Good to the Last Drop

If you're old enough, you may remember the ketchup commercial to the song of "Anticipation" by Carly Simon about waiting for the extra thick ketchup to pour from the bottle. Have ever tried to pour ketchup at a restaurant and had to slap the bottle or insert a knife to start it flowing?

It was rather clever of MIT to use ketchup to demonstrate its new non-stick coating for the insides of bottles. Scroll down the page at MIT’s Freaky Non-Stick Coating Keeps Ketchup Flowing to see a video of ketchup pouring out without leaving even a drop behind. This reminds me of a chemistry lab partner in college, born of two PhD chemists, who could empty a test tube with not a single drop left at the bottom of the tube.

Water, water everywhere

When you look at a photo of Earth what is most noticeable is that our planet is blue. Not red like Mars or cloud covered like Venus. Our home is 71% covered in water and the oceans are rather deep. And so we may think, there's a lot of water, but that's not actually true.

If you collected all the water on the Earth into a sphere (oceans, icecaps, atmosphere, everything) the water sphere would have a diameter of 1,385 kilometers (about 860 miles), and span the distance from Salt Lake City, Utah to Topeka, Kansas. It would have a volume of about 1,386 million cubic kilometers (roughly 332,500,000 cubic miles). And again this sounds big but a picture tells the real story:

Wow that looks small. How can we possibly fill the oceans from such a small drop? The answer is height. The water bubble is 860 miles high in the artist rendering. The deepest part of the ocean is just under 7 miles. The oceans are but a thin sheet of water compared to the water sphere.

But what about the polar bears?

The foundation of Science is good measurements that can be independently verified. Consider the following two charts on historical temperatures:

These two charts could hardly be more different and yet both are produced by Climatologists who stand behind their accuracy. The first shows that we have climbed quite a bit since 1600 but that was an extreme cold dip;  AND our current high is less then 1100 BC before the carbon crisis AND we seem to be on a downward dip since 1998.

The second chart is the famous hockey stick graph cited by Al Gore in his documentary as proof of modern global warming. Wikipedia has a detailed discussion on it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy

Bottom Line

The wiki article cites many recent papers as supporting the hockey stick with results like warmest in the past 400 years or warmest in the past 600 years. But this is only proving that it's warmer than the start of the "Little Ice Age".  Temperature data older than this is still rather fuzzy but getting better with ice cores, etc.

So it may be fair to say the question is still open. What caused the Medieval warming period of 1000 years ago? Why is the modern warming different? or is it?

What Moon is That?

"Don't go around tonight,
Well, it's bound to take your life,
There's a bad moon on the rise."
-Bad Moon Rising by Creedance Clearwater Revival

I've always loved Astronomy so one of my daily stops for great images and a daily dose of science is Astronomy Picture of the Day. Occasionally they'll have a picture of a full moon and describe it as the Hunter's Moon or the Wolf Moon. Huh? Who made up these names?

Throughout history civilizations have marked time according to the moon. The Algonquian confederation of Indians (from New England to the Great Lakes) used these names to track the seasons:

Jan. Wolf Moon

Feb. Snow Moon

Mar. Worm Moon

Apr. Pink Moon

May Flower Moon

June Strawberry Moon

July Buck Moon

Aug. Sturgeon Moon

Sep. Harvest Moon

Oct. Hunter's Moon

Nov. Beaver Moon

Dec. Cold Moon

Early settlers of New England like the idea of giving names to the Full Moon so they adopted the custom with some changes:

Jan:  Old or Ice Moon
Feb:  Wolf, Hunger, Storm, Candles Moon
March: Lenten, Crow, Crust, Sugar, Sap, Chaste, Death Moon
April:  Egg (Easter), Fish, Seed, Waking Moon
May: Milk, Corn Planting, Corn, Hare Moon
June: Flower, Honey, Rose, Hot, Planting Moon
July: Hay, Thunder, Mead Moon
Aug Grain, Red, Green Corn, Lightning, Dog Moon
Sept: Fruit, Corn, Barley Moon
Oct: Harvest, Travel, Dying Grass, Blood Moon
Nov: Hunter's, Frost, Snow Moon
Dec: Oak, Frost, Winter, Yule Moon

It's not so obvious from the list but some moons got changed from one month to the next like Hunter's from Oct to Nov. The lunar orbit of 28 days makes the full moon shift on the calendar and drift relative to the equinox's (start of spring, summer, fall, winter).

