Not all people who "love science" are like that

Yes, yet another rant against the "I Effing Love Science" crowd.

Midway through a MOOC lecture on nuclear decay I decided to write a post about production values in MOOCs (in my case not really a MOOC, just University lectures made available online). Then, midway through that post, I started to refine my usual "people who love science" vs "people who learn science" taxonomy; this post, preempting the MOOC post, is the result. Apparently my blogging brain is a LIFO queue (a stack).

Nerd, who, me?

I've posted several criticisms of people who "love science" but never learn any (for example here, here, here, and here; there are many more); but there are several people who do love science and therefore learn it. So here's a diagram of several possibilities, including a few descriptors for the "love science but doesn't learn science" crowd:

The interesting parts are the areas designated by the letters A, B, and C. There's a sliver of area where people who really love science don't learn science to capture the fact that some people don't have the time, resources, or access necessary to learn science, even these days. (In the US and EU, I mean; for the rest of the world that sliver would be the majority of the diagram, as many people who would love science have no access to water, electricity, food, let alone libraries and the internet.)

Area A is that of people who love science and learn it but don't make that a big part of their identity. That would have been the vast majority of people with an interest in science in the past; with the rise of social media, some of us decided to share our excitement with science and technology with the rest of the world, leading to area B.

People in area B aren't the usual "I effing love science" crowd. First, they actually learn science; second, their sharing of the excitement of science is geared towards getting other people to learn science, while the IFLS crowd is virtue signaling.

People in area C are those who learn science for goal-oriented reasons. They want to have a productive education and career, so they choose science (and engineering) in order to have marketable skills. They might have preferred to study art or practice sports, but they pragmatically de-prioritize these true loves in favor of market-valued skills.

As for the rest, the big blob of IFLS people, I've given them enough posts (for now).

- - - - -

Note 1: the reason to follow real scientists and research labs on Twitter and Facebook is that they post about ongoing research (theirs and others'), unlike professional popularizers who post "memes" and self-promotion. Or complete nonsense --- only to be corrected by much smarter and incredibly nice Destin "Smarter Every Day" Sandlin:

Note 2: For people who still think that if one of two children is a boy, then the probability of two boys is 1/3 (it's not, it's 1/2):

and the frequentist answer is in this post. Remember: if you think a math result is incorrect, you need to point out the error in the derivation. (There are no errors.)

This particular math problem is one favorite of the IFLS crowd, as it makes them feel superior to the "rubes" who say 1/2, whereas in fact that is the right answer. The IFLS crowd, in general, cannot follow the rationales above, though some may slog through the frequentist computation.

The strange case of the oscillating black hole at the gym

There's a micro-black hole at my gym, and it oscillates between a position under the squat cages and the deadlift platform, in synchrony with my powerlifting program.

It's the only possible explanation.

The data: following my not-very-demanding powerlifting program (which is very low volume, even for powerlifting), I should have gained $5\%$ in both the squat and the deadlift in the last six weeks. This is feasible because I'm recovering strength from the beginning of the year, not creating new strength. (Who said powerlifters have crazy superstitions?)

Clearly, what is happening is that the same mass (bar + weights) is exerting a larger force on my body, which means that there's a micro-black hole under the gym. Since I estimate that there's a 3-meter foundation, this being earthquake territory and all, I postulate that the black hole is below that:

Furthermore, it has to move, since it doesn't affect bench press (where, despite a damaged right rotator cuff, I'm recovering strength well above the program envelope) but it affects the other two lifts. Since it affects both lifts the same percentage, that black hole has to move diagonally, as seen above. It also oscillates back and forth between the squat and deadlift stations.

Two black holes, you say? Don't be ridiculous. Two back holes, indeed! Pah!

So, a little back-of-the-drawing calculation, the kind that drives OCD quants crazy...

(with three or four corrections along the way, including a slight ahem when I used $c = 3\times 10^{9}$ instead of the correct $c = 3\times 10^{8}$ m/s)

... and I have my micro-black hole. As small as the total gains of an entire continent's worth of CrossFitters, at a Schwarzchild radius of $3\times 10^{-16}$ meter and as heavy as a Planet Fitness personal trainer, at a mass of $2\times 10^{11}$ kilogram. That mass means that the black hole won't evaporate anytime soon, so my stalled gains will continue.

