Seeing that I have some sort of weird fetish about doing double blinded experiments, I did a test on 4 brands of orange juice from the store across the road.
At first I was planning to do this experiment like I usually do them, but during the start of testing something weird happened.
In the first test one of the juices got a score of 6 (1-10) but in the subsequent tests got 2.5 and 3. The reason for this is “The orange juice deviation”, a law of nature that states that “If you drink two different types of orange juice in a short time span, the second one will taste fucking weird”.
I tried rinsing with water between each test, but that did not help, so I had to do the testing another way to avoid interference between the different samples.
So to avoid the taste testing being influenced by the previous one, I drank 24 cups of orange juice over the course of 3 days with a minimum of 30 minute delay between tests. Thanks to my GF Stacy for helping with the blinding (she suspected it was all a ploy to make her get me juice).
TEST 2 DATA SET
1 lerum 6
2 sunniva 6.5
3 first price 7
4 sunniva 8
5 first price 6.5
6 first price 6.5
7 first price 7.5
8 eldorado 5.5
9 sunniva 7.5
10 first price 7.5
11 lerum 7
12 first price 7
13 lerum 6.5
14 sunniva 7
15 lerum 8
16 eldorado 6.5
17 lerum 8
18 sunniva 8
19 eldorado 6
20 lerum 6
21 lerum 7
22 eldorado 7
23 sunniva 8
24 sunniva 7.5
Test 1 – drinking 4 glasses of randomized juice.
Sunniva
First Price
Lerum
Eldorado
1
6.5
5
6
7
2
7
5.5
2.5
6
3
7
5
3
6
AVG
6.83
5.17
3.83
6.67
STDEV
0.22
0.22
1.44
0.44
Test 2 – drinking 1 glass of random juice.
Sunniva
First Price
Lerum
Eldorado
AVG
7.5
7
6.75
6.25
STDEV
0.43
0.33
0.58
0.5
Trimmed mean:
AVG
7.6
7
6.62
6.25
STDEV
0.32
0.25
0.38
0.25
Price per liter (NOK)
19.9
6.45
18.6
13.26
So what’s the conclusion?
I’ve always been buying the Eldorado juice, however I clearly think Sunniva is the best (highest score in both tests). however the 1 Liter pack of Sunniva is almost twice the cost of the 2 Liter pack of First Price which is a very cheap brand. Despite that First Price did came in second and who doesn’t love a juice with a small standard deviation?
Are earthquakes increasing in strength or frequency?
Just found myself in a debate where the opposition claims earthquakes is on the rise (judgement day, wrath of god, etc..), being a skeptic I of course needed evidence, and where better to get it than to analyse it for myself from raw data?
How many earthquakes are there?
I went to the United States Geological Survey for the raw data, they have a pretty big list of “selected earthquakes of general historic interest” (6.0+) earthquakes recorded (ordered by magnitude, strongest quake first) http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/historical_mag_big.php
I then made a little computer program to parse the text, and output it in csv format:
java program: Test.java
data text file: quakes.txt (program input)
csv result file: quakes.csv (program output)
The output from the data was opened in a spreadsheet for further analysis. There are 722 quakes in the input data file. I used the data from the period 1900 to 2010 in the statistics below (660 of the 722 total data entries).
The data in table form
6+
7+
8+
1900
9
5
1
1905
14
12
5
1910
14
9
1
1915
9
6
0
1920
10
8
3
1925
15
10
0
1930
20
13
4
1935
12
7
2
1940
16
15
4
1945
21
18
5
1950
21
11
3
1955
20
18
3
1960
12
10
3
1965
34
18
3
1970
21
13
2
1975
18
12
0
1980
15
4
0
1985
17
6
1
1990
17
11
1
1995
31
21
1
2000
110
50
5
2005
194
67
8
The first column is the date of the quakes, the next 3 are number of earthquakes with a magnitude of at least 6, 7 and 8 respectively.
Data is grouped into 5 years.. so the first row with year 1900, is data from 1900 to 1904, followed by 1905 to 1909, etc..
