Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Friday, 23 June 2017

A self-driving, road-going train

Well it's certainly more plausible than that double-laned monstrosity that was hitting the headlines not so long ago, but I'm rather skeptical of the claims. The article requires disabling adblock, which annoys me so here it is in full :

China has unveiled an innovative public transportation solution to ease commute in the form of a hybrid self-driving vehicle that looks half like a train and half a bus and may be the world's first railless train.

Termed as the Autonomous Rail Transit (ART) the elongated vehicle was shown off in the city of Zhuzhou in Hunan province. The transit looks similar to a train and has three standard train/tube like compartments but runs on a virtual track rather than rails, making it technically a bus.

The ART, which is capable of holding up to 307 passengers and hitting speeds of up to 70km per hour, is currently being tested for 6.5km track in Zhuzhou. CRRC, the company that built the vehicle hopes will be operational by next year. The ART not only aims to tackle congested areas but also the alarming pollution level. It is completely battery operated and can get 15 miles on a 10 minute charge.

As shown in the images it is like a modular train or a modern day tram and carriages can be added or removed to accommodate people. The train-bus hybrid follows a pair of white lines painted on the street and has sensors fitted like autonomous vehicles to avoid obstacles.

Work on the ART began way back in 2013 to ease congestion in China's crowded urban centres. The government also wanted to build a cost-effective solution to traffic congestion and the CRCC has managed to build the ART at nearly the same costs as a regular bus in Chinese urban centres.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd3N9CFKe9M

Via Markus Keller.

Originally shared by Rick Li

#China has unveiled an innovative public #transportation solution to ease commute in the form of a hybrid self-driving vehicle that looks half like a train and half a bus and may be the world's first railless train.

Termed as the Autonomous Rail Transit (ART) the elongated vehicle was shown off in the city of Zhuzhou in Hunan province. The transit looks similar to a train and has three standard train/tube like compartments but runs on a virtual track rather than rails, making it technically a bus.


#DigitalStrategy #DisruptiveStrategy #DriverlessVehicles #DisruptiveInnovation #DigitalEconomy #DigitalDisruption #FutureTech #AutonomousVehicles #SelfDrivingVehicles
World's first railless #train? China unveils hybrid self-driving electric vehicle
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/worlds-first-railless-train-china-unveils-hybrid-self-driving-electric-vehicle-1625186
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/worlds-first-railless-train-china-unveils-hybrid-self-driving-electric-vehicle-1625186

Tribalism in science is stupid and you know it


Apparently I'm wrong about tribalism in science. Apparently it's actually a perfectly acceptable practise and even a good thing, and instead of trying to stop it we should encourage it. Even when it's about trivial matters of no real importance, we should deliberately piss people off.

Aaaaaarrrgggh.

Sometimes I don't know why I bother, I really don't. If anyone needs me I'll be busy beating my head against a wall for the next few hours.

(I wouldn't bother posting this were it not for the fact the OP is an otherwise intelligent and respectable individual)

Thursday, 22 June 2017

Short on shorts

My school had the problem of insisting we wore shorts to PE lessons even if it was freezing cold and raining. It doesn't toughen kids up or any of that nonsense, it's just stupid.

Some 30 boys have worn skirts to school in protest at being told they were not allowed to wear shorts. The pupils from ISCA Academy in Exeter asked permission to modify their uniform because of the hot weather.

One of the boys who took part in the protest said: "We're not allowed to wear shorts, and I'm not sitting in trousers all day, it's a bit hot." Head teacher Aimee Mitchell said shorts were "not part" of the school uniform, as first reported by Devon Live.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-devon-40364632

SOLAR FREAKIN' BORDER CONTROL WALLS !

Yes, this is definitely completely consistent with all his previous statements about bringing back coal and making Mexico pay.

US President Donald Drumpf has told supporters that his proposed wall along the border with Mexico could have solar panels fixed to it. Addressing a rally in Iowa, he said the panels would provide cheap energy and help to pay for the controversial wall.

He suggested the plan was his own, saying: "Pretty good imagination, right? Good? My idea." However, solar panels have been included in designs for the wall submitted by companies.

"We're thinking of something that's unique, we're talking about the southern border, lots of sun, lots of heat. We're thinking about building the wall as a solar wall, so it creates energy and pays for itself. And this way, Mexico will have to pay much less money, and that's good, right?"

He added: "Solar wall, panels, beautiful. I mean actually think of it, the higher it goes the more valuable it is."

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40363390

Sunday, 18 June 2017

Fiction can advocate without endorsing

A play has the added benefit of exploring the emotional and physical aspects of a situation, not just the intellectual ones. And plays can explore issues from many points of view. Just because something happens in a play doesn’t mean that the playwright is advocating for it. When the title character in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is assassinated, some characters think it is a good idea, some characters think it is a bad idea. What did Shakespeare himself think? We will never know.

