Bench Press

I’ve posted before on plush particles, plush organs, knitted dissections, and even plush microbes. It seems in the math/science world, there’s always some creative soul who wants to cute-ify subjects of study.

Well, that set is joined by the latest plush craze… plush… statistical distributions? (HT: Flowing Data). Less stuffed-animal-like per se than say a pillow, but the Etsy store Nausicaa Distribution is selling normal distribution shaped pillows:

If the normal distribution isn’t your thing, how about some of its friends (like t, chi-square, log-normal, uniform, weibull, cauchy, poisson, gumbel, or erlang)?

And not to mention a wide range of statistical-relevant material:

If you’re interested, check out Nausicaa Distribution’s Etsy website!

(Image credit: all from Nausicaa Distribution’s Etsy site)

A recent publication (requires access; discussed at a high level here) in Nature actually demonstrates quantum effects on a “large” object (still only 30 micrometers, but much larger than the single/handful of particles where it’s been demonstrated previously). Scientists were literally able to make a paddle simultaneously vibrate and not vibrate! This modern day Schrödinger’s Cat inspired me to look for something nerdy to commemorate this.

Behold: take Hello Kitty, and mix it with a little Schrödinger’s Cat, and put it on a shirt, and you get “Hello Schroddy”:

Interestingly, the shirt also comes with printable explanation cards so that you don’t have to explain it to the quantum-ly-challenged:

Schrödinger’s Cat is a thought experiment. In quantum physics, a subatomic particle can exist in multiple states at once (imagine coming to a fork in the road and going both left and right). All of these possibilities combined is a thing called quantum superposition. When the particle is observed, however, it collapses into a single state, giving us the option of left or right not some of both left and right at the same time. To explain how difficult it is to conceive of this indeterminacy at a non-subatomic level, Schrödinger described a hypothetical experiment involving a cat. He puts the cat in an opaque box so that the cat cannot be observed. Also in the box is a flask of poisonous gas and a radioactive substance. The radioactive substance controls the flask so that when an atom decays, the gas is released. At any given moment, then, from outside the box, the cat is in a state of indeterminacy. From a theoretical perspective, it’s both alive and dead at the same time… until we open the box.

No actual cats were harmed in this experiment. Many theoretical physicists, however, were.

Now, who’s the lucky lady who’s going to receive one of these from you, huh?

(ThinkGeek link; comes in pink in many sizes, $18.99)

Paper: O’Connell, A. D., et al. “Quantum ground state and single-phonon control of a mechanical resonator.” Nature. Mar 17 2010. DOI: 10.1038/nature08967

My talented girlfriend is both a science aficionado (currently a med student) and an avid knitter. So when she showed me the science-inspired knitting creations of one Etsy user CraftyHedgehog, I knew I just had to blog about it:

After all, who wouldn’t want knitted replicas of their favorite dissection specimens? And, the creative Ms. CraftyHedgeHog has taken her art a step beyond – behold, a knitted dissection of an Easter Bunny:

The fetal pig is 100% wool. The frog is made from a silk/wool blend with the organs made from 100% wool (and yes, that’s a real aluminum tray – don’t worry, Ms. CraftyHedgeHog assures us that they’re unused). The rat is hand-knit from an acrylic mohair, also with 100% wool organs. The Easter Bunny is made from soft nylon yarn and the insides are made from 100% wool (for the eggs) and the plastic grass used to line Easter baskets.

You can buy the specimens and learn more from CraftyHedgeHog’s Etsy page!

(Image credits – CraftyHedgeHog’s Etsy page)

Who said giant subatomic particles and giant microbes had a monopoly on plush cuteness? I Heart Guts shows you that plush organs can be just as cute:

That would be a heart (on the left), lungs (on the top), kidney (in the middle), and liver saying hello from what looks like a location in Japan.

And there are more adorable creations! They include: intestines, spleen, stomach, bladder, brain, pancreas, gallbladder, uterus, and even a special faux leather “black heart”!

