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Scientific R&D At Home?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm currently on the cusp of getting myself a new hobby and making some investments. There are a few areas that interest me greatly, from playing with EEG/ECG and trying to put together a DIY sleep lab, to astronomy, etc. I'm somewhat hesitant to get into these fields because (despite the potentially short-lived enjoyment factor) I'm not convinced they are areas that would lend themselves to making new discoveries in the home and with home equipment, which is what I'd really like to do. I've also read quite a number of articles on 'bio hacking,' and the subject seems interesting, but it also seems futile without an expensive lab (not to mention years of experience). What R&D hobbies do Slashdotters have that provide them with opportunities to make interesting discoveries and potentially chart new territory in the home? Do such hobbies exist?"
Robotics is always interesting. Servo motors are pretty easy to control, once you learn a little microcontroller programming. All you need is a basic understanding of algebra; write a few timing loops and angle-to-pulse-width conversion routines and you're there. (I've been using PIC16 microcontrollers, which do this sort of thing nicely.)
Besides, that way, you'd have a good chance of being among the first to officially welcome our new robotic overlords!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
The prime frontier is in software. New concepts and applications based upon scientific discoveries are all over the world of software.
Only a few hundred planets outside the solar system have been discovered. Some of those were found from backyards by amateurs.
Check out The Sky is Your Laboratory by Robert Buckheim. It's a ~$30 book that will show you how you can participate in meaningful astro research with no equipment beyond a stopwatch for the simplest stuff. Later chapters get increasingly complex and show you how to do things that be pretty big contributions to the field.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
...that you're more interested in the recognition than the achievement. Most folks I know who make real breakthroughs in a discipline are genuinely interested in the discipline.
I occasionally teach and mentor in a doctorate program, and my essential observation is that those who are interested in the topic have a higher probability of finishing than those who are "chasing the paper". Even those of the latter category who finish the program eventually find such a perspective catches up with them in the workplace or in academia.
I don't mean to sound trollish here, but you need to search your motivations and go for the thing that really interests you. That'll render reward far past achieving 'just something, anything' And that motivation will overcome obstacles such as home-based, etc. You'll find a way, if it interests you...
... lab, to astronomy, etc....
You totally picked the wrong optical hobby dude. Unless you live in some sort of paradise, its either going to be too cold, too hot, too rainy, too buggy, too cloudy, too windy for lightweight mounts, or bad temp inversions, about 99% of the time. Now, a microscope, on the other hand, maybe with a cam attachment hooked up to a PC, with some image analysis software, that could be big fun under any weather condition. And they both cost about the same, less than a car payment for junk, about a single monthly mortgage payment for the good stuff, and about one decent used car for used pro-grade hardware.
Also, we all look at the same sky. That means intense competition. But we all have different dirt and ponds. Yet another vote for microscope.
I'm not convinced they are areas that would lend themselves to making new discoveries in the home and with home equipment, which is what I'd really like to do.
Yeah well you're about to learn the hard part is not deciding what to buy, or even whipping out a credit card, the hard part is figuring out how you'll determine its something new. Pretty easy if you want to discover something new to you, look, an algae species I've never photographed before. Pretty hard if you want to darn near prove a negative, prove no human being has ever photographed that particular species of algae before.
Something New is not necessarily discovering a new individual thing. Something New might be using yer computer and some homemade software that emulates a red blood cell counter to chart the population of algae per sample vs ... something, to make interesting predictions, or discover a new effect. Or turning your computer-microscope into the worlds weirdest spectrophotometer, to measure ... something.
What R&D hobbies do Slashdotters have that provide them with opportunities to make interesting discoveries and potentially chart new territory in the home? Do such hobbies exist?
On the other hand, one good thing about the astronomy hobby is the AAVSO, American Association of Variable Star Observers. You'd never guess that their URL happens to be:
http://www.aavso.org/
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
As far as serious "science" might I suggest this -- while groundbreaking research is mostly hi-tech requiring expensive equipment, one thing that doesn't get done much anymore is well within reach: verifying or debunking claims about various products. This can range from, say, taking time lapse photos of -- oh, I don't know, the progress of competing wart removers -- to basic qualitative chemical analysis of product ingredients (is that fish oil actually mercury-free).
Another idea might be designing coffee table doodads that show off scientific phenomena or engineering tricks.
Someone had to do it.
The probability of you making a significant discovery at home is close to zero. That is not meant to disencourage you. I spent enough time in professional labs myself to know that you can work for years on end on a scientific topic professionally without making any significant discoveries. However, home science is fun, so, by all means, go ahead with it! Just don't choose your field on the vague possibility of discovering something of greater meaning, just pick something that is actually FUN to you.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I don't know the answer. The areas of science that I could imagine practicing at home are well trodden. That's not going to stop me from making electromechanical things for fun, but I don't expect to change the the world with it.
