The Lansey Brothers' Blog

Puzzles Part 2

2009-11-11T10:30:00.002-05:00

Well no one seemed to look at the first puzzle (from Stargate Atlantis by the way) and as NotElon pointed out the second problem is a topological impossibility. However, me and some fellow engineers found a valid solution that involves no crossing lines. We decided to electrify the gas and water lines into the house that otherwise would not have been able to get power. Now you may say but the gas lines are already electrified (to prevent corrosion which is why you should never ground to your gas piping), well yes they are, we are just raising the voltage a bit. Also, once the water gets into the house you will want to have some sort of ceramic length of pipe sufficiently long to prevent the voltage form arcing through the water, or your morning wake up shower may be a little extra jolting.

Ohms at MIT, Part 1/3

2009-11-07T21:30:00.001-05:00

While touring a certain dorm at MIT I came across a nice creative work of art.

They were inspired by a certain physics major who used to live in the room, and she really liked the Greek letter Omega and the Units of resistance, the Ohm. For a period of time she would get these little pieces of art slipped under her door by a secret admirer. The identity of this great artist is still unknown but his work will now be published online here.

There are 7 in total, which I will be posting in 3 posts, along with my critical commentary. Thanks to Amber for mailing me the photos.

What we see here is a depiction of the MIT dome, famous location of MIT hacks.

Perhaps the artist has some Spanish influences. By the change in the style of pen I would guess that the "ho(h)mbre" note was added later by another artist. I personally don't approve of this addition because there is no clear "ohm" shape in the person.

Famed blogger Eli has created his own version of this man which I share with you below:

You can tune a piano

2009-11-06T09:52:00.000-05:00

For Stacy's birthday this week I made sesame crusted yellowfin (ahi) tuna, following Alton Brown's recipe and directions (part 1, part 2). Really this food should bear the legend: Warning: Crunchy raw real dead tuna to avoid prosecution, as the tuna is barely seared on the outside.
Anyway, after sourcing and finally purchasing the fresh tuna (not an easy endeavor to find a whole hunk kosher fresh tuna of good quality), I cut and marinated the pieces:

And got the chimney going:

This thing gets super hot, in a very concentrated space:

The recipe itself is actually really easy. After the marinade, roll in sesame seeds

to coat the outside

Sear for a few seconds on each side

Ogle the results:

Slice:

And eat:

Puzzling Puzzles

2009-11-04T11:20:00.008-05:00

Recently I watched a TV show in which the main characters come to puzzle to get a device they want. The puzzle consists of a three by three matrix and nine stones with the number 1-9 written on them. They come to the conclusion that what they need to do is arrange the stones so that in every direction including the diagonals the value of the stones sum to 15, where if they where wrong when they tried to open the compartment that the puzzle was the key to they would be poisoned.

Last week I was in the mood for a good puzzle while bored in an engineering project management course so I decided to take a crack. After a couple of tries consisting of an initial random guess then working out from there I struck on a strategy and found a solution that was almost perfect except that one of the diagonals summed to 12, so I did it once more and found a solution. However, I looked at it and came to the solution that the characters only had a one in eight chance of getting the exact solution with only the center stone fixed. The reason for this is that the rotation or flipping about the center lines will also give a valid solution, so that there is a set of eight dependent solutions. I find this funny because they where talking about the same question having been on a MENSA exam (which caused me to take a mental workout exam on the MENSA website, also a fun endeavor). In this case the center stone/number was given to fit into the center slot and my solution ended up with that value in the center. I have two challengers for you readers find a solution to this problem and determine if there are multiple independent solution sets (where the center values are different between the two sets). The second one is a different puzzle entirely that was given to me by a friend who had gotten it in class (he was told that anyone who solved it would not have to take the classes final and that only one person had done it in the past). It goes as such, you have three houses and three utilities. The objective is to connect all three houses with all three utilities without crossing any of the lines as it is in a 2-D world.
Good Luck to all (just don't spend to much time on the last problem). Plus bonus points to anyone who knows what show this is from.

Browns Stages of Productive Syntax

2009-11-01T18:43:00.000-05:00

Notice that that Early I goes from 1.01 to 1.49, and Late I goes from 1.50 to 1.99, with Stage II starting at 2.0 etc.

