Alright, just a quick post here, i came across this video yesterday and thought it was a really cool concept

I was hoping the website they were advertising was actually exciting and had more similar videos, explaining physical concepts in an innovative way, sadly i was mistaken and the website seems like a boring front for applying for research grants and searching for Post-doc positions.

Well it’s another lazy Sunday, and i figured i’d make a quick little post. One of my friends on facebook posted a video of a nerdy math song called “I will derive”, a spoof of the “I will survive” song. The singing is god awful and the lyrics are kinda sluggish at times, but i’m a sucker for nerd/geek humor. I figured I’d do a short little compilation of a few math songs i’ve come across on youtube through the years. I won’t pretend i understand everything in them, but sometimes just hearing people laughing at a nerdy joke that’s over my head is enough to make me laugh.

Click on “Read more” if you want to see the videos (so as to avoid cluttering the frontpage).

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Yes i know i know, no posts for two days. As you may be used to by now (as this always seems to be my excuse) there was some drinking going on, “drinking midweek?!” you might say, and you’d be quite right. Except for the fact, that this week there was a Champions League finale to watch. If you don’t follow football/soccer (which probably means you’re American), think of it as the Superbowl of club football.

Now i’ll be making a real post later tonight, but to mark the occasion of Champions League glory, i thought i’d post a semi-science video on one of the greatest football goals ever scored. Roberto Carlos’ amazing backline curveball goal. It’s a crappy video camera recording off a TV, but they explain all the gory details and numbers behind it (speed of ball, curve, angle etc). Hearing all the facts behind this goal are truly inspiring, suffice to say it SHOULD be impossible, but he made it happen.

Well, since noone objected to last weeks link spamming, i’ll give it a whirl again (plus it’s easier for my hung-over brain to write then a full-blown article). Like last week, it’s basically just websites/blogposts i came across throughout the week that weren’t really news, but still interesting. If you have suggestions for links, send them to kari@reducedmass.com and i’ll have a look, maybe i’ll include it next week. Enough chatter though, on to the links.

The radiation pseudo medical-science of the early 1900’s: This is by far my favorite link this week. It is an article discussing a pseudo medical-science from the early 1900’s that involved getting a good dose of radiation every day to stay healthy. Much like other crap such as homeopathy, there were never any real research done on this, it was just assumed to be natural and good. Very interesting and almost comical read.

Visual representation of some crazy equations: This may be too nerdy for many, but i thought it was interesting still. It’s basically some guy that has apparently plotted a variety of functions with fancy colors and all. He’s also got a pretty fancy of a simulation of a galaxy. I honestly don’t know many of the equations he’s playing with, but if nothing else, it’s pretty psychadelic.

Clearing up electricity misconceptions from school-books: Now i’ll admit i didn’t read the entire website, but i think it’s a good subject and fairly easy to navigate to find something that you may have been taught wrong. The basic premise is that most books taught at the elementary school level are teaching things that are wrong, and this website aims to clear up some of the misconceptions that may have been born from this. If nothing else i’d suggest scrolling through the front-page reading the table of contents, you can see pretty quickly what the misconception being discussed in each chapter is, and decide if it is something you need/want to read or not. Some of the stuff is pretty pedantic really, but still interesting.

Well the title may be a bit dramatic, but i wanted to do a quick post on binary (0’s and 1’s) and i can only assume that Hollywood is right and computers are indeed plotting our inevitable destruction (and are presumably doing so in binary). Bottomline is, i once again saw a pretty cool video on youtube and wanted to do a quick post about it. Unlike the Brian Cox TED-Talk video though, i know a bit (get it?!) about binary so i’ll explain a little. Here’s the video if you want to skip he explenation, but if you don’t understand how binary math works it might be fun to read below the video first and then watch it (although i’ll admit it’s not as exciting as the video).

Binary addition is one of the simplest thing you can do with binary numbers really, and it gives a neat little window into how computers work (on a very simple level anyway). So lets say you have 3 bits, so your binary code will be any permutation of 3 0’s or 1’s, like 000, 010 101 etc. First off, we need to know how we read binary numbers, so lets call the 3 bits for a,b and c, so our number is abc. We start by numbering each decimal place, counting up from zero, starting from the right, so c is in the zeroth place, b in the first, and a in the second place. We then take our bit, and multiply it by two lifted to the power of whatever decimal place we are in and add them all up. So the mathematical equation would look like this: abc=a*2^2 + b*2^1 + c*2^0. Now we know that 2^0=1, 2^1=2 and 2^2=4 (next places are 8, 16,32 etc. as you see in the video). So putting it all together we see that 101=1*4+0*2+1*1=5.

What happens if i want to add two binary numbers together? Well the math rules are really quite simple, 0+0=0, 1+0=1, 0+1=1 and 1+1=0 (but here you carry the 1 over to the next decimal). So lets say we are looking at 001 (1) and 010 (2), we start and take the first number to the right in both numbers, that’s 1+0=1, second number in both added together is 0+1=1 while the third is 0+0=1, so in the end we get 011, and using the knowledge we had before we see that it’s 3, which is obviously the correct answre for 2+1. These are clearly exceedingly simple numbers, but expanding this into much larger numbers is really just a formality of adding more bits, it obviously takes longer to calculate, but the method is the exact same.

