February to March is the best time to find frogspawn (apparently), so this is ideal time for me to watch a tadpole grow into a frog. So I could go to a lake and wait for a few weeks/months until I get to see the product of the final transformation: the frog. Now that's interesting, I am sure, but, there are other more extreme transformations that can be observed.. not at the lake, but on YouTube. Try watching the video below and see for yourself! This is as close I will get to watching animal transformations!
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Sunday, 10 February 2008
Saturday, 19 January 2008
The brain: a powerful thing
The brain is a powerful thing - that can make you or break you. You get to learn to think in a certain way and that may often may be very different to how others think. Your experiences, the environment you live in, the people around you or away from you, will affect you, either contradicting or more often re-enforcing how you think. It's all in the process and bias. Bias gives you the building blocks: assumptions and 'rationale'; process puts them together, like the scaffolding that creates the structure for the bricks to follow or like puzzles pieces that come together to create a picture. Why all this totally unscientific and fascinating simplistic approach to neuro-science?
Well, it's been a long week of counting swear words. I estimated 11 a day and to my surprise I found that on average I use(d?) fewer words than that. This is good news, as I have to put 10p in my swear box for each one of them, but still... it got me thinking. Is it really the absolute number of words that matter. Is really my set target of 11 words a day that difficult to achieve? 'Yes and no' is my answer.
For example: assume you sleep 8 hours on average that leaves you with 16 hours with a quota of 1.45 words each. That's sounds difficult, especially if you take into consideration that when we use bad words they are more than one in a phrase!
What about the % that bad words represent of our total spoken words a day. I found a page that concludes that males use about 6000 words per day and females use 8800 per day. I am sure you were not surprised! There are other estimates that show the same trend, albeit with a larger gap. In anyway lets assume females use more words than men. With 300 words per page, that's 20 pages for a male and 29.3 for a female. With an average of 4-6 characters a word and 70 years of average talking life-span one can easily calculate the amount of storage space required to transcribe everything one said in a lifetime and save it on a PC, which I roughly calculated to be less than a gigabyte of data. Sad - my phone has enough memory to keep everything I've said so far and will say in my remaining days. Anyway returning to my previous argument 11 words a day is only about 0.2% of what males say and even lower for females. That makes you feel better eh? Perhaps, but this should not be an excuse to start using more bad words. In fact, that reminds me of a song that says "those who swear do so, because they have not learnt to talk".
Returning to the actual Thing in hand I've tried to count as accurately as possible and I found that counting was a good obstacles to using bad words. Often I found that I started replacing them with something less 'offensive'. You could perhaps use something totally irrelevant, like apples or oranges. That can even be a good ideas as saying oranges so many times a day may create the desire to eat one. Vitamins are good after all.
I will keep counting for another week - more counting will increase the validity of my experiment and perhaps will help me rewire the hardware in my brain and prevent me from using bad words in the future.
Well, it's been a long week of counting swear words. I estimated 11 a day and to my surprise I found that on average I use(d?) fewer words than that. This is good news, as I have to put 10p in my swear box for each one of them, but still... it got me thinking. Is it really the absolute number of words that matter. Is really my set target of 11 words a day that difficult to achieve? 'Yes and no' is my answer.
For example: assume you sleep 8 hours on average that leaves you with 16 hours with a quota of 1.45 words each. That's sounds difficult, especially if you take into consideration that when we use bad words they are more than one in a phrase!
What about the % that bad words represent of our total spoken words a day. I found a page that concludes that males use about 6000 words per day and females use 8800 per day. I am sure you were not surprised! There are other estimates that show the same trend, albeit with a larger gap. In anyway lets assume females use more words than men. With 300 words per page, that's 20 pages for a male and 29.3 for a female. With an average of 4-6 characters a word and 70 years of average talking life-span one can easily calculate the amount of storage space required to transcribe everything one said in a lifetime and save it on a PC, which I roughly calculated to be less than a gigabyte of data. Sad - my phone has enough memory to keep everything I've said so far and will say in my remaining days. Anyway returning to my previous argument 11 words a day is only about 0.2% of what males say and even lower for females. That makes you feel better eh? Perhaps, but this should not be an excuse to start using more bad words. In fact, that reminds me of a song that says "those who swear do so, because they have not learnt to talk".
Returning to the actual Thing in hand I've tried to count as accurately as possible and I found that counting was a good obstacles to using bad words. Often I found that I started replacing them with something less 'offensive'. You could perhaps use something totally irrelevant, like apples or oranges. That can even be a good ideas as saying oranges so many times a day may create the desire to eat one. Vitamins are good after all.
I will keep counting for another week - more counting will increase the validity of my experiment and perhaps will help me rewire the hardware in my brain and prevent me from using bad words in the future.
Saturday, 13 January 2007
Six degrees
You may have come across the term Six Degrees most probably because of its relation to Hollywood and namely the Kevin Bacon number and the movie with the same title that featured Will Smith. The basic idea is that human beings (i.e. you and me) are connected through relationships with at most six other people. In other words pick a stranger, in average he or she will be a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. (For those interested I strongly suggest reading Watt's Six Degrees: The new science of networks and Barabasi's Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life)
At first it may seem a bit bizarre. That's probably what Stanley Milgram thought and tried his small world experiment, which was later tested using emails (e.g. look here). Participants are given an item and a recipient. If they know the recipient they can forward it directly to him or her. If not they will need to forward it to someone who they think is closer to the recipient than them. Can you guess how long (on average) the chain is?
By now your question should have been: what do all the above have to do with the message in a bottle? Well, the message could have said: "If you find this bottle please forward it to X. If you don't know him forward it to someone who you think is closer to X". If you are going to start throwing bottles in the sea, you may as well do it for the benefit of science!
At first it may seem a bit bizarre. That's probably what Stanley Milgram thought and tried his small world experiment, which was later tested using emails (e.g. look here). Participants are given an item and a recipient. If they know the recipient they can forward it directly to him or her. If not they will need to forward it to someone who they think is closer to the recipient than them. Can you guess how long (on average) the chain is?
By now your question should have been: what do all the above have to do with the message in a bottle? Well, the message could have said: "If you find this bottle please forward it to X. If you don't know him forward it to someone who you think is closer to X". If you are going to start throwing bottles in the sea, you may as well do it for the benefit of science!
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