Category: Science

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Up

While on my trip to Washington DC I met someone who asked me for my opinion on a bracelet / wrist band thing they had bought. I was worried at first because these things tend to be utter rubbish, woo if you will. There are many performance bands that are supposed to interact with your body’s vibrations and improve your coordination and these are all fraud. They don’t work and they never will. If someone like Powerbalance can show that their bracelet works then we will have to re-write all of modern physics [similarly if ghosts exists then what are they made of? Get me the proof and we’ll develop new physics].

I had just been introduced to the Up by Jawbone wristband. A movement (not position) tracker. It has a gizmo inside that measures how much you move and then you can upload that data to your iPhone or android device. I was so excited by this that I went and bought one from the Apple shop in Georgetown [DC].

Up By Jawboen

The device is easy to use. You wear it on your wrist and then upload the data to your phone app twice a day. You don’t have to upload the data that often but it seems about right.

I have to say I have been really impressed with the data I can collect. The Up band will time and measure the distance of a run, it’ll buzz me when I’ve been inactive. It can tell what sort of sleep I am having and when I got up to look after my boys.

The big question is how to use the data. It’s all very well collecting this stuff but it’s another knowing what to do with it. I have no idea how to use this data to inform what I should do in the future. The walking and running data is fair enough, I know I can aim to move around more but the sleep data? I can only sleep how I sleep. Perhaps I need to search the interweb thing to see if I can find out how to improve my sleep without having to give up alcohol! I love my wristband. I love the information it collects and the graphics it shows me. I’m just not sure what it tells me!

 

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Scrolling Direction

I think a new convention is needed. Being a somewhat literal interpreter of language and also because I like playing devil’s advocate I cause confusion when asked to “scroll up” my computer screen. As part of my job I regularly project my computer screen and write on the display using Microsoft OneNote. Sometimes it is requested of me to show more of my previous writing because those who should be following my work are a little slow.

Can you scroll up please

This is what I will be asked to do and although I understand the intention (to see what I wrote earlier) I irritate by moving the display on the screen so that the “paper” moves up. This is, of course, the opposite of what was being asked.

My argument to my followers is that in the days of paper scrolls being asked to scroll up would have moved the paper up and so would allow more of the bottom of the paper to be seen. I honestly do not know what should be the correct way to move the “paper”. If I was asked:

Can you move the scroll bar up please

I would say that is pretty unambiguous. Moving the scroll bar up has the desired effect. Or perhaps if I was asked:

Could you move the screen down so I can see the earlier work please

Again, it is quite clear what the intention of this statement is. I guess one of the lovely things about language is how vague and foggy it can be. It takes time and clarity of thought and interpretation to say exactly what you mean.

The offending item:

Scroll bar

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ISS Pass 2

Don’t think I’m going to see the ISS tonight as there is 8/8 cloud cover at the moment. I’m very glad I managed to fleetingly see it last night.
I have signed up for emails from NASA informing me when the ISS is going to pass over this part of the Kent countryside. Hopefully I won’t miss the next opportunity to see it.
I need to spend more time star watching later in the summer. I could do with a decent telescope. Maybe one that connects to my phone or computer to automatically track the celestial body I find interesting.
I’ve seen Jupiter and Saturn through telescopes in Florida and Australia. It’s awe inspiring to see these bodies of our solar system. It really brings home how far science and human knowledge has come in the last 400 years.
We are still in the infancy of human scientific verifiable knowledge. I hope that one day we leave our superstition and fairy stories behind.
This communication went somewhere I wasn’t expecting!

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ISS Pass 1

I’m not really sure why I looked or how I found out but the International Space Station passed over the Kent countryside last night. It will also pass over tonight.
According to a website the sighting time last night was about 20:30 Hrs. I was preparing to head outside and observe this modern wonder when there was a knock at the door!

ISS Passes

I had a few minutes to help my neighbours out with a problem they had and get into my back garden. Fortunately they only needed a little help and I stood on the patio with a glass of wine in hand.

At 20:35 the sky was not really dark but I hoped to see the ISS pass. The moon was bright. I used my Star Walk iPhone app to check where I should be looking and waited. After a short while there was a bright star travelling fast through the sky. It was the only other thing visible in the sky apart from the moon. After about a minute I looked away and the ISS disappeared behind the dust and particles towards horizon. It was wonderful to see. I’ll be out again tonight!

