Pauls musings and tidbits

Papers Reveal Pentagon Funding of Boeing’s Psychic Research: “ESP, meditation, parapsychology … nothing’s too paranormal for a military contract.

[…]

Boeing researchers don’t just spend their days designing killer drones and networked tanks.  They also investigate unexplained powers of the mind, sometimes. Especially if those times are the late ’60s. 

This study, New Correlation Between a
Human Subject and a Quantum Mechanical Random Number Generator, conducted in 1967, "tentatively conclude[s]" that people can basically will particular numbers to appear. 

According to the Boeing-ites, there "exists a weak but significant
correlation" between the experiment’s "statistical processes" (that would be the generation of random numbers, "connected to four lamps and four corresponding pushbuttons") and "the experimenter who initiates the processes" ("the human subjects, asked to press the buttons… with the objective in mind of obtaining a high number of coincidences").   

There’s no mention of follow-up studies.  But this Boeing experiment is one of a number of fringe and alternative science projects we found after a quick dig through the online archives of the Defense Technical Information Center.  You’ll get a kick out of the others.  So keep reading…

(Read Original Article - Via Wired News.)

Ugly Airline Math: Planes Late, Fliers Even Later - New York Times: “As anyone who has flown recently can probably tell you, delays are getting worse this year. The on-time performance of airlines has reached an all-time low, but even the official numbers do not begin to capture the severity of the problem.

That is because these statistics track how late airplanes are, not how late passengers are. The longest delays — those resulting from missed connections and canceled flights — involve sitting around for hours or even days in airports and hotels and do not officially get counted. Researchers and consumer advocates have taken notice and urged more accurate reporting.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did a study several years ago and found that when missed connections and flight cancellations are factored in, the average wait was two-thirds longer than the official statistic. They also determined that as planes become more crowded — and jets have never been as jammed as they are today — the delays grow much longer because it becomes harder to find a seat on a later flight.”

(Read Original Article - Via .)

Ugly Airline Math: Planes Late, Fliers Even Later - New York Times: “As anyone who has flown recently can probably tell you, delays are getting worse this year. The on-time performance of airlines has reached an all-time low, but even the official numbers do not begin to capture the severity of the problem.

That is because these statistics track how late airplanes are, not how late passengers are. The longest delays — those resulting from missed connections and canceled flights — involve sitting around for hours or even days in airports and hotels and do not officially get counted. Researchers and consumer advocates have taken notice and urged more accurate reporting.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did a study several years ago and found that when missed connections and flight cancellations are factored in, the average wait was two-thirds longer than the official statistic. They also determined that as planes become more crowded — and jets have never been as jammed as they are today — the delays grow much longer because it becomes harder to find a seat on a later flight.”

(Read Original Article - Via .)

Thousands of rubber ducks to land on British shores after 15 year journey | the Daily Mail: “They were toys destined only to bob up and down in nothing bigger than a child’s bath - but so far they have floated halfway around the world.

The armada of 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs broke free from a cargo ship 15 years ago.

Since then they have travelled 17,000 miles, floating over the site where the Titanic sank, landing in Hawaii and even spending years frozen in an Arctic ice pack.

And now they are heading straight for Britain. At some point this summer they are expected to be spotted on beaches in South-West England.

While the ducks are undoubtedly a loss to the bath-time fun of thousands of children, their adventures at sea have proved an innvaluable aid to science.

[…]

So precious to science are they that the US firm that made them is offering a £50 bounty for finding one.

THE JOURNEY SO FAR:

10 JANUARY 1992: Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean nearly 29,000 First Years bath toys, including bright yellow rubber ducks, are spilled from a cargo ship in the Pacific Ocean.

16 NOVEMBER 1992: Caught in the Subpolar Gyre (counter-clockwise ocean current in the Bering Sea, between Alaska and Siberia), the ducks take 10 months to begin landing on the shores of Alaska.

EARLY 1995: The ducks take three years to circle around. East from the drop site to Alaska, then west and south to Japan before turning back north and east passing the original drop site and again landing in North America. Some ducks are even found In Hawaii. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) worked out that the ducks travel approximately 50 per pent faster than the water in the current.

1995 - 2000: Some intrepid ducks escape the Subpolar Gyre and head North, through the Bering Straight and into the frozen waters of the Arctic. Frozen into the ice the ducks travel slowly across the pole, moving ever eastward.

2000: Ducks begin reaching the North Atlantic where they begin to thaw and move Southward. Soon ducks are sighted bobbing in the waves from Maine to Massachusetts.

