Category: Fightin’
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Calculating the cost of dirty bombs
One of the more frightening scenarios that civil defence teams worry about is the possibility that a bomb contaminated with radioactive material would be detonated in a heavily populated area. Various research teams have considered this problem and come to similar conclusions–that the actual threat to human health from such a device is low. Some…
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The power laws behind terrorist attacks
Plot the number of people killed in terrorists attacks around the world since 1968 against the frequency with which such attacks occur and you’ll get a power law distribution, that’s a fancy way of saying a straight line when both axis have logarithmic scales. The question, of course, is why? Why not a normal distribution,…
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Massive miscalculation makes LHC safety assurances invalid
It just gets worse for CERN and its attempts to reassure us that the Large Hadron Collider won’t make mincemeat of the planet. It’s beginning to look as if a massive miscalculation in the safety reckonings means that CERN scientists cannot offer any assurances about the work they’re doing. In a truly frightening study, Toby…
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Reinventing the dismal science
The discipline of economics in crisis. The credit crunch has exposed many economists’ most cherished ideas for the nonsense they manifestly are. With its theories in tatters, what now for the dismal science? It looks as if the best bet is take a a few leaves out of some network science text books. Economies are…
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Why astronomical units need to be redefined
In 1983, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures defined the metre as the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second. That makes a metre a fixed unit of length. For astronomers, however, distance is rather more malleable. In astronomy, distance is measured in astronomical units. Astronomers think of an…
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Steganophony–when internet telephony meets steganography
Steganophony is the term coined by Wojciech Mazurczyk and Józef Lubacz at the Warsaw University of Technology in Poland to describe the practice of hiding messages in internet telephony traffic (presumably the word is an amalgamation of the terms steganography and telephony). The growing interest in this area is fueled by the fear that terrorist…
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How much force does it take to stab somebody to death?
How much force does it take to stab somebody to death? Strangely enough, forensic scientists do not know. A number of groups have attempted to measure the forces necessary to penetrate skin but the results are difficult to apply to murder cases because of the sheer range of factors at work. The type and sharpness…
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The exoplanet photo gallery is bigger than you think
Astronomers tend to get excited by pinpricks of light. And perhaps today they have more reason than usual to celebrate the pixels that Paul Kalas at the University of California, Berkeley, and pals have found in one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s images. These pixels, they say, represent the first optical image of a planet…
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The terrible truth about economics
“Compared to physics, it seems fair to say that the quantitative success of the economic sciences is disappointing,” begins Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, an econophysicist at Capital Fund Management in Paris. That’s something of an understatement given the current global financial crisis. Economic sciences have a poor record of success, partly because they are hard (Newton once…
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Frustration with fluid dynamics
There is no shortage of fascinating videos for the Gallery of Fluid Motion at the upcoming meeting of the American Physical Society Fluid Dynamics division. At least they sound interesting. We’ll never know because they’re practically impossible to download from eCommons library at Cornell University. That’s not good enough. Surely YouTube (or one of its…