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Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
In Honor of our Favorite Irrational Number
Pi Day: Today we celebrate the irrationality of a circle’s perfection.
At this very minute, and for many more minutes after this one, Supercomputers are busy crunching and calculating the next decimal place for the ratio that is known as Pi. All around the world, vast networks of energy and power wrought of human design are being tuned and taxed to the very extent of their capabilities.
Most people may forget what Pi really is. Pi is the number of diameters of a circle that can fit around it’s circumference. That’s it. That’s all there is. If you had a piece of string and a circle, you can easily estimate that Pi would be 3 and some change. Why, then, are humans investing their massively powerful computing into calculating 1,241,100,000,000 (that’s 1.24 trillion, if you’ve never seen it) decimal digits of Pi [link goes to record-holder's announcement]?
I dunno. Sombody wrote a book about it. I didn’t read it.
But i do know this! One of my students suggested that since we’ll never know all the decimal digits to pi, because it’s irrational, that some day, somewhere, something or someone will die! Pretty scary, i know! I tried to tell him that even 10 digits of pi is accurate enough to do grand things with great accuracy. However, he maintained that in the future, there will be a breaking point. We will need the unadecillionth digit, but we’ll only have the octillionth. His warning should ring loudly in our hearts and minds. Pi is going to get you! Sooner or later!
And that concludes my presentation on Pi. For snacks today, i brought several different fruit pies, and when i ordered them, i intentionally left off the “e”. But those silly bakers. They get an order for a Blueberry Pi and they give you a pastry! What noobs. Dibs on the apple!
the good old days
From Sound Recording on Wikipedia:
In the 1930s radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi developed a system of magnetic sound recording using steel tape. This was the same material used to make razor blades, and not surprisingly the fearsome Marconi-Stille recorders were considered so dangerous that technicians had to operate them from another room for safety. Because of the high recording speeds required, they used enormous reels about one metre in diameter, and the thin tape frequently broke, sending jagged lengths of razor steel flying around the studio.
the VW jet-ta
This is awesome. some dude built a jet engine into a volkswagon beetle.
Yes. It is real.
it reminds me of something that a bunch of Mech. Egrs. would do if they were given infinite money. This is so hilarious, i can’t believe how cool it is. You should really read the article, it is entertaining and short enough to stay interesting. Now, practically, it’s not exactly connected to the drivetrain of the vehicle or anything, it’s kinda just providing additional thrust, and that kinda makes it like “NOS”, or nitrous oxide… basically boosting performance in a kinda cheesy/showy way. But also, practically, if it was connected to the drivetrain, and it idles at 13,000 RPM, it would tear the car apart. But holy crap, it would sure go fast for that initial 5 seconds of full-throttle amazingness!
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more nerdness
In a wicked twist of fate (and the boundaries of modern computing), the cost of one tricked-out Quad-Core 2.5 GHz G5, with 16 Gigs of RAM and 1 TB of internal storage IS ALMOST EQUAL TO thirty-three stock Mac Minis, a combined 16 Gigabytes of RAM and 1.2 TB of internal storage.
Note: the 16 GB of ECC RAM in the G5 costs in excess of $10,000 alone.
However, I would wager that if you could arrange the Mac Minis in a Parallel Computing arrangement, their combined power (in gigaflops) might surpass that of the Quad-Core G5.
Sounds like a science project!! Where’s my research grant?
The French Paradox
Having never been to France, reading this article was like sitting in on some interesting gossip, but nevertheless, I found this to be an absolutely fascinating read.
Most of the article seemed like sound diet sense that we hear here in America, but maybe our friends across the Atlantic are on to something when they speak of “food experience”, n’est pas?
My favorite part of the whole thing was reading the comments at the bottom of the page where many french women admit to smoking “about 20″ cigarettes a day.
Health paradox indeed!
Looks like rain
Since it’s been raining so frequently lately, I’ve gotten in the habit of checking my morning forecast. Everyday, the local weatherman enthusiastically displays at least 5 screens worth of graphics telling me everything from air quality to who the latest “color the weather” winner is.
Normally, I’d say the weather forecast dosen’t affect me too much. If it rains, it rains. If not, no problem. I’ve always accepted weather patterns as facts of life and, unlike the news broadcasters, I’m never really upset to find out that there is a 50% chance of rain for that day.
Sure, I like to know if there is a deadly category five hurricane heading my way, or terrible flooding, or a lightning storm, hail shower, apocalyptic comet impact, ect… but since those don’t happen often (and if they did there would be no way for me to avoid hearing about them) I never paid much attention to the weather until now.
Recently, maybe because I’m working under a professional climatologist, I have felt the need to be on top of what the atmosphere will be up to on any given day.
So like I said earlier, I’ve been watching the weather. There is one thing, however, that I just don’t get about weather prediction: Rain percentages.
Nothing gets my morning off to a more confused start than hearing that there is a 50% chance of rain today.
Upon hearing this I automatically think, “Hmmm…there is an equal chance of it not raining or raining today. It could rain or it couldn’t. It’s absolutely split down the middle.” Then I think, “No, 50% is a much larger percentage than say 10%, so there is a greater chance of rain today than if there was only a 10% chance.” But, since no two days are alike, and the forecast does not allow for a basis of comparison, I just stare at the middle-aged tweed-suited man who is now pointing to moving green blobs over New York.
Not to be befuddled so easily, I head on over to the national weather service, which gives this explanation of rain percentage calculation:
“the likelihood of occurrence (expressed as a percent) of a precipitation event at any given point in the forecast area”
Of course, now it all makes sense! That clears up everything!
So if there is a 30% chance of rain in Baton Rouge that means that there is a 30% chance of at least 0.01 inches of precipitation will fall somewhere in Baton Rouge.
30%? What does that really mean? That it could, sort of, maybe rain but probably not? What about the 50% problem? Isn’t that more like a “We don’t know if it will rain or not today” forecast.
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