topix of general interest

Pay more for Opening nights

2009-08-09T07:17:00.003-05:00

Theater ticket pricing is a good instance where pricing varies with demand.

Fridays and Saturdays (opening nights for most movies) the tickets are charged the max (here locally it is $10 per tix), on rest of the days from Mon till Friday 5pm it is lower ($5 per tix).

There are enough customers willing to fill theaters paying for opening nights as the movies do their best to line up demand for Fridays and Saturdays through intense advertising campaigns. After that it is a diffusion process that proceed more or less by word of mouth.

Pricing might be refined to get better revenues if it were not for the simplicity of a two tier system.

Lead Pencils : a big waste!

2009-08-04T14:29:00.004-05:00

One repeats the following process with lead pencils.

A. Sharpen to a cone pointed tip.

B. Flatten the head through use.

So if you divide the "cylindrical" lead structure in the pencil along the length into mini cylinders. Then you basically remove 67% the volume by sharpening the mini cylinder and using the conic remainder.

So you lose at least 67% of the lead in the pencil by sharpening. You can save unnecessary waste of wood and lead by not using lead pencils.

TIP: A cylinder has 3 times the volume of a cone of the same base and height.

Why have Fingerprints?

2009-07-24T13:27:00.002-05:00

Some ideas:

Friction and increased surface area.
DNA coded unique for each human specimen
Increased sentitivity due to blood flow.

In fact this post on NPR suggests fingerprints may not aid in friction and in fact reduce contact area. The study mentioned in the post still leaves most possibilities open to scientific debate.

Total Solar Eclipse

2009-07-20T13:05:00.000-05:00

Iran is a threat to Israel?

2008-01-10T18:33:00.000-06:00

Israel's foreign minister Tzipi Livni wrote an Op-Ed in Haretz a while ago saying "Iran's nuclear arms do not pose an existential threat to Israel". So what supports the judgment of those who think so?

To give some context to who Tzipi Livni is: from a Jan 22, 2006 Wa-Po interview

Tzipi Livni, is a rising star in Israel's centrist Kadima party. Although she grew up in a right-wing Likud family, Livni, 47, strongly supported Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's decision to withdraw Israeli troops and settlements from the Gaza Strip as well as his formation of a new party -- which is favored to win the most votes in elections set for March.

Kadima Party did win in March 2006 ushering Kadima Party led by Ehud Olmert into Power.

Back to the Iranian threat. The chronology of the collective efforts of a few from the U.S administration to the domestically raise the threat of Iran provides the context for the latest reports from Pentagon of Iranian ships threatening U.S ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

from April of 2006, Seymour Hersh reported in his rather long New-Yorker piece "Iran Plans":

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack.

The war plans, the article states, included the use of tactical nuclear weapons and that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the such a use of nuclear weapons.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/27/061127fa_fact?printable=true

Al Franken bags key endorsement

2007-11-19T22:13:00.000-06:00

Minnesota Public Radio reports:

The political arm of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 5 voted Saturday to back Franken, a comedian turned candidate.
The union represents 43,000 public and nonprofit employees in the state. Its leaders said in a news release that Franken's membership in four entertainment unions and his proven ability to raise money for the campaign put him in a stronger position than Ciresi.

lawsome

2007-11-17T13:28:00.000-06:00

From the Women's Press

After a Philadelphia prostitute was gang-raped at gunpoint by four men, she sought justice in court. The 20-year-old single mother, who worked for a service advertised on craigslist, agreed to have sex with two men for money. Instead, one of the men pulled a gun, robbed the woman, and forced her to have sex with himself and three friends at gunpoint, stating that if she did not cooperate he would kill her. In court, Municipal Judge Teresa Carr Deni dismissed the rape and sexual assault charges. stating "she consented and didn't get paid. I thought it was a robbery."

Can you believe this?

Its kinda sad

2007-11-14T23:50:00.000-06:00

Its kinda sad to hear this. Also weird. From an interview by Dick Cheney in 1994.

body parts of grammar

2007-11-13T09:51:00.000-06:00

going head to head

going toe to toe

walking shoulder to shoulder

my lips to your ears

Iraq : Daily Life

2007-11-12T16:30:00.000-06:00

A slice of life from bloggers in Iraq

Aunt Najma from Mosul writes:

I'm sick of talking about the bad situation. I just hate the mornings, there's always shooting and many explosions. .... I always have doubts that I'll be able to make it to college - the roads are rarely open.... My cousin drove me home the other day - building after building, destroyed, burnt. Black signs announcing deaths. .... I asked my cousin about a destroyed building I hadn't seen before. He said it was months ago. I was shocked. I didn't ask about the ones that followed.
We're really strangers in our country... oh well, excuse me, I don't think "our" should be used anymore. I'm not sure whose country it is, but it's not mine for sure.

Reality Realised

2007-11-12T16:06:00.000-06:00

Iran plans to crack down on vice: which includes decadent films, drugs, and alcohol. The campaign has the blessing from the Supreme Leader: Ayatollah Khomenei.

as any good first step involves, they are going for the biggest of threats to society: women's clothing.

should people start paying attention to Ayaan Hirsi Ali?

shoot!

2007-11-11T13:02:00.000-06:00

dumblaws.com says:

In Lousiana, it is illegal to rob a bank and then shoot at the bank teller with a water pistol.

full text of the Louisiana Law

hat tip: heard on the freethought radio.

building a bureaucracy

2007-06-01T07:35:00.000-05:00

just pick a favorite bureaucratic website and see the document requirements page. for instance the consulate of any country and their page listing documents for any particular service. My wager is over 100 years requirements would have been added or replaced, but only rarely will they be dropped.

The list will grow and continue to grow. at our expense.

dot or no dot

2007-05-25T11:39:00.000-05:00

Because Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, adding or removing dots from a Gmail address won’t change the actual destination address. Messages sent to yourusername@gmail.com and y.o.u.r.u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@gmail.com are all delivered to your Inbox, and only yours.
Gmail allows only one registration for any given username. Once you sign up for a particular username, any dot variations are made permanently unavailable for new accounts.

-from Am I receiving someone else's email?

making sense of the absurd

2007-05-23T14:37:00.000-05:00

If you have time on your hands, then the following piece is recommended for reading; Making Sense of the Absurd. It sort of goes through a list of things that starts to blur the line between absurd, right and wrong. It isn't making the case that religion isn't absurd, but that we probably take too many scientific statement for granted. for instance:

7. Parallel lines never meet.
8. The sum of the interior angles of a triangle is 180°.
Well, these aren't quite accurate. There's an implicit constraint on these statements that they are true only in euclidean (planar) geometry. In non-euclidean geometry, these statements can take wild turns. For example, on the surface of a sphere like our own planet, we can start at the north pole, walk south 1 mile, east 1 mile and north 1 mile and return exactly to our starting point. Our turns were approximately right angles and our return also consists of a right angle, meaning that the triangle we walked had interior angles summing up to almost 270° (to the nit-picky, this isn't strictly true--in order to get exactly 270°, we'd need to walk all the way down to the equator, but I'm too lazy to walk that far). And while we're talking about the globe, we can observe the long parallel longitudinal lines to see that they can indeed meet twice: once at each pole. In other more intriguing spaces, such as lobechevskian space whose shape is often compared to that of a saddle, we can find parallel lines that intersect exactly once. And if the real-world example of the globe isn't enough to discredit the universality of propositions 7 & 8, we could look at the math supporting Einstein's theory of special relativity which relies on non-euclidean math to derive its results.

women for religion?

2007-05-10T06:24:00.000-05:00

I have often heard that our morals come from religion. take one example where it does not: Women and Men are created equals. There is no religious orthodoxy in history that has not attempted in the name of religion and/or religious scripture to oppress women. examples abound: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and they all regulated women's bodies, thoughts, behavior, and actions.

when women have secured their equality by struggling against religious orthodoxies, why do they still flock to religion?

oh on the corridor

2007-04-30T08:54:00.000-05:00

overheard on the corridor: "It wasn't my wife this time. It was another random variable."

On faith : Sir John Houghton

2007-04-27T06:25:00.000-05:00

Sir John Houghton: One of the most important statements as a scientist: "I don't know". One of the most important statements you should be prepared to make as a believer. "I don't know". Both evolutionists and religious fanatics can learn a bit from this man.

democracy

2007-04-23T10:09:00.000-05:00

Cheese eating, yuppy French had a election, where all the jobless people wandered into voting booths, to avoid the sun. They had 85% turnout. U.S, the paragon of democracy, so much that there is enough left to be exported to Iraq. The most touted turnout for elections in U.S. history had a record 55% turnout.

French election is also very significant in the sense of Sarkozy offer a new direction that explores a freer economy that tilts away from labor and provides greater freedom to employers. Ms. Royal offers a more socialist program that has energy and vision. It remains to be seen which way the election will go as the first round votes are close.

Simwinga's green model

2007-04-23T06:38:00.000-05:00

Hammerskjoeld Simwinga wins $125,000 for the award, sometimes called the Nobel prize for the environment.

He helped set up bee-keeping and fish-farming projects for people in the North Luangwa valley, where elephant numbers had shown a dramatic fall. He persuades local people they can earn money by keeping elephants alive.

Mirroring the experience of Muhammad Yunus, who said over 95% of loans go to womenfolk:

Over 70% of loans are made to women and Mr Simwinga says they are the backbone of the programme. "We deliberately pushed our resources to the womenfolk in the community because we knew that working with the women was the strongest part of persuasion," he told Reuters news agency.

As an inspiring story of resolve and progress, Mr. Simwinga describes:

He inherited the North Luangwa Wildlife Conservation and Community Development Programme (NLWCCDP), when its US founders Delia and Mark Owens were forced to leave in 1996.

Despite fears it would collapse, Mr Simwinga, known as "Hammer" and named after UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold who died in a 1961 air crash in Zambia, instead managed to expand the project.

"If I had left as well then the work we had worked for so many years to build would have just collapsed," he said.

news link: BBC World Service

Poem event at Boston University

2007-04-22T08:05:00.000-05:00

profiling shooter?

