OED “siphon” definition wrong for decades

If you want to find a definition, the Oxford English Dictionary is the most copied cited work, so it's no surprise to hear many, many dictionaries have the definition of "siphon" incorrect. Just like the OED did.

http://www.kidglue.com/2010/05/12/oxford-dictionary-has-been-mis-defining-siphon-for-99-years/

For the inexperienced, I recommend trying to siphon gas from your car for your lawnmower. This is how I discovered the amazing taste of gasoline, not to mention its effect on my digestive tract. Not pretty.



I think these people are being picky -- just because editors thought atmospheric pressure was how siphoning worked (instead of gravity) -- you really to have to change the atmospheric pressure on the end of the tube to get it to start.

Let the arguments begin.

Posted By: gdanea - Thu May 13, 2010 - Comments (31)
Category: Science

A Robot That Parks Cars

No, not Marvin (ref.), this one is from the Computer Science Department of Stanford University and it not only parks cars, it does so awesomely!



The only disappointment is that it doesn't come with a little row of strobing red lights on the front.

Posted By: Dumbfounded - Thu May 13, 2010 - Comments (10)
Category: Daredevils, Stuntpeople and Thrillseekers, Robots, Science, Technology, Computers, Cars

Weird Science - Towel Folding Robot

Judging by the huge response to what I thought was a fairly large and obscure post about a tiny coincidence, the Hitchhiker's Guide and cutting-edge science is obviously a winning combination.

So here is a super special Douglas Adams bonus, a robot folding towels! Okay so that's a bit of a stretch, but it is still quite cool.

Note that this video has been speeded up 50x, in real time it took the robot over an hour and a half to complete this one task. Perhaps it was feeling a little depressed?

Posted By: Dumbfounded - Sat Apr 17, 2010 - Comments (25)
Category: Boredom, Futurism, Inventions, Robots, Science, Experiments, Technology

Weird Science - Douglas Adams For The Win!

When Isaac Newton first published his laws of motion, he ushered in a new era in science where - in principle - every event could be exactly predicted if you knew the forces at work in the system accurately enough. in Newton's "clockwork universe" true randomness did not exist, since the unpredictability of an event was just a statement of your ignorance, with careful enough measurement everything from the roll of a die to the spin of a roulette wheel could be known to any degree of accuracy. Even relativity only refined, rather that displaced, Newton's deterministic new world.

That prevailing view of the universe was thrown, literally, into chaos with the advent of quantum physics, where counter-intuitive results were commonplace, effects could appear to happen before causes (or even without causes) and true randomness abounded. In an effort to return to the saner world of "classical mechanics" many physicists sought to again ascribe the apparent randomness of quantum systems to ignorance, they declared that "hidden variables" currently unknown to science had secretly determined the results. Even Einstein, whose 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect had helped found the new physics was moved to say categorically that "God does not play dice!"

But who was right? In an effort to determine this, in 1964 the physicist John Bell performed a thought experiment whereby pairs of entangled particles (ones where a particular property of the pair is known but each particle's individual contribution is not) are measured simultaneously while a great distance apart from each other. In the classical view either the results would have been determined well in advance of the measurements, in which case they should correlate perfectly, or they are separately determined by the act of measurement, in which case they should not correlate at all. Bell showed with mathematical rigour that in one particular experiment any hidden variable theory should produce a correlation of < 0.5. This became known as the Bell Inequality. At the time there was no practical way to test Bell's hypothesis, and the earliest attempts in 1972 were inconclusive, but by the 1980s the technology had matured to the point that physicists could be very confident that Bell's Inequality had been violated, at its core the quantum universe really was truly and utterly random.

But how random? Consider the quantum equivalent of a coin-toss, one that is completely fair and - as we have discovered - completely random; clearly it is equally likely to end up in only one of two states, the quantum equivalent of "heads" or "tails". We could represent each result with either a 1 or a 0, so the amount of randomness of our quantum coin is said to be "1 bit". But quantum systems are not bound to act like coins, perhaps they are more like dice or roulette wheels, perhaps a quantum system is a random as a lottery draw with literally millions of possible outcomes. It was to answer this question that a team led by S. Pironio of the Laboratoire d’Information Quantique in Brussels set up and ran their own "Bell experiment" and measured with 99% confidence just how random quantum systems are.

So how many bits of outright randomness are created by each quantum interaction? If the title didn't give it away, the answer is...



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Posted By: Dumbfounded - Fri Apr 16, 2010 - Comments (10)
Category: Ambiguity, Uncertainty and Deliberate Obscurity, Philosophy, Science, Experiments

Creative Editor Fun

Now, why would an editor assign not one but two reporters to this assignment? Sure, the Large Hadron Collider is important science, and even sexy for the layman, in its quest for the Higgs Boson--

Oh, now I get it! You want a byline of "Higgins-Borenstein" so it sounds just like the elusive particle!