Sorry, home science is now an arrestable offense.
Seriously, they have some great biological modules to investigate ;)
Sounds like fun but I found:
Conflicts: wife (>= 1.0)
Suggests: Whole-bunch-of-money
Also the installation process took too much time.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Or get a bunch of old microwave ovens and see what you can plasmify at what distance. Electricity is cheap and your utility company will thank you!
Atomic power is a good source for X-rays and all sorts of fun can be had with radiation. Even ultraviolet is enough to increase the mutation rate of bacteria. Mutants! Need I say more? *wink-wink nudge-nudge*
You can also build your own lasers, and tesla coils are always impressive. Don't bother with rockets because the cheapest/best rocket engines are solid explosives that fit nicely in the hands of pros.
When I'm established I'll have a bunch of high-density flywheels built to deliver impulses of power befitting my megalomania. Then, superconductors!
All rites reversed 2010
In the late 1980s I worked for a biomedical company (BMSI) in Silicon Valley that made EEG equipment. They stored the EEG waveforms on a video tape. The image on the video tape had the EEG waveforms from 16 head sensors on the left of the screen and an image of the patient on the right. Patients would try to get 100% disability checks for life by claiming to be epileptic. They would spend a night in a monitored sleep lab, and then do a little horizontal dance while pretending to be asleep. Our equipment matched the brainwave recording to the image of the patient twitching to verify or disprove nocturnal epilepsy.
It doesn't really matter that you can or can't do real high-level research at home on DIY equipment. It only matters that you can build calibrated and reliable medical equipment that delivers accurate results at a small fraction of the cost of the equipment used in American hospitals. As we all know, the US medical health care system is collapsing. The recent legal reforms are basically meaningless and consist mostly of administrative and billing changes. If you can do a $1500 sleep apnea test or overnight EEG recording on DIY equipment for $50, then you are a welcome and honored member of the new health care system that is self-generating now underneath the bloated, corrupt, and crumbling official health care system.
Just be discreet at the present time.
By the way, instead of digitizing and storing the EEG waveforms directly, do a FFT on 1024 samples. The EEG waveform is basically sinusoidal so it can be recreated mathematically. Determine the formula that will regenerate the recorded waveform sample, and only store the offsets and co-efficients of the sine wave formula that will recreate that segment of the waveform accurately. You will get a 1000-to-1 data compression and be able to get all the circuitry into a hand-held small package.
CS is an awesome field for this because you don't need expensive equipment, you can run all your experiments on a single computer. Not only that, it's a young field, so you can get to the cutting edge of the field really easily (compared to something like antiquities studies, where you have to go 8 years post-doc before you're likely to come up with something new, they've been working on it for thousands of years, after all).
For example, for me, for the past few years I've been focusing on artificial intelligence, as in, figuring out the algorithm for how the brain works.
Another thing I've wanted to work on is figuring out if P=NP or not.
Another thing is figuring out the best way to teach programming to beginners (I even have my name on a paper in that field, for whatever it's worth)
Another thing that is relatively easy to do, and likely to get you published (which is kind of fun), is a wordprinting program on Shakespeare's works or some other works of disputed authorship.
On the more programming side, there are a number of things to do, for example, build a program to display all the temperatures taken in the world, along with pictures of the thermometers (apparently some guy went around and took pictures of them all). Show visually how the global temperature is taken.
Some of these are obviously really hard, but sometimes it's better to go for something hard that you really want to do. As the quote says, "shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll have landed among the stars." Even if you don't figure it out, you'll have learned something and pushed your limits.
Qxe4
There's another concern about special equipment as well -- for instance, in the US, some types of glassware needed to explore chemistry, and perhaps to some extent biology, have been classified as "drug paraphernalia" by our insane government. You can get in some rather severe legal binds because you honestly want to "do" science if you just go about it like an innocent person would.
One oft-quoted example is that it is illegal in Texas to own anything with a ground glass joint; the rumor is that you can get a permit to get around this, so that's something to try... of course, if they don't issue the permit, you've lost your anonymity and that's the end of anything that requires that type of glassware.
You can be sure there are rules and regulations about chemicals themselves, too. Heck, around here (Montana), if you buy a bottle of NyQuil at one pharmacy, then go to another and buy one, you're going to be arrested almost immediately. They presume, you see, that you are going to manufacture Meth. Apparently our legislators have never experienced cold symptoms. Or maybe they're just fucking retarded (based on other evidence, I generally go with the latter.) In any case, don't assume that you can buy some innocuous thing and no one will pay any attention. There's a whole world of surveillance and paranoia waiting to see what you might do. To you, it's pursuit of science, and noble. To the prosecutor, it's just a feather in their cap. Don't let those two worlds collide, ever.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.