The Leidenfrost effect: More proof that science is cool

I had never heard of the Leidenfrost effect before, but I must say it is kind of cool (well hot actually).  It is basically this, when a liquid comes in contact with something that is significantly hotter than its boiling point, it produces an insulating vapor.  This vapor barrier keeps the liquid from getting hot and boiling.  Usually as a liquid boils it bubbles off in all directions.  However, because of the Leidenfrost effect and surface tension, the liquid can stay on (actually floating just above) the hot surface for much longer than usual.  The folks at the University of Bath used this effect and a set of etched saw tooth patterns to make water move in a certain direction.  Using this, they can get water droplets to actually move up hill.  They created a track that uses this effect to guide water droplets around a course.  It makes me think the whole thing is a sort of Escher drawing where water magically circulates around a closed track.  Check out the video below.
   

The same effect was used by the Mythbusters to allow them to do something really crazy in the video below.  They dunked their hand into molten lead.  No, really... molten lead.  Quite bizarre and interesting.

oh... and kids... this probably isn't something to try at home.   

Popular Science shuts off comments - a sad day for the internet and our species

We are breaking the Internet.  I'm not talking about some technical problem that will cause the volume of data to keep us from being able to download Netflix videos in HD.  I'm not talking about the fact that there are millions of new iPhones clogging up the cell towers.  No, I'm talking about us -- you, me and everyone -- ruining the ideal of the Internet.  We are breaking the very value proposition that makes the Internet the awesome thing that it could be.  The Internet has feet of clay.

For me, the big letdown started with filter bubbles.  In the early 90s, I was completely bought in to the idea that the Internet would bring us together.  It would become this great democratizing force that would give everyone a voice.  Free flowing information would break down barriers across societal boundaries.  It was going to be awesome.  Well, it has had some of that effect, but more recently it has also had a segregating effect.  Filter bubbles allow people to live in a world on the internet created just for them.  The Internet is adapting to show them only the information that is relevant to them, and in the process limiting the free flow of information.  Instead of hear about a lot of diverse opinions, complex analytics engines on far away servers whir away to make sure that I only get server content that is "relevant" to me.  My data is filtered to assure, among other things, that I will see information that I agree with.  I will tend to find more people who have the same opinion as me.  Rather than exposing me to more new ideas, it will reinforce my current beliefs.  I can live in a filter bubble with other people like me (who I can find now much more easily than in the pre-Internet world) and we can go on happily reinforcing our views and ignoring anything that might challenge us.  A TED talk on this topic by Eli Pariser explains the problem.

Today, the Internet took the next step down a long, lonely road of self destruction.  Popular Science announced that they were shutting off the user comments on their web site.  In a well written piece published today entitled "Why We're Shutting Off Our Comments," they explain why they feel compelled to stop allowing the general public to comment on their articles.  It basically boils down to trolls; people who post derogatory or inflammatory comments for whatever reason.  Rather than sane discourse, people post comments to sway or influence in spite of contrary facts.

Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. 

They quote Brossard and Scheufele who wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times claiming that comments on web stories influence people's interpretation of the validity of the original story.  They want the scientific merits of their stories to stand on their own, not be influenced by any crazy person with a keyboard.  Rather than getting into a potentially biased process of editing users comments, they've taken the difficult decision to shut down all comments for everyone.

Really?  Seriously?

Lets just think about this for a second folks.  This is Popular Science, not some high brow scientific journal.  It is stories about flying cars and Mars colonies.  They bring interesting scientific trends and their implications to all of us.  They exist to inspire us, not to provide a platform for debate.  Yet, they find themselves so besieged with spam and misinformation that they feel compelled to cut off comments.  Do people really think that they can change facts by ignoring them or denying them?  This seems to me like a rather short term strategy because ultimately the truth will come out.  This isn't the democratization that the Internet was supposed to bring us, is it?  Please, can we focus on educating each other rather than fighting?  Can we reason with each other instead of arguing without evidence?  I feel sorry for the people at Popular Science.  And I feel sorry for us all.

Come on folks we're better than this.  I know we are smart enough to handle the power of this Internet thing, after all, we were smart enough to invent it (or was that just Al Gore?  I forget).  It is a very powerful tool and we really need to use it to make ourselves smarter, not misinform and obfuscate.  If you can't play nice, I'm going to pull the car over and come back there.  Don't tempt me because I will!  Right now I need everyone to take a deep breath and count to ten.  Now more than ever, it is up to you.  To counteract this ugliness in the world, I need all of you Digital Diner readers to redouble your efforts to build cool stuff, inspire each other and make the Internet a great place for us all.  It's the only way to keep the world safe for awesomeness.  It's up to you!  Let's go!

Making the Wizard of Oz 3D

Back a 10+ years ago, I spent some time at Warner Brothers studios trying to convince them that they should convert to all digital.  The idea of storing images on film seems so arcane.  After seeing how they worked and thinking about it, I changed my mind.  While production and post processing/editing make sense in digital, film is a wonderful archiving medium.  As we talked about recently, digital is not the best way to store something for an unspecified length of time because it isn't clear what format will be most compatible with future systems.  You can always pick up a piece of film and look at it.  There will always be a way to view it.

