Archive for category science
Weather to be or not to be, that is the question
Last night I got a panicked call from my host for a talk scheduled tomorrow night to a group of quality professionals and their student section at Purdue University. Predictions had just firmed up for a major winter storm that might dump up to a foot of snow in parts of Indiana. Which parts would get snow was hard to forecast, but it seemed likely to be rain south of Indianapolis – my flight destination, icy there and snowy to the north in Lafayette – home of Purdue. Thus, given I’d be driving through the middle of this wintry mess, my host’s bias toward canceling the meeting met with little resistance from me. At the moment, based on tonight’s weather reports, it appears that we made the right decision. However, I’ve seen plenty of dire weather predictions fizzle over the years, particularly for snow and/or ice, which often end up precipitating as relatively benign rain due to unexpected warmth.
North American winter storms can wreak havoc on a grand scale, for example, when ice builds up to a point where power lines come down over broad areas. However, hurricanes like Katrina really strike fear in the hearts of insurance underwriters. Richard Mullins of the “Tampa Tribune” reports* on the use of simulations for predicting the financial scale of disasters like this. According to him, some storm models sell for as much as $10 million! For that price, one would assume the results would be unbiased. However, non-profit and privately-funded researchers interviewed by Mullins agree that results from studies underwritten by insurance companies naturally fall to the high side, whereas ones done for the public interest tend to the low end. The range went from $2 billion to $12 billion for 2005’s Hurricane Wilma!
Things really get wacky when one tries to assess risks of buying a vacation property in Florida to escape the wretched winter weather of the northern USA, from Indiana on up. Where would one be safest in a beach home – a place like Jacksonville that’s experienced no category 4 hurricane in 150 years? Maybe they are ‘due’ for one. A contrarian might take an opposite tack – buy where the most recent horrific hurricane hit, such as the surprisingly robust Wilma that tracked in to Florida after clobbering Cancun.
My idea is to simply rent a haven in Florida during the winter – the season when there are no hurricanes. I would leave at the first sign of snow up north and not go back until it melted. I wonder if any fellow northerners have thought of this?
*“Calculating Disaster,” Sunday, 2/11/07
Nature’s dangerous forces — including cold temperatures
Sadly, tornados devastated central Florida this week, including a church designed to resist a category 4 hurricane. The twister that destroyed this building must have been a 3 on the Fujita scale based on my comparison of its wind speeds with that of the Saffir-Simpson categorization for hurricanes.
Scales like this are popular for devasting forces, such as the Richter for earthquakes and decibels for Rolling Stones (a joke). I’d like to contribute one of my own:Cold Force. My cold force (CF) scale begins at 40 degrees C (104 F) and increases by 1 for each decrease of 10 C. For example, today I experienced a temperature of 6 degrees F (-15 C), which translates to a CF over 5 on the Anderson scale. This measure is a useful predictor for the number of layers a person should wear to maintain body temperature. Notice all the clothes I wore today – not quite enough for prolonged exposure – take my word on that!
I experienced extreme heat, over 100 degrees F, last July at a Baltimore Oriole baseball game in their home field — Camden Yards. Since this correlates to 0 CF, one could comfortably go around in literally nothing, but I recommend at least a bathing suit. At 1 CF (30 C, 86 F), you might consider putting on a t-shirt. Next on the scale comes 20 C or 68 F, at which point (CF 2) a nylon windbreaker would be good – in other words a second layer.
Wind-chill becomes a factor below CF 3 (10 C, 50 F). The Mount Washington Observatory, “Home of the world’s worst weather,” provides the mathematical formula below their chart of temperature versus wind. They also provide a calculator for this purpose. According to Environment Canada , residents of Pelly Bay experienced a wind chill of -91 degrees C on January 28, 1989. That created a freezing force of 13 by my reckoning. However, it would be ridiculous to put on that many layers of clothes. Maybe that’s why last winter while vacationing in Miami during unseasonably cold weather – CF 2, a radio DJ derisively noted that anyone wanting to see Canadians need only drive by the beach. I was decked out in my bathing suit and driving there myself at the time!
