How do you learn about things?
-
Experience: things you do, or things
that happen to you.
Your observations.
-
Primary sources: you heard about it from
someone who experienced it. "We performed the following
experiment." Scientific articles; investigative journalism;
diaries; transcribed interviews.
Someone else's observations.
-
Secondary sources: you hear summaries or
distillations of primary sources, without reference to the
authors' own experience. "An article in this week's Journal of
Scientific Spiffiness reports …." Science journalism;
unbiased but non-investigative reporting.
Someone's reports of someone else's
observations.
-
Tertiary sources: you hear distillations
of secondary sources, without direct reference to any primary
sources. "The Associated Press reports that scientists
have …."
Based, in principle, on someone else's
observations.
Of course these categories are pretty fuzzy. So, some fuzzy
questions:
-
How much of what you know, and care about knowing, comes from each
category?
-
How much weight do you attach to new information from each
category?
-
How good are you at telling one source of information from
another?
My goal here is to publish questions every day, and essays once a
week.
So far (March 2009, about six months after starting)
it's been more like a question a week and an essay a month.
Recent questions
[none]
Older questions
Arguments about the safety of high-energy experiments
sometimes cite the rate of high-energy few-particle collisions
when cosmic rays hit the moon.
What's the production rate for making
transuranic elements from this process?
What fraction of the universe's element 118
was made in earthbound accelerators?
2009-06-11 Thursday 15:34:41
Children's medicines come suspended in goopy liquids.
Some part of the medicine always stays behind in the measuring
spoon. Do dose estimates like "3/4 teaspoon twice daily"
include a correction for the left-behind part of each dose?
Do different types of dosing cups make a difference?
Or do other factors introduce more uncertainty?
2008-12-29 Monday 19:14:27
CSX has been advertising that they "move a ton of freight
400 miles on a gallon of fuel," or suchlike. This seems extreme,
like a cherry-picked statistic. Where does it come from? (
more)
2008-11-20 Thursday 10:11:10
My fan-driven humidifier makes my house feel colder. How much heat
does it pull to vaporize the water it does?
2008-11-14 Friday 16:59:35
New "open" signs at restaurants, with bright red and blue LEDs,
bring out some chromatic aberration in my glasses: viewed
peripherally, the different-colored parts don't line up.
Quantify? Why have I only just started to notice this?
2008-11-11 Tuesday 09:44:38
Passing traffic makes Doppler-shifted noises ("wheeee-oooom").
Useful trick: map between musical interval of the shift
and the speed of the traffic?
(maybe)
2008-11-11 Tuesday 09:38:19
If you pull two connected blobs of Silly Putty apart slowly, the
thread between then stretches plastically; if you pull them apart
quickly, it fractures cleanly. What sets the threshold? How sharp
is it?
2008-10-20 Monday 16:16:27
The Economist claims that some 1200 people have died crossing from
Mexico to the US since 1990, compared to about 300 killed trying to
cross the Berlin Wall during the 28 years it was up. Fatalities per
mile? Fatalities per legal crossing? Estimates of successful
crossings?
2008-10-11 Saturday 09:54:20
You can't interact with a physical system without disturbing
it, though you can ignore the disturbance in the limit where
ħ is small. Similarly, you can't interact with a market
for some product (by asking or buying or offering or selling)
without affecting the "market price" seen by others, but
you can neglect that change unless your exchanges comprise a large
fraction of the market. There is some correspondence here. Clearly
it'd be easy to take this correspondence as justification for
saying some really dumb things. Are there any useful insights
there?
2008-09-26 Friday 14:50:23
What's the pressure inside an unopened soda bottle (or can)?
What's the rate at which CO
2 comes out of solution
at ambient pressure? How much does the bubbling change the
temperature of the liquid?
2008-09-23 Tuesday 19:19:09