Clean Air Acts, Catalytic Converters, and the EPA: Before and After, Or, Why I Support the Paris Agreement on Climate Change

New York:

 New York, 1966, by Andy Blair

 New York, 2015

Los Angeles:

source

Baltimore:

Baltimore, 1953

Baltimore, 2015

We can do this.  We can support the EPA.  We can keep our planet habitable.  

Annals of a Lazy Activist: Napping for Science

Chihaya is a good person who stands up and even marches for what she believes.  I am not so good of a person.  I dislike marching and even standing up when unnecessary.  I am taking a nap for science.  With her sign.

Friday Fabulousity: Baby Stars

Or more formally, young stellar discs, seen in infrared by the Hubble Space Telescope:

Awww, they're so cute!  More info from Hubble Space Telescope News. 

Friday Fabulousity: An Engineering Problem

                         "I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of  humans.  

                                  I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive."

                                                                                  Interplanetary Cessna, from xkcd's What If? 

Everything I Want to Say, Randall Munroe Has Already Said More Cleverly and With Graphs

Download and magnify to view, or get a much better upload of the original at xkcd.com

Friday Fabulousity: Scuttle!

This is Scuttle:

Scuttle is a trilobite.  Sometime between 521 million years ago and 252 million years ago, Scuttle scuttled upon the earth.

Someday in the future, we too will cease to scuttle upon the Earth.  Therefore scuttle while the scuttling is good!

The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Science!

Burn tests are a venerable and respectable way to identify stuff.  And you get to set things on fire!

A little explanation: I'm working on an evening dress for Elisheba with fabric she brought back from a Ugandan excursion while working in Peace Corps Tanzania.  Of course the fabric is fabulous:

It's very lightweight and drapey and shiney, but also easy to snag, pull the weave out of true, and it shreds almost as much as the heavy costume satin I work with a lot.  I wondered if it might be silk.  This seemed unlikely, given the cheap price, but I wondered.  A quick internet query suggested that the quickest way to determine fabric type is with a burn test.  One tea candle, bare concrete sidewalk, bucket of water, and scrap of fabric later, I came up with this:


Definitely synthetic.  The gold overlay flames and burns extremely aggressively (the twisted, blackened portion in the upper photo).  The non-gold-overlaid bits burned less aggressively, but they did burn, with flame, and left a crispy but not very hard, twisted edge.  The burned portion without metallic overlay had no smell that my nose could detect.





















While I had a lit candle and bucket of water, I tried a number of other fabric scraps from my stash, because science!

Satin from the underdress for Elisheba's dress:
it melts into hard, shiny, slick, slightly flexible (but easily broken if bent too far) plastic!  I actually like working with this type of mid-weight satin: it's strong, tightly woven, hangs well, and takes many types of embellishments in stride.  I just have to French seam everything and/or use Fraycheck liberally to stop the raw edges from shredding away.  And not set it on fire. 







Used silk sari I turned into large pillow covers:
it...vanished, flamingly, leaving a hard,
bad-smelling residue at the edges.  Had to be
dipped in water to stop burning.  Not real silk, then. 










Nylon tricot, used for aerial fabrics: it vanishes,
rapidly, with almost no flame, leaving a thin, brittle rim of hardened fabric.  Smelled faintly of burning nylon rope (hard to describe: not exactly unpleasant, but unbreathable, a little bit like old charcoal ash, a little bit metallic, a little bit chemical but not ammonia or chlorine smells.)  Note to self: do not under any circumstances combine fire dancing and aerial fabrics. 






Stretch velvet from a leotard: burned aggressively,
with flames (I'm guessing the added surface area of the velvet pile increases the burn rate), twisted up a lot and left a hard, plastic-y residue.  Also split where the selvedge edge met the main fabric.  Do not combine fire dancing and velvet leotards.  









