New Summer Glory Index provides proof positive of great weather
Minnesotans love to point out what a pain in the posterior (PIP) it is to endure the climate from November through March. Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) State Climatology Office (SCO) quantifies the suffering with this Winter Misery Index (WMI). As you can see by their chart, last year’s WMI ranked highly for PIP.
I actually like the cold (good for ice skating!) and snow (great for cross-country skiing). Therefore I agree with the DNR suggesting the WMI be renamed WFI, that is, Winter Fun Index. However, even I must admit to favoring spring, summer and fall over the winter.
It’s been especially nice here for the past few months—only a few really hot days. This is confirmed by the MN DNR climatology wonks who concocted this Summer Glory Index (SGI). They figure the sweet spot (“full credit”) is high and low temperatures of 73-79 F and 57-64, respectively, with less than 60 F dew point and at most 0.01 inches of rain. By these measures we Twin Citians are enjoying a mostly glorious summer.
Looking back some years on the chart a few summers fall into the “wretched” category, primarily due to extreme heat. I recall many a summer night lying awake in my upper bunk on the second floor of our home in St. Paul with the window pulled down and begging for the least bit of breeze. That really was wretched. Thank goodness for air conditioning now being so ubiquitous in buildings and vehicles!
Check out my granddaughter Laine enjoying our great outdoors. Glory be! : )
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.
Crater Experiment Makes a Big Impact
Posted by mark in design of experiments, science on June 25, 2015
Craters are crazy and cool. One that is quite amazing was created by the Barringer Meteorite that crashed into Arizona about 50,000 years ago with an explosion equal to 2.5 megatons of TNT. Based on this detailing of what a 2 MT bomb would do I figure that Barringer would have completely wiped out my home town of Stillwater, Minnesota and its 20,000 or so residents, plus far more beyond us. The picture my son Hank took of the 1 mile wide 570 foot deep crater does not do justice to its scale. You really need to go see it for yourself
as the two of us did.
Because of my enthusiasm for craters, making these rates number on my list of fun science projects in DOE It Yourself. As noted there, members the Salt Lake Astronomical Society wanted to drop bowling balls from very high altitudes onto the salt flats of Utah, but workers in the target area from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management objected to the experiment.
Kudos to science educator Andrew Temme for leading students through a far more manageable experiment shown in this video. In reply to me asking for permission for providing a link to his fantastic impact movies Andrew gave me this heads-up. “I attended a NASA workshop to get certified to handle real moon rocks and meteorites at the NJ State Museum in Trenton. This lab in the educator guide suggested mixing up your own lunar powder and throwing objects to simulate impact craters. When I got home I ran the lab with a few of my classes and then made the video. I used a Sony handheld camera that had a slow motion setting (300 fps).” Awesome!
The other day I went up to the 9th floor of my condo building in Florida and tossed a football down on to the parking lot. I am warming up to heaving a 15 pound mushroom anchor over on the beach side from atop one of the far pricier high rises along the Gulf. However, I have to wait until the turtle nesting season is over.
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.)
Believe it or not–sweet statistics prove that you can lose weight by eating chocolate
A very happy lady munching on a huge candy bar caught my eye in The Times of India on Friday, May 25. Not the lady—the chocolate.
After tasting a variety of delectable darks from a chocolatier in Belgium many years ago, I became hooked. However, I never imagined this addiction would provide a side benefit of weight loss. It turns out that a clinical trial set up by journalist John Bohannon and two colleagues came up with this finding and showed it to be statistically significant. This made headlines worldwide.
Unfortunately, at least so far as I’m concerned, the whole study was a hoax based on deliberate application of junk science done to expose phony claims made by the diet industry.
It turns out to be very easy to generate false positive results that favor a dietary supplement. Simply measure a large number of things on a small group of people. Something surely will emerge that out of this context tests significantly significant. What this will be, whether a reduction in blood pressure, or loss in weight, etc., is completely random.
Read the whole amazing story here.
My thinking is while Bohannan’s study did not prove that eating chocolate leads to weight loss, the subjects did in fact shed pounds faster than the controls. That is good enough for me. Any other studies showing just the opposite results have become irrelevant now—I will pay no attention to them.