Making coffee to the most by taking on the roast
The “Everyday Cheapskate,” Mary Hunt, advised this week that the more you learn about coffee the less, you’ll spend. I went high-tech some years ago with Cuisinart’s Automatic Grind & Brew Thermal ™. It makes great coffee and preserves it well by percolating directly into a stainless steel carafe. I get up early for a fresh-made cup and set the remainder at bed-side for my wife to enjoy as an eye-opener. She was the one who pointed out Hunt’s article to me, which suggested that roasting your own beans makes the brew “infinitely better tasting” at half the price. That is good, because after reading this, I immediately bought a $400 Swissmar Bravi and fired it up this weekend — the distinctive, but not unpleasant, smell of roasted coffee fills my home as I write. (My daughter thought I’d been boiling down maple syrup.)
The Bravi manufacturer leaves nothing to chance. For example, in the coffee roaster’s product guide they begin by saying “Keep the instructions (sic) manual.” The Swissmar engineers then specify that their customers “always use exactly one-half pound (225 g)…no more, no less.”** The machine offers a variety of roasting levels to a maximum of “Espresso,” which “comes very close to the edge of ruin.” Taking no chances, I went far lower than that extreme roast my first time around!
The moment of truth will come tomorrow morning when I make coffee with my home-roasted beans (Sumatra Mandheling). It had better be good, because I figure that, given the $6 per pound savings in beans and assuming a production rate of 40 cups of coffee per pound, the payback period will be two years. If the brew gets a “boo,” that will seem like an eternity to a ‘caffiend’ like me.
*Coffee trees produce a red “cherry” that peels back to the core green-bean
**At Ubersite, which “capitalizes on random, chaotic, unpredictable, flexible, bizarre human behavior,” I found these humorous comments (censored) on whether one ought to bother weighing:
I’m too lazy to actually measure the coffee out, so I just dump some in and try to visually judge how much I’ll need to brew a pot. Each day I stare while it’s brewing, tingling with anticipation… “today it’s going to be perfect.” No matter what, I either get really strong goo, or light brown water. Wouldn’t I be so much happier if I just measured?
The righteous way, and the path to true enlightenment, is to judge for yourself. As you hone your senses and your appreciation of the subtleties of coffee concentration increases, you will journey on a remarkable voyage of self discovery. You will see things that are invisible to the unenlightened eye. This will lead to a greater understanding of being. However, if you are fluctuating between brown water and syrupy goo, then I suggest you measure. You are a dingbat.
No. You will never achieve Zen-like coffee by measuring. The only way is trial and error. I know, I have achieved UberCoffee.
Quest against greenhouse gases takes on religious fervor
(For the record, I do not drive an SUV, my furnace is a high-efficiency gas burner, my windows are double-insulated and the attic was recently blown with ultra high r-value fill. In other words, please do not question my dedication to reduce fossil fuel use by any reasonable means. Furthermore, I enjoy hiking, biking, canoeing, ice and roller skating — any outdoor activity that does not involve an engine. In other words, I am in favor of environmental protection.)
