Category: Science

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Published

In November 2009 I was moved to write a letter to the editor of Private Eye after the architecture critic, Piloti, suggested that living near electricity transformers was dangerous to human health. The letter was published and I have kept that copy of Private Eye for the future. Looking back through my emails it would appear that I have written to Private Eye 5 times. So that’s a 20% hit rate so far.

Sir,

I was disappointed to read that Piloti (Eye 1249) has reinforced the incorrect view that magnetic fields from electricity substations are a danger to health. There is no scientific evidence to link electricity substations with an increase of ill health. Piloti’s use of the specific term “radiation” only reinforces peoples’ prejudices against such structures. EM radiation covers everything from radio waves to X-Rays and beyond and does nothing to describe what is actually emitted. Should your excellent staff of humanities graduates want to further their knowledge I point you in the direction of: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/magnetic-fields

I shall, however, not be cancelling my subscription for this minor transgression.



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Skeptical Pat

Just watched an episode of Postman Pat, or rather, just turned over and caught the last little bit. I was feeding son #2 rather than enjoying the stop-motion for myself. The episode was called Postman Pat and the Magic Lamp.
Now I’m going to have to guess what the story was about but I think the kids (all with ginger hair, Pat’s hair is ginger, you figure it out) found a lamp that they considered magic. I think they made wishes and then waited for them to come true. When Pat spoke to them he said:

Wishes only come true like that in books and stories. If you want something to come true then you have to work yourself to make it come true.

This is surely an excellent lesson, not only for children but also for every person on the planet. What a skeptical chap.

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48 Degrees

My newest favourite number is 48 or more accurately arccos (2/3). Other favourite numbers are 5,17, and 309. Although 48 is ten more that the Revolting Cocks song 38, the reason for 48 degrees is explained (mathematically) below, but essentially 48 degrees is the solution to the problem:

A smooth hemisphere with radius, r, is resting in a fixed position on a horizontal plane with its flat face in contact with the plane. A particle of mass, m, is slightly disturbed from rest at the highest point of the hemisphere. Find the angle to the vertical that the particle leaves the surface of the sphere.

Also  this is independent of radius, particle mass and local gravity! Nice.

 

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A Bit Cold

This is an epic fail. I know Manchester is shitty but I think this is a bit wrong!

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Perhaps it’s getting back for the BBC move to Salford or most likely the number was an accident. Humans are fallible and so any counting or typing procedure can’t be 100% accurate!

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Winter Solar Farm

Here’s the local solar farm in the winter. It’d be interesting to know the power output of the whole farm. Also, the panels don’t face south, more south-east. Perhaps that’s when the sun is most useful? Or perhaps clouds tend to cover the sky in the afternoon? Not sure. Perhaps an email to the company is needed. Watch this space.

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Just found this information:

The 4.9 megawatt solar farm covers 26 acres of the former SCA paper mill site, which closed in 2009 with the loss of 130 jobs.

So that’s 0.19 MW/acre. For comparison the Magnox nuclear reactor Sizewell A in Suffolk created 420MW for a land area of 245 acres. This gives 1.7 MW/acre, nearly ten times the power. It’d be interesting to compare running costs!

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Descent into Skepticism

Most of my life I was little affected by “woo”. I think I had always been curious about some things like alternative medicine, but never really investigated it. Where would you go in the days before the internet? I didn’t care about it enough to go to the library. If I had I might have got a book by Deepak Chopra instead of Carl Sagan and perhaps that would have moved my life in entirely the wrong direction.

I can remember my dad saying to me in my early teens that if all other things had failed for a terminally ill patient then what harm was there in trying acupuncture? I think that was the only SCAM (I borrow Mark Crislip’s definition of SCAM here) I was aware of. When I was about 18 my mum trained in reflexology. She went to college and got a proper qualification and letters after her name. When she explained it to me, I paid attention and thought about it, but didn’t form a hard opinion. I was happy to let people believe what they wanted.

About 5 years ago (it’s currently 2012) my Dad bought me a fuel economy device(magnet) for my car that would also work on ANY vehicle. Now I was curious about this. I searched the internet and looked at the manufacturer’s website which tried to explain that the magnet aligned the fuel so it burnt more efficiently. I knew there is no ferrous material in hydro-carbons. I also now have progressed from an un-thinking 18 year old to having an engineering degree and about 15 years of reading about science and was hooked on this issue. Surely, my logic went, if a simple magnet could improve fuel efficiency then the car manufacturers would be buying all the magnets in the world. If it really worked it would be a standard component in all engines.

