Terahertz

Apparently Ed Neeland at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna has started a “Creation Club” and has written a big-old-bag of crazy for the local newspaper.

First, he misunderstands philosophy of science in that falsifiability is not the only way we actually do science and much of our knowledge is learned inductively.

He then decides that evolution is the same as the Big Bang and abiogenisis, neither of which Charles Darwin or subsequent evolutionary biologists have written about since neither of which deal with evolution by natural selection. Furthermore, both are wildly supported by facts and data, including experiments that demonstrate the basis for life. He seems to think that since it’s unobservable in a single lifetime that therefore the Bible is more right.

Finally, he obsesses about information again, with no definition of what it is that he’s talking about or demonstration that he even understands how biological evolution work.

Somehow, UBC decided to give this man a PhD in Chemistry and then hired him as an Associate Professor. I think they need to refund his money.

At least almost all of the comments on his article are trying to actually teach him science.

Why is there so little quackery in dentistry?

I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but as I look around, even in Vancouver (woo-capital of Canada), it’s hard to find “wholistic” or “naturopathy” dentists. There are some, who complain about mercury in amalgam fillings, but even they admit the fillings work!

Perhaps it’s because real dentistry so obviously works.

You have tooth pains, the dentist pokes, jabs and hurts your mouth for an hour, then after a bit of healing, your teeth are fine. It’s hard to question the results.

There’s also very few cases of chronic dental pain, whereas undiagnosed chronic pain issues abound in normal medicine.

I think this also helps that dentists are quick to embrace recent scientific findings, like the discovery of Recaldent, a compound that actually helps rebuild tooth enamel. In only the last few years, this has been discovered, researched, and commercialized in both dental paste and a special brand of Trident Gum.

Despite the general quality of dentists, you still get activists pushing for de-flouridation of water, and naturo-nuts selling fluoride-less toothpaste (which amounts to breath freshener I guess).

Nevertheless, good work dentists.

Don’t even pick up The Epoch Times.

The Georgia Straight has raised the Skeptic North ire a few times now with credulous anti-vax and homeopathic articles, but the average edition of the Straight contains one credulous article and a bunch of left-wing bias, all buried after about 5 pages of pure ads.

The Epoch Times meanwhile, which is available nationwide for free, online, and for paid subscribers, takes the credulity cake with their latest edition.

2012, LHC destroying the Earth, evolution and global warming are myths.

That’s right, over half of their “science and environment” page is dedicated to anti- or pseudoscientific rubbish.

And this from a paper that looks and feels like a real newspaper. Of course CanWest has a history of anti-evolution and anti-global warming stances, so perhaps The Times is just trying to catch up through mimicry.

So let’s do quick dissections of the crap that prompted me to write this piece:

From the LHC article:

After a year’s delay, scientists at the world’s biggest accelerator have restarted an experiment to recreate "Big Bang" conditions that had sparked suggestions the Earth would be sucked in by millions of black holes.

Yes, there are “suggestions,” but not by any real scientists. The rest of the article also totally ignored this fact. Nothing like using juicy lies to hook readers into your article.

The entire 2012 article mentions how the movie loosely mentions a few prophecies then delves into them without a single interview or fact check:

On the winter solstice of 2012, the sun will align with the dark rift of the Milky Way …Only in the last five years have scientists discovered that there is indeed a black hole in the center of our galaxy. [“…” in original]

Black holes again! Those things are scary! Too bad that one is a whopping 25,000 light years from the centre. Given Newton’s handy discovery of gravity being proportional to 1 over the square of the distance, that means that we’re not going to start plummeting to the centre of the galaxy regardless of how the galaxy turns. In fact, if you read that “dark rift” horseshit right, you could assume that we’d see slightly less mass between us and the big, bad black hole, and the gravitational force would actually be less in 2012 (to a crude approximation). Earth has been in the Milky Way for 4.5 billion years, and will continue to sit here for another 5 billion or so until the sun eats us up (or ejects us from the solar system).