Tuesday night, at my brother-in-law’s invitation, I listened to a lecture by a professional from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) who added fuel to the fire for reducing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The venue was the men’s club for a local Methodist church. The talk was introduced with an appeal for environmental stewardship as a Christian mission. It began with an explanation of the science behind greenhouse gases. To be fair, the speaker suggested that without any carbon dioxide, we would likely be a bit chilled — perhaps by 60 degrees Fahrenheit! Next we saw the usual graphics on global warming over the the past century and back to the Middle Ages (for example, see this site by Woods Hole Research Center (protecting the integrity of the global evironment). Several people then pitched in with comments about how Al Gore dramatized this in the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” by climbing up a ladder to the peak of temperature. (I am suspicious of politicians and Hollywood actors preaching science, so this film remains unscreened.) One fellow, a retired PhD scientist, had the temerity to speak up that the connection of carbon dioxide to global warming is not yet proven and that other causes, not manmade, could have far greater impact on temperature increases or decreases. Seeing others in the audience squirm uncomfortably and even make faces to indicate how crazy this was, I knew that the earth’s fate was sealed — we are soon to be cooked in an atmospheric stew of our own making. The speakers then broke the church members into small groups to select from a handout of action items some things they would pledge to do (see the MPCA’s “What Can We Do”). I am thinking about buying a bunch of cloth bags to bring my groceries home (one of the items). I’ve already done most everything else on the list.
What worries me more than global warming itself is the intermingling of politics and religion with climatology, for example the demands of a group led by Reverend Rich Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals and Nobel laureate Eric Chivian of Harvard to make changes in values, lifestyles and public policy to avert global warming. Cizik told a news conference that “…Evangelicals have a responsibility to be even more vigilant than others. We will not allow the Creation to be … destroyed by human folly.” An opposing view is offered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology atmospheric scientist Richard Lindzen — a critic of California’s proposed legislation against global warming: “It’s kind of pathetic because we have almost no understanding of major changes in climate over hundreds of thousands and millions of years…we’re forecasting climate when our success in explaining it is about zero.” (Source: CBS Broadcasting .)
Seeing the recent California freeze play havoc with citrus must give that state’s citizens pause in their rush to join the global-warming evangelists.
Mixing beers — synergy of zymurgy?
This Sunday during the NFL playoffs, Guiness beer ran one of their ongoing television commercials featuring two eccentric, but (self-styled) “brilliant,” zymurgists. Try this “z” word for a trivia question — the last one in most dictionaries. It refers to those that study fermentation in brewing.
That brought to mind my experience last week at Granite City Brewery — a midwestern USA restaurant that features handcrafted beers. Seeing my befuddled look at the overwhelming selection of suds, the waiter offered the suggestion that I go for a 50-50 blend of the paler ales (the stouter stuff like Guiness is too much for me).
Given my affinity for experimenting, I liked this idea of mixing beers. It worked out a lot better than the last time I tried something novel: Pouring cream into my mug of carbonated beverage. That mixture succeeded for entertainment value — producing an effect like a lava lamp, but it tasted really bad. I do not recommend it.
Aside from the Guiness guys, who seem far too goofy (sampling too much?) to be as brilliant as they think, the fellow I’d bank on for blending drinks would be John Cornell. He co-authored what must be one of the more unusual scientific articles ever: “In Search of the Optimum Harvey Wallbanger Recipe via Mixture Experiment Techniques”.
I’ve heard of beer cocktails such as the whisky-spiked boilermaker — a variant being the “depth charge”. However, it seems that the practice of mixing one beer with another is mainly for salvaging a botched brew. Thus, whereas blends of white wine, and to some extent reds, are the rage in California, the same phenomena remains to be seen for beers. I see a real opportunity here for some research by zymurgists. My advice is that they study the statistical methods promoted by Cornell and made easy by Stat-Ease software, training and consulting. I volunteer to be on the sensory panel that rates the results.
Close encounters with improbable events (‘Goofers’) and implausible beliefs (Martians)
On my flight home yesterday from vacation in Arizona and New Mexico, a lady from Santa Fe asked about my screen saver showing photographic evidence from NASA that water flows freely on the surface of Mars. She told me that this is just a cover up by the US Government of Martians living under the surface of their planet. “The truth will come out soon,” this New Mexican said, “They cannot suppress the bloggers who know that aliens really do exist.”
Photo by H. P. Anderson
I suspect this woman scoffed at NASA’s high resolution photos taken in July of the Face on Mars showing it to be only a geological mesa — not an artificial monument by extraterrestials. The diehard believers in Martians, represented by a caller to the Art Bell “Coast to Coast” radio show, say that NASA dropped a nuclear bomb this structure to de-face it!
