Comments on: Nathan Efron whores himself for Bausch & Lomb

By: Frank the Sciencepunk

Frank the Sciencepunk — Sat, 26 May 2007 17:59:48 +0000

Thanks Daniel. I very much doubt there’s a paper, unless you mean the small rectangular kind with lots of zeroes that you give to the bank. There was definitely one of those.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 25 May 2007 22:03:25 +0000

Ah, it tried to filter inequalities as though they were HTML tags.

In any case, the sensitivity to V_0 isn’t that important, since the article makes clear that in most cases it will be between 0.5 and 1, and in “normal” cases probably more like 0.75 to 1. So the influence of that will be at most a factor of four, and more likely a factor of between 1 and 2.

I’d be more concerned about the smokiness, which can apparently effect beta by a factor of ten. Unless a pub wouldn’t normally get S any higher than 2 or 3 I can’t believe this at all, and even then I still have some trouble believing it. Also, I’d be somewhat concerned about the fact that alcohol consumption clearly doesn’t effect everyone at the same rate; it seems A_n should actually measure blood alcohol content.

I would like to see the paper, however.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 25 May 2007 21:53:01 +0000

For some reason this thing lost like 75% of my comment. Bah :p

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 25 May 2007 21:52:15 +0000

The business about values less than ones refers to values between 0 and 1; for instance, anyone who hasn’t had anything to drink will have beta = 0.

As for the sensitivities, you need to take into account that the ranges that these values will commonly take on; we have 0

By: Frank the SciencePunk

Frank the SciencePunk — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 17:08:00 +0000

ha, i love it when people smarter than me comment on my website!

By: James Hunter

James Hunter — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:22:46 +0000

Negative value - result of a square root of positive number is conventionally the positive root but could of course also be the negative root.

By: Bill Preston

Bill Preston — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 13:56:19 +0000

From the Beeb article:

“The formula can work out a final score, ranging from less than one - where there is no beer goggle effect”

…erm…how does one get a negative value from the formula given?

I’d imagine that there’s a rule of thumb with formulas like this; having no constant to tie up units indicates that either a) the formula is so fundamental that it defines the units in question, e.g. F=ma for constant mass, or b) the formula means nothing in terms of the real world. I suspect that the latter is the case.

Also, note the incorrect usage of the lower-case delta symbol. Shouldn’t be used for constants, really. What a pillock.