Arts & Crafts for Nerds

Nerds have been busy so far this year, and not just at reading Slashdot, learning pi to 281 places, and spreading rumors about what Steve Jobs will come up with next. Some have also taken up filmmaking, music, photography, fashion design, photomosaic, beading, and stop-motion animation. Can't wait to see what the rest of the year brings.

We're Surrounded!

Or, as Gizmodo puts it, space is full of crap. It seems that in addition to the normal trash we've left in orbit, Earth is being surrounded by smaller particles and debris that are the result of explosions of old satellites and other junk. This cloud of dust could get thicker and thicker as more of the rubbish we've left up there collides, disintegrates, and blows itself apart. It causes several problems. The ESA states that "objects from 1 to 10 cm in size — about the diameter of a salad bowl — cause the real worry. These are too small and numerous to be individually tracked but could cripple or kill any craft they hit." The problem is that even though the stuff is small, it moves really fast. The ESA notes that "As of 2001, Space Shuttle windows had been replaced 80 times due to sub-millimetre object impacts. " Sometimes space junk could be made usable, but as Slashdot notes, patent disputes can get in the way of such endeavors. The ESA suggests using clean spacecraft operation techniques to reduce our litter. As this comparison shows, that could help, but it still won't solve the problem entirely.

Experiments you can actually do

There are a lot of great science experiment videos on the web, but many show reactions that require very expensive (or very unsafe) chemicals, or that are otherwise unsuitable for home or classroom imitation. (For examples, see the Top 10 Chemistry Videos Online from the March 5th post.) At least one site, however, specializes in very, very simple experiments (occasionally underwhelmingly so) that anyone can do. It's Robert Krampf's Science Videos, and it's experiments, while geared toward the elementary and middle-school crowds, are often the kind that you can watch, think "I've got that stuff in my kitchen", and immediately do for yourself. Even though as adults we might already know the information he presents, many of the experiments show practical (or at least fun) applications of things that we've only learned in principle. I'm still catching up on them, but so far my favorites are the Bouncing Balls (complete with slow-mo replay) and Orange Segments. Each video has a complete text description with it in case you missed anything.

Links - March 28, 2008

First, some entertaining takes on the Department of Homeland Security's threat scale, all from Wired:
The Colors
The T-shirts
The Dogs

In other security news from Wired, here's how to terminate a terminator.

Next, how to improve your own security (or at least reputation) online, from PC World.

An interesting interview about how the brain handles (or doesn't) multi-tasking, from Quirks and Quarks.

Why a cat can cut your heart-attack risk by a third, from US News & World Report.

How to understand kilobytes, as explained by comic Randall Munroe.

Anaesthetics could block formation of bad memories, from the UK's Channel 4.

Google's "clippy" easter egg, from Google Blogoscoped.

Flickr users help LOC identify photos

Wreckage of new library building, Indianapolis (LOC)
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is posting thousands of photos from their archives on Flickr, and the site's users are helping to identify and catalog them as well as do research and link them to related materials. For example, when this photo, labeled simply "Wreckage of new library building, Indianapolis", was posted, most assumed that it was of a tornado's aftermath. Further investigation by a user revealed a much more interesting story. The user linked the photo to this New York Times article from November 21, 1912, which shows that the public library in Indianapolis was probably dynamited by International Association of Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Ironworkers members in retaliation for the use of non-union builders in the building's construction.
Other photos from the LOC collection are attracting attention because of their rarity. For instance, a large group of color photos from the Great Depression is quite popular, since most people are only familiar with black and white images from that era. The LOC currently has more than 3,000 photos on Flickr and plans to add more soon.

Gadgets - March 13,2008

Ambient Corporation is developing a neckband that can "hear" and transmit your words even if you don't speak them aloud. It intercepts nerve signals on their way from the brain to the vocal cords and transmits them to a computer which interprets them as speech and sends the words as sounds on to the intended destination. This could be handy, they suggest, if you want to have a private phone conversation in a public place, for example. The completed system could also be used as a voice for "people who have lost the ability to speak due to neurological diseases like ALS – also known as motor neurone disease" according to New Scientist. It can even control a wheelchair using just thoughts. There's still a way to go before the neckband is ready, though. The one demonstrated at the TI Developers' Conference took quite a while to translate even short, simple phrases into speech, and as of yet the software can only decipher about 150 words and phrases.

I don't know who thought to make their Etch-a-sketch into a clock, but it makes a pretty impressive one.

