The Science News Cycle

Mad props to Jorge Cham

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Armor gymnastics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hlIUrd7d1Q

Craptacular Eskimo Fan

Heather bought another old fan at the Arden Fair a few weeks back. It’s a single speed oscillating Eskimo with aluminum blades from the late 1930s. It has a somewhat attractive pseudo-Deco design with a spiderwebbish pattern to the cage.

Dissassembly revealed not only unbelievably thick crud deposits (half an inch of greasy fur inside the casing) but also the cheesiest design and materials I have ever seen in an antique fan.
EskimoFanOpen
The shaft bearings are thin and very yellow, very little copper content. But not all of the bearings are even metal! Some of them appear to be made of greased cardboard. The stator windings are literally bound with masking tape, although the wire nuts are porcelain. Two of the gears in the oscillator box are made of masonite – steam-pressed wood fiber. The worm gears they engage are steel, so don’t grab the fan and prevent it from oscillating unless you enjoy the sound of masonite gear teeth snapping off. The blade is soft aluminum, so soft that sticking a finger into the cage will almost certainly unbalance it… two of the blades are already bent, so that it vibrates noisily and the main shaft sidles erratically in and out like a trombone slide.

Even without the blade mounted it still sounds like a gravel crusher and the main shaft wobbles all over the place, because the squirrel cage rotor has never been balanced and all the cheesy bearing surfaces are worn out. If you push the oscillator shaft bearing up into the housing with a penknife it’ll swing back and forth wildly, at surprising speed, until the shaft bearing flys back out and the gearing disengages. I guess with a 2-pole stator and a 15-pole rotor you can’t expect smooth operation? The fact that the oscillator must have fallen apart almost immediately is probably what preserved those masonite gears.

Generous and repeated use of PB blaster, WD40, degreaser, and ultrasonics have given this piece of junk an interesting wabi-sabi patina that I kind of like, so I’m thinking about replacing all the bearing surfaces with bronze, and seeing if I can reshape the blade to restore balance. Planishing fan blades is always a big challenge, though.

0+12=13 in DBMspeak

In the field of Computer Science, there are many sub-disciplines, and there are varying shades of technical opinion. One of the shadiest of these is that of the database managers. An outspoken group on many subjects, always willing to force academic ideals of data integrity on hapless junior programmers, critical of any engine that caters primarily to real-world use cases, and always willing to compromise any such principles in any situation that affects them personally. Phil Ochs fans are laughing, everyone else is confused.

To illustrate: Everybody knows C programmers can’t count to ten on their fingers, because they start at zero. But if you ask a C programmer to provide ten items, he will – they’ll just be numbered from zero to nine, that’s all. A Visual Basic or FORTRAN programmer will give you the same absolute number of items, although they’ll be numbered from one to ten. Two boxes twice is always four boxes, in the world of workers getting things done, no matter the language nor what the labels on the boxes say.

Perhaps only in the field of database management would a list of “Ted Codd’s 12 Rules” include 13 items numbered zero through twelve. I suspect that in any other field, this would be considered a typographical error and quickly corrected in the proofreading stage.

Gartner Hype Curve

Gartner Hype Curve, http://tbdcatalog.com/
fig. a: Gartner Hype Curve traces outrageous ideas from excited trigger moments through frenetic hype (typical in media outlets) to inevitable sad disillusionment to refinement of what is actually sensible finally to mundane product/ion.

From TBD Catalog

Hawking radiation precludes singularity formation?

Laura Mersini-Houghton at the University of North Carolina and Harald Pfeiffer of the University of Toronto have published a paper suggesting that as a collapsing star emits Hawking radiation, it must also shed mass at a rate that would necessarily prevent it from achieving the density necessary to form a singularity. This doesn’t mean they are claiming black holes don’t exist, they’re saying that if Hawking radiation is real (and so far it’s entirely theoretical) a black hole singularity cannot be formed by the implosion of a star.

Of course if a mass is high enough to create an information paradox, would we ever be able to tell if that mass is a point singularity or not? I don’t know, but the non-mathematical parts of the paper are surprisingly readable.

Don’t answer the phone.

Courtesy + civility = emotional intelligence?

The problem with this video is that it restricts itself to business settings – in real life, it’s always difficult to ignore purposeful rudeness, whether you’re in a meeting or not. If someone is talking to you, and you do anything with a phone without first explaining why your phone is more important than what’s being said, you are being extremely discourteous.

My friend Pedro, who is on call at all times, invariably says, “Excuse me, hold on a moment, let me see if I have to take this call” and checks his screen – if the person calling is an important customer, he’ll say “I’m really sorry, but I have to take this call. I’ll make it as short as I can” and then after he gets off the phone he will apologize briefly but sincerely for the interruption.

These simple apologetics invariably waste less of Pedro’s time than his incoming call wasted of anyone else’s time, and cost him literally nothing. Nonetheless this small gesture of courtesy and respect, this trivial acknowledgement of an inconvenience, has a huge impact on how others see him and act towards him.

If you want others to treat you with courtesy and respect, you need to start by treating others that way. Answering your phone while another person is taking the time to talk or listen to you is purposeful rudeness. It’s ignorant and disrespectful, and it makes you look shallow and stupid.

