The dignity of scientific endeavours

Defences were found against U-boats. The great (New Zealand) physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford was held upside-down from a rowing boat above the Firth of Forth to see if he could hear anything, and eventually a hydrophone was invented, able to hear underwater noise.

-          Norman Stone, World War One: A Short History, London, 2007, p.102

Radcliffe sings The Elements

Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe sings the periodic table in an arrangement by Tom Lehrer, on the BBC's Graham Norton Show:



[Via PodBlack Cat]

Dumbing down

The Herald reports that Prof James Flynn of Otago University has found that IQ levels of teenagers in England have declined by two points from 1980 to 2008, but that the IQ of those English teenagers in the top 50 percent of IQ ratings have declined by six points over the same period:

Professor Flynn suggested that the falls could be down to lifestyle changes, including more time spent in front of the television or playing video games. And a growing tendency in schools to "teach to the test" was affecting youngsters' ability to think laterally.

"While we have enriched the cognitive environment of children before their teenage years, the cognitive environment of the teenagers has not been enriched. Other studies have shown how pervasive teenage youth culture is, and what we see is parents' influence on IQ slowly diminishing with age."

Perhaps English teenagers are too busy playing tinny music on their mobiles (without headphones) to read a book. That’s all they seem to do on my bus, anyway.

- Source: NZ Herald, 10 February 2009

Enjoy your first day at work! Here, have some urine

Repairs are underway on the International Space Station, where astronauts are hurrying to patch up the station's expensive water treatment system, which has been playing up recently:

Astronauts hope they have a solution for getting a pivotal piece of equipment working so it can convert urine and sweat into drinkable water and allow the international space station to grow to six crew members.

Flight controllers asked station commander Michael Fincke on Sunday to change how a centrifuge is mounted in the $154 million water recycling system. The centrifuge is on mounts and Mission Control asked Fincke to remove them.

"Fantastic! That is something we can do," Fincke told Mission Control.

The astronauts have been working for the past three days to get the system running so that it can generate samples for testing back on Earth, but the urine processor only operates for two hours at a time before shutting down.

You don't find many workplaces in which the employees are queuing up to get to work so they can drink urine and sweat, do you?  (Although to be fair the water apparently tastes perfectly normal when the system works properly).

- Associated Press, 23 November 2008

Dodgy food miles

Ronald Bailey points out that advocates of 'food miles' awareness are over-simplifying the problem of greenhouse gas emissions in agricultural production:

 

Local food production does not always produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the 2005 DEFRA study found that British tomato growers emit 2.4 metric tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of tomatoes grown compared to 0.6 tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of Spanish tomatoes. The difference is British tomatoes are produced in heated greenhouses. Another study found that cold storage of British apples produced more carbon dioxide than shipping New Zealand apples by sea to London. In addition, U.K. dairy farmers use twice as much energy to produce a metric ton of milk solids than do New Zealand farmers. Other researchers have determined that Kenyan cut rose growers emit 6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per 12,000 roses compared to the 35 tons of carbon dioxide emitted by their Dutch competitors. Kenyan roses grow in sunny fields whereas Dutch roses grow in heated greenhouses.

 

Of course I'm biased: without New Zealand milk and apples the economy would be shot. 

 

- Ronald Bailey, Reason.com, 4 November 2008

[Courtesy of AL Daily]

Eagle-eye Cooper

From a book chapter on mapping the Earth from space:

 

'...the most fruitful of the Mercury missions was the last, the 22-orbit flight of Gordon Cooper in May 1963.  Cooper was equipped with a hand-held 70mm Hasselblad [camera] and with incredibly acute vision, 20/12 instead of the normal 20/20.  Because of the weather conditions below and the configuration of his orbit, nearly all of the best colour pictures Cooper took were of Tibet.  He passed over that country several times, travelling at an altitude of more than 160 kilometres and a speed of 28,000 kilometres an hour.

 

Cooper's report after the mission astonished everyone.  "I could detect individual houses and streets," the astronaut said, "in the low-humidity and cloudless areas such as the Himalaya ... area, the Tibetan plain, and the southwestern desert area of the US.  I saw several individual houses [probably large lamaseries] with smoke coming from the chimneys in the high country around the Himalayas ... I saw what I took to be a vehicle along a road in the Himalaya area and in the west Texas-Arizona area.  I could first see the dust blowing off the road, then could see the road clearly, and when the light was right, an object that was probably a vehicle"

 

Could this really be possible?  Or was Cooper seeing things?  Since the physiological effects of space flight were at that time largely unknown, a number of scientists suspected that Cooper, under the influence of prolonged weightlessness, had suffered hallucinations.  But subsequent investigation revealed that a large white-topped truck had indeed driven along that rather deserted southwestern highway at the exact time and place Cooper had reported.  

 

- John Noble Wilford, 'The Mapmakers', 2002  

The price of credulous ignorance

...is apparently $44.99, which is the sum self-taught weather forecaster Ken Ring is asking for his annual publication of weather predictions for New Zealand in the coming year:

 

His predictions for this month are a lot of rain on October 24 and if you have something planned for the first 11 days of February 2009, cancel them and prepare for flooding.