Bottom Line

There are 12.37 full moon in a year so one out of every three years will have 13 full moons. The extra moon is called the Blue moon? It was mistakenly thought from an error in the 1946 Sky & Telescope that the second month in the same month was "Blue". But the correct definition is that when a "season" (fall: Oct-Dec, winter:Jan-March, etc) has four moons, the 3rd moon is Blue. Horrible definition but it must have made sense to someone who made it up.

Out of This World

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.
-Mark Russell

I'd like to end this year with an amazing image from the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn. The large moon in front is called Dione. In the background you can see Saturn’s rings on the left, nearly edge-on, and two more moons as well: Epimetheus, only 130 km (70 miles) across, and Pandora, slightly smaller at 104 km across.

Pandora was discovered in 1980 by the Voyager 1 probe, Epimetheus was discovered by astronomers in 1966. Dione was discovered long ago in 1684 by the astronomer Cassini (for whom the space probe is named). At 1122 km in diameter, Dione is the 15th largest moon in the Solar System and is more massive than all known moons smaller than itself combined.

Bottom Line

This so reminds me of covers of Sci-Fi magazines of the 1950's with an imaginary sky of a planet far away but this is real and Cassini is there; seven years imaging Saturn and its moons.

May 2012 bring amazement and wonders and joy to one and all.

Bonus Image

Another excellent photo from Astronomy Picture of the Day. You may recall that a lunar eclipse is caused by the moon passing through the Earth's shadow but this multiple-exposure really makes that shadow visible. (And gives one a feeling for the size of the moon compared to Earth)

Astrology is geocentric?

When the Moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars; then peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars.
-lyrics from "Aquarius" by the 5th dimension

While looking at a list of the top 40 news stories shared in Facebook this year, I noticed that three of the 40 were about the Zodiac signs changing (or not changing). I recall hearing something about the signs being a month off but didn't pay much attention at the time since I do not believe in Astrology. But many Americans do.

The CNN story, "No, your zodiac sign hasn't changed" (#3 on the Facebook list) nicely explains the confusion that occurred. On Jan. 10, 2011 the  Minneapolis Star Tribune published an article in which a Minneapolis astronomer affirmed that due to a wobble in the earth's axis over thousands years, the sun has shifted one whole month in the zodiac. So when the astrology page say it's the "month" of Leo, the Sun is really in Cancer. Some astrology believers refused to accept this,

“I’ve known myself to be a Sagittarius, I believe, since I was born. So to come up now with some new sign? It’s unacceptable!”

The same astronomer also pointed out that there is a 13th constellation, Ophiuchus (Ooh-FEE-yew-kus), the Serpent Bearer, between Scorpio and Sagittarius. The sun in only in Scorpio for 1 week.

Astrologers were flooded with concerned phone calls. Is it true? Is the sun not where it's supposed to be according to the Zodiac calendar? Will everyone have to change?

The answer is ... Yes, the sun is not where you expect it to be AND no, you don't have to change. 

Huh?

The answer lies in ancient history. The original zodiac, invented by the ancient Babylonians (or ancient Hindus according to wikipedia), is sidereal, meaning based on the sun's position with the stars. So if you were born under the sign of Leo, the sun really was in Leo. But the earth has slowly wobbled under the pull of the moon and the sidereal calendar has shifted by one month.

However, the Astrology tables used by Western cultures today were created in the 2nd century AD by astronomer/astrology Ptolemy. In this tropical zodiac system the start of Aries is fixed to one solar equinox (March 21), and Libra at the other equinox in September. He knew about the sidereal drift and chose to ignore it by basing the calendar on the equinox (when the day is exactly 12 hours light & dark) instead of the sun's position in the sky.

