The Joyful Addictions of Geeks/Nerds

quantumaniac:

Modeling the Price of Different Sized TVs

It really started with a joke.

“Oh, you need a new TV? You should get a 70 inch. Wait, what about the 80 inch TV? Well, those quite a bit more expensive than the 70 inch TV”

I really hadn’t looked carefully at TV prices so I wasn’t aware that the price increased dramatically with size. I’m aware now.

You can probably guess what comes next. Yes, I need to go to Amazon and look up the prices of different sized TVs. Now, there is a problem comparing TVs of different sizes. You could have a 42 inch TV with more features than a 60 inch and that could have an impact on the price. What I need are TVs that are the same model except for size. Fortunately, I was able to find some models just like that from Sharp, Samsung and Vizio. Along with this, I have the lowest prices for the different size ranges as advertised by the Walmart website.

The different brands seems to be similar enough that we can look at this all as one set of data. So, what happens when you double the size of a TV? Does the price also double? No. A 40 inch TV is much less than half the cost of an 80 inch TV. Well maybe the size is proportional to the area of the TV.

First, let’s look at the listed “size” vs. the actual area. The standard measurement for a TV is to give the diagonal distance from one corner to the opposite. We also know that a standard HDTV has a 16:9 aspect ratio. Maybe this diagram will be useful.

It doesn’t matter how big your TV is. If it’s an HDTV, the ratio of height to width will be 9/16. Here, I just have some constant in there (a) to get the actual size. Using the Pythagorean theorem, we can find the length of the diagonal based on the side lengths – you can see that parameter a survives. But this isn’t really right either. I want the area in terms of the quantity s (which I am using as the length of the diagonal). From this expression, I can get an expression for a in terms of s:

I probably shouldn’t have evaluated that square root since it looks like I will just square that value anyway. Now for the area (which I will label as A).

Let’s just check this really quickly. What if I have a 40 inch TV? It would have a height of 19.61 inches and a width of 34.86 inches. This would give it an area of 683.6 inch². Now, if I use the above formula with a diagonal of 40 inches, I get the same value.

Now for the plot of TV price vs. screen area.

That doesn’t look as linear as I would like it to be. Look at that 80 inch TV. It doesn’t fit very well with the linear function comparing area and price.

More Data

That doesn’t really improve anything. My last option is to forget about my first assumption. What if the different TV manufactures follow different models? Here is a plot of price vs. screen area for the Sharp, Target, and average Walmart TVs with separate linear fits.

This gives three different price functions for TVs in terms of screen area.  (Yes, I know I left off some of the brands of TVs – but they mostly fit with the lower sized models so I left them off for a cleaner graph)

What does this tell us? First, if Walmart sold a TV with no screen (zero area) – it would cost you -$21.64. Yes, they would have to give you money. This could be my new job – buying zero-inch TVs and collecting the money. But really, does this make sense? Yes. It must mean that if they are basing the price on the area of the TV then they are subsidizing this price. Otherwise, your Target TV would cost 21 dollars more. And look at the Sharp TVs. They have a zero-inch price of almost $4,000. Of course, maybe this just indicates the sale price of these devices and not an actual price. What do I know? I am just making up economic stuff here.

So, How Much? 

In this case, I have a question in my mind. What if there was a 100 inch TV? How much should that cost? What about a 200 inch TV? Of course, these are the diagonal measurements and not the area. So, let me re-write the price function in terms of diagonal size (s) instead of the area.

Now that the price is a function of size, I can just plop in the size to get a price. With this, a 100 inch TV should cost $10,706. A 200 inch TV would cost $54,806 dollars. That’s a serious TV. Now, this is just using the Sharp price function since I have data for larger TVs from them. What if Walmart made a 200 inch TV with their same pricing model? It would cost just $4,888. Not too bad.

One more thing. What if you want a free TV? How big would a Sharp TV be if it was free? Here, I can put in a price of zero dollars and then solve for the size.

