Blessed by the Potato

The just noticeable difference (JND) is the smallest difference in something that can be perceived. For instance, if you show me two pieces of string that are very nearly the same length, and then another similar pair, and another, there’s a certain length difference that I will just be able to perceive, and any that are closer together than that I won’t be able to tell apart. Similarly for other senses: two audio tones have to have a certain amount of difference in their volume or frequency in order for me to tell that they were different rather than the same tone repeated. The size of the JND is dependent on methods: you can notice a smaller difference in lengths if you look at two pieces of string side-by-side rather than one on one day, and one on the other. It can also help if there’s a point of reference, such as a grid in the background. But nevertheless, there will be some small difference below which you will be unable to tell two things apart.

So the JND can vary quite a bit depending on the experimental procedures, but given a particular method, the JND scales with the starting size of what you’re looking at: JND ∝ dl/L. If you have double the length of string, the difference in length between two comparison pieces also has to double before you’ll notice that there has been a change. If you’re in a dark room with one candle lit, lighting a 2nd is very noticeable addition to the brightness. If you’re in a bright room with a thousand candle power light on, lighting a candle may not noticeably increase the brightness — and if you can just notice adding (or subtracting) one candle against a background of say 200, then you should be able to just notice a change of 1/200^th of a candle against a background of one candle.

Let’s consider the case of hair. I cut mine every 50 days or so. It goes from about 0.3″ when freshly cut to about 1″ in that time, for a rate of growth of 0.014″ per day. After I cut my hair it takes about a week before I notice that it’s gotten longer. So the constant for the JND is:
0.014*7/0.3 = 0.33

If the starting length for hair was instead say, 12″, then the scaling indicates the JND would be 3.9″. That is, a girl with shoulder-length hair would have to cut off about 4″ in order to have a good expectation that — with a one day to the next observation — a boy would notice that indeed her hair had been cut. Getting a 2″ trim would fall well below the JND, and psychophysically, it would be highly unlikely for such a difference to be spontaneously noticed. Nay, nearly physiologically impossible for such a difference to be detected under such conditions.

Everyone’s JND constant will be different, and circumstances can vary (e.g., someone may consistently wear shirts with horizontal markings on them to serve as a guidepost, or an observer may have superhuman vision discrimination, or the hair may be pulled into a ponytail, making the judgment even more difficult).

But whatever the individual circumstances, don’t forget the pioneering psychophysics work of Weber when someone doesn’t notice your haircut — they may not have been able to!

The CBC recently ran an editorial titled “Cool science, but is it news?”

I was prepared to rant and rave and dump all over it for pages and pages, but I suspect that it’s meant to manufacture controversy.

So instead I’ll just make a few rebuttal points. The big question underlying the question in the headline is what is news? I think scientific progress definitely fits most any definition of news: it can have big (or small) impacts on society, health, and business, in addition to the esoteric impact on our understanding of the universe around us. Sports on the other hand, doesn’t: locked in a continual, meaningless struggle that will be repeated anew next monday/year/whatever. I am continually baffled by professional sports in general, but at least have some inkling of the entertainment value of watching it. Reading about it the next day seems like abnormal behaviour that should maybe get looked at by a specialist — if it weren’t for the fact that so many people do it.

On the CBC’s news website, they have one screen with a varying selection of top stories, then towards the bottom 10 boxes with different categories (business, world, Canada, politics, etc). Two of those categories are different boxes for sports. Two are ostensibly science-related: technology & health, but both tend to have much less scientific stories than what is being discussed in the editorial (the latest happenings on twitter, scandals of minors doing things that may hurt them, or the tech specs of the flashiest gadget are hardly cool science). On the mobile site, fully one third of the screen space is dedicated to sports, and even then sports stories crawl into the other two panels in the default view. Science is nowhere to be found.

Science certainly isn’t being treated as news, though in my opinion it most certainly is.

