Flying Carousel of Science

William and Aidan on
the Flying Carousel

The Flying Horse Carousel in Watch Hill, Rhode Island is a historical landmark enjoyed by generations of children seeking the brass ring. Parents measure their child's progress through their patronage of the carousel. At two years old they select their favorite among the inner ten horses then hang on for dear life. At three they move to the outer horses where they are handed rings by the attendants. Before long they begin snatching rings from the holder allowing a chance at the elusive brass. They get a solid four or five seasons perfecting their technique before puberty ushers in a weight above the limit.

Most of the local kids move on to the operation of the carousel as a summer job. It was sad the day my son, Aidan, rode the carousel for the last time. The teenagers running the carousel knew it was his final ride so they handed him the brass ring several times allowing an extended whirl. Back in 2017, our youngest, William, was just discovering his ability to snatch rings from the holder. At the time, he hadn't yet felt the summer joy of discovering brass in his little hand.

The carousel offers a lot of opportunity for amusement. When Aidan or one of his friends came up with the brass ring my friend, Steve, would always shout,

"Take the thousand dollars!"

As if there was a choice between one free ride or $1000. The tourists would all look puzzled. Once I told Aidan,

"Don't come home unless you get the brass ring."

The frowns from parents were priceless. Every once in a while a kid snatches the prize and says,

"Mom, Dad! I got the golden ring!"

One of us usually exclaims,

"It's brass. Go back to New Jersey."

Aidan also enjoyed pretending that he fell asleep as the ride whirled about. The carousel was abandoned by a travelling circus in 1879. Originally, it was powered by a horse, but over the years it was modernized and housed in a stone and wood structure at the entrance to the town beach. During winter the horses are repaired and repainted by volunteers. The ride is the oldest flying carousel still in operation in the country. It's been lovingly cared for by the nonprofit Watch Hill Improvement Society for decades.

One day, as I watched Aidan reach out for a ring, I thought of the movie, A Beautiful Mind, starring Russel Crowe as John Nash, a Nobel Laureate in Economics. Nash came up with the game theory concept, Nash Equilibrium, which was depicted in the film as a bunch of guys employing a collaborative strategy to score with a blonde. Not only was this not an example of Nash Equilibrium, it didn't actually happen. That's Hollywood for you. Always dumbing down history for the consumption by us stupid people. The closest the movie got to the actual definition of Nash Equilibrium is when Crowe said,

"The best result comes from everyone in the group doing what's best for himself and the group."

This got me thinking about the brass ring and carousel. I had Aidan and five of his friends position themselves one horse apart from each other. There were ten outer horses which gave access to the ring holder. The odds of getting the brass ring was one out of ten. I instructed the group to pass on the ring when it was not brass so as to constantly feed a losing selection to the person behind them. This ensured that one of the five in the group would always get the brass ring, doubling the odds of someone on the team winning.

The strategy worked amazingly well with the odds going up as the number of riders went down. Some times Aidan rode the carousel with only one tourist who he fed all the losing rings. In this scenario, getting the brass ring is all but guaranteed. Aidan and his friends began dominating the brass ring capture with some kids getting it over ten times for the season. Aidan, himself, lost count after twenty. I enjoyed his theatrics as he missed the ring, ensuring the hapless kid behind him snagged a loser.

Science is often used to enhance our lives as in better medical advancements, more effective means of communication or increased travel convenience. Ever so often, some people use science to beat the system like the Eudaemons, a small group of University of California physics graduate students who in the 1970s figured out an algorithm to predict the outcome of roulette. They derived their name from the word "eudaimonia" which means "human flourishing."

And that's what Aidan did with four of his friends one summer. They flourished as each upped their brass ring count. It never lost its appeal. In fact, it got even more exciting as each kid knew they were beating the system. Many asked me to explain the increased odds they experienced by the passing strategy. One parent said,

"I hope you feel good that you taught them how to cheat."