Now, having returned from my travel to India, I am going back to dip into my horde of dark chocolate.
Research on happiness encourages smiles
The American Society of Quality did well by bringing in Harvard researcher and best-selling author Shawn Achor in to keynote their World Congress for Quality Improvement in Nashville this May. I was happy to hear him reinforce my practice of smiling at people whenever I think of doing so—this being a great way to generate good feelings all around. Often I make a little game of this by seeing if I can get a smile back. When I am really on a roll, especially when just taking a leisurely stroll, I also give a cheery “Hello”. Of course, some curmudgeons neither smile nor reciprocate with a greeting. That gets me trying even harder the next time to get some positive feedback for my joviality.
Achor noted that top-rated hotels require their staff go by the 10-5 rule—giving their lodgers a smile at 10 feet and a greeting at 5—in the process generating far more goodwill than they would do by just going about their work. He is working to get hospitals going 10-5, thus lightening up greatly what otherwise can be a very depressing environment.
If I really need to upgrade my smiling game, I take my granddaughter Laine along with me on my walk. How can you not give a grin back to this sweet seven-month-old (or big brother Archer pictured hugging her)? If you can keep a straight face looking at Laine, then I advise you take up poker for a living.
Here are some other nuggets that I gleaned from Shawn’s presentation:
- Don’t follow the “cult of the average” by trying to rope in the positive outliers—those individuals who are exceptional performers. I’ve seen this happen in schools where a teacher (not a good one!) gradually wears down a superior student to the norm, this being the easiest course rather than making any exceptions to the curriculum. On the other hand a conference presenter from Crayola found from their statistical studies that one of the workers packing boxes did so with abnormal precision. By studying this positive outlier they were able to revise their process so it produced far less defects in inventory control.
- Seeing potential problems is not pessimism, it is “rational optimism”. Along those lines a fellow whom Achor had just pumped up with his talk about happiness decided that he needn’t wear a seat belt anymore. Perhaps it may not be right for person to be painted as a pessimist when they call out risky actions like this.
The only downer on this whole deal is that it remains obscure why some people are just naturally positive, while others tend to be gloomy. Based on a sample size of 6 for siblings and 5 for offspring, I believe that everyone has a natural set-point for happiness. However, perhaps I am being overly optimistic (for the cheery sorts) or purely pessimistic (regarding those who seem to be always out of sorts).
P.S. On the topic of happiness, I wish this aplenty for all you moms for tomorrow’s Mother’s Day. As my grandson Archer explains, “My Papa is Mark, my Nana is Karen [my wife], my daddy is Ryan, and my mommy is Mom.” That puts everyone in the proper perspective.
A helpful hierarchy for statistical analysis spells out how deep to drill on the statistics
Posted by mark in design of experiments on April 26, 2015
Fred Dombrose, a force for use of statistical design of experiment in biomedical research, alerted me to an enlightening article on statistics asking “What is the question?” in the March 20 issue of Science magazine. It lays out these 6 types of data analyses laid out by biostatistician Jeffrey Leak:
- Descriptive
- Exploratory
- Inferential
- Predictive
- Causal
- Mechanistic
For the distinguishing details going up this ladder see this Data Scientist Insight blog. However, the easiest way to determine where your study ranks is via the flowchart provided in the Science publication. There you also see four common mistakes that stem from trying to get too much information from too little data.
“Poor design of experiments is one of, if not the most, common reason for an experiment to fail.”
– Jeff Leek, “Great scientist – statistics = lots of failed experiments”, simplystats blog of 4/12/13
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
When you gotta glow, you gotta glow
In my youth I enjoyed a pop ditty by Johnny Mercer about a little glow worm. This song is now stuck in my head. It is an “ear worm”! It emerged from a corner of my brain when I toured the Waitomo Caves in the North Island of New Zealand yesterday and saw the wonderful constellations of glow worms that populate its cavern ceilings.
I have no clue how to eliminate an ear worm, but it turns out that glow worms are susceptible to increases in carbon dioxide according a poster presentation of this scientific study that kept me occupied while awaiting our Maori guide at the cave mouth. Not surprisingly the half million tourists get the most blame. It’d be far worse if not for the glowworms providing such a breathtaking sight.