The New York Times' tech reporter, David Pogue, reviewed two non-traditional music players this week. One is the Media Street eMotion Solar, which, as the name implies, runs on sunlight. The other, the Baylis Eco Media Player is crank powered. Neither sounds completely ready for the mass market, but they seem to be, as he says, "the advance team for a new, very promising, very green world of products." His review is an interesting read for gadgetophiles.

Newsweek's Steven Levy managed to loose the review sample MacBook Air he was loaned by Apple. As Wired notes, "Much has been made of the thinness of the Mac notebook, mostly its ninja-like ability to slide, almost undetected, into a manilla envelope." Apparently, it was so thin that he and/or his wife did not notice it was sitting on, in, or with a Sunday New York Times. They recycled it with the paper, he thinks. Newsweek is paying for the unit. Levy argues, "Can you really blame a guy for losing something that's called Air?"

Hyperbolic Headlines: A Black Hole in the Phone Line

As with the 'Flying Lemurs with Wiis' story (see post from Feb. 20), some science stories just beg to be exaggerated for the sake of a good headline. That's what's happening to a paper published in Science by a group of physicists from the University of St. Andrews in the UK. Some resultant headlines are:
Physicists Make Artificial Black Hole Using Optical Fiber (IEEE Spectrum Online)
Artificial Black Hole Created in Lab (Silobreaker)
Laser Light Re-creates 'Black Holes' in the Lab (Slashdot)
Scientists Can Now Create a Black Hole Event Horizon In The Lab (Newsvine)
Scientists Make Fake Black Hole In a Phone Line (Wired)
These headlines have seriously confused some readers, as evidenced by some comments on the Newsvine site. What actually happened, as shown in Dr. Ulf Leonhardt's own words (worth a look if a bit dense - he's obviously got a great sense of humor and a vocabulary much bigger than mine), is this: "In our experiment, we use ultrashort light pulses in microstructured optical fibers to demonstrate the formation of an artificial event horizon in optics. We create analogues of the horizon, not real black holes, they only act on light in the fibre, and our experiment is completely harmless."
In other words, what they made was an event horizon, not a black hole, real or otherwise. What is an event horizon? In an interview with Bob McDonald of the CBC's Quirks & Quarks, Dr. Leonhardt describes it as a "point of no return". He gives the example of fish in a river. As the river flows toward a waterfall, it speeds up. At a certain point, the water's velocity increases to a point where even the fastest fish can no longer swim upstream because they are being carried along too quickly by the current. This point is the event horizon, or point of no return.
So, why did they make an event horizon? The University of St. Andrew's press release explains that it "could allow physicists to investigate what happens to light at both sides of an event horizon - something they describe as a `feat that is utterly impossible in astrophysics'." That is, they can't look inside a black hole to see what happens to light on the other side of its event horizon, so they had to make an event horizon without a black hole in order to see what goes on there. They hope to soon use their optical-fiber event horizon to test some of Stephen Hawking's theories about light and black holes.

Links - March 5, 2008

Interesting and/or fun links:

Geek Graffiti
List of free online university classes
A Brief History of Orcs
A Brief History of the Dr. Who theme music (video)
Top 10 Chemistry Videos Online
The Economics of Movie Popcorn
A Sport For Nerds (yes, those are Ethernet cables)

What goes up . . .

Two falling items today: a long-range paper airplane and an apparently suicidal skydiver.


The paper airplane is the product of University of Tokyo Professor Shinji Suzuki, and he wants it to be thrown out of the space station. It has been treated with chemicals to keep it from burning up as it falls through Earth's atmosphere, when its speed may reach Mach 20, according to the World Aeronautical Press Agency. The idea has received mixed responses. Suzuki and his team hope that it could "inspire new designs for lightweight re-entry vehicles, or for planes to explore the upper reaches of the atmosphere." On the other hand, London's Daily Mail sniffs, "The mission would follow a distinguished history of pointless experiments in space."



A movie stuntman in a spacesuit will go for the world record in Skydiving, according to British newspaper The Sun. He will dive from 120,000 feet, freefall for seven minutes, and likely break the sound barrier before opening his 'chute. He will hopefully also survive.

Bacteria Make it Rain?

Brent Christner, of Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, has been studying rain and snow. He found something surprising: lots of bacteria. His colleague, Pierre Amato, found the same thing in clouds, according to New Scientist. That led Christner to the interesting theory that these bacteria actually cause the ice and water vapor in the atmosphere to form crystals which are large enough to fall to the ground as precipitation. The particular bacteria he studied cause disease in tomatoes and beans, but he says they could be useful. "In places that suffer drought you could plant crops that harbour bacteria to increase precipitation," he suggests. We may at least want to slow down our efforts at killing the pathogen off, which is what we've been trying to do until now.