Einstein affirmed Charles Hapgood’s theory of Earth crust displacement, that the Earth’s shifting crust will cause the north south poles to shift toward the equator. Recent research by geologists Adam Maloof and Galen Halverson proves that a polar shift has happened before, at least twice in the distant past.
Is this just a coincidence or are these prophetically accurate warnings?

Yes, it is a coincidence. I like how Einstein is trotted out for no reason other than to make the “polar shift” idea sound credible. Einstein corresponded with lots of people and he was “electrified” by Hapgood’s ideas of polar shifts, which has since been replaced by the widely accepted plate tectonic theory. “Pole” shifts still

It’s nice that they trot out the geologists, since Maloof wrote an explanation for National Geographic of how polar shifts will not result in 2012 like catastophes:

it would take 1-100 million years to accomplish a 50 degree pole shift. In other words, although pole shifting may seem rapid to a geologist, it would still be imperceptible to human generations and even to whole civilizations.

…

Pole shifting is a fascinating and important process in geological history, but will have nothing to do with the Mayans or with 2012.

Great research their Epoch Times. They end with this dire warning though:

But one fact remains certain—if indeed the poles were to shift and worldwide havoc were to ensue, the sight of tsunamis ripping apart cities, earthquakes splitting through supermarkets, meteors spewing from volcanic eruptions, and massive floods … will not be entertaining at all. This is, after all, a story about humans trying to survive what simply cannot be survived.

That fact is not certain. That is a distortion, a lie, and bad reporting.

Next they challenge the notion that CO2 is causing global warming, implying that no research has been done in climatology in 53 years!

While looking at some old copies of Life magazine in an antique store in the spring of 2008, I came across a very interesting article from August 1956 about the fear of global warming. It reviewed many possible causes for the phenomenon, including increased levels of CO2. There seems to be nothing new today that goes beyond this 1956 article.

Perhaps don’t read Life magazine for science then? The “journalist” then trots some discredited crap about sun cycles, the belief the world has been cooling for 4 years (not exactly the definition of climate…), this lie:

During the late 1960s and 70s, the press, the public and many “scientists” were worried about global cooling and the return of an ice age.

Well, perhaps not a lie, since he did put scare quote around scientists, a review of the literature proves that this was more a public misperception than what real scientists (note the lack of quotes) believed.

Then there’s this:

What about greenhouse gases? As noted in the Scientific American of July 2004, atmospheric methane gas remains in minuscule concentrations of only about 1.7 ppm, CO2 is roughly 220 times as concentrated at the planet’s surface (although, still at a very low 0.038 percent), while water vapour is a whopping 6,000 times as plentiful. Surely, the sun’s effect on atmospheric water vapour plays a much stronger role in global temperature variation than does CO2.

Just 1.7 ppm for methane, 374 ppm for CO2 but 10000 ppm water! Wow those are crazy numbers! Too bad they’re fucking meaningless to climate change.

Yes, water does affect global temperatures, but it’s really hard to change atmospheric concentrations of water, whereas to change CO2 and methane requires simply burning crap constantly since the middle of the nineteenth century. In fact, in the past 5 years, CO2 concentration has increased by 3% alone, and by 25% in the past century. The fact is we do not live in the same climate as we did 100 years ago.

Unfortunately this was only Part 1, with the second part promising to discuss “melting glaciers and ice sheets, long-term weather forecasting, and political support for CO2 reduction.” I somehow doubt real science will be reported.

Finally, the evolution article follows Carl Wener (no, not the German watercolourist, this one has a doctorate in medicine), the seemingly sole winner of the Norman D Jones Science Award, who later went on to preach biblical creationism (not mentioned in the “science” article).

Werner doubts evolution because the “laws of chemistry would preclude life from forming by itself.” After a fun “life-long adventure” (it obviously didn’t last a lifetime since he’s still around to talk about it, maybe he needs to keep searching), he decided there was no evidence for evolution and now makes up lies against science.

