Better than Sunshine Units

Posted by Danny on Monday, March 21, 2011 at 5:54 pm

In response to the partial meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear power plant following the earthquake on March 11, 2011, there’s been an understandable but unfortunate rise in opposition to nuclear power in Canada (and elsewhere, of course) by folks like me with limited and patchy knowledge of the physics behind radiation, and cynically advanced by stakeholders in public fear and, probably, providers of competing energy sources like fossil fuels.  This is unfortunate if you feel that

1. nuclear power is a contending alternative to fossil fuels for sustaining our energy needs while we seek to transition to cleaner, more sustainable technologies and lifestyles, or that
2. public fear is, on balance, bad.

I wanted to post about this because there are a few public scientists and science-literate public figures who are trying to make the available data digestible (even appetizing, considering the circumstances) for folks whose dominant sources of information may be less than disinterested in public ignorance.  If you have nine minutes, consider watching Martyn Poliakoff covering the workings of a nuclear reactor, the meltdown process, why the sea-water pumped into the plant as an emergency measure will compromise its future viability, and why potassium-iodide pills are being used as a precaution against radiation sickness.  I found this to be a valuable and concise primer.  (Direct link here.)

If “radiation” is equated uncritically with “badness,” it becomes impossible to judge the gravity of situations involving it, or to make decisions about its use as compared with, say, a coal-burning power plant, the byproducts of which seem to be more readily quantified in public discourse.  The enterprise of usefully quantifying radiation (that is, the harmful form of radiation pertinent to living near nuclear reactors or eating bananas) has been recently undertaken by XKCD’s Randall Munroe to provide a sense of context and scale.  The blog post featuring the chart in question is over here, but consider also reading Phil Plait’s brief discussion of it, here at Bad Astronomy.

P.S.: Carlin (or Yermus) fans: remember Sunshine Units?

Alan Davies Measures String! Amazing!

Posted by Danny on Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 11:32 pm

A quick post and a long video: Alan Davies of Quite Interesting fame recently featured in an episode of the venerable BBC documentary series, Horizon.  In the grand pedantic tradition of trying to answer rhetorical questions, Alan wanders through laser measuring technology, fractals, atomic structure, and quantum mechanics as he tries to figure out “how long is a piece of string.”

Davies is impossible to dislike, as most QI watchers will probably attest; I think this video could be a good teaching tool because his bafflement, occasional glazing, and plaintive insistence on real-world relevance resonate with a lot of the students I’ve seen who are dealing with these ideas for the first time, and could thereby possibly spin sympathy into engagement.  Moreover, through the frustration of just trying to figure out how long his piece of string is, he remains stoic and good natured—this is pleasant.

A couple of final points: I’m usually impatient with some of the more popular conventions of documentary filmmaking, of which plenty are employed in the above video; I nonetheless found this a rewarding view in toto.  Secondly, the YouTube version linked to in the Open Culture post where I found this originally has already been taken down.  If you get to this version in time and find it a worthwhile resource, you might consider nabbing it while you can.

Dammit, Feynman!

Posted by Danny on Saturday, September 19, 2009 at 12:51 am

Stupidly, at some point, I stopped being a good sponge and started caring about what others saw me sucking up.  If everyone in the room seemed to have already sucked it up long ago, for example, the compulsion has grown for me to try to make a note of the thing, and then to pretend as if I, too, was a dead, turgid invertebrate successfully repurposed for carrying this particular popular effluvium.  (But the metaphor grows strained… mangled… finished.)

I really regret that I have sometimes—unthinkingly!—nodded my head in mature acknowledgement of my fluency with a name or other reference, uttered by a respected speaker, when that name or reference was at best only semi-familiar-sounding to me.  This is for two reasons: first, it adulterates my supremely laudable curiosity, wonder, and avid lust to understand everything about everything everywhere with petty social duplicity; second and more importantly, I am often ashamed into passivity rather than correction, and don’t bother to look up the thing afterwards and educate myself.

Sometimes I wise up and actually hunt down that thing I’ve been nodding my empty head to.  Richard Feynman’s come up in XKCD a couple of times, and elsewhere, and I finally looked him up a few months ago.  He was (for those of you who don’t know and haven’t looked him up yet but are willing to privately acknowledge your potentially uncommon ignorance by reading onwards) a legendary and beloved teacher of physics, one of the scientists who developed the atomic bomb, a prolific writer of popular and theoretical scientific works, central to explaining NASA’s Challenger disaster, an amateur painter and bongo-player, and so on.  I listened with unexpected relish to his autobiographies as audiobooks, and have tried to follow some of his celebrated Lectures on Physics with mixed success.  All in all, it was one of my more rewarding admissions and corrections of pretention.

He did an interview/talk for the BBC program, Horizon, in 1991 (available on YouTube and embedded below) wherein he tells abridged versions of a number of the stories in his autobiographies.  If you have ten minutes, please consider giving the first video segment a shot—I’m happy I’m not missing this anymore. Read more »