2007-04-20T15:03:00.000-05:00

livescience.com you can't profile school shooters

One of the problems, they say, is : There are far too many people who are depressed and lonely are not mass-murderers. And how ever finely you make up a profile, the number of false-positives* will be more than true mass-murderers that fit that profile. This reminds of the Bayesian estimation "paradox" that Arunn on Nanoscience posted a while back.

Example: False positive in a medical test (example taken from [1])
A “false positive” in medical terminology is a situation when ... a person not actually having a particular disease or conditions may be returned a positive result in a test. ... Suppose that a test for a disease generates the following results.

(1) If a tested patient has the disease, the test returns a positive result 98% of the time, or with probability 0.99
(2) If a tested patient does not have the disease, the test returns a negative result 96% of the time, or with probability 0.96.

Suppose also that only 0.1% of the population has that disease, so that a randomly selected patient has a 0.001 prior probability of having the disease. The question now is what is the probability that a positive test results in a false positive?

from back of the envelope calculations:

If there are 1000 people, 1 person has the disease. of the 999 people only 96% were detected. so 39.96 were detected positive, but don’t have the disease. So only 1 in 40 people detected to have the disease really do have the disease.

E=mc2 (Documentary)

2007-04-19T07:06:00.000-05:00

I was checking out the documentary about E=mc² . The documentary attempts to bring to the fore the contribution of one of the greatest minds of the century, Albert Einstein, his equation relating mass, energy, and the speed of light. If we cut through the melodramatic presentation with the Victorian charms and the bourgeois society and its workings, rest of the documentary takes us through the most important developments that made Einstein's discovery possible. As Newton said 'standing on the shoulders of Giants', the documentary attempts to show the giants on whom Einstein stood to see farther than light, figuratively speaking.

The first important milestone happened to be the idea that various forms of energy though having an existence independent of their own, are inter-related and can be changed from one form to another. Heat in the steam, and electricity in the wire, and magnetism of the magnets were all examples of energy in the pristine form, all having a common undercurrent: "energy". Michael Faraday showed that electrical energy can be used to create magnetism in objects and vice versa. The theory of electro-magneitc waves and electromagnetic field came to be proposed for the first time.

The debate that then ensued was about the conservation of matter. That it can neither be created nor be destroyed. It was shown by Antoine Lavoisier, assisted by his wife Marie Anne, that water can be converted to steam, then passed through iron and then condensed at the other end. The liquid at the other end is water, but is lesser in mass than initial. The hydrogen gas collected along with the water in the container and the rust that had formed by reaction between iron and oxygen accounted for the missing mass.

The next crucial part was that energy was proportional to the square of the velocity. It was shown by a Dutch scientist that when a lead ball is dropped on to a box of clay, it makes 4 times deeper impression when dropped from twice the height. Thus providing evidence to the squared relation, though it went against the proposals of Newton at that time. It took a century to gain general acceptance among the scientific community. Major headway in these episodes was played by Gottfried Leibniz and Emilie du Chatelet. Emilie du Chatelet lead a prolific role in science apart from excelling in arts, and raising a family of 3 children. She translated the Newton's Principia in French.

We are then taken back to Faraday who had then proposed that light itself as a form of energy and hence an electromagnetic wave. It caused much furor as people were still grappling with the idea of the mysterious interplay between Electricity and Magnetism that Faraday himself had demonstrated earlier. Maxwell came along to show that mathematics did permit such a possibility. But then Maxwell also suggested that, to be consistent with his theory, even if one were to travel at the speed of light (690 million mile per hour), one would observe light traveling at the 690 million mile per hour away from them. If you travel next to a car at the same speed as that car, that car would then appear stationary to you. The proposal was counter-intuitive.

Einstein for his part, had to reconcile this fact. He realized that this is possible if the hands of the clock were to move slowly at higher speeds. Thus time was no more independent of the space, measured in watches. Space and time were now related. This dealt an incredible blow to 3 centuries of resolute faith in the scientific belief that time was an absolute.

Einstein began to wonder, what would happens if train were to be accelerated to the speed of light, and more fuel were added to it to accelerate it further? Will it travel at a speed greater than light? That's not possible. So, he concluded that the added energy must be converted to mass of the train to conserve energy.

Thus it allowed him to derive the relation between energy, mass, and velocity of light. E=mc^2

The documentary then goes on the show the meteoric rise of Einstein among the ranks and his proposal for special and general relativity of which a nice introduction can be found on shallowthgts.

So definitely get hold of the documentary and see it. You will learn about women who played very important role in science and have remained relatively unknown. You also get to see the coming together of important scientific developments, each one a truly great milestone.

IMDB: tt0476209

(an updated repost from the past)

equality indeed (joke alarm)

2007-04-18T06:50:00.000-05:00

Kurt quipped on the CT forum: "We have been a horrible animal. after the Spanish inquisitions, the two world wars, Hiroshima, Roman games. Its clear the earth is trying to get rid of us." Joyce Carol chimed in the middle with the question "But which sex is doing this stuff?" without a second thought Kurt Vonnegut made the snarky comment "Women are no good at doing science, you know? We discovered that at Harvard." (see the video)

I thought this was a nice short exchange for more reasons than one. Kurt may have meant that - In Cat's cradle Kurt talks about the detachment of scientists from the impact their discoveries have on the world, however disastrous they may be. Especially that this is independent of gender. But if you twist his statement it could also mean "If Women claim they can do the most wonderful discoveries just as well as men have in the past, they should accept with calm deference that they are capable of committing the very same horrors as well."

History has shown only few contributions of significance from women. Naturally so. So why would anyone search history to point to the potential of women or the capacity of women to be creative as evidence? Rather, why not believe in the inherent equality of men and women as the basic hypothesis of natural law? Desmund Tutu described of man (and women) "he(she) is capable of most evil acts as he(she) is of the most elevated."

when local search isn't local

2007-04-18T06:33:00.000-05:00

I did a linkpost on the interviews about local search and business models before. As a follow up I found this

Cathy: (h/t Paul)

Hate to tell you this, but right on the first page of the Yahoo Local Minneapolis results sits Minneapolis Florist-Same Day, (612) 339-4023, 381 5th St Se, Minneapolis, MN 55414. There’s no flower shop at that location. The calls are just forwarded to an ‘order gatherer’ in Issaquah, WA called Cascade Florist. ...

The second Minneapolis results page shows Florists of Minneapolis, (612) 827-6356, Minneapolis, MN 55408. Nope. Not a real florist either.

the listings on your local search aren't truly local. then what is?

local ad search

2007-04-15T12:18:00.000-05:00

FindBuffalo:

Q: With a $1,000 or less annual budget, what 3 things should a small business execute online?
Paul: Getting their correct business information to the online portals, get social (online), and proactively encourage customers to provide online ratings and reviews … and up the budget (ok, that’s four).

Matt: Less than $100/month? That’s ultra-small budget. Okay… 1) A blog. 2) A listing in all the free local search sites. 3) A PPC campaign on low-cost, long tail phrases (including geo-targeting).

Local Ad sites: truelocal iBeginsource yelp

Nina Hale shares her views on strategic internet marketing:

What do you think of Google getting into Pay Per Action (PPA) advertising? Do you see yourself recommending this for some of your clients?

This is a fascinating idea, and I’m studying it seriously for some clients. This is another great form of disintermediation that Google is getting into, but also supports their goal of building their user base by providing successful web experiences, because they will rank good converters higher.

Aggregators like Lending Tree, Search for Colleges, etc., have made enormous amounts of money in this space and I love the idea of putting some of that power back into client’s hands. Of course, the aggregators will also love it! I think it will be most successful overall in fragmented industries.

Gandhi: love and truth as supreme moral law

2007-04-14T15:15:00.000-05:00

Gandhi says how he perceives God. In all of the 6 minutes he appeals not to religion or spirituality but to humanity. I suspect even a majority of secular humanists will find themselves in agreement.

this day. 36 years ago. man enters space

2007-04-13T06:54:00.000-05:00

News from the NASA pages.

On April 12, 1961, the era of human spaceflight began when the Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth in his Vostock I spacecraft. The flight lasted 108 minutes.

Twenty years later, on the morning of April 12, 1981, two astronauts sat strapped into their seats on the flight deck of Columbia, a radically new spacecraft known as the space shuttle. more here ...

Click on the image to see the full "Hunstsville Times" story.

future of tv?

2007-04-12T20:50:00.000-05:00

On India Uncut Amith wrote about this video by Cheddarvision.tv who have posted on youtube, a video that shows cheddar cheese as it ages. Striking is the similarity to the concept described by Lewis Black on what makes a successful television. you definitely got to watch Lewis Black.

Paul Wolfowitz. saga continues...

2007-04-12T07:21:00.000-05:00

The man who led the charge on the Iraq war as part of the PNAC. When he took charge of the World Bank, he made the fundamental argument that "countries whose governments are highly corrupt should not receive aid". It has its merits, as Wolfowitz recognizes that "major hurdles to transfer from aid to development is corruption". Wolfowitz began to decide by himself which governments are corrupt and which aren't. He stood against aid to Congo because he found out that their representatives to New York had charged hundreds of thousands of dollars at their bank expense account. Similarly he decided India doesn't meet his standards and so obstructed the flow of aid to India. People at world bank argue that it is not their place to take up anti-corruption efforts and focus only on development. This is an interesting debate and one that must be followed closely. But this got muddled in the hypocrisy of the man leading the charge.

Just as he joined the World Bank as its head, conflict of interest arose, as the woman he had been dating also worked at the bank. This quickly lead to corruption and controversy. Bush style.

can never divide?

2007-04-11T21:37:00.000-05:00

1. Given that x is a positive integer prove that f(x) = x² + x + 1 will never divide by 5.

2. Consider the expression x^x + 1, where x be a positive integer.

It can be verified that x = 7 is the least value for which x^x + 1 divides by 2³.

Given that n is a positive integer, find the least value of x for which x^x + 1 is divisible by 2ⁿ.

India unspoken

2007-04-10T06:26:00.000-05:00

Joseph Curiale's journey into the life of Anjamma and many others like her who would have committed suicide due to heavy debts.

