Aug 15
lindsayrgwattScience
I live in New York City, where you can’t go more than about 150 feet without hitting a road. I’m from Canada where you can go up to the North and there are no roads for at least a hundred kilometers (see my earlier post on the ice fields in Auyuittuq park). So what about the U.S.? How far can you go before you hit a road?
Turns out, not that far. According to this article, the farthest you can go in landlocked America is 20 miles, and it’s in the southeastern corner of Yellowstone:
Apparently in Louisiana there are some swamps that preclude road building and it’s the part of the country where technically you can get the furthest from a road:
Jul 18
lindsayrgwattScience Earth, Space
Check out this video NASA has made of the moon orbiting the Earth. It’s taken from 31 million miles away and will hopefully help scientists identify planets in other solar systems that might be similar to Earth.
Here’s a screen grab from the movie showing the moon over Africa:
Jun 29
adminScience
A recent Wired article cites the following:
The pitches in musical scales are likely derived from language. Turns out, aspects of spoken English and Mandarin correlate to the intervals between notes in a chromatic scale (the black and white piano keys in an octave).
Unfortunately, there’s nothing more than this offered as proof. What a bold statement to make but then not back up. Anyone out there know anything about this or where to get more details on this?
Jun 23
adminScience Complexity, Prediction, Science
One of the most fascinating scientific developments of the past 20 years has been the emergence of the field of complexity. With the advent of computers, scientists can now model massively complex systems – many of which tend to form from remarkably simple interactions.
A case in point was revealed in a New York Times article on cellphone tracking. The article summarized a recent letter to Nature magazine, understanding individual human mobility patterns (PDF). Previous studies of human mobility had used the sighting of banknotes in the same geography (via Where’s George) as a proxy for human mobility. The conclusion: humanity’s movement was random, following a fat-tailed Levy distribution (a lot of movements of short distances but more long distance movements than you’d expect).
However, the new study actually tracked people’s movements based upon their cellphones (data was anonymized and from a European provider who is required by law to track). What’s the new conclusion: humans don’t actually travel too far on average and our movements are actually highly predictable (Not too surprising given how much of your time is spent at work or home).
How do you reconcile the random movement of money with the predictable movement of humans? Simple “dollar bills diffuse, but humans do not” – the dollar bills do not travel with each human daily, rather are passed on. As a result a bunch of humans who do very predictable things can cause apparently random patterns to emerge in the movement of money. This is a classic example of complexity: a series of simple actions create a ridiculously complex pattern at an aggregate level.
Fascinating science and kind of makes me want to be an undergrad again.
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