So which system is "better"? Most "Western" astrologers are sticking with the tropical system but some are making money publishing books about the sidereal system or the 13th constellation.

CNN quotes astrologer Jeff Jawer, "When we look at the astrology used in the Western world, the seasonally based astrology has not changed, was never oriented to the constellations, and stands as … has been stated for two millenniums ... Astrology is geocentric. It relates life on Earth to the Earth’s environment, and seasons are the most dramatic effect, which is why we use the tropical zodiac."

Bottom Line

That "Astrology is geocentric" sounds like an oxymoron - a self contradicting phrase. But when you think about it, the statement is true. Astrology is about the position of the sun and planets from the earth's viewpoint. Or at least it used to be 2000 years ago. As an amateur star gazer I find some value in the sidereal calendar but fail to see the astrological value of the tropical calendar based on the earth's seasons with Aries associated with the start of Spring and Libra with the start of Fall regardless of where the sun is.

The Alien Eel?

Dallas: [looks at a pen being dissolved by alien's blood] I haven't seen anything like that except, uh, molecular acid.
Brett: It must be using it for blood.
Parker: It's got a wonderful defense mechanism. You don't dare kill it.
-from the movie Alien

If you saw the movie Alien (and then Aliens, 2, 3, etc) you may remember that the monster had a double set of jaws. Inside her mouth of very sharp teeth there was a second mouth with yet more teeth. What an amazing imagination of the monster designer! Or was it imagination?

The moray eel has a second set of jaws in its throat that can launch forwards, like the movie Alien. It bites prey with the first set, and then pulls them in with the second set.

(Image from a clever site called Nature Wants to Eat You which features the jaws of many odd creatures.)

Researchers had to use high speed photography to capture these internal jaws in action. These natural forceps dart forward faster than a blink to seize the flesh of their prey and pull it down the gullet. Just like the movie. And yet the eel jaws are a recent discovery so the monster designer deserves credit for imagining something long before it was discovered in real life.

Bottom Line

Truth is stranger than fiction! (or at least as strange)

Happy Mole Day!

The Speed of Light = 670,616,629 mph: It's not just a good idea, it's the law!

Unless you're a very early riser you have already missed the celebration of Mole Day at 6:02 am on Oct 23. What the heck?

Mole Day is an unofficial chemistry holiday celebrated on a date that relates to Avogadro's number, which is approximately 6.02 x 10²³. Avogadro's number is the number of particles in a mole of a substance.

Mole Day traces its origins to an article that appeared in The Science Teacher magazine in the early 1980s about a high school chemistry teacher's reasons for celebrating the day. The idea for Mole Day took root and the National Mole Day Foundation was formed in 1991. The American Chemical Society plans National Chemistry Week so that Mole Day falls within chemistry week each year.

So what exactly is a mole? (Not the one's digging holes in our yard.)  A mole is a quantity of any substance where the number of particles match the number of atoms in 12 grams of pure carbon-12, approximately 602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. What so special about Avogadro's number of 6.02 x 10²³? It's just the right amount so that the mass of one mole of a substance, expressed in grams, is exactly equal to the substance's mean molecular weight. For example, the mean molecular weight of water is about 18.016, so one mole of water is about 18.016 grams. This property considerably simplifies many chemical and physical computations.

For example: mix 4 moles of Hydrogen gas (H) with 1 mole of  oxygen gas (O2) to get exactly 2 moles of water H2O. This would mean 4 * 1.008 grams of H and 32 grams of O2 (atomic weight of O is 16) to get 36.032 grams of water (2 * 18.016).

Bottom Line

Too much math? I'll digress with a story about the fuzzy moles. We have a cat who loves to sit next to mole and chipmunk tunnels and play wack-a-mole. My wife recently saw him playing with a chipmunk by repeatedly tossing it into the air.

Update  10/26

The General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) in Paris, France, has unanimously agreed on a proposal that would lead to reform of the mole, kilogram, kelvin and ampere, according to the international system of units (SI).