2001: Ducks are tracked in the area where the Titanic sank.

JULY TO DECEMBER 2003: The First Years company offers a $100 savings bond reward for the recovery of wayward ducks from the 1992 spill. To be valid ducks must be sent to the company and must be found in New England, Canada or Iceland. Britain is told to prepare for an invasion of the wayward ducks as well.

2003: A lawyer called Sonali Naik was on holiday in the Hebrides in north-west Scotland when she found a faded green frog on the beach marked with the magic words ‘The First Years’. Unaware of the significance of her find she left it on the beach. It was only when she was chatting to other guests at her hotel that she realised what she had seen.
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(Read Original Article - Via the Daily Mail .)

IBM 1401 Mainframe, the Musical: “A touring song-and-dance performance uses musical sounds recorded by Icelandic engineers in the 1960s who worked with the decades-old, room-size computer. Older IBM-heads are loving it.

[…]

When IBM chief maintenance engineer Jóhann Gunnarsson started tinkering with the IBM 1401 Data Processing System, believed to have been the first computer to arrive in his native Iceland in 1964, he noticed an electromagnetic leak from the machine’s memory caused a deep, cellolike hum to come from nearby AM radios.

It was a production defect but, captivated, amateur musician Gunnarson and his colleagues soon learned how to reprogram the room-size business workhorse’s innards to emit melodies that rank amongst the earliest in a long line of Scandinavian digital music.

Fast-forward four decades, and recently discovered tape recordings of Gunnarson’s works form the basis of a touring song-and-dance performance, IBM 1401: A User’s Manual. The show was composed by Gunnarson’s son Jóhann Jóhannsson, with interpretive dance choreographed by Erna Omarsdotti, whose father is another IBM alum.

(Read Original Article - Via Wired News.)

Editor: My first real full time job had a 1401 still in regular use. Luckily I wasn’t responsible for it. We had the same type of musical fun with radios using a Honeywell computer during Junior High.

An Earth Without People — [ environment ]: Scientific American: “It%u2019s a common fantasy to imagine that you%u2019re the last person left alive on earth. But what if all human beings were suddenly whisked off the planet? That premise is the starting point for The World without Us, a new book by science writer Alan Weisman, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Arizona. In this extended thought experiment, Weisman does not specify exactly what finishes off Homo sapiens; instead he simply assumes the abrupt disappearance of our species and projects the sequence of events that would most likely occur in the years, decades and centuries afterward.

According to Weisman, large parts of our physical infrastructure would begin to crumble almost immediately. Without street cleaners and road crews, our grand boulevards and superhighways would start to crack and buckle in a matter of months. Over the following decades many houses and office buildings would collapse, but some ordinary items would resist decay for an extraordinarily long time. Stainless-steel pots, for example, could last for millennia, especially if they were buried in the weed-covered mounds that used to be our kitchens. And certain common plastics might remain intact for hundreds of thousands of years; they would not break down until microbes evolved the ability to consume them.Scientific American editor Steve Mirsky recently interviewed Weisman to find out why he wrote the book and what lessons can be drawn from his research. Some excerpts from that interview appear on the following pages.”

(Read Original Article - Via Scientific American .)

Behind the iPhone Frenzy: “

Let me say right up front that I have not accepted the Jesus Phone as my personal Lord and Savior. The iPhone might turn out to be insanely great. It might become the best-selling mobile phone ever. Or it might not.

Either way, the iPhone’s arrival and the attendant frenzy mark the beginning of a new phase in the mobile phone world — a phase based on the radical notion that it’s possible to make a pocket-sized device that is a pretty good phone and a pretty good networked computer at the same time.

From a purely technical standpoint, this isn’t surprising at all. Phones are basically computers, and we know how to cram a decent computer into a small, low-power package. The engineering isn’t trivial but we know it can be done. Apple might have modestly better engineering, and significantly better human-factors design, but what they’re doing has been technically possible all along.

Yet somehow it hasn’t happened, because the mobile carriers don’t want it to happen. They have clung to their walled garden models, offering limited, captive services rather than allowing easy development of Internet applications for mobile devices. An open system would provide more benefit overall, but most of that benefit would accrue to consumers. The carriers would rather get a big share of a small pie, than a small share of a big pie.

In most markets, competition keeps this kind of thing from happening, by forcing producers to account for consumer preferences. You would expect competition to have forced the mobile networks open by now, whether the carriers liked it or not. But this hasn’t happened yet. The carriers have managed to keep control by locking customers in to long contracts and erecting barriers to the entry of new devices and applications. The system seemed to be stuck in an unstable equilibrium. All we needed was some kind of shock, to get the ball rolling downhill.

