Archive for category pop
Fewer kids, more pets—what this world is coming to
Posted by mark in Consumer behavior, pop on August 28, 2015
NBC’s Today show posted this album yesterday of an Australian dog named Humphrey posing as a newborn baby. Unbelievable! This is what the world is coming to—far fewer children and many more animals being welcomed to families.
The latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek tells this story of a German pet store with a quarter of a million animals—the world’s biggest—to meet the ever-growing demand of empty nesters. I cannot decide what fascinates me more, the video of 32 weird animals for sale, or the “They Never Talk Back” graphic showing how many countries everywhere have increased per capita spending on pets. The United States leads the way with an arrow point well past $120 per person spent on their loved ones, that is, household animals.
“After food, clothing and medicine, the fourth item is cosmetics and the fifth is pets. That’s serious.”
–Pope Francis
Achieving a good group photo in more than a blink of an eye
Posted by mark in pop, Uncategorized on August 16, 2015
This summer has featured a number of occasions where I got roped into a group photo, always enduring an annoying number of “just one more” shots. With this in mind, a retrospective in September’s Popular Science on the 25th anniversary of the Ig Nobel awards caught my eye by calling out the 2006 Mathematics award. This honor went to two Australian researchers who calculated that, for group photos of 20 or fewer people, you must divide the count by three and take that many photos to ensure that everyone’s eyes will be open.
Check out what to do if there are more than 20 in your group, noting that things become hopeless beyond a count of 50, and the underlying statistical calculations detailed in “Blink-free Photos, Guaranteed,” Nic Svenson, Australasian Science, August 2006, p48.
Upon accepting the award for frivolous research, the lead scientist, physicist Piers Barnes, said that
“We are proud to have made a gross simplification of complex physiological and psychological factors backed up with no empirical data. Like many other theories, if enough assumptions are made, we are confident that our expression holds.”
(Source: This phys.org press release.)
For count of calories it is nary the area of the Oreo but the thickness
In a new twist on sandwich cookies, the manufacturer of Oreo brand cookies, Chicago-area based Mondelez International, now offers a thin version with a 12.5% reduction in calories per serving. (From what I gather off the internet a “serving” seems to vary from 2 to 4 cookies, depending on the thickness, I suppose. For example, I would not advise eating four Mega Stuf Oreos in one sitting.)
The Detroit Free Press gives the 7.5 mm thick Oreo Thins two thumbs up in this July 6 review. Unfortunately the reduction in filling from the 12.5 mm thick regular cookie closes out as a practical matter the option for splitting them apart, which normally about half of Oreo cookie-eaters do, according to Mondelez.
These thin confections are likened by the Oreo maker to crepes, perhaps to be eaten only at fancy teas in the mid-afternoon by proper ladies and gentlemen. To me that is a deal breaker. I plan to eschew the Thins in favor of the Mega Stuf, which according to this “implusive” blogger who will eat “anything edible no matter how strange” contains 52.5% more filling than Double Stuf.
Come to think of it, the food scientists at Mondelez really out to come up with an Oreo that is comprised only of the crème filling—saving us the trouble of having to twist them apart.
Pyrex—a miracle of material science—hits the century mark
A few years ago I dropped my cell phone and, to my great surprise, broke the Corning® Gorilla® glass display. This incident illustrates how far our expectations have come for what originally was an extremely fragile material. Tough glass is a very recent development that still falls a bit short—even the newest Gorilla Glass 4 survives drops only 80% of the time according to Corning. But give these material scientists a little more time. They are sure to do even better at making glass truly unbreakable and far more flexible to boot.
Resistance to temperature, on the other hand, is now a given with glass, in particular the brand Pyrex® introduced in 1915 by Corning. They quit manufacturing Pyrex in 1998 but you can still buy it, albeit in a cheaper form made from soda-lime rather than borosilicate.*
For the whole story, see Pyrex at 100 from the May 18th issue of Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN).
*(You are advised to read these shattering details from The American Ceramic Society on the consequences of going to the less-costly Pyrex.)
Too many tourists trying to occupy limited spaces
I spent the weekend in Prague attempting to relax after a stimulating two days attending the 2015 Camo User Meeting. It really was great except for the main sights of the city being so crowded with tourists like me.
The traffic patterns vary greatly by the intermittent busloads of tour groups—big bunches of Japanese or Americans and other places worldwide that come to this wonderfully historic city.
It turns out that there’s a universal power law governing pedestrian interactions according to studies led by the Director of the University of Minnesota’s Applied Motion Lab Stephen Guy. He and his collaborators have developed a novel statistical-mechanical approach to directly measure the interaction energy between pedestrians. Using this simple interaction law they can simulate crowd phenomena such as two tour groups crossing a city square or trying to push into a just-opened attraction. See these situations and others illustrated in CGI movies here.
