Musings from Southern New Mexico

Category: science (Page 2 of 3)

Mindnumbing

Steering clear of politics for a moment, as well as retreating from the exchange of “your mama” jokes on Twitter, I’ll talk about what has been haunting my dreams lately:

Science.

Tomorrow is my day off. Yet I so wish to go in to work. I have been working all week on revising a piece of software I wrote some 6 or 8 years ago. I have been treading water just keeping up with my ever=growing workload, but find myself caught up for the first time in several years. This entire week has been spent taking a hammer to my cobbled-together piece of functional software. Using a far superior algorithm I developed for very low ballistic coefficient debris propagation, I began to completely replace the viscera of the program.

A problem with working on old software is that you often forget what the hell you had been thinking. I found that my code commenting skills 6 or 8 years ago were far better than 10 or 12 years ago. Much confusion was avoided by simple notes to myself clearly explaining what might otherwise appear to be gibberish. That was good. But I wasn’t perfect. In one case, I discovered what seemed to be a pronounced mathematical error in matrix multiplication. It took several hours before I found that I had simply melded several processes together, while trimming away portions that became unnecessary in order to maximize efficiency. I essentially repeated an optimization I did long ago.

Concentrated work on a single such activity swamps the mind. Except for a couple of bouts of rigorous exercise on Tuesday and today, I’ve been headlong in this project.

This afternoon, the worst possible thing happened: I finished.

Well, that is a bit of an overstatement. I finished freehand plugging in hundreds of lines of code that needed to be changed. Then the hard part started. Put in the data, press the button, and then…

Far too early in the debugging process, it was time to go. Tomorrow is my day off, making for a three day weekend.

The worst thing in the world for people like me is an interruption in the process.

I am all but certain I will awaken multiple times over the course of the weekend contemplating potential reasons for the issues I found. I expect to be a basket case until I get this software out for beta testing.

The Existence of Expertise

On easy way to see if your pursuit is real or bullshit is the existence of experts. People in science often see it as a battlefield wherein truth is approached through bitter struggle between competing factions supporting incompatible models of reality.

On this, the fools and leaders of fools capitalize.

Unlike silly detective shows, the world does not really lend itself well to discovery. Large effects have been known since ancient times. Think of these as a first order approximation. Less obvious effects took more time, but are still old by most standards. These are second order approximations. Then, through numerous iterations, we achieve finer and finer approximations of reality. This, now, is where we find ourselves. Scientific argument has reached the point where, in most fields, academic disagreement is on scales which are not accessible to those outside narrow focal areas. My late thermodynamics professor (if you’ve used dive tables, you have used his work) said with some pride that an important constant had been changed within his lifetime. He had been born in the 1920s, and I think that it may have been Avogadro’s number that had changed in the third decimal place.

I wasn’t taking notes, sorry.

Simulations I create of movement of objects through the atmosphere rely on work done from the 17th Century to the early 20th Century. From Galilean relativity and Newtonian mechanics and gravitation, through a rotating frame of reference (Coriolis), to simple models of atmospheric resistance originating with Bournouilli and standardized by Prandtl. More complex models exist to account for geographic variation in gravity, and to more closely approximate acceleration due to drag, and to incorporate gravitational effects of the sun and moon, and include relativistic effects. For real-world simulations, however, difference in estimate impacts between the two are small.

That is where science is. As far as modeling the world, it is being done deep in the decimal places. Discoveries and inventions still appear and do improve our understanding of the world, but not very much of it noticeably alters our lives. A 10% improvement in energy storage per unit of mass (say in batteries) would be dramatic from an engineering standpoint. It wouldn’t really make much difference to an individual, though. Your iPad would be slightly lighter or last slightly longer.

We have reached a point where any person whose model would overturn major established theory can be dismissed as a crackpot out of hand. Absent overwhelming supporting evidence, we can safely dismiss any such theory out of hand.

Media Passively Attacking Science

I took a screen capture of a symptom of the pathology of our current media environment.

What's the implication here?

What’s the implication here?

The story here is of a man, John Beale, who was serving as a top EPA official. His job description included expertise in the science of climate change. Rather than doing that job, however, he managed to convince his employer that he was secretly working for the CIA. He racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel expenses and collected a salary while doing little actual work.

What does this have to do with climate science?

Nothing.

But don’t let that stop you from writing a headline implying that climate science is a fraud. In our mediascape, creating a false impression is desirable if it earns clicks.

Attention Credulous Boobs: Amazon Drones!

In the community, UAVs are not the same as drones. Drones are unmanned targets. Drones are designed to be shot down. The unmanned aerial vehicle or UAV is mean to be used over an extended period of time. Since someone is apparently employed full time at the Pentagon with the sole task of creating unnecessary abbreviations, UAVs are now also known as UASs (unmanned aerial systems) or RPVs (remotely piloted vehicles).

