The most exciting aspect of walking in New Orleans’s Krewe du Vieux parade every year is not dressing up, throwing goodies to miles and miles of crowd, the loudness, color and flash of everything or even ending the night jamming to the best bands in the city who gather together to play just for us. No, it’s that initial second line. For fifteen or so minutes, before any of the night’s festivities begin, the Paulin Brothers brass band leads the Krewe de C.R.A.P.S. from our subkrewe’s muster point to the start of the larger parade.

Imagine: It’s twilight in the Marigny. A sharp and beautiful arpeggio from Rickey Paulin’s clarinet announces it is time. And the band begins. Suddenly, what seemed like a chaotic fancy-dress party with horns sticking out of it morphs into a traditional marching New Orleans brass band followed by sixty or so outrageously-attired adults shimmying and swaying in (our version of) lock-step, a true second line. I have no use for prayer. But, at the moment when I fall into that number, all the differences between the world and me melt away. I am free, alive and one with all.

You can have all the holidays and the rest of Carnival, but this I must do each year. And when my marching foot finally kicks the bucket, make sure to send me off with a big old Carnival second line and dump my ashes on the parade route from the back of the C.R.A.P.S. float.

Not-So-Reddy Kilowatt by Pics by Wendy

Queen Bethany Bultman. All hail!

On Decatur Street

Ent-Orgy by boxchain

Michael Homan and me by Therese Homan

• Picture of the title float by skooksie
• More pictures on my photostream and Flickr favorites. (If you were in the parade and I know you, I may have favorited a picture of you, so look for yourself in the favorites area.)
• NOLA Defender’s Krewe du Vieux photo highlights.
• 2013 KdV pictures at MardiGrasParadeSchedule.com
• A thousand apologies for linking to the online version of the Some-Times Picayune, but Doug MacCash said the C.R.A.P.S. float was the best! Squeeee! Thanks to our wonderful float builders.

Remember when xkcd described how a rocket works using only the 1000 most commonly used words in the English language? “Saturn V Rocket” isn’t in the list, so it was reduced to “Up-Goer Five.”

Now Theo Sanderson has created an Up-Goer Five text “editor” into which you can type anything you want and it warns you when you’ve used an uncommon English word. Naturally, today’s Twitter science meme (#upgoerfive) is explaining your research or what you do at work using the “ten hundred” most common English words.

This is my attempt at explaining what I do everyday, i.e. exploration geophysics using techniques of seismic interpretation, rock porosity, fluid in pores, seismic inversion, reservoir volumetrics and 4D seismic.

“I study the deep ground to understand it better and to find stuff that we burn to make power, water and stuff that goes into building other stuff like the big or small computer you are reading this on.

“The ground has different types of stuff in it. When the ground is hit very hard, the different types of stuff in it shake in a different way. I can then get back a computer picture of the different stuff that the ground has in it. Next, I look and look and look and look at the picture of deep ground on the computer and draw a box around the stuff that has the wet stuff we want to get out. (The box is often as big as a town, to give you an idea.) The wet stuff we want to get out is not in a big space in the deep ground, like many people think, but in tiny little spaces inside other harder, not-wet stuff. So, knowing what the harder, not-wet stuff looks like up here, I also use the computer to guess how many tiny spaces there are within it down there, how well the spaces touch each other, how much wet stuff there is in the whole box, how much we can get out and how easy or hard it will be for others to suck the wet stuff out from the tiny little spaces. In the last few years, we have been taking the wet stuff out and then hitting the ground very hard again so that it will give us a picture of any wet stuff we left behind.

“I also like to show other people what I do, help women get into jobs like mine and think that my work should be open so that many people can learn and fix problems that face all of us.”

Chris and Anne are compiling a list of geological #upgoerfive contributions.