(The time to evaporate a black hole with a mass of $10^{11}$kg  is in the billions of years, about the time it would take for a CrossFitter to do one good chin-up or a Planet Fitness client to lose five ounces of fat.)

Clearly this is an important discovery. Hello, Nobel Committee? Got a pick for 2017 Physics yet?


Alternative explanation 1: weight gain on my part

First off, to cancel a $5\%$ increase in squat and deadlift, I'd have to have gained close to $15\%$ of my bodyweight over six weeks. That's not impossible (or even unheard of), but in reality I've been losing weight at about 1kg per week, mostly fat, hopefully more than 1.5kg of fat per week (muscle mass increasing at 0.5kg/week during a recovery is reasonable).

Also, weight gain wouldn't affect squat and deadlift in the same way, unless I gained all the weight above my sternum. (I continue to improve my mental skills, but that doesn't significantly increase the mass of the brain...)

In an ass-to-grass squat (my type of squat), the femur goes over a 110-120 degree arc, hence getting to the weakest part of the quads force curve. So, some more weight in the torso may affect the ability to squat heavy. But for the deadlift, the drive with the legs is only an arc of 60-70 degrees, well away from the weak part of the force curve for the quads, therefore the loss of deadlifting power given additional bodyweight should be much lower than the loss for the squat, not the same. But the same it is.

(In the squat my weakness is the quads, in the deadlift, the spinal erectors; never my glutes. Hip thrusts, baby, hip thrusts FTW! I do leg-extensions with the full stack for reps, but only an ass-to-grass squat hits the quads at their full extension...)

This explanation is therefore dismissed.


Alternative explanation 2: poor supplementation

A picture is worth a thousand words (and about two hundred dollars):

Of course, I eschew that marvelous "supplement" family, anabolic steroids, or if one wants to be a little more discreet, TRT, testosterone replacement therapy. I like my reproductive system to stay at manufacturer's specification. It's kind of a big deal for me, to have the theoretical capability for reproduction (Theoretical because the 3.75 billion women in the world took a vote and unanimously –minus my mother– decided that for the good of the universe I should not reproduce; who am I to question democracy?)

This explanation is therefore dismissed.


Alternative explanation 3: I'm no longer an 18-year-old kid.

Poppycock and balderdash! Balderdash, I say!

Age is but a number and you're as young as you feel. Besides I'm barely in my early middle age -- just a few months past 30.*

This explanation is dismissed with extreme prejudice and a SEAL Team 6 visit.


Conclusion

The only possible logical conclusion is that, like in the 1990 David Brin scifi novel Earth, there's a naughty micro-black hole oscillating between the space under the squat cages and the lifting platforms, and by enormous coincidence its period matches my powerlifting program.

Obviously the solution is to combine the Westside Barbell approach of growing a big belly with the Testosterone Nation recommendation of synergistic beard growing and head shaving so that, even with increasing gravity, gains will come:

It's Science!


-- -- -- --
* 236 months, to be precise.

People in glass houses shouldn't call smart kids ignorant

So, an acquaintance forwarded another "kids these days can only take tests but don't know anything important" link; it included these questions as example of the problem:

"Who fought in the Peloponnesian war?  What was at stake at the Battle of Salamis?  Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach?  How did Socrates die?  Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey.  The Canterbury Tales?  Paradise Lost? The Inferno? 

Who was Saul of Tarsus?  What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect?  Why does the Magna Carta matter?  How and where did Thomas Becket die?  What happened to Charles I?  Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him?  What happened at Yorktown in 1781?  What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural?  His first Inaugural?  How about his third Inaugural? Who can tell me one or two of the arguments that are made in Federalist 10? Who has read Federalist 10?  What are the Federalist Papers?"

The funny thing, and I'm not the first one to notice this, is that the people who ask these questions in order to call others ignorant have little knowledge of the sciences, technologies, engineering, and math. (Or economics and business, for that matter.)