Graph
Click for larger version
Conclusion This graph makes it look like earthquakes are running rampant, and you might have seen a very similar graph on the Internet (YouTube and other places), used by conspiracy cranks as an argument that earthquakes are increasing. But fortunately this graph is very misleading.
The data used to make it is complete rubbish, to quote the page they are collected from: “selected earthquakes of general historic interest”.. These quakes have been hand picked as the most interesting ones, and the data has a HUGE bias towards newer earthquakes, so you can’t make any meaningful statistics out of it (except if you are making statistics of which years the guy who compiled the data finds “interesting”).
Maybe we should try and remake the graphs using some good solid data..
== Real Data ==
A scientist at the USGS was kind enough to send me a datafile with all the 7.0+ earthquakes from 1900 to 2010 (all the registered quakes, not filtered in any way).
Making some graphs from those data yields results consistent with what the experts on earthquakes are saying.. They are totally random and unpredictable, and there has been no increase of earthquakes since we started recording them:
Frequency of earthquakes from 1900 to 2010. Click for bigger version:
Distribution of earthquakes by month:
Distribution of earthquakes by day of month, (day 31 omitted for obvious reasons):
Now, for a post dedicated to two of my favorite things… Angel and Statistics:
I’ve got all my DVDs registered on my computer, and each time I watch a movie or an episode I give it my personal rating on a scale from 1 to 10 (10 being best).
So without further ado I give you the statistics for Joss Whedon’s Angel:
First, the average rating for each season. And as you can see Season 2 and 4 is awesome =)
Below is a chart of all episodes, click to enlarge:
It’s hard being a skeptic sometimes..
Today I saw a particularly silly story in the local Newspaper: “Supermånen Sprer frykt” or “Supermoon spreads fear”.
To sum it up, in 10 days the moon will be closer to the earth than it has been in 19 years.
The newspaper then goes on to list a bunch of conspiracy theory bullshit about several times when the moon has been at its closest to the earth, earthquakes/tsunamies/etc. occurred.
The moons orbit is not a perfect circle, so the distance from the moon to the earth varies between roughly 350’000 km and 400’000 km.
The moon’s effect on the tides is around 60-70% and the sun makes up 40-30%, so of course when the moon gets closer the tides get more extreme, and unless I made an error in the calculations below, the difference in gravitational force between the earth and the moon from when the moon is farthest away and closest should be 13.764%
= 13% difference
Update: It seems the formula I used above is the “shared” gravitational force between the earth and the moon, Phil plait comes up with a maximum 50% increase in the moons gravitational effect on the earth, which is a more useful number. Also he’s an astronomer, so I’d take his word over mine.. On anything but Star Trek trivia
When the moon is at it’s closest and at the same time line up with the sun, we get what’s called the Perigean spring time. In other words, a big ass tide
Earthquakes and statistics!
They also cited a professor in astronomy (they actually referred to him as professor in astrology, but later changed the article and deleted the comments pointing this out).
The paper suggests that earthquakes can be caused by the moon being to close to the earth (sounds like a 50′s sci-fi movie), but what I find quite surprising is the rather strange quote from the professor: “I would be very surprised, if there was a really strong earthquake at this particular date”. and that while living in California, he witnessed an powerful earthquake on the day before a “supermoon”.
The USGS defines a strong earthquake as anything with a magnitude of 6.0 or above (Christchurch was 6.3). On average there 150 earthquake like this yearly.
So the chance for a strong earthquake to happen on march 19th, is 41%.
If we however include the day before and after, the chance increases to 79%.
If we where to include 2 days before and after, we’re up to 92%.
So it’s pretty certain that a big earthquake will take place on or around march 19th, and it’s pretty certain crazy doomsday nuts will say there is a connection between that statistically predicted earthquake and the evil moon. The chance of the quake hitting a densely populated area however is much smaller, so maybe the nuts won’t notice it
update 11.03.2011: As statistics predicted a large earthquake did occur. It did hit a densely populated area, and caused a huge tsunami that hit the northwestern coast of Japan causing massive damages and deaths
The newspaper actually takes this flawed thinking to a whole new level, posting a picture from a earthquake/tsunami in Indonesia, making the point that it “happened only 2 weeks before a supermoon” (oooouh spooky!!).