On March 2nd of this year, I saw something very disturbing on CNN… thousands of farmers in South India have committed suicide because of 7 years of drought, and because of the mounting debt ... forced to switch to genetically modified seeds and expensive pesticides made things much worse ... more than 150,000 farmers have died countrywide as a result,

In a little more than a month I raised around $9,000! So I strapped that money to my waist and headed for India with total faith. When I stood before Anjamma, in the exact spot I had seen her on CNN a few weeks earlier … My biggest challenge at that moment was not to ... break down crying…

Joseph Curiale now has a foundation that has helped many widows out of poverty and will keep them out of it at least for the next 5 to 6 years.

A story from Jadugoda, related to development technology [from the AID India website]. I remember reading an essay by Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, early after Indian independence, on how India cannot afford to produce talent without a moral, ethical dimension. It seems this has been done, without our realizing so.

The soil of Jadugoda in the Jharkhand region has provided uranium to run the Atomic Energy program in the country and develop Nuclear capabilities, but the Santhal aadivasis of this region are dying a slow death by uranium radiation ... It is a death the reality of which is being denied by all Government agencies. In the region of the uranium mines, in villages such as Chatikocha, Dumardeeh, Telaitaand, Echada, Bhatin, and Lipighututu, 45 of every hundred women are suffering from spontaneous abortions. The children are dying. Most of the children are becoming physically and mentally handicapped. People are not living beyond 65 years of age. No one wants to marry the girls from this area. The girls who did get married are being abandoned for their inability to bear children. Under the influence of radioactivity, physical malformations, cancer and pulmonary diseases are assuming demonic dimensions.

Drive fewer miles

2007-04-09T06:18:00.000-05:00

Vehicles make up almost one-third of smog-forming emissions nationally, and because we are driving more and more miles every year (up 127% since 1970), vehicles continue to be a significant contributor to air pollution. Whenever possible, take public transportation, car pool, and combine activities into one trip (such as shopping trips). Even your Weather channel says so!

heartburn? use organic vinegar

2007-04-07T10:40:00.000-05:00

Apple Cider Vinegar ::

Many consider apple cider vinegar as a natural way to cure heartburn. This should be done with caution as this is actually adding more acid to the stomach. This is believed to be helpful by the theory that heartburn is caused by lack of digestive enzymes in the stomach, which causes the food to sit and ferment and therefore expel gas and acid into the esophagus. The natural enzymes in the vinegar help to replenish the stomach enzymes to ease digestion. Those who choose this method should only use organic apple cider vinegar with natural unfiltered enzymes. All other vinegars filter out the enzymes.

open office file sizes v. windows

2007-04-05T06:48:00.000-05:00

word files v. open document format (.doc v. .odf)
74K v. 11K
93K v. 13K

excel files v. open document spreadsheet (.xls v. .ods)
127K v. 5K
126K v. 6K

exact same content. very different sizes.

great movie, nice song!

2007-04-04T19:29:00.000-05:00

Jules et Jim (1962) by François Truffaut. A story well ahead of its times, probably even ahead of today's accepted norms.

books on my list : lucifer effect and human behavior

2007-04-04T10:10:00.000-05:00

Philip Zimbardo talks about his new book 'Lucifer Effect: How good people can do bad things". Zimbardo says "That human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside." This is a book I am looking forward to read along with "Discipline & Punish: The birth of the prison" by Michel Foucault. Foucault analyses the birth of modern society and the role of prisons as a symbol of power and means for delivering justice.

Breast Cancer detection

2007-04-04T09:17:00.000-05:00

American Cancer Society recommends MRI scan over Mammogram for patients who may have high risk of breast cancer. From the Star Tribune pages:

On the mammogram, there was no sign that Carla Meyers had breast cancer. But last November, she had an exam with an MRI, a more powerful imaging device that shows far more details. And that's how her tumor was spotted. [news link]

also from the same article ...

"We've had several patients call in and cancel their mammograms, saying 'I want to have a breast MRI instead,' " said Dr. Audrey Caine, medical imaging director of the HealthEast Breast Cancer Center at St. John's Hospital in Maplewood. ... MRIs cost $1,500 to $2,000, 10 times as much as a mammograms, and have a high rate of false alarms. MRIs use computerized magnets and radio waves, rather than radiation, to produce images of the body's organs.

Trumpeter Swans dip into lake in Bonobo's neighborhood

2007-04-04T09:01:00.000-05:00

Trumpeter Swans will dip into a lake near 8 bonobos. The 8 Bonobos will get to name these Swans that are dipping in their neighborhood for the first time.

Trumpeter swans are America's largest waterfowl, weighing up to 35 pounds with an 8-foot wingspan. Once common across much of the continent, they were hunted for their feathers to near extinction by the late 1800s. [picture courtesy: Surf Birds]

Bonobos have sophisticated language skills, a trait they'll demonstrate when asked to name the swans.

Swartz said they'll either use a board that has symbols the apes associate with objects or choose names from a list researchers provide. The apes already use the board to communicate with humans to identify things like location, food and color. [picture courtesy: William Calvin]

[News Story link]

converting types may end blood shortage

2007-04-03T10:06:00.001-05:00

BBC reported today that blood types can be converted

"The method, which makes use of newly discovered enzymes, may help relieve shortages of blood for transfusions. The work, led by the University of Copenhagen, is reported in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

This should have potential to make a large scale impact on everyday needs. The mechanism by which this is done is:

The blood cells of people with group A and B blood contain one of two different sugar molecules - known as antigens - which can trigger an immune system response. People with AB blood have both types of molecule, while those with group O blood have neither.

And they found two bacteria (out of 2500 candidates) that could do this:

The new technique works by using bacterial enzymes [from two bacteria - Elizabethkingia meningosepticum and Bacterioides fragilis] to cut sugar molecules from the surface of red blood cells.

The research still needs to be tested before there is talk of any implementation on the field.

top 20 reasons why you visit this page

2007-04-02T14:18:00.000-05:00

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Michael Ware bio cnn
photo,bio, Michael Ware CNN
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Did you come this for one of these reasons? Google keyword search statistics says so.

Sunita Williams will run Boston marathon, in space!

2007-04-02T06:49:00.000-05:00

Williams is registered for next month's Boston Marathon, even though she'll be stuck on the international space station when the rest of the field lines up for the 111th edition of the race. So the U.S. Navy commander will run the equivalent distance on a treadmill -- 210 miles above Earth, and tethered to her track by bungee cords so she doesn't float away.

-- Read the rest of the article

Sydney black outs: its lights shown on global climate change

2007-03-31T13:10:00.000-05:00

Major Landmarks including the Sydney Opera House and Sydney Harbor House shut down its lights for 1 hour in the evening in an attempt to raise awareness about Climate Change.

Said GW "Sydney did what?"

The News story

Michael Ware

2007-03-30T18:05:00.000-05:00

Journalism, especially covering a war, is always scary. Here is a interview when Andersen Cooper sat down with Michael Ware. Michael Ware has spent 4 years covering the war in Iraq.

Michael Ware, man from Brisbane, spent early part of his Journalism career for TIME and has now joined CNN as the Baghdad correspondent. He now has the reputation for having traveled to insurgent's territories to report their perspective of the war.

Interview parts I II III IV V VI (these are on U-toob. they maybe pulled off eventually.)

An excerpt from one of his pieces:

MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A sniper is watching these American soldiers. You're looking at the unobstructed view from the sniper team's vehicle.

And they are waiting for their moment, as the soldiers mingle with Iraqi civilians.

"People are around them," warns the sniper's spotter, who seems to be operating the video camera.

"Want me to find another place?"

"No, no," comes the reply. "Give me a moment."

And, then, the soldier falls forward. You hear the sniper's vehicle start, and they slip away.

American casualties this month are tracking at near record numbers. This video is a glimpse into an enduring feature of this war.

A career bio quote from Michael Ware on a radio show:

"I'm actually a lawyer or an attorney by training. But after graduating law school, I only stayed in practice for one year after working in our court of appeal, then fell into journalism, working for Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation newspapers in Australia, where I eventually covered the conflict in East Timor. After that, I took a job with Time Magazine in Australia, and then after September 11, I was sent to Afghanistan, where I stayed for over a year. And then as the war in Iraq approached, I entered Iraq through Iran, into the Kurdish North, where I hooked up with U.S. Special Forces, and the Peshmerga militia, and covered the Northern front line. Ever since then, I have essentially been living in Baghdad."

Electric car timeline

2007-03-30T07:57:00.000-05:00

Time line for 'Electric Car design' dates back to 1834 when Thomas Davenport invented a car run on non-rechargeable batteries. Thomas Davenport was the first to hold patent on Electric car design. His auto shop where he did this work is still preserved in Forestdale, Vermont.

for the full time line see the Who killed the Electric Car movie page from Sony Classics.

Science with a bang

2007-03-25T07:29:00.000-05:00

Boomer has a new approach to teaching, "anything that makes a bang or a noise is good".

One day the cops showed up as a result of a half-baked Boomer stunt. He was testing whether a 1.5-million-volt Tesla coil could shoot a spark across the room. In the process, he cut off all police radio communications for miles.

Boomer’s reaction: “Neat!”

Would you have liked him as your science teacher?

While Shane Totten won the Golden Apple award for teaching.

Students line up in pairs and hold balloons attached to sticks over a candle. The balloons filled with the students’ breath, regular carbon dioxide, make small pops. The balloons filled with hydrogen the students got by combining hydrochloric acid and zinc in a flask pops and creates a small fire ball, eliciting screams from some of the kids in the class.
It’s a lesson on mini-Hindenbergs, complete with Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” in the background. --[Excerpt from Naples News]

for your viewing pleasure: What would happen when, at low gravity, balloons filled with water are pinched? NASA has posted some demo videos on this.

NASA playing with marbles?

2007-03-21T09:06:00.000-05:00

NASA scientist Bill Cooke is shooting marbles and he's playing "keepsies." But, this knowledge will help keep astronauts safe when America returns to the Moon in the next decade. some very interesting stuff on simulating meteors and their impact using fancy marble guns on carefully arranged soil terrains. More here in the NASA pages

peek into the abyss?

2007-03-20T17:33:00.000-05:00

Will you look up at the clouds or down into the abyss?