Moving past that quibble, the article goes on to lament the way science stories are reported. And I have plenty of things to gripe about there. On the first day of J-school it must be drilled into journalists’ heads that they must — must! — attempt to relate science stories to some every-day impact. “This will (eventually) lead to a cure for cancer…” “Can warp drive be far behind?” “Climate doom awaits us all!” “Bacteria found in space rocks: Can invasion be far behind?” On top of that, stories have to be written for a very lay audience: often below the high-school level. So the stories don’t get to convey much, and waste a lot of column-inches on trying to catch the reader up on basic background information. Some of that should be changed, if for no other reason than Wikipedia exists. Hyperlink the big words, and accept that a certain portion of the readership will either tune out (they probably are anyway), or, after reading enough, will have managed to refresh their memories of grade 11 and caught up to a slightly higher scientific reading level.

After all, that’s the way the other sections work. The business stories just plow on through terminology like basis points, index, or leverage, and don’t even attempt to define acronyms like CEO or EBITDA. Everyone would think the sports section dull and boring if in the midst of describing something they had to break and ensure the entire audience understood, and had to lead off with a slow insertion from some random generality:

Every year thousands of Canadian youth enrol in hockey programs to get fit, make friends, and lose teeth. These programs are supported by billions of taxpayer dollars in the form of subsidies for arenas, tax credits for kids’ programs, and direct funding of government salaried referees. It may not look like an activity that would lead to preparing our kids to become productive members of society, but these kids are in it for a different reason: to gain one of the coveted spots as a ‘professional’ hockey player.

One such professional team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, played a second team composed of paid players from Ottawa, known colloquially as the “Senators” (though there is no relation to the Senate). Vladimir passed the puck — a hard black rubber disc that is the focus of the players in hockey — to Jacques, another member of the Toronto Maple Leafs team (though peculiarly enough, neither one is actually from Toronto). Jacques then skated, which is like running but on the icy surface of the hockey rink, towards the net that was defended by the goalie from the Senators. However, before he could attempt to score a goal, an unforseen result was found in the data: the referee determined that he was offside with a confidence of 95%, 19 times out of 20.

“Offside” is a state of being that makes no sense in our conventional world, but hockey experts assure us that the implications could be far-reaching, including the beginning of a whole new hockey “trial” from the face-off area. Despite this two-steps-forward, one-step-back outcome, head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs is excited about the work done so far. “I’m really pleased with the progress we’ve made on moving the black, rubber object across the slippery surface; or as we call it, ice. This really speaks to the dedication of the team, and the value our work has for society as a whole. It’s really just one piece of the puzzle, but it’s like that corner piece that really helps orient your worldview and re-define the problem. Now instead of trying to put the puck in the net, we’ll be working to make sure the Senators don’t get the puck out of the little circle.”

Opinions are conflicted as to the real-world benefits of last night’s hockey game, but there’s a sliver of hope that if this pattern continues in further games, there could be an increase in the supply of donor teeth to the local gummy homeless population.

And I’ll conclude by linking to a very good article that I didn’t find until after I had already finished my little rant. It tears apart the science journalism tropes even better: The Unwritten Rules of Journalism

Another perpetual motion machine scheme has cropped up, this time stealing its name from a popular carnival ride, the gravitron. What made this one come to my attention was the fact that they are looking to hire a post-doc to run some calculations for them.

Now, I need a job, so I’m tempted to apply (though I have no desire to go to BC — perhaps I could work from home in Ontario?). If they’re going to waste their money to get someone to tell them precisely why their idea for a generator doesn’t obey the laws of physics, I suppose I’m as good a person as any to be the recipient of that money. On the other hand, perpetual motion machine pumpers tend to be flaky at best, and fraudulent at worst, so I’d have to negotiate for cash up front.

Their description of how it works is full of unit errors (using Watts for both power and energy, then comparing one to the other), and lots of dubious explanations. Rather than trying to work out where they’ve gone wrong on the physics (hey, they might hire me to do that!) let’s instead look at the economics. They say that it’s not a perpetual motion machine, because:

The Gravitron is not a perpetual motion machine, that is, it will not work indefinitely. The neodymium magnets that make up the magnet track will lose magnetic energy over time, and at some point will no longer have enough magnetic energy to lift the neodymium spherical magnets from the bottom to the top, at which point they will need to be replaced or remagnetized.

