DI was down for a couple hours early this afternoon. Thanks to the smart guys at our hosting service to resurrect the site quickly. BTW, for those of you wondering about DI's traffic, during October, 2008, we had: 108,322 visits 72,012 unique visitors 396,280 pages downloaded. 1,053,050 files downloaded, and…
Barack Obama is going to be a big change from George W. Bush, as you can see by reviewing his transition site: Change.gov. It's gratifying to see the many enlightened changes that Barack Obama will be bringing to the way the government views and uses the Internet. For example, he…
Given that technologies such as the internet, personal connectivity, and pervasive monitoring are still in a nearly malignant growth phase, it might be useful to review the positions of the presidential candidates on technology. Keep in mind that the future of America as a technological nation is also dependent on…
Tim O'Reilly (the technology book publishing O'Reilly) lines out his technology focused assessment of why he is supporting Obama in this post on his blog. We are in unprecedented times. And folks, I'm sorry to say that the current financial meltdown is not the worst of it. Political instability around…
One sticking point I reach in certain discussions on this site is trying to pin down exactly what constitutes a fact in science. Let’s try a simple one as a test case.
The temperature is 68° Fahrenheit.
Is this measurement a fact, or a conclusion based on a tall tower of theories? I’ll bet that you forebode where I’m going with this.
First, let’s get legal and precise: The air temperature in the shade in my garden at the location of my thermometer at precisely this moment (as defined by some reading at GMT-6 on the radio-synchronized clock on my wall) is 68°F (292.0K). We cannot conclude (absent other information) what the temperature is elsewhere in the neighborhood, or the rate and direction of the change of temperature from this single reading.
Next, considered as an experiment: The incident radiant heat from reflecting sources is minimal, estimated as an error of increase of less than 0.1°F. The relative humidity and breeze are constant enough to ensure that the thermometer is dry, therefore evaporative cooling can be ignored. The temperature is safely too high for quantum effects, yet far too low for relativistic effects to be measurable. The instrument is viewed at eye level normal to its plane at teh reading height, reducing parallax effects to negligible.
Next, how well is this thermometer calibrated? Um. Well, it has numbers and marks. But those indicate only about one degree of precision, without indicating any accuracy in particular. It is not a laboratory …
