Cool Science

Anybody remotely close to the state of being alive has been inundated with news of Ford Motor Company's massive losses for 2006, over half of which were due to an employee buyout program. Ford's on the ropes. 2007 is the critical year...

A long time ago I somehow managed to get into an email conversation with a consultant for an american motor company. I have no idea how - it was totally random. We had recently bought a Chevy Malibu - it was about 5 years ago plus or minus. Chevy was bragging about the driver side drink-holder: it was in fact the first of its kind. Toyota was bragging about hybrid technology; also the first of its kind. Ford was bragging about the horsepower and size of the Explorer. Honda was bragging about hybrid technology. A long time ago -we're talking Clinton here- I pointed out to this consultant that Chevy's idea that a drink hoder was innovation was nonsense. As I remember he continued to point out that the driver side drink holder was the first of its kind. Fast forward to today - Ford and Chevy are on the ropes. Toyota and Honda are surging.

Everybody cashed in on the SUV craze, especially Toyota. But when cash was flowing, did Ford and Chevy try to innovate a next generation of products for the future? It doesn't look like it. The mistake was to substitute marketing for innovation. The cup holder is a genius marketing idea - I actually liked it - but you can't innovate without science and technology. Toyota and Honda divorced themselves of their SUV dependency faster and dug themselves out with hybrid technology.

We have become the marketing generation in America. But marketing can never substitute science and technology when it comes to innovation. So here's my own " Hints to Inventors" : stick to science and technology - there's always room for new ideas that can transform our society for the better by addressing crucial national needs (like lower fuel dependency). And science is the key to true innovation, the kind of innovation that can save a company. I've been sitting on one idea for a long time - maybe it's time to give it a go.

Oh, we replaced our Malibu with a newer model. Our new Malibu doesn't have the cup holder and I actually miss it.

Posted by Dave at 08:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So in a couple weeks I'm going to go see Bill Nye the Science Guy talk and I have to say I'm floored. To be fair, I came in late on the Bill Nye craze and I was really in the Mr. Wizard generation and I liked his style. If you followed that link you'd see Mr. Wizard when he was a lot younger and that's pretty wild. Bill Nye's show used to be on all the time but I haven't seen it any where in ages. Maybe they squeeze it in between infomercials at 3am, because I haven't caught it on any Saturday mornings in years. Not that I look for that kind of stuff on saturday mornings...

I think Bill Nye has moved on to more advocacy and outreach and other ways to try to get his message out and I totally respect that. But there seems to be a void here - many scientists I've talked to will credit either Mr. Wizard or Bill Nye when talking about why they became scientists. So who is it now? Well Mythbusters is easily the best science on TV and their stuff is unrelenting brain-candy, but they're not really focused on the outreach and the education aspects or on the fundamental science. And they're not on saturday mornings either! Alan Alda is doing a brilliant job on Scientific American Frontiers; he really impresses the heck out of me and how naturally he interacts with the scientists on the show; and they get amazingly deep into the material, but that show is definitely for adults.

So where's the next Mr. Wizard or Bill Nye? Don't know but I hope he or she shows up soon.

Posted by Dave at 08:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I nose around antique book stores from time to time hoping to find quircky old books on science. One I stumbled into a long time ago was "Hints to Inventors" by Robert Grimshaw (nope, I don't know anything about him) professing to to tell "what inventions are needed and how to perfect and develop new ideas in any lines". The year : 1907. It's a hundred years later now - 2007 - and the hot topic of our time must be energy. So let's see how we've done. Here are some hints to inventors in 1907:

1. "The production of electricity from coal without the use of steam; without the incidental production of light or heat." Grimshaw further writes,"whoever does this successfully should become rich beyond the dreams of avarice". I agree. This challenge is constrained beyond reason leaving only an electrochemical cell as that remaining option, and barring some improbable and counter-intuitive disovery, coal has no practical use in driving a purely electochemical cell. But, it's compelling that he's coming out and asking for a non-polluting way to use coal. Fast forward to today - same problem.