Ok, so let’s take that at face value: their not-a-perpetual-motion-physics-defying machine is just a really neat way to turn the energy in the magnetic field of a neodymium magnet into electricity. Well, obviously you can’t round-trip that or it’s again going to run into the perpetual motion problem, so the machine is going to extract less energy than it would take to re-magnetize the neodymium magnets when you’re done. The only way to work the machine then is to run it until you “drain” the neodymium magnets, throw those away, and buy brand new, fully-magnetized magnets to extract the energy from those anew. The question then becomes how much energy do you get, and how much does a replacement magnet cost?

Without spending too much time looking up the properties of neodymium and how to calculate the energy density of its magnetic field, Wikipedia provides this figure: an energy density of ~500 kJ/m³, or in electricity terms, 0.138 kWh per cubic meter of neodymium. A ballpark figure for the cost of electricity is 5 cents/kWh, so in order to be economical, they’d have to be able to source magnets at less than a penny per cubic meter. I don’t think so.

A former classmate says on facebook:

Here is some free advice to all inventors out there: if you have to include an explanation on your web site why your invention isn’t a perpetual motion machine, you’re probably trying to invent a perpetual motion machine.

When I told Wayfare I was thinking of applying, since hey, if nothing else I need to do some mock interviews to get some practice, she said: ‎”When I say you need to do a mock interview, I don’t mean an interview where you mock the interviewers.”

Today is the 50th anniversary of JFK’s speech at Rice.

My favourite part of the speech — I’m sure the favourite of many — is in the title. There are many situations where those words apply, from choosing worthwhile courses over electives with easy marks, to bike routes for your daily work-out.

My second-favourite part:

We have had our failures, but so have others, even if they do not admit them.

It’s been a tumultuous year so far, and the snow hasn’t even melted yet! The big news story has been the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which has killed thousands of people and caused billions in dollars of damage. Oh, it also put some nuclear reactors into partial meltdown which added salt to the wounds by possibly making a few hundred more people sick, and releasing radiation into an area around the plants. But since it’s the ongoing story which will take weeks to fully play out, since people are afraid of the very word nuclear, and since fear-mongering sells papers, it’s been the headline story all week. Not that I am free of blame — I’ve re-read my radiation safety training materials and spent a lot of time brushing up on nuclear power generation this week, and have been soaking up the Fukushima stories.

While I do want to help everyone who’s going out of their minds keep perspective, I also don’t want to minimize the tragedy: the workers are being very brave while facing a terrifying situation, and are making personal sacrifices to try to minimize the damage to the rest of Japan. There have been fires, explosions, and meltdowns, leading to some radiation release (though whether the panicked mobs in Tokyo have anything to fear is an open question)…

Oh yeah, and there’s a civil war in Libya, demonstrations in Saudi Arabia, and crackdowns in Bahrain.

Joe Kelly over at Nerd Boys has a few posts on UBB up. He even tabulates the UBB fees by various ISPs.

Michael James reports that AT&T in the US has introduced UBB, which has sparked some outrage… at 1/10th the price of Canadian UBB.

Something I haven’t really drawn enough attention to is the very framework the CRTC laid out for making its decisions. They state that when congestion occurs, it should be corrected first by network infrastructure upgrades, then by economic incentives (i.e.: UBB), then by throttling and other traffic control measures. The thing is, there’s no structure to those guiding principles, leading to perverse incentives with UBB: an ISP can make more money by encouraging congestion, then charging UBB than it can by upgrading the network to stay ahead of traffic growth. Anyway, it was back in my 5-page submission if you read that, and if not, you probably want to focus on other things now.

Michael Geist, who has been debating Dan McTeague about proposed copyright reform, points out that despite calling for severe penalties for copyright infringers, Dan McTeague himself appears to fit the criteria for a repeat infringer. Zing!

Laser pulse pistol. Yes. The future is here.