Hopefully that was clear enough, writing math in HTML isn’t the most end-user friendly thing in the world, but as always we can recommend the wikipedia article on it, if you still have questions.

First things first, sorry for the lack of updates in the past few days, partly caused by not finding much interesting stuff to write about, and partly caused by beer-drinking induced by various Christian and socialist holidays. Drinking aside, it’s been awfully quiet around here for a few days so sorry about that.

I’m going to try something new in this post, so let me know if it’s something you’d like to see more of or if you’d prefer for this kind of link-spamming to stay on reddit/digg etc. I realize that these posts tend to be like the clip-show of blogging, but bear with me. The basic idea is that I often see interesting science stuff around the interwebs, but it’s not really news as much as it is posts by other science bloggers about something interesting. Now I’d like to expose you to it, but it would basically be stealing their content if we did a post on the exact same thing here, so we’ll try it like this.

Seven warning signs of bogus science: This article is a bit long, but even if you just skim through it and look at the bold headlines for each section, it’s 100% worth it. It is basically a pocket guide to spotting when a proposed science theory/news is bullcrap. Originally intended to help judges decide if scientific evidence in court was good or bad science, having the skill to spot red-flags in stuff like this is something everyone should have.

Bad astronomy’s video tour of CERN: Phil Plait, the man behind bad astronomy is quite the jet-setting rockstar when it comes to science bloggers. He was actually invited to Europe for a few days and got the grand tour of the new Large Hadron Collider over at CERN. Check out his youtube video as he guides you through it, the size of it is incredibly impressive and i, at least, find it to be awe-inspiring thinking of all the things that went into creating it and how complex it is, such a feat of engineering.

Alright that’s about it for this time around. Not a whole lot to start with, but hopefully (assuming your verdict isn’t that you hate these kinds of posts), we can expand on this and have more substantial link-hoarding post next time.

Apart from this filing under the “Duh” department for any rationally thinking human being, this is quite old news, but i hadn’t actually seen this specific news-piece, and it’s been popping up on some social networking sites so I figured I’d make a quick note of it so you have some ammo next time your aunt tries to read your star-chart.

Basically all i have to go on is this article from the Daily Telegraph, but they are, as far as i can tell, a fairly reputable newspaper, so i’ll suffice with that for now. As you can see if you go ahead and read their article, it will have a time stamp of August 2003, so this isn’t exactly breaking news.

More or less what the scientists did, was pick 2000 babies born in a very similar time, in some cases just minutes from eachother (and all in the same star-sign, obviously). According to astrology, this should mean that they have similar character traits and other such things. Not surprisingly, no such things were found. This is of course something you could’ve told yourself, but it’s always nice to have some concrete evidence behind you to back up your claims. If you’re interested in some of the specifics of it, I suggest you read the telegraph article. It’s actually quite good and not the usual sensationalist stuff they usually print when it comes to science.

Also interesting to note, assuming that the figures that the article uses are correct, is that more then half of the population believes in astrology now-a-days (or at least back in 2003), compared to only 13% 50 years ago. You would think (and hope) that with the increased scientific knowledge in the world, and the easy accessibility to it through the Internet, that the general public would be more informed and able to rationalize that astrology could not possibly be true, but sadly the opposite appears to be happening.

As a final word on this, i highly recommend, if you haven’t already, to read Phil Plaits article where he debunks astrology systematically (Phil Plait is the author of badastronomy.com, another great science blog).

Back in 2001 the Taliban in Afghanistan demolished a couple of Buddha statues that had been standing there for around 1500 years, behind them were some caves that were adorned with paintings from a similar era (around 5-900 AD). Now don’t worry, i have no intentions on touching on politics here (something we steer clear of here at reducedmass), but the point is, although the caves are now gone, pieces of them have been tested at a European lab and have lead to some surprising discoveries.

It turns out, after having examined fragments from the paintings (a cross-section of a painting piece can be seen in the picture to the left), they reached the conclusion that they were made with oil! Why is this exciting you may ask? Well until now, it was believed that oil painting was first developed in the 15th century, and by Europeans. Now this isn’t exactly a scientific breakthrough or anything, but i think it illustrates nicely how science is involved in almost everything.

To figure out what the paintings were composed of, they used so-called synchrotron radiation, which is more-or-less just a machine that accelerates electrons around in a big circle, producing x-rays. These x-rays are very strong and focused, and can be used to decipher the structure of materials using a variety of techniques, and they actually had to use a good many of them on this project to get a full picture of all the layers. Other materials found in the pictures include natural resins, proteins, gums, and in some cases, a varnish-like layer.

If you want to read more about the Buddha statues and the caves that contained these oil paintings, I suggest reading the wikipedia page on it, and eventually branching out from their sources.

