12/16/09  Pair of Hearts

      True or false? In the U.S. most people who get married don't divorce, yet most marriages end in divorce. Is it even possible?

      Let's examine this proposition with a hypothetical small town of Wedville which has only 14 people, 7 men and 7 women. Let's say they all get married, that's 7 marriages. (We assume conventional marriage, no Mormons or the like.) The next year three couples divorce, and then remarry different partners. Now there's been 10 marriages.

      The following year the three remarried couples get divorced while the 4 couples that didn't divorce before stay married. Now there have been 6 divorces out of 10 marriages. Yet 8 of the 14 people of Wedville that got married stayed married. Meaning most people who get married don't divorce (8 of 14) while most marriages end in divorce (6 of 10).

      So we know it's possible, is it true? It is true. In the U.S. most people who get married don't divorce, while most marriages end in divorce. Which means both anti-marriage folks and pro-marriage folks have bullet points in their favor. It's the miracle of statistics. Or rather the wonder of spin. Then again, maybe it's good old everyday...

      Card stacking and the fallacy of exclusion (suppressed quantification): using selected evidence to make one's side look favorable, or omitting evidence that would undermine an argument.

      This is card stacking as in stacking the deck, not building a house of cards. Though if the "evidence" you've stacked is a laundry list of other fallacies your solidly stacked deck might well be as flimsy as a house of cards.

11/4/09  Galileo Was Wrong?

      The Earth doesn't orbit around the sun. At least not strictly speaking. They orbit each other. It's just that the gravity of the Earth has close to no effect on the motion of the sun.

      Imagine it this way, say you have a star and a planet the same size. In this case the equal mass of each will effect the motion of each other equally. The orbital center of this system will be a point midway between the two so they orbit each other. Now then, shrink the planet down and the center point gets closer to the star. Shrink it way down and the point of mutual orbit is somewhere inside the star.

      Now, the Earth isn't very big compared to the sun. Big old Jupiter is a different story. Its gravity not only effects the movement of the sun, but the movement of every other planet in the solar system. In fact, all the planets effect each other so the center of the solar system changes depending on the position of all the planets and the sun.

      This is called the barycenter of the solar system, the average center of mass of all the bits. In the end, everything sort-of orbits everything else in what's called barycentric orbits. Sometimes the barycenter is inside the sun, and at other times away from the sun. So, the sun is at the center of the solar system, but it isn't the center of the solar system.

10/6/09  Watt is Moving

      Even though we use electricity, rarely do we use it directly as electricity. By which I mean electricity is converted to some other type of energy to be usefull to us. Such as coverting it to light energy with a lightbulb. Or to mechanical energy with a motor as in a fan, pump or compressor. Or to sound waves with a speaker. Or to heat energy with a stovetop or oven.

      There are very few uses for electricity as electicity outside of stun guns, electrified fences and crash cart paddles. Even though the work done with your computer is all electrical, you can't much use it unless it is converted to light energy on your monitor or mechanical energy with your printer or sound waves with a speaker.

      Consider the other end of electricity, the source. Thing is, there are no direct sources of electricity, no vast electrical fields or reserviors that can simply be tapped into. Electricity must be generated. Other than photovoltaics this is done mechanically with dynamos. Turning a dynamo can be done with falling water or moving air. Though usually it's done with a source of heat powering a steam turbine. Most often the heat comes from combustion of fuel, usually coal or gas. Even a nuclear reactor generates heat for steam turbines turning dynamos.

      You could say electricity isn't a source of energy, but a way to transport energy. It starts out as heat or mechanical energy, flows to your home as electricity and is converted to mechanical, light, heat, or whatever energy that you can actually use. Without it we'd be back to fireplaces, candles, hand cranks and wind-up springs. Or maybe lots of little steam engines on every appliance.

7/31/09  Our Neighbor to the South

      If you head due south from Detroit across the Michigan border you'll arrive, not in Ohio, but in Canada. Windsor, Ontario to be specific. Just one of those geographical quirks where a bit of Ontario over Lake Erie sticks under the "thumb" of Michigan's lower peninsula.

