All posts by Wan Kong Yew

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Aug ’10)

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This installment will be a little light with just three short articles. One is about how having dogs around seems to improve cooperation between humans, one about using a powerful computer to find every possible solution to the classic Rubik’s Cube puzzle, and the last one looks at how people get trampled to death in large crowds.

Dogs make people more social

The first article is from The Economist and covers research by Christopher Honts and his colleagues at Central Michigan University who wondered if having dogs around in the workplace improved collaboration among people. This was because previous research has indicated that dogs help their owners forge intimate relationships with other people.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (Aug ’10) →

Science

The ancient Greeks were just as kitschy as we are

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Today,  when we think of classical art, few things are as dignified and tasteful as the crumbling statues of ancient Greece. There’s something about the bare, weathered stone pieces, so full of history, that elevates them above mere decoration. In fact, we’re so used to the way they look now that it’s hard to imagine what they might have been like when the pieces were first made.

The article however shows how ultraviolet light can be used to reveal what they were like, or more importantly, what the artists of the time intended them to look like. All of a sudden, the statues seem a lot less dignified and very much like something we might find in a modern amusement park. Take this for example:

The ultraviolet light works by causing the organic compounds used in the original paint to fluoresce. Even in cases where it is difficult to figure out what the original hues were, researchers can also use infrared and x-ray spectroscopy to discover what materials were used to make the paints and derive what the colors must have been from there. It turns out that the Greek artists tended to use very tacky and loud colors which we wouldn’t find tasteful at all.

As one commenter on the article notes, it makes us wonder if someday far in the future, archaeologists might unearth the remains of Disneyland and think that all those figures and decorations represented the pinnacle of our art and were objects of great veneration.

Films & Television

Lost

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Ok, so we’ve just finished watching the final season of Lost. Admittedly, by the time we had gotten to season 3, it was mainly me pushing to watch it. That was around the time when it became painfully obvious that the writers had no clue what they were doing and were just making things up as they went along. That was bad enough, but what really ticked my wife off was the stupid back-and-forth characterization: Kate loves Jack, no, she loves Sawyer, nope, she still loves Jack. This made character development a joke and all but ensured that audiences cared not one whit for the characters.

Still, I insisted on watching for a variety of reasons. It’s worth remembering just how fantastic and promising the first season was. This was a major television series made using near theatrical-quality cinematography and high production values. It had a huge ensemble cast, some of whom gave truly stellar performances. It was a mainstream show, yet drew extensively on science-fiction and fantasy themes. And even if it ended up promising more than it could deliver, it successfully created a compelling and fascinating mythology of its own. Considering how much we’d already invested in the show, I thought we might as well see it through to the end.

Continue reading Lost →

News & Politics

Be careful when using percentages

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The above chart caught my eye while I was reading through an issue of The Economist. The article is available online here. It basically shows how much gold a US dollar can buy from 1973 to 2010 and uses this as a measure of the dollar’s devaluation. In 1973, we can see that one US dollar could buy slightly less than 2 troy ounces of gold while in 2010, a US dollar can buy less than 0.10 troy ounces of the stuff.

What’s interesting is that the chart is that it also divides the period of time under study into three separate phases and gives a percentage for the change of value in each period. So it notes that the US dollar was devalued by 90% from 1973 to 1980, that it was revalued by 236% from 1980 to 2000, and devalued again by 80% from 2000 to 2010.

The chart is impeccably correct of course, but intuitively if someone told you that something went down in value by 90%, then shot up 236% and then went down 80% again, would you understand that its current value is now about one twentieth of the original? Unless you took the trouble to actually work the maths out, I think most people would be surprised by the actual results.

Anyway, this isn’t really apropos of anything, but since investment returns tend to be stated in percentage terms, I thought it would be a good idea to demonstrate how important it is to actually chart out the real values instead of relying on percentages and using guesstimates. This also demonstrates how valuable a good chart is to help people understand what’s really going on.

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Jul ’10)

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Four articles this month and it’s a pretty mixed bag. The most controversial article of the bunch is one that links autism with wealth, but the one drawing a link between human intelligence and disease rates in different countries comes a close second. Then, there’s the highly speculative paper that offers a new model of the universe that abandons the familiar Big Bang. Finally, just for fun, there’s one article talking about a cheap and effective way of deterring thieves from stealing your car.

Autism, disease of the rich?

The precise causes of autism is as yet unclear and it doesn’t help matters that there’s a major anti-intellectual movement that attempts to link the disease to vaccination. This post on Neuroskeptic points out that autism appears to be more common in rich countries than poor ones, which is odd, but might be explained by the fact that many cases of autism in poor countries might simply be undiagnosed. A new paper however attempts to correct for this ascertainment bias and it discovered that not only were incidences of autism more common in richer countries, they were also more common among richer people in rich countries, independent of ethnicity.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (Jul ’10) →

Films & Television, Science Fiction

Inception is a disappointment

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As usual, I don’t write film reviews, only critiques and analyses, so get the hell away from this post if you have yet to watch this film. Come back only after you’ve done so.

Anyone who reads this blog should know that Christopher Nolan is easily my favorite director and that I eagerly look forward to every film that he makes. This has been true ever since I first discovered Memento. Since then, I’ve watched every one of his films, except for The Following, which I understand is sort of a student film made on a shoestring budget. With the sole exception of Insomnia, which, being an adaptation of a Norwegian film, is competent but otherwise unremarkable, all have been stellar.

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Fun, Science

Can you parallel park this well?

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It’s been a while since I last posted a YouTube video as a post and since I’m busy at work today, here’s a video showing how well a modern computer equipped with suitable sensors can parallel park a car. Note that there’s a human driver in the car but he’s just there for safety reasons and is not driving the car in the maneuver shown in the video. Certainly few human drivers will be able to pull this off.

Originally seen on Marginal Revolution.