They weren't cheating like doping, deflating a football or illegally avoiding taxes. They used knowledge to increase their odds of winning. That's not cheating. That's smart. In the end the flying carousel of Watch Hill will continue to whirl about through the summers enthralling generations of children, and every so often the old ride just might inspire a kid to go into science.

Editor's Note: Jeff Probst, the host of Survivor, cashing in on the popularity of the movie, A Beautiful Mind, once claimed that everything needed to win Survivor was in Nash's seminal paper. I'm sure Professor Nash would be thrilled that his Nobel Prize winning work was helping people win the Dorito Food Challenge. Originally posted on March 17, 2017.

The Middle School Infatuation with the Scientific Method

It's impossible in this country to traverse middle school without a thorough examination of the scientific method, which usually involves multiple full on projects, topped with presentations. Most of us have studied the scientific method more extensively than the Constitution, the seminal document written by the founding fathers that defines your rights as a citizen. People in this country learn the Pledge of Allegiance to the scientific method all through middle school.

Bill Nye

It's great that our preteens learn to make a hypothesis, collect data and evaluate the results. That's science. Bill Nye would stand in ovation and clap like one of Pavlov's dogs at the mere utterance of the term. It's been around since the 17th century. If it wasn't for the scientific method, we would still be going for a haircut, and a blood letting to balance the humors.

It's great that everyone has to learn about the scientific method so we don't have to argue arcane stances against creationism or intelligent design. We can simply pull out our scientific method banner and march, lock step, over anyone who doesn't agree with our well-formed, thoroughly researched, extensively tested hypotheses. The only issue I have with the middle school infatuation with the scientific method is that most of us in the course of our daily activities for better part of our entire life will never have need for the scientific method. What we more likely will need to do is some form of reengineering.

Now, reengineering is likely something you didn't study in middle school. Simply put, reengineering is figuring out how something is made, how it was assembled, how it works. You reengineer something for a very important reason, to fix it. A lot of things are going to break in your lifetime, and being able to fix things is a valuable skill. Calling in the trades every time something doesn't work is an expensive proposition. If you own a house, a car, a boat, a computer, a bicycle, anything you got to be able to fix things.

A good example is a 3-way switch which is used when you have a need to turn on a light from more than one location. I'm sure you have a 3-way circuit in your house. My son, Aidan, did in the science room in sixth grade. There were two doors in the science lab with light switches at each. The simple circuit for a switch and a light looks like this,

Simple Switched Circuit

Obviously if you have two switches at different locations you need something more in the wiring and switches to allow one switch to operate independently of the other. Understanding how this works is crucial to repairing a 3-way circuit. You can call an electrician, but it will cost you a minimum of $400, or you can fix it yourself in about twenty minutes. Your choice, Einstein.

When it came to the science fair, Aidan became very interested in the operation of a 3-way circuit. He wanted to teach his friends how to set up the circuit given wires and switches, a battery and a light. Commensurate with his generation, he developed a simulated three way circuit in Minecraft, a popular, creative building, sandbox video game.

His teacher initially rejected his proposal on the grounds that it didn't follow the scientific method. He asked if she knew how a 3-way circuit worked. She didn't. True, he wasn't purposing a possible solution to a problem plaguing mankind, but if you ever worked on one of these circuits without knowing what you’re doing, you know how difficult it is to get the wiring right. There are six connections to be made which offers you 720 possible combination with only two of them being correct.

After some negotiations, he managed to convince Madam Curie to let him proceed. He did a fantastic job explaining how a 3-way switch is actually a logical OR gate. He traced out the circuit from the power source to the light for each switch position. He even called his presentation The Or Gates Around Us.

Van da Graaf
Generator

When the judges voted on the best science project, a student whose father build a Van da Graaf generator out of some copper gutters won first prize. I sat through the kid’s explanation of how it worked, and he was under the impression that the charge came from the cord to the electric motor. Wrong answer, Tesla.

Second place was a girl with an orange and some litmus paper. As far as I could tell, she was technically correct with all her findings. It's just not very hypnotizing to hypothesize that dipping litmus paper into a glass of milk would give a neutral response, however true. Not bad, Rachel Carson.