On the profiteering side of the Japanese tragedy, Financial Uproar discusses investing in Tepco, which I was actually just talking about today with Netbug. I saw a lot of parallels with the BP situation there. Though there is an ADR, it trades on the pink sheets and is quite illiquid: TD Waterhouse wouldn’t let me put in a bid online, I had to call. I decided to sleep on it, but it’s now up ~20% in Tokyo tonight, so I may have missed my chance.

National Post: Language used to describe Japan’s atomic crisis borders on reckless hyperbole.

An old Scientific American article about how the emissions from coal plants are more radioactive than those from nuclear power plants. However, the mercury, particulate, and greenhouse gas emissions of the coal plants are far bigger concerns, not to mention mining issues.

And finally, I think my favourite link in the round-up: A post showing the deaths per TWh for different power generation methods. There’s lots of room to quibble about an order of magnitude here or there, but the end result is that coal is several orders of magnitude more deadly than nuclear. And coal never provided us with medical advances like radiotherapy or diagnostic nuclear medicine.

There’s Chernobyl, everyone knows that one. Then a handful of other accidents involving nuclear power generation, with the most famous perhaps being Three Mile Island, though the impact of the non-Chernobyl accidents have been pretty minor.

In the early days of research, there were a fair number of accidents, especially with enriched fuel, and a bunch of military accidents.

But after Chernobyl, most of the worst civilian radiological accidents come from the medical side. As much as people rail against nuclear energy, I don’t hear a lot of people trying to ban nuclear medicine.

The biggest cause of accidents seems to be the escape of radiation sources, with the Goiania, Brazil accident being perhaps the best example. There, a medical clinic moved, and left behind a radiotherapy device. These guys came in to the abandoned, half-demolished structure, and stole the Cesium-137 source at the heart of the machine, to sell for scrap. In dismantling the source, they got a large dose of radiation, and then later did sell the core for scrap. The scrap dealer noticed this blue glow in the material, and — I kid you not — decided it was magic.

He invited his friends and family over to check it out, made jewellery and body paint out of it, and spread this stuff all over. People were putting it on their bodies to increase sexual potency, ingesting it, and selling it. It took over two weeks before it was realized that a disaster was unfolding. 4 people died, many others got sick, and something like the equivalent of 100 transport truck containers of contaminated waste were produced.

There are also a number of cases of accidental over-exposure from radiotherapy or imaging, though those seem to be more accepted as there is always some background medical mistake risk.

Went grocery shopping, with largely two things on my list: real food, and candy. At the intersection of the two: cocoa krispies, but they look to have discontinued them! Which is dastardly, because they were on sale this week!

Wired had a good article on magnetic navigation in sea turtles. Neat, because I was just talking about this in my lecture last week! Hope the undergrads find this. I love this quote: “A skeptic could reasonably believe that the latitudinal cue is magnetic, but that determining east-west position depends on magic,” Another recent article also discusses the radical-pair mechanism. I’ve long lamented the poor quality of journalism, especially science reporting, in these times of ours, but I have to say that I’ve been reasonably impressed with a few articles from Wired recently, in particular because they actually include the citations to the papers they’re talking about, so I’ve subscribed to their RSS feed.

The Berkshire Hathaway annual results are out, including Warren Buffet’s famous annual letter to shareholders. Worth a read even if you’re not a shareholder. Of course, many blog posts out there to help you digest the wisdom, including Larry MacDonald, Canadian Capitalist, and Michael James.

Barry Rithotlz points out that banks are writing credit default swaps on debt that doesn’t exist… if you figure out how to view the full story on the WSJ, let me know, I only got the first few lines as a preview, and there wasn’t even a link with the option to buy the article, so to me it just looks like a broken website (way to go, newspapers, you show the internet how conveying information is done!).

I got a response from my MP after my UBB letters: basically just a form response that the Liberals oppose UBB, and that they’ve received a lot of letters on the topic! Other than that, I haven’t noticed any news on the matter, so now I think we just wait and see what comes out of the CRTC.

A bunch of other bloggers got copies of various tax programs to give away (come on Intuit, it’s not a personal finance blog, but I do taxes too!). Oddly enough many of them only opened their contest up to their email subscribers. I guess people who use RSS to follow every. single. post. just aren’t worthy.