That’s bigger than the TV I have right now. OK Sharp, I will take my free 52 inch TV. I will even pay for the shipping. Just send me an email and I will give you my address.

Oh – someone is probably going to ask if they can use my data.  Sure.  Here it is in a Google Docs spreadsheet.  Have with it.

Source: Dot Physics

scinerds:

For Your Consideration: Anti-Drone Hoodie

The anti-drone hoodie which can make its wearer invisible to spies in the sky

Those concerned about the conspiratorial machinations of the state surveillance infrastructure can now swap their tin-foil hats for a more fashion conscious accessory.

A New York-based artist has designed an ‘anti-drone hoodie’ stitched from metallised material used to counter the infra-red cameras that spy drones use to spot people on the ground. It is part of a line of high-tech ‘Stealth Wear’ that can thwart cameras and block tracking signals, which has been unveiled in London this week.

Also on offer is a pouch for carrying mobile phones made from a special ‘attenuating fabric’ which blocks the signal so it can’t be tracked or intercepted by the authorities. And there is also a shirt designed with an x-ray shielding print in the shape of a heart which is intended to protect the wearer’s heart from damaging x-ray radiation.

Artist Adam Harvey, who collaborated with fashion designer Johanna Bloomfield to come up with the range, said the pieces are intended to provoke a debate about the increasing ubiquity of surveillance across society. A landmark Freedom of Information lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation last year forced federal authorities to reveal there are at least 63 active drone sites around the U.S. The unmanned planes – some of which may have been designed to kill terror suspects – are being launched from locations in 20 states and flying spy sorties across American soil.

Most of the active drones are deployed from military installations, enforcement agencies and border patrol teams, according to the Federal Aviation Authority. In the UK police forces including Merseyside Police have trialled the use of remote-controlled drones to replace helicopters to conduct surveillance that would usually be undertaken by helicopters.

It was this increased use of military-style surveillance technologies in civilian environments that inspired the 31-year-old artist to come up with with the clothing line. ‘Military technology is coming home from the war,’ Mr Harvey told Slate. ‘These pieces are designed to live with it, to cope with it — to live in a world where surveillance is happening all the time.’ He came up with the range, which also includes an anti-drone scarf, primarily as an exercise in provocative conceptual art, but the garments will also be manufactured for sale to the public.

However, due to the expensive materials used in the design of the clothing, they are unlikely to go on sale in your local Primark anytime soon. Mr Harvey, who hasn’t yet pinned down the retail prices for his garments, jokes that his target demographic is the ‘fashionably paranoid market’. The counter-surveillance Stealth Wear range is on display from today at the Primitive boutique in Great Portland Street in West London, until January 31.

memewhore:

Holy shit!

Oh wait, it’s German.

(via fuckyeahdementia)

ikenbot:

Are We Living Inside a Computer Simulation?

The popular film trilogy, The Matrix, presented a cyberuniverse where humans live in a simulated reality created by sentient machines.

Now, a philosopher and team of physicists imagine that we might really be living inside a computer-generated universe that you could call The Lattice. What’s more, we may be able to detect it.

In 2003, British philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper that proposed the universe we live in might in fact really be a numerical computer simulation. To give this a bizarre Twilight Zone twist, he suggested that our far-evolved distant descendants might construct such a program to simulate the past and recreate how their remote ancestors lived.

He felt that such an experiment was inevitable for a supercivilization. If it didn’t happen by now, then in meant that humanity never evolved that far and we’re doomed to a short lifespan as a species, he argued.

To extrapolate further, I’d suggest that artificial intelligent entities descended from us would be curious about looking back in time by simulating the universe of their biological ancestors.

As off-the-wall as this sounds, a team of physicists at the University of Washington (UW) recently announced that there is a potential test to seen if we actually live in The Lattice. Ironically, it would be the first such observation for scientifically hypothesized evidence of intelligent design behind the cosmos.