This is just moronic.. the chance of a strong earthquake being 2 weeks before or after a certain date is 99.999977369 %
Note: all my calculations are based upon dates of earthquakes being relatively evenly distributed through the year, as confirmed by USGS
I recently saw a video debate between David Robertson and Alistair McBay
The only entertaining part of the debate are the numerous occasions where Robertson talks about all the great evidence for god’s existence, without ever mentioning the actual evidence itself. His crappy book lists the following 10 pieces of “evidence”: (source: http://bethinking.org/)
1. The Creation. By that I mean the heavens and the earth, from the smallest atom to the vastest galaxy. It all shouts to me of the glory of God. As I write I am sitting in my parent’s home in the Scottish Highlands overlooking the Dornoch Firth. The night is still and clear and in a moment I will go and clear my head and gaze up at the stars.
This it not proof, it is merely stating the obvious.. The universe and everything was created at some point, it does not prove that someone did it.. And if for some reason the creation of the universe required a creator, it would not favor the christian God any more than it favored Ymir, Nyx, Unkulunkulu or Xenu.
2. The Human mind and spirit. Why are we conscious? Why are we special? And life. Where does it come from? How can we get life from non-life?
I hardly expect Christians to be good judges of what constitutes evidence, it is after all not often evidence appear as a series of questions.. I’m almost disappointed. We are conscious because our brains have evolved (at least for some of us) that way. Who said we are special? How life can be created from inorganic and inanimate matter is a own field called abiogenesis.
3. The Moral Law. How do we know what good and evil is? Why do we have a sense of that at all?
Good and evil are subjective terms, that is different from person to person, culture to culture, religion to religion and changes with time. Most humans have a set of common morality like “dont kill people”, this nice deal probably started thousands of years ago when cavemen formed together to make small communities to improve the chances of survival.. These communities would be less efficient if people randomly killed eachother.
If we where to get our moral sense from the bible, then killing homosexuals, people who works on sundays, men who sleep with their stepmoms would all be morally good calls.
4. Evil. Unlike Dawkins I cannot believe in the innate goodness of human beings. I see too much evil and no explanation fits what I observe as neatly and realistically as the teaching of the Bible. More than that I find that the Bible also brings us the answer to evil – and I have never yet come across any philosophy which does so.
Wow.. Evil can be motivated by greed, jealousy, hatred, chemical imbalances in the brain, and is a interesting field for social anthropologists everywhere.. The fact that Robertson think the most realistic and “neat” explanation is that it’s all Satan’s fault and a bad choice of fruit really blows my mind. Still the existence of evil does not disprove or prove the existence of God.. It proves the existence of whatever it is YOU perceive as good or evil and the fact that you can label stuff.
5. Religion. Yes there is so much in religion that is wrong and in many ways I hate religion. Generally I think it is a human imitation that more often than not blocks the way to God rather than opens it. And yet it is an imitation of something that is real. As Augustine said, ‘Our hearts were made for you, O God, and they are restless until they find their rest in you.’
Finally, we have something in common.. I too hate religion but now to the WONDERFUL argument.. God is real BECAUSE “(religion) is an imitation of something that is real”. Wow.. Why did he not just make “it is real” his ONLY argument? it would have been a sure winner..
6. Experience. I believe because I have tasted that God is good. Of course we can be deluded in our experience (that is why we need to reflect). And we can be wrong in our knowledge. But it would be a strange kind of person who did not take into account their experiences as part of the whole package. Not long after I became a Christian I was visiting a ‘hippy’ home where amidst all the music and drugs paraphernalia there was a poster stuck on the wall. Its words have remained with me ever since: ‘All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all that I have not seen’. Sure – answered prayer, that sense of God’s presence and that joy in worship may all have been illusory. But then again it may all have been real.