My trip last week featured a few other improbabilities. Its purpose was to see the Minnesota Gopher football team play in the Insight Bowl at Arizona State University’s stadium in the Phoenix area. Us Minnesotans cheered wildly as our team went up by 31 points past the halfway point of the game. Sadly, the ‘Goofers’ blew their seemingly insurmountable lead and let the Red Raiders of Texas Tech win in overtime. This reportedly was the biggest comeback in a Division 1A bowl. Cursory research on the history of bowl games shows them going back over a century with accelerating frequency in recent years — perhaps a few thousand games in all. I suppose I should feel lucky to see this unlikely event, but what really pleases me is that the coach got fired immediately afterwards.
The other unusual event experienced by me and my traveling companions was a record 16 inch snowfall in Albuquerque where I’d booked our flights to save on airfare. Fortunately the weather cleared just in time for takeoff. En route to the airport we stopped at Meteor Crater where NASA astronauts train for extraterrestial missions. Some people, like my fellow traveler from Santa Fe, believe that this was where the NASA perpetrated the hoax of man traveling to the moon. After seeing the Minnesota team implode at the Insight Bowl and then on my trip home almost getting stuck in over a foot of snow in supposedly sunny New Mexico, I am ready to believe that just about anything can happen. Come on NASA — quit covering up: Bring on those eight-fingered aliens! By the way, how are they at handling oblate spheroids?
Do mental workouts keep your mind sharp?
Yesterday when I saw a Christmas card in our post-box, I wondered who went right down to the wire with their mailings this year. It was my last card returned for lack of address. I only put the name on the envelope — no postal address. Could this be a sign of my mental decline after age 50? Earlier this month (Dec. 2), I watched NBC’s “Saturday Today” with interest as a fellow only a few years older than me took a test for his brain age. He was horrified to be rated in his ’80’s mentally, but after a session of exercises prescribed by Dr. Gary Small, director of UCLA’s Center on Aging, this guy got down to near the ideal of 20 years of brain age.
The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives. — William James (1893)
According to an article by Debbie Geiger of Best of New Orleans, Dr. Small recommends cross-training for the brain, for example by solving visual mazes with your right-brain and completing crossword puzzles with your left. To facilitate mental workouts, you could make use of resources on the internet, such as Happy Neuron, or buy a new computer game by Nintendo called Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! It includes Sudoku math puzzles and word quizzes, and the software tracks your progress over time. More recently the game-maker released Big Brain Academy (see review by Walter Mossberg of the Chicago Sun-Times). Both of these Nintendo games are based on the theories of Japanese brain researcher Ryuta Kawashima. Ironically, he initially earned the ire of the software publishers by claiming that their computer games stunted brain development.
It seems prudent that, before investing money in software and time to do mental exercises, one should see whether scientific evidence provides any support for such expenditures. This week the Washington Post reported positively on mental exercise based on a randomized controlled trial detailed in the Dec. 20 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. It involved several thousand aging adults (over 65 years) who were divided into groups trained for memory, reasoning, and spead processing. Compared to a control group that received no brain training, immediate improvements were seen by most individuals. However, after five years (with some ‘booster training’ along the way), the effect was only significant for the reasoning group.
These results stike me as being somewhat ambiguous over the long haul. For a more balanced view, I recommend reading Mental Exercise and Mental Aging Evaluating the Validity of the “Use It or Lose It” Hypothesis by Timothy A. Salthouse, which appeared in the March 2006 of Perspectives on Psychological Science. This is a very detailed article that thoroughly reviews relevant studies. In the end, the author’s professional opinion is that the benefits of mental exercise hypothesis stem more from optimistic hope than empirical reality. However he suggests that, one should “continue to engage in mentally stimulating activities because even if there is not yet evidence that it has beneficial effects in slowing the rate of age-related decline in cognitive functioning, there is no evidence that it has any harmful effects, the activities are often enjoyable and thus may contribute to a higher quality of life, and engagement in cognitively demanding activities serves as an existence proof — if you can still do it, then you know that you have not yet lost it.” Sounds good to me, but then what do I know (other than what I knew at age 20-25)?