The UW team too propose that super-intelligent entities, bored with their current universe, do numerical simulations to explore all possibilities in the landscape of the underlying quantum vacuum (from which the big bang percolated) through universe simulations. “This is perhaps the most profound quest that can be undertaken by a sentient being,” write the authors.

Before you dismiss this idea as completely loony, the reality of such a Sim Universe might solve a lot of eerie mysteries about the cosmos. About two-dozen of the universe’s fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life. At first glance it seems as unlikely as balancing a pencil on its tip. Jiggle these parameters and life as we know it would have never appeared. Not even stars and galaxies. This is called the Anthropic principle.

ANALYSIS: Building the Universe Inside a Supercomputer

The discovery of dark energy over a decade ago further compounds the universe’s strangeness. This sort of “antigravity” pushing space-time apart is the closest thing there is to nothing and still is something. This energy from the vacuum of space is 60 orders of magnitude weaker that what would be predicted by quantum physics.The eminent cosmologist Michael Turner ranks dark energy as “the most profound mystery in all of science.”

We are also living at a very special time in the universe’s history where it switched gears from decelerating to accelerating under the push of dark energy. This begs the question “why me why now?” (A phrase popularly attributed to Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan in 1994 when she was attacked and crippled by an opponent.)

If dark energy were slightly stronger the universe would have blown apart before stars formed. Any weaker and the universe would have imploded long ago. Its incredibly anemic value has been seen as circumstantial evidence for parallel universes with their own flavor of dark energy that is typically destructive. It’s as if our universe won the lottery and got all the physical parameters just right for us to exist.

Finally, an artificial universe solves the Fermi Paradox (where are all the space aliens?) by implying that we truly are alone in the universe. It was custom made for us by our far-future progeny.

Biblical creationists can no doubt embrace these seeming cosmic coincidences as unequivocal evidence for their “theory” of Intelligent Design (ID). But is our “God” really a computer programmer rather than a bearded old man living in the sky?

Currently, supercomputers using a impressive-sounding technique called lattice quantum chromodynamics, and starting from the fundamental physical laws, can simulate only a very small portion of the universe. The scale is a little larger than the nucleus of an atom, according UW physicist Martin Savage. Mega-computers of the far future could greatly expand the size of the Sim Universe.

ANALYSIS: Artificial Universe Created Inside a Supercomputer

If we are living in such a program, there could be telltale evidence for the underlying lattice used in modeling the space-time continuum, say the researchers. This signature could show up as a limitation in the energy of cosmic rays. They would travel diagonally across the model universe and not interact equally in all directions, as they otherwise would be expected to do according to present cosmology.

If such results were measured, physicists would have to rule out any and all other natural explanations for the anomaly before flirting with the idea of intelligent design. (To avoid confusion with the purely faith-based creationist ID, this would not prove the existence of a biblical God, because you’d have to ask the question “why does God need a lattice?”)

If our universe is a simulation, then those entities controlling it could be running other simulations as well to create other universes parallel to our own. No doubt this would call for, ahem, massive parallel processing.

If all of this isn’t mind-blowing enough, Bostrom imagined “stacked” levels of reality, “we would have to suspect that the post-humans running our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may also be simulated beings. Here may be room for a large number of levels of reality, and the number could be increasing over time.”

To compound this even further, Bostrom imagined a hierarchy of deities, “In some ways, the post-humans running a simulation are like gods. However, all the demigods except those at the fundamental level of reality are subject to sanctions by the more powerful gods living at lower levels.”

If the parallel universes are all running on the same computer platform could we communicate with them? If so, I hope the Matrix’s manic Agent Smith doesn’t materialize one day.

To borrow from the title of Isaac Asimov’s novel I Robot, the human condition might be described as I Subroutine.

(via thescienceofreality)

ikenbot:

Black Holes Spew Out Surprise

Black holes come in a variety of sizes, ranging from 10 times the mass of the sun to a billion times as massive. But new research shows that black holes of completely different masses, ages and locations can produce jets of ionized gas that behave similarly.

