Do you have a second?

Every 15 minutes, someone averages a sum of events over an arbitrary period of time. No, I don't have a citation for that. It's standard practice to assume that frequencies are infrequently constant yet are much easier to understand if we can apply some kind of linear assumptions to them. That's perfectly fine, especially when we don't really know when the event in question is more or less likely to happen. This approach is used in science and medical journalism with the intent of breaking down impossibly huge numbers (i.e., 50 thousand deaths due to Ocelot Fever) into something more human-readable.

The problem arises when the level of granularity imposed by averaging over time obfuscates the reasons why the events happen at all. If MADD tells us that "In 2011, 9,878 people died in drunk driving crashes - one every 53 minutes", what do we really learn? That single number, (9,878 deaths / 53 minutes) is so specific that it disregards critical time-related factors like the weekend.*

I was planning to do an XKCD-inspired bit of Googling** and search for results of a few arbitrary frequencies to find out what happens at those times, every time. The results are too ghastly to share as most of the assumed events involve death, dismemberment, or assault. So, for the sake of diversity, I'll pull a few numbers from everysecond.info instead:

• Every second, Johnny Depp makes $2.92. The guy makes $92 million a year. Economists do use hourly pay or yearly salary to estimate how much an individual's time is worth, such that any period of time is "worth" however much they would have earned had they spent it working for pay. This can lead to some rather ludicrous estimates when inappropriately applied. We know Johnny Depp isn't actually working continuously despite his numerous sources of income. Even so, a number like $2.92/sec doesn't really provide us with any context to Mr. Depp's economic situation.
• Every second, 194 videos are watched on Myspace. What a perfect example! The statistic is from 2009. Some big changes have happened since then. Even so, it's fun to imagine Myspace users draining what's left of their attenuated attention spans on single-second videos. Hundreds of them every second!
• Every second, cows emit 250 kgs of methane in the United States. It's already difficult to imagine what a single kilogram of methane looks like,*** much less how what happens to it when the next second's round of methane arrives. Even so, cows don't continuously emit methane and they may emit more or less of it depending on what they're eating. Those factors can't even be considered when we break things down into seconds or even hours. If I observe a cow swish its tail three hundred times in an hour, perhaps I can safely claim 5 tail swishes per minute. Expanding the observation to a thousand cows over the course of months or years would render per-minute or per-second estimates useless without a greater knowledge of the relationship between cow tails and time.

All I'm saying is that averaging massive numbers over time is misleading at best and dangerously myopic at worst. These are situations best handled by probabilities, not solid quantities and linear relationships. Averaging such an immense quantity over such a small period of time distorts our understanding of both quantities.


*This paper's thesis in brief: young people like to drink for fun on the weekends. To be fair, the study subjects were Swiss rather than the usual Americans. I'll refrain from griping about social science research for now.

**I have this nagging suspicion that this actually was an XKCD piece at some point. If so, go read that again too. It was probably pretty entertaining.

***250 kg of methane is 375 thousand liters, if that helps.

Get well soon

Here is a use for one of the strange but inevitable results of modern society: singing greeting cards. The materials in one of those cards, plus a cheap resistor and capacitor, are enough to assemble a perfectly usable pulse sensor. The original paper suggests that this off-the-shelf solution could be used in an educational setting. 

A little Googling shows that a number of pulse sensors are available or can be made for all kinds of platforms.

• This one is intended for use with Arduino. Total cost is ~$25, not counting whatever it's attached to.
• For comparison, this one is a more clinical model. I can only imagine how much it costs.
• This setup uses an optical approach instead of a piezoelectric one. It seems like overkill, possibly because the signal requires a lot of amplification.

I'm imagining an art project in which a viewer's heart rate changes the intensity of lights in a room or turns certain appliances (i.e., a fan or a radio) on or off at certain rate thresholds. Even something like a cheap knock-off of this bike helmet seems entirely feasible. 

