I am spending some time playing around with the cosmic ray muon data from an instrument in the SMU Physics Department. That instrument is located in the basement hallway of Fondren Science Building. I already setup a “dashboard” of information derived from the instrument, available here: https://blog.smu.edu/saso/projects/muon-observatory/. If you want […]
Science
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With reports from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna that the preliminary analysis of their data suggests a 95% effective vaccine (one each for each company) [1], I found myself wondering about the mathematics of vaccine effectiveness. There were some small details about how numbers were calculated from the data that were lost […]
There are a lot of idiots on social media. This will come as no surprise to most of you (to the rest … well, chalk up one more). For example, in response to the COVID Tracking Project’s update of weekly COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and death data, this was posted: Of […]
The Biden transition team has been hard at work preparing for the first real presidency in 4 years. While there will be a lot of work to do to claw out of the abyss created by the previous 4 years of chaos, mismanagement, and willful ignorance of reality, it’s nevertheless […]
In my thoughts on the close of the experiment with American Fascism, I worried at the end about the damage that would be wrought in the months before Trump is constitutionally required to leave office. Here is a good example on the scientific side of things: www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/11/09/trump-removes-climate-program-director/ UPDATE: 10:46am This […]
On Saturday, we took a break from the pandemic to go outside and look for a comet. We live in a Dallas suburb, but one which has grown a lot in 10 years. The skies are not quite as dark as they used to be, but we thought it might […]
It has been 73 days since Texas, racing to reopen without first putting in place large-scale testing and tracing infrastructure, ceded the population of the state to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. That was COVID Day, or C-Day: May 1, 2020. On C-Day, Texas announced that businesses could re-open at 25% capacity; […]
This is the second day in a row that Collin County, TX, has not reported or updated its COVID-19 case or death count (or any other statistics). It is – likely not coincidentally – two days since the State took over the handling of cases from the County. The question […]
In 1970, Hall, Lind, and Ristenen (Univ. of Colorado at Boulder) published a paper in the American Journal of Physics (AJP, vol. 38, No. 10) on “A Simplified Muon Lifetime Experiment for the Instructional Laboratory.” Basically, it articulates precisely the experiment at the heart of a similar instrument at SMU. […]
One of my daily activities in the last 20 days (or so) has been to scoop up the COVID-19 case and death data for my county from the Texas Department of Health’s (DSHS) information center [1]. I’m not an epidemiologist; I’m a physicist. I’m not trying to make predictions; I’m […]
Muons are a gateway drug. They are just difficult enough to detect that they are really not obvious to humans. They are just easy enough to stop in material that, once you learn to spot them, you want to stop them and watch them do what they do. What do […]
I started this post as a place to collect scientific programming discussing COVID-19. The Guardian’s Science Weekly – “Covid-19: can ibuprofen make an infection worse?” (March 26, 2020) Nicola Davis speaks to Dr Ian Bailey about the current guidance on taking ibuprofen and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs during a Sars-CoV-2 […]