Image: This illustration shows a black hole emitting jets of fast-moving plasma above and below it, as matter swirls around in an orbiting disk. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

“As scientists, we are always seeking universal principles,” Rodrigo Nemmen, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told SPACE.com.

Nemmen and his colleagues studied a wide variety of black holes in an attempt to compare how efficiently their jets emitted light. “I was very surprised,” Nemmen said of the results.

Discovering similarities between ancient supermassive black holes in the center of distant galaxies and baby black holes born as stars collapse should help scientists gain a firmer understanding of these jets.

Cosmic accelerators

Black holes are well known for their ability to pull matter into them. But not all material near a black hole finds itself lost. Some bits of matter just outside the point of no return (called the event horizon) are accelerated away at near-light speeds, creating jets of particles shooting out above and below the black holes.

“I like to call black holes ‘cosmic LHCs,’ or very powerful particle accelerators,” Nemmen said, referring to the Large Hadron Collider, an underground machine in Switzerland that speeds protons to 99.9999991 percent the speed of light.

When matter is spun away from a black hole in the form of a jet, most of its energy goes into its motion, but some of it is changed into light in the form of gamma-rays. Nemmen and his team studied findings on 293 previously observed black holes and calculated how efficiently the jets converted energy to light. They found that the rate scaled across the range of black holes.

“This was one of the surprises of this work, that this efficiency of conversion of the energy into light is essentially the same for black holes with very different masses, very different ages and completely different environments,” Nemmen said.

Black holes are powerful beasts, interesting in and of themselves. But by accelerating ionized gas, they also have the potential to change their environment. Heating up space, they could affect the production of new stars, thereby influencing the galaxy they live in.

“These jets might be powerful agents of creating changes in the host galaxy,” Nemmen said.

Scientists still don’t have a strong understanding of how these violent particle outflows form. But the fact that the energy efficiency of the jets scales across black holes may help theorists better understand how something that pulls in most particles could shoot away others, and how the outflow of energy may affect surrounding space.

The findings were published online today (Dec. 13) in the journal Science.

(via scinerds)

jtotheizzoe:

What Space Data Looked Like in 1962

50 years ago today, Mariner 2 became the first interplanetary explorer when the probe flew by Venus, collecting 45 minutes worth of data about our planetary neighbor. It found that Venus was, in fact, a planet much like Earth underneath all that gas, even if it was 800˚F all the time. That carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere means that lead would melt just sitting outside, and serves as a reminder of what runaway greenhouse gases can really do.

What did all that data look like? A big roll of paper. We have come quite far.

Dig into the details of that pioneering mission, half a century ago, here.

(via The Atlantic)

ikenbot:

Brilliant Geminid Meteor Shower Peaks Tonight

ikenbot:

positive-press-daily:

The revolutionary ‘contact lens’ loaded with stem cells that restores sight - by helping the eye heal itself naturally

A ‘contact lens’ loaded with stem cells could be a way to naturally repair or retain sight. Scientists hope the biodegradable implant loaded with stem cells that then multiply will allow the body to heal the eye naturally. 

Stem cells are the building blocks of tissue growth. They can transform into any other type of cell the body is built from and so should be able to repair everything from the brain to the heart. The scientists at the University of Sheffield who developed the implant now hope the new technique could help millions of people across the world retain or even regain - their sight. 

The technology has been designed to treat damage to the cornea, the transparent layer on the front of the eye, which is one of the major causes of blindness in the world. With the new implant, by mimicking structural features of the eye, the researchers have developed a new method for producing very delicate thin membranes to help graft stem cells onto the eye itself.

Using a series of complex techniques, the researchers are able to make a disc of biodegradable material that can be fixed over the cornea. The disc is loaded with stem cells that then multiply, allowing the body to heal the eye naturally. Standard treatments for corneal blindness are corneal transplants or grafting stem cells onto the eye using a donated human  membrane as a temporary carrier to deliver these cells to the eye. 