It is somewhat disheartening that “calculate” and “examine” aren’t in our common vocabulary, forget “science” and “rock.” Then again, words like “space,” “ground,” “computer” and “problem” are used often, which makes this fun and challenging. What is the value of the exercise? It reminds me of the times I explained my graduate theses to my super-intelligent and intellectually curious grandmother who understood English but fluently spoke only Tamil. How do you explain brittle failure, transtensional folding, gravimetry, seismic and rock porosity to someone like her? Heck, how do you explain them to a native English speaker not familiar with these terms? You go back to basic principles and basic English and start from scratch without skipping any steps. I feel non-scientists actually like and understand science better this way, if you do it in a non-condescending way. And, once you introduce a new term or two, they adopt it and begin recognizing and using it themselves because they earned it. Isn’t that how we learned and still learn?

Try it out. Run your engineering, legalese, business lingo and medical verbiage through the Up-Goer Five editor. It’s a great brain workout.

Mean vs. Median: A runner friend posted this last night in that social media space which must not be named: “Just read that Americans average 4000 calories per day. Mind boggled. Also really want to know the standard deviation.”

The immediate responses were mostly on the order of OMG THE JUNK-FOOD-SWALLOWING AMERICAN FATTIES. So, I countered with “This could be a right-skewed distribution, in which case the average is greater than the median.” In plain English, this means that if there are a lot of Americans who eat, say, a reasonable 2000-to-3000-calorie-per-day diet and there are fewer who eat 4000 to 6000 calories per day, the average number of calories consumed will work out to around 4000, but a lot more people are eating fewer calories. If you still don’t get it, read this. “Typical” or “average” numbers can only be trusted from bell/symmetrical curves. Furthermore, the standard deviation will tell you something in the case of a skewed distribution, but not a lot.

Naturally, my comment was glossed over and there were more responses on the order of OH THE HORRORS OF OBESITY AND THE AMERICAN FAST FOOD INDUSTRY. This one was my favorite: “I see the way a lot of ‘average’ eaters eat. It’s not good. Not good at all.” Oh, sweet mother of statistics. I had to reply. “It’s not about what average eaters consume, but the average calories consumed by this population sample. Again, the average without a mode and median, i.e. whether or not the distribution is a bell curve, is pretty pointless. Sorry, how statistics are presented in the media [and understood by the public] is a bit of a peeve of mine.”

The next time someone gives you a mean/average number to make you think it’s typical, ask for the mode and median as well.

Suggested reading: Mean, median, mode and range; Summary statistics for skewed distributions; Life is log-normal!

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Risk vs. Uncertainty: Both of the terms reference unknown outcomes, but there is a difference between risk and uncertainty. Please don’t use them interchangeably. If you’re uncertain whether something will succeed or not, that is a risk, not an uncertainty, i.e. you risk failure. Risk is “a set of possibilities each with quantified probabilities and quantified losses.” If you are out driving today, the risk  you take is getting in an accident. There is no uncertainty involved here – you always run the risk of an accident when in a moving vehicle, a flood during rainy or hurricane season, the failure of an oil and gas well, a broken heart if in a romantic relationship, etc. Uncertainty is then used to describe the range of outcomes, i.e. How Badly? Will you be in a simple fender bender or will you be killed? Will your house flood by 0.2 inches or 20 feet? Will your failed well release 2 gallons of oil or 2 billion gallons? Will you get over your breakup in two days or be wounded forever? (Who knows? That’s where Bayes comes in. What, you don’t think the a priori probability distribution of your reaction to being dumped can be calculated?)

I bring this up because of something Engineer Tim said today as a response to error bars in engineering calculations: “It’s really hard to talk to the public about uncertainty and fragility; they just want to hear it’s fixed and safe.” Ack. Ok, look: 1) Nothing about human life implies 100% safety at all times. Just being alive means you are at risk of failure with any set of outcomes. 2) “Fixed” and “safe” are illusions when there is risk, uncertainty and (in)variables that are truly unknown. You may predict a set of outcomes for a low- or no-risk situation, but how do we know all factors have been taken into account? We never do.

Yes, great engineering, proper precautions, understanding the risks and uncertainties and a robust post-failure response mechanism may greatly alleviate things, but much of human living inherently involves risk with an uncertain set of outcomes. Furthermore, there are truly things we do not know or have not taken into account, but let us not use the words “risk” and “uncertainty” to characterize them.

