Finally a use for Zoolander.
If there was ever a waste of zeros & ones, Zoolander was it. That movie sucked so hard, so bad, that BlackHoles are considering a bit of "Industrial Espionage" to find out how anything can suck >that< hard.
Blu-Ray might not be setting the world afire, but boffins have turned up a surprising upside of the technology that can be applied to solar PV manufacture. It turns out the pit-and-peak pattern that encodes a movie on the disk helps improve light absorption if reproduced on the surface of a solar cell. Published in Nature …
Zoolander - one of those films that is silly, but enjoyable if you just go with it. Similarly, The first couple of episodes of Vic and Bob's 'Shooting Stars' left me cold, but then something clicked and I now find it hilarious.
I can do Blue Steel AND Magnum.
I get the impression any movies will work, because once compressed they are all quasi-random and therefore all have similar "array of islands and pits with feature sizes between 150 and 525 nm". So to get around any potential copyright issues the solar panel manufacturer simply needs to shoot a cheap video themselves and get it blu-rayed.
Icon: blu and disky.
While it isn't quite simple, the movie-like object might need to plausibly resemble a movie, something more than a high-definition camera watching traffic on a busy road (I'm thinking of the effect of cutting from one scene to another). So taking a "real" movie might be easiest. I'm thinking that any contract might include a few clauses on how the solar cell components are mounted so as it is difficult to extract the data, maybe something as simple as no hole in the middle, or putting the pattern off-centre.
Frankly, if the Blu-Ray is on sale, you don't need to do anything heroic with the solar cell to duplicate the data. And there are any number of cheap movies where the producers might leap at the chance of a guaranteed fee that can cover the costs of preparing the data for disk manufacture.
Or they could simply bulk-buy the unsold BD stock from HMV. They could probably do a deal like 1 pound for a million discs. They could probably get HMV to pay for delivery too.
That should certainly cover mankind's needs for PV panels for the next few generations...
So repeatable observations are no good if you can't come up with a theory to explain them? Whatever happened to the idea of science being about observations trumping theories by falsifying them, among other things? Should we now throw our observations out if there are no theories available to explain them?
My ghast is truly flabbered.
Whatever happened to the idea of science being about observations trumping theories by falsifying them, among other things?
For one thing, Popper's model of scientific epistemology was superseded by Perfect Bayesian Reasoning, a considerably more accurate and more formally defined one. Popper's gives falsification a special epistemological status which isn't necessary; the Bayes model precisely and formally explains the proportionally greater effect of a contrary result on an established hypothesis.
For another, he didn't say repeatable observations were "no good". He said the science wasn't good until you have a theory that's congruent with the observations (and, presumably, meets various other tests - but the man wasn't trying to provide a formal definition of scientific epistemology, so perhaps you should relax a bit). Observations by themselves are just data. They are a necessary part of scientific epistemology (along with experimentation protocols, formal methods, calculation, and so on), but they are not sufficient.
I'm not actually (formally at least) acquainted with either form of epistemology, as you put it, but I think I know what you mean in your first paragraph.
The problem I had with what was said was with the context. Assuming something like:
1. formulate hypothesis that PV with bumps is more efficient than a smooth one
2. design an experiment to test it, with a smooth control and various different patterns
3. do the experiment and make measurements
4. compare observations to expected results:
4A result support the hypothesis
4B observations that Blu-ray seems to have best efficiency
The context of the statement seems to be about the need to explain 4B with the implication that it's not good science if it's left unexplained. In reality, they just went "that's interesting" and proceeded to try and explain it. If they hadn't, but instead just published the data and results with a note about the interesting Blu-ray results, it wouldn't detract a whit from how good the science of the paper was. They followed up because it interested them (and probably because they wanted to be the first to publish a possible reason "why"). The "it wouldn't be good science if we didn't" argument is spurious in this particular context.
but the man wasn't trying to provide a formal definition of scientific epistemology, so perhaps you should relax a bit
Yes, you're right. It was a throwaway line, but it irked me that it was delivered as a fact about the scientific method. If it were literally true, then we'd end up saying that things like the observation of the Mpemba effect isn't good science because it didn't come with a "why."