To whoever just found my blog by Googling the question “What if my child fails ISTEP science?”:
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing happens, anywhere, to anyone.
No one cares.
The end.
Tag: SCIENCE!
Reblog: Ducks and Horses
Ducks and Horses
A certain amount of nonsense has been written about duck-sized horses and horse-sized ducks, and it’s time to set the record straight.
In an online Q&A session back in August, President Obama was asked, “Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?” The Atlantic wrote a cheerful article about Obama’s choice (horse-sized duck), but the biologists they hastily recruited as fact-checkers were obviously operating outside their specialty. I feel it’s rather a shame Obama staffers neglected to consult me, as that question was, in essence, my PhD topic; I could have given the President better advice, and explained why his intuition—that a single giant duck would be an easier fight—is wrong, wrong, wrong.
The Fight
Ground rules: in the immortal tradition of Flash Gordon or Star Trek, the President finds himself alone in an arena, armed only with what he can improvise (“Your drones will not help you now, Mr President”). He’s faced with two doors: behind each are the opponent(s) he must defeat in order to, I don’t know, save the Earth. Which should he choose?
Horse-Sized Duck
A good-sized horse weighs 500 kg, or half a metric ton. What would a half-tonne duck look like, exactly? The problem is most people aren’t thinking of the biological scaling laws, known as allometry, that come into play when you make animals larger or smaller. While I’m sure John Eadie, the conservation ecologist quoted by The Atlantic, knows his field, he’s just wrong to imagine a giant duck would be dealing terrible blows with its enormous wings. It would be flightless, and its wings would be reduced to tiny stubs or have vanished altogether.
The closest thing to half-tonne ducks we have in the fossil record are Gastornis, sometimes known as Diatryma, from Europe and North America, and the dromornithids of Australia. Both were gigantic moa-sized birds, related to ducks and geese, with huge sturdy legs and gigantic sharp beaks. They’re sometimes thought to be scavengers or fruit-eaters, but were likely predators similar to the better-known but unrelated phorusrachids of South America. Dromornis stirtoni, one of the largest birds ever, approached 500 kg and has even been nicknamed “the demon duck of doom” by Australian paleontologists, in their playful way.
Duck-Sized Horses
What’s a typical duck? I had to measure many, many duck bones to come up with a model for estimating body mass from femur diameter. There are over 100 species of ducks, and they range from less than 300 g (10 ounces) to about 4 kg (9 lbs); the “average duck” weighs about 700 g, the same as a guinea pig. That’s smaller than you would think, but more of a bird’s volume is made up of feathers than most people realise, now that we no longer pluck our own game.
What would a duck-sized horse look like? The smallest horse that springs to mind for most people is the ancestral Eohippus, famously “fox-terrier” sized, but actually about 30 kg according to more recent models (such as MacFadden’s in his 1994 book on fossil horses), so about 40 times too large for our purposes. When we scale animals up and down in size, allometry—the laws of physics—has far more effect on their appearance than their ancestry does. A dog-sized horse has body proportions about that of a dog; a guinea-pig sized horse would look pretty much like a guinea pig.
Wouldn’t about 100 of them be fairly formidable, though? The herding behaviour of horses and other large herbivores lets them spot predators and defend themselves if necessary, but that only works if predators are roughly the same size as them. For a predator 100 times your size, the only response is not to try and swarm it, but to flee in terror.
Conclusion
President Obama weighs about 80 kg. Should he try to take down a 500 kg bird, with its powerful kick and huge razor-sharp beak, using just his bare hands? Or should he rather face 70 kg of terrified guinea pigs, which would require nothing but stout footwear? If the Earth’s fate is in the balance, the choice is clear, and it’s a specific instance of a general law I once came up with: nothing in evolution (or imaginary arena combat) makes sense except in the light of allometry.
A really positive review and a really unfair one
You should go find a copy of The Martian, by Andy Weir, and you should buy it, and you should read it. Right now.
And I gotta say it: I’m so glad to be able to say that. I was scared of this book, guys: when you’ve got a novel you’re about to unleash on the world and your novel is set on Mars and someone publishes a book called The Martian with a picture of a dude in a spacesuit on the cover before your book comes out, it tends to inspire… panic. Mild panic. Oh shit he wrote my book.
