know that in the future they too can have warmer temperatures without giving up their prized health care system.

For the developing world the effects of climate change are most likely negative but not so negative that further development – combined with some modest changes in first-world technology, such as greater use of nuclear power – is not the best solution.

Reading this made me sad:

Early detection [of a bomb] can backfire because of the grisly fact that human beings act as human shields.  "There is a trade-off between crowd size and crowd blocking," says Prof. Kaplan.  A large, dense crowd puts more people in harm’s way, but "the probability of being exposed to a bomb fragment declines exponentially with the size of the crowd."  As a crowd flees, there are fewer people near the bomber to absorb the fragments (as when a soldier falls on a grenade) and more people, unshielded, farther away.  Simple geometry shows that you can hit more people at a radius 20 feet from a bomber than you can five feet from him…The same effect occurs if people throw themselves to the ground  That minimizes each person’s exposed area, but also at the expense of decreasing human shielding.  For bombs with 500 or more fragments (in Israel, 1,000 is typical), "hit the deck" can raise rather than cut casualties.

That is from The Wall Street Journal, 8 July 2005, by Sharon Begley.