Monday Science Links

This week's sciency goodness:

• Erik at Eruptions talks about what will happen when Redoubt blows (if it has, you can check his predictions): The clock is ticking for the new dome growing at Redoubt to collapse. What will happen if/when it does collapse? Good question!


• Ethan at Starts With a Bang! explains how an asteroid impact works (with pictures!): I recently got this comment of incredulity on my article about what wiped out the dinosaurs? "I´m sorry. But i don´t believe this. In my opinion they were wiped out by a climatic changing." And I think it's worth -- with the help of a little math and physics -- looking at what this asteroid impact might have done. First off, we need to know how massive this asteroid was. This asteroid was about 10 to 12 km in diameter, which is large, but less than 0.2% the diameter of the Earth. It's pretty unremarkable, and makes it a pretty typical minor asteroid. For comparison, this makes it about half the size of the known asteroid Gaspra, shown below.


• Kristjan at Pro-Science talks about how people can't rate themselves: The "above-average syndrome" is, simply put, that the average person in a given field will believe themselves to be above average. In other words, more people believe themselves above average than really are. Obviously, only 50% can be above average, but there are perhaps 80% who believes they are. The Dunning-Kruger effect is related to the above-average syndrome, but it's one explanation of why this syndrome exist (there can be other reasons). The effect is named after Justin Kruger and David Dunning who made a series of experiments, which results they published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in December 1999. The title of the article was Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (.pdf), which to my mind is one of the greatest titles I've ever seen on an article.


• Jennifer at Cocktail Party Physics talks abouthow the iPhone came to be: I went on to talk about the seminal work of Hans Christian Oersted and Michael Faraday, not to mention James Clerk Maxwell, who formalized Faraday's ideas into an actual set of equations that are now a staple of college physics courses. In fact, I'd argue that you could probably build an entire course around the "Science of the iPhone," and cover a lot of that same material in a concrete, real-world context. Maybe then those students would appreciate the scientists who gave them their iPhones and other gadgets a little more. For instance, they could learn about Benjamin Franklin and countless others who experimented with electricity in the 1700s -- at least one of whom was killed by ball lightning. R.I.P., Wilhelm Reichmann. And they would come out of college knowing the name of William Gilbert, an English physicist in 1600 who noticed that friction (rubbing one object against another) could create "electricity." (The effect had been known since around 600 BC, but was limited to amber rubbed against, say, fur. Gilbert noticed this phenomenon also extended to other objects and was not a specific magical property of amber.)
  


• And Chad at Uncertain Principles looks at questionable physics in fraily tales: You might think that Monday's discourse on thermodynamics in the Goldilocks story [why was Mama Bear's porridge "too cold"?] was the only children's story in which physics plays a role, but that's not true. Physics is everywhere in fairy tales. Take, for example, the story of Rumpelstiltskin, in which a mysterious little man demands a terrible price for helping a miller's daughter spin straw into gold. This raises the obvious question of exactly how one would go about extracting gold from straw.

Enjoy!