With even the permabulls like the real estate boards calling for the housing market to at the very least flatten out, it’s important to market your home’s selling features. A snazzy virtual tour may help, but might I suggest a space wall?

Toronto Realty Blog considers moving up. The post highlights a few things that I see as being horribly sick and wrong with the current Toronto market (well, it doesn’t intentionally highlight them, but they stand out to me):

• “Five years is far above the average time that a condo-owner will spend in one unit in downtown Toronto…” Transaction costs are high: so far, price appreciation has dwarfed them, but in a flat market, moving very often means more people should lean towards renting rather than buying. If people are feeling squeezed out (or bored, or whatever other reason they have for moving so frequently), then they do need to start to consider the risks of buying at the top, as they can’t just wait out a downturn in the unlikely event that it happens (even if that’s what they tell me). Five years sounds like a very short amount of time to buy a place for to me, so for that to be above the average sounds crazy.
• “As I look around the living room, I see a bookshelf with so many books stacked on top of the unit itself that I’ve begun a small pile on the floor […] and I can’t tell you how many things (skiis, snowboard, golf clubs, hockey equipment, baseball gear, winter tires) I keep in seasonal storage in my mother’s basement. Not only have I outgrown my space, but I can afford far more now as well.” The condos that are going up (even in Markham) are freaking tiny. I have trouble seeing how a single person fits in some of them, let alone a couple. That is partly due to amenities: no need to set aside room for a treadmill if your building has a gym, and space for more than two guests can be taken care of by the party room and movie theatre. But I have to wonder how much of the demand for these tiny units is driven by people buying from plans, and when the buyers will finally stop trying to get a place, any place, and start demanding livable space.
• “Let’s assume that I own my condo in cash, and I have no mortgage.[…] For whatever reason, I would rather keep my money in my condo th[a]n throw darts at the board known as the stock market […] so my all-in cost of living is only $545 per month.” Once again, the fallacy that owning your shelter somehow makes it free, or nearly so, without taking into account the opportunity cost, that is, the return one could get by investing that money elsewhere. Even a GIC-like rate added to the other costs listed would put that monthly total north of $1600 — more than what a 1-bedroom rents for. And along with it, the notion that somehow the stock market is risky but Toronto condos are not. Eventually, fundamentals will matter.

Haven’t had one of these for a while.

The bar for the diet goals, as you may recall, was significantly lowered for the thesis writing here, because it’s just too hard to sit and try to write all day and not “fuel up” — and there is a limited supply of willpower. The goal was simply to not gain weight. Sadly, I’ve failed even that, as this last week I’ve jumped up nearly 5 pounds (I blame the 1 kg jar of cashews I just couldn’t resist buying). I got called in to spare a bunch for curling though, so I’ve been doing that about 3 times a week, and the snow keeps coming, leading to lots of shovelling-related “workouts”.

A Toronto statistician found a flaw on some Ontario lottery tickets. Interestingly, the end of the article suggests that Bingo tickets are still exploitable. I’m not sure how useful that is though — in the article, the fellow says he brought the flaw to the OLG not because he was necessarily moral, but because it wasn’t worth his time to try to scam the system. And that was for the tic-tac-toe tickets: the Bingo tickets are much “busier”, and the hit rate isn’t as high according to him, so it would be even less worthwhile trying to exploit. Nonetheless, my curiosity is piqued. If anyone wants to bankroll buying a few dozen tickets to try to find the exploit (might even get a paper published out of it!) I’d be interested in trying to analyze them.

Lenny sent me to a new webcomics site, Abtruse Goose. Lots of geek love there.

For those that like to watch rather than read, TVO has a decent video on the UBB issue, summarizing it in 3 min. And Michael Geist also caught Bell’s admission in the Industry committee hearings: there is no congestion on the last mile (and if there was, they’d have to be fair and charge UBB to their IPTV service).

The Torontoist reports on the CRTC’s cavalcade of failure, this time highlighting their decision to not allow a TV station to air more (Canadian) music videos.