I find it very interesting that they would have chosen a discontinuous scale whereby children with a reasonable "MLU" of say, 1.995 would not not lie in any of these categories. In fact there are uncountably infinite numbers between 1.99 and 2.00, something that these child linguisticitians are apparently not aware of.

This side up

2009-10-29T18:25:00.000-04:00

Or not

Flood in Brighton

2009-10-25T01:19:00.000-04:00

The day that I had a canal down my street in Brighton

The new Googleism, Google Suggest

2009-10-22T11:03:00.007-04:00

Back in the day googlism was a site which allowed you to find out what google thinks of you, your friends or anything. Now you can use Google suggest (graduated from Google labs).
Just go to Google.com and type in a few words and see what comes up:

It shows what people are searching for, what people are really thinking about in America and the English speaking world!

Starting with politics, this goes to show what everyone already knew, most of what is written is slander, with very little positive!

My favorites in the politics category: Republicans are Happier, democrats are destroying america, obama is god, george bush is an alien.

My favorites in the people category: the pope is the Antichrist, Michael Jackson is still alive, Brittney spears is fat, French people are Italian people in a bad mood.

My favorites in the things category: banks are more dangerous than armies, my apartment is infested with koalas . . .

Apparently a lot of people are wondering: Italy is located where and in what continent. The ones wondering in part of what country Italy is, are in for a surprise. I'm glad though that they are at least trying, perhaps they will learn some geography from Google!

Lastly my it is only appropriate to see that people are searching for "Google is going to take over" the world!

Ye Old Blog Post

2009-10-20T23:15:00.005-04:00

A while back (have kept managing not to post), me and some friends went to the New York Renaissance Fair. It was tons of fun, I even dressed up.

I borrowed the clothing from a friend (notice the sword).

The friend I borrowed the stuff from and his wife. He made the chain mail himself.

Me with a silly hat on, makes me sort of miss the hair.

We spent a ton of time hanging out with the blacksmiths, the sword type thing was drawn from the same kind of railroad spike being held next to it. Also, it is super bendy.

This is one of the blacksmith apprentices with the BFW (bonus points if you can figure out what it stand for).

Some of the cool things they make.

Whats a day at the Renaissance Fair without a bit of jousting.

The Teaneck Ice Caves

2009-10-15T13:31:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago we started getting an impressive buildup of ice in our freezer:

Upon closer inspection, we discovered that the mysterious drip in the fridge, below the freezer was also due to creeping ice:

It turns out that although the freezer is "self-defrosting," the place the defrosted frost goes got clogged with too much ice and was thus frozen shut. Thus, the defrosted frost just hung around in the freezer, building up those cool ice crystals.

Fortunately, we have nice neighbors with a big fridge who let us store stuff while we did a massive defrost operation one Sunday. After all the ice finally melted (turned out to be a LOT) we dried the thing out using a custom-built rapid drying rig:

And now all is, more or less, well with the fridge.

I beg to differ

2009-10-08T15:36:00.000-04:00

I saw this sign today:

I doubt this Moot Court thing is really more fun than Quantum Physics. What's strange, though, is that the person who made this sign picked good images, not the first results for "Quantum Physics" on a Google Image Search. A physics major gone over to the dark side?

What a difference a year makes

2009-10-01T06:00:00.000-04:00

A Purple Folder

2009-09-24T18:29:00.000-04:00

I got a purple folder this afternoon:

And this was inside:

Now I just need to update my website, resume, social networking sites...

Practically health food

2009-09-17T22:28:00.000-04:00

In the supermarket the other day I saw this giant sign:

In case you were blind and missed the sign, they also included this exciting information on their bottles, too:

That's right, Log Cabin "authentic maple tasting syrup" has "No high fructose corn syrup!" Their website claims that they removed the HFCS and replaced it with "real" sugar. Aside from the stupidity of the comparison of HFCS and "real" sugar -- as if the sugar in HFCS is somehow "fake," and the other sugar is somehow "real" (and, of course, magically healthier) -- any guesses as to what the first ingredient in this newly formulated syrup is?

That's right! Plain, old-fashioned corn syrup. Here's the complete ingredient list:

Corn syrup, liquid sugar (sugar, water), water, salt, natural and artificial flavors, cellulose gum, preservatives, sodium hexametaphosphate, caramel color.

But compared to a doughnut, it's practically health food.