      If you drive by car from Detroit to Canada you can go over the border under the Detroit River by tunnel, or over the water by the Ambassador Bridge. What might surprise you, the bridge is privately owned by one Manuel Moroun. You might wonder how a private citizen owns an international bridge. Well, because it wasn't a public project to begin with, it was a private enterprise from the git-go. It still is.

      So the old gag about selling the Brooklyn Bridge to some bumpkin doesn't work for the Ambassador Bridge. You might actually be able to buy it. Just be sure you're dealing with Manny Moroun and not some "Realtor" working out of the trunk of his car.

7/9/09  Blimey, Limey! C Asea, See?

      Despite their reputation, citrus fruits are not an especially rich source of vitamin C. Many green vegetables, like broccoli to name one, have more. Eating citrus fruits for vitamin C can be attributed to the English navy.

      Back in the old days of sailing ships, none of which had refrigeration or AC, it took a long time to get from place to place and so there wasn't a lot of perishable produce on board, just a lot of salted meat, hard stale biscuits, and whatever it was that made gruel. To help sailors stomach this dubious diet they also had generous lashings of rum. This limited menu led to scurvy, a vitamin C deficiency.

      When they figured out the cure, fresh fruits and vegetables, they settled on limes because they would last without spoiling a lot longer than, say, broccoli. Limes are thick skinned and contain citric acid, both helping to maintain freshness. The choice of limes was about shelf-life rather than the amount of vitamin C provided.

      Anyway, all that lime eating is how English sailors got nicknamed limeys. Whether they fancied the sobriquet or not I can't say, but I'm pretty sure avoiding scurvy was a good trade-off if they didn't.

6/3/09  Smaller Than Bigger Than Life

      If you're a history buff perhaps you've been watching the PBS series WWII Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West. As you may know, Joseph Stalin translates as Joe Steel in English. Which might explain his iron fisted rule. All the same it was a pseudonym. A sort-of street name revolutionaries often adopted.

      His given name, depending on your source, was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, Joseph Vissarionvich Djvugashvili or Joseph David Djugashvili. I can only imagine the disagreement comes from translating Cyrillic spelling to Roman spelling. You know, how CCCP equates to SSSR which we further alter to USSR.

      All the same, there is something wrong with the casting in the series, and perhaps with some folks perception of Stalin. The actor playing Stalin is a big man, Stalin was not. Take a look at the following picture.

      In the pic, Stalin, Churchill and Truman all look to be about the same size. Truman and Churchill were shorter than average, they were not big men. Stalin was not a big man, a burly Russian bear. In fact, he wasn't Russian. Stalin was born in Georgia, the country not the state.

      So, while his reputation might be bigger than life, in real life he was just life-sized.

5/11/09  BIG and small

      Upper case and lower case are pretty well-known terms for anyone dealing in type or the written word. You know, CAPITAL LETTERS and non-capital letters. Have you ever wondered where those terms come from, what they refer to? Here's the answer whether you've ever wondered or not.

      It all goes back to the big breakthrough in printing, moveable type. Gutenberg's big invention was not the printing press itself, but standardized, individual letters on little metal blocks that could be assembled into any text. This way you could print a Bible or a do-it-yourself book with the same bits by rearranging them without having to start over from scratch.

      These letters were stored and organized in wooden cases with a series of partitions making cubby holes for each particular letter. These were standardized so typesetters could find what they needed with all the capitals in the upper part and all the non-capitals in the lower part. Hence upper and lower case.

      Now a bit of minutiae you may not have considered. If you've played around with typefaces you may have noticed some fonts look smaller at the same point size compared to other fonts. That's because they are, even though they ain't. Which sounds like gibberish, but I can explain.

      Above are the letters "I, x, p" in 80 point type. The first font is Humanist and the second is Helvetica. As you can see, if you set them on the same base line both the upper case and the lower case letters are taller in Helvetica. But point size isn't measured that way. It goes from the bottom of the descender, the tail of the "p" to the top of the ascender, the top of the "I".

      When you line them up like that, they are the same size. You will notice the lower case "x" in each are different sizes. This is referred to as the x-height of the font. A typeface with a smaller x-height will look, or read smaller than a font with a bigger x-height even when they're the same point size.