Only a company with marketing muscle, design mojo, and a world-historic Reality Distortion Field could provide the needed bump. Apple decided to try, in the hope of selling zillions of the new, more capable devices. The real significance of the iPhone, whether it succeeds or fails in the market, is that it will trigger the transition to more open networks. Once people see that a pretty good phone can be a pretty good mobile computer, they won’t settle for less anymore; and mobile networks will be pried open.

Whether or not the Jesus Phone achieves worldly success, it will succeed in its own way by convincing people that the world can be different.

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(Read Original Article - Via Freedom to Tinker.)

Fever Builds for iPhone (Anxiety Too): SAN FRANCISCO, June 3 — During an onscreen demonstration of the iPhone in Apple’s sprawling retail store here recently, an employee, clad in a black T-shirt, of course, surprised a potential customer.

Nonplused, the customer stammered, “You mean it’s a cellphone, too?”

Such is the spell that Steven P. Jobs has cast on the American consumer.

It has been almost six months since Mr. Jobs, the world’s consummate salesman, introduced the iPhone as the Ronco Veg-O-Matic for the Internet era. Tongue only partly in cheek, Mr. Jobs promised that Apple’s entry into the cellular handset market would be a better phone, Web browser and music player.

Mr. Jobs succeeded in building expectations for what some have called “the God machine.” The bar-of-soap-size phone is being coveted as a talisman for a digital age, and iPhone hysteria is beginning to reach levels usually reserved for video-game machines at Christmas.

Although the phones are expected to cost as much as $600 when they go on sale at Apple and AT&T stores later this month, each company has received more than a million inquiries about the product’s availability. Apple disclosed in television commercials Sunday night that the phone would be released June 29.

Further evidence that expectations have been wound up to a fever pitch: the phones, or promises to deliver a phone, are already on sale on eBay for $830. A pundit as unlikely as Arianna Huffington sought out Mr. Jobs directly for advice on being the first to score a phone. (He told her to go to an AT&T store.)

Last week, during an appearance at a technology industry conference in Southern California, Mr. Jobs teased the audience by briefly pulling an iPhone out of his jeans pocket and immediately slipping it back out of sight.

(Read Original Article - Via NYT > Technology.)

Web Video: A PoliticsTV Retrospective: “

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(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)

The Curious Cook: The Five-Second Rule Explored, or How Dirty Is That Bologna?: A COUPLE of weeks ago I saw a new scientific paper from Clemson University that struck me as both pioneering and hilarious.

Accompanied by six graphs, two tables and equations whose terms include “bologna” and “carpet,” it’s a thorough microbiological study of the five-second rule: the idea that if you pick up a dropped piece of food before you can count to five, it’s O.K. to eat it.

I first heard about the rule from my then-young children and thought it was just a way of having fun at snack time and lunch. My daughter now tells me that fun was part of it, but they knew they were playing with “germs.”

We’re reminded about germs on food whenever there’s an outbreak of E. coli or salmonella, and whenever we read the labels on packages of uncooked meat. But we don’t have much occasion to think about the everyday practice of retrieving and eating dropped pieces of food.

Microbes are everywhere around us, not just on floors. They thrive in wet kitchen sponges and end up on freshly wiped countertops.

As I write this column, on an airplane, I realize that I have removed a chicken sandwich from its protective plastic sleeve and put it down repeatedly on the sleeve’s outer surface, which was meant to protect the sandwich by blocking microbes. What’s on the outer surface? Without the five-second rule on my mind I wouldn’t have thought to wonder.

I learned from the Clemson study that the true pioneer of five-second research was Jillian Clarke, a high-school intern at the University of Illinois in 2003. Ms. Clarke conducted a survey and found that slightly more than half of the men and 70 percent of the women knew of the five-second rule, and many said they followed it.

She did an experiment by contaminating ceramic tiles with E. coli, placing gummy bears and cookies on the tiles for the statutory five seconds, and then analyzing the foods. They had become contaminated with bacteria.

For performing this first test of the five-second rule, Ms. Clarke was recognized by the Annals of Improbable Research with the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize in public health.

It’s not surprising that food dropped onto bacteria would collect some bacteria. But how many? Does it collect more as the seconds tick by? Enough to make you sick?

(Read Original Article - Via NYT > Most E-mailed Articles.)