So, here's my response:

What happens when you drop metallic copper into sulfuric acid? What does it mean that the half-life of caffeine in the human body is approximately 2 hours? What is the main function of the kidneys and how does the heart work, namely what's connected to each part? Raise your hand if you can write the chemical equations for sodium hydroxide reacting with hydrochloric acid and for the combustion of propane. The quadratic equation solution formula? The equations of motion for a ballistic projectile? The complex conjugate of $(4 - 7i)\times (3+ 2i)$? 

What is discounted cash flow? How far are the Sun and the Moon from Earth? What is kinetic energy, and for a given moving object does it increase more when you double the mass or the speed? Why does the standard error for an estimate matter? How does a pressure cooker do its faster cooking? What's the difference in market outcomes for an increase in demand and an increase in supply, everything else being constant? What happens at Lagrange Points? What amino acids are essential, and why are they "essential"? What's Newton's first law of motion? His second law? What's an example of the difference in programming languages between a cycle and a conditional statement? Who can tell me one or two main differences between Newtonian physics and general relativity? Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics? What makes quantum mechanics "quantum"?

I contend that knowing the answers to my questions is a lot more important than to the first set of questions. Alas, many "educated" people don't think so. After all, most of the top questions lead to discussions where one can say more or less what one wants, but the bottom questions all have outside validators (the science, engineering, math, and economics or business).

The kids may well be ignorant, but the haughty superciliousness of most people whose knowledge base is the Humanities or Social Sciences is completely undeserved.

I'm going to start asking people who make big pronouncements about the ignorance of today's youth to calculate something like the missing value in the diagram above. It's basic Pythagorean theorem, applied twice, so everyone with a basic education should be able to do it, right? Right? RIGHT?

[Thoughts ruminate during the work day…]

The more I think about these two cultures, the more I see it's not just about different knowledge, it's about the focus of attention.

Compare the following question, from the original article:

Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach?  

with

What is kinetic energy, and for a given moving object does it increase more when you double the mass or the speed?

The answer the author was looking for, I think, is Socrates and Aristotle. Not the thoughts of Socrates and of Aristotle, but simply the persons. A lot of the questions in the original article are about people or events, not about concepts, ideas, or tools, which are what all my questions are about. (Kinetic energy is the energy of motion, $E_{K} = \frac{1}{2} m v^{2}$ so doubling the speed quadruples the kinetic energy, while doubling the mass only doubles the energy.)

Of course, some questions are out-and-out cultural virtue signaling. I'll see your

Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey.

And raise you a

Raise your hand if you have read both Molecular Biology of the Gene and Walter Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis and can answer the questions at the end of the chapters.

Game, set, and match, as they say in the Super Bowl.

One of the funniest things to see is the collision of these two focuses of attention, for example when people who don't like science try to pretend they "love" science by emphasizing people or events. That's when we see "science" questions like

• Where was Einstein born? 

• What Nobel Prizes did Marie Curie win?

These are, at best, history questions. Compare with

• What is the energy of a 1kg mass going $99\%$ of the speed of light? 

• If we start with 100g of Thorium-231 ($^{231}\mathrm{Th}$, an isotope in the decay chain of Uranium) and wait 51 hours (two half-lives), how much $^{231}\mathrm{Th}$ is left?

The answers to these don't depend on historic events or individual people. (They do relate to the people in the questions above by way of their work.) They require computation and thinking, for real. And that "for real" part is killer. For example, one can argue endlessly about the meaning of texts and the existence of "penumbras" in law or sticking to original intent, but there is no arguing with the technical questions.

That's one of the big issues that separates technical material from "soft" material: there's really an answer, and that answer can be shown to be right or tested with experiments that don't depend on feelings or whether Taul of Sarsus came up with it in the $94 \frac{1}{2}$ theses he nailed to the door of the Delicatessen in Wittenberg while he went in for a Schlagobers after the battle of the Salamis (pork against beef against chicken against vegan).

BTW, people who "love" science and haughty non-STEM professoriate: what's the answer to those two technical questions? Hint: don't forget the Lorenz correction.

"Won't someone rid us of these meddlesome quants?"

Four bad messages from a Mythbusters episode

I had high hopes for the Mythbusters when they started, but these hopes were quickly squashed. Now in its last season, the Mythbusters have become a perfect representation of the 'people who "love" science, as long as they don't have to learn any.'