Grand Canyon glass skywalk is open for public. BBC Sketch of the design:

convolutions and sum of sums

2007-03-20T09:44:00.000-05:00

Let S_k be the sequence of simple sums, that is S₁=1, S₂ =1+2, S_k =1+2+...+k then

S₁ + S₂ + ... + S_k = k.1+(k-1).2+(k-2).3+ ... + 2.(k-1)+1.k = the convolution of the sequence {1, ...,k}.

In your spare time you can show that sum of sums equals (n)(n+1)(n+2)/(1.2.3) and sum of sum of sums equals n(n+1)(n+2)(n+3)/(1.2.3.4) and so on.

1.2.3 = 6.
1.2.3.4 = 24.

Enticing review

2007-03-17T08:39:00.000-05:00

The bloodred walls are lined with Ralph Steadman's dark and drippy drawings and Gary Larson's devilish Sunday comics. Vultures perched in tree branches inhabit the restaurant's back wall, watching over any diner unlucky enough to be facing north. But forget impending death by taking comfort in the menu: lemon ricotta hotcakes, buffalo sausage, and homemade jam and peanut butter served with every slice of toast. The unlikely jewel in this crown is the wild rice porridge. Wild. Rice. Porridge. It's a sumptuous mixture of wild rice, blueberries, cranberries, hazelnuts, sweet cream, and pure maple syrup. It's also one of the best reasons to get out of bed since Christmas. - From review of Hell's Kitchen

This is not an endorsement, but I agree with the above review. Only because the review is written so well! Well, Hell's Kitchen is pretty good for a breakfast place.

Fibonacci Sums

2007-03-15T16:03:00.000-05:00

The Fibonacci series is: F₁=1, F₂=2, for n=2,3,... F_n+1= F_n + F_n-1. The (n+1)-st number is the sum of n-th and (n-1)-th number in the sequence.

Fibonacci numbers have the property that: the sum of the first n numbers of a sequence is contained in the sequence. Do you know of others?

F₁+F₂+F₃+...+F_n = F_n+2-1

Actually the sequence G₁=1, G₂=2,for n=2,3,... G_n+1= G_n + ... + G₂ + G₁ trivially staifies that property. So, Fibonacci sequence is not unique in the above sense. Can you think of a sequence {H_k} such that

H₁+H₂+H₃+...+H_n = H_n+3 - c? for some constant c.

On a tangent: Kolmogorov information complexity speaks of representations that can compress information effectively. Not only does the following set of characters "F₁=1, F₂=2 F_n+1= F_n + F_n-1" contain the entire Fibonacci sequence, but also the sum of its first n elements.

Search Engine Spoilers

2007-03-15T10:26:00.000-05:00

I wanted to search for consumer experiences of a decent dealership in my area. Since, google general search includes all kinds of corporate sites, I looked up something like "subaru decent dealer in my neighborhood nice people" in google blog search. The top 10 results were hijacked by very random corporate spam links from dealerships that want to sell cars, but are not even in my neighborhood! We are told blogs are a democratic medium, and these search results seem to show that blog network is not well connected enough for good regular blogs to trump over cheap sleazy spam.

Maybe google can tweak their engine for blog search to weed out these spammers more effectively.

Crazy!

A Girl Like Me

2007-03-12T12:01:00.000-05:00

A Girl like me, a short film by Kiri Davis is a project for an after-school program that won the audience award at the Silverdocs festival and the Diversity Award from Media that Matters festival.

Kiri Davis was on NPR to talk about her project. The title for Kiri Davis' project is drawn up on a video by Bill Cosby called 'A Boy like Me' made in 1972.

New green is coal?

2007-03-12T10:30:00.000-05:00

Winona Daily News reports

The latest trend in the green world of ethanol is a surprising one: coal.

Minnesota’s first coal-fired ethanol plant soon will begin operation in Heron Lake, and it won’t be the last. The high price of natural gas is enticing new plant owners to embrace coal power. But while it may make economic sense, the choice of this fossil fuel to make a renewable one has some people shaking their heads. [emphasis added]

look around in your neighborhood to see if this is the trend we want to see? The report offers this comment on the Californian law:

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his state’s Legislature have embraced a plan to rate all motor fuels by greenhouse gas emissions over their entire life cycles, from production to transportation to ignition.

Measured that way, ethanol made from plant residue would earn an excellent rating. Ethanol from corn would do moderately well. And corn ethanol made in a coal-fired plant? That would rate poorly — even lower than ordinary gasoline, according to Schwarzenegger’s office.

Having Kids

2007-03-11T19:32:00.000-05:00

I recently came across a thoughtful blog by my friend at Thought Raker on "When Should you have a child?" She lays out some very thoughtful reasons suggesting "it is better to have a kid later in your life." After a comment on that blog from someone who is juggling the idea of balancing independence and career with having kids, she has now expanded on the older blog.

On the experience of having kids, there is a very engaging conversation on pregnancy from Whirlpool Family Talk podcast (and this you got to listen to!). Here is the audio:

U.S Welfare Subsidies and global effects

2007-03-10T10:05:00.000-06:00

PBS NOW has a program on the effects U.S subsidies have on global cotton farmers. A few excerpts ...

There are roughly 30,000 cotton-growers in America who receive billions of our U.S. tax dollars every year through government subsidies. ... Ray Offenheiser, president of the anti-poverty organization Oxfam America told NOW, "There is a direct association between these subsidies and the hunger in Africa and the plight of African farmers."

The website also has podcast and a video, with responses from Oxfam and the U.S National Cotton Council.

The community in Vidharba region of Maharashtra is sustained by cotton farming. In recent years it has been plagued by farmer suicides. A number of articles on this topic can be found here and here. On Jan 3, 2006 P.A. Sainath writes in his column "The swelling register of death"

Farm suicides in Vidarbha since November 1 have crossed the 100 mark. There have been 200 since June 2. But the last 100 have occurred in less than two months. A little more than 65 farmers have taken their own lives in December alone.

"Note that the rise in suicides has followed the fall in cotton price," points out Vijay Jawandia, Vidarbha's leading farm activist. "This is no surprise. The government's so-called `relief package' of Rs.1,045 crore for the farmer has not had the slightest impact on the trend."

Question is: Is the world listening?

noodling

2007-03-10T08:37:00.000-06:00

considering many options, but decided on none. [source: Anonymous]

Water and Oil do mix

2007-03-08T20:56:00.000-06:00

To provide for water in plastic bottles to Americans for one year requires 47 million tonnes of oil, which is equivalent to taking 100,000 cars off the road. - Container Recycling Institute.

U.S shortchanged by Ford and GM?

2007-03-07T06:39:00.000-06:00

An article today in Guardian Unlimited about Green F1 racing car from Honda had this small bit

in the US, where the transportation department estimates that the average fuel economy of cars and light trucks sold in 2001 was just 24.5mpg, the same as in 1999 and slightly below the 24.7mpg in 2000. The peak was 26.2mpg in 1987. The auto website 40mpg.org says Americans have little choice. It says there are now only two vehicle models on sale that have a petrol mileage of at least 40mpg. In 2005, there were five.
By comparison, Europe has 113 models. Adding insult to injury, nearly two-thirds of the 113 highly fuel-efficient car models that are unavailable to American consumers are either made by US companies, such as Ford or GM, or by foreign manufacturers with substantial US operations, such as Volkswagen, Nissan and Toyota.

[emphasis mine]

SUVs and Monster trucks

2007-03-05T10:52:00.000-06:00

Reasons for not buying a SUV:

The environmental damage is very significant.
Even if it buys safety for the owner, in any accident it will inflict greater damage to the family in the other car.
The mileage is very low. The CAFE standards has a very interesting history. In 1979 the standards for passenger cars was at 18mpg and and for light trucks at 17mpg. S.U.Vs introduced in the 90's got classified as light trucks and since then the standard has nudged its way up to 21 mpg today. The passenger car standards have increased up to 27 mpg. The low price of oil in U.S helped a surge in market share for S.U.Vs.

Today GM still advertises "at least 30mpg cars" on their website, when most competitors have gone way past that mark and the future looks to 100mpg cars.

U.S. Predicting Steady Increase for Emissions

2007-03-05T08:21:00.000-06:00

NY Times article says the U.S predictions for emissions over the next decade will increase at the same rate as last decade. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has come out with a report and have upped the certainty of human involvement to 90%. There are now people trying to confuse the concern of global cooling in the 70s to global warming concern now. To set the record straight: the excessive particulate matter in the atmosphere helps scatter the heat before it reaches the earth and thus causes cooling. This has been addressed using particulate matter regulations since the 70s. However volcanoes continue to play a role in global cooling. This is not to be confused with the excessive amounts of greenhouse gases being pumped in to the atmosphere which causes global warming (unfortunate use of language).

from the NASA website (link to .rtf file):

How do volcanoes affect the atmosphere? As volcanoes erupt, they blast huge clouds into the atmosphere. These clouds are made up of particles and gases, including sulfur dioxide. Millions of tons of sulfur dioxide gas can reach the stratosphere from a major volcano. There, the sulfur dioxide converts to tiny persistent sulfuric acid (sulfate) particles, referred to as aerosols.
How do volcanic emission influence climatic changes? Global cooling often has been linked with major volcanic eruptions. Sulfate particles reflect energy coming from the sun, preventing the sun's rays from heating Earth thus lowering temperatures in the troposphere, and changing atmospheric circulation patterns.

pain in the neck?

2007-02-28T09:20:00.000-06:00

Rdoctor has a very lengthy blog on just that. Neck pain and whiplash.

Batmobile for sale

2007-02-27T09:23:00.000-06:00

Sowmya commented here that $98000 for a Tesla is a lot, and today the Batmobile goes on auction and is expected to sell for £75,000 ($187000). "The Batmobile was devised when the cartoon superhero suffered a broken leg in the 1950s, and his trusty sidekick Robin built the vehicle to allow him to continue protecting the residents of Gotham City" reports the news.com.au website news-link here

Since Oscars went green, will the future Batmobiles be Teslas? This will be a good item to blog about as this is the first time an entire event of this magnitude has gone green!