The first sign that the SI was flawed was noticed in 1949 in a check on a lump of metal kept inside a vault at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Paris. By definition, it is the only object in existence with a mass of exactly 1 kilogram – one of the seven SI base units – so metrologists were unsettled to discover that this mass had changed.

For the kilogram, the proposal is to use the Planck constant, which relates the energy of electromagnetic radiation to its frequency. The Planck constant can also be used to define the Avogadro constant, the number of atoms in 12 grams of carbon-12, which in turn can be used to obtain the mole.

The decision will not be binding without another vote in four years' time.

Selection Bias

A story from WWII has been making the rounds on the Internet...

During WWII, statistician Abraham Wald was asked to help the British decide where to add armor to their bombers to make them more robust. He examined the records of planes that had returned to base and noted where the bullet holes were. He recommended adding more armor to the places where there was no damage.

What? Wouldn't you want more armor where the bullets hit? No.

Wald reasoned that gunfire was not fired by snipers and that bullets were equally likely to hit anywhere on a plane. So what could explain why some locations on the planes showed damage and other areas nothing at all? It's an example of selection bias. Since only planes that were able to fly back after being hit were examined, the damaged areas indicated locations that were already strong enough to take a hit and keep flying. The areas that were serious enough to bring down the plane when hit were not recorded because the plane was lost. 

Selection bias is a sneaky error that can creep in to any study. Suppose you test a diet on 1000 people. 700 drop out and never finish. But you get great results with the 300 who stick with it and publish your diet as very successful when followed faithfully. But what about the drop-outs? Why did they drop out? Perhaps the diet made them ill, or failed to work, or made them gain weight. By including the drop-outs in the final results the results change from wildly successful to a 70% chance of failure.

Suppose you call random homes between 9-5 on a weekday for a survey. Is this a random sample? No. You're won't get families with two working parents. Instead the study will bias the unemployed, stay-at-home moms/caretakers, the self-employed, and others who might be at home instead of an office during working hours. To overcome the bias of the home/hours selected, the surveyors need to call back at later hours the homes not reached so that every home is accounted for in the survey with few to no drop-outs.

Or consider that many psychology studies are made with college student subjects who get paid for participating. This is a case of self-selection bias. Those who select themselves are likely to be 18-25, a college student, willing to do odd things for money, etc. Again not a random sample and a difficult problem to fix. Even if you advertise the study in the paper and radio for a broader population, you'll not see successful CEO's & lawyers sign up for minimal wage.  And the study is still haunted by self-selection, the extremely shy or introveted are not likely to apply.

Bottom Line

Always be extra cautious when a study or survey says it used a "random sample". How was the randomness generated? Was there hidden bias in the selection method?

You're Burning the Chow

Little John: You're burning the chow!
Robin Hood: Sorry, Johnny. I guess I was thinking about Maid Marian again
- Disney's movie, Robin Hood

When one thinks of school the obvious subjects are Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. But the two high school classes that I have most benefited from are Typing and Cooking which I use everyday. Cooking class was fun - our teacher acquired bags and bags of apples that fell on a nearby golf course so for weeks we explored many possible ways to cook or bake with apples (yum!)

It is often said that cooking is an art while baking is a science. Cooking follows formulas and requires technique but the flavoring should be done by taste because the seasonings used may be stale and require extra amounts. Baking requires exact measurements and precise cooking time and temperature. Baking uses ingredients that are rather basic but must be combined in the right way - butter, eggs, salt, flour, water, milk, sugar, etc.

For example, if you're making sugary candle like caramel, you'll want to buy a candy thermometer. Sugar is very particular and changes its color and consistency with different temperatures that is well documented in cookbooks.  Because of this I thought the chemistry of sugar was well understood. Imagine my surprise to find out that University of Illinois scientists learn startling new truth about sugar.

"In the literature, the melting point for sucrose varies widely, but scientists have always blamed these differences on impurities and instrumentation differences."

When the Illinois scientists could not get sugar to melt at a fixed temperature, they decided to investigate and learned that the melting point of sugar was heating-rate dependent.

"We saw different results depending on how quickly we heated the sucrose. That led us to believe that molecules were beginning to break down as part of a kinetic process."