The assassination is a transgressive, bloody act. And in case the audience at this moment still thinks that Brutus’s line of thought was correct, Antony delivers a powerful expression of outrage and emotional trauma. Brutus and Antony then have funeral orations giving opposing points of view. Whomever you agree with, one thing is clear, things do not go well for the conspirators. Brutus and Cassius wind up dead, and Rome is pushed farther down the path of tyranny toward the next Caesar: Augustus.

It is hard to imagine a production of Julius Caesar advocating the idea of assassination as a political tool.

The Breitbart article that started the controversy is — I kid you not — a review by someone who talked to someone who saw the show. This second-order correspondent also thinks the play ends with the death of Caesar, as if they are killing the bad guy at the end of a superhero movie. In fact, the assassination takes place in the middle of the play, the rest of which deals with the terrible consequences of this action. Shakespeare built the outrage into the text. Mark Antony is so outraged — for himself, and on our behalf — that outrage suffuses the play’s entire second half. If you see a production, you get outraged with the play, not against it.

https://medium.com/@robmelrose/obama-trump-caesar-f81bf985ac67

Taxes should be spent for the public good, not given back

Spend your damn taxes, Kensington.

In 2014, I received my Kensington and Chelsea council tax bill and a letter from the leader of the council, Nicholas Paget-Brown, explaining that all residents who pay council tax in full would “receive a one-off payment of £100”, to be deducted from the bill. This bonus, the letter continued, was due to the council’s careful management of its finances over the years, “consistently delivering greater efficiencies while improving services”. ... For years, the Royal Borough has got away with bribing the electorate with its own money.

As the toxic ash of Grenfell Tower’s vanity cladding falls over the neighbouring streets, we are left with the acrid truth in our throats: regeneration in the Royal Borough is in fact a crime of greed and selfishness. I took the refund. At the time, I felt uncomfortable with this decision and the ways in which I justified it to myself. And then I forgot about it, until the smoke drifting into my flat in the early hours of Wednesday woke me up. Today, I gave it back. It wasn’t ever mine to keep.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/16/my-council-tax-rebate-from-kensington-and-chelsea-is-blood-money

Saturday, 17 June 2017

Astronomy outreach for schools done properly

More like this, please.

The new Sky Explorers club at Wheatfields Junior School in St Albans is making use of a night sky camera which has been installed on the building's roof. "I am really looking forward to doing all the great stuff we are going to do with the camera," says eight-year-old Cameron. "Looking at space is really exciting."

Throughout the night, the camera takes a long exposure shot of the whole sky once a minute and the resulting thousands of images are made into a time-lapse film for the children to view the next day. The club members will be on the look-out for shooting stars or meteors and will log where they appear, their direction and the time and send the data to the international All Sky Camera network.

Dr Geach, who studies galaxies, also has a second task for the children, directly related to his own research. He plans to give the children access to images from the Subaru telescope on Hawaii, which takes pictures of deep space, to look for interesting or unusual looking galaxies. "Some of them will not have been seen before and could be very exciting," he says. He will come to the school every two weeks to run the club, answer the children's questions and evaluate their research.

This kind of engagement by scientists with primary pupils is "one of the things we need to do, as this age is when you can really get them switched on as scientists", he adds. This view has strong support from Dr Becky Parker, director of the Institute for Research in Schools. "Students get a diet of quite factual based science in school and yet they have the potential to contribute," she says. "Why not involve them in doing real science? Teachers find it keeps them inspired and keeps them right at the cutting edge of their subjects."

"Too often a lack of resources in schools makes encountering real science very difficult. But, for example, you would be appalled if students had never put pen to paper when doing art GCSE, or never made any kind of music while doing music A-level. If all you have done is learn the facts of what biology or chemistry have shown us, you haven't actually engaged with what it is. We are passionately committed to making sure that pupils get as rich an experience of science as we possibly can."
http://www.bbc.com/news/education-40125352

Friday, 16 June 2017

Multitasking is bad for you but I don't care

I read this in between pressing the "random" button on assorted webcomics and writing a paper on the evolution of turbulent gas clouds in galaxy clusters. Now I feel guilty...

As a rule, I prefer to "multitask" (actually, flick back and forth between different activities) when I have something boring and tedious to do (or just plain long). This makes them all collectively much more interesting, which is apparently because chemicals :

Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new – the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens.