Education

2007-02-25T18:31:00.000-06:00

If you think cost of Education is expensive, imagine the costs of ignorance
- Derek Bok

100 mpg car

2007-02-24T12:41:00.000-06:00

Steve Lapp, a professor from Ontario, says the moment has nearly arrived. "I've actually gotten over 100 mpg on some trips in my 2001 Toyota Prius," he says. The secret? He mounted solar panels on the car's roof to keep the batteries charged when the sun is shining. If Lapp, a backyard big thinker, can get triple-digit mileage occasionally, why can't the world's car manufacturers hit the mark on every drive?

Automotive X prize will soon announce a challenge to design 100mpg car that can be produced in large scale.

Some interesting bites from a very long but very interesting article in Popular Mechanics:

Body Use of carbon fiber instead of aluminum or steel, because of its superior strength to weight ratio can bring down the weight of the vehicle significantly.
Aerodynamics "We're noticing in the wind tunnel that what you do on the bottom of the car can be more profound than the roof shape. The rear of the car needs to be either long and attenuated or abruptly cut off. A car's wake can have a detrimental effect on the mileage by creating a partial vacuum behind the car, tugging it backward." says Stewart Reed, who chairs the Transportation Design Department at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif.
Tires Tire manufacturers already use silica in the tread compound to help lower rolling resistance. David Van Emburg, Michelin North America's product marketing director, says we could soon see exotic tires with 20 percent lower rolling resistance than today's models.

Ongoing efforts All electric 100 mpg car from Tesla Motors (Jon Mittelhauser has a blog on why you should get yourself a Tesla). The Aptera Concept Car from Steve Fambro of Accelerated Composites have a 330 mpg, 2 passenger car that can cost under $20K (link : pdf file). Popular Mechanics has a design to achieve 100 mpg without too much extra sweat using existing technology.

Excuses, worse than school children

2007-02-24T00:23:00.001-06:00

The Committee was unanimous in its view to submit its report by 8 June 2006 when the 15 months time originally allotted was to expire. However, it came across some insurmountable impediments. In June 2005 the Committee had written to the Ministry of Programme Implementation and Statistics seeking relevant data of NSSO based on 61st Round (corresponding to the 2004-05). It was expected that this data would be available by November 2005. Though the Ministry of Statistics tried its best to supply us the information early but, may be because of the extensive nature of the work, it could not be supplied to us even by May 2006. -- Sachar Committee Report

Science Experiments in under 10 minutes

2007-02-21T15:52:00.000-06:00

An excerpt from Dave Barry's column "Science: It's just not fair"

you might consider duplicating the one that my wife swears she did in the 7th grade late on the night before the science fair. It was called ''Waves,'' and it consisted entirely of a baking pan filled with water, and a pencil. ''You swished the pencil around in the water, and it made waves,'' my wife explained.
I asked her what scientific principle this project demonstrated, and, after thinking about it for a moment, she answered: ``The movement of the water.''

Impossible though it may sound, I did a project in 6th grade that was even lamer than that. It was called ''Phases of the Moon,'' and it consisted of a small rubber ball that I had darkened half of by scribbling on it with a pen. You were supposed to rotate the ball, thus demonstrating scientifically that the phases of the moon were caused by, I don't know, ink.
The total elapsed time involved in conceiving of and constructing this project was maybe 10 minutes, of which at least nine were devoted to scribbling.

40 trillion gallons over your head

2007-02-20T07:48:00.000-06:00

If you live in the United States, there are 40 trillion gallons of water above your head on an average day. Each day, about four trillion gallons of this water fall to Earth as precipitation, such as rain, snow, or hail. Some of the water that falls to Earth soaks into the ground and provides runoff to rivers, lakes, and oceans. The remainder—more than 2.5 trillion gallons—returns to the atmosphere through evaporation, and the process begins again. read more ...

an earlier attempt to explain rain from clouds - 'Being on Cloud Nine'.

The Colorful Demise of a Sun-like Star

2007-02-18T19:39:00.000-06:00

link post. click the title.

Ten Myths about cars

2007-02-18T19:04:00.000-06:00

Popular Mechanics have a list of 10 myths your dad was wrong about.

Here is one:

DAD SAID: "Don't replace wiper blades, just clean them with solvent."
BUT: Mineral spirits and other petroleum-based solvents kill rubber. Occasionally wiping the blades with alcohol removes dirt, but the rubber blades still deteriorate with age and sunlight, and must be replaced regularly.

Jay Leno has a few comments on some of those "myths".

Cars too want to loose Weight!

2007-02-16T17:18:00.000-06:00

Keywords: Traction, Emission, Balance, Weight Transfer

How does your car handle on slippery Ice? One of the factors is:[1] Front wheel drives handle better than rear wheel drives on slippery roads as the weight of the engine is on the drive wheels, which helps to improve traction. How does weight affect traction? Though we won't see the exact science of it, we can get a peek at the factors that play a role in the story behind traction.

Medium sized cars weigh approx 600 lbs less than 25 years ago. Mid-sized Cars now weigh around the ballpark of 3000 lb.

A debate carried in an article, carries the following points:

"vehicle quality is a better predictor of safety than weight" says an University of Michigan physicist Marc Ross. "It turns out that relatively inexpensive light cars do tend to be unsafe but more expensive light cars are much safer and are as safe as heavier cars and SUV (sports utility vehicle) models," said Ross. "Analyzing statistical things is sort of funny," Ross said. "If you choose categories so you get cheap cars in your category, then the death rates go up. What we found is that the price of a car is a much better predictor of risk in traffic accidents than the weight of the car."

"No matter what you do, you cannot repeal the laws of physics," spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Russ Rader said. "A larger, heavier vehicle is always going to be safer than a smaller, lighter vehicle. If you're looking at small cars vs. larger cars, small cars have twice as many occupant deaths as large cars." He noted, however, SUVs have a higher rollover risk and are disproportionately involved in single vehicle crashes.

Reducing the weight also brings with it other benefits: “A 40% decrease in car weight can result in a tremendous reduction in CO2 emissions,” says Ignaas Verpoest of Belgium’s Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

How does weight interplay with traction? While driving, if you change direction towards your left, you get pushed to the right. This push transfers the weight on the left tires to the right. Your car has 60% of its weight (1800 lb) on the front tires and 40% on the back (1200 lb). So the car is unevenly loaded. When you make such a turn this push has a chance of pushing you over. The best protection against this comes by adding weight to the car: the greater the weight, the harder it is to transfer any weight from one side to the other. Some recommendations that come your way suggest placing weight on the rear ends to balance weight between the tires. Using a front-drive car, so the higher load on the front tires can be effectively countered.

There are other suggestions: Increasing the distance between the right and left tires (a person is more stable standing in "at ease" posture than in the "attention" posture). Also, reducing the Center of Gravity of the vehicle, or the "center of balance" of the vehicle (a Sumo wrestler or a Football player buckles down before taking a hit from the opponent). For something to think about until the next blog:

***For slippery ice, there is a lot more at play, on how the steering is used along with brakes, keeping off the gas pedals, etc. But these are things you do independent of the design of the car.

related: European cars are doing much better than U.S cars in mileage standards.

100$ Laptops on flickr

2006-05-23T16:16:00.000-05:00

I had blogged about the MIT initiative a few months back. The pictures of the laptop can now be seen on flickr (thanks to Pete!).

The nature of the laptop to be expected (from the Project Website)

The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.

Quails, the American Passion

2006-05-06T13:06:00.000-05:00

I have nothing particular in mind writing this except for a strange coincidence of listening to Tom Wolfe reading about his book 'A Man in Full' and the Dick Cheney's quail shooting incident.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/08/ra/wolfe.ram The reading session was in the November of 1998.

In the audio file, if you listen to the first 5 minutes, Tom remarks...

He starts talking about private jets and then starts to say: "There seems to be the new Expensive American Passion. In Georgia 10 thousand, 20 thousand sometimes 50 thousand acres of land dedicated to shooting quails. ... You can have only two shooters at a time, as the birds don't fly over, but burst out of the tall grass in every possible direction. If you had 3 or more, you could have hunters shooting each other than the quails..."

Have fun!

ABC : Peek at India

2006-04-08T09:48:00.000-05:00

Videos from an ABC correspondent's recent trip to India: video 1 video 2

Video 1 is particularly interesting.

Richard Engel: War time coverage

2006-04-05T18:12:00.000-05:00

Engel has an eye-opening perspective on wartime reporting. It is not that there are not many stories to be told, but how it can be told without blowing oneself up. He did emphasise that mostly Iraqi's believe the security situation is worse that what is depicted on TV.

the link also carries a video link to Engel's piece. Very interesting to watch and learn. This might even be a problem in (war)science. Can it enable the journalists in any way?

Narmada Dam(ned)

2006-04-04T17:23:00.000-05:00

Medha with two other volunteers is on the seventh day of her indefinite fast.

Ms Patkar continues her struggle against the plans of raising the height of the Sardar Sarovar Dam and refused to break her fast even as Union Water Resources Minister Saifuddin Soz met her on the seventh day of the agitation today.

says the Chandigarh Tribune.

and this: PM Manmohan Singh is learnt to be keen that the issue be resolved says a TOI article.yes, learnt to be keen! now, you can go sleep in peace.

The raising of the height goes against the supreme court ruling claims NB!B!A (Narmada Bachao! Bachao! Andolan). Perhaps, soon somebody will be needed to save the Andolan itself. The issue of rehabilation has not been settled. The struggle has been on for 6 years! Sometimes you wonder how much struggle will break the indifference of these government that come one after another.

This is representative dmeocracy?

Rural Computing

2006-03-31T10:06:00.000-06:00

The fantastic information revolution is reaching rural india. Intel is taking the lead.

I was wondering, all these years, if any of the giant sloths like Infosys, etc will look "Inside" instead of "outside". Now you really have "Intel inside". They may start to teach the giant sloths a new way of making business work and still serve communities.

The computers may not be cheap, but they are considering a pay-per-use model.

A Little plant that won't die

2006-03-29T10:41:00.000-06:00

A coffee plant that does not die on NPR news.

don't banana plantains do the same? don't they self-propogate?

Evolution and Religion

2006-03-28T21:30:00.000-06:00

Greg Graffin's Ph.D. work suggests that

only 10% of the people think religion is incompatible with evolutionary biology.
Relgion is an adaptation. A part of Evolution. That religion was manufactured by humankind.
Naturalist worldview proposed by evolutionary biology is harmonious with religion on one condition: If the tenets of theology such as 'existence of soul' or 'consciousness' and such are rejected as unnecessary.