The magic-magnet manufacturer’s website had a money-back offer and lots of testimonials. How could so many people be wrong? I must have also stumbled upon a “skeptical” website with some information and a podcast. I was already listening to some BBC podcasts and so I subscribed to the skeptical podcast. I can’t remember which one it was, but probably “The Skeptic Zone” from Australia. From there it was a short journey into “Skeptoid”, “The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe” and “Skeptics with a K”.

I now don’t want to let people believe what they want. I want them to know what works and what doesn’t. Human civilisation has developed the most sophisticated tool for understanding the world and how it works – SCIENCE. Now although science occasionally has its flaws it is a self-correcting system. The evidence wins-out eventually. There is no evidence for SCAMs, they just keep inventing more ludicrous mechanisms to explain their failure.

I’ve read around the subject, including Bad Medicine by Ben Goldacre and a couple of Robert Park books and, of course, Cosmos by Carl Sagan. There’re still a few books to read and magazines to subscribe to, but I consider myself educated in this realm. I understand evidence, trials and logical fallacies. The world needs to be educated about SCAMs.

If you are not sure what the harm is, then have a look at this site.

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Excellent Adverts

It really doesn’t get much better than this Australian advert from the Shonky awards:

 

Or, you might want to have a look at this excellent Adobe advert:

 

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The Big Bad Mouse

Now I’ll admit that picking on a children’s book and film is pretty poor but then perhaps the producers of these should make sure that their science is consistent. I am happy for books and tv shows to make changes to a rule of physics and then follow the consequences. For instance, The Octonauts seem to have no need of decompression when they do their deep dives, they also have open water in the Octopod which means the whole pod is pressurised, this, technologically is possible but very hard.
For some reason, the story of the Gruffalo’s Child has really piqued my criticism micro-chip. I’m happy for a creature called the gruffalo and I’m happy with talking animals and I can cope with an intelligent mouse. One, tiny scene has really bugged me though. Towards the end of the Gruffalo’s Child, SPOILER ALERT, the mouse climbs a tree and uses his huge shadow from the moonlight to scare the gruffalo child into thinking that there is a huge mouse who eats gruffalo. This size of shadow is impossible. The moon is so far away that any shadow on the ground will be, effectively, lifesize and so the size of the actual mouse. Perhaps, if the gruffalo child understood some basic physics it would have stayed in the wood and eaten the cocky mouse.

The diagram shows how the distance of the object from light source and the distance to the image are important in determining the size of the image. The mouse is so far from the moon’s light it will not be able to make a bigger shadow.

Gruffalo - mouse shadow

The above diagram shows that if the light source (A) is far from and object (circle BC) then the shadow thrown (circle DE) is small. Whereas, if the light source (A1) is close the object (circle B1C1) then the shadow is large (circle D1F). My original drawing is below:

Moon Shadow

I have since had some criticism from the USA about this post and I have included the text of the email here:

Dear Sir
I refer to your fooyah posting of January 9th, concerning the shadow-casting abilities of an intelligent mouse. I wish to point out that shadow up-scaling would be possible if the light rays reflected by the moon were partially obscured or reflected (perhaps by some dense foliage) thereby creating a quasi point source of illumination. The point source’s proximity to the subject mouse could then produce an enlarged, not to say terrifying, shadow.
Just saying.

I have to agree and I replied saying that before I wrote this post I had thought about water droplets focusing the moon’s light to create a light source close to the mouse. I’d then forgotten this side of the argument. In fact a frozen, pure, droplet that had grown in size with succesive layers of water freezing on it without boundary layers (one continuous freeze whilst growing) could create a lens that would allow for the size of the mouse’s shadow. Diagram to follow if I can be bothered.

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How to light a fire

Photos to be included soon.