Net, to fluff out the underdress for Elisheba's dress:
it vanishes, rapidly, with almost no flame, leaving a
thin plastic film at the edges of the burn:













Cotton/polyester twill (ratio unknown), used for a
doll's tae kwon do outfit, a Hakaryu doll for
cosplaying Cho Hakkai from Saiyuki, Zelda's apron
from Legend of Trapeze Zelda (yes, we do Legend
of Zelda on a trapeze.  We are that fabulous.), and
various other small projects: burned aggressively,
with flame, twisting up and leaving a hard residue.








100% cotton from cosplaying Meow from
Kazemakase Tsukikage Ran: burned aggresively,
with flames, no twisting or hard residues.
Burned portion split and frayed under tiny amount
of pressure.  Burned portion smelled good, vaguely like cooking meat on a charcoal grill.










100% linen from a commission for a Roman-style tunic: burned aggressively, with flames, no twisting or hard residues.  Burned portion tore and frayed
under tiny amount of pressure.  Burned portion smelled wonderful, kind of like pine straw heating up under a June sun or mesquite chips for grilling.


 




Conclusions:

1. Fire is still one of the most amazing and powerful forces for change that we have discovered. 
2. None of the fabrics I work with on a regular basis is the slightest bit fire-resistant.
3. The main fabric for Elisheba's dress is some kind of synthetic.  It feels more like nylon, but burned more like the cotton/polyester twill.  I didn't have any rayon scraps to burn, so cannot compare with that.  Tentative conclusion: nylon/polyester/unknown blended fiber.  It might be a satin weave, which would explain the shredding at raw edges.  
4. That was fun!  I learned stuff!  Let's do it again sometime when I can burn some real silk or wool!  I should take better notes!  Maybe take video!

Horrifying Thoughts: What If the Moon Were At the Same Distance From Earth as the International Space Station?

The animation:

 Phil Plait explains just why this is horrifying (spoiler: tidal forces would leave the Earth scoured, cracked, and sloshing, and would rip the Moon to pieces.)

But the chances of this ever happening are extremely low (as in, lots of zeros after the decimal point low).  An old end-of-earth fantasy book I read as a child got it wrong: the Moon is not falling, and is in fact currently receding from us at roughly 4 cm/year.  (That rate is not constant.)

The physics are complicated.  (Very complicated.)  But we can outline the basics by talking about tidal forces.  The Moon exerts a gravitational pull on the Earth, squishing the Earth to slightly more like a football than a sphere, an oblate spheroid.  Earth's oceans can deform more to this pull than land, but because the Earth spins more rapidly than the Moon revolves, the bulge of the oceans is whirled slightly ahead of Earth-Moon shortest distance line.  Crash Course Astronomy has a good animation at about 5:00.

But this bulge has mass, and so it exerts a gravitational pull on the Moon, hurrying the Moon along.  The Moon also pulls back on the bulge, which drags on the Earth and slows down its rotation.

The net effect is to transfer energy to the Moon, causing it to speed up, and because of Kepler's Second Law (orbiting bodies sweep out equal areas in equal time, seen better with an animation), this moves the Moon farther away from the Earth.

There are lots of complicating factors: the shape of the continents (not constant), friction between the Earth and its oceans (imagine trying to model tidal forces during a global ice age!), the forces exerted on and by Earth's atmosphere, every other non-negligible body in the solar system exerting its own gravitational force into the mix, orbital mechanics, etc.

Ask an Astronomer has a nice write-up without math.  I don't have a good source for those wanting math, but I'm starting with Lunar Orbital Evolution: A Synthesis of Recent Results from 1999 (I know, not that recent, but free.)  If you, gentle reader, have a relevant article that you found helpful, please leave the title and a link in the comments.

The Mad Person-Who-Stitches: Almost the Full Rainbow

I have from roughly 700 nanometers (10^-9 meters) to 470 nanometers here (violet is around 380 nanometers).  Aren't they pretty? Any guesses as to what I'm going to be making?

More on wavelengths of visible light here, courtesy of NASA. 