A longer write up is available here.

Graffin is a evolutionary Zoologist who received his PhD from Cornell in 1991.

Global warming?

2006-03-27T10:13:00.000-06:00

Here is a small ad. nicely done.

transcript:

some say the irreversible consequences are 30 years away.

30 years?

that won't affect me.

Warming up of Lake Tanganyika

2006-03-25T21:44:00.000-06:00

An article on effects of a warming planet on its various communities has recently appeared on Salon.com. This is part of a series of reports on the effect of global warming on the various communities, jointly produced by NPR's 'Living on Earth', U.C. Berekely graduate School of Journalism and Salon.com

KALALANGABO, Tanzania: Tanganyika is the longest freshwater lake in the world, the second deepest and the second most biologically diverse. It is also getting warmer.

Along the shores of Lake Tanganyika, there are two kinds of fishermen: the ones who fish for an abundant nocturnal sardine called dagaa and the ones who don't. ... For generations, the dagaa were so plentiful, it never occurred to anyone the abundance wouldn't last. ... But now, Seph said, the catch is down. All along the Tanganyika basin, from Bujumbura in Burundi to Kalemie in the Congo to Mpulungu in Zambia, fishermen like Seph are beginning to say their lake is changing and with it, their way of life.

Whenever any discussion of global warming is brought up, the picture soon gets cluttered with indications to apocalyptic melting of arctic glaciers and flooding of mainlands in the future. People are now reminded that there could a slower and continuous destruction that is happening right now, as we speak, elsewhere farther from the artics, where communities have lived and thrived. It is time we took note.

Equinoxes

2006-03-24T10:07:00.000-06:00

Signs and Science

It was believed for a long time that Eggs can be made to stand on its end only during equinoxes. A superstitious belief rooted in the scientific fact that earths pole is tilted just the right amount so the day and nights are equal in length. Science has destroyed that belief and down goes one fond tradition of people in China; placing eggs on its end during equinoxes.

One Wayne Osborn, in Central Michigan University, has a tabulation of eggs standing on its end. The experiments ran for 3 whole months including the autumnal equinox on the 22nd of September.

All this because one equinox just passed us on March 22. This is supposed to be the official start of Spring! As Jon said: It bitter cold out here. If you see a ground hog, make sure to punch him in the face.

Delphi unveiled?

2006-03-10T07:00:00.000-06:00

A NY Times article discusses the long time relation between religion and science: One more example, down this way, has been the revelations of Delphi Oracle and the stories related to it. A part of it has now been uncovered.

The recent discoveries of a renegade four-member team of scientists illustrate ... the truth behind the Oracle of Delphi's legendary powers, showing how the most influential figure of ancient Greece prepared for ecstatic union with Apollo. The scientists, ... discovered tons of bituminous limestone down below, its layers rich in intoxicating gases.

They also found two faults that crisscross beneath the shrine to form a geologic pathway to the surface. They even measured traces of intoxicants still bubbling up today. This and other evidence suggest that the Oracle inhaled a mist of potent gases that could promote trancelike states and aloof euphoria, helping send her into mystic ecstasies.

However, the euphoria did not extend all the way to other mysticisms.

They claimed no insights into how her utterances stood for ages as monuments of wisdom. They had no explanation for how the priestess inspired Socrates, or the seeming reliability of her visionary pronouncements.

If Science would encroach into realm of mystics, demystifying the myths, then mystic maybe forced to work harder creating new ones. Will Mystics catch up? How much does faith really depend on belief in Mysticism or Miracles?

As light leads us from Earth to the Sun

2006-03-08T07:31:00.000-06:00

We may know our Sun (Our sun?) as it goes to sleep,

The sun went to sleep,
in a brilliant night dress,
That seemed to shorten,
as its light was seen less.
Until it had rested,
its weary warm head,
Within the cool blankets,
of moon glow, its bed!
-Linda A. Copp

or even as it is waking up

The sun in the morning.
Like a protective mother she rises and brings warmth to everything she touches.
Artists try to harness her beauty, scientists study to find her secrets.
Every being feels more alive when she is there sad when she is shrouded by a cloud.
She leaves each day with a promise to return that is never broken.
--By Bruce Patterson

But how well do we know our Sun? (this is probably the same problem every parent has with their child.) But keeping our discussion to the Sun; It is so scorching hot that we can't go near it, or peek into it to see what it is made of. This is not quite the truth.

Even as people reveal their true feelings when they become angry, any physical element shows its nature when it is very hot. The physics of it is: a hot body "feels" hot to us, and this heat comes to us as heat waves.

The light we see are waves of a particular length (or wavelength), and within them we see variations from blue (40 microns) to green to red (70 microns). One time when Newton passed white light through an optical prism, he found an image of a rainbow on the white screen nearby. This rainbow is the called "spectrum" of white light. You can also call it the signature of white light. Similarly when physical elements are heated at high temperatures, they begin to glow and emit waves, just like light, and that defines its own charateristic signature spectra. In the turn of the 19th century, enough progress had been made studying the signatures of Hydrogen and Helium at very high temperatures. (1000000 microns = 1 meter)

It was then possible to obtain signature of the heat waves coming from the sun and they began to show patterns that matched those of Hydrogen at high temperatures. This not only gave an idea of how hot the sun is (Its very hot!), but gave us an insight what is happening inside of it. The temperature on the sun is about 15 million degrees Celsius at its core.

At this temperature, as makers of the atom bomb also figured, many Hydrogen atoms can fuse into larger elements, thus producing a lot of energy. You see, the total mass of Hydrogen atoms is more than the mass of larger element produced. The remainder is released as energy in accordance with Einstein's relation that energy and mass are equivalent. We knew there was Hydrogen there and it was there at high temperatures. The patterns that matched were not exact, and what didn't match must have come from the heavier elements. You can also guess now that Sun has more hydrogen than of the heavier elements, as Hydrogen leaves heavier imprint on the signature of sun's heat waves than other elements.

So the theory was that Hydrogen fused to form Helium, and some Helium atoms further fused to form Carbon and so on. This theory is now backed by the signature patterns. We begin to appreciate how we have gone from visible light to make inference about the sun, which we can hardly look at. But, Sun is the Star of our solar system. Sun looks bright to us because it is so close to us. So the same story holds for all the stars that light up the night sky.

There are many unresolved questions. Will Hydrogen get exhausted? Remember some energy also comes from fusion of Helium atoms. How long will the sun last? How did it come to be in the first place. How old is it? There are many theories and each one was arrived at in its own peculiar way.

The sun went to sleep,
Within the cool blankets,
of moon glow, its bed!

Another day, Another time, Same blog.

Being on Cloud Nine »

Harassment : Blog-a-thon

2006-03-07T06:23:00.000-06:00

What do you do if you are not someone who has been harassed, or have not seen anyone be harassed? That is more a question to me than to you. I guess there might be something right there.

Most of these incidents that I have read have been harassment where the victim's response is muted and does not draw attention to the harassment when it happens. Perhaps, in a society where people take their perceived self-respect a little seriously, they continue to engage in this behavior not because they won't get referred to the police, but they won't even evoke a whisper. At least in all cases where the victim knows what is happening to them, and can raise the issue. I think that might have made the issue claimed to be present everywhere to be there on every mind too. Won't you think that would help?

Most Famous Photo

2006-03-06T16:13:00.000-06:00

Science Update : India

2006-03-05T10:34:00.000-06:00

Recent Developments:

A group of Indian researchers, Pankaj Joshi of TIFR, his student Rituparna Goswami, and Parampreet Singh of Pennsylvania State University, have found and proposed an experimental test for the quantum theory of gravity. "Validating quantum gravity is a necessary step in having a unified theory of forces of nature" says Dr. Joshi. We may also remember the "Primes is in P" paper by Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal, and Nitin Saxena of IIT-Kanpur. Or, even the work of Abhas Mitra of BARC.

Science and Society:

Scientists have isolated anti-malarial compounds from Mussels, and these can be prepared without killing the Mussel. The discovery came from a team led by Dr Anil Chatterji of NIO. Shreya Life Sciences, a Mumbai based company has the right to commercial production of the compounds.
Even as progress is made in medicine, you would think a patient can't be blamed for not responding to treatment!

The Indian Budget for the Fiscal year 2006 has allocated 16% of GDP for endeavors in Science and Technology. As part of this, chosen universities will receive large research award to develop and nourish scientific programs.
President Kalam has exhorted the scientific community to engage in finding and developing alternative sources of energy on the National Science day. He envisions an energy independent India by 2030.
Hyderabad has now become the Genome Valley of India, one of the largest such bio-technology facility in the world. The facility will house among other things an international life sciences institute, a world-class animal resource facility and a biotech incubation centre for start-ups.

Journal access to Africa

2006-03-03T09:32:00.000-06:00

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has announced that it will give Africa free access to its journal archives. A total of 1.5 million pages and 250,000 articles will be available electronically to African scientists.

Science Key to Africa's Future: To drive home the point, Professor Calestous Juma, co-ordinator of the UN's Millennium Project Task Force on Science, Technology and Innovation says "If all the aid from Live Aid was spent on agricultural colleges rather than relief, Ethiopia would not be in difficulties today".

Open Access Movement has been around for years fighting the idea of mandatory paid subscriptions to access journal articles as it impedes the academic dissemination of ideas freely among the scientific community through out the world.

some outlets for free public access to journals are PLOS, arXiv, and there are many more.

Lyrical Limerical

2006-03-02T17:06:00.000-06:00

friends gods send

walk with your hand in mine
this way brotherhood will gain
in a future so bright
country can take pride
this journey will not be in vain

air eclair

i don't remember jack abramoff
hey journalist, you back off!
I tell you, in honest!
once there 'was' a forest!
no clean air, childrens cough

havana marijuana

marijuana keeps your pain at bay
medical of course, didn't I say?
no side effects, no no
not until well, you know
an elegy comes to me from far away

kicks of limericks

hey you, this is all just limericks
write some and get some kicks
out of it. you care?
have time to spare?
write yours on glossy lipsticks

Harassment. Will it stop with us?