When I was a lad we didn’t have any fancy central heating and radiators, oh no. Coal fire in the front room and a Rayburn (think cheap Aga) in the dining room. The Rayburn was always on and in winter we would move the tv into the dining room so there was only one room to heat. As soon as you got out of bed or the bath you’d run to the dining room as quick as you could.
The only winter day in the lounge was Christmas day. We’d move the tv back for the day and the tree and presents would be in there. It was my job to start the coal fire in the lounge. It was nice to have the responsibility.
I’m worried that starting a fire is a dying skill. Mind you it’s just not really needed anymore. Central heating and all that! Unlike, say, changing a wheel, surely all people can and have done this for practice but people I’ve spoken to have no idea about this. I will be doing this for fun with my sons when they are older.
So the easiest way to get a fire going requires a little time to set up but you save time in the long run having to start again.
Take some news paper, lay it flat and then gather up along the fold line so it’s bow shaped and then fold in half and put these pieces under the grate (these are the bits you light).
Now take more newspaper and lay it flat. Then roll into a pipe about 2cm in diameter along a diagonal of the rectangle. Now take your tube and tie it in a loose knot and even out the circle. Place these on top of the grate to cover the surface. These will light the kindling.
The kindling should be places in a check pattern on top of the paper circles. A couple of layers should be enough.
Lastly get some coal, without too much dust, and place a layer evenly on the kindling. The kindling should be placed so no lumps of coal can fall onto the paper circles. That’s it!
Get a match and light the paper under the grate in a few places and your fire will start beautifully.

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Plane Finder AR

Just installed Plane Finder AR onto the phone. Point your camera at a plane and it’ll tell you

  • what it is
  • where it is
  • where it’s going
  • how far away it is
  • whose it is

    • absolutely brilliant. I love it. Just right for an aircraft geek.

    Night time picture of screen! That’s what time it is here!
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    Mobile Phones

    I have owned a number of mobile phones and most of them were rubbish. Going to give you a rundown of them from the earliest.
    Phone number 1 – sometime in 1999 or so:
    Brick
    The Ericsson A1018

    The order of the next few phones is not remembered easily. But here goes:
    O2 X1

    The next was:
    A200

    then:
    Nokia 3210

    And then the nifty fold-out keyboard:

    Nokia 6280 Nokia 6230

    Then we get to the first smart phone:

    Nokia N70

    Then the brilliant and pretty usable N95, it was the last Nokia I owned that worked well:

    Nokia N95

    Then the big memory but pretty useless N97:

    Nokia N97

    Finally, a phone that works. The iPhone 4. Until then the iPhone specification was pretty rubbish. It took a lot of soul searching to convince myself that selling out to the walled garden of Apple was worth it. However, I have to say that the iPhone is brilliant. It works!

    iPhone 4

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    LED Car Lights

    When Audi put super bright LED lights on the front of their cars I was really impressed. They looked cool and were possibly a good safety feature.
    Then everyone got in on the act. Citroën, Porsche, VW and the other day I swear I saw a KIA with these lights.
    Now I’ve changed my mind. They aren’t cool. They are annoying. Always on and too bright if these lights were the reason you bought a car then get your head examined. They are the automobile equivalent of a snake shaped belt buckle.
    I’m not convinced of any safety argument either. If manufacturers want lights on all the time because they know that most drivers can tell when to flick the switch then change your name to Volvo.

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    Looking in the mirror

    Here’s a tip for some of you drivers out there. It stems from my experiences as a motorcyclist and now as a driver, although now I’m not travelling quite as fast. The bike was an 1100cc machine and my car is a diesel estate!

    I noticed in the past that whenever I was coming up behind a car on a motorway and that car was indicating to pull out into my lane that the driver would (I assume) check the rear view mirror or door mirror. Now, if the driver looks once and gets a snapshot of the road they would see me in the outside lane. What would be interesting is that the driver would have no idea of how fast I was travelling unless he/she spent a long time staring in the mirror. To get an impression of speed the driver would have to look again in the mirror to see how my position relative to him/her had changed in the time that had passed.

    I believe it is for this reason I had cars pull out in front of me causing me to brake many times. It is quite simple that to judge a speed you need two reference times to see position change. Hence drivers need to look in their mirrors twice before pulling out in front of traffic in the next lane. Most drivers are ignorant of this fact of physics given that cars still pull out in front of me and I’m now in a car.

    Perhaps drivers don’t care about other road users and I’m in the minority. Gosh, I think I’m better than most.

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    No pak choi ahoy

    So my vegetable plot grew well but my pak choi are gone! Not eaten by humans though.
    See the carcass of my work:

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    All done by these:

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    Mind you it’s been a good talking point with my son. Haven’t trapped any in a jam jar, will do that next year when he’s older.

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    Latest Tech

    Here’s the latest tech I’ve bought. I’m a bit of a Logitech fan so this was always going to be something of theirs.
    Really nice sound and rechargeable batteries to carry it around.

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    Fiction

    Picture of part of my bookshelf. Note the fiction title surrounded by reference books!

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