4. May 2008 by emeris.

Somehow I missed this post when it went up. All I really have to add is to say “Go read the older wiser physicist”.

Posted in physics, Pop Culture, science | 1 Comment »

3. May 2008 by emeris.

It makes me sad when people abuse science in the name of ripping people off. It makes me sadder when people claim to explain the science being used and muddle it even more.

For example: http://bellasugar.com/1073289 (which I am not linking to because I don’t want to help their google ranking at all (I know google regularly crawls this page)).  First they define an ion, while linking to wikipedia, and still get it wrong. Typically “atomic particles” is referring to the constituents of atoms. Second they claim that ionic hair driers are faster by “…breaking down water molecules into smaller bits…” which strikes me as nonsense. If this were a major factor in drying the hair, it should also cause a fair amount of damage to your skin as well.

I briefly contemplated signing up for the site to make these comments, but then I thought of this xkcd and decided to write a blog post instead.

To see other people pointing out people who are wrong on the internet see here. Teh stoopid, it burns!

Posted in bad science, bug, physics | 2 Comments »

30. April 2008 by emeris.

I work primarily in matlab(2007b 64bit) on a group computational server, hence my main mode of access to the server is through ssh with X forwarding. The problem is that on my laptop I am running the ubuntu 8.04 (32bit) with the compiz eye candy turned on and the java jre does not get along with compiz (from what I gather it has to do with something about repainting frames and swing waiting for the window manager to do that, but compiz never does this so java based programs sit there with grey screens forever, this is a bug in the JRE not a bug in linux and has been fixed in newer releases). The simple solution would be to turn off the eye candy, but some of it does in fact add to productivity (particularly when going from matlab window <-> emacs for code <-> firefox for matlab documentation given the limited desktop space on a laptop screen some of the window manager features are very nice) so after poking around for a bit I found this:
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1003847#post1003847

The summary is that matlab (version 2007b) uses java1.6.0, but installing java1.6.0u6 (java 6 update 6 (the forum claims that update 5 also works which is a claim I saw else where)) and the running
$export MATLAB_JAVA=(location of java1.6.0_6)

everything works wonderfully.  This needs to be done on the computational server as that is the jre that is running matlab, not my local version.

Posted in bug, computer, linux | 1 Comment »

11. April 2008 by emeris.

This blogging thing is harder than it appears. There are a lot of things in real life that do a good job of providing ample distraction from this activity. On the bright side my life has been going well

Posted in random | 1 Comment »

19. March 2008 by emeris.

This is pretty cool.

Nice when markets work the way they are supposed to due to some technology . The penny summery, fisherman in India got mobile phones, their waste dropped to zero, their average profit went up, and the consumer price went down. This is postulated, as I understood it, to be because they now had the ability to call multiple beach front markets and determine where their fish would sell best before having to land, thus the distribution of fish became more efficient.

Posted in Econ, politics | 1 Comment »

15. March 2008 by emeris.

A follow up to the last post on the space shuttle launch, a link to NASA’s Page for the space shuttle.

People may say what they want about the scientific use of the shuttle and the ISS and how you can get more results per dollar with robots than you can with people, which is undoubtedly true, but it is no where as near as cool. Additionally we have invested a lot of money, time, and brain power in manned flight over the past 50 years. If we do not keep at least a token manned space program all of the knowledge and expertise that we have gained will be lost. And did I mention it’s really cool!

Posted in space | 1 Comment »

11. March 2008 by emeris.

The shuttle is up again

bbc

Posted in random | 1 Comment »

29. February 2008 by emeris.

People always say it is important to take the time to document your code, keep your work organized, and to write scripts that generate your figures all by them selves.

They are not joking.

Posted in physics, math, random | 1 Comment »

27. February 2008 by emeris.

In avoiding doing homework the other night I ended up in a conversation about when it is appropriate to add to the public discourse on a topic. On one hand it is important that everyone have a voice and in some sense impossible to not have a voice in a democratic system (as not saying anything is equiviolent to agreeing with the status quo). On the other hand it is not worth saying anything if you have nothing to say or are not qualified to say anything. For example are 20ish year old males who have not fathered a child qualified to talk about the emotional ramifications of abortion? It is easy to say how one would react in a given situation, however in my experience the way that one does react in tough situations does not always match how one would have liked one’s self to have reacted. All the logic in the world is useless if the underling assumptions are wrong.

This rapidly generalizes to a whole host of other issues, are only rape victims qualified to talk about rape? are only people in the military qualified to judge soldier’s actions during war time? (i say no, civilians must dictate how the military will behave)

Posted in meta, politics | 1 Comment »

23. February 2008 by emeris.

Some ideas, such as “Speak like a noun” days, are in general silly, this one takes the cake. If 3.14 is designated as such, does this mean I’m not allowed to talk the rest of the year?

Posted in random | 3 Comments »