Third place was a balloon on a string. The hypothesis was that when the clothespin was removed, the balloon would zoom along the string. Since tape was used to form a loop through which the string passed through, when the clothespin was removed, the balloon popped. Good enough for third place, Orville Wright.

Aidan got "honorable mention" because he didn't follow the scientific method. The kid who won didn't either, but when you got electric bolts shooting across the classroom and students hair standing on end, you got a winner with or without the scientific method.

I know what you're thinking. I'm a disgruntled, snowplow parent, who's annoyed that my son didn't win. That's what a friend of mine told me. He's probably right. The other day at his house, I flipped a switch, and he said,

"Don't touch that switch. If you do, the other switch over there won't work anymore."

Aidan said,

"The travelers are hooked to the wrong screws."

He was right. I took out my Swiss Army knife, and he and I wired the switch up correctly. I don't know much about snowplows, but if I had a problem with mine, my son and I would certainly figure out how to fix it.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on October 20, 2016.

Bill Nye the Pseudoscience Guy

Bill Nye

Bill Nye is a mechanical engineer who graduated in 1977 from Cornell where he enrolled in classes taught by Carl Sagan. After working for Boeing for several years, Nye migrated towards comedy and invented his popular character who hosted the syndicated PBS namesake children's science show. Following the success of his television series, Nye wrote two best selling books on science, rose to prominence as the CEO of the Planetary Society, and competed on Dancing with the Stars. Now, his Netflix series, Bill Nye Saves the World, continues to educate devoted fans through lighthearted comedic thespianism artfully crafted to explain the world around us. 

While hordes of nerds attribute their success in fields like engineering, medicine and astrophysics to their childhood patronage of Bill Nye The Science Guy, I watched Nye's shows collectively for less than a few minutes. I find him to be exceedingly tedious with all the goofy get ups and theatrical facial expressions. The show, itself, is downright painful with odd voice overs and jumpy cut scenes designed to speed up the more boring parts. My oldest son is a very tech savvy high schooler who loathed Bill Nye primarily because Aidan doesn't suffer from attention deficit disorder. Nye would repeatedly drive home a mundane point with statements like,

"The earth is big. Way big!"

Then he would demonstrate that if the earth was a grain of sand he held in tweezers, the sun would be the size of a grapefruit. He didn't just reveal how far away the grapefruit would be though. He held his hand a few inches from the tweezers, then asked,

"Would the sun be this far away?"

Of course not. After playing this game three more times, Bill finally let us all in on the titillating fact that the grapefruit would be 22 meters away. I know this is a character Bill plays, but a less goofy version of the science guy, complete with bowtie, has been appearing in the media, making all sorts of intellectual claims based on dubious scientific knowledge. Bill Nye is not really a scientist. He's an engineer. A college degree and a bowtie don't make you a scientist. Nye often says when arguing a point he feels he understands better than you based on his extensive scientific background,

"We in the science field..."

Nye won't be doing an intellectual ride along with Neil de Grasse Tyson anytime soon. A while ago Nye did an "ask me anything" on reddit in which he fielded a question about an interesting event in his life that affected him deeply. Nye said,

"I watched bumble bees (Hymentoptera bombidae) for hours. How could such a relatively big animal fly with such relatively small wings? The answer was discovered in my lifetime. Their abdomens are springs, and their halteres provide vortices with (sic) allow the wings to swing up with hardly any aerodynamic drag. If I may, how cool is that?"

An etymologist chimed in with,

"...hymenopterans don't have halteres. Those are specialized balancing structures limited to Diptera (flies). Hence di (two) ptera (wing). Hymenoptera still have all four wings, no balancing structures. Their muscles vibrate instead of contract to allow for extremely fast wing movement."