Friday Fabulosity: Gravitational Ripples

From 5:45 - 6:00, watch two of Saturn's shepherd moons herd ring particles:

If you watch the ring, not the moons, you can see the "ripple" in the ring as the moons pass.

If you love space, this entire Crash Course Astronomy video series is well worth watching.  It's free on youtube, with the inimitable Phil Plait of the always interesting and informative Bad Astronomy blog as narrator.  

The Grandeur In This View of Life

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
                                                       -Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

February 12th would be the 207th birthday of Charles Darwin.  I made a bushy, branching tree of life green tea cake:

And here is "Endless Forms Most Beautiful", the symphonic rock version:

Friday Fabulosity: All of These Worlds

Lucas Green's breathtaking animation of some already amazing visuals from Hubble, Cassini, and others:

http://vimeo.com/111882554

How many of these worlds could you identify?  You can check most answers here:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/01/12/animating_the_universe_space_suite_1.html

Road Trip Physics

I was driving through a snowstorm yesterday: the dry, powdery kind with 56 km/hr winds sending snow sheeting at right angles across I-80 (and whipping the world into the resemblance of what happens if you drop a cake onto a towel full of powdered sugar when driving into the wind on I-25N).  I really needed an autopilot so I could take video of the interference and turbulence patterns created in the snow streaming across the asphalt by passing trucks: the patterns were much, much clearer than in my lab's ripple tank.  Fluid dynamics are awesome!   

The Imitation Game: The Betterment of the World Because of Alan Turing

Alan Turing is my hero.  He is the intellectual progenitor of my science, a war hero who never held a gun, a rallying cry for the injustices perpetrated against LGBT* folk, and an all-around amazingly smart yet tragic person. Some time back, someone asked me what I thought of Benedict Cumberbatch starring in a movie about him.  I hadn't heard of either Benedict Cumberbatch or a movie about Alan Turing, but I promptly started watching Sherlock specifically to judge how I felt about Cumberbatch as Turing in the then only forthcoming Imitation Game.  Now that The Imitation Game has been released, albeit in a limited way, I have been talking about how much I wanted to see it and I finally managed that at an advance screening an hour's drive away.  

Despite all that, I wasn't really sure what exactly I wanted from this film.  I knew two things I didn't want, those being a lurid focus on either homosexual romance or suicide.  Concerning the former, I wouldn't mind a torrid steamy romance story here, but if we have learned nothing else from Brokeback Mountain, it is that Hollywood will use even gay cowboys as an excuse to have women taking up most of the topless screen time.  Concerning the latter,  Turing's death was slightly foreshadowed, but I doubt I would have picked up on it had I not just happened to have known how he died, and because of that, I could be reading in a foreshadowing that isn't actually there.  Either way, his death is dealt with respectfully, and his sexuality is addressed as a non-issue that people make a fuss about.  

Furthermore, I was deeply concerned that Mr. Cumberbatch would play Turing the same way he plays Sherlock Holmes, by which I mean an I-am-smarter-and-better-than-thou with weird twitchy habits and the camera wanting us to believe that his prominent cheekbones are just irresistibly attractive.  Fortunately, he mostly did not, though when he did it was particularly bad, since most of the film portrayed Turing as being almost completely unable to understand human interactions.  In fact, one scene had Turing explicitly stating that he didn't know how people could say something other than what they meant yet still be understood.  Then toward the end of his life Turing was shown as sarcastic and superior and rather Sherlock-esque, and I have no idea when the transition happened. 

I was pleasantly surprised in some things.  I have very low expectations of American movies, but that this is a war message the unapologetic message of which is that force is bad and will be defeated by intellect was delightful, unambiguous, and accompanied by masterful cuts between war scenes and a mathematician hard at work.  The other thing I really liked was the subplot of Miss Clarke's (played by Keira Knightly) struggles to have her very serious intellectual work taken seriously because she was a woman.  We need more movies that push the narrative that sexism is bad and intellectualism is good.