The recent episode "Driven to destruction" had four clear, though not explicit, messages; all of them were anti-science messages. Here they are:


I - Don't bother checking existing knowledge or consulting field experts

Adam wants to lift a car using only the suction of a vacuum cleaner to attach the car to the crane. He builds some suction cups and then places them on the car, without any consideration of the distribution of mass (and therefore of the lifting force necessary) in the car.

If Adam had consulted a mechanical engineer (or anyone with enough of an interest in mechanical structures to read a couple of books), he'd have learned that to lift an heterogeneous object using multiple attachment points to distribute the load, one needs to consider the distribution of mass and not just the total mass.

But here, like in most if not all episodes, the Mythbusters spurn extant knowledge and actual expertise and decide to pretend that science is 'make stuff up as you go.'


II - Calculations are boring, but show pretty charts (and formulas)

Adam's rig doesn't lift the car, it just creates attachment. Computing the attachment force is a simple matter: the total force is the maximum sustainable pressure of the system (vacuum cleaner motor fighting the atmospheric pressure on the output side, seals fighting it on the contact boundaries) times the surface of the attachment. This would be simple enough to measure and calculate (and then multiply by an engineering safety factor to account for faults).

Instead we get a chart about "linear relationship," which is true enough for the purposes of lifting the car, but doesn't even show what the calculation is. Also, because of the lack of expertise in how distributed lifting works, the calculations are actually quite dependent on where the attachment points go and therefore not linear at all.  (The point of saying "linear relationship" is to teach the audience yet another identity phrase.)

(There were no formulas in the show itself, but there are several, apparently randomly selected, during the opening credits.)

Note also that in the early part of the show pressure was measured in pounds per square inch, while in the last version of the experiment pressure was measured in millimeters of mercury. No effort was put into explaining how these relate to each other. Because the purpose of the gauge (and of the "measurement" for that matter) is to look and sound scientific without actually making any type of calculation.

"Math is hard," said Barbie the people who "love" science (as long as they don't have to learn any).


III - Experiments don't need controls or replication

As usual, Mythbusters experiments are made without a control condition and run only once. The lack of a control is less important in this episode, as they were really not testing any theories (unless one considers the quality of vacuum cleaner seals a theory), but the lack of replication is problematic.

Adam does make a lot of attempts to lift the car, eventually getting his rig to work. Once. Since there are all sorts of situation variables that aren't fixed, including the speed at which the crane operator lifts the load, that "experiment" needs replication.

Note that here we're not talking about the independent replication that is now debated in science (when team A publishes a result and team B checks that result by replicating the experiment). Independent replication has been the bane of the social sciences, for example. What we're talking about here is to make the car go up more than once.


IV - Change whatever elements of an experiment you want, no problem

When measuring the "force" (in fact the pressure) of the vacuum cleaner in the shop, and for the first few tests, Adam uses a home vacuum cleaner (looks like a Dyson), but later the experiments with the car use a shop vacuum cleaner, which in my experience creates a lot more pressure ("suction" is pressure). Jamie changes the explosive from a plastic explosive to ANFO (ammonia nitrate - fuel oil, a much slower explosive).

For the small-scale experiments to have any relevance to the large-scale experiments, all the elements other than scale should be unchanged. There could be a case for a different explosive if Jamie were trying to scale up the detonation speed, though that's hard to do correctly, but it would have gone in the other direction, using an explosive with higher detonation speed.

(The explosives are rigged by demolition experts, who could probably have taught Jamie how to do the detonation correctly, since it's their expertise; but that wouldn't work with the psychological premises of the show: that the Mythbusters are experts and experts don't ask for help -- both totally wrong.)


None of these things matter

To the audience, that is. Because their audience is full of people who "love" science, as long as they don't have to learn any. And they want explosions, words that they can use to impress equally ignorant friends (like stoichiometry), and the warm glow of looking down upon other people who don't profess "love" for science (but might actually know some).

And for those who believe that the Mythbusters might have some value as a motivator, consider the case of Planet Fitness: a gym where you pretend to work-out and people tell you how great you are doing, therefore preventing you from actually working out at a real gym.

The Mythbusters are the Planet Fitness of science education.