Can't argue with a bug guy. I guess when Bill was watching bumble bees for hours, he never actually thought of reading a book about them. At least he didn't say that scientists don't know how a bee is able to fly because clearly the etymologist who responded to Nye had his bees in a row. Okay, I'll spot Bill Nye this public flub since we all at some time in our life comment on something we know nothing about. A few years ago, Nye weighed in on abortion with a video entitled, Bill Nye: Can We Stop Telling Women What to Do With Their Bodies? Refuting the prolife stance that life begins at conception, Nye opened with,

"Many, many, many, many more hundreds of eggs are fertilized than become humans, ...but if you're going to hold that as a standard—that is to say, that when an egg is fertilized, it therefore has the same rights as a human, whom are you going to sue?"

Nye makes the point that fertilization is not enough. The egg must attach to the uterine wall before it can grow into a fetus. About half of fertilized eggs fail to do this. Most of the time only one egg is released per month so a woman does not discard hundreds of fertilized eggs naturally as Bill suggests. Nye also uses the term "womb" instead of uterus which had me thinking he made this clip for eight year olds. Although I'm not a lawyer nor a physicist, I suspect a neutrino went through Nye's head when he suggested you can sue a women for terminating a pregnancy. He can't possibly think right to lifers want to sue women whose bodies for whatever reason reject a fertilized egg, but Bill yanks in science by saying,

"It just reflects a deep lack of scientific understanding, and you... apparently literally don't know what you're talking about."

I'm glad that Bill Nye with his mechanical engineering degree could straighten out all those stupid people concerning this whole abortion issue. It took an unmarried, childless guy who is not a medical practitioner to explain the science behind procreation to the hordes of dumbasses in our society. I found it hard to listen to Nye explaining procreation especially when he used the term "sperm." The fact is Bill Nye is not the most masculine guy on Tinder. He was married once for seven weeks before the union was annulled, after which he filed a restraining order against his former spouse for stealing his laptop and dumping herbicide in his garden. Bill has to get back into the game of life. Even Stephen Hawkin got hitched twice.

When asked if he thought it was ok to jail climate skeptics as war criminals, Bill stated,

"Was it appropriate to jail the guys from Enron?"

Then he added,

"Was it appropriate to jail people from the cigarette industry who insisted that this addictive product was not addictive?"

The Enron guys who cooked the books to scam investors are being bitch slapped right now in Shawshank, but the cigarette executives who testified before congress that cigarettes were not addictive never went to prison. Bill continues,

"In these cases as a taxpayer and voter... the introduction of extreme doubt... about climate change is affecting my quality of life as a public citizen. So I can see where people are very concerned about this and are pursuing criminal investigations..."

Bill must be applauding the Italian courts manslaughter conviction in 2012 of six scientists and one civil defense officer over their failed prediction of the 2009 earthquake in l’Aquila that killed 309 people. The courts found the scientist and government official did not communicate the actual risk to the populus. The defendants were accused of giving "inexact, incomplete and contradictory information" concerning minor tremors before the quake. Oddly, those are the exact adjectives which accurately describe the science of earthquake prediction.

Maybe we should call for the imprisonment of Bill Nye for his many misstatements. Something tells me Bill wouldn't survive the check in procedure at the county jail. Nye likes to invoke consensus among climate researches when he argues for jailing global warming skeptics. Agreeing with the crowd is important to Bill because he probably spend most of high school with his underwear rocket rammed up his rectum. History is full of stories of people being jailed for their beliefs. Bill often exclaims,

"Science rules!"

But what we know about science from recent history is that rather than ruling, science is often wrong. Before the advent of the personal computer, scientists at IBM believed that five super computers would run the world. Hewlett Packard had the rights to the personal computer, but they signed them over to Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak because they didn't think anyone would want a computer in their home. Prior to 1880, physicians didn’t believe in germs. Amputation saws weren’t sterilized during the Civil War. Not only did the science community not know how to treat basic wounds, their actions often led to life threatening infection. Disease was thought to have been spread by “bad air” and foul water. Scientist believed that infection propagated by “miasma” a poisonous bad smelling mist filled with particles from decomposing matter. At least by then they had stopped trying to balance the humors, which killed George Washington, who was bled to death by his barber to treat a soar throat.