When a compound has a fixed melting point, the compound changes phase-state (i.e. from solid to liquid) and that change is reversible because the chemical composition of the compound is unchanged. But some substances (organic ones like milk and now sugar) "melt" by decomposing, by breaking up in to different chemicals in a process that is NOT reversible by merely cooling the temperature. At high heat sugar will decompose rapidly and appear to "melt" at a lower temperature. This is exactly the same as heating milk - if you heat it too quickly it "scalds" and burns. You must heat milk (and sugar) slowly to avoid decomposition.

Bottom Line

What does this mean for cooks? The temperature setting on your stove matters. You can not just set the burner to High to cook something faster. Butter will burn, milk scald, and sugars break down when the heating is too fast.

Experienced cooks also learn that more heat does NOT boiling pasta faster-  the water will stay at boiling temperature (100 C or 212 F) and go no higher. You can use High to get the water to boiling quickly, but once there, you're wasting energy if you don't turn it back to Low. All high heat does during boiling is turn more water to steam - it won't make the water any hotter.

Nine women can not produce a baby in one month
- The Mythical Man-Month

"all things come to those who wait"

Total Perspective - You Are Here

"In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."
-Douglas Adams

In Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe, the Total Perspective Vortex is allegedly the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected. The Vortex gives a momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here." The machine was originally invented by one Trin Tragula in order to annoy his wife. Because she was forever nagging him for having no sense of proportion, he decided to invent something that would show her what having a sense of proportion really meant. Unfortunately the shock of being placed in the Vortex destroyed her brain, but Trin Tragula's grief was tempered by the knowledge that he had been right and she had been wrong.

Bottom Line

Now I don't want to destroy your brain but consider this photo. EVERY dot is a entire galaxy.

Frame Dragging

“In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you.”

- Frank Wilczek

Pardon me as I dive into some deep physics today. I'm blogging this in the hope that I too will understand it.

You may be aware that Einstein's General Relativity predicts that a massive object like the earth or Sun will bend the space around it causing light rays to be slightly deflected in their path. This was first demonstrated in 1919 with a photo of stars observed near the Sun during a total eclipse. Today "gravitational lensing" is used to see very faint galaxies near the origin of the Universe.

What you might not know is that General Relativity becomes even stranger when the massive object is rotating. The spinning mass creates a drag on space that gives it a very small twist (about 1 part in 1 trillion). Scientists are very good at measuring small amounts like this and recently verified gravitational Frame Dragging with a specially built satellite circling the earth called Gravity Probe B.

Recently a physicist from the University of Warwick applied Frame Dragging in an unusual way to explain an old problem in physics, the“Charge Parity violation” (also called “CP violation”).  CP-symmetry states that the laws of physics should be the same if a particle were interchanged with its antiparticle (C symmetry), and left and right were swapped (P symmetry). The discovery of CP violation in 1964 in the decays of neutral kaons resulted in the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980 for its discoverers James Cronin and Val Fitch.

CP-violation answers one of the Big Questions in physics. Why is there something rather than nothing? Or put another way - where is all the antimatter? The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter (thus keeping a balance and allowing something to come from nothing). But over time the matter and antimatter would destroy each other. That is not what happened; our universe is mostly matter.

CP-violation "explains" that the universe has a bias for matter. Riddle solved. But unfortunely no one could explain why CP-violation exists - until now.

We live in a galaxy that rotates. "The spin of our galaxy has a twisting effect on our local space that is a million times stronger than that caused by the spin of the Earth," according to Dr Mark Hadley, of the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick. Our galaxy creates a Frame Drag that gives a preferential spin to local space and so favors matter spinning one way instead of antimatter spinning "against the grain." This is a testable theory which could change physics if true.

Another recent study looked at thousands of galaxies and found a 7% difference in the number of galaxies that spin clockwise vs those that spin counter-clockwise. The was too large for chance according to the authors of the study. They said this proved that the universe itself is spinning and influencing everything inside it. If true then there may be a Frame Drag from the spinning universe twisting all of space and time.

Bottom Line

There are still deep mysteries left to solve about the nature of reality itself. 