Suggested reading: What is the difference between risk and uncertainty?; Defining risk versus uncertainty; The stock market: risk vs. uncertainty (“Whereas risk is quantifiable randomness, uncertainty isn’t.”)

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#OverlyHonestMethods: A few days ago, scientists on Twitter started this hashtag to describe how real-life experiments are done and how data is collected in the real world. Some of the tweets bordered on confessional in terms of real number of samples used, unrepresentative population samples and methodology, but the majority of them displayed how experimentation is done and the limits of data capture and analysis. Popular Science rounded up a number of #overlyhonestmethods tweets into an article entitled #OverlyHonestMethods Hashtag Reveals How Science Is Really Done.

Which, of course, makes me wonder how the public thinks we do science.

Scientists seem to have one of three responses to this meme: 1) Hahahaha, story of my life!, 2) This is bad PR as laypeople will get the impression we’re a bunch of frauds because they lack the context of knowing how science is really done [e.g. @EruptionsBlog] and 3) We owe this to the public to teach them that the range of science is –>known, experimentation, uncertainty, unknowns as well as hypotheses that are built upon or changed as more data is captured and better techniques are developed<– [e.g. @SciObservatory].

I am of the (first and) third opinion. I find no problem in telling the public

what we know: Evolution is an observable fact; childhood vaccinations prevent horrible diseases.

what we don’t know but can guess at: Geophysical reservoir thickness calculations bear hundreds of feet of uncertainty based on the ability to seismically image top and base of the reservoir at great depths; these uncertainty bounds change as we drill more wells and the seismic data set becomes clearer or murkier,

what we don’t know at all: I have no clue whether aliens exist or not, and

we are human: The best measurements I made in my field area in Mexico using the Lacoste-Romberg gravimeter came from when I was sitting, which is easier on my back, and not kneeling in a tight spot.

Science is not done with all the data possible (in which case it wouldn’t be science but pure knowledge) and in a neat and linear fashion by automatons in white lab coats. Most of the time, we work very hard to acquire enough good data, make sense of what we do have, offer intelligent theories to explain any observable trend and even state that we must not over-science a problem until we have more data. Whether it works or not is immaterial, the science is in that we robustly attempted to find an answer from observations.

In fact, the onus is on the consumers of science and engineering to appreciate the concepts of statistics and uncertainty I wrote about earlier in this post AND on scientists and engineers to be transparent about our methods. If the intermediate result is the misunderstanding of science and the outing of some bad science, so be it. I’d rather that laypeople think about what science is and may be, rather than being completely disinterested or categorically “confident” of nothing of import.

What questions and concerns do you have about science?

Huh.

Slate: Leading Environmental Activist“s Blunt Confession: I Was Completely Wrong To Oppose GMOs

So I guess you“ll be wondering”what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.

Huh, I say. Such an adoption of a scientific way of thinking is rare and stuns me when I witness it in action.

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Science: How to Build a Smarter Rock

THIS IS SO COOL. Joel Johnson and Lindsay Olinde at the University of Texas and the University of Virginia’s Joanna Curran have developed fake rocks with rock-like density but with electronics inside to study the downstream movement of sediment in a river system.

We know the rocks go downstream ” we“re not idiots, says Joanna Curran, a hydrologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. But because sediment transport is a nonlinear physical process, small mistakes in input measurements can result in disproportionately large output errors in mathematical model predictions. Improving the models means getting down to nitty-gritty details, including better measurements of dozens of variables ranging from large-scale channel slopes and water velocities to minute interactions between a single grain of sand, the water flowing around it, and the river bed.

Also, faux-cobbles that travel for miles: “‘We had fist-sized particles move almost 7 kilometers,’ Johnson says, in awe.”

I now wonder what reservoir characterization tests we can conduct with smart faux-sand.

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Most sobering statistic from (the hilarious) Free Press Houston’s Worst of Houston: 2012 Edition

“80% of [Houston Independent School District] libraries don’t meet the state guidelines for staffing and book collections.”

One of the most affluent US cities with some of the highest property taxes, keep in mind. Pretty sure our contribution to the pot is being diverted to the creation of yet another ring around the exurbs.