Things take a turn in this roundabout technical study of lasagna: “Multiphysics modeling of microwave heating of a frozen heterogeneous meal rotating on a turntable,” Krishnamoorthy Pitchai, Jiajia Chen, Sohan Birla, David Jones, Ric Gonzalez, and Jeyamkondan Subbiah, Journal of Food Science, vol. 80, no. 12, 2015, pp. E2803-E2814. (Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing […]
Theoretical physicists are sometimes accused of making over-simplifications for mathematical models. This has lead to many variations on the spherical cow story, where a physicist claims to be able to cure a sick cow, but only if it is a spherical cow in a vacuum. Oddly, most iterations of this tale ignore heat radiated from […]
Authors J. D. Lozier, P. Aniello and M. J. Hickerson remind us, in a 2009 editorial for the Journal of Biogeography that : “[…] very sensible-looking, well-performing (based on AUC and threshold tests) ENMs [Ecological Niche Models] can be constructed from questionable observation data.“ They demonstrate by building an Ecological Niche Model to predict the […]
The quest advances, scratch by scratch, in the search for an excellent rodent itch model: “Quantitative assessment of directed hind limb scratching behavior as a rodent itch model,” Hiroshi Nojima and E. Carstens, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, vol. 126, no. 2, June 2003, pp. 137-43. The authors, at Toyama Medical and Pharmaceutical University, Japan and […]
People with bipolar disorder swing between mood extremes. A team of mathematicians decided to see how much of that swinging they could describe mathematically. Mason Porter, then at the Georgia Institute of Technology and now at Oxford University, with several US colleagues, published a study in 2009, Mathematical Models of Bipolar Disorder. It appeared in the journal Communications […]
Rachel Lavin writes in The University Times, about Science Gallery [Dublin]‘s “Fail Better” exhibition: Some of the highlights are Christopher Reeve’s wheelchair, Samuel Beckett’s original manuscript drafts of Westward Ho, and most intriguingly, a human birthing machine that earned itself an Ig Nobel Prize. The machine has been rebuilt for viewing and is available to […]
From the book World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement by Robert P. Crease: Rita Mazzella is the doyenne of bra fit models. Lingerie companies use her breasts — size 34C — to construct new brassiere lines, then scale the size down to A and B, and up to D. […]
Tom Pagano explains “how to model monks going in and out of a cafeteria and how it is like a hydrological model“: The classic analogy for hydrology models is that soils hold and release water like a series of leaky buckets. But instead, let’s start by discussing how to model a cafeteria/mess hall/canteen for hungry meditating monks…. […]
Of all the fuzzy intervening opportunity models, this one is most explicitly designed to predict home-based shopping trips: “A fuzzy intervening opportunity model to predict home-based shopping trips.” Shahriar Afandizadeh [pictured here], Seyed Mehdi Yadi Hamedani, Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering, 2012, 39:(2), 203-222, The authors are at the School of Civil Engineering, Iran University of Science […]
Some people don’t like to think about evolution, but others so enjoy doing it that they think about the evolution of evolution. The model for this—really for modeling models of this, is a study written in 1999: “A Simple Model of the Evolution of Simple Models of Evolution,” Cosma Rohilla Shalizi and William A. Tozier, […]