 

Mr Ring is also a global warming skeptic, arguing that we shouldn't be fretting:

 

"Please tell your children to stop worrying. The planet is fine. Enjoy the planet. That what it is here for".  He said the planet's weather systems could never be affected by carbon dioxide emissions and it would not make any difference if all the CO2 currently stored in wood, coal and fossil fuels was released in the atmosphere all at once.  Even if it did, he said a warmer planet was not something to be afraid of. "We have a moral responsibility to create global warming because we need a warmer planet. We really do. A warmer world is better. Really. Life likes warmth."

 

Maybe I should give this weather forecasting lark a go too.  Here goes.  In New Zealand, in the coming year, it will rain, like, heaps.  Wellington will be windier than is strictly necessary, Auckland will be sticky and humid, Invercargill will be chilly, and as a blanket rule the nightly television news programmes will devote a comically large proportion of their running time to talking about the aforementioned weather, in lieu of actual news to talk about.   

- Source: Taranaki Daily News, 3 October 2008

 

The key to happiness is low expectations

From an article offering possible explanations why Denmark has yet again been ranked as the world's happiest country:

In 2006, researchers from the Institute of Public Health at the University of Southern Denmark examined a range of possible factors, from genes to cycling habits to cuisine. In a charming report, they offered two explanations: the Danes have never got over their rapture at winning the European football championships in 1992 (their happiness rose to new peaks that year, and has stayed on a plateau since), and—the main finding—Danes, unlike the woeful Greeks and Italians, have very low expectations of the immediate future. "Year after year," the researchers write, "they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark."

- Sally Laird, 'Why Hamlet's Heirs Are Happy', Prospect Magazine, September 2008

A spatial analysis of Ludacris' alleged 'hoes'

I'm glad to see that someone has taken the time to analyse the statements of the rapper Ludacris to investigate if his preferences for, ahem, 'hoes' as expressed in his track 'Area Codes' are distributed in a particular fashion. Some of the findings are that 'there is a ‘ho belt‘ phenomenon nearly synonymous with the ‘Bible Belt’, and that 'Ludacris has a disproportionate ho-zone in rural Nebraska. He might favor white women as much as he does black women, or perhaps, girls who farm'. For others of its ilk, see the excellent Strange Maps website.

Ludacris' rap map of US area codes

Can scientists dance?

'No one quite knew what to expect as the lights came up on a pair of astrophysicists dressed as binary galaxies. To the tune of an old tango, Ruth Gruetzbauch stalked and twirled around Jesús Varela before surrendering to his supermassive gravity. The rowdy audience of scientists exploded with applause. The world's first Dance Your Ph.D. Contest, with Christoph Campregher at the controls of the sound system, was off to a good start'

Be sure to watch the videos! My favourite so far is Simone Recchi's interpretation of 'Dynamical and chemical evolution of blue compact dwarf galaxies'.

- John Bohannon, 'Can Scientists Dance?', Science, 15 February 2008

[Courtesy of Lauren]

Orbital waltz

For an entertaining little science R&R, try out the orbital simulator at the University of Colorado site - use the drop-down box at top right to set up individual sun/planet/moon scenarios, and re-jig the vector arrows to redirect the bodies as you see fit.  Master of the planets!

Orbit simulator

[Requires Shockwave plugin]

How scientists acquire wives

'When [Ludwig] Prandtl found himself nearing the age of forty, he decided he should get married but didn't know how to go about finding a wife, and finally hit upon the solution of writing to the wife of his former professor and asking for the hand of one of her daughters. He did not specify which one. The family decided that the older daughter, in her late twenties, would be the best match, and by all accounts it was a successful marriage'

- Stephen Budiansky, 'Air Power', 2004, on German aerodynamics pioneer Ludwig Prandtl

Bush Acknowledges Existence Of Carbon Dioxide

WASHINGTON — In an unexpected reversal that environmentalists and scientists worldwide are calling groundbreaking, President George W. Bush, for the first time in his political career, openly admitted to the existence of carbon dioxide following the release of the new U.N. Global Environment Outlook this October.

"Carbon dioxide, a molecule which contains one atom of carbon bonded with two atoms of oxygen, is a naturally occurring colorless gas exhaled by humans and metabolized, in turn, by plants," Bush told a stunned White House press corps. "As a leading industrialized nation, we can no longer afford to ignore the growing consensus of so many experts whose job it is to study our atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is real."

Many of those whom Bush has long considered to be his most loyal followers, however, have expressed disappointment with the development.

"There is nothing about any 'carbon dioxide' in the Bible," said Rev. Luke Hatfield of Christchurch Ministries in Topeka, KS. "What's next? Claims that so-called 'fossil' fuels come from mythical creatures like dinosaurs? This has been a sad step backward for our nation."

- The Onion, 21 December 2007