2. "If some scientist -or any one, in fact - will invent a way of storing up lightning and using it when and where it is needed, he will make for himself more than a mere name." To be fair, what he's really getting at is batteries, which were crude and messy at best in 1907. No, I don't know of any one trying to juice up batteries from lightning bolts, but we've done some good things with batteries. Still have a long way to go and I'm not sure that we've met the spirit of this call yet. My favorite part of this one is the line "...or any one, in fact...".

3. "In many houses now having electric lights a good device for cooking by electricity taken from the same wires which supply the light could very readily be introduced." Finally, here's one we've knocked out of the park!

4. "the practical utilization of peat has only just begun". See, they were thinking about alternative fuels in 1907! Grimshaw also laments the waste of millions of tons of sawdust every year and notes how combustible this is as well. Although peat, sawdust etc. would just contribute more carbon to the atmosphere and aren't very exciting right now, I respect the drive to develop diverse energy sources.

Posted by Dave at 07:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Classes are about to start and that always makes me very philosophical. I usually get over that quickly enough, but here is one tangent/rant to get it out of my system. The wiki chemistry portal reminded me of somebody I haven't thought about in a while: Amedeo Avogadro, who rationally realized there was a difference between atoms and molecules. We take this concept for granted now, and yet it was a profound, radical, realization that atoms could associate into molecules. It wasn't fully accepted until after Avogadro's death.

So I poked around and ran into Johan Josef Loschmidt who it seems did so much and is remembered for so little. It appears that Loschmidt was the first to try to estimate the number of molecules in a mole and some wonder if we should call Avogadro's number Loschmidt's number instead! I had no idea.

Where is this going? I'm not sure, but it led me of all places to homeopathy and the silly (yes, it's silly) idea that a solution "remembers" a particle that was once in it. It's scary how long this mucked up idea has lasted. But one website (which I can't bear to link to) rattles off various tidbits like Loschmidt's determination of the average size of a small particle in the hopes that we'll think that if they can quote science history then they must be right about "memory water" too. There are a bunch of ways to debunk 'memory water', but the smoking gun is probably Brownian motion.

What's brownian motion? It's the drunk and the lamp-post of course. A drunk starts out at a lamp-post and has an equal probability of taking a left or a right step to go one way or the other down the sidewalk. How long does it take him to get home? Skipping to the punch-line: on average he never gets home! But hope is not lost - as he takes more and more steps he does have a probability of making some fairly large excursions from the lamp-post.

Posted by Dave at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Science sometimes seems beyond belief. After all, the whole fascination with alchemy stemmed from the property that cinnabar (which is found on all continents) bleeds liquid mercury when heated. Several thousand years ago (or even more recently), seeing glistening molten metal bleed from a red rock was just too much for every civilization to ignore. So the Chinese incorporated this into traditional medicine that includes ingesting powders from red rocks. Cinnabar is mercury sulfide - out of the frying pan and into the fire. The european alchemists believed fervently that there would exist a "philosopher's stone" that could transmute metals. They were certain that stone would be red. I submit that all of this is why our society today is permeated with the association of the concept of power with the color red. Consider our collective social ideal that values candy apple red for muscle cars...

Today, chemistry can still seem like magic. Just take the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser which is taking blogs by storm, like this early rave. We've used it and -yes- it's totally wicked. When something works that well it provides a window into human behavior. For example, it inspires fear and conspiracy in some, which was well debunked by snopes. A testimonial credits it for saving a marriage. So what is it? C&En news noted that it is a melamine foam so I set out to find something out about it. A wiki entry notes that the foam consists of hard fibrous structures. Also the product must not be used on shiny surfaces. Ah-ha there's the rub! It's an abrasive. But an extremely clever one. It is very mild, but the neat part is that the spongy nature allows it to scrape porous and uneven surfaces. Wetting it improves the contact between the sponge and the surface. And, just as sandpaper degrades as it is used, so does the magic eraser. That's the gotcha : a cleaner that doesn't use active chemicals.

I actually started this rant because I noticed one of those pieces of science I wish would get more popular press. A group of scientists were able to experimentally confirm that a small fraction of the time, bare neutrons can decay by giving off light. It's another great clue to how the subatomic particles are held together and it's just really wild - you can't invent this stuff. I love sci-fi, but science is always stranger than fiction.

Posted by Dave at 09:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)