I wonder if galaxies that spin opposite of ours would favor antimatter over matter?

A Future for Fossil Fuels?

“Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!”
- Golda Meir

Salon.com reports that "Everything you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong". Yes we may be at or even past Peak Oil, but oil is just one of many fossil fuels.

Hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" is much disputed today as it is rumored to make groundwater flammable in some areas. And yet it has been highly successful with previously-unrecoverable “shale gas”.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, these advances mean there is at least six times as much recoverable natural gas today as there was a decade ago.

Also,

• "Fracking also permits the extraction of previously-unrecoverable 'tight oil,' thereby postponing the day when the world runs out of petroleum."
• "There is enough coal to produce energy for centuries."
• Researchers are "studying ways to obtain energy from gas hydrates, which mix methane with ice in high-density formations under the seafloor. The potential energy in gas hydrates may equal that of all other fossils, including other forms of natural gas, combined."

And with oil at $100 a barrel, tar sands and shale oil have become economically viable and competitive.

Bottom Line

"Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its final decades?"

Technology

Energy and persistence conquer all things.
-Benjamin Franklin

When you think "big" technology perhaps your mind goes to the military with tanks, battleships, the Pentagon building (world's largest office building in floor space). But this is peanuts compared to civil engineering. Imagine the size of hydroelectric dams, skyscrapers, thousands of miles of roads through all types of terrain, etc. And then think of the equipment used to make these. Giant dump trucks with tires taller than a person. Cranes as large as a city block.

The Shell gas company is creating a new entry in the competition for "big". The Prelude Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) facility will be nearly one-third of a mile long and tip the scales at up to 600,000 tons; that's six times heavier than America's largest aircraft carrier. FLNG will be a floating drilling rig and refrigerator used to extract, cool and offload liquefied natural gas into tanker ships. Starting in 2017 it will stay permanently moored at the Prelude gas field northwest of Australia for the next 25-plus years.

Bottom Line

Ann Pickard, chair of Shell in Australia, says that the Prelude FLNG facility will be a "game changer for the energy industry."

The Future of Advertising

"At bottom, robotics is about us. It is the discipline of emulating our lives, of wondering how we work."

-ROD GRUPEN, Discover Magazine, June 2008

I like to keep on eye on technology and how it changes our life. Recently Toyota annouced a new spokeswoman, Hatsune Miku, a young Japanese singer who has been extremely popular in her homeland. Nothing unusual about that. Until you learn that Hatsune is computer-generated based upon a poplar anime character.

There have been computer generated actors in the past. Long ago there was Max Headroom. And more recently Jar Jar Binks. Usually these are rendered over a human actor who supplies the motions. I suspect Hatsune is totally drawn from comptures but she does use samplings of real human voices.

Bottom Line

Personally I'm not suprised by this. I'm actually more suprised that we have not seen more of this. Most animated films are now computer drawn with robotic models, not hand drawn. As the cost comes down I expect computer actors will replace live one with greater frequency.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel?

Brunel

“The hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn”

- David Russell

I just finished a book called The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack which included several famous persons from an alternate-history of Victorian England. Many I recognized like Richard Francis Burton, Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale. But I had never head of the title character, Spring Heeled Jack, an urban-legend (?) from the Victorian era of a ne'er-do-well gentleman who could leap amazingly high.

Another character I had never heard of is Isambard Kingdom Brunel. (And with a name like that you'd think I'd remember it.) So I looked him up on Wikipedia and learned that Brunel placed second in a BBC 2002 public poll to determine the "100 Greatest Britons". Say what? Second only to Winston Churchill? Of course this was a "public" poll which becomes more obvious in that Princess Diane placed third, above Darwin (4th), and Shakespeare (5th).

Thames tunnel

So who is Brunel and what makes him so famous (at least to your average Briton)? Isambard Kingdom Brunel (9 April 1806 – 15 September 1859) was a genius of civil engineering who designed and built dockyards, railways, transatlantic steamships, and numerous important bridges and tunnels. His designs revolutionised public transport and modern engineering with innovative solutions to long-standing engineering problems. He assisted in the building of the first tunnel under a navigable river, the first propeller-driven ocean-going iron ship (SS Great Britain, which in 1843 was also the largest ship ever built), and first major British railway (The Great Western). Many of Brunel's bridges are still in use, having stood the test of time.


