Golden eggs

I just got back from visiting my lovely lady counterpart in Germany. In lieu of describing the whole trip, here is a photo of a gold-plated silver chicken.

Click here and see if you can find this guy. Hint: he's smaller than the average rooster.

Many, many more photos, presented with no context at all, are present here.  Nope, that link is no longer operational. Photos available upon request.

Do you have a second?

Every 15 minutes, someone averages a sum of events over an arbitrary period of time. No, I don't have a citation for that. It's standard practice to assume that frequencies are infrequently constant yet are much easier to understand if we can apply some kind of linear assumptions to them. That's perfectly fine, especially when we don't really know when the event in question is more or less likely to happen. This approach is used in science and medical journalism with the intent of breaking down impossibly huge numbers (i.e., 50 thousand deaths due to Ocelot Fever) into something more human-readable.

The problem arises when the level of granularity imposed by averaging over time obfuscates the reasons why the events happen at all. If MADD tells us that "In 2011, 9,878 people died in drunk driving crashes - one every 53 minutes", what do we really learn? That single number, (9,878 deaths / 53 minutes) is so specific that it disregards critical time-related factors like the weekend.*

I was planning to do an XKCD-inspired bit of Googling** and search for results of a few arbitrary frequencies to find out what happens at those times, every time. The results are too ghastly to share as most of the assumed events involve death, dismemberment, or assault. So, for the sake of diversity, I'll pull a few numbers from everysecond.info instead:

• Every second, Johnny Depp makes $2.92. The guy makes $92 million a year. Economists do use hourly pay or yearly salary to estimate how much an individual's time is worth, such that any period of time is "worth" however much they would have earned had they spent it working for pay. This can lead to some rather ludicrous estimates when inappropriately applied. We know Johnny Depp isn't actually working continuously despite his numerous sources of income. Even so, a number like $2.92/sec doesn't really provide us with any context to Mr. Depp's economic situation.
• Every second, 194 videos are watched on Myspace. What a perfect example! The statistic is from 2009. Some big changes have happened since then. Even so, it's fun to imagine Myspace users draining what's left of their attenuated attention spans on single-second videos. Hundreds of them every second!
• Every second, cows emit 250 kgs of methane in the United States. It's already difficult to imagine what a single kilogram of methane looks like,*** much less how what happens to it when the next second's round of methane arrives. Even so, cows don't continuously emit methane and they may emit more or less of it depending on what they're eating. Those factors can't even be considered when we break things down into seconds or even hours. If I observe a cow swish its tail three hundred times in an hour, perhaps I can safely claim 5 tail swishes per minute. Expanding the observation to a thousand cows over the course of months or years would render per-minute or per-second estimates useless without a greater knowledge of the relationship between cow tails and time.

All I'm saying is that averaging massive numbers over time is misleading at best and dangerously myopic at worst. These are situations best handled by probabilities, not solid quantities and linear relationships. Averaging such an immense quantity over such a small period of time distorts our understanding of both quantities.


*This paper's thesis in brief: young people like to drink for fun on the weekends. To be fair, the study subjects were Swiss rather than the usual Americans. I'll refrain from griping about social science research for now.

**I have this nagging suspicion that this actually was an XKCD piece at some point. If so, go read that again too. It was probably pretty entertaining.

***250 kg of methane is 375 thousand liters, if that helps.

Get well soon

Here is a use for one of the strange but inevitable results of modern society: singing greeting cards. The materials in one of those cards, plus a cheap resistor and capacitor, are enough to assemble a perfectly usable pulse sensor. The original paper suggests that this off-the-shelf solution could be used in an educational setting. 

A little Googling shows that a number of pulse sensors are available or can be made for all kinds of platforms.

• This one is intended for use with Arduino. Total cost is ~$25, not counting whatever it's attached to.
• For comparison, this one is a more clinical model. I can only imagine how much it costs.
• This setup uses an optical approach instead of a piezoelectric one. It seems like overkill, possibly because the signal requires a lot of amplification.

I'm imagining an art project in which a viewer's heart rate changes the intensity of lights in a room or turns certain appliances (i.e., a fan or a radio) on or off at certain rate thresholds. Even something like a cheap knock-off of this bike helmet seems entirely feasible. 

More like "Nope! Share, Fool!"

It's worrisome to see politics bleed into science. It's even more alarming to see sources of scientific funding dry up because they don't fit a specific agenda. The National Science Foundation, under directive from Congress, recently cut off funding for political science research except for that "promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States." It's a rather general guideline for a specific field. It also reveals how legislators feel about the role of any science and when it deserves to be funded: we want results, we want them now, and we want we certainly don't need any context.


The NSF spent more than $7 billion last year. It's where 20 percent of the money for federally-funded research in the US comes from. That total goes a long way and contributes to numerous fields, from engineering to education. It's only a matter of time before some Congressman decides an entire field of research doesn't need federal funding at all.