"Higg-Bo" might never be another Woodward and Bernstein, but they made my day!

Posted By: Paul - Wed Mar 31, 2010 - Comments (5)
Category: Newspapers, Science, Europe

The Bagel Has Landed!

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap... to infinity and beyond!"

Those, presumably, are what 1-in-10 UK schoolchildren believe were the historic words spoken by the first man on the moon, who according to them was Buzz Lightyear.

In a survey of 1000 primary and secondary school pupils by Dr Pam Waddell of Birmingham in England, Buzz was the top incorrect answer given to the question of who was the first man on the moon, though other incorrect responses included Richard Branson, Lance Armstrong and Luke Skywalker. Another question, who invented the telephone, drew answers of Charles Darwin, Noel Edmunds and the Queen, while Isaac Newton was variously credited with discovering fire, DNA and America. The results, released just ahead of a British "National Science and Engineering Week" to promote science to schoolchildren, shows that educators there still have a long way to go (Telegraph).

(Image Source: FreeClipArtNow.com)

Posted By: Dumbfounded - Mon Mar 15, 2010 - Comments (14)
Category: Education, Humor, Science

Al Jarnow

Considering this was originally presented on a kid's show, 3-2-1-CONTACT, can't you see this video giving some poor tyke nightmares?

Posted By: Paul - Wed Feb 24, 2010 - Comments (8)
Category: Science, Television, Children, 1970s

Mystery Meat, Human Style

I was catching a bus the other day, and this box was awaiting transport. If you enlarge the photo, you can see that the label says: PLEASE RUSH/DONATED HUMAN TISSUE/NOT SUITABLE FOR TRANSPLANT.

What does one do with human tissue, if not transplant it? Perhaps create a cell-culture line? It's all very mysterious.

As I was taking the photo, a bus driver came by and joked with another employee. "What's that for--the barbecue?"

If anyone has a good explanation, please offer it in the comments!

Posted By: Paul - Mon Feb 15, 2010 - Comments (12)
Category: Body, Science, Unsolved Mysteries

More Solid When Disturbed

I learned something today about non-Newtonian liquids -- cornstarch and water!! Two different examples!!

Walking on liquid!!




Speaker activated liquid!!



An interesting collection of these on YouTube!!

What's the principle behind this?

Posted By: gdanea - Thu Feb 04, 2010 - Comments (6)
Category: Science

Weird Science - I Sing The Body Eccentric

President Obama’s recent fall in approval rating may have an unusual cause, he may possibly be too thin. In a recent study by Elizabeth Miller of the University of Missouri, voters prefer their male politicians to be portly, while women representatives should be more wasp-waisted. In an experiment involving 120 volunteers, people were asked to assess fictitious male and female candidates from a brief bio and a picture, crucially two pictures of each candidate were used, a natural one and one manipulated to portray the person as overweight. People shown the heavier male scored him an average 10% higher for reliability, honesty, dependability and inspiration than his thinner doppelganger, but this relationship was reversed in the woman candidate. In the journal Obesity, Miller puts this down to societal expectation and stereotyping (Telegraph).

Social pressure also crops up in explaining another finding this week, this one by Meridith Young of McMaster University in Ontario, that what single women eat depends a lot on whom they are eating with. After covertly monitoring the canteen behaviour of 470 undergraduates, Young found that women significantly lowered their calorie intake when sat with men compared with all women groups. Moreover, the more men a woman sat with, the less on average she consumed. In the journal Appetite, she puts the discrepancy down to women unconsciously advertising themselves to men, adding "the salad leaves are meant to say, I'm pretty, I'm attractive, I take care of myself" (Guardian).

Of course, we all know what men really like in a woman; that she not appear too powerful. Or so says a study by Brian Meier and Sarah Dionne of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. In the study, eighty 19 year-olds were asked to rate the attractiveness of a number of images presented in random order, some of which would be repeated. In fact the subjects saw each image twice, once near the top of the screen and once low down. The researchers found that men rated women 1.8% more attractive when observed near the bottom, and women found men 1.5% better looking when higher up. They suggest that their findings might explain why men are taller than their women partners more frequently than would be expected by chance (Times of India).

As to what women really like in men, perhaps not being British should be somewhere on the list. After champagne controversially lost out to an English wine earlier this week, French scientists have hit back at British research that concluded that the mythical “G-spot” did not exist. “Of course it exists,” say French gynaecologists, “you just can’t find it!” The original study by King’s College in London looked at over 900 pairs of identical or non-identical twins in the expectation that the identical siblings should both report having a G-spot more frequently than the others, they did not. The French however claim their cross-channel colleagues have got the wrong end of the speculum, “It is not a question of genetics but of use," said one (Telegraph).



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Posted By: Dumbfounded - Wed Feb 03, 2010 - Comments (6)
Category: Babies, Cosmetics, Exercise and Fitness, Politics, Science, Anthropology, Experiments, Psychology, Sexuality, Divorce, Obesity