The entire article is an advertisement for the creationists book “The Grand Experiment” and finishes with these quotes from Werner,

“Basically what I read in the college textbook was in contradiction to what I was finding out in the field when we did the interviews with the scientists. So there was great disparity between what was written and what the reality was,” Werner said.
“There’s a lack of candor in the universities on this one topic. It is kind of a closed topic. Scientists are unwilling to discuss it openly because of fear of repercussion.”

Scientists are always investigating evolution. How about read a real book on evolution, learn that we know a lot more than just fossils (which we have lots), and stop shouting persecution when you’re just wrong.

Usually when a newspaper tries to present creationism, it’s usually a point-counterpoint that results in a draw, with a real scientist at least getting interviewed. Epoch Times, you fail even the basic test.

I’ll end with this note: The main readership of The Epoch Times are Chinese populations (seeing as how the paper was founded by Falun Gong members and routinely attacks the atrocious human rights record of the Chinese Communist Party), meanwhile, nearly all North American skeptics groups are predominantly white, middle-class males(even in Vancouver where nearly 20% of the population is Chinese). While some attention has been paid to the gender discrepancy, race has been an even greater taboo.

If we want to grow as a movement, we need to take action to diversify beyond our limited appeal. Clearly there’s credulity in other cultures, but there’s also skeptics. We’re more alike than we are different and we only limit our potential by not reaching out to skeptics of other cultures.

The LHC collided particles today!

It’s worth noting that the Earth is still in existence from all experimental evidence.

Of course they haven’t reached new record collisions, but they say by the end of the year they’ll hit upwards of 7 TeV.

I’m either trying to sell out or pursue more creative outlets, either way, I’ve started making some science/skepticism t-shirt designs that I’m selling through the Canadian company T-ShirtMonster.ca.

So check out my store, PhysCoast, and feel free to stock up on some Christmas gifts. You can also see some of the designs scroll through on the right column.

I’d also like to know if you think of any other science designs that would translate nicely to art and then to t-shirt canvases (or if I can improve these designs). And if you do buy a shirt or two, let me know how the quality comes through.

The title “Poll shows young drivers using cellphones while driving a non-issue" and associated article neglects one simple fact:

Cellular telephones (including hands-free devices) lead to an increased risk of accident by distracting drivers [pdf].

Newsflash: Conservative cops don’t like Vancouver’s safe-injection site.

In other news, sky still said to be blue (it’s perpetually cloudy here for the next 4 months so I’ll take your word).

But seriously, a study of police officers opinions is not a legitimate source of data compared to actual sociological studies of the project. But facts don’t tend to matter to some officers or politicians.

After reading a Built on Facts post on a recent Mythbusters episode that tackled one of the classic first year physics problems (that I happen to be TAing right now), and posting the video on my Facebook, one of my more analytic friends pointed out the shoddiness of the 10% error in their precise experiment.

First, here’s both parts of the video, the first contains all the numbers you need to run the physics estimates and the second has the results:

Here’s the summary of the important values:

• Horizontal distance (fired outside): 360 ft = 110 m
• Vertical drop: 36” = 0.914 m

So let’s run through the calculations and see where some error can accumulate.

First source: They measured the horizontal distance outside and then moved the gun inside and never re-measured the horizontal distance. While the calculations don’t tend to care where the gun is fired (since we ignore air resistance), the actual bullet is potentially affected by the wind/weather/etc. outside. Humidity actually decreases the density of air, creating less drag and friction than drier air. Total error (estimated): ~0.5%

Second source: I’m not sure if this is a source of error, since information was omitted, but they never guaranteed that the gun was fired level outside when they shot it to find the horizontal distance. Since the bullet needs to leave the barrel with zero vertical velocity, it is imperative that the gun be fire horizontally. However, this ranging exercise was more to place the dropped ball at the same spot as the bullet for the camera, so I’m going to take this error as negligible (however, this distance becomes important for my later calculations, but we’ll assume it’s within ~5%, or about 5 m of the reported distance).

How long should the drop take until the bullet (or ball bearing) take to hit the ground?