All I can think of when viewing these simulations is how horrible it is to get caught up in a crowd. The saving grace is you needn’t think much when this happens—just let your natural collision-avoidance system take over and go on auto-pilot.
Cheers for Czech beers
This is the view of the Charles Bridge in Prague from the usual vantage point of a fellow like me who likes his beer. As reported here by Radio Prague, the Czech Republic leads the world by drinking 160 liters per person per year. With half liter cans of Urquel going for less than 35 Crowns–only about $1.50 in US dollars, I can see why this alcoholic brew has achieved such popularity in this country. Bottoms up!
A fine beer may be judged with only one sip, but it’s better to be thoroughly sure.
-Czech Proverb
Are dogs right-pawed or left?
Last week I judged a number of entrants in a 7th grade science fair. The one I liked the best investigated a number of dogs to see which paw they favored. This depended on which hand the student held out. When he held out his left hand, all dogs offered up their right paw. But when he held out his right hand, half of the canines shook it with their left paw. I conclude from this that far more dogs are lefties than humans, who favor their right hand by a ratio of 9-to-1. Based on what I read here in the Washington Post and see published on the internet, my guess is that dogs are split 50/50 left versus right. The same may be true for cats, although they might be slightly more likely to right-pawed according a study noted in the Post article.
Just for fun, test your pet by putting a snack just barely within their reach. Which paw do they put out? Make a note. Do it again a number of times. If you see what seems to be a significant bias to left or right, let me know.
Lightening up the load on birds and bees
My former neighbor Phil–a bee-keeper–told me he loaded up too many hives in his truck on a run to California and it went over-weight for the regulations on the road home. However, Phil beat the highway inspectors by banging on the side with a hammer as he drove onto the scale. The bees flew up in the air and took down the measurement just enough for a pass–avoiding a hefty fine.
I always wondered if Phil was ‘bee-essing’ me, but a recent study by a Stanford scientist, reported here by NewScientist, indicates that this trick might be bang on. The only catches are that the flyers (in this case Pacific parrotlets, must flap in synch and the weight must be taken on the upstroke. This whole idea would backfire badly on the downstroke when the weight of the flyers comes back double.
Bee-leave it or not.
Statistic of the year: Americans busy buttering up
Posted by mark in pop, Uncategorized on December 31, 2014
According to today’s Wall Street Journal, USA citizens on average consumed 24 sticks of butter in 2014. Wisconsinites would be careful to differentiate whether this was really “butter” or actually “oleo”—aka margarine. By State law* restaurants will only serve the non-dairy “yellow stick from Satan himself” (as a Governor deemed it) if a customer specifically orders it. Until 1967 margarine was not allowed to be sold at all in Wisconsin—it had to be smuggled in from Illinois. Meanwhile in Minnesota only sickly white oleo could be purchased. To make it look buttery consumers had to knead in a capsule of yellow food color. I remember those days and my wife Karen recalls going on smuggling runs for pre-yellowed margarine from Iowa. Those were some messed up times!
Butter, preferably from grass-fed cows (margarine being ‘udderly’ eschewed), is now the rage as a health food thanks to The Cult of the Bulletproof Coffee Diet. At up to 2 tablespoons of this bovine grease per cup I presume 2015 will see an increase in per capita consumption. Yuk! These are some messed up times!
*See this detailed along with other strange Wisconsin State laws here.
The best accidental inventions of all time
I learned from my latest issue of Chemical and Engineering News that Stanley Stookey of Corning Glass Works died last month at age 99. In 1952 he mistakenly heated an alumino-silicate glass to 900 degrees C meaning only to top out at 600. After much cursing, according to the CEN story, Stookey found that instead of the molten mess expected, the material crystallized into a new type of material called a glass ceramic that proved to be “harder than carbon steel yet lighter than aluminum—shatterproof.”
Being in the business of planned experimentation it always amazes me to come across stories like this of serendipitous science. Obviously chance favors the prepared mind because most of the momentous discoveries are made by world-class chemists such as Stookey and others of his kind in the fields of physics and so forth.
I am a huge fan of 3M Post-It® Notes, not only due to their incredible usefulness, but also because it delights me to think of my fellow Minnesotan Art Fry coming up these by accident. For a list including him and a dozen other experts in their field who made the most of mishaps into inventions see 13 Accidental Inventions That Changed The World by Drake Baer of Business Insider. The one I like best is George Crum (great surname for a chef!) who reacted to customer complaining about his French fries by slicing them into ridiculously thin and hard-backed pieces. Never mind that it probably was his sister Katie who made the accidental discovery according to this Snopes investigation. Either way this works out to be a delicious story.
My advice to our clients is to keep a close watch for any strange results that crop up as statistically deviant in the course of a designed experiment. They may turn out to be really Crummy!