Does your radio battery last longer if you rest it between uses? This is the question that Steve Reyer asked in the context of his Web page about the first transistor radio (the Regency TR-1).

The image above (from Steve’s site dedicated to the TR-1, and copyright to Steve) illustrates the measuring rig that he devised to explore the question. He has…

• Examined an assertion made by a commercial concern
• Searched the literature
• Devised a simulation of average radio use
• Ran the experiment
• Interpreted the data
• Evaluated the results

My own experience of using a battery powered radio for about half an hour a day tends to support the assertion anecdotally. I’m still on the same set of 6 C cells after two and a half years.

It has to be said that the TR-1 circuit (as shown in the US Patent, from Steve Reyer’s site) has a class A output stage: major inefficiency as the standing current in the circuit had to be set to the maximum output expected into the loudspeaker -probably 50mW or similar

A group of them were building Excel spreadsheets into which they’d dump all the information they’d gathered about how each boss behaved: What potions affected it, what attacks it would use, with what damage, and when. Then they’d develop a mathematical model to explain how the boss worked—and to predict how to beat it.

From How Videogames Blind Us With Science, an article in Wired by Clive Thompson. This provides me with an example of the scientific method in an everyday context. The conversations between the players were available for later reading…

...the conversations often had the precise flow of a scientific salon, or even a journal series: Someone would pose a question—like what sort of potions a high-class priest ought to carry around, or how to defeat a particular monster—and another would post a reply, offering data and facts gathered from their own observations. Others would jump into the fray, disputing the theory, refining it, offering other facts. Eventually, once everyone was convinced the theory was supported by the data, the discussion would peter out.

So what I need now are examples of that discourse in laboratories that ‘do’ actual science.