Science – Page 27 – Fooyah

April 23 2012April 25 2012

Making It Look Easy

Recently I have taken up jogging. This is a normal summertime hobby with the aim of helping lose my winter blubber and get fit. This year is slightly different as ww has decided to do this also. There is a little bit of competition there but it is rather unfair at the moment as ww has slight activity-induced asthma!

We have found a 5Km route around the vineyards and fields surrounding our village. There is a bit of vertical work to do as we live at the base of the North Downs and there are ups and downs on the route!

At the moment I can run the 5Km in about 32 minutes. Let’s say that this is about 6 mile per hour. Which would give a pace of about 10 minutes per mile. Now for the scary bit. . . . The current world record for the mile is under four minutes. If we take the four minutes as the correct time for ease of calculations then that is 15 mph or 2.5 times my current speed. An athlete I am not!

The London Marathon was recently run in a time of just over 2 hours. Assuming it to be about 2 hours you get a speed of 13 mph which isn’t that much slower than the speed for the mile and yet these athletes keep it up for 2 hours. VERY impressive. The human body is quite stunning! An athlete I still am not.

I think this is part of a bigger social phenomenon that professional people make things look very easy because they do it all-day every-day. Professional footballers make playing in the premiership look easy (although for £50,000 a week I’d make sure I could hit the net EVERY time). Professional athletes make it look easy, professional sports drivers make it look easy.
Even in my profession (teaching) I think we make it look easy. I have had people come and observe my lessons and I think they think it looks easy. Then when they get the chance to do it themselves a lot of them are rubbish and have no idea and to be honest won’t be able to do it after lots of practice. It takes the right kind of person with the right kind of practice to be good at their chosen profession. Not everyone can do it. The following is a misnomer:

you can do anything you set your mind to

Unfortunately this was said by Ben Franklin whom I would normally hold in high esteem. Perhaps it should be re-phrased:

you can do anything you set your mind to as long as you have the natural ability

April 19 2012

Kent Rainbow

Here’s a rainbow I saw while out having a jog.

March 29 2012March 29 2012

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.

March 1 2012March 1 2012

A Bit Cold

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

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!

February 18 2012February 18 2012

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.

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!

January 26 2012June 22 2018

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.

January 16 2012

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:

January 9 2012January 10 2012

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.

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:

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.