2006-03-02T07:00:00.000-06:00

Annie's post, Streets, stories, strategies, for a woman on the streets of bombay: filled with anecdotes, tips for survival, what to expect, things that will make you cringe. Another post that is worth reading more than once. A post that appeared much earlier on the same issue : On being a female body by Charukesi. Reading all this also reminded me of an op-ed: Rape is Murder by Vir Sanghvi on the Delhi rape incidents.

On a follow up note, there is a Blog-a-thon on the issue of street harassment, you can blog your thoughts, experiences, and comments on March 7th. You can have your intention to blog announced early by emailing to blurtblanknoise [AT] gmail.com before the coming Monday (6th March).

Scian Melt 14

2006-03-01T12:00:00.000-06:00

Science and Society:

Sunil has his blog on Medical developments including Avian flu in China and how it is being managed. Sowmya has an elaborate blog on the role of Radon in your lives and on Dishwashers and Suds, a blog exemplifying 'scientific curiosity as part of our lifestyle'. I have been making some attempts to find out the 'how of supercooling' by looking at two of its examples: Hand Warmers and Clouds.

Sujatha has written a vey nice blog on Caserean Sections in India: analyzing from both the mother's perspective as well as from the doctor's perspective. Gurcharan Das argues for how burgeoning prospects for education in India can help position it as a powerful knowledge economy. On a related note, Sujatha narrates the story of Noor: a foot-soldier on war against illiteracy.

from small to big:

Aswin gives us the deal with the Big Bang theory. On the smaller end, Selva has blogged on Quantum Computing and Cryptography and how you can hide your secrets.

India:

Abhinandan carries a discussion on the recent denial of visa to Indian scientists by US immigration authorities, its consequences, and the barriers to science caused. At the same time, India isn't doing too badly for herself. Amardeep blogs on India's new digital library project in progress, much like Gutenberg. Even as we progress in our sciences, our failings in leaving Indian women in tatters is a cause of woe and concern: from Uma of the other india blog and Peppy of the perpetualmisfit blog. This is not all, as Dilip blogs on two cases of rape and homicide that have come before the justice system only to slip away without notice. But then Dr. Indumathi bridges both issues: A scientist with a social conscience (link courtesy: Selva). Talking of integrity, Prashant blogs on Why are Indian politicians this corrupt? claiming they aren't quite as corrupt as they are just effectively playing a game of survival in a system whose rules are larger than themselves.

Link to Previous Scian Melts can be found on the announcement blog. For future nominations write to melt [at] thescian [dot] com

Charon's Cousins

2006-03-01T07:37:00.001-06:00

Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope from May of last year show two tiny dots revolving around the same center of gravity as the ninth planet (Pluto) and its largest moon, Charon.

(yes, even the moons have a name!)

"We used Hubble's exceptional resolution to peer close to Pluto and pick out two small moons that had eluded detection for more than 75 years," says Hal Weaver, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University and the discovery team leader.

Based on their brightness--and assuming that their surfaces are about as reflective as Charon's--the scientists believe the two moons are roughly 38 miles and 29 miles in diameter.

Given that they share Pluto's distance from the sun--roughly three billion miles--but are 4,000 times fainter, it is not surprising that the satellites eluded detection until now, the researchers say.

--Thats how large the distances are. If you were looking at your palm, and see the wedges between the palm lines, imagine a palm sitting there with its own palm lines, and do this a 1000 times, thats how small the moons appear when we place the distance between the Sun and Pluto into perspective. Hubble telescope is quite a remakable window to outside of our world.

--How do I know what a solar system is? Is "my world" all that I can see? What if the tenth planet has already given its loyalty to another Sun or a Star?

--From the Scientific American article

Scian Melt Nominations

2006-02-24T10:40:00.000-06:00

The next Melt will be hosted on this blogspot page on March 1st. You can find more about The Melt here. If you have written a blog page on Science and/or India, you can make your nominations to melt [at] thescian [dot] com. The previous one, the 13th one, is hosted here.

The following places also carry further announcements and information: at shallow thgts and at Scian

Cheers!

12:NeoSagredo, 11:Shallowthgts, 10:Kyun, 9:Reflections, 8 and 7:Scian, 6:Geomblog, 5:Patrix, 4:Tiffinbox, 3:Sel.Amnesia, 2:Rathod, 1:Scian

Being Human and Science : Linkspress

2006-02-21T11:50:00.000-06:00

Being Human can be tough. Especially in medieval times. Because of this, we came out for the better and turned out to be most social of animals, anthropologists say.

Now it is time for us to get back at them; the species in our neighborhood. Humans perceive animals, insects as sources of threats or infections. It turns out, we have been making the wildlife sick!

"With emerging infectious diseases of wildlife today there's almost always some human component," say Dr. Lewis, an NSERC-funded mathematical ecologist in the mathematics and statistics department at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.

in a landmark paper, he helped document how commercial salmon farms off Canada's British Columbia coast are a breeding ground for sea lice, a parasite that then infects young wild Pacific salmon. The research was the first to document the parasitic impact of commercial salmon farms on wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest.

When it comes to emerging infectious diseases of wildlife, Dr. Lewis says that public perception and policy needs to move beyond seeing "special cases" to seeing the constant role that people play.

Unlike the research above popular science need not be of good quality as much as having a wring of currentness to it (the be hip mantra!). Perhaps the blame lies with the schools and the science teachers for not being able to convey the pleasure of science. Here is a nice article about that.

Added 2/22:
Ice Ice Baby If you thought you knew why ice is slippery, think again! Even the scientists are not sure what the reason is, says a nicely written NY Time piece.

Science off the tap! To bring the science fervour to the public, Cafe Scientifique started in Leeds and slowly spread to other places including its now popular home in Denver, CO. People gather to disucss about all science topics that affect their life from genetics to cancer research.

Disoriented?

2006-02-20T19:28:00.000-06:00

Just to have fun with orientation, try making a Moebius strip. If you have a normal rectangular strip of paper, you can join one short end to the other to make a simple closed strip. IF you twist one end (by 180 degrees) first before joining with the other end, you have a Moebius Strip. The ants in the picture are actually on the same side of the strip, even though they appear to be on two sides. An ordinary strip has two sides (an inside and an outside), but a Moebius strip has only one side!

Think about that! :)

Take the normal rectangular strip and join the long ends to make a long cylinder. Just as in the case of the rectangular strip above, close the circles in the two ends of the cylinder in a simple way to make a hollow doughnut (a torus). What is the analogue of the Moebius Strip for the long cylinder? It is a Klein Bottle! A hollow doughnut has an inside and an outside, but a Klein Bottle does not. So it cannot hold any water as inside is also outside :P

Caveat: Klein Bottle does not physically exist in 3-dimensions (but in 4 dimensions!), so the picture is an illusion. I don't want you to get all cross-eyed looking at it. :P

Being on Cloud Nine

2006-02-17T23:17:00.000-06:00

What would it be like if you were in the middle of a cloud? Can you Imagine millions of droplets of water floating around you? These droplets are very small, and they float around you without touching each other. This is how it would be to be among the clouds.[1] So is it all just water? Why don't they fall down? We can wonder what goes on up among those clouds, sitting here on the ground beneath our feet. (read my earlier blog to know about supercooling and crystallization).

The water droplets are so small that they can be kept afloat by small wafts of upward wind, more like a feather in the air that will float and float and float but will never fall to the ground. The droplets are kept from running into each other by the same air, which acts more like a foam cushion that keeps a high-jumper from bumping into the floor. You can imagine these droplets danced around by the wafts and yet not bumping into each other.

There is something more to clouds. Clouds are also very cold. So cold that it can be below -40 deg C (now you are having second thoughts about being in the cloud). You must have read my earlier blog and wonder: how can water remain unfrozen? The answer also lies in the same blog. For water to freeze, it needs points of crystallization. Up in the clouds these are provided by suspended particles (dirt) in the air. But as you can imagine, a cloud living so high is also far from the dust and dirt of the Earth![2] So it is very hard to find such dirt that can make crystallization to happen. So water droplets remain water droplets but at temperatures much below zero.

So all these droplets go as clouds from one place to another, to another. When do they ever come down as rain? Will they fall on me? The first question is easier than the second. So, we will answer the first.

As we understand it, supercool water (water below zero deg C) becomes unstable as the temperature decreases. Only the slightest disturbance is needed for it to freeze. So lower the temperature the less impurities are actually needed to cause the disturbance. After all, even in the clouds there are impurities, though not as many as on the surface of the Earth.

We know that warm currents and cold currents all have a thing going of their own, independent of the clouds. Where they come from, how they come, we don't care. But if enough cold winds come to make the supercool water droplet's temperature drop below -40 deg C, then crystallization can start. So droplets turn to ice and slowly the surface of ice (flake rather) becomes the source of further disturbance and the crystallization spreads through the cloud. There is an additional effect that happens here. There are wafts of wind blowing between the droplets. This air is rich in moisture (it contains water vapors) and on meeting ice, the moisture in the air, condenses and then freezes to form more ice.

We remember well that the droplets are floating away from each other. So, as the ice starts to form, the cloud does not become a block of ice but a cloud of snow flakes, all ready to fall. As they fall, they melt and drop as rain droplets, only much bigger ones than the ones in cloud. How so? The air added more ice to them from the moisture it was carrying, remember?

Most of the drops evaporate as the fall down, due to the resistance from the air, just the same resistance we feel when riding a bike on the road. The clouds contained in a cube of one kilometer for each side, weight about a few hundred tonnes, so heavier the clouds the more drops that actually fall down on it, heavier the rain.

So that is the story of rain. You may prefer to stand in the rain than to be among the clouds.

We can tweak science to create rain in places that don't traditionally receive rainfall. If you remember the relation between supercool water and disturbance needed for crystallization, we needed a lot of cold drafts because there was not much "dirt" up above. Now this is the reason why clouds pass by without raining. So what scientists propose is to introduce "dirt".