Anyway…

Some large UAVs, such as the Predator, are extremely reliable. That is to say, they have a mean time between failures of thousands of flight hours. These cost four millions dollars apiece. Of course, “reliability” is relative. A passenger jet is expected to have a mean time between failures of millions of flight hours. UAVs and passenger aircraft, you see, are held to very different standards. Note, as well, that the pictures provided by Amazon show UAVs much smaller than the massive and expensive military UAVs. In the UAV world, reliability tends to scale down with size.

The image invited by the headlines is of a rotary-winged aircraft dropping down to your front lawn cradling Aunt Zelda’s Christmas cookies in a bow-bedecked box. With this in mind, I think I’ll write down the first five objections that come to mind:

First, what fraction of the population lives in a place that could easily be reached without hazard to or from overhead power lines, trees, or transmission towers?

Second, surface winds and weather in general are extremely important to low flying aircraft, especially the small variety. Is there a vast real-time weather grid operating at the 100 meter scale across the nation that I don’t know about?

Third, any UAV large enough to carry cargo and with enough range to be useful will produce lethal debris when (not if) it fails mid-flight.

Fourth, an enormous hazard that would be posed by thousands of vehicles. In order to make this venture profitable, the government would have to preemptively absolve the carrier of any liability for the deaths and damage to property that would inevitably result.

Fifth, there is a reason we never got the jet packs and flying cars we were promised decades ago. Those things are not economically feasible. A vehicle to cargo mass ratio of 100 to 1 may work with ground vehicles, but I really doubt it would work with any rotary-wing aircraft.

And any of dozens of other questions follow, about protection from the elements, signing for packages, ethics of surveillance, reliability of operators, right wing loons shooting them from the sky, and the list goes on. But I think you get the idea.

In conclusion, this is farce masquerading as science fiction. Any government official unscrupulous enough to sacrifice public safety in favor of corporate profit would be … well, to be fair, would be just about any political appointee confirmed by the Senate in the last couple of dozen years.

But regardless of the abrogation of the public trust this entails, it is a crackpot idea. I have only ever heard of one crackpot who succeeded in technology: Guglielmo Marconi.

But that is another story (see Erik Larson’s excellent book, Thunderstruck).

Letters to the Editor

One of the only non-science dead-tree publications I read is The Economist. It is somewhat right-leaning, but is generally reasonable about most things. A couple of days ago, (I’m a few issues behind) I read an article (“Apocalypse perhaps a little later,” The Economist, March 30th – April 5th 2013 issue) claiming that “some scientists are arguing that man-made climate change is not quite so bad a threat as it appeared a few years ago.” While the article was hardly sounding the bells confirming that the right wing nuts were right, it will nevertheless have that effect.

Two issues later, I found exactly what I expected. In the interest of “balance,” the editors included four responses. As luck would have it, these perfectly reflected a cross section of opinion as presented by the mass market media:

  1. The Reasonable Crank: If one takes the advice of the Concern Troll, his efforts are rewarded with a “bravo” and golf-clap from the Reasonable Crank. In this case, the author writes:

    Your change of tone on climate change is welcome … You now have common ground with people who have long been dismissed as sceptics (actually something for any scientist to be proud of) or vilified as deniers

    What has become more and more obvious is that current climate-change policy is an expensive waste of time …

    This is the sort of person who writes in complete sentences, carefully toning down any would-be mouth frothing to maintain the facade. The reasonable crank often claims a sort of credential via membership to one or more organizations that, on closer inspection, are crank institutions. In this case, the writer, Mr. Martin Livermore, claims membership to something called the “Scientific Alliance.” That sounds innocuous. Unless, of course, we actually look any further (from the Scientific Alliance “About Us” page):

    The Alliance brings together both scientists and non-scientists committed to rational discussion and debate on the challenges facing the environment today.

    Members of the Scientific Alliance are concerned about the many ways in which science is often misinterpreted, and at times misrepresented, within both policy circles and in the media.

    Whenever a person incorporates “non-scientists” in analyzing “misinterpretation” of science, you can rest assured he is a crank.

    So this guy is given the first word.

  2. The Actual Expert: This person is generally actively involved in research in the object in question. While such a person readily dismiss crank arguments:


    … As long as we do not find modern physics to be fundamentally wrong, we will have to plan for a climate sensitivity of 3°C.
    Since CO2 emissions are consistently at the upper end of the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]’s scenarios both our solid understanding of climate change on a global level and our lack of understanding of hurricanes and other climate extremes demand more, not less, caution.

    While the author of this letter, Professor Anders Levermann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, is an actual climate scientist, he gets second billing to the crank.

  3. The Who Knows? Guy: The fence-sitter only sits the fence in that, since doing something requires effort, “We should do nothing and see what happens.” While claiming neutrality between science and anti-science, he is a de facto enemy of science.
  4. The Pithy Idiot: This person’s entire contribution to an debate is to provide a single quote from a (probably long dead) individual. To wit:


    Your article brought to mind Mark Twain’s adage:

    There is something fascinating about science. Once gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

    The contributor here apparently doesn’t realize that more data have been collected on any facet of climate science now than the entire collected knowledge of man at the time Mr. Clemens penned that (obviously satirical) remark in Life on the Mississippi.

The ineptitude of our media is the real tragedy of our age.

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