(Note that this has happened to me once already. I had a novel entirely planned out down to small details and was ready to start writing it when a Star Wars book came out that had the exact same goddamn plot except theirs had Han Solo and Chewbacca in it. It was uncanny. I shelved the entire story. I was worried this was going to happen again.)
But it didn’t! The Martian is the story of an astronaut who is stranded on Mars when his mission is scrubbed abruptly and in the scramble to get off the planet his team is given very good reason to believe he’s been killed. At this point it becomes, as a back cover blurb describes it, “Robinson Crusoe on Mars,” which is the greatest four-word high-concept pitch in human history. The whole thing is tense and engaging and funny and awesome. It’s 370-some pages and I devoured it in two big gulps over two nights; I was up until midnight last night because there was simply no chance that I was going to put it down. It is, in a lot of ways, the perfect novel for me.
Sadly, I feel the need to issue a warning: Weir is heavy on the science– and occasionally heavy on the chemistry and the math. Yes, there’s math in this book, although Weir isn’t actually asking you to do any of it. But there’s a lot of math drama of the “How do I get enough calories to live X days” type. And when the main character accidentally turns the hab he’s living in into a bomb, he explains the chemistry behind his stupid mistake.
It is possible that this might turn some people off a bit. Those people are bad people, don’t get me wrong! But they might not like this book as much as I did. Despite their badness. For me, this is already on the shortlist for best books of the year. Awesome work; read it now.
I wrote a very brief post when I got home stating that I’d had a long day and I was going to go play some video games. You may recall me buying a PS3 around Thanksgiving and a rapturous review of The Last of Us; the PS3 has kinda sat and gathered dust since then. Earlier this week I got a bug up my butt and bought a couple of games that were PS3 exclusives that I’d never had a chance to play. One of them was Heavy Rain, which took me much longer than it should have to buy because the guy behind the counter wouldn’t shut up about how great the game was for long enough to actually sell it to me. (Generation gap warning: He didn’t own a PS3. He’d stayed up “all night” watching someone else play the game. On YouTube. I know “Let’s Play” videos exist, but… really? That’s a thing The Kids do now?)
I’ve sat and watched Heavy Rain install for twenty-five minutes and played it for maybe twenty, so let’s not even pretend this is a fair review. I’ve also heard in several places (and I knew this before I even bought the game) that the game starts really slow to get you used to the rather unique control system. I’m fine with that. I’m also pretty sure that by the time I finish the game I’ll not be griping about it. But there is some serious nonsense in the first prologue chapter and I wanna gripe about it.
Yeah. That control system. The game starts with your character in bed asleep. In his tighty-blackies. The game instructs you to push up to get him out of bed, and wants to really impress you by showing you that the slower you push up the longer he takes to get out of bed. For the most part so far I’m less playing a game than I am following on-screen prompts; I assume this will either get better or will become less annoying soon. (Again: I really do believe the people who are raving about this game. I’m just not there yet.) Here are the things I did. There are other things you can do; I didn’t do some of them, and part of the deal behind the game is that the story’s structured so that you can miss stuff.
- I took a shower. This sequence involved copious amounts of manbutt (and I’m pretty sure I’d be complaining about pointless nudity even if my character were female, so don’t think this is homophobia talking) and a ridiculous sequence where I had to shake my controller in certain ways so that my dude could dry himself off.
- I found a note from my wife saying that she’d taken the boys out for groceries. Note that this implies that everyone in the house is awake and dressed and out doing shit before this lazy bitch even gets out of bed.
- I got dressed. At around this point the game pointed out that I could hold a trigger to see what my character was thinking; this is a thinly-veiled way for the game to push you to move the story along.
- My character thought about doing some work, but the game didn’t provide any feedback on what that meant, so I went downstairs. I said hello to the family bird along the way.
- I ate two grapes. The layout of their house is really weird.
- I drank juice. I screwed up the prompt on how to drink the juice so I accidentally gagged on it a little bit. Yes, that happened.
- I made coffee. Espresso, technically, I think. Drank that too. Healthy!
- At some point in here I discovered that it was nearly lunchtime. My character is seriously a loser.