What does this have to do with technology and science? Well, I found these on the Internet after all… okay its a stretch. But, after all, how can you not *lung* these guys (yes, they also sell organ-inspired T-shirts)?

(Images all from I Heart Guts website)

The heartbeat of the news.

Ever since June 25, 2009, Michael Jackson’s death has been the talk of the nation, his face plastered over web articles, newspapers, and television stations. His death broke the record for the number of users on Yahoo news at any one point in time, topping even President Barack Obama’s inauguration, and even Google believed its servers were under attack due to the sudden spike in web searches for the moon-walking legend. However, have you ever wondered why the news of the King of Pop’s untimely death has stayed in the media for so long, while other news topics, such as the death of another cultural icon, Farrah Fawcett, quickly died out?

Jon Kleinberg, Jure Leskovec, and Lars Backstroma, from the computer science department at Cornell, sought to answer these types of questions by tracking the life-cycle of news articles for a three month period during 2008. Their research included 20,000 mainstream media sites and over 90 million articles. Using a complex algorithm which could identify certain phrases in different news articles such that the computer could mark them as being of the same subject (a task that has proven to be very difficult time and time again), the team tracked the movement of news using across blogs and news sites across the Internet. Armed with an extensive pool of data to sift through and analyze, the three researchers discovered an astounding pattern that was shared throughout most news topics.

They found a consistent rhythm as stories rose into prominence and then fell off over just a few days, with a “heartbeat” pattern of handoffs between blogs and mainstream media. In mainstream media, they found, a story rises to prominence slowly then dies quickly; in the blogosphere, stories rise in popularity very quickly but then stay around longer, as discussion goes back and forth. Eventually though, almost every story is pushed aside by something newer.

Before research like this was done, many editors and journalists perceived something they described to be a “news cycle.” However, with no quantifiable data, there was no way to be confident whether this was just their perceptions or an actual phenomenon. With the information collected by these Cornell researchers, they believe the latter to be the case and have started to create mathematical models which would accurately describe the life-cycle of news.

The slow rise of a new story in the mainstream, the researchers suggest, results from imitation – as more sites carried a story, other sites were more likely to pick it up. But the life of a story is limited, as new stories quickly push out the old. A mathematical model based on the interaction of imitation and recency predicted the pattern fairly well, the researchers said, while predictions based on either imitation or recency alone couldn’t come close.

This type of news excites me because it shows how technology and the Internet have produced a tangible result (in this case, a physical model to the life cycle of a news article) to a question that would have been unsolvable 20 years ago. Truly the capabilities of technology to solve even the most abstract problems are limitless.

(Image Credit)

One of the ways in which scientists can reach out to the public with new social media techniques is through online video, and this is a lesson that the University of Nottingham has learned well. This past week, I found three informative sites that scientists at the University of Nottingham have contributed to:

• Sixty Symbols – a site dedicated to helping the layperson understand those crazy symbols that they see in physicist’s and astronomer’s equations and work



• Periodic Table of Videos – a site which has an informational video for nearly every element in the periodic table
• Test-Tube – an award-winning site which tries to document the daily life of a scientist, including the triumphs, failures, and the monotony/drama that occurs in between

The interesting thing, at least to me, is that the videos succeed not only in conveying interesting concepts in, hopefully, an easy-to-understand format, but that they do what textbooks and slides and figures and online encyclopedia’s can never do: they humanize the science and the scientists behind them. And, if that happens effectively, then social media may be the most powerful scientific tool ever.

The most amazing thing about social media services like Twitter and Friendfeed is how rapidly you can find interesting articles and links. One of my good friends on Twitter, Charles Ju, recently pointed me to a picture which he only described as “this picture blows my mind”.