Personal experience and anecdotal evidence are always great ways of winning an argument, they are also great ways of selling alternative medicine.
All persons take into account their experiences, but not all people automatically assumes a deity is at work every time something statistically interesting happens.
“it may all have been real”.. Or maybe he was getting high from second hand marijuana smoking?
7. History. Again as I have continued to read and study history it has broadened my horizons and enables me to see in the words of the old cliché that it is ‘His Story’. The history of mankind makes a whole lot more sense when it is set in the context of the history of God.
The fact that mankind’s history makes much more sense to him, if there existed a God, does nothing more than prove that he is a poor historian who is unable to deal with the cause and effect, randomness, chaos and human unpredictability that makes up our rather interesting history.
8. The Church. I mentioned earlier that there are things in the Church that more than anything else have caused me to doubt. When you see Christians behaving in a way which would shame Satanists, when you see preachers being pompous, hypocritical, money and glory-grabbers, then it is enough to put you off Christianity for life. But I have also seen the other side. I have seen the most beautiful people (some of whom had been quite frankly ugly before their conversion) behave in the most wonderful, inexplicable ways. Inexplicable that is except for the grace and love of God. The Church at its best is glorious, beautiful and one of the best reasons to believe.
Yes, the church may have good and bad sides, and Robertson have apparently seen both sides.. This proves that Robertson can observe the world around him.. great job proving stuff..
And the fact that you don’t understand how people can change personality except for God’s love.. Each time an idiot gets a question that there is no apparent answer to, this is more than enough evidence that some god did it.
The Church at its worst is murderous, authoritarian, credulous, ugly and one of the best reasons to stick with reality.
9. The Bible. Again I mentioned problems that I have had and occasionally still have. But I can truthfully say this – that every year I read the Bible through at least once, that every day I try to read it and every week I study it in order to proclaim it. It has been a source of challenge, comfort, truth and renewal. I have no doubt that God speaks to me through it (and I don’t mean the kind of loopy ignoring of context or more esoteric interpretations). In fact, I am so assured of this, experiencing it continually, that I have very little time for Christians who are always looking for ‘extra words’ – as though the Bible were not enough. For me the thrill is still there.
Thank you for proving that you love the bible. That is really really interesting.
10. Jesus. I guess that any one of the above nine reasons would not be enough on their own – although I think their cumulative effect is overwhelming. But this is the icing on the cake. Actually no … this is the cake. Jesus is the reason I believe and will continue to believe:
Yes, the cumulative effect of the reasons above are not only overwhelming, they are STAGGERING, I can barely hold myself from screaming out in joy, accepting Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior..
‘In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things..(lots of crappy bible quotes)…..Would I really want to trade Jesus Christ for the Selfish Gene? No thanks. ‘For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ.’ Why would I swap the fullness of Jesus Christ for the emptiness of a universe and life without God?
Why would you swap the fullness of magical pony’s shooting rainbows of love at you from puffy clouds, with a sporadically hateful god who kills infants and tells you lots of things you can’t do, but most of his followers do anyway?
And why should you? The wonderful thing about Jesus Christ is that you cannot inherit him, he cannot be bought and you cannot earn him. He simply comes as a free gift to all who would receive him. I leave you with some words from another man who had his life changed by Jesus and I pray that you too will see, believe and be changed.
Why should you live in the real world? A good psychosis will get you anywhere. The magic pony’s also comes as a free gift, and they won’t judge you or send you to hell even if you DON’T believe in them.
I leave you with some words from one of the greatest thinkers of our time (who is also very handsome).
“David Robertson is a complete tool, he think he is so smart when bringing up his crappy half-baked arguments which are nothing more than a bunch of empty statements and his own personal opinions. He should be forbidden to ever use the word “Evidence” as he clearly has no idea of the meaning of the word. His statements about us atheists defining evidence in such a way that he can never prove something is bullshit. We don’t define evidence, you present the evidence which is either good evidence (makes sense, can be tested, can be falsified, etc.) or it is SHIT (old writings by unknown authors, vague metaphysical statements that you pull out of your ass, pseudo scientific nonsense).