What I didn't like was that the movie wasn't particularly intellectual, despite its obvious moral.  The writers had only sorta kinda done their research.  They conflated Turing machines with the code-breaking work he did on Enigma, which were two separate endeavors.  The writers seemed to almost realize how big a flaming deal it was for mathematicians rather than linguists to be doing cryptographic work (it marked a major shift in thought about codes) but didn't quite get there.  Likewise, the writers seemed to almost get to putting in Turing's Polite Convention (which states that we cannot actually tell if anyone besides ourselves is actually thinking, but we politely assume that we do) but stopped at having him say that we all think in different ways, so why can't machines think?  Finally, and this angered me a little, they subverted Turing's best known (though not the most important) work, that is the Turing test, in order to make a statement about not judging people.  Turing's arresting police office in the film states that if asked to judge whether Turing was machine or human, he could not possibly judge.  Not being able to tell is a result,not, in this context, a statement of being non-judgmental about homosexuality.  Can we please make points about tolerance without sacrificing our grasp of science?  I realize I'm a computer science nerd who basically worships Turing, and I'm probably not the film's target audience, but still.  There are multiple ways to say everything, what is wrong with the factually correct ways?  At least there was a good and mathematical explanation of why brute force methods in science are untenable because large numbers.  

I also didn't like the way the story was handled.  A (by the accounts I've read) quiet and reserved mathematician published a seminal, but not really at the time recognized as such, paper on constructing imaginary machines that demonstrate important things about determinism, then goes on to crack the most mathematically advanced code at the time, then is tortured into suicide by the British government, that is a story in itself.  Yet the film pads it with lots of conflicts between Turing and colleagues and introduces an element that I really hate by having Turing anthropomorphize the machine he built into the image of his dead childhood love Christopher.  No.  Just no. I cannot sufficiently express the amount of no that I have in response to a Hollywood Turing having a creepy and weird romance with a machine named Christopher.  But besides that, the whole film felt a little short on substance, and even short on manufactured interpersonal drama.   

So, it had some of the things I wanted.  Hollywood is actually making a war movie the message of which is that it is better to use intellect than force.  It was even a nuanced movie, that did not pretend that one intellectual victory would magically make all problems go away or that war comes without horrific and loathsome moral dilemmas in which there is really no way to actually win, there are only ways to lose less badly.  Where less badly still means fields full of graves.  The film had two women characters who talked to one another (but about a man.  So close to a pass of the Bechdel test). The film takes an unambiguous "discrimination and sexism are bad" stance. It may have felt a little short on substance, and uninformed on science, but it exists and makes statements that should be more prevalent.  Ultimately, The Imitation Game is not the story I would like to see told about my hero, but it does contain a moment in which Joan Clarke says to Alan Turing "the world is a better place because you were in it."  Yes.  It is.  This world was not only changed irrevocably because of the scientific achievements of Alan Turing, it became a better place because of his efforts.  We need more people like him.  

Happy Darwin Day! Have a Cheesecake!

It's Darwin Day!  Celebrate science!  Because I am an American, the only way I know to celebrate anything is with excessive amounts of food, so I have cheesecake.  White chocolate and cranberry, with a little orange instead of vanilla.

It's an itty bit overcooked at the edges, but I maintain this is a result of the
variation that exists within cheesecakes.  

I clearly did not put in enough cranberry sauce, but again, this is natural variation
existing within cheesecakes, definitely not my own incompetence.

I'm proud of us, as humanity.  We turned cows from gigantic things that could kill cavemen into little docile things that we've genetically engineered over the centuries to produce huge amounts of milk with high fat content.    Also, even though the majority of my own species can't digest milk past childhood, I am one of the minority that retains that enzyme into adulthood, which is why I can eat cheese products now.   Variation within a species!

Close Encounters of the Anti-Nerd Kind

I have a habit of eavesdropping on people around me when I am in public places.  It's a natural thing to do.  Natural, of course, doesn't imply much of anything, but I do it.  I was in a bookstore the other day, browsing idly through 2014 calendars, when I heard a woman behind me reproaching her daughter for wanting to buy a "nerd" calendar, because there was "only so nerdy that she [the mother] could be."