Clifton Bridge

Brunel is perhaps best remembered for the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol. Spanning over 700 ft (210 m), and nominally 200 ft (61 m) above the River Avon, it had the longest span of any bridge in the world at the time of construction.

Bottom Line

I'm pleased that an engineer is recognized in his own country. There are many famous scientists but who remembers the engineers? In America the only engineer that I recall is, John Augustus Roebling, who built the Brooklyn Bridge and many others. Perhaps only bridge builders are remembered? And some architects like Frank Lloyd Wright or I.M. Pei. But what of the others? Who built the Empire State Building? Who built the Trans-Continental Railroad? I don't recall being taught that.

Information is Beautiful

Everything is beautiful
In its' own way
- lyrics, Ray Stevens

If you're a regular reader of my blog, you'll know I love graphs and visual representation of data. Today I "discovered" InformationIsBeautiful.net which collects excellent examples of visual displays.

For example:

Which health supplements are backed by scientific evidence?
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-supplements/

A color wheel of emotions
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shellberry/5468624509/in/pool-16135094@N00

Plants that grow well together
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nhawtin/5549980086/

This one I've posted before, The True Size of Africa
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/the-true-size-of-africa/
but this version also shows the US compared to Europe and US compared to Antarctica.

Bottom Line

Numbers by themselves don't say much. A picture makes a huge difference.

Smart-phone Apps

"O brave new world,
That has such people in't!"
Shakespeare's, The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1

I love the information explosion that modern technology makes possible. Twenty years ago I bought reference works, maps, etc to gather facts. Now it's all at my fingertips on the Internet.

On the flip side, I hate spending lots of money on technology. So I wait for prices to come down which can mean waiting several years. For example, my phone is NOT a smart phone. They look fun and perhaps will be within my budget soon. My cellphone contract expires this month so who knows what I'll get as the upgrade.

If you have a smart-phone you may appreciate this article by the Christian Science Monitor,
http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/2011/0201/The-10-weirdest-uses-for-a-smartphone/

"The current generation of iPhones and Android phones have processors that are about 500 times faster than the computer onboard the Apollo Lunar Module (with the added benefit of not weighing 70 pounds). All this computing power can be used to tackle ... humanity's most vexing problems:"

10. Solving a Rubik’s Cube

9. Creating fine art (the May 2009 cover of the New Yorker was made on a smart phone)

8. Avoiding police speed traps

7. Performing live music on the subway

6. Piloting an augmented-reality drone quadricopter

5. Monitoring earthquakes

"Researchers at Berkeley have developed an app that uses the accelerometer in your phone to measure the intensity of an earthquake."

4. Solving Sudoku puzzles

3. Annoying teenagers
 An iPhone app named "Annoy-a-Teen" emits frequencies above 16 kHz that only children can hear.

2. Piloting a satellite
British researchers have developed an 8-pound satellite with a smartphone as its brain: The STRaND-1 (Surrey Training, Research and Nanosatellite Demonstrator).

1. Blowing out a candle
 The app "Blower" uses the smart phone speaker to create a very weak fan effect.

Bottom Line

What new uses have you discovered for a smart phone?

Check out http://gizmodo.com/#!5781077/the-apps-you-need-to-prepare-yourself-for-a-disaster for low cost apps that give emergency & First Aid advice.

Radiation Exposure

“The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.”

- Albert Einstein

With nuclear meltdowns in Japan, there's a lot of talk about Radiation Exposure. And it's very confusing. While researching I came across measurements in millisieverts, mircosieverts, Grays, and millirems so just dealing with units was tricky. And then there's the question, what level of radiation is "normal" or "safe"?