More like "Nope! Share, Fool!"

It's worrisome to see politics bleed into science. It's even more alarming to see sources of scientific funding dry up because they don't fit a specific agenda. The National Science Foundation, under directive from Congress, recently cut off funding for political science research except for that "promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States." It's a rather general guideline for a specific field. It also reveals how legislators feel about the role of any science and when it deserves to be funded: we want results, we want them now, and we want we certainly don't need any context.


The NSF spent more than $7 billion last year. It's where 20 percent of the money for federally-funded research in the US comes from. That total goes a long way and contributes to numerous fields, from engineering to education. It's only a matter of time before some Congressman decides an entire field of research doesn't need federal funding at all.

2018 edit: Hahahaha. Haha. Haha...ha. To think this was the extent to which we were collectively worried about politics controlling science funding. (For the record - whoever is keeping track of the record these days - I don't believe that science is ever independent of politics, just that political trends can imbue supposedly objective decisions with a distinctly volatile flavor of unpredictable bias.)

There aren't as many videos about yawning out there as you might think.

This Slate article about a supposed phenomenon known as ASMR is a few months old but it's still an interesting subject*. ASMR, or the Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response** is a rather general term for a collection of subtle but pleasurable psychological and physical reactions to what appears to be gentle or indirect stimuli. It can reportedly be triggered by gentle whispering, light touching, or even just the implication of receiving care from another person. Crinkling food wrappers, sorting silverware, or examining groceries also seem to produce ASMR for some individuals.

I don't experience this phenomenon. I generally remain skeptical about unexplained phenomena, too, especially when they're endemic to the Internet. Despite my skepticism I can't help but wonder if ASMR is really just a way to collectively codify a set of real psychological phenomena previously considered too minor to observe or too difficult to quantify. Everyday life is rich in dull but enjoyable moments. Perhaps mass communication just offers them in a more concentrated format, much like it does with news. Information overload is a real issue, too, if not a psychological one. It's the result of an inability to distinguish signal from noise; perhaps ASMR is pleasurable because it requires observation of a small signal (like Bob Ross' whispered instructions, for instance) in a low-noise background. It's relaxing because there isn't a lot of stimulus competing for the recipient's attention but it's stimulating because it's direct.

What's considered ASMR may truly be a collection of phenomena all related to the same set of primarily audiovisual stimuli. I think it's safe to suggest that the limbic system is involved and that much of the reaction is subconscious. It's reported to be not quite but almost orgasmic, much like yawning or sneezing are sometimes described. The Slate article above also suggests some potentially Freudian parent-child reaction but I think that may just be confirmation bias; Youtube participation may skew toward female users.

It would be interesting to see what range of stimuli repeatedly produce ASMRs in those who feel them. Do gently-worded threats do it? What about calming medical interviews in foreign languages?


*This sentence originally ended "...but it's been making the rounds again." That's how the last entry begins and it's kind of an embarrassing phrase to use anyway. Calling attention to it kinda defeats the purpose of editing but now it's not redundant, at least.

**It's really kind of a curious name for the phenomena. I'd generally expect unexplained psychological responses to acquire more pseudo-scholastic and less clinical names, i.e. Morgellons. Perhaps that's one distinction between a pleasurable unexplained phenomenon and a collective delusion.

Hunka burnin' love

There's a web game called No One Has To Die that's been making the gaming-blog rounds. I don't intend this to be a gaming blog per se but this particular game is really quite good. Without giving too much away, it an excellent example of how even the smallest dose of interactivity can turn a fairly average story into a multifaceted one by virtue of player choice. The venerable Choose Your Own Adventure books did that too, of course, but aren't those really games, too? Either way, No One Has To Die isn't even that much more fun than flipping around a paperback to avoid the "bad" endings, but in this case it's clearly intentional. Perhaps most games can be reduced to repeating different permutations of the same actions until the desired result is reached.