“This is literally a decision that benefits absolutely nobody, which is why it’s so amazing: usually when the CRTC makes a horrendously bad decision, it at least has the appearance of being because Rogers or Bell whispered in their ear that they wanted to make more money.

“But this? This is so witless that we are forced to wonder if maybe we’ve misunderstood the CRTC all along. Maybe they aren’t a shell of a government agency beholden to corporate media giants to the point of uselessness. Maybe they’re simply so stupid that uselessness is their natural state, and all along we’ve been blaming Bell and Rogers for influencing the acts of lunatics. It’s possible. After all, the CRTC honestly thinks MuchMusic airs music videos.”

Via Reddit, an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson on whether the goal of science (and science funding) should be to improve life. I have to disagree with Neil on the first part of the interview: not everyone would choose the video over the transcript given the option. And not just Canadians with our backwards limited-usage internet. I skip over a lot of video/audio content on the internet because I can read a transcript much faster than an effective audio podcast can convey information, because a transcript is searchable and quotable, and because I just can’t stand listening to some people talk (even more so when they amateurishly try to film from the side of a busy street), even if I wouldn’t mind “hearing” their thoughts. Yes, some content is lost without facial expressions, gestures, cadence, and tone of voice. But you know what? We’ve been communicating effectively for centuries in a textual fashion — on a hot summer’s night, there’s little I like better than curling up with a book at the cottage — so I don’t see how he can call into question the worthiness of producing transcripts.

As Canadians, I think it’s sad that we don’t get to appreciate just how awesome the US version of Amazon is. At the lab today the very real question was asked*: where do we go to buy a superconducting coil? We’re still looking for a supplier to meet our needs, but lo and behold, frakin Amazon! * - PS: science is awesome some days.

Wayfare got me this cute little USB-powered Peltier cooler single-can “fridge” for our anniversary (aside: thanks to Amazon, I got her a big pile of late).

The idea is neat: using the power from your computer’s USB hub, you can cool a plate down to a respectably cool temperature, and use that to cool your pop. Then, encase the whole thing in retro-styled plastic. It’s a great gift idea for me, as I’ve been known to drink a half dozen or more caffeine-laced beverages through the course of a stressful work day. Because I’m cheap, I keep a case of Coke bought from the grocery store under my desk rather than go down to the vending machine or caf to spend waste $2.25 a pop. However, I then have to go to various lengths to make them cold, such as stealing ice from various hospital ice dispensers (the caf used to have a free ice dispenser for this purpose, but they took it out during the last renovation and never put it back in), or putting my Coke outside on the window ledge in the winter. After all: a One that is not cold, is scarcely a One at all.

Unfortunately, the cooler doesn’t look to be quite powerful enough to get the job done. After several hours on the plate, my Coke was barely any cooler than the ones that had been sitting on my desk at room temperature. However, the plate itself does get nicely cool, so I figured it maybe just needed more time to bring the temperature of the Coke down. However, even after sitting there overnight, the Coke is at best “not warm”. The air inside the fridge is also not particularly cold.

So, time to hack!

I can immediately identify two issues with the design. The first is that though the plate gets cold, only a small ring of aluminum from the can actually contacts the plate to transfer heat. So, I grabbed a handful of copper wool sitting around to see if I could increase the surface area for conduction.

The other issue is insulation: the little plastic fridge isn’t insulated. I figured it would at least limit convection and so should work better than the similar pop chillers that consist of just the cooler plate alone… however, remember in thermodynamics there is no free lunch. Though the top half of the plate gets cold, the bottom half gets hot, and in the system as a whole there is a net increase in heat. There’s no insulation break in the plastic around the heat dissipating area on the bottom and the chilled area on the top — the plastic may be serving as a route for the heat to get back up to the can, working against the chiller’s job. Though the fridge is very nearly perfectly sized for a single can, there is a tiny bit of wiggle room for insulation. Though I do actually have some syrofoam here, it’s way to messy to try to cut down to the right size, so I’m going to start by testing some bunched up tissues.