- Upon it being suggested that he wanted some “garden time” or something like that, I figured out how to go into the back yard, thinking that maybe there was some work for him to do back there. I sprawled out on the grass and got back up and went inside. No work for me!
- Then my wife got home with the boys. She handed me some bags, which I promptly dropped because the game made me hold down two different buttons to take them from her and I flubbed one of the buttons. I put the groceries on the counter. There is a birthday party for one of the boys soon; she said she was really busy and didn’t know how she was going to get everything done, and the game prompted me to help out.
- She told me to set the table, but warned me that the dishes were fragile (because we use the good china for basic birthday party lunches.) The game used this as an opportunity to demo the “move things carefully” mechanic, where you follow onscreen prompts with the thumbsticks really slowly. I accidentally moved too fast and put a plate slightly off-center from where it was supposed to be. I tried to fix it but the game wouldn’t let me; I spent the rest of the prologue wondering when that dish would get broken, but it never happened.
- After doing a shitty job setting the table, I played with the kids’ electric car (I really thought that was going to hit a table leg and jar the plate loose, but it didn’t happen) and then went outside to roughhouse with my kids for a bit, including mercilessly beating one of them up with a plastic sword. So much for helping my overworked wife, apparently.
- She called us in for lunch, which was not on the table I’d set. The boys ran in ahead of me. I followed them and discovered that one of them had disappeared; how this happened, I don’t know. I told my wife I’d find him and went upstairs. He was crouching in front of the birdcage. The bird was on the floor, dead. He was sobbing that it was his fault. My character (and this was a cutscene, so I had no control over it at all) assured him that it was not, with no trace of that damn bird was alive ten minutes ago, what the hell happened?
At this point the first chapter ended and I saved and quit out to go to the Internet. There appears to be no way to save the bird; it’s not like I forgot to feed it when I got up at noon or anything. Although given how much of a loser this guy seems to be maybe he’s actually never fed the bird. I dunno.
I think I miss Q-Bert right now.
On adaptation
The human body fascinates me. It’s cold as hell outside again, right? Eleven degrees, wind chill of -4. -4 is, by any remotely reasonable estimation, cold. Append an “as fuck” as needed. I just got home from work and cleared yesterday and the day before’s snow off of the driveway and finished re-digging my mailbox back out from the glacier the snowplow deposited in front of it.
I did not bother zipping my coat until I was almost done. Why? I wasn’t cold. We are at the point where if it were to leap up to 30 degrees tomorrow I would be entirely unsurprised were I to see someone wearing shorts outside. And don’t get me wrong; it’s not like I’m claiming superpowers here– it’s happening to everybody. Tomorrow morning’s supposed to be crazy cold again, although the predicted temperature has been creeping skyward all morning. A week ago– and I mean that literally, last week– the news that temps would be below zero between six and seven would have everyone scrambling to predict that we’d be out. You can see me doing it if you look at last Thursday’s post. Tomorrow morning? Everyone’s looking at the exact same temperatures and going “ah, fuck it.” There is, at this moment, not so much as a single two-hour delay for tomorrow announced. Last Thursday there were a dozen districts that had already announced delays by now. I think we figure anyone who hasn’t died from the cold already can probably handle waiting for the buses for a few minutes. Now all we need are buses that can actually get our kids to school on time; that’s been a huge mess lately.
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Complete change of subject: anyone know how to find out if an image is public domain or not? I know that a lot of stuff NASA puts out is basically free to use for anyone for any reason (IANAL) but what if you can’t confirm where an image comes from? For example, this rather striking image looks like a lot of planetary nebulae, but I can’t find this specific image anywhere helpful and I wouldn’t be completely surprised to discover it was a Photoshop job. I’ve done a reverse Google Image Search on it to no real avail, although I probably need to suck it up and just check every use of the image until I find somebody linking it as their work on DeviantArt or something. But if I don’t find that… I still can’t assume, right? Argh.
Anyway, here’s the picture I’m referring to:
I shoulda known this was gonna happen
What’s that line from Blade again? “Some motherfuckers are always trynna ice skate uphill”?
Forgive the possibly choppy presentation; turns out embedding Tweets is a bit more complicated than I thought it was.