But for some patients, the treatment can fail after a few years as the repaired eyes do not retain these stem cells, which are required to carry out repair of the cornea. A key feature of this new disc is that it contains small pockets to house and protect the stem cells, to keep them in the eye and also grouped together.

‘The disc has an outer ring containing pockets into which stem cells taken from the patient’s healthy eye can be placed,’ said Dr Ílida Ortega Asencio, from Sheffield’s Faculty of Engineering. 

‘The material across the centre of the disc is thinner than the ring, so it will biodegrade more quickly allowing the stem cells to proliferate across the surface of the eye to repair the cornea.’

Without this constant repair, thick white scar tissue forms across the cornea causing partial or complete sight loss. The researchers said another advantage of the disc is that it is biodegradable and made from the same material already used in sutures, so it will not cause a problem in the body. 

Laboratory tests have shown that the membranes will support cell growth. As a result, clinical trials are expected to begin shortly in India, as the Sheffield scientists are working in conjunction with researchers at the LV Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad.

Commenting on the disc, Dr Frederick Claeyssens, lecturer in biomaterials at the University of Sheffield, said:  ‘We also believe that the overall treatment using these discs will not only be better than current treatments, it will be cheaper as well.’

The research is published in the journal Acta Biomaterialia.

Woah.

(via scinerds)

ikenbot:

Geminid Meteor Shower Coming on December 13–14 2012

If it’s clear late Thursday night, December 13th, 2012, keep a lookout high overhead for the shooting stars of the Geminid meteor shower. “The Geminids are usually one of the two best meteor showers of the year,” says Alan MacRobert, senior editor at Sky & Telescope magazine. “They may beat out the Perseids of August.” This year’s showing has the added benefit of reduced celestial competition — thanks to the new Moon, no moonlight will interfere with meteor counting.

Under a clear, dark sky, you may see a shooting star every minute from 10 p.m. local time Thursday until dawn Friday morning. If you live under the artificial skyglow of light pollution the numbers will be less, but the brightest meteors will still shine through.

Lower counts of Geminid meteors should be visible earlier that evening, and a few should also flash into view on the nights of December 11, 12, and 14.

To watch for meteors, you need no equipment other than your eyes. Find a dark spot with an open view of the sky and no glaring lights nearby. Bundle up as warmly as you can in many layers. “Go out late in the evening, lie back, and gaze up into the stars,” says Sky & Telescope editor in chief Robert Naeye. “Relax, be patient, and let your eyes adapt to the dark. The best direction to watch is wherever your sky is darkest, probably straight up.”

Geminids can appear anywhere in the sky. Small ones appear as tiny, quick streaks. Occasional brighter ones may sail across the heavens for several seconds and leave a brief train of glowing smoke.

If you trace each meteor’s direction of flight backward far enough across the sky, you’ll find that this imaginary line crosses a spot in the constellation Gemini near the stars Castor and Pollux. Gemini is in the eastern sky during evening and high overhead in the hours after midnight (for skywatchers at north temperate latitudes). This special spot is called the shower’s radiant. It’s the perspective point from which all the Geminids would appear to come if you could see them approaching from the far distance, rather than just in the last second or so of their lives as they dive into Earth’s upper atmosphere.

(via scinerds)

ikenbot:

Citizen Science: Your Help Needed to Study Andromeda Galaxy

A group of astronomers is inviting the public to join their star-hunting team in a search of the bright Andromeda Galaxy.

The project aims to identify star clusters in our neighboring galaxy, also known as M31. All it takes to find the clusters in Andromeda is an Internet-enabled computer and a desire to help, said Anil Seth, the team’s lead investigator. “No special training is required,” he said.

The so-called “Andromeda Project,” which began Wednesday (Dec. 5), will generate the largest sample of clusters from a single spiral galaxy when it is completed.

Scientists expect the project could identify 2,500 new star clusters when finished. This would provide useful goalposts to chart how the galaxy, which is on a collision course with the Milky Way, formed and evolved.

