mercredi 20 décembre 2017

Huffpost: "Area Man Uses Basic Math to Figure Something Out"

Okay, this is about a more than two and a half year old article. I stumbled across it while Googling for information about the more recent Amtrak derailment.

Here's the article.

Apparently, it's now (at least slightly) newsworthy that someone was able to use available data and elementary-school-level arithmetic to figure something out. In this case, the speed of a train captured in motion in a video clip.

Quote:

Originally Posted by the linked article
Here’s how it works: On Noda’s site, Sic Transit Philadelphia, he analyzed video obtained by CNN of the train rounding a bend immediately before the crash. Looking at the time on the surveillance video, Noda counted 4.5 seconds between the first car coming into view and the last car passing out of the frame.

Based on Noda’s identification of the train’s eight cars — an ACS-64 locomotive at the front, followed by seven Amfleet I passenger cars — he was able to calculate the length of the entire train. The combined length of a 67-foot ACS-64 and seven 85-foot Amfleet I cars is 662 feet. That means the train traveled 662 feet in 4.5 seconds.


There are three more paragraphs that follow, explaining operation by operation, how Noda converted feet per second into miles per hour. Really. Here's the first:

Quote:

To calculate how fast the train was going in miles per hour, Noda converted feet per second to miles per hour. First, to convert seconds to an hour, he found the ratio of 4.5 seconds to the number of seconds in an hour. Since there are 3,600 seconds in an hour, a 4.5-second interval occurs 800 times in an hour.

The reporter is obviously very impressed by this feat. Maybe because Noda didn't use a radar gun or a video-train-speed-finder app or anything! Just the miracles of taking and looking up measurements, addition, multiplication, and division. Who knew such things were possible?

I find this a bit alarming. This had to be explained? This impressed the reporter enough to write about it in the same admiring tone that a typical local reporter would use to describe how a fifth grader sold potted seedlings to raise $5000 for a charity?

On the other hand, if such articles were commonplace, if there were frequent sidebars or a regular section in news media on "how we can figure this stuff out, step by step," maybe more grown-ups would know how to do it.


via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2B6IP7m

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