The calendar in question was a periodic table of the elements calendar.  Now as far as the sciences go, chemistry is possibly the most easily accessible.  Computer science, for all that I support it, doesn't generally look interesting, biology has way too many spleens*, and physics is really hard even assuming a frictionless universe.  More to the current point, I can't think of any other science in which the central tenants can be presented in such an easy and logically organized way as the periodic table of elements.

But while thinking all this stuff, I was sort of paralyzed with indecision.  Do I defend intellectualism, and how it shouldn't be derided** as nerdiness?  If so, how?  I have no kind of relationship with these people, and while it is a popular conceit of the evangelically religious that people are just waiting for the right word (or tract) from complete strangers, I think that that is rarely, if ever, true.  Also, while it is easy, and a bit fun, to judge people based on snippets of contextless conversation fragments, for all I know there are mitigating circumstances.  Maybe this lady has cancer and has just had radiation explained to her in exhaustive detail and she's upset and scared and in no mood to think more about chemistry.

So I did and said nothing and went to complain to the internet about those who feel free and unashamed to openly deride knowing stuff in a world the luxuries of which were developed by people who dedicated their lives to knowing stuff.  Not to mention people who decline to invest in the future by discouraging younger people from knowing stuff.  I hope the daughter in this situation pursues her interest in things chemistry despite a lack of support.

*For the record, I have nothing against spleens, being as they are a useful sort of organ, and more power to those who want to study spleens.  I, however, find them a wee bit icky.

**I am not convinced that I want to reclaim nerdiness as a good term for a variety of reasons. I know quite a few people who use it as a good term, and I won't argue about it, but I am becoming less and less likely to self-identify as a nerd.

Copy Machines Part 2: Now with More Gorillas

With great blogging comes great responsibility.  I must create content worth reading to make the web a little better than I found it.  So when I am informed by a darling reader in the comments that my copy machine emulation is flawed because I used a giraffe picture, I have no choice but to repeat the experiment with a gorilla picture, as suggested.

This is a mountain gorilla in Uganda.  The photo has a
resolution of 72x72ppi, the same as the giraffe photo. 

As suggested, my verticalstreaks error function has been modified to use prime numbers.

def verticalstreaks(img):
    px=img.load()
    width, height=img.size
    rand1=random.randrange(1,523)
    rand2=random.randrange(1,653)
    #print rand1, rand2
    for i in range(width):
     
        for j in range(height):
            h=5
            if j%rand1==0 and i%rand2==0 and i+h<width and j+h<height:
                for k in range(h):
                    px[i,j+k]=(0,0,0)
                    px[i+1,j+k]=(0,0,0)
                 
    return img        

Now for results.  I am just using this with errors that should be invisible to a casual copyist, because again, if you noticed problems you would try it again, right?

Copied 50 times. 

Copied 100 times.

Copied 250 times. 

Copied 500 times.

So there you have it.  

Fabulosity for a Tuesday: Mavis Batey

One of the last survivors of Bletchley Park has passed away.  The Boston Globe has a lovely piece written about her.  She is quoted as saying that neither her legs nor her German were good enough for her to be Mata Hari.  But more fortunately for posterity, she participated in the cryptography project of the century.  Rest in peace, Ms. Batey.  The work of you and your colleagues helped to bring us the information age.  

The Questions that Keep Me Awake at Night: Copy Machines

How many times can you make a photocopy of a photocopy before losing legibility?

Not having an actual photocopier that I can abuse, I'm going to have to emulate this, which means I am going to actually have to have some sort of understanding of copy machine resolution and what sort of generation loss I can expect.  That's the hard part.  The easy part is building an emulator, which will be a Python script that take in some jpg or whatever, applies an entropy function, and outputs the resultant jpg or whatever.  Turing bless the PIL [Python Imaging Library], which is going to do all the heavy lifting in the code without making me bother my pretty little head about the details.

