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Submission + - Grad Student Wins Alan Alda's Flame Challenge (flamechallenge.org)

eldavojohn writes: Scientists have long been criticized of their inability to communicate complex ideas adequately to the rest of society. Similar to his questions on PBS' Scientific American Frontiers, actor Alan Alda wrote to the Journal of Science with a proposition called The Flame Challenge. Contestants would have to explain a flame to an eleven year old kid and the entries would be judged by thousands of children across the country. The winner of The Flame Challenge is quantum physics grad student Ben Ames whose animated video covers concepts like pyrolysis, chemiluminescence, oxidation and incandescence boiled into a humorous video complete with song. Now they are asking children age 10-12 to suggest the next question for the Flame Challenge. Kids out there, what would you like scientists to explain?

Comment Re:Get a refill.. (Score 1) 1141

What I do to my own body shouldn't affect you. If it does, that just means you need to mind your own business and get out of my life.

The truth is that we are all utterly dependent on each other to survive - every part of our life is dependent on a product or service that is the result of the combined effort of many people. If everyone got out of your life, your would literally have nothing. Whether we like it or not, what one person does to their body does effect other people, and it places a cost on others regardless of any intentional interest in their business. Should we update are laws to acknowledge that, or just ignore it?

Comment Re:Get a refill.. (Score 1) 1141

One could also argue that companies marketing soda in excessively large containers is a nudge, considering psychological factors that we are all subject to, to consume more sugar than people otherwise would be interested in - this law is simply trying to reduce that nudge. People are already used to constant intervention from corporations everyday (I'm walking down the street, I'm thristy, let's see, what are my options to drink - what does that giant billboard suggest?), so an effort trying to reduce public health problems arising from that intervention isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm not sure that legally restricting container size is necessarily the right approach, but there are two sides to the argument.

Comment Re:aka Differential GPS (Score 1) 140

DGPS is all about using the fact that error in a normal satellite GPS signal is relatively constant in one location on Earth - the ground based transmitters just tell the DGPS receiver what that error is in your specific location. This sounds like they are using actual ground-based GPS transmitters, thereby removing the calculation of where the satellite is in the first place, to improve accuracy.

Comment Re:Who wouldn't? (Score 1) 427

I agree with your point that the carbon offsets don't truly offset the damage, but having punched the child doesn't change the positive effect of donating to NSPCC - i.e. punching a child and donating to NSPCC is still slightly better than only punching a child, and having punched the child doesn't mean that then donating to the NSPCC is stupid. The carbon offsets presumably do some good, even if it isn't enough.

Comment Re:Stored energy (Score 2) 87

Using energy stored as momentum would only allow for a temporary hop off the ground, until that momentum is used up - if the pilot can't sustain the power required for flight, the rotor would quickly slow down.. It sounds like the requirement that it fly for at least 60 seconds means that the human pilot has to be able to maintain the momentum of the rotor by pedaling with the power required for actually flying.

Comment Re:1st of Clarke's Laws (Score 1) 428

I wonder if you could flip that around to say something like:

"When a young inexperienced scientist states that something far-fetched is possible, he is probably wrong. When he states that something is impossible, he is almost certainly right."

Comment Re:In a sense ... (Score 1) 428

I admittedly have only tried it in rental cars - satellite radio is great for talk radio, so you can listen to the same program while driving cross country, but the music quality is pretty bad, the "sizzle" and reduction in dynamic range of the overly compressed audio is kind of grating.

Comment Re:When will these nutjobs learn? (Score 2) 480

A better way to word it would be to say people have the right to not have the internet taken away from them. Provided a person lives somewhere where a company can provide them access, they can pay for it, etc, then no government or other organization should be able to prevent someone from accessing it freely.

Comment Re:Supercars (Score 1) 274

It probably uses a frequency splitting response, like a high pass filter on the shock response to block out "steady state" response, so that it only responds to changes in the road - in the driving over a curb example, the shock would probably respond quickly (at high frequency) to the immediate bump, but wash out with some time constant to the normal position. If you hit the beginning of a steep slope, the shocks only would respond immediately to soften the transition.

So, right, big enough bumps (below some cutoff frequency) would be felt so as to not saturate the actuator, but most ride discomfort probably comes from higher-frequency bumps.

Comment Re:Correlation is not causation (Score 1) 490

The point is that forcing students who wouldn't otherwise take Algebra II to take it might not provide as much benefit as the correlation seems to indicate if there is not a direct causation, but instead a third variable effecting both. There may be root factors that occur much earlier in life that determine whether a student ends up being the type that would take Algebra II, and benefit from it - it may be more worthwhile to continue investigating to figure out what that root factor is.

Comment Re:Noooooooooo!!!!!!1111!11! (Score 3, Interesting) 541

It's kind of an interesting game theory problem - from the perspective of an individual parent, the risk of not vaccinating only their child is relatively low, given that they are assuming everyone else will be vaccinated. if there is even a tiny perceived danger in getting the vaccine (real or not), than the rational choice may really be to not be vaccinated. Unfortunately, this can lead to a Nash equilibrium, in that the outcome for the entire population is worse if everyone were to make this choice, similar to the prisoner's dilemma problem. From the perspective of the entire population, for example a public health official, it obviously makes sense to vaccinate everyone, even if there is some very small risk from the vaccine, as long as that risk is smaller than the risk of getting a disease without the vaccine.

Comment Re:Stunning (Score 1) 206

Creativity is often just finding a solution to an NP-hard problem, for example writing a song. Most people can tell if a song is enjoyable to listen to or not, but they can't necessarily write their own. They can listen to many songs and determine which are most pleasing. A songwriter has the special ability of assembling a song that meets the requirements of being pleasing by some method that is more efficient than simply testing each combination of random notes. Sudoko is similar, it is easy to verify that a given solution is correct. One solution method would be to keep testing different combinations of numbers until a solution is found, but there are more efficient methods using some heuristics based on the other numbers present, or experience from solving previous puzzles. The question might be whether there is something fundamentally more intelligent about things that humans create - songs, literature, etc, compared to a series a numbers in a Sudoko puzzle.

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