I tend to do this an awful lot at work, but much less so at home. If I have a single, definite problem to tackle and a clear way forward, that's different - I'll work at it constantly and try and shut out emails etc. as much as possible. Or even if it's not so straightforward but interesting to think about then I tend very much to focus. Oh, I might still be doing other things, but I'm not really concentrating on them, they're more in the hope of catching an inspiration particle than being genuine diversions (except for walking, which is the single best way to induce concentration). It's when things get boring that so-called multitasking comes into effect. And I'm not sure I'd really want to work any other way - if someone forced me to write the paper and banned all access to webcomics, I'm pretty sure productivity would go down, very sharply.

Fortunately my phone is rarely used for anything and I don't have the other problems of being inundated with messages in various formats described elsewhere in the article, however :

Because the very act of writing a note or letter to someone took this many steps, and was spread out over time, we didn’t go to the trouble unless we had something important to say. Because of email’s immediacy, most of us give little thought to typing up any little thing that pops in our heads and hitting the send button. And email doesn’t cost anything. The sheer ease of sending emails has led to a change in manners, a tendency to be less polite about what we ask of others. Many professionals tell a similar story. One said, “A large proportion of emails I receive are from people I barely know asking me to do something for them that is outside what would normally be considered the scope of my work or my relationship with them. Email somehow apparently makes it OK to ask for things they would never ask by phone, in person, or in snail mail.”

The most common variant of this I have is being asked to watch lengthy documentaries about things I'm not at all interested in, mostly UFOs. Listen, bub, if my best friends suggest a TV series to me I'll get round to it within the next six months or so if they're lucky, so what makes you think I'm going watch something I keep telling you I'm not interested in by next Tuesday ? Not gonna happen.
Worse are requests for art. I had one recently from a reputable company (I couldn't actually figure out what it is that they do from their website, but it looked shiny) and not two days later I got a reminder email. Two days ! I don't always respond to work emails that quickly, let alone strangers. Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile...
And worst of all are people - just random strangers on the internet - asking for Blender files. Why not just ask for a stool sample while you're at it ? Hell no, you can't "just have" my Arecibo or Orion models. Do you know how many tens of hours they took to produce ? Lots, that's how many. They're not even for sale, so no, mysterious stranger*, you can't "just have" them. They're mine, so sod off.

* This does not apply to people I've already established trust with.

Peter Milner and James Olds, both neuroscientists, placed a small electrode in the brains of rats, in a small structure of the limbic system called the nucleus accumbens... Olds and Milner called it the pleasure centre. A lever in the cage allowed the rats to send a small electrical signal directly to their nucleus accumbens. Do you think they liked it? Boy how they did! They liked it so much that they did nothing else. The rats just pressed the lever over and over again, until they died of starvation and exhaustion. Does that remind you of anything? A 30-year-old man died in Guangzhou (China) after playing video games continuously for three days. Another man died in Daegu (Korea) after playing video games almost continuously for 50 hours, stopped only by his going into cardiac arrest.

I would hazard a guess that that level of terminal addiction develops from a combination of the chemical effects of addiction but coupled with a life lacking in meaning (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html) or a serious underlying neurological condition. I doubt very much it's easy for normal people to become so chronically addicted to video games or smartphones or emails.


Multi-tasking has an actual energy cost: ‘Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task.’
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/18/modern-world-bad-for-brain-daniel-j-levitin-organized-mind-information-overload

Dodge taxes by forming your country

It's been a turbulent year for His Royal Highness Prince Leonard I. The 91-year-old self-proclaimed ruler of the Principality of Hutt River in Western Australia, abdicated power in February. Now a court has ruled that he and one his sons must pay A$3m (£1.8m; $2.3m) in unpaid taxes.

The judge in the case dismissed their claims to sovereignty over their 18,500-acre farm as having "no legal merit or substance". The Principality of Hutt River, 500km (300 miles) north of Perth, says it seceded from Australia in 1970, though the government does not acknowledge this.

Self-proclaimed Prince Leonard Casley declared independence after a dispute with the government over wheat quotas. The farm, which has a population of about 30, created its own tax system and laws and issues its own currency, stamps and passports. Tourists can pay a few dollars for a visa and a personal tour of the site, which is bigger than the Vatican, Monaco and Nauru, but is not recognised by any government.

The Australian Tax Office has long been chasing the prince and his son, Arthur Casley - known as Prince Wayne - for overdue taxes. In 1977, the farm briefly declared war on Australia over one demand for payment.

Prince Graeme, who took over as ruler in February but was not implicated in the case, said he was "disappointed" by the court's decision. "We're a fully independent country," he told the BBC. "We don't believe the income was earned within the Australian jurisdiction." He suggested that an appeal may be lodged on grounds of human rights violations due to the "mental torture" caused by repeated court cases.

That's BS Trump would be proud of. Anyway they totally should have formed a Grand Duchy instead.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-40298433

Review : Epic Slavic Myths

Following a now well-established procedure, after that delightful but short offering from Thames & Hudson , I turn to a longer collecti...