As self-driving cars become more a reality with multiple companies developing them, the issue of who would be responsible for accidents has become an issue. Sadly, that debate has come to the fore because of the crash of a Tesla car that was in self-driving mode with a tractor-trailer in which the ‘driver’ of the Tesla car was killed. This seems to be the first fatality involving such cars.
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Helium is a vital natural resource. Among other valuable uses, it plays an essential role in scientific research because in its liquid form it enables researchers to reach temperatures close to absolute zero on the Kelvin scale. What many people don’t realize is that helium is obtained from underground reserves and that these are finite and thus should be carefully conserved and not wasted on frivolities like balloons, making voices high pitched, and the like.
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It appears that dozens of people were burned, some seriously and having to be hospitalized, while doing the fire walking exercise that is the climax of the motivational seminars run by Tony Robbins that supposedly teach people how to be successful. Clearly being successful at walking on hot coals was not one of the outcomes.
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Regular readers may have noticed a reduction in blog postings. This is because I have been spending some time with family and friends. First my daughter came for an extended visit and after she left we went to Washington DC to show some of the sights there to relatives who were visiting from Sri Lanka.
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My attention was drawn to this newspaper article about how more and more people are covering up the cameras that are in their computers out of concern that other people could, unbeknownst to them, actually turn them on and spy on them. This fact has been known for some time to computer security experts but was given greater publicity by Edward Snowden as part of his expose of how the NSA and other government agencies spy on people.
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(As I mentioned some time ago, I am working on my next book that is tentatively titled The Paradox of Science. From time to time, I will try out ideas from it on the blog, suitably modified to make the blog posts self contained. Readers get the benefit of a sneak preview and I hope to get feedback from readers as to clarity, correctness, style, etc. Note that the book is aimed at the interested layperson and not the many experts who read this blog so put yourself in their shoes when reading. This post is the first of such offerings. Enjoy!)
The website Fivethirtyeight has a weekly feature called The Riddler where puzzles of a mathematical sort are presented and the solution given the following week. Here is one such problem stated in its entirety:
Complete this series:
10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 23, 30, 33, …
I want to use this simple purely mathematical puzzle to illustrate an important insight about science. I will give the solution below the jump and then discuss the relation to science.
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The US has a pretty strong regimen for getting drugs approved, a system that has great credibility after it kept out the nausea and morning sickness combatting drug thalidomide that in the 1950s wreaked havoc on babies in other countries. The gold standard for new drugs to be allowed to be prescribed is, as I understand it, that they have to show that they do not pose significant risks and also undergo double-blind clinical trials on humans that demonstrate that they work better than a placebo. The process is long and expensive.
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High-speed photography enables us to see the beauty of some of nature’s most spectacular effects, such as lightning strikes. Ningyu Liu at the Geospace Physics Laboratory at the Florida Institute of technology recorded lightning during a storm. He filmed it at 7000 frames per second and with the playback speed reduced to 700 frames per second, the result is quite beautiful.
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As we approach the much ballyhooed era of the so-called ‘internet of things‘ where pretty much all our devices will be connected to the internet and thus remotely accessible and controllable, on the surface this looks great. But the catch is that this also allows hackers to access them and that can be problematic.
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Anyone who has seen classical statues of male nudes, such as Michelangelo’s statue of David, would have noticed that they have quite small penises. Nowadays, this is often the subject of humor, such as Stephen Colbert recently showing an image of the statue and then commenting that it must have been quite cold when David posed.
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