      If you're interested, you can read about the another built-in optical illusion of type here.

4/14/09  Taxing Time

      April 15th looms and the IRS is expecting your check is in the mail. You might be thinking this is money down the drain you'll never see again. Maybe, maybe not.

      Social Security began in 1935 and Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Virginia was the first to receive monthly Social Security benefits. Retiring at the age of 65, she began collecting checks in January 1940. Ida paid a total of $24.75 into the system and lived to be 100 years old. During her lifetime she collected $22,888.92. Which might not seem like a lot but represents a 90,000% return on her "investment".

      In a strange way you might think of Social Security as reverse inheretance. Instead of the older generation providing for the younger, it's the other way around.

3/27/09  Time to Rain

      Not only do oceans have tides, there are tides in the air, too. After all, both are huge fluid bodies covering the Earth. Just like sea tides, atmospheric tides are caused by gravitational pull from the sun and the moon.

      As the Earth turns the tides migrate causing changes in atmospheric pressure. It's why there is more rainfall around 4AM and 4PM in the tropics than any other time. This effect on rain times gets later the father north you go. This is why it seems so often you get late afternoon showers.

      These tides are the one effect on weather regular as clockwork and for well-known reasons. Even so, the weathercasters on tv can't predict what time it will rain or even if it will rain or not with total accuracy. They hedge their bets with predictions like "a 70% chance of rain." But why 70%? Ever wonder where they get that number?

      Forecasts like those are calculated by the National Weather Service by comparing all other days in their historical database with the same weather characteristics (temperature, pressure, humidity, etc.) and determine on similar days in the past it rained 70% of the time.

3/13/09  Better with Butter

      Vegetables are not only tastier with butter, they're better for you. That's because many essential vitamins and carotenes in fruits and veggies are fat-soluble. The bioavailability of alpha-carotene, beta-carotene, and lycopene is increased when salads are eaten with yummy full-fat dressing. Studies show up to a 15-times increase compared to salads with the funny-tasting fat-free variety.

      Add to that the nutrients in many fruits, vegetables and grains are more bioavailable when cooked compared to eaten raw. Plus, high fiber diets reduce the absorption of nutrients in foods. While many extol the virtues of dietary fibers and whole grains while snubbing white, refined foods, this is mostly modern folk medicine short on science.

2/24/09  Whale of an Animal

      One of the biggest animals ever to live on Earth is a gargantuan creature that's around today, the blue whale.

      Unlike the biggest land-based beast, the elephant, the blue whale isn't a vegetarian but a meat-eater. And it eats a lot of animal flesh, if you can call it that, consuming vast quantities of krill, a tiny shrimp-like sea creature. Though it might be thousands of times bigger than a mouse, it doesn't eat thousands of times as much to get so big. It's just one of those wonders of nature that the bigger you get the less food per pound you need to live.

      You gotta figure the biggest animal would live in the sea. After all, it doesn't need to use a lot of energy holding itself up with muscle power. Instead all that tonage is supported by water with bouyancy. It's kinda like living in a weightless environment.

2/5/09  Lots of Bang for the Buck

      Pound for pound, gasoline contains 15 times more energy than TNT. Which might not be the main reason we don't drive TNT powered cars, but it's a good one.

      Perhaps you're wondering how that compares to, say, the high-quality batteries used in cellphones and laptops? Electric batteries have only 1 percent of the energy of an equal weight of gas. While they're rechargeable, they typically die after 1,000 charges. If you include the cost of recharging and replacement, they're more expensive to use than gasoline.

      Maybe you're thinking hydrogen fuel has more energy per pound. It does, but less per gallon. In liquid form hydrogen has 25% as much energy per gallon as gasoline, though it weighs less. However, to be liquid hydrogen must be kept at -253° Celsius (-423° F). Not very convenient.

      The biggest problem with hydrogen, it can't simply be pumped out of the ground. There are no ready supplies of the stuff, it has to be manufactured either from water by electrolysis or from natural gas. With electrolysis you can only get back the same energy you put in. This makes a fuel-cell car similar to a battery powered car, it has to be charged up.

      By contrast, the energy in gasoline is built-in when you get it out of the ground. That's why gas is so cheap and easy to use.