Open Letter to the BU Farmer’s Market

2009-09-13T01:01:00.000-04:00

Dear Kelly,
I have recently purchased my books for the semester from the BU Barnes and Nobles and so I have no money left. Do you know if the BU farmers market will accept an arm and/or a leg instead of cash? I heard that is the way they do business.
Thanks,
-Jonathan

As you can see in the photo, squash is $3 a pound. The same squash is $1 a pound in my local market but in a less fancy basket.

Below is the email to which I was replying, the green font was their choice because of the amount of green cash required to make use of this farmers market:

About the Farmer’s Market:
Dining Services is a proud sponsor of the weekly market featuring locally grown
fruits and vegetables, fresh baked goods, and crafts made by area artists.
Stop by every Thursday through the end of October and support your local
vendor community!

Give me a lever and a place to stand

2009-09-11T11:27:00.007-04:00

A few months ago I joined a new lab at CCNY. Shortly before I arrived, the lab purchased a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster:

For a while it was running in our lab. Unfortunately, the lab is not a data center: It is not climate controlled, not dust controlled, etc. But we needed it there to set up some stuff, to heat our lab and to provide deafening ambient noise. Fortunately, CCNY does have a data center, though it's in a different building (NAC), about 1000 feet from the building the lab is in (Steinman Hall).

View Moving an HPC in a larger map

This past Wednesday was the epic move to CCNY's data center.

WARNING: If you are a professional IT person or server administrator, or are pregnant, have a heart condition, or are overly sensitive to computer abuse, please, stop reading at this point, and go find pictures of butterflies or daisies. Continue reading at your own risk.

Firstly, although there are small wheels on the bottom of the rack, they're designed for sliding the thing around short distances on smooth surfaces, not for wheeling down the block. So we arranged with a facilities person, who said he's moved a few HPCs in his time, to move the cluster. He told us to wheel the thing out of the lab into the hallway and he'd bring his equipment:

That's right, his equipment for moving a very expensive, fragile computing cluster was a pallet truck. After he looked over the cluster for a few seconds he announced, "I'll be right back. I need a...[dramatic pause]...Johnson Bar."

Turns out, a Johnson Bar is a giant, wheeled lever which he used to get help the HPC onto the truck. I say 'help' because it just got one side precariously onto the forks. He then went to the other side, levered and lifted and we pushed the rack (trust me, you do not want to hear the scraping sound this makes) fully on to the tines .

Well, almost fully on to the tines. After a brief ride in the freight "only" elevator,

we got stuck getting out of the building:

To get it out, we propped it up on bricks to help get it off the truck,

[stole its tires,] and wheeled it out of the building.

Before I continue this epic tale, I would like to draw your attention to the following detail:

Remember what I said about little wheels? To get the cluster over that bump we needed to get a running start and develop enough momentum to hit that threshold and keep going. Just imagine the jolt and vibration those poor servers were getting!

In any case, we got it out, back onto the truck, and started wheeling it down the sidewalk, and then onto the street:

Remember earlier when we barely got it onto the tines? This time was no different. So why, you might be thinking, is the rack all the way up against the far edge of the hand truck? Well, when we went down the wheelchair ramp thing from the sidewalk to the street, the cart got stuck, and the server slid forward and slammed into that lip.

Anyway, we wheeled the thing down the street

narrowly missing being smashed by some speeding buses and nearly running over a few pedestrians. Keep in mind that this pallet truck didn't really have any suspension to speak of, and this was a NYC street, so there was quite a bit of vibration during this leg of the trip, too. After a few near misses with some giant, man-potholes, we got stuck again, this time outside NAC:

Well, after another brick trick, and another rough trip over another threshold, we were inside! Only to discover that one of the servers had been shaken free from its mount:

After re-securing that server (and checking the others), we continued on our way, bouncing over the textured, uneven tiles of the NAC lobby then down a hall to the data center!

We found our spot, in a cozy corner, plugged it in

and, miraculously,

IT TURNED ON!!! A few connections were loose in the back, but otherwise all 11 computers, somehow, survived the trip!

Now our lab is quiet, the cluster is happy, I learned what a Johnson bar is, I beat Aryeh's record for number of pictures in a single blog post, and I now know how to move a high performance computing cluster.