When I was a kid, we learned in school that dinosaurs were wiped out by a huge eruption of a giant volcano. After scientists were unable to find a volcano large enough to snuff out most of the life on the planet, they switched to the asteroid impact theory. Scientists now believe dinosaurs had large multicolored feathers. So much for the depiction of the T-Rex running down Jeff Golblum in Jurassic Park. In ancient times, scientists erroneously believed that the earth was continuously increasing in size and that an undiscovered planet, called Vulcan, messed up Mercury’s orbit. They also said a fluid passed between objects rubbed together which explained the heat that was generated. It didn’t seem to bother them that objects contained an infinite amount of this fluid as you could keep generating heat indefinitely. Science is not always right, and consensus is not a measure of veracity. In fact, often the opposite is true.

This got me thinking about Bill Nye's actual education, namely his GPA. A guy stretching his credentials as far as he would certainly let his GPA slip out, especially if it was noteworthy. Since he was in school in the '70's, I would imagine he smoked a lot of pot while listening to Peter, Paul and Mary. So I went to the Cornell website where I found the frequently asked questions to which I submitted a straight up inquiry. As anticipated, that went nowhere.

Then I called the Registrar's Office at Cornell and spoke to a nice bot that directed me to the National Student Clearinghouse, the organization that handles such inquires. I opened a case by explaining that I was "an independent journalist" writing an article on Bill Nye. Hey, if he can call himself a scientist, I can call myself a journalist. I asked four things in my email.

1. Did Bill Nye graduate in 1977?
2. With a degree in mechanical engineering?
3. Was Carl Sagan one of his professors?
4. Was his GPA 3.61?

All of this is on the internet except his GPA, but I was hoping that someone new at the National Student Clearinghouse would inadvertently rifle off an answer to #4. Unfortunately my case worker wanted to know what I was going to do with all this information. I responded that I was a "freelance journalist" verifying information for an article. My caseworker told me, as I expected, they could only verify information a student used on a job application. So I responded with,

I didn't get a response. Maybe because I misspelled "Cornell." Undaunted, I decided to go directly to Bill himself. I found his email address online then sent him this,

I know "whose" should be "who's," but I find intelligencia often flame off an answer when they think someone is beneath their intellect. Like Bill Nye, I was an engineer for many years. To be equitable, my education and GPA can be found here.

In the end, I believe that people use the term “scientist” because they want to invoke credibility. We all know those religious folks are consummate nut jobs. They don’t believe in evolution, they don't want women to have abortions, and they think the earth is 4000 years old. Scientists know better because, well, they’re scientists. People listened to Stephen Hawkin, Carl Sagan, and Albert Einstein blather about anything because they were scientists so they had to be right. Hawkin once claimed the universe would eventually stop expanding and when it contracted, time would run backwards. Sagan often lamented about overpopulation in his books and television series, but he and his wife had five children. Einstein often used fudge factors he called "cosmological constants" to make his equations match reality. He also married his first cousin.

I once jokingly put down on an online profile for my life's ambition,

"To not learn anything new for the rest of my life, but if I have to learn something, let it come from TV."

Turns out I was wrong. Bill Nye is a successful showman, but when it comes to questions about science, I'd rather not be educated by a comedian on a television show.

Fake Science?

Tom Brady

Last week, Ace Davis, a fourth grader from Lexington, Kentucky won his school’s science fair with a project entitled, “Is Tom Brady a Cheater?” His father, Christopher Davis, posted his achievement on Facebook and social media did the rest by launching Davis' project into viral land. Now, the news media is reporting that a ten year old from the Bluegrass State proved that Tom Brady intentionally ordered the deflation of game balls to his teams advantage. Headlines read,

"Science proves Tom Brady is a cheater," LA Times

"Tom Brady a cheater? 10-year old Ace Davis' science fair project proves Super Bowl quarterback cheated in deflategate scandal," CBS News

"10-year old proves Tom Brady is a cheater, wins science fair," New York Post

Davis’ hypotheses on his three panel project display reads,

“Through various testing measures of weights (psi - pounds per square inch) of footballs, we should find that the underinflated footballs create a competitive advantage in a game.”