I selected a sample photocopier to emulate on the extremely rigorous basis of the first thing that came up at Amazon when I searched for a copy machine. The important thing to note here is that the photocopy resolution is 600x600dpi.   Because I don't understand the complexities of dpi vs ppi, I am going to claim that in this case, there is actually a 1 to 1 conversion.  That's true in some cases at least  Feel free to tell me in the comments how wrong I am for making this assumption.  The image below is 72x72 ppi, thank you GIMP print resolution feature.  It is well within the resolution limits of my imaginary copier.

Now, what can go wrong with in the process of copying?  The digital process of storing and copying an image should not have any inherent generation loss, provided the resolution of the image is not above the resolution of the copier.  There is some evidence to suggest that sometimes characters will change into other characters depending on what sort of compression algorithm is being used.  Xerox claims that this can all be avoided by changing settings.  Since this isn't a Xerox machine I'm emulating, I think I'm going to ignore this.

Based on that pinnacle of internet research, howstuffworks.com, the process of copying is complicated and involves a lot of different things like lights and toner all working properly.  I don't know how failure of any one piece translates into image quality when copying.  So I got the user manual for this copy machine and looked at the trouble shooting section to see what commonly goes wrong and came up with the following list and hacked together some functions that will produce each effect.

• uneven printing
• white specks
• vertical streaks
• smudges or spatters appearing
• printing is dark
• bottom edge has smudge marks
• portion of the page not printed

None of the individual functions will produce much of a noticeable effect.  If something went horribly wrong, you would redo the copy, right?  The question is, I think, how quickly small accumulating errors lead to completely terrible resolution.  The only assumption I need to make here, is how often such a small error will occur.  I am going to claim an error happens 4 times out of 10.  If this seems arbitrary, that's because it is.

Now for my emulator.  At each copy pass, there is a 40% probability that an error will occur.  An error will be chosen at random from the above list.  Each error has an equal probability of occurring in my emulation.


Below are my results

Copied 30 times. 

Copied 50 times. 

copied 100 times. 

copied 500 times. 

If I adjust the numbers such that visible (to the casual eye) errors are made by the error function, illegibility happens a lot faster.

Copied 10 times. 

Copied 20 times. 

Copied 30 times. 

To make this smell like science I'd have to fiddle with a lot more of the variables, but I think I'm bored at this point.  So I'm going to leave this as is.

Copied below the fold is my code, for anyone interested.

Ada Lovelace Day: The Power of an Education

Today is Ada Lovelace Day!  Celebrate the achievements of women in science!  Encourage a girl to get an education in science!  At the very least, read Sydney Padua's Lovelace-The Origin and smile.

The date of Ada Lovelace Day is rather arbitrary.  But I like that it is right after Columbus Day.   Columbus Day we should remember the sobering facts of where the U.S. came from by having a day for a racist genocidal rapist (as a friend of mine commented, "nothin' more American!" which is unfortunately true). Lovelace Day we remember that we do have wonderfully smart people and we can get to a point that is better than where we are now.

My grandmother told me once that when she was a girl, chemistry classes were only for women because supposedly it would help them cook better.  Let's never go back to that.  It is fashionable to relegate sexism to something that happens places not America, but there is an unfortunate movement in the U.S. for women to not go to college, and either live at home or work menial jobs until marriage.  That's not okay.  Education is power for people to think for ourselves and make our own choices.  Whether that choice is to stay at home and getting married or a career in super science or anything in between or any combination of things, it's a choice that is ours and no one else should have the power to make for us.

Like much of the rest of the internet, I have been fangirling over Malala Yousafzai.  She is just such a wonderful human being.  Her main goal is education for women, because, as she says, "education is power." Indeed.  Women who are educated, and not just in those things we are told are suitable for women, have the power to decide for ourselves our role, our dress, and our lives, in a world that prefers to dictate all of that to women.

So Happy Ada Lovelace Day!  Encourage a girl who is interested in a traditionally male-dominated field of study!  Encourage all girls in their education!