Ok this is not really the kind of science news we usually report on, but seeing as how i’m a sucker for trashy day-time television, such as Maury’s talkshow where he routinely has episodes doing paternity tests on multiple guys, i thought i’d mention this. Apparently some would-be baby-daddy’s have been trying to cheat the system by a not-so-novel and fairly gross approach. It’s a variant of the good old “clean urine” technique utilized by athletes for decades, with a little twist.

When DNA tests are taken, they usually obtain a sample from the subject by using mouth-swab, and a DNA analysis is done on that sample and compared to another. In this particular case it’s a paternity test so it’s compared to some kids DNA where they can see the similarities if the kid has the guys genes. So the guy mentioned in this specific press release, got results back from the scientists that were pretty much impossible unless there were two different DNA’s in the sample they collected. When confronted with this he confessed, and it turns out he was carrying an extra bottle of saliva from one of his friends, and put that in his mouth right before the mouth-swab.

Science prevailed though and saw through it fairly easily, and although this has lead to a new procedure in paternity testing in hopes of avoiding similar situations, it would be almost impossible to sneak one past the laboratory using this method. They will of course keep trying to find new and innovative methods of cheating the tests (after all, murder trials hang on these things as well), and scientists will try to keep up and out-smart them. They go to quite some lengths to try and cheat it though, as you can also read about in the press-release, they’ve had similar problems before with DNA tests from blood-samples, where the subjects tried to get a blood transfusion shortly before their test in hopes of beating it.

As you may have noticed, last Saturday was the whole “earth hour” thing where people turned off their lights for an hour to feel good about saving the world. Google joined the fun and put the background on their search-page to black (at least in some regions) and linked to this article from the google blog. The article basically adresses why google does not switch 100% over to black. It says:

One idea, suggested by the site called “Blackle” (which is not related to Google, by the way, though the site does use our custom search engine), is to reduce energy used by monitors by providing search with a black background. We applaud the spirit of the idea, but our own analysis as well as that of others shows that making the Google homepage black will not reduce energy consumption. To the contrary, on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market), displaying black may actually increase energy usage. Detailed results from a new study confirm this.

They make it sound like it doesn’t make a difference and even suggest it may be counter-productive! But if you actually look at the results of the article they point to, it specifically states that it is only LCD’s (flatscreens) that are not effected, but that CRT’s (the big old monitors) certainly are! Looking at their numbers, there is 13% less power consumption on average for CRT’s when running a black background. If we combine this with what google says, that 25% of their users still use CRT’s, then there would certainly be power to be saved.

I’ve done some quick calculations to illustrate how much power could be saved. I should state right from the get-go that these are very bushleague calculations and are based on numbers that are largely guesswork, specifically the number of users google has and how much time they spend on their site. I’ll downtone all numbers a good deal to try and keep this as conservative as possible and not get into sensational numbers here. The main point is that energy CAN be saved.

The results

We’re doing this a little backwards. If you’re interested in how we did the actual calculations, go below the dashed line. If you just want to hear the bottomline in all this, just read this.

What we found was that slightly less then 5% of the total power consumption (of monitors) could be saved by a black background. This was the equivilant of 1.65*10^10 Joules per day, or around 4500 kiloWatt hours. To put this into perspective, a normal US household uses around 8900 kilowatt Hours a year (source). So if google did this, they would not be shutting down any powerplants, but at the same time, saying it would have no effect is misleading.

I want to make it clear though, that i am not accusing google of anything sinister. I just found a small error and wanted to elaborate on it. It is also a fairly small power consumption, and i don’t blame google for not wanting to go with a black background, as it’s ugly as hell.

P.S. I didn’t want to clutter this article any more, but in the next few days I’ll try and elaborate on WHY it is that CRT monitors save energy, and the LCD’s do not.

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The data

1) Average number of users on google each day.
In order to find this, I compared the “reach” number they had on www.alexa.com with the “reach” number of another website that I happen to know the exact number of visitors on (no it’s not this one. It’s a fairly large site so hopefully it’s as accurate as possible). This gave me a number of 160.000.000 users per-day. I’ll drastically cut it down to 100.000.000 so it’s easier to work with, and make the number more conservative.

2) Average time spent on google per day by each user.
For simplicity I’ll assume this to be one minute. In actuality it is probably 3-4 times as long, but again, lets keep it simple and not blow the numbers up.

The calculations:
The data we have to work with is from the Techloggs article. It tells us on average how many watts (which is Joules (unit for energy) per second) an LCD and CRT uses with white and black background, respectively. Our equation should roughly be:

Total energy per day, per person = Average Watts(Joule/second) * 60 seconds

Replace the Average Watts with the numbers given from Techlogg and then multiply the LCD number with 75.000.000 and the CRT number with 25.000.000 (75% and 25% of the google userbase). Then add the two to get the total energy used per day. We did this for both white and black background, and then subtracted the two numbers. That gives us the total energy saved per day (in Joules) and to get it in Watts, we simply divide by 3.600.000 (you can see how that works over at Wikipedias article on kWh).