You Brain Is Like A Lump of Coal

2009-09-08T15:14:00.002-04:00

School has started again and I find that I need to fill my Human Social Science requirements. So I am taking Psychology; yes I know psychology. The professor is a bit of an eccentric, also makes rather large statements as if they where facts. The one statement that I have decided to nitpick is a fun one, he stated that the brain is incredibly amazing (a fact that I will not debate), however felt it necessary to add one more thing to how amazing the brain is. He informed the class that the brain has more connections in it then there are atoms in the universe. Of course this immediately range alarm bells in the scientist part of me. Looking at this from the most basic logical standpoint, the fact that your brain is enclosed in the universe means that it can't possibly have more things in it than the universe. However, for the sake of argument lets work it out. The human brain weighs around 3 pounds or 1400 grams assuming that all of the material in your brain is carbon (ignoring that it is mostly water weight) every 12 grams of carbon would be one mole of atoms or Avogadros number (6.02*10^23) atoms per 12 grams. So lets divide the 1400 by 12 then multiply this by 4 which is the number of bonds carbon is capable of making. Now lets multiply this by Avogadros number and we find that at most the brain can have about 2.81*10^26 connections in it. Another way to look at this, which is really the whole point is that what the professor was saying is that your brain is about as amazing as a lump of wet coal, of course mabey his is.

People forget about global warming during the dead of winter.

2009-09-05T20:00:00.000-04:00

Perceptions of Global Warming and the Seasons:

There is a large drop in google searches for "global warming" in the US, Canada and the UK during our February winters. The same drop in searches for Australia and South Africa happens during their July winters. The search for "Calentamiento Global" in spanish South America has the drop coinciding with that of the English speaking southern hemisphere countries.

What does this say about how people understand these issues?

These graphs were made possible with Google Insight. See if you can find your own interesting trends. Post them here or tell the people at Google Israel insightsforsearch@google.com

Unrelated, see where people have been searching for Obama.

Two worlds

2009-09-03T18:22:00.002-04:00

This is a picture I took on vacation to Lancaster, PA a few weeks ago:

Boston Marathon 2009

2009-08-30T01:19:00.000-04:00

The Boston marathon runs right by my apartment and I highly recomend watching one if you have the opportunity.

This man below is running to get his fixed gear bycle

No less than two wonderwomen, probably more that I didn't spot

The best part about watching a marathon is cheering on the strangers who run by. If you haven't done this, you haven't really spectated. I personally wrote "Dave" on the back of a sign and held it up to cheer any surprised Daves who passed by.

Zooming In

2009-08-27T15:19:00.000-04:00

I was recently trained to use a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). This one, in fact:

(I also managed to crash the thing, but that's not the point of this post.) These microscopes take really fantastic pictures down to really tiny sizes. This size of this crevasse is about the diameter of a human hair.

You could have easily seen this in an optical microscope, some of which can see things (if you push it) even 100 times smaller than this hole. However, the SEM can see things 100 times smaller than that. To get a sense of this, here's a serious of pictures I took using the SEM. Each picture has a red box around what you see in the next zoom level:

The whole picture is around 2 mm across and each of the squares in the image are about 2 times the diameter of a human hair. Now, we zoom in on one of the squares:

And now further towards that speck in the middle of the picture:

That canyon is about the size of a water droplet in fog. Let's zoom in a bit more:

And a tad more:

This image approaches the limit of optical microscopy. An old-school microscope image of this would not be anywhere near as sharp. For example, if you click on the picture to make it bigger you'll see that the bright stripes are actually made of a bunch of little blobs (gold nanoparticles, I believe). You would certainly not be able to see that optically. And now, we'll zoom in some more:

The larger blobs are about the size of the wavelength of ultraviolet light. And now we'll zoom in once more:

The big blobs in the center of the screen are about the size of the thickness of a cell membrane, about 10 nm. As a sense of scale, if those big blobs were peas, an actual pea would be around the size of the Earth. The teeny little dots on the left are around 1nm in diameter (the maximal resolution of this SEM). As a further note of scale, if we were able to zoom in on this picture as much as we have from our first picture (and we can't) we'd be seeing atomic nuclei.

Any thing you'd like to see electron microscoped? The guy who trained me suggested starting a bug collection.

Qualified Health Claim

2009-08-20T06:00:00.069-04:00

Stacy and I recently purchased a fancy-pants bottle of olive oil from Fairway.