And sure enough, it completely blew my mind. I re-shared it on my own FriendFeed (garnering a couple of comments/responses from my own Twitter followers and Friendfeed friends) If you didn’t understand the scale of the universe before, this will put it all into perspective:

A big wow for:

1. How powerful social media services like Twitter and Friendfeed are for disseminating cool information/factoids/images
2. How vast the universe is
3. The capability of the Hubble Space Telescope to amass information about our universe

PS: If you’d like to follow the Bench Press authors on Friendfeed/Twitter you can follow me at http://www.friendfeed.com/benjamintseng, Kevin at http://friendfeed.com/ktseng, and Anthony at http://friendfeed.com/atphan.

Thanks to the internet the enterprise of playing practical jokes on the world has become incredibly easy and every year now I look forward to seeing what hilarious items pop up throughout the internet. So here’s a quick list of some of my favorite tech/science April Fools jokes for 2009:

Google masters artificial intelligence. The brilliant people over at Google continue to amaze by creating the world’s first “artificial intelligence tasked-array system” which they’ve dubbed the Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE). Apparently it’s already cranking out changes at Google: “Earlier today, for instance, CADIE deduced from a quick scan of the visual segment of the social web a set of online design principles from which she derived this intriguing homepage.”

Gmail Autopilot. Thanks to CADIE e-mail’s even easier than before. By using the Gmail Autopilot one can set simple sliders to manage all your e-mail without going through the hassle of reading and writing. E-mail will never be the same again. Nigeria may become more wealthy though…

Let Gmail Autopilot handle all your e-mail conversations.

Tiny black hole on Earth created by Large Hadron Collider. CERN admits that the real reason they shut down the LHC was due to the creation of a “tiny black hole” that they have “kept under quarantine” and are monitoring as we speak.

Qualcomm, on the cutting edge of Bioengineering. Qualcomm best known for it’s CDMA technology for wireless networks has delved into cutting edge research to improve wireless network coverage around the world. The video below takes an exclusive look behind the scenes of Qualcomm’s latest work.

Happy April Fools!

The sentiment expressed in the comic above isn’t just common when you’re absorbing your grandparents’ wisdom; but is something you often run across when talking with grizzled research veterans as well. Often times you’ll here reminiscent stories about the good ‘ol days, without complicated equipment and how scientists nowadays are soft and spoiled by kits and electronic pipettes. Today, Derek Lowe has a great post talking about the dangers of romanticizing ancient equipment and techniques.

Derek writes:

If you’re in a resource-limited situation, then, you’ll probably try to carefully pick out problems that can actually be well addressed with what you have. That’s a good strategy, but it’s not always a possible one. Huge areas of research can be marked off-limits by the lack of key pieces of equipment, and by the time you’ve worked out what’s possible, there may not be anything interesting or important left inside your fence. Medawar’s point was that being stuck inside such a perimeter would not only hurt the way that you did your work, but could eventually do damage to the way that you thought.

While learning about old techniques and how they contributed to previous breakthroughs can provide tremendous value by illustrating thought processes and helping to build a solid scientific foundation, Derek accurately points out that clinging to old methods just for the sake of doing it the “old fashioned way” can sometimes be detrimental to not only one’s work, but one’s thought process as well. In the end, make sure you don’t handicap your most precious resource by continuing the tradition of “walking uphill both ways”.

(Image Source – Bobwama’s Wallpaper of the Day)

No they haven’t actually, although Eric’s girlfriend threw me for a loop by sending me an IM with that headline.

However, my disappointment quickly melted by the website she linked me to and the adorable particles therein:

The Higgs Boson - found!

They’re brought to you by “The Particle Zoo”, which was inspired when an aspiring physicist realized that each particle seemed to have its own “personality” — why not make them into little plushies? I happen to think the Gluon and Dark Matter are especially cute:

Particle Zoo promises the release of “anatomically correct” particles (so probably breaking out some of the particles into their quark “components”) and some sort of “quantum duck” in 2009.

The real question now is, who will buy me one for the holidays?