BTW – I don’t like the fact the website that displays the information has a mixture of 24Hr and 12Hr clock times. I don’t think they understand the conventions!

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Bridge Construction

When I was in America I did some running. On my last day in the USA I ran past some bridges. While running up to the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge I noticed a curious linkage design in the side of the bridge.

TRMB

In the UK the majority of bridges are built on rollers so that when they expand in the summer, warmer months they don’t crack and break apart. These rollers can be observed from under the bridge and the expansion joints can be seen on top of the bridge.

This particular bridge in Washington DC is hanging from the cantilever end parts of the bridge to allow expansion in the structure. A close up below:

Bridge Expansion

A close up with my annotations:

Extra

This is quite a clever solution to bridge expansion. I also think it is quite clear that I would make an excellent dinner guest, not boring at all! One of the things I love about civil engineering is that it is Meccano but just bigger. Big bolts, big nuts and big cables!

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Jack Frost

This Fooyah Communication concerns the weather and cars. It does not concern the fact that my car doesn’t like starting if the temperature is below 2 Celsius and nor does it concern the run of cold weather recently. I also have not done any controlled, scientific tests to confirm my observations but I would be interested in doing so.

Observation:

When there is a frost and the cars in my street have ice on the windows the side of the car that is closest to the buildings has less or zero ice.

Hypothesis:

One side of the car is warmer than the other resulting in less ice.

Mechanism:

The nearby buildings radiate heat and keep that side of the car warmer or slow its loss of heat.

Pretty picture:

Jack Frost Street
The Street

Cars parked in the road in position A have less ice on the SW facing side which is nearest the buildings in the street. Cars parked in position B have less ice on the NW side which is closest to the buildings there. It is not a phenomenon to do with the sun as both of these positions are shaded from the sun’s rays in the early morning and there isn’t any sun when I go out to the car in the deep dark midwinter.

Most of the houses in these streets were built around 1880 and so have brick-thick walls and no cavities to insulate. Therefore they radiate the heat energy of the house quite efficiently. I need to park my car outside a modern house with cavity insulation to see what effect that has on the frost of the car.

Some not-very-sciency-maths-stuff:

I have made a huge number of simplifcations in the following calculations but the order of the result will be about correct and if it isn’t then I am sure that one of the F5 +1 will let me know. Essentially I have estimated the amount of energy lost by the air in my whole house and have assumed that about one third goes through the front of the building (the roof is quite well insulated). I have also assumed that the bricks of the house will lose some heat over the night and that this is radiated out although some will be radiated in. Then the car absorbs the energy without any loss. Basically, the final answer is a big ISH.

Sums and maths

More sums

Final Calculations

So the car absorbs about a couple of Watts per metre squared. That seems about right, but what do I know? Thermodynamics freaked me out at college!

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It’s Just Right

Once a fortnight is just about the correct frequency.

Private Eye is a fortnightly news magazine to which I subscribe. It’s possibly the only newspaper willing to spread the truth and print what is going on. It’s quite frightening really just how corrupt and dodgy most organisations and societies are. Maybe corrupt is the norm and I’m just hoping for an idealised society that can never exist? The other magazine I subscribe to is Scientific American.

In the same week that I receive Private Eye the Merseyside Skeptics Society release their podcast called Skeptics With A K. It’s a show about an hour long which features three normal (ish) guys chatting about skeptical items that interest them. There’s a bit of swearing and a reasonable amount of poking fun at people but it is very interesting and I learn a lot.

Both these subscriptions arrive in the same week and have for a few years, even allowing for the Christmas break they have. Each new year I wonder if the synchronicity will be altered but I haven’t found so this far. Perhaps it’s deliberate?

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Easy Research

Short one this. For a few years now I have become convinced that there’s an easy way to make discoveries and gain a PhD. Although this might be slightly controversial and I am prepared to accept my views are probably wrong, I do currently think that this is how some fields of research work.

Recipe:

  • Take a phase of life or social behaviour (grieving, riots, middle-age, becoming a parent)
  • Perform a survey of people going through this process or involved in these behaviours
  • Look through your data to find correlations or patterns (humans are very good at this)
  • Make up a causation-correlation statement or split the phase into sub-divisions
  • Perform another survey to confirm your results
  • Write up a PhD
  • Write a popular style book explaining your results and what people can do to fix themselves
  • All done!
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