Stress as factor for cardiac arrest felled along with author who did not sweat the small stuff?
I’m a hard-working guy who suffered a heart attack at age 51 despite not smoking, and staying in shape via regular exercise. Although it was hard to overlook the genetic factor of my younger brother preceding me with his own myocardial infarction (as the cardiologists refer to it), many acquaintances figured that both of us probably created our own problem by being too stressed. After reading this morning that Richard Carlson, author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, passed away on Wednesday due to cardiac arrest, I feel less sure than ever that stress creates heart problems. Ironically at this time just before Christmas, Carlson, only 45 years of age, died en route to an a New York city promotional appearance for his new book Don’t Get Scrooged: How to Thrive in a World Full of Obnoxious, Incompetent, Arrogant and Downright Mean-Spirited People.
The American Heat Association in their detailing of Risk Factors and Coronary Heart Disease puts stress near the bottom of the list and speculates that people suffering from this may overeat, start smoking or smoke more than they otherwise would — all more likely to create problems than stress itself. The most stress that I ever experienced was driving into Manhattan for a Broadway play and getting stuck in a traffic jam entering the Lincoln Tunnel. I made the mistake of being ‘Minnesota nice’ by letting someone wedge into line ahead of me. This precipitated widespread honking of horns from irate New Yorkers waiting impatiently all around me. A cursory internet search on stress studies dredged up Exposure to New York City as a Risk Factor for Heart Attack Mortality. It seems that I cannot yet rest my case against stress being a factor for causing heart problems, especially since Carlson was heading for New York when he suffered his cardiac arrest. 🙁
Murderous statistics?
An assistant criminology professor at St. Cloud State University claims that a string of drowning deaths of white, male students from Upper Midwest colleges does not exhibit a random pattern based on location, race and other characteristics, including the phase of the moon. However, an article by Todd Richmond of the Associated Press cites opposing views by two professors from University of Wisconsin-La Crosse who said that “It is often harder to accept explanations that hit close to home — explanations that involve actions we ourselves have engaged in that put us at risk.” Nevertheless, it is tempting to speculate, as a criminology student at St. Cloud does, that a predator prowls the Interstate 94 highway making stops at near-campus bars to look for inebriated young men.
Geographic profiling evidently is well-accepted as an enforcement tool as evidenced by its use by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). A Canadian police detective, Kim Rossmo, wrote the book on this subject. He details how analyis of the location and distribution of crimes can help pinpoint a murderer such as the Yorkshire Ripper. According to Rossmo, there is no such thing as a “random homicide.” The problem in this case though is whether the deaths are due to homicide or random accidents to a susceptible population — young male college students in river towns.
Holiday fun — tossing leftover fruit cakes with trebuchet
Hank loads a missile
Not sure what to do with that rock-hard holiday cake riddled with fluorescent fruit? Fling it! But don’t just hand toss that fruit cake, use medieval missile-hurling machinery called a trebuchet. Unlike a catapult that operates on tension or torsion (a heavy rubber-band is used for scale models), a trebuchet uses a counterweight as its energy source. I got the one pictured from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (SDSM&T) in Rapid City for purposes of experimental design. However, I never considered using it to launch fruit cakes like they do at city celebrations in Pepin, Wisconsin. The record for flinging these unappreciated holiday confections is claimed by Manitou, Colorado at their Great Fruitcake Toss — over 1000 feet! This was done not by a trebuchet, but an “air powered pneumatic device.” Perhaps this could be the gift for the gadget-loving guy who already owns everything — useful for getting rid of unwanted holiday gifts.