Edit: Obviously the story is sad, but the sadder story is the terrible journalism.

People not knowing the relationship between correlation and causation has become a recent pet peeve of mine, especially when talking about global warming.

So, if you don`t get the comic below, please go educate yourself and read this article.

-from xkcd

One of my biggest pet peeves is numbers without units. Kelloggs claims that every box of Raisin Bran contains two scoops of raisins. This is a stupid claim as the scoops could obviously be any size. A quick google search didn’t yield any answers, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I am in between school semesters right now and have a lot of time on my hands. With this surplus of time, I decided to measure the amount of raisins in a box of Raisin Bran. I was originally planning on counting them, but then I decided that was a bad idea.

I checked out the official Kellogg’s website and it didn’t have any info on what size scoops they use.

I separated the flakes from the raisins and found that there was 1 cup of raisins which weighed 150g in the 475g box. Kellogg’s made a good marketing move as “contains two half-cup scoops” doesn’t sound very good. The raisins barely filled the 1 cup measuring cup, and they made a heaping 3/4 cup.

The whole process is documented with pictures below.

[update] I just found somebody else that did the same thing!

The term ‘New Age’ is becoming more common. When I think of new age things, I think of magnetized wrist bands with healing power, healing crystals and phony spiritualism. They are all things that put mind over matter and they fall under pseudoscience.

One specific new age belief that really bothers me is the belief that intuition is better than rationalism and the scientific method. There are too many cases where our intuition is wrong, that we really can’t trust it all the time.

Another example of this is in the movie “What the bleep do we know?” Here, quantum mechanics is hijacked by pseudo-scientists that link it to new age thinking. They steal all of the scientific terms, but leave behind all the science.

Why hasn’t the term new age been claimed by science and reason? Shouldn’t an age of reason be the new age? I hope that someday our world will become one.

John Timmer, over at ars technica, has posted a great article about explaining science to the polarized US public. It is a summary of a few talks given at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Here are a few excerpts:

“most of the presenters advocated some sort of framing of scientific communications. The frames proposed, however, often seemed to run the risk of excluding some part of the large and diverse scientific community from the frame. The two that struck me as the most powerful, however, were the most inclusive. The first came from Barbara King, who advocated separating the communication of science completely from the communication of a belief system, so that discussion could focus on scientific models and their supportive data. The other was Steve Case’s presentation of scientific exploration as giving us a reason to feel optimistic for the future. ”

“Perhaps the best way to communicate science is simply to remind people about some basics of the scientific endeavor.”

At the end of my last entry, I started to ramble about the popularization of science. This article explores a few routes for delivering science to the public.

I couldn’t agree more with the last quote above, which also happens to be the last sentence of the article. The sole thing that bugs me about public knowledge of science, is that they don’t understand the scientific method. I don’t expect people to be able to draw out a flowchart with hypotheses and theories, but it is valuable to know a little bit about it. The most important thing about science is viewing it as a method as opposed to a body of knowledge.

Link

I think that the media should use scientific notation. First of all, scientific notation should ditch the scientific tag. This just scares people away. Instead of using a “trillion”, 10¹² is much clearer and is the best method we have for visualizing large numbers. Our minds aren’t good at this anyways, so we need all the help we can get.

Which notation would you prefer?

a) one billion

b) 1000000000

c) 10⁹

The word ‘billion’ is too interchangeable with the other illions. Writing out all of the zeros is just tedious. Scientific notation clearly identifies the size of the number.

The media tosses millions, billions and trillion around like they are equal. They are far from it. To put it in perspective, a million seconds takes 11 days; a billion takes 32 years; and a trillion takes 317 centuries. The cost of the war in Iraq has passed the trillion dollar mark. If you made $10,000/sec, you would be a millionaire within 2 minutes, but it would take you over 3 years to make a trillion dollars. There is a big difference!

Nikon has produced a great site which helps visualize very small and very big numbers. Check it out.

Ok, I’m not actually getting a tattoo, but I’m pretty tempted after seeing the science tattoos flickr set. These are tattoos from the readers of The Loom. It’s always good to see people dedicated to science.

As a spicy food addict, the capsaicin tattoo is my favorite:

The most useful science tattoo was this human ruler:

Check them all out Here.