A brief rant
I apparently have yet to regain my jovial equanimity.
A request for the world’s dumb people and woo addicts: If you have ever complained upon finding out that a “chemical” (ooooh, SCARY!!!) that is part of one thing that you eat is also part of another thing that you do not eat, and said discovery caused you to consider no longer eating the first thing, or especially if you complained to others about the presence of the chemical in the edible thing… well, telling you to kill yourself is probably a little extreme and I’m not quite that far gone today but suggesting that you begin practicing the fine art of shutting the fuck up would be good, and perhaps also I should tell you some incredibly terrible things about oxygen that would totally ruin your day. And hydrogen, which is in both water, which you need to survive, and gasoline, which you should never drink obviously is perfectly potable since water is.
Here’s a definition of “chemical substance,” you nimrods. You don’t get to use that word again where I can hear or see you until you understand why complaining about things having “chemicals” in them is dead goddamn stupid.
Okay? Good.
And because apparently I have decided to be in a bad mood today, I’m off to find a politician who has done something stupid. Gimme five minutes.
In which two thumbs up, would watch again
The boy has abruptly shifted his educational TV priorities in the last few days, suddenly becoming an ardent devotee of PBS Kids’ Dinosaur Train. I can’t say I mind; I’ve seen every episode of Sesame Street aired since 2008 fifteen times by now and something new is hella welcome.
If you’re child free, like a sensible person, or your kids are older than toddler age, you might not be familiar with the premise of this show. It’s a fascinating mix of science and nonsense; the idea is that the orange tyrannosaur in the middle there, whose name is Buddy, because of course it is, was randomly discovered in the pteranodon nest along with the three baby pteranodons behind him, and when they all hatched at the same time Mama pteranodon just sorta shrugged and decided she had four kids.
One of whom is supposed to eat the other three. Plus her. And daddy pteranodon. There is an episode where Buddy discovers he’s a T-Rex, right? He discovers that he’s supposed to be a carnivore (he eats “carrion,” which is an undifferentiated lump of meat-lookin’ stuff not unlike what Chicken McNuggets are made of, which begs the question of what the hell he’s been eating since hatching) and that he’s eventually going to be very very big. Left alone is the fact that he eats other dinosaurs. The episode we just watched featured the kids talking to an ankylosaurus who declared that his heavy armored plates were to keep him safe from other carnivorous dinosaurs “who might want to hurt me,” and the phrase, “…like you” was conspicuously omitted from the end.
Also, there is the titular “dinosaur train,” which is full of all sorts of dinosaurs and travels around to “T-Rex Town” and “Triceratops Town” (probably not their actual names but you get the idea) and apparently travels through time as well– they actually acknowledge that they’re heading to the “Cretaceous Age” or the “Jurassic Age” from time to time– technology that I’d love to have access to.
The thing, though, is that everything else is awesome, and it ain’t like I’m enough of a dick to actually be offended by the show using Buddy as a non-homicidal protagonist; it just entertains me. They don’t skimp on the complicated names of the dinosaurs (there’s a funny bit at the end of each show where they show four or five kids trying to pronounce the names of things) and they manage to pack a legitimately impressive amount of scientific information into every episode. Plus there’s a guy who calls himself Dr. Scott who shows up at the end of every episode who is either an actual paleontologist or an actor portraying one who gives two or three minutes of detailed information about the dinosaurs that were portrayed in the episode.
And then there’s “Point of Fact!” guy, who wins the show. Sometimes “Point of Fact!” guy walks through a drawing of a door on Dr. Scott’s stage and declares that, as a Point of Fact, no, hadrosaurs did not actually arrange concerts where they played their fluted crests, as portrayed in the episode you just watched. This always terribly disappoints the children listening to Dr. Scott, and then he follows up with a related actual fact and makes them happy again.
And then– and I swear this isn’t a joke– PoF Guy goose-steps his way back off the screen. It’s ridiculous. And hilarious.
Dinosaurs, science, goose-stepping Nazi pedants. Everything I want in a children’s show.
Edited to add…
Interesting follow-up to the math post here. Stay tuned for a few more minutes; there’s another chunk of the Benevolence Archives coming. All violence from here on out!