Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojkt
An Actress of Rare Beauty, Gladys Frazin, from the days of more modest covers of National Police Gazette.
Looking for evidence that we are indeed moving forward as a society, and humanity is progressing nicely? Then, look to the past and National Police Gazette, and contemplate the fact that it finally stopped publishing in 1977. Progress, people. Progress.
Filed under: Bits and Pieces, Uncategorized | Tagged: gladys frazin |
All Things in Moderation 
Neutrinos not actually faster than light, maybe.
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KW:
Just for you, the full statement by the OPERA group about the revelations that they may have screwed up.
“The OPERA Collaboration, by continuing its campaign of verifications on the neutrino velocity measurement, has identified two issues that could significantly affect the reported result. The first one is linked to the oscillator used to produce the events time-stamps in between the GPS synchronizations. The second point is related to the connection of the optical fiber bringing the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock.
These two issues can modify the neutrino time of flight in opposite directions. While continuing our investigations, in order to unambiguously quantify the effect on the observed result, the Collaboration is looking forward to performing a new measurement of the neutrino velocity as soon as a new bunched beam will be available in 2012. An extensive report on the above mentioned verifications and results will be shortly made available to the scientific committees and agencies.”
OPERA oopsies
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I feel their pain. They’re dealing with the oldest kind of error in scientific experiments. I call it “Did you turn it on?” I’ve seen this story before.
Act I.
My post-doc supervisor called me from a conference telling me about a certain experiment (phosphorescence from a certain polymer when illuminated with ultraviolet light). I set up the experiment, using a solar blind filter to eliminate all but UV light. Sure enough, there were some spectral lines right where we might expect them. Then I changed samples and repeated the measurement. Sure enough, similar but slightly different lines. Eureka! I excitedly phoned my supervisor about our confirmation. I kept making more experiments and the results looked suspiciously similar. So, I removed the sample and saw, well, the same data. I then learned something. Solar blind filters have a small window in the near-IR, right where our light source, a xenon lamp, has a few atomic lines. Even worse, the light was bouncing around in the monochromator, so the lines didn’t show up at the right wavelength.
Act II.
Three years later. I was now a lecturer in England. We were looking into how phosphorescent devices work. There was a certain mechanism, energy transfer, that happens to be important for photosynthesis. In order to get the best response, we biased the photodetector into what is called photoconductive mode. We saw the kind of delayed rise that we would expect for this mechanism. Turns out that the voltage source we used to bias the detector had a slow response, just at the kind of rate one would expect for energy transfer. Once we shifted to unbiased (photovoltaic) mode, the delay went away. It turned out to be a key piece of evidence. I think I wrote about this experiment in my mega post.
Act III.
Fortunately, this one didn’t involve me. My former post-doc supervisor was still looking for phosphorescence and his graduate student performed a clever experiment. Unfortunately, silicon photodetectors have a weak, delayed response in the near IR, right where you would expect to see phosphorescence. They published their result in Physical Review Letters and had to publish a correction later. Oops.
I’ve been lucky to not have been caught out by this problem. Fortunately, none of my mistakes have resulted in a correction, let alone coverage on the news.
BB
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Now this is funny. In addition to being a Presidential candidate Rick Santorum apparently believes that old folks in the Netherlands actually wear bracelets to protect themselves from euthanasia. I love Kevin Drum………
“here is Rick Santorum peddling a common myth:”
In the Netherlands, people wear different bracelets if they are elderly. And the bracelet is: ‘Do not euthanize me.’ Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands but half of the people who are euthanized — ten percent of all deaths in the Netherlands — half of those people are enthanized involuntarily at hospitals because they are older and sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital. They go to another country, because they are afraid, because of budget purposes, they will not come out of that hospital if they go in there with sickness.
“This Soylent Green version of life in the Netherlands attracted my attention because I ran across it a while back and took the time to look into it. I’m not going to bother digging up all the references a second time, but basically this is totally untrue. The bracelets don’t exist. Euthanasia accounts for only about 2% of all deaths in the Netherlands. And Dutch safeguards are, in fact, quite effective. No system is perfect, but virtually no one in the Netherlands is euthanized without explicit, repeated requests — and the tiny number of violations of the rules are mostly technical. No one is allowed to die who doesn’t want to.”
Here’s more if you’re interested.
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