(1)

with g=9.81m/s², the acceleration due to gravity near the surface of Earth, we get a drop time of 0.432s. Just under half a second, or about the time your mind takes /to comprehend a simple picture.

Since we know the time to drop (or at least the theoretical value since they didn’t tell us the experimental time), we can calculate the horizontal velocity.

(2)

where x is the total distance of the bullet, measured outside. This gives a velocity of 255 m/s leaving the barrel, or 3/4 the speed of sound.

Third source: I’m not too familiar with fluid dynamics, but suffice it to say that we can assume some difference in downward drag between the bullet and the ball bearing, although unlikely to account for much more than a 1% error.

And if you really want to get technical with a discussion of fluid dynamics, drag and models of bullet ballistics, check out the overly-in-depth Wikipedia article on ballistics as a start.

Now, in part 1, Adam uses a laser to make a line, level with the gun, at a sheet 20’ from the barrel. He then claims that the bullet’s drop between the gun and the sheet will be negligible. It’s worth noting that we expect this to be false since the distance between the sheet is roughly 1/20th of the total distance travelled, or 5%.

Since we know the horizontal velocity (or at least have a calculated estimate of it), we can find the distance dropped in that distance via the time. Rearranging equation (2) to find the time, we get 0.0239s to hit the 20’ target and rearranging equation (1) to find the drop, y, we get a drop of 2.39 cm, or almost 1”.

Fourth source: Adam assumed that in the first 20’ of horizontal travel that the bullet’s drop was negligible when in fact it represented 1/36 of the total drop of the bullet. This introduces an error of roughly 3%, not huge, but it’s beginning to add up.

Now, Jamie show’s off his impressive timing device and demonstrates that the release is timed to 1/3 of a millisecond, or 300 microseconds.

Fifth source: The timing difference introduces an absolute error of less than 1%.

However, to demonstrate his device, Jamie places the dropper and the gun next to one another and lets the high-speed camera capture the release difference. He then moves the dropper to the end of the course for the actual test. I have to assume for safety that they coiled the long cord up when they had the two devices next to one another. A coiled wire will have some inductance, and hence an associated time constant, which will delay the signal. This would mean that the ball might drop sooner when the wire is straightened out.

Let’s figure out an order of magnitude for this time constant.

The inductance of a coiled wire is given by:

(3)

Where L is the inductance, is the permeability of free space, N is the number of loops, A is the area of a loop and l is the length of the coil (assume this to be 10cm for a tight packed coil, note this is not the length of the wire). The wire has to be at least 360’ long, and they likely coiled the majority of it, and if it is coiled into loops with area of 0.785m² (assuming loops of 1m diameter) we therefore have 32 loops. Using all of this we get an inductance, L of 10.1 mH. If we assume resistance of the wire to be 0.1 Ohms, then we get an RL time constant of up to 0.1 s.

Sixth source: If Jamie coiled the wire of his dropper when he measured the two devices next to one another, he may have introduced a significantly large time constant into the system – on the order of the time it took to drop the ball! Since I don’t know whether or not this happened, or to what extent, I can’t quantify this error any better than to say it could be negligible if it was controlled for, or it could have screwed the experiment. Of course, with properly shielded cable this may not even be a concern.

I have just a couple more issues:

Seventh source: The shutter speed of a high-speed camera is finite, so they have an upper limit on measurements taken by the camera. The best guess I have for this is the 300 microsecond measurement that they gave for the measured difference in the drop times, assuming that measurement was limited by the camera. Knowing Mythbusters, I can see them having some of the fastest high-speed cameras that are commercially available, so this error is likely negligible.

Eighth source: I almost forgot this one, but it’s a huge no-no in science. They got cocky and ran their experiment only once! Their trigger device still worked, so the least the could have done was performed a couple times and averaged them out (perhaps they did and it didn’t make the cut). This is just sloppy and it’s hard to really quantify any error with this though.

Taking all of these various sources, especially the incorrect drop assumption (fourth source of error) and potentially the cord inductance (sixth source), it is not unreasonable that the difference could be upwards of 10% in this experiment.