What I cannot explain well is that one kind of "dirt", when introduced, can actually trigger crystallization at a higher temperature than some other "dirt". Silver Iodide can do this at -20 deg C where as usual crystallization needs well below -40 deg C. The process of introducing Silver Iodide in clouds to create the rain formation artificially is called seeding the clouds. Silver Iodide needs to be sprinkled fairly well inside the cloud, so crystallization will be uniform. Or rather, the upward drafts must help mix silver iodide fairly well in the clouds. There are hundreds of factors that need to go right so rain can be formed from the clouds. Here is two important ones

1. If the cloud isn't precisely downwind from the target area, the rain will fall in the wrong place anyway.
2. If the seeding is done at the wrong time, or on the wrong cloud, it may cause "cratering," or large holes in the cloud that cause it to fall apart. So an errant effort can destroy the clouds that might otherwise produce rain.

[1] Its not all water. There is some ice too. But not so many that can induce crystallization. But mostly water.
[2] The reason why dirt and dust are less at higher levels is rather simple. Anything to rise to that level against gravity must have really small weight, or can be vaporised in gas form. Most dirt don't become gas, and as the threshold of weight becomes smaller, fewer kinds of dirt can qualify.
[3]Stratus, Cirrus, Cumulus are three common varieties of cloud.

I spare you from reading this rather longish article, by quoting some interesting excerpts from it:

The researchers have found: Rainfall from seeded clouds lasted longer than rain from unseeded clouds, the rainfall covered a larger area, and total precipitation was higher, sometimes even doubled. And in many cases results began just 20 minutes after the seeding.

Mr. Bruinties is now in the United Arab Emirates conducting a three-month feasibility study to determine whether conditions there are right for a cloud seeding program. Remember, not all clouds can be seeded.

Only certain clouds, early in their formation, are useful, and timing is everything.

Other seeding agents have been researched for the last 40 years, along with the importance of other conditions that help seeding to arrive at a better understanding of the process.

This resource provided the most material for the above write up. The following is another excellent very understandable discussion on everything there is to know about clouds. Recent News on Cloud seeding in Wyoming (Jan '06), and other ones in Australia, South Africa, Texas, and Israel.

Trivia: The Arctic ground squirrel hibernates at a body temperature below freezing--and yet doesn't freeze. The ground squirrel is able to do this because before hibernation it goes through a sort of internal purification that gets rid of any particle that might seed the freezing process. Liquids require such a particle (sometimes called a nucleus) in order to freeze. By purging itself the squirrel avoids becoming an ice cube, even if the temperature drops below freezing. (Link to Source Courtesy: Pradzie)

« As Light Leads us from Earth to the Sun

Warm your hands with Supercool Liquids »

Mirror Mirror ...

2006-02-17T10:10:00.000-06:00

I found this problem in No Ordinary Genius by Christopher Sykes. It's pretty easy.

You look in a mirror, and let's say you part your hair on the right side. You look in the mirror, and your image has its hair parted on the left side, so the image is left-to-right mixed up. But it's not top-to-bottom mixed up, because the top of the head of the image is there at the top, and the feet are down at the bottom. The question is: how does the mirror know to get the left and right mixed up, but not the up and down?

--Question Posted by Richard Feynman

Check out Disoriented? to become really disoriented.

how small are atoms?

2006-02-16T20:29:00.000-06:00

Why are atoms so small? To begin with, they are very small indeed. Every little piece of matter handled in everyday life contains an enormous number of them. Many examples have been devised to bring this fact home to an audience, none of them more impressive than the one used by Lord Kelvin: Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water; then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if then you took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules

--Erwin Schrodinger 'What is Life?'(1944)ISBN:0521427088

Of Many Worlds in this World

Just like as in a Nest of Boxes round,
Degrees of Sizes in each Box are found:
So, in this World, may many others be
Thinner and less, and less still by degree:
Although they are not subject to our sense,
A World may be no bigger than Two-pence.
NATURE is curious, and such Works may shape,
Which our dull senses easily escape:
For Creatures, small as Atoms, may be there,
If every one a Creature's Figure bear.
If Atoms Four, a World can make, then see
What several Worlds might in an Ear-ring be:
For, Millions of those Atoms may be in
The Head of one small, little, single Pin.
And if thus small, then Ladies may well wear
A World of Worlds, as Pendents in each Ear.

-Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673)

Warm Your Hands with Supercool Liquid

2006-02-11T14:43:00.000-06:00

Keywords: Supercooling, Hand warmers, Crystallization.

If you hold on to the thread till the end, you might actually learn something. As a teaser: The title is sorta accurate. Read on to find out.

My friend and I went that evening to the sports store to do some ski gear shopping. As we left the store for another to do some price comparison, we entered into a chat with the guy at the counter. He said he was going to buy ski mittens instead of ski gloves. Minnesota cold meant mittens, which offer additional warmth for fingers (as they are next to each other). Mittens are also convenient for using hand warmers in them (these are heating pads inserted in the back of the gloves for additional warmth).

Hand Warmers: So our discussion turned to reusable hand warmers (see picture. the metal is at the bottom of the pouch). He showed us a small plastic pouch of liquid with a penny sized metal plate inside it. When the metal is bent, the liquid slowly starts to turn solid and white, and releases a lot of heat while solidifying.

The liquid, it turns out, is sodium acetate, which is a very specially suited liquid for use in hand warmers. The process of releasing energy it turns out is due to two other very special processes called supercooling and crystallization. These can be observed by performing experiments which you can do yourself either by buying an handwarmer pouch or even with water (you have to work extra hard for this).

Cooling and Crystallization: Supercooling is the principle that lies at the bottom of this heat release. Cooling, as we know it, is a process by which temperature of a liquid (think water) is reduced. As the temperature goes down slowly the liquid starts to turn into solid. What is really happening here is that liquid starts to go through a change in phase (from liquid to solid) as the temperature goes down.

In fact you can see that until the temperature reaches zero, the water remains water. No ice. When temperature reaches zero, the process called crystallization starts (nobody really understands how this works). Around an impurity or a surface with irregularities (even smooth surfaces have a small amount of irregularities), the water molecules find the source for some kind of a disturbance to their liquid state. At these crystallization points, water begins to crystallize (that is, becomes ice), right when temperature hits zero. Slowly as crystallization spreads, the surface of the ice thus formed becomes a natural site for further crystallization of the uncrystallized water that remains. Water placed in an ice cube box becomes ice much faster than if kept in a vessel: because the amount of surface irregularities for potential crystallization is larger in the ice box. The temperature at which the liquid crystallizes to solid is called the freezing point temperature. So that is the short primer on cooling and formation of ice for you.

Supercooling: If you cool a liquid very quickly and much below the freezing point temperature, the liquid can avoid crystallization and remain liquid. But, now it remains liquid at a temperature lower than the freezing point temperature. For this process, it is important that as the liquid is cooled it remains still and undisturbed. Even slight disturbances can provide a site for crystallization to start.

Crystallization and Heat: So when this supercooled liquid is disturbed, it immediately begins to crystallize. But then, when it crystallizes its temperature is restored to freezing point temperature. So all this energy that comes from crystallization (called latent heat) is released outside. If you must know, this kind of reaction where energy is released outside is called exothermic (exo=out, therma=heat).

Back to Hand Warmers: So this is what is happening with sodium acetate. It is naturally in the liquid form above 54 degC. On cooling, it will freeze at 54 degC. When I found this liquid pouch of sodium acetate at room temperature (25-30 degC), it is liquid at a temperature clearly below its freezing point temperature. But this pack is shaken, transported in trucks and sold in shops. How is it possible? Well, it turns out sodium acetate is special. It is very stable as a supercooled liquid. It needs heat to be supplied to disturb its condition and induce crystallization.

This is precisely the point of the metal piece inside. When the metal piece is bent, it produces a very small amount of heat; Heat that is good enough to make sodium acetate crystallize. Then sodium acetate freezes and restores itself to 54 degC. We find that it is heating up our hand because our outside body temperature is 25-30 degC.

So this is the cool story of how supercooling, crystallization, and sodium acetate come together to make our hands warmer.

Actually there is more unexpected stuff. You will have to wait until next week to find out, and this time you don't get to choose the liquid, but the metal.

Additional Notes:
[1] I never told you why the hand warmers were reusable. So what needs to be done with frozen crystallized sodium acetate is a careful process of boiling and cooling back to room temperature (remember that this is below the freezing point temperature of sodium acetate). So place this pouch in hot water and make sure every crystal is melted to liquid. Then let it cool without any disturbance. Since sodium acetate is quite stable it will supercool to room temperature nicely. Then you can reuse it by bending the metal plate again. You can do this experiment with water. However, though cooling water below zero degC (say to -2 or -3 degC) is possible, you have be sure that the container remians undisturbed throughout the experiment. And remember, water is not as stable in the supercooled state as sodium acetate.

Some >links<
How hand warmers work (scroll down), wiki on hand warmers and an experiment (.pdf file) with handwarmers. How supercooling might be useful in metal treatment and hydrogen fuel cells Understanding exothermic and endothermic reactions from pbs A demonstration of supercooling in water

Trivia:
[1] During the Korean war (circa 1924), Japanese soldiers mixed warming powder (a mixture of iron, water, cellulose, vermiculite, activated carbon and salt) with water to generate heat to help keep soldiers warm in the bitter cold of the wartime battlefield.
[2] Rusting of Iron produces heat, but the process is so slow that you don't notice it.

« Being on Cloud Nine

$100 Laptops and Newton's Dog

2006-02-07T16:14:00.000-06:00

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been working on a new kind a laptop: one that costs $100, works on opensource Operating System and software, run by a 500MHz processor and has a 1GB Flash RAM instead of a hard drive. It is said that the target price is likely to come down once the product goes into production. The laptops will not be available for the general public to purchase.

Kofi Annan, while unveiling the first prototype in the World Summit on the Information Society, said "It holds the promise of major advances in economic and social development. But perhaps most important is the true meaning of 'one laptop per child.'"

MIT Tech Talk covers the lap-top project (pdf file)

The project website

The World Summit Coverage on MIT press

This is old news, but something worth covering. Also in the same vein I would like you to check out: Newton and the Walking Dog by Balaji for more than one reason. It takes a non-text-bookish approach to understanding the Newton laws (what is there to know about it?). The presentation is aimed at secondary school children, but it has surprises irrespective of the "level" of the reader. It costs only Rs. 150. The author is one of the finest people I have met. He also leads the AID India team. I will post a review soon (watch this space!)