Unfortunately, even after leaving it on with the new mods in place overnight, my Coke was still no cooler than before. The copper wool turns out to not be a particularly good thermal conductor, despite being made of copper (I guess it’s all those air pockets). So, I grabbed some aluminum foil and tried to pack the bottom hollow of the Coke can to get better conduction, but still no joy. Then I did a bit more reading:

The Wikipedia entry on the thermoelectric coolers mentions that these USB drink chillers may not be very useful, providing milliWatts of effective cooling. For a quick calculation, the specific heat of water is about 4.2 J/°C/g. So, it would take 4.2 * 355 = 1.5 kJ of energy to lower the temperature of my pop by 1 °C. If 0.1 W of effective cooling were getting into the can, it would take over 4 hours to lower the temperature by 1 °C. Yikes!

Now I know why it says “keep your drink cold” on the box and not “cool your drink down” — it looks like the chiller is only powerful enough to slow down the warming up of an already cold drink. The answer may be more power!!!!!11one!111!! I’m pretty sure there are some DC power supplies not being used around here, though I’ll need to check with some of the more electrically-intelligent people around here if feeding more power to this thing could blow it up (or even help at all).

Other oddities: even though it only takes power from the USB (it doesn’t seem to try to load any drivers or work with the software in any way), it has system requirements, including 100 MB of free disk space…

Wow, what a terrible, terrible week for exercise and diet. Started off with a StarCraft 2 “LAN” party, which involved 2 days of nothing but junk food. Then I was busy with work and it was hot and humid out, and I got my sleep schedule all screwed up, so I did basically no exercise. Weight’s up 2 pounds (and the scale’s calibrated right this time), so I’m going to have to be extra good this coming week. Meal plan: egg whites, oatmeal, fruit, repeat.

Of course, this was also the week that I started putting together “Little Known Facts About Calories” — a semi-secret project which I am teasing you about now, and hope to unveil soon… but not today!

Links:

Gamers can beat algorithms for finding optimum protein structures in a game simulating how protein chains would contort themselves to find their minimum energy configuration in the cell (with the water-like cytoplasm, and the fatty membrane layers). Turns out the algorithms are good at getting fairly close, but can be trapped in local energy minimums, which the gamers see past. A neat read.

OK Cupid has an article up investigating what can help make your profile picture look more appealing. Also, a neat graph showing that sluts are more likely choose iPhones as their smartphone of choice.

Yet more nonsense on the census. I don’t see the problem: StatsCan is a government agency with an excellent record of protecting privacy. The long-form census is incredibly useful and should continue to remain mandatory… I can’t believe the Cons are still trying to make an issue of this.

An illustrated guide to a Ph.D.. And, from the same author, 3 qualities of successful PhD students. To quote liberally from the second article:

“Smart” qualities like brilliance and quick-thinking are irrelevant in Ph.D. school. Students that have made it through so far on brilliance and quick-thinking alone wash out of Ph.D. programs with nagging predictability. Let there be no doubt: brilliance and quick-thinking are valuable in other pursuits. […] Certainly, being smart helps. But, it won’t get the job done.
[…]
To survive this period, you have to be willing to fail from the moment you wake to the moment your head hits the pillow. You must be willing to fail for days on end, for months on end and maybe even for years on end.
[…]
For students that excelled as undergraduates, the sudden and constant barrage of rejection and failure is jarring. If you have an ego problem, Ph.D. school will fix it. With a vengeance. (Some egos seem to recover afterward.)
[…]
Science is as much an act of persuasion as it is an act of discovery. […] You will have to write compelling abstracts and introductions that hook the reader and make her feel like investing time in your work. […] You will have to learn how to balance clarity and precision, so that your ideas come across without either ambiguity or stifling formality.
[…]
That’s why I recommend that new students start a blog. Even if no one else reads it, start one. You don’t even have to write about your research. Practicing the act of writing is all that matters.

I started my site in undergrad/high school, but the blogging platform didn’t arrive until grad school, so I suppose I can use this as a backwards rationalization as to why I did it :)