I'm really glad that they had the Wizard of Oz on film because Warner Brothers has been busy restoring it and converting it to 3D.  They have a rather manual process for converting from 2D to 3D (not like the system we recently talked about), but the results will certainly impress.  They had over 1300 people working on it by hand for 14 months.  The movie itself is a little over 100 minutes long.  At 24 per frames per second, that works out to less than 150,000 frames or a little over 100 frames per person.  I'm pretty sure that I could make 100 frames look pretty good in 14 months.  No news about whether or not they listened to Pink Floyd while working on it (you should try this).

The video below gives a hint about how the 3D process worked.

More information available here and here.

..and with Dark Side of the Moon below

Bohemian Gravity

This song is really geeky and quite epic.  Science and music in package that is destined to become a classic.  Very impressive.  As one of the comments says, this is like Graduate Schoolhouse Rock.  I mean... it's like one unified theory of everything all wrapped up in a song.  Awesome!  Listen and learn.

 

Revisiting Fibonacci in nature

Lots of our readers enjoy Vi Hart and her amazing videos on the beauty of mathematics.  One particular favorite was the video on Fibonacci numbers.  She has since followed up with a few more on the topic that attempt to explain why it is that we find Fibonacci in nature.  I find this video from Vi Hart especially fascinating when combined with the second video from Etérea studios.  The world is quite an amazing place, don't you think?

Extracting 3D objects from images

If this is for real, it is very impressive.  It is from a presentation at the SIGGRAPH conference, so I presume it is real...  In the video below, some folks have come up with a technique for extracting 3D objects from 2D images.  Not worrying about the fact that it is impossible (since there is no way to know what is on the far side of an object in a 2D image), they appear to have used a set of techniques from photo editing programs like Photoshop, combined with modeling techniques from programs like Blender to allow you to create three dimensional computer models of objects from two dimensional images.  This technique is limited to symmetrical objects, but it certainly opens up exciting possibilities.  The future is sure to be an exciting and interesting place.

America's Cup - Catch it before it ends

Last weekend we went to see the America's Cup.  It was a beautiful day, and it was amazing to watch the boats fly across the water.  It is one of those things that I've wanted to do since I was a kid.  Oracle Team USA is defending the title they won three years ago.  The winner of the recent Louis Vuitton Cup, Emirates Team New Zealand race series is the challenger for oldest continuously contested trophy in sports.  Unfortunately the races were a little underwhelming.  New Zealand led from the first mark to the end on both races Saturday.  Sunday was quite a bit more exciting with New Zealand and USA splitting the two races.  Today New Zealand won another race.  The Kiwis are looking very strong.  I still think that the Red Bull Youth America's Cup series with ten boats racing at a time was much more impressive to watch.  That was exciting racing!  

While it is amazing to see the America's Cup spectacle in real life, the television coverage is quite outstanding.  The video below shows the technology involved in TV coverage which is available on YouTube.  They are able to track incredible amounts of live telemetry and turn it into things like overlays on the screen that show a grid, not unlike a football field, in the San Francisco Bay.  When you watch in person, you have to interpret all of this yourself.  In some ways, the TV coverage is much easier to follow.

Raspberry Pi Micro MiniMac almost solves my problem (why digital data isn't always good for archiving)

This could ALMOST solve a recent problem we had here at Digital Diner.
A fellow named John has built a magical little masterpiece.  It is a Raspberry Pi-based micro Macintosh.  It is a 1/3 scale replica of the original Mac... you know, the 1984 one.  It actually runs Mac OS 6, which is quite amazing.  It is quite small and quite cute.

It is a great piece of work and the result is pretty impressive.  The case is packed with a Raspberry Pi, a power supply, a small display and a USB hub.  While the disk drive is not real, this Mac has a color display, USB and Ethernet, which the original didn't.  Plus it is based on a $35 computer... I think my original Mac was $1800 (in 1984 dollars).

Now to the problem that this almost solved.  A while ago, one of Monika's advisors contacted her to see if they could get some of the data from her PhD thesis.  Now I don't think that data is, um, well, really old.  We tried to figure out where it might be and decided that it was probably on an old Mac SE in the garage (see? you should never throw anything away).  Well, I pulled it out and fired it up and after many years of being ignored, it fired right up.  There was a Y2K bug, so I had to set the clock back to 1999, but otherwise the system just worked.  Strangely, it seemed to boot much faster than any of my modern machines.  After taking a little trip down memory lane and then wandering through the disk drive for a bit, we were able to track down the data that had been requested.  So far, so good.

This is where the problem began.  You see, we found the data file and could even fire up a program to look at the values, but the next step was a bit of a problem.  How do we get the data off this old Mac?  I found some old floppies, so I could copy the data there, but then what?  I don't have any way to get data from a 3.5" floppy onto a modern machine.  Maybe I could connect it to the network?  Nope.  The only network this thing supported was AppleTalk, which was a glorified serial port.  Maybe I could plug a flash drive into the USB port?  Nope... no USB port.