“The general benefit is to better understand how spiral galaxies form,” said Seth, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Utah.

“Andromeda is the nearest example of a [spiral] galaxy, except for the Milky Way,” he said. “We can study in detail things we can’t see in larger distances.”

(via scinerds)

laboratoryequipment:

Researchers Solve Darwin’s ‘Abominable Mystery’

Research by Indiana Univ. paleobotanist David Dilcher and colleagues in Europe sheds new light on what Charles Darwin famously called “an abominable mystery:” the apparently sudden appearance and rapid spread of flowering plants in the fossil record.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers present a scenario in which flowering plants, or angiosperms, evolved and colonized various types of aquatic environments over about 45 million years in the early to middle Cretaceous Period.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2012/12/researchers-solve-darwin%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98abominable-mystery%E2%80%99

(via scinerds)

scinerds:

When Depression Drugs Don’t Help, Talking Might

Talk therapy may be a helpful supplemental treatment for people with depression who have not responded to medication, a new study from the United Kingdom suggests.

Researchers found that people with depression who had not improved despite taking antidepressants were three times more likely to experience a reduction in their depression symptoms if talk therapy was added to their treatment regimen compared with those who continued to take only antidepressants.

The study is one of the first large trials to test the effectiveness of talk therapy given in tandem with antidepressants, the researchers said.

Up to two-thirds of people with depression don’t respond fully to antidepressant treatment, and the findings suggest a way to help this group, the researchers said.

“Until now, there was little evidence to help clinicians choose the best next step treatment for those patients whose symptoms do not respond to standard drug treatments,” study researcher Nicola Wiles of the University of Bristol’s Centre for Mental Health, Addiction and Suicide Research said in a statement.

The study followed patients for one year. Future studies should examine the effectiveness of this treatment combination over the long term, as patients with depression can relapse after treatment, the researchers said.

In addition, because some patients did not improve substantially when talk therapy was added, further research is needed to find alternative treatments for this group, Wiles added.

The study included about 470 people with depression who had not responded to antidepressants after six weeks of treatment. About half received cognitive behavioral therapy — a type of talk therapy — in addition to their usual antidepressant treatment, and half continued antidepressants without the addition of talk therapy.

After six months, about 46 percent of patients in the talk therapy group experienced at least a 50 percent reduction in their depressive symptoms. By contrast, 22 percent of people in the antidepressant group improved by the same amount. By the 12-month mark, both groups experienced similar rates of improvement.

Often, talk therapy is more difficult to access than medication, the researchers said. And people may not be able to afford the treatment if their health insurance does not cover it. Only about 25 percent of Americans with depression have received talk therapy during the past year, they said.

Pass it on: People with depression who have not responded to antidepressants may benefit from the addition of talk therapy.

(Source: japanlove)

the-star-stuff:

“The Black Marble”: A New Satellite View of the Earth That Will Leave You In Awe

Scientists unveiled today an unprecedented new look at our planet at night. A global composite image, constructed using cloud-free night images from a new NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite, shows the glow of natural and human-built phenomena across the planet in greater detail than ever before.

1. North and South America

2. Africa, Europe, and the Middle East

3. Asia and Australia

Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/NOAA NGDC

ikenbot:

Gravity Map Reveals a Surprisingly Battered Lunar Surface

The moon and other rocky bodies in the inner solar system were pounded by long-ago impacts far more violently than previously thought, two NASA spacecraft have found.

NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) made this new high-resolution map of the moon’s gravity field. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MIT/GSFC

NASA’s twin Grail probes have created an ultra-precise gravity map of the moon, revealing that its crust is almost completely pulverized. The surprising find suggests that Earth, Mercury, Venus and Mars endured a similar beating billions of years ago, researchers said.

The discovery “really opens a window to this early stage of just what a violent place the surfaces of all terrestrial planets were early in their history,” Grail principal investigator Maria Zuber of MIT said during a press conference here today (Dec. 5) at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophyiscal Union.

(via scinerds)