Let's start with units. Radiation dosages are measured in sieverts. A Sievert represents an effective radiation dose so one Sievert "produces the same biological effect" regardless of the type or size of the radiation particle. Since Sieverts are so large you'll normally see mSv (millisieverts).
1000 mSv = 1 Sievert.
You'll also see microsieverts for hourly measurements (for example Tokyo was experiencing 1.0 to  0.6 microsieverts per hour last week).
1,000,000 micorsievert = 1000 mSv = 1 Sievert

And then there are Rems.  1 Sievert is 100 Rems.

Less confused yet? Let's look at radiation exposure. According to Forbes.com

Radiation is emitted from all sorts of sources. Cosmic rays, radon, x-rays, brazil nuts, granite. Just living in a high-elevation city like Denver gets you a higher dose because there’s less atmosphere to block radiation. The granite in Grand Central Station and the uranium-laced stone used to build the U.S. Capitol Building supposedly give off enough radiation that if they were nuclear power plants they wouldn’t pass licensing.

Here are some radiation comparisons using millisieverts, mSv:

.001 = extra hourly exposure in Tokyo last week (equal to radiation from one cigarette)
.01 = Dental x-ray
.036 = eating one banana
.04 = one chest x-ray
.4 = one Mammogram
2 = natural radiation exposure every year (.24 from comic rays)
9 = extra yearly exposure for airline crew (increased cosmic rays)
13 = yearly dose from smoking 1.5 packs a day
16 = one CT scan for heart, abdomen or pelvis
100 = yearly dose at which the increase in cancer risk is clearly evident
100 = recommended limit over 5 years for Nuclear Plant workers
400 = hourly level at Fukushima plant that forced workers to withdraw
1,000 = not fatal in a single dosage but will cause radiation sickness
6,000 = level for Chernobyl workers who died within a month
10,000 = fatal within weeks

Bottom Line

It's hard to grasp the range of values in the chart above (a factor of 10,000,000 from lowest to highest). One site compared exposure to cigarettes which are slightly radioactive (.001 mSv). Others use Banana Equivalent Dosage (BED) where one banana is (.036 mSv).  So the increased risk in Tokyo is equal to eating an extra banana every day and a half.

This helps put things into perspective.

Additional Resource

http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/risk.htm (Idaho State University - amazing amount of information about relative risks)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/mar/15/radiation-exposure-levels-guide

Apophis

Apophis

Astronauts talking from the movie Deep Impact...
Mark: How do we set the nukes inside the comet and get out before they blow?
Orin Monash: We don't.
Andrea: Look on the bright side. We'll all have high schools named after us.

One of the open questions in science is, "Where are all the aliens?"  Given the immense number of stars and all the planets we are busily detecting, it just does not make sense that we are alone. There are four popular theories that I know of:

1. Stay hidden or else the militaristic aliens will get you
2. Intelligent machines eventually take over each planet
3. Periodic supernova sterilize regions of galaxies
4. Civilization is wiped out by a meteor impact

We know that Earth has been hit by meteors in the past - some of them were pretty big as in Arizona and the Yucatan. NASA takes seriously the chance that it will happen again by tracking the path of all known asteroids.

Presently all eyes are on asteroid, Apophis. In 2004, NASA scientists announced that Apophis, an asteroid larger than two football fields, could possibly smash into Earth in 2029. After taking more measurements, NASA decided that Apophis will pass by the Earth on April 13, 2029 at a distance of five earth widths. Very close! The moon is about 30 earth widths away.

This year Russian scientists have predicted that the 2029 fly-by will alter the orbit of Apophis in such a way that it will collide with Earth in 2036. NASA is not convinced. They put the odds of this happening at 1 in 250,000. About the same odds as a person being hit by lightening in a given year. (Though I have seen various odds for lightening 1/250K, 1/500K, 1/750K per year per person.)

Bottom Line

You can bet that when Apophis makes its next fly-by in late 2012 it will be extensively observed with ground-based telescopes and radars. If improved calculations put it on a destructive path, NASA will have 24 years to find a way to alter the asteroid’s orbit. Unlike the movies, blowing it up with nuclear bombs is not a good solution - this just changes the impact from one big rock to many smaller rocks. The best hope is to nudge it or push it into a safe orbit.