Norway to pay Liberia for uncut trees

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Neil DeGrasse Tyson as a sacred cow?

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote an article about the way most modern people have debased science into a caricature of pre-renaissance religious dogmatism, simply substituting white lab coats for black cassocks.

…let me explain what science actually is. Science is the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation. That’s the science that gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet. But what almost everyone means when he or she says “science” is something different.

To most people, capital-S Science is the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It is a thing engaged in by people wearing lab coats and/or doing fancy math that nobody else understands. The reason capital-S Science gives us airplanes and flu vaccines is not because it is an incremental engineering process but because scientists are really smart people.

In other words — and this is the key thing — when people say “science”, what they really mean is magic or truth.

The Intarnets are up in arms. Criticize capital-S science, or the inanity of assuming that science and religion are conflicting methods of solving the same problems? Oh please. Richard Feynman brilliantly plowed that furrow in 1956, and nobody’s really changed their opinion on the subject then or since. What’s important here is that somebody criticised Neil DeGrasse Tyson! Quelle horreur!

2014 IgNobels awarded

Winners were ceremonially announced last night. I haven’t yet watched the awards video, so I do not know if Miss Sweetie-Poo was called into service.

The Medicine Prize was won by Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, for developing a means of treating uncontrollable nosebleeds that involves packing the patient’s nose with bacon.

Haban Sickle-Mo

Example of a small sickle-bar type mower, and why they are great for stream edges, under fences or treelines, and alongside roads. You can keep to the safe ground and reach out to one side.

The bad thing about them is that they are pretty much giant scissors, so they are tough to sharpen, and just as dangerous to wildlife, kids and misplaced property as any other mowing system. I think snakes would argue that they are even more dangerous, because they are relatively quiet.

Putting it on a computer doesn’t make it new.

This Ars Technica article is notable not only because it explains the Alice decision, but because it leads with a picture of a Wang System 2200 terminal. I taught myself BASIC on one of these around 1977 or so (before the Black Ships came and the secret of hose gartering that doesn’t ravel was lost).

Murder by Cop

Want to see the cops murder somebody in cold blood? Well, if you’re a bigot who works at Walmart, you can just wait for a young black man to pick up a BB gun and dial 9-1-1.

Oldest Known Pants

As a proud member of the Men Without Tights, I am pleased to report that our fellowship extends further back in time than previously documented.

Trousers are believed to have evolved concurrently with horseback riding by men. For reasons that will be obvious, at least to men.

The pants, which date from 3,000 to 3,300 years ago, are tattered, but are surprisingly stylish, combining attractive form with function. Made out of wool, the trousers feature straight-fitting legs and a wide crotch.

Discovery article, surprisingly good once you scroll past the unrelated photos

The invention of trousers and its likely affiliation with horseback riding and mobility: A case study of late 2nd millennium BC finds from Turfan in eastern Central Asia (Quaternary International, paywalled)

Dyes of late Bronze Age textile clothes and accessories from the Yanghai archaeological site, Turfan, China: Determination of the fibers, color analysis and dating (also Quaternary, also paywalled)

Phone Scammer Slammer

Revenge!

“Man Ass”

Unix-derived operating systems have a tradition of making commands short and easily typed regardless of social conventions.

So, in order to consult the manual page for the Autonomous System Scanner, you would type “man ass” at the command line. People involved with AS work would not find this remarkably odd or offensive – we’ve already got jobs to do, that don’t involve complaining about other people’s sense of propriety.

However, if one creates a site that automatically generates HTML-formatted web pages from the man pages of the Ubuntu V13.04 linux distribution, popularly called Raring Ringtail, one ends up hosting a page describing “raring man ass”.

The Internet being what it is, such a page may have unexpected effects on your google analytics results…

Apple live event in progress

Xeni Jardin is tweeting it, if you like the twidder.

Apparently Apple would like the “Apple watch” to overshadow the iPhone 6.

“The most innovative time-telling device since the sun dial.” #applelive — Carson Hickox 2:23PM EST

What I’m hearing is “We spent all of our time on making watch faces instead of improving battery life.” #applelive — Taren Smith ‏2:25PM EST

John Lopez: Scrap metal sculptures with a midwest theme

Mom sent me a link to an article on Bored Panda about John Lopez‘s welded iron work.

Horses, cowboys and a dinosaur or two.

Birthday Paradox

Wikipedia’s entry is unwieldy and Wolfram’s is written in the obtuse language of professional mathematicians. HowStuffWorks cuts through the clutter.

65 ton baby dinosaur with a 30 foot tail

And this one’s for Bhil Dreadnoughtus schrani.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyoTwDfXZ6c

One for Falcone

Armorial bearings of Royal Navy Vice-Admiral Samuel Butcher, commander of the 50-gun frigate HMS Antelope and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Butcher family arms

Arms: Vert, an elephant argent. Mantling vert and argent. Crest: On a wreath of the colours, a branch of a cotton-tree fructed proper. Motto: “Be Steady”.

Image from page 278 of “Armorial families: a directory of gentlemen of coat-armour” (1905).