What did this moron expect? that we would say ‘we will accept ANYTHING as evidence’, again Robertson obviously needs a goddamn dictionary. What if I where to complain that the criteria for evidence where unfair when trying to prove my magical rainbow pony theory? That people where narrow and closed minded because they did not take my buckets full of invisible magic pony hair as evidence?
If I did that, I would have to be a complete idiot.. Like Robertson”
Michael Shanks
24: Mark Bishop
Stargate SG-1: Daniel Jackson
Alexander Siddig
24: Hamri Al-Assad
Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Dr Julian Bashir
Also, I thought a FBI agent was played by Star Trek Voyager’s Robert Duncan McNeill, however the FBI agent was played by Scott William Winters, which just happened to look and sound very similar
Don’t tell me this could not be the same guy (12 years apart)
Today I finished up the project from yesterday (A applet for testing the bandwidth to our server).
I spent most of yesterday trying to figure out why the upload speed always where 20 times higher than the download speed, I tought it was a bug but now I’m convinced it’s some evil setup in the firewall that throttles the speed like this.
Here is the result
I also generated a 1 mb testfile on the server to test download speed using “dd if=/dev/urandom of=testfile bs=1024 count=1024″
In this random file there are 16x smiley faces, 9x sad faces, an asian smiley with a missing ear [‘_’ and a vampire :-[
also the word “UNiX” appears.. spooky.. It’s not the complete works of Shakespeare, but then again I didn’t have any monkeys.
I’m sure you’ve had a call where nobody responds and all you can hear is vague unidentifiable sounds in the background. That’s because someone forgot to lock their phones keypad while wearing it in their pocket/purse.
I myself have had around 5-7 of these calls trough the years, where around half where rather lengthy messages left on my answering service.
Personally I don’t think this is a big problem, but as chance would have it (and I have to emphasize the word chance here), the following event was kind of embarrassing
I just got a message from my mom where she asks me what kind of messages I send out late Sunday night.. I have not used my phone to send messages for at least a week, so I check the “sent messages”, and there are 2 messages to my mom, 1 of which is empty..
And before I tell you the contents of the second message, I would like to note that these messages where sent at 00:30 night to Monday. That means the phone was in my house, there where no visitors, and I was wide awake and did not operate the phone in my sleep. to quote Sherlock Holmes
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
This means the message sent was a result of several random pushes to the phones keypad, “however improbable” they might be. My mom is first on the alphabetical list of people on my phone, and thus it does not seem unlikely that she would be the recipient of such an accidental message.
But let’s get to the point, here are the actual keys that had to have been pressed:
joystick is pushed left, which opens the “new message screen”
the numbers 585 are pressed on the keypad
the “ok” button is pressed 6 times (to go trough the address book, etc..)
The steps above results in the message being sent
The problem here comes from the fact that 585, with my phones dictionary spells “kuk” or in English:”cock”, which on it’s own is a very popular and widely used Norwegian insult.
Now luckily my mom has a sense of humor, and we can laugh about this. I guess it could be worse if it was sent to my boss or something..
I’m now deleting the database over the 200 students who took the programming class at NTNU some time ago.
In honor of their achievements I thought I might share with everyone, some of their creative passwords:
3 people used their first name as password
11 people used their first name as the main part of their password
13 people used a names from the opposite sex as passwords
3 persons used their student id numbers as passwords
1 person used a phone number as a password
1 person used their favorite soccer team as password
1 person used the numbers 1 to 9 as their password
3 people used the name of the course itself as password
Got the grade for my exam in Algorithms and Datastructures yesterday.
This is the third time I take the damned class, and previously the percentage who failed the exam was 76% and 77%, needless to say the exam is considered pretty hard and I’m very pleased with the result (a C), this means I only have 1 class left until I get my Bachelors degree in Information Technology.
I also started working full time (100%) since coming back from the Holidays and I really like working at Intrapoint compared to life as a student
