Dude. Seriously?

thisistheverge:

Commodore 64 transformed into hybrid bass keytar

The Commodore 64 has long been a staple of the chiptune and circuit bending scenes, but it’s not often that you see the old computer converted into a fully-fledged musical instrument. That’s exactly what enthusiast Jeri Ellsworth has done, splicing a C64’s body on to the neck of a bass guitar, allowing her to control the sound through the on-board Sound Interface Device (SID) chip.

youmightfindyourself:

Isometrical Drawing of the Gettysburg Battle-Field, 1863.

jtotheizzoe:

This was a super-fun question to research. For one thing, it made me go back and re-learn a lot of basic geometry that would have the average 9th grader laughing in my face. I guess that’s not so fun, on second thought. But I did get to learn a lot about satellite orbits, which are really fascinating.

On with the question.

When thinking about how high something would have to be launched to be visible from the opposite coast of the United States, we are really just talking about a more advanced “horizon problem”. Essentially it looks like this:

If you were standing along the line segment h, with your head as the O, your line of sight to the horizon would be the line d. Your actual distance to the horizon would be the arc s, though. When talking about viewing the horizon while standing on the beach, those are almost exactly the same, so the math is easy (horizon = 3 miles for an average person at sea level). But when you are talking about distances like, say, Los Angeles to New York, it gets a bit more complicated.

Let’s say you’re gonna fire a rocket from the Santa Monica Pier and your friend is looking west from Battery Park, waiting to see it. How high will it have to go? Using the equations found here, we can work backwards to figure out the height h above Los Angeles that something will have to attain in order to be seen from NYC. 

First we start by assuming that the Earth is a perfect sphere, which it is not. The average radius of this pretend-Earth is 6,378 km (that’s R up above). The land distance from NYC to LA is 3,932 km, give or take a few, since Google Maps insists on using roads (that’s s above). So using my Geometron 5000™ machine, I can solve for h, the height above LA to be seen along the line d from NYC.

Your friend in NYC would see your rocket when it reached 1,440 km above Earth. For comparison, most man-made satellites above Earth are less than 1,000 km up, including the ISS and almost every manned space mission. It’s about the same height as the Globalstar communications satellites, but much, much less than things like GPS satellites (which are in geosynchronous orbit at 35,786 km above sea level). Here’s a diagram of where most things orbiting Earth reside (our pretend rocket would be just outside the inner “ball”):

As for how big it would have to be to be seen? Well, a lot of that depends on how bright it is, how much background light there is, etc. Assuming it was super-reflective, not leaving a trail of fire, your friend was viewing with the naked eye and NYC had the most severe blackout in history … well, this one’s really hard. The human eye has the ability to see a 1.2 meter object at a 1 km distance according to Wikipedia, so along the line d above (4,521 km), the object would need to be 3,768 m wide by my calculations. That’s pretty big. If I screwed that last one up, let me know. 

jtotheizzoe:

In Louisiana, Loch Ness Monster Learns YOU!

Religious textbooks touting the Loch Ness Monster as proof against evolution

Louisiana students have the ability to use state-funded school vouchers to attend private schools. That’s fine, on the surface. BUT … some of these private schools are teaching “science” classes using textbooks that use Nessie as proof that evolution is false and that the Biblical creation story is the only way onto the highway to heaven.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Their theory goes something like this: Plesiosaur gets flooded after not making it onto Noah’s Ark. Plesiosaur gets stranded in Scotland. Therefore, evolution is wrong.

For more, visit io9. And for even MORE, with a side of headdesk, check out this exposé from Salon.

I’m pretty sure this is not how you create the great scientifically literate nation of tomorrow. I think we can allow the creation story of the Bible to be taught in the right place at the right time without making a complete laughing stock of biology, no?

youmightfindyourself:

By: Jonah Lehrer
New Yorker, June 12, 2012

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)

For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—Kahneman, the late Amos Tversky, and others, including Shane Frederick (who developed the bat-and-ball question), demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. These shortcuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether. Asked about the bat and the ball, we forget our arithmetic lessons and instead default to the answer that requires the least mental effort.

Although Kahneman is now widely recognized as one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, his work was dismissed for years. Kahneman recounts how one eminent American philosopher, after hearing about his research, quickly turned away, saying, “I am not interested in the psychology of stupidity.”

The philosopher, it turns out, got it backward. A new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology led by Richard West at James Madison University and Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto suggests that, in many instances, smarter people are more vulnerable to these thinking errors. Although we assume that intelligence is a buffer against bias—that’s why those with higher S.A.T. scores think they are less prone to these universal thinking mistakes—it can actually be a subtle curse.