While we purchased it primarily for taste (and the shiny foil wrapping [shiny!]), the bottle carried a tag proclaiming

Olive Oil for your heart

followed by

FDA
QUALIFIED HEALTH CLAIM FOR CORONARY HEART DISEASE RISKS' REDUCTION

Here's the tag a little clearer:

A cursory glance at the tag (they even have the official FDA font for writing FDA!) gives the impression that this oil is super healthy, and will save you from heart disease. Well, that's until you open the little tag and read the inside:

In case you can't read it from the picture:

QUALIFIED HEALTH CLAIM Limited and not conclusive scientific evidence suggests that eating about 2 tablespoons (23 grams) of olive oil daily may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease due to the monounsaturated fat olive oil. To achieve this possible benefit, olive oil is to replace a similar amout of saturated fat and not increase the total number of calories you eat in a day. [Emphasis added.]

After reading this, I'm convinced! Instead of those two tablespoons of butter I am careful to eat every day, I may, possibly, down two tablespoons of olive oil in a limited and not conclusive way. I wonder what it takes for the FDA to qualify a health claim. I suggest not all that much.

The Amazing CCNY Diet

2009-08-13T14:22:00.000-04:00

You may recall the fat pedestrian sign from a few weeks ago. Well, he's gone on a very impressive diet:

He also purchased himself a new bag. Still talking on his cellphone, though.

Of Hair Had and Lost

2009-08-12T00:04:00.004-04:00

As is rather obvious to anyone who reads this blog I have been growing my hair and beard for nearly two years. Well what you probably don't know is that a very good childhood friend of mine is getting married on August 23rd. I decided that I really could not go to a friends wedding looking like I have, because of this I decided to shave and get a haircut. I had to go out and buy a shaver (which I have never done before and resulted in me calling Eli for advice on what shaver to purchase), and get my dads beard trimmer (which I used for the first rough passes).

First pictures of the hair and beard in all their glory (shortly after getting out of the shower).

I felt that you would not really be interested in seeing all the pictures of me shaving (they are not very exciting). Instead I will show you how weird I looked with the hair and no beard, however I will tell you that when I got up this morning my mother freaked and couldn't look at me.

Finally a picture of what I now look like, unfortunately I had to take the picture so it is not an exceptionally good one.

Cargo Cult Science and Doings at Useless Ranch

2009-08-08T22:30:00.000-04:00

One of this blogs readers, who lives on a Florida ranch with her physicist husband has an interesting blog of her own, Doings at Useless Ranch. In particular a post from last February Equine Cargo Cult describes a horse and donkey dynamic relationship where the horses end up acting quite like a cargo cult for the Donkeys. They lick the lock to their food that was once opened by a donkey's prehensile lip. That was just a tiny summary, but you should really take a look at the well written post here to get the full story.

Now I can't mention this with out talking about the great Cargo Cult Science essay by Richard Feynman. From wikipedia quoting Feynman, "it has the semblance of being scientific, but is missing 'a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty."

The first google hit gives a strange 404 error so I'll include the full text below. I recommend reading it if you ever happen to plan on contributing to science. I apologize for its length, but I guarantee it is quality.

CARGO CULT SCIENCE by Richard Feynman

Adapted from the Caltech commencement address given in 1974.

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such

as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a

method was discovered for separating the ideas--which was to try

one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it.

This method became organized, of course, into science. And it

developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It

is such a scientific age, in fact that we have difficulty in

understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when

nothing that they proposed ever really worked--or very little of

it did.

But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me

into a conversation about UFOS, or astrology, or some form of

mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and

so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.

Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to

investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my

curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I

found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by

investigating various ideas of mysticism, and mystic experiences.

I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations,

so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a

hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should

go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how

much there was.

At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated

on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most

pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and

watch the waves crashing onto the rocky shore below, to gaze into

the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she

quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.

One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl

sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began

thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this

beautiful nude babe?"

I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her,

I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?"

"Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a

massage table nearby.

I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of

anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel

it, "he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?"

I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!"

They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said, "It's

reflexology!"

I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.

That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I

also looked into extrasensory perception and PSI phenomena, and the

latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able

to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his

hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both

mindreading and bending keys. He didn't do any mindreading that

succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key

and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it

works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing

in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and

him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was

unable to investigate that phenomenon.

But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And

I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have

been to cheek on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So

I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have

some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading

methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice,

you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up

in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to

improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't

work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their

method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We

obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress--

in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to

handle criminals.

Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I

think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by

this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to

teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it

some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into

thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent

of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels

guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right

thing," according to the experts.

So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and

science that isn't science.

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are

examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the

South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw

airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same

thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like

runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a

wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head

like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's

the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're

doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the

way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So

I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the

apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but

they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing.

But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea

Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some

wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling

them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one

feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science.

That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying

science in school--we never explicitly say what this is, but just

hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific

investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now

and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity,

a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of

utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if

you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you

think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about

it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and

things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other

experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can

tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be

given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know

anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you

make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then

you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well

as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem.

When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate

theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that

those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea

for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else

come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to

help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the

information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or

another.

The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for

example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil

doesn't soak through food. Well, that's true. It's not dishonest;

but the thing I'm talking about is not just a matter of not being

dishonest, it's a matter of scientific integrity, which is another

level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement

is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain

temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will--

including Wesson oil. So it's the implication which has been

conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what

we have to deal with.

We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other

experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you

were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll

disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some

temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation

as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind

of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to

fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the

research in cargo cult science.

A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of

the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the

subject. Nevertheless it should be remarked that this is not the

only difficulty. That's why the planes didn't land--but they don't

land.

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of

the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the

charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and

got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a

little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the

viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of

measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you

plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little

bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than

that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until

finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away?

It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because

it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a

number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something

must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why

something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to

Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated

the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that.

We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that

kind of a disease.

But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves--of

having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something

that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that

I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are

the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about

that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other

scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after

that.

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science,

but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool

the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to

tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your

girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be

a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll

leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about

a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending

over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to

have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as

scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a

friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology

and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the

applications of this work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any."

He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of

this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're

representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to

the layman what you're doing--and if they don't want to support you

under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind

to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should

always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only

publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look

good. We must publish both kinds of results.

I say that's also important in giving certain types of government

advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether

drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it

would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a

result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're

being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the

government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument

in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish

it at all. That's not giving scientific advice.

Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When

I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology

department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an

experiment that went something like this--it had been found by

others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A.

She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to

Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment

under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.

I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her

laboratory the experiment of the other person--to do it under

condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change

to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know that the real

difference was the thing she thought she had under control.

She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her

professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the

experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time.

This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general

policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but

only to change the conditions and see what happens.

Nowadays there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even

in the famous (?) field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an

experiment done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator

Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his

heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen"

he had to use data from someone else's experiment on light

hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked why,

he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program (because

there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the

experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there

wouldn't be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs

at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money

to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are

destroying--possibly--the value of the experiments themselves,

which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the

experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific

integrity demands.

All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For

example, there have been many experiments running rats through all

kinds of mazes, and so on--with little clear result. But in 1937

a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long

corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and

doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if

he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from

wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the

door where the food had been the time before.

The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was

so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door

as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was

different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very

carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly

the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats

were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell

after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the

rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement

in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the

corridor, and still the rats could tell.

He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded

when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his

corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible

clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to

learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions,

the rats could tell.

Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one

experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running

experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat

is really using--not what you think it's using. And that is the

experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in

order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with

rat-running.

I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next

experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young.

They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on

sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running rats

in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries

of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't

discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the

things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not

paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of

cargo cult science.

Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other

people. As various people have made criticisms--and they themselves

have made criticisms of their own experiments--they improve the

techniques so that the effects are smaller, and smaller, and

smaller until they gradually disappear. All the parapsychologists

are looking for some experiment that can be repeated--that you can

do again and get the same effect--statistically, even. They run a

million rats no, it's people this time they do a lot of things and

get a certain statistical effect. Next time they try it they don't

get it any more. And now you find a man saying that it is an

irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is

science?

This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which

he was resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology.

And, in telling people what to do next, he says that one of the

things they have to do is be sure they only train students who have

shown their ability to get PSI results to an acceptable extent--

not to waste their time on those ambitious and interested students

who get only chance results. It is very dangerous to have such a

policy in teaching--to teach students only how to get certain

results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific

integrity.

So I have just one wish for you--the good luck to be somewhere

where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have

described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain

your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on,

to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.