So even though the Mac fired up and ran amazingly well, and even though we found the data, there was no way to get it to a modern computer.  Still, the problem could have been worse.  It was promising that at least the data was in a format that could be read by Excel.  If it was in some old, unsupported database format or something like that, there would have been very little hope.

As it turned out, before I had to reverse engineer AppleTalk, they found another source for the data, and I was off the hook.  Still, this whole process got me thinking.  Digital data seems wonderful for archiving because it doesn't change over time, but really it has some significant problems.  First is the issue that bits are volatile and they can be lost.  We were lucky that this computer booted at all after decades of non-use.  Second is that the breakneck speed of change in the computer industry has led us to changing standards that cause many devices (and their data) to become orphaned.  My Mac SE still runs, but it is an island.  I can't figure out any good way to get it to interact with modern computers (without committing to a lot of work).  We are rapidly speeding away from storing our data on rotating disks of rust and moving to solid state drives.  How long will it be until computers with Ethernet can't be connected because everyone uses wireless?  How long until we stop storing images as .jpg files, or (a more immediate concern) software stops supporting my old DSLR's raw image format?

What will archeologists discover when they dig through our stuff many thousands of years from now?  Will they be able to learn anything about our society?  Will they be able to resurrect YouTube to find out the cat worshiping people that we were?  Or will they be left with unrecognizable petrified hard drives with no explanation of what they meant to us; no idea of the secrets they contained?

I once spoke to Brewster Kahle about this.  His internet archive project is a truly outstanding piece of work, but he knows that even if he could be successful at archiving every piece of information on the network, he still has the problem of changing data formats that may render it all obsolete.  The data we archive needs to be taken care of and kept alive.  Storage isn't enough.

This is why I appreciate it when people resurrect old systems, as with the old version of Mac OS above.  It is a service to us all that they keep history alive.  So while this little 1/3 scale Mac didn't make it possible to retrieve Monika's thesis data, it represents a step toward keeping our digital legacy alive.  To that I say Thank You!

Read more information about the Mini Mac project here.

Hold on to your phone, don't send it to heaven, and why accelerometers don't really measure acceleration.

Here's a little advice.  Hold on to your phone.  There has been some discussion at work recently about an app that encourages you to throw your phone in the air.  When you do, it tells you how high you threw it. That's it.  Of course, it tells you how you did compared to others, thus encouraging you to throw your phone higher and higher until... well... I would image this story rarely ends well.  Eventually I would think either the smartphone isn't caught and it splatters on the concrete, or worse, it hits an unwitting bystander on the head.  The app is called SMTH which stands for "Send Me To Heaven," and it seems to be gaining popularity.  Resist!  I must say that I do love the quote in the marketing of this app, “Probably the last game I´ll ever play on my current phone.”  Someone is having fun.

Still, it is interesting to understand how this application works.  Some of you may assume that the GPS is used to track the altitude of the phone when you throw it, but this is not the case.  GPSes are notoriously bad at calculating altitude, so they cannot be accurate enough to measure a throw of a meter or two.  Most phones have no altimeter.  So how do they measure how high the phone is thrown?  It turns out that they use accelerometers and the same principle that makes astronauts experience weightlessness on the International Space Station, even though they are in orbit and very much under the effects of Earth's gravity (Disclosure: the truth is that I have no information about how they do it, but I know how I did it a few years ago and it is all about accelerometers).   You can learn a little bit about how accelerometers work in the little video I put together for you on part of this subject.

To understand how this is used to calculate height of a thrown smartphone, you'll have to read on...

The Perseid meteor shower is really just bugs on our windshield

Perseid meteors over the ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile - Photo: S. Guisard

Nature is putting on a show and you are invited.  Every year at about this spot in the Earth's orbit, we run into some debris in space. We move through a cloud of rocks and ice (which are remnants left behind comet Swift-Tuttle long ago) much the same way that a car driving through a swarm of bugs on the highway may get a few on its windshield.  Fortunately for us, the splat made by this debris is much more interesting to look at and not something we need to clean off next time we stop at the service station.  Instead, these bits are vaporized as they hit the atmosphere, and they leave behind lovely trails that we call the Perseid meteor shower.  Don't worry, this space stuff is pretty small, so none of it will make it to the surface - there isn't anything to worry about - there is just a lovely view.

To see this light show best, find a dark place, away from city lights.  You don't need a telescope or binoculars.  The best tool for watching this show is just your naked eyes.  Lie on your back and look up (I like imagining that I'm floating in space and the entire Earth is my giant backpack, but that is just me).  It can take about 30 minutes for your eyes to fully adjust to the darkness.  You should start to see shooting stars... as many as 50 per hour.  Go on and give it a try.  The peaks from August 11-13, so don't miss it.  ...and to all you space dust particles from Swift-Tuttle, watch out for that big blue marble headed toward you!