Even though Davis is a ten year old fourth grader, I would expect the winner of a science fair to know that pressure is not a measure of weight. Perhaps the judges should have picked up on this error, but then again, this is Kentucky, the state that has the Creation Museum. Davis continued with a problem statement,

“The National Football League alleges that Tom Brady ordered the deliberate deflation of footballs to gain an advantage in the 2015 championship game versus the Indianapolis Colts.”

That's not quite how it went. The Wells Report, commissioned by the NFL, concluded that it was “more probable than not” that New England Patriots equipment personnel intentionally violated the rules. The report also contended that Brady was "generally aware" of their actions. There was no actual direct evidence that Brady was involved nor requested the modification of air pressure in game balls. While the Wells Report offered no scientific basis for underinflated footballs, many of the technical aspects in the findings have been supported by the likes of Bill Nye and refuted by MIT Professor John Leonard.

What is certain is that the NFL performed a pregame check on all the balls provided by each team. At a news conference a referee, Bill Vinovich, said,

"We test them. It's 12.5 to 13.5. We put 13 in every ball..."

It's safe to assume that during the halftime of the AFC championship game when balls were discovered deflated on both sides, they were pumped up again. The Wells Report speculates that after taking custody of the properly inflated footballs, New England Patriots personnel probably released some air. The report does not prove that doing so gave the Patriots a competitive advantage, leading to their 45-7 win over the Colts. This last bit was the subject of Ace Davis' winning project.

A blind study by the Mythbusters tested whether there's an advantage to catching or throwing an underinflated football. Using a throwing machine to maintain consistency while tossing footballs inflated to various pressures, the researchers showed that underinflation offered no benefits when catching or throwing. Davis, his mother and sister threw footballs inflated to various pressures. Since Davis admitted that he “hates Tom Brady,” I would gather that his research wasn’t conducted in a blind fashion, that is, the throwers likely knew which footballs were underinflated.

Scads of scientists, engineers and nerds have all weighed in on the Ideal Gas Law, the relationship of pressure and temperature of gases in a fixed volume, as well as the warming rates of footballs in duffel bags to prove or disprove cheating. I tend to focus on a more rudimentary question,

How common is it that footballs lose air during normal game play?

Over the course of the 2015 AFC championship contest, footballs on both sides were found to be deflated pregame or at halftime. During the 2016 season, the New York Giants took possession of two Pittsburg Steeler balls. Subsequent testing on the sidelines revealed that both were underinflated. This occurred after the NFL instituted new rules which require each team to bring 24 balls to the Official's Locker Room for inspection two hours and fifteen minutes prior to kickoff.

When asked what he would say to Brady if he had the chance to meet him, Davis responded,

“Give me some of your money. You don't deserve it."

After posting his son’s win on social media in which he declared “Hater Level: 100,” Christopher Davis told a reporter that his son is "not a big fan of school." Ace Davis and his project are on their way to the district level science fair where I'm sure he'll perform well; after all, Kentucky isn't exactly known as a bastion of scientific enlightenment. In fact, senators from the Bluegrass State once objected to questions involving evolution on standard tests in biology. Kentucky is one of those states that was let into the Union just to connect up the coasts. It's a region of the country in which the toothbrush is appropriately named. Criminals know that Kentucky is a good place to commit crimes because everyone has the same DNA.

I usually pass on articles concerning science and technology written by the mainstream media since journalist are mostly former college potheads who can turn a phrase but can't carry a one. Like the science fair judges, the media apparently overlooked Ace Davis' overt distain for Brady which likely led to procedural partiality. His parents also seem to celebrate their son's "hater level." All this judgmental assertions and personal persecution got me thinking about the Gospel of John when a crowd gathered to stone a woman accused of adultery. Jesus said,

"He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone."

If that happened today, someone in the crowd would snatch up a rock then exclaim,

"I'm free of sin! Let's kill that ho!"

Then he would drill the rock into the woman's skull. Half the people would join in while others filmed. It would all be uploaded to YouTube by the morning.