Of course this is Mythbusters and not a class on error analysis. The show is more valuable by remaining entertaining and employing the rough tools of science, with the nitty-gritty details to be filled in later.

I’m heading from Vancouver to Calgary this weekend to spend the Thanksgiving Holiday with my fiancée’s family, and I thought it would be a little tongue-in-cheek if I wore my Royal Tyrrell Museum Evolve t-shirt (with the classic misguided evolution picture):

But I’m not even in Calgary yet and I’ve already been confronted over my t-shirt.

Walking through security the guard who waved me through the scanner said she liked my shirt, then the guy scanning my bags looked at me and asked where I got it.

I replied the Tyrrell Museum and then he asked if I “believed” it.

Now, the average creationist is annoying enough to deal with, but you tend not to want to argue with people with guns who have the ability to order full cavity searches on anyone randomly.

But he felt like continuing, blathering something about the comparative anatomy of human skin cells being more like cats then monkeys and that disproved evolution (wouldn’t that really just demonstrate we’re more related to cats then monkeys and not disprove anything?). He finally finished scanning my stuff, which I grabbed and walked off as he said that I could even “ask any doctor” or pre-med about what they study (I imagine comparative anatomy is done more on cats and smaller mammals because of numerous reasons which boil down to we value them less than the “higher” apes – including valuable reasons like growth rates, etc.)

I can’t find any references to his absurd claims on TalkOrgins.org, but that’s more likely that he’s mixing numerous stories and I wasn’t willing to sit around and be preached at by a security guard.

Beyond the annoyance of being preached at in one of the most awkward situations possible, I think we ought to have a few concerns here:

1. A creationist is using his position to push his beliefs – atheists wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) be allowed to mock people who walk through wearing crosses or other religious symbols. (Note I’m not calling evolution a religious position, but it’s not something we need to debate when you’re trying to determine if I’m a threat to air travel).
2. Someone anti-science is running x-ray machines and granting access to airplanes – two of physics crowning achievements of the 20th century.
3. If you like conspiracies, perhaps you could ask how many creationists are running airport security (and other government jobs) since Harper became prime minister? I doubt it’s higher than the general public.

Blogging’s been a little infrequent of late, and it’ll be at least a week before anything comes up regularly since on Wednesday I head to Edmonton for the Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference – both to represent SFU Physics at the Graduate Studies fair and to support my overstressed girlfriend who’s been organizing this event for the past year.

So here’s some news (in no particular order or even semblance of relatedness other than that it all interests me):

• Obama is doing a better job defending our medicare system then most (but not all) Canadian politicians
• On the CFI and accountability issue, I had received an informal response from CFI Transnational a few weeks ago (essentially saying the system works so why fix it), but they have yet to release anything official. I’ll likely come back to this next week.
• In Malaysia, they’re going to cane a Muslim woman for drinking a beer. She’ll be the first woman in Malaysia to be caned for drinking under the Sharia Law there that only applies to Muslims (for now). It’s supposed to be a “ceremonial” caning as opposed to anything painful, but I still don’t think that cuts it. We don’t “ceremonially” spank children because it’s nearly as bad as actually spanking a child.
• I got a new Netbook, and it kicks ass. I also got an external DVD burner and used it to put Windows XP on my old netbook which I plan to give to my girlfriend (so she no longer has to lug around her 10 lb “laptop”). The funds for this were provided by the UofA ECE department for me having the top presentation of the 2009 EE 495 research project.



• If you’re interested in what my research career is shaping up to look like for the next couple years, and don’t want to wait for my inevitable posts that attempt to boil it down for easier consumption, you can try to get through this guy’s thesis [pdf] which somewhat relates to what I might be doing (I’m still not 100% sure since our lab’s not fully operational yet). Short form: measuring exotic micron-scale forces with Bose-Einstein Condensates.
• Finally, North Vancouver is considering an obscure piece of technology to make getting up the steep hills easier on bicycles. See the video below: