Here Comes Science by They Might Be Giants

They Might Be Giants creates great music and has moved into creating music aimed at kids, of any age, over the last few years. They are releasing a new Album and animated DVD Here Comes Science, is being released tomorrow. Their music is both enjoyable to listen to and educational, something that is often attempted but rarely done as successfully as they do.

The release include the following songs and videos:

1. Science Is Real
2. Meet the Elements
3. I Am a Paleontologist w/Danny Weinkauf
4. The Bloodmobile
5. Electric Car w/Robin Goldwasser
6. My Brother the Ape
7. What Is a Shooting Star?
8. How Many Planets?
9. Why Does the Sun Shine?
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Experimenting Social Network

Social media is definitely a fad filled with lots of ways to waste time. It also does have real value, ways to connect to things people care about and wish to focus on. Reddit is a good site for finding interesting resources online. Sub-reddits are topical areas within Reddit (I have set up management and investing sub-reddits). A new experiment subreddit looks very interesting:

Each experiment will go through a few threads. The first step will be a query for experimental methods. Someone will present a problem or piece of information they want to find out, and then others will suggest methods. Once this is agreed upon, it will be carried out, and a second thread will be posted detailing the method and providing a place to post results via the comments. Then, a third thread can be made to discuss the results. Having more than one thread for every experiment will make things more accessible and easier to sort.

Don’t research ways other people have experimentally determined these things. Submit original ideas to the experimental design thread. Try to come up with a novel way to discover things, but don’t be completely limited by this suggestion. This is chiefly about rediscovery, not repeating someone else’s experiment, but sometimes there’s fun and merit in that as well.

I have joined. You can go to Reddit and join this subreddit to see experiences with experimenting to learn about the world around us.

Atomic Force Microscopy Image of a Molecule

The delicate inner structure of a pentacene molecule imaged with an atomic force microscope. For the first time, scientists achieved a resolution that revealed the chemical structure of a molecule. The hexagonal shapes of the five carbon rings in the pentacene molecule are clearly resolved. Even the positions of the hydrogen atoms around the carbon rings can be deduced from the image. (Pixels correspond to actual data points). Image courtesy of IBM Research – Zurich

IBM scientists have been able to image the “anatomy” — or chemical structure — inside a molecule with unprecedented resolution. “Though not an exact comparison, if you think about how a doctor uses an x-ray to image bones and organs inside the human body, we are using the atomic force microscope to image the atomic structures that are the backbones of individual molecules,” said IBM Researcher Gerhard Meyer. “Scanning probe techniques offer amazing potential for prototyping complex functional structures and for tailoring and studying their electronic and chemical properties on the atomic scale.”

The AFM uses a sharp metal tip to measure the tiny forces between the tip and the sample, such as a molecule, to create an image. In the present experiments, the molecule investigated was pentacene. Pentacene is an oblong organic molecule consisting of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms measuring 1.4 nanometers in length. The spacing between neighboring carbon atoms is only 0.14 nanometers—roughly 1 million times smaller then the diameter of a grain of sand. In the experimental image, the hexagonal shapes of the five carbon rings as well as the carbon atoms in the molecule are clearly resolved. Even the positions of the hydrogen atoms of the molecule can be deduced from the image.

Read full press release: IBM Scientists First to Image the “Anatomy” of a Molecule
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Lego Mindstorms Robots Solving: Sudoku and Rubik’s Cube

LEGO Mindstorms Rubik’s Cube Solver

Tilted Twister solves Rubik’s cube fully automatically.
Just place the scrambled cube on Tilted Twister’s turntable. An ultrasonic sensor detects its presence and starts to read the colors of the cube faces using a light sensor. The robot turns and tilts the cube in order to read all the faces. It then calculates a solution and executes the moves by turning, tilting and twisting the cube.
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The challenge was to build the robot using only the Lego Mindstorms NXT Retail-kit. And to make it completely independent, without need of being connected to a PC.
The Lego Mindstorms NXT Retail-kit contains three servo motors and four sensors (touch, light, ultrasonic and sound). How should I build the robot using only these items?
After a lot of experimenting I came up with a solution – If I tilted the whole robot, it would be possible for it to tilt the cube using only one motor, leaving the other two motors for turning the cube and for positioning the light sensor. Thus Tilted Twister.
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Scanning the cube: 1 minute
Calculating a solution: 20 – 40 seconds
Executing the moves: 1 – 5 minutes. Average 4.5 minutes (60 faceturns)
Average total time: 6 minutes

Very cool. Related book: Building Robots With Lego Mindstorms

Physics from Universe to Multiverse

2005 video of Dr. Michio Kaku speaking on BBC on physics from Universe to Multiverse.

Unfortunately BBC leaders decided to hide this from the world and removed the video. Maybe scientists should stop talking to organizations won’t share the output with the world.

What is a Molecule?

One of the things I keep meaning to do more of with this blog is provide some post on basic science concepts that may help raise scientific literacy. Some of these will be pretty obvious but even reminders on some facts you know can sometimes help.

What is a molecule?

A molecule is the smallest particle of a compound that has all the chemical properties of that compound. Molecules are made up of two or more atoms, either of the same element or of two or more different elements. The example of molecules are water (H₂O) and carbon dioxide (CO₂) and molecular nitrogen (N₂).

Organic molecules contain Carbon, for example, Methane CH₄). The original definition of “organic” chemistry came from the misconception that organic compounds were always related to life processes.

A few types of compounds such as carbonates, simple oxides of carbon and cyanides, as well as the allotropes of carbon, are considered inorganic. The division between “organic” and “inorganic” carbon compounds while “useful in organizing the vast subject of chemistry…is somewhat arbitrary”

Ionic compounds, such as common salt, are made up not of molecules, but of ions arranged in a crystalline structure. Unlike ions, molecules carry no net electrical charge.

Guadalupe Mountains National Park: Ladybug City

Ladybugs crawling on rocks in Guadalupe Mountains National Park

photo of ladybugs covering the bark of a tree near the Guadalupe Peak, by John Hunter, Creative Commons Attribution.

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At Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas at 8,749 feet in Guadalupe Mountains National Park I found a huge city of ladybugs. They covered the bark of many bushes and trees and crawled over rocks (as seen in the photos). They were everywhere. It seems odd to me that they would have such a huge concentration since it would seem like food would then be a problem, but there they were.

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Friday Cat Fun #16: Cat Lift

And here is a cat taking a human elevator.
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S&P 500 CEO’s: Engineers Stay at the Top

2008 Data from Spencer Stuart on S&P 500 CEO (link broken so it was removed, it is so sad that companies still pay people to manage web sites that don’t even understand basic web usability principles such as web pages must live forever) shows once again more have undergraduate degrees in engineering than any other field, increasing to 22% of CEO’s this year.

Field
	2008	2007	2006	2005
Engineering	22	21	23	20
Economics	16	15	13	11
Business Administration	13	13	12	15
Accounting	9	8	8	7
Liberal Arts	6	6	8	9
No degree or no data	3	3

In 1990 Engineering majors accounted for 6% of the bachelor’s degrees in the USA (1970 5%, 1980 7%). Business accounted for 23% of the majors in 1990 (1970 14%, 1980 21%). Liberal arts 3% in 1980 (1970 1%, 1980 2%).

The report does not show the fields for the rest of the CEO’s. 39% of S&P CEOs have MBAs. 28% have other advanced degrees. The University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard tied for the most CEO’s with undergraduate degrees from their universities at 13. Princeton and the University of Texas had 9 and Stanford had 8.

While the CEO’s have engineering education backgrounds the work they have done is often in other functions. The top function that CEO’s that have worked in during their careers: Operations (42%), Finance (31%), Marketing (24%), Sales (17%), Engineering (11%).

Data for previous years is also from Spencer Stuart: S&P 500 CEOs are Engineering Graduates (2007 data) 2006 S&P 500 CEO Education Study – Top degree for S&P 500 CEOs? Engineering (2005 study)

Controlled Experiments for Software Solutions

by Justin Hunter

Jeff Fry linked to a great webcast in Controlled Experiments To Test For Bugs In Our Mental Models.

I firmly believe that applied statistics-based experiments are under-appreciated by businesses (and, for that matter, business schools). Few people who understand them are as articulate and concise as Kohavi. Admittedly, I could be accused of being biased as: (a) I am the son of a prominent applied statistician and (b) I am the founder of a software testing tools company that uses applied statistics-based methods and algorithms to make our tool work.

Summary of the webcast, on Practical Guide to Controlled Experiments on the Web: Listen to Your Customers not to the HiPPO – a presentation by Ron Kohavi with Microsoft Research.

1:00 Amazon: in 2000, Greg Linden wanted to add recommendations in shopping cards during the check out process. The “HiPPO” (meaning the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) was against it on the grounds that it would be a bad idea; recommendations would confuse and/or distract people. Amazon, a company with a good culture of experimentation, decided to run a small experiment anyway, “just to get the data” – It was wildly successful and is in widespread use today at Amazon and other firms.

3:00 Dr. Footcare example: Including a coupon code above the total price to be paid had a dramatic impact on abandonment rates.

4:00 “Was this answer useful?” Dramatic differences occur when Y/N is replaced with 5 Stars and whether an empty text box is initially shown with either (or whether it is triggered only after a user clicks to give their initial response)

6:00 Sewing machines: experimenting with a sales promotion strategy led to extremely counter-intuitive pricing choice

7:00 “We are really, really bad at understanding what is going to work with customers…”
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