Cool Science

I should be grading, but probably a little procrastination would be good for me. Anyway, music has suddenly been the theme of the last week or two and I feel driven to share.

First, I broke down and bought a pair of budget headphones (Philips SHP2500) for home. I didn't realize it until now, but the Grado SR80's I listen to at work have really spoiled me and I'm mildly stunned at the difference. Budget headphones get the job done and sound better than budget headphones of 20 years ago, and I'm happy since they were cheap. But I have noticed that sounds blend together and have less depth and I find myself straining to pick out things that I take for granted I will hear on my high end 'phones. I think somehow I've become a sort of mild headphone audiophile. Translation: I'm destined to lose my hearing at an early age. Sigh.

Second, I started in on a xylophone project for Henry and whipped up something with a PVC frame and pine boards for notes. The complexity of sound from the pine planks is really surprising and tuning this thing is rough. The electronic tuner seems to have no idea which frequency to analyze. Tuning longer boards is getting interesting because the density of the wood makes two boards of equal length have very different tones, and the method of suspending the planks (hooks, string, etc.) not to mention the tension, plays a role in the tone too. So I really underestimated this project, but it's fun and Henry seems to dig it.

As I was striking the wooden planks and listening to them carefully, I experienced a big flashback to a nice era in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) when many spectrometers would play the audio equivalent of your data. The ear (technically the brain I suppose!) can sometimes analyze the character of the signal better than visual inspection of the raw data as it would appear on a scope. It's a long story, but NMR has a great deal in common with an FM radio station. Anyway, the NMR data we generated usually sounded like a slightly metallic bell with various reverberations and complexities that we trained ourselves to pick out by ear. I long for that again, for its deeper sensory connection to the data and the work we do. In addition to some potential advantages to processing our data by listening, the use of more senses forged a deeper emotional connection to the work also I have to admit.

If you think about it, in the chemical sciences at least, sound plays virtually no role in the application of our senses to the discovery of knowledge. We view data and we handle chemicals - so sight and touch are especially important. Smell can still be useful, and taste is forbidden for obvious reasons. But I claim that hearing is underutilized. So I'll end on a speculative question for fun if nothing else: is it possible to better engage our hearing in the conduct of scientific inquiry?

Posted by Dave at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

It's the time of year when I get really annoyed at how often our heat comes on to maintain our house at a pretty modest temp. After all, we live in a tiny little cottage-style home and it should be cheap as hell to heat this place and it shouldn't feel like the inside of a fridge.

When we first moved in to our fair abode, we couldn't be there for the home inspection, and as far as I can tell the guy just phoned it in. That's a disappointment but I've made my peace with it for now because we anticipated a lot of the issues for ourselves. But the biggest surprise probably was the "insulation". I have to use quotes because when I poked my head into our little attic space I was horrified that about 20% had no insulation and the rest had 2-3 inches of crumpled up mess. I happily took care of most of this and smugly indulged in way too much diy pride.

But incredibly the house was as cold as ever, especially upstairs. "How", I wondered, "could I have taken major tracts of ceiling from no insulation to R-34 and see no return?". It must be the windows right? They give us a nice breeze whether they're open or not. But our house has about as many windows as our four door sedan, so that can't be it. I sat on it for a while, stewing.

Then for a birthday (I think?) I got this awesome surface-scanning thermometer gun that I'd wanted for a while (initial motivation was to monitor the temperature of my smoker without lifting the lid). And I wanted it out of sheer gadget-envy too, ok. I was reading the literature that it comes with, and that was annoying because it didn't explain the science. Closest I could figure from the vague description - and this strikes me as a little unlikely - it may do a blackbody radiation analysis, which I find surprising for the temperature range it covers. But the one reason why this might be right is that blackbody radiation is theoretically independent of the material (not quite true in reality), a very desirable property of a surface scanning thermometer. But even if I can't find a source on the science, I can see plainly that it works.

And I was surprised at how good the good precision was, and realized I could use this to start hunting for variation in wall temperatures. It's so good I can use it as a stud-finder.

And I now know why our house is still cold. First (cue the 'ironic surprise' music) large tracts of ceiling that were not visible to me from the attic are not insulated and it was really easy to spot with the thermometer from inside the rooms; and I went spelunking in crawl spaces and found it. Yes at least 50% of our ceilings were not insulated at time of purchase. I see in hindsight that after I fixed the attic, it dropped to maybe 30% of our ceiling being uninsulated. If I ever meet our home inspector I don't know if I'll be able to be civil. So I'm about to start on putting that missing insulation up.

Second, 60 year old insulation is really, really bad. I replaced an original batting with a combination of styrofoam board and new batting and saw the wall temperature increase 3-4 degrees over a region with old insulation. So I'm now on a humbug to go through and do that all around also.

Those two are the biggies - I found a bunch of other problems less interesting to mention here. So, if your house feels cold don't be a dope like me - there's probably an obvious, fixable reason and a cheap surface thermometer gun will at least make it fun to discover how the person before you bungled the insulation.

Posted by Dave at 09:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Toyota has been - publicly at least - very confused in trying to explain run away vehicles that accelerate uncontrollably and have been connected to truly tragic accidents. It does not look like loose mats any more. More recent reports in the news appear to blame the pedal itself somehow, while private litigates are suggesting an electronic culprit. Toyota has been more silent on this than they probably should have and is promising to announce the definitive fix. Is this a problem with the japanese corporate culture, as many have said? Maybe, probably. But there's potentially another reason: this could also mean that they don't know.

Seems crazy right - how is this possible? The modern car is a study in complexity and when a failure is sporadic and unpredictable, how do you test if the culprit is mechanical, software or electronic? Even worse, nearly every system in a car contributes to 'making the car go' so that there are thousands of mechanical parts directly or indirectly contributing to accelerating the car. And that's just the mechanical. So something is failing sporadically - and spectacularly - and its only symptom is that the car accelerates. Not good. Analysts are railing on Toyota for reckless outsourcing and cost-cutting that may have contributed to this. So don't feel sorry for Toyota, but let's hope they figure out a way to deal with the complexity and find the culprit soon or that the NHTSA does first.

Compare to NASA who manages complexity on an entirely greater level and scope - every successful shuttle launch is a technical marvel in which millions of parts work together in astounding harmony to lift many thousands of pounds off of our fair earth. The feat can barely be described by words. They make it look too easy. I DO feel sorry for NASA.

Anyway, I meant to build all of this up to reflect on the role of complexity in scientific data, and really took my sweet time doing it. Well with over the counter terrabyte storage and wondrous new instruments, we can collect such vast quantities of data that human inspection of the raw results is utterly impossible. Such a thing would normally have been frowned on - experimentalists have always aspired to elegantly design studies that isolate variables one at a time (and still do). But what is new is that there are more ways of extracting meaningful information from vast quantities of data. I met a scientist who can take an orange and tell you exactly where it was grown because they have a wealth of data on oranges in a data base - another who could take a cod (yech) and tell you where it was caught, all in the space of a few minutes (not counting wrestling the cod I suppose).

These are impressive, but the big prize is to demystify body fluids. There are a lot people working to develop what you and I would most closely recognize as the Star Trek 'tricorder'. You pee in a cup - maybe submit a blood sample too - and a few minutes later, you receive an astonishingly complete medical diagnosis of diseases, conditions, etc. This will probably happen in our lifetimes. You heard it here first.

I tried to think of a really cheesy, clever Star Trek quote to wrap this one up and got writer's block about it. It's monday night and BBT was new and awesome so in honor of Sheldon, I'll leave it to Spock,"Life...is not a dream".

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