West and his colleagues began by giving four hundred and eighty-two undergraduates a questionnaire featuring a variety of classic bias problems. Here’s a example:

In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

Your first response is probably to take a shortcut, and to divide the final answer by half. That leads you to twenty-four days. But that’s wrong. The correct solution is forty-seven days.

West also gave a puzzle that measured subjects’ vulnerability to something called “anchoring bias,” which Kahneman and Tversky had demonstrated in the nineteen-seventies. Subjects were first asked if the tallest redwood tree in the world was more than X feet, with X ranging from eighty-five to a thousand feet. Then the students were asked to estimate the height of the tallest redwood tree in the world. Students exposed to a small “anchor”—like eighty-five feet—guessed, on average, that the tallest tree in the world was only a hundred and eighteen feet. Given an anchor of a thousand feet, their estimates increased seven-fold.

But West and colleagues weren’t simply interested in reconfirming the known biases of the human mind. Rather, they wanted to understand how these biases correlated with human intelligence. As a result, they interspersed their tests of bias with various cognitive measurements, including the S.A.T. and the Need for Cognition Scale, which measures “the tendency for an individual to engage in and enjoy thinking.”

The results were quite disturbing. For one thing, self-awareness was not particularly useful: as the scientists note, “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” This finding wouldn’t surprise Kahneman, who admits in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” that his decades of groundbreaking research have failed to significantly improve his own mental performance. “My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy”—a tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task—“as it was before I made a study of these issues,” he writes.

Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.” This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves. Although the bias blind spot itself isn’t a new concept, West’s latest paper demonstrates that it applies to every single bias under consideration, from anchoring to so-called “framing effects.” In each instance, we readily forgive our own minds but look harshly upon the minds of other people.

And here’s the upsetting punch line: intelligence seems to make things worse. The scientists gave the students four measures of “cognitive sophistication.” As they report in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” This trend held for many of the specific biases, indicating that smarter people (at least as measured by S.A.T. scores) and those more likely to engage in deliberation were slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes. Education also isn’t a savior; as Kahneman and Shane Frederick first noted many years ago, more than fifty per cent of students at Harvard, Princeton, and M.I.T. gave the incorrect answer to the bat-and-ball question.

What explains this result? One provocative hypothesis is that the bias blind spot arises because of a mismatch between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves. When considering the irrational choices of a stranger, for instance, we are forced to rely on behavioral information; we see their biases from the outside, which allows us to glimpse their systematic thinking errors. However, when assessing our own bad choices, we tend to engage in elaborate introspection. We scrutinize our motivations and search for relevant reasons; we lament our mistakes to therapists and ruminate on the beliefs that led us astray.

The problem with this introspective approach is that the driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence. In fact, introspection can actually compound the error, blinding us to those primal processes responsible for many of our everyday failings. We spin eloquent stories, but these stories miss the point. The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand.

thedailywhat:

Rock N’ Roll History of the Day: Alex Chadwick of the Chicago Music Exchange offers up 100 famous guitar riffs, played chronologically and in one take.

[devour]

(Source: thedailywhat)

jtotheizzoe:

Interesting New Easter Island Theory Says Giant Statues Rocked Their Way Into Place

Of the many mysteries surrounding Easter Island, the moai are perhaps the greatest. These iconic statues line the coast of the island, more than 10 miles from the stone quarries where the multi-ton stones were harvested and carved.

Earlier theories relied on wooden rollers as the likely form of transport, an idea that led some to believe that the statues were behind the island’s deforestation and population collapse (although more recent research calls that into question). Newer tests using replica statues (like the one above) demonstrate that due to the statues’ pot-bellied shape, as few as 18 people could rock-walk them over distances of hundreds of yards.

It’s not definitive evidence either way, of course. It may just add to the mystique of the moai legend.

Previously: Rats, not recklessness may have done Easter Island in.

(via National Geographic)

thepit-nyc:

This week we will be getting Angry Orchard hard cider on tap at the PIT’s Love Bar!  It’s like apple juice, but then you’re drunk.

thedailywhat:

Letter Of Note of the Day: Wedding season once again is upon us, and a June 1971 letter from future U.S. President Ronald Reagan to his soon-to-be-wed son, Michael, contains advice for the groom that stands the test of time.

An excerpt:

If you truly love a girl, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors.

Mike, you know better than many what an unhappy home is and what it can do to others. Now you have a chance to make it come out the way it should. There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.

Read the letter in full here.

[lettersofnote]

(Source: thedailywhat)

npr:

This is where I’ll be when the zombies come. — Tanya

(via Safe House Transforms Into Impenetrable Concrete Box | Gadget Lab | Wired.com)

(via hodgman)