New mnemonic for planets

Now that there are officially 11 planets (since Ceres, Pluto, and Eris are now considered "minor planets") we need a new way to remember their names. National Geographic Kids thus sponsored a contest for the best new mnemonic, or memory device. The winner was a ten-year-old from Montana named Maryn Smith, who came up with "My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants." What was her reaction to winning? "I was sort of embarrassed", she told the Washington Post. It took her and her mother just 10 minutes to come up with the phrase which will now be made into a song by Lisa Loeb and included in astronomer David Aguilar's next book, "11 Planets: A New View of the Solar System." If you don't like Maryn's idea, Sky and Telescope has issued a new challenge: "Try your hand at crafting a planet mnemonic of your own . . . You get extra credit if it makes sense with — and without — the inclusion of Ceres, Pluto, and Eris." In my opinion, the best entry posted so far is "Mother's Very Expertly Made (Cranberry) Jelly Sandwiches Unavailable Now (Please Enquire)". Makes the ten-year-old look pretty smart, doesn't it?

Brain cells, when bored, make stuff up

Robert Krulwich of NPR has done three fascinating reports about what brain cells do when they are bored. Two are interviews with Dr. Oliver Sacks. A woman came to him because, it turned out, the part of her brain that was made to process sound got bored after she went deaf, and it started spitting out music. Dr. Sacks is, as always, an excellent storyteller, and you can listen to this interview here. Another woman had songs going through her head all the time, as many of us do. Her problem was that hers were loud enough to drown out conversations and other sounds around her. You can listen to or read her story here. The third program (listen or read here) features a man who suffered from the visual equivalent of the bored-brain-cell phenomenon. After he went blind, his visual cortex started producing rather odd hallucinations. I'd generally recommend Mr. Krulwich's reports, which are usually between five and ten minutes long and can be had as a podcast, called Hmmmm. . . , and these three stories will give you a good first taste of his style, if not of his normally much wider range of science topics.

Flickr users document lunar eclipse

Some gorgeous photos of the eclipse this week are showing up on photo-sharing sites. Many are straight from the camera, while others have been manipulated to show off certain aspects of the moon or the passage of time. The one above was posted by Scribner on Flickr. Here are links to some of my other favorites from that site:

(C)lint shows the moon reflecting normal sunlight on one side and sunlight that was bent as it passed through Earth's atmosphere on the other.

Many users made composites of the eclipse. My favorite of these is by Peter Heinzen.

Blazczak captured the constellation Leo with the eclipse, got a great shot of totality, and has an amazing collection of other photos worth checking out.

Finally, there's a nice close-up by Yani Ioannou. In his Eclipse Set, he also shows the camera/telescope setup he used to get his photos.

For other interesting eclipse images on Flickr, try their eclipse page.

Flying Lemurs with Wiis? Not exactly, but close.

Many of the reports in the news this week about scientists strapping Nintendo Wii controllers on the backs of flying lemurs have several details wrong, but the story is basically true. While colugos are not actually lemurs, can't actually fly, and aren't getting real Wiis to play with, two scientists are using accelerometers (like those in Wii remotes) and memory chips (similar to the ones in iPods) to study how the colugos are able to control their glides and thus land gracefully on nearby branches rather than plummeting straight to earth like you or I might do. Andrew Spence, now at the Royal Veterinary College in England, and Greg Byrnes, a graduate student in UC Berkeley's Department of Integrative Biology, made backpack-like attachments that could be temporarily glued onto the animals' backs, and then retrieved after recording flight data. Spence, as quoted on Environmental Graffiti, explained why the backpacks were important: "Despite being common throughout their natural range, the Malayan colugo is quite poorly understood because it’s hard to measure things about an animal that moves around at night, lives 30 metres up a tree, and can glide 100 metres away from you in an arbitrary direction in 10 seconds. Our new sensing backpacks have given us an insight into the behaviour of these fascinating creatures.” Some of the results of the study can be found on Scientific Blogging, and may be used by human aeronautical engineers to improve our machine-assisted flights.

WTP 181

It's a couple weeks old, but I finally got around to listening to episode 181 of the Technology podcast from PRI's Clark Boyd. The podcast is usually a collection of tech stories by PRI and the BBC, and I generally find one or two of the included pieces to be especially interesting. This time I liked them all. The podcast starts with a story from China about how computers are eroding the ability of the Chinese to write in their native language. Of course, we don't have to worry about that problem in English (where's the spellcheck button on this page, anyway?). Then you learn about Estonia's aims for world dominion (in the technology sector, at least), oil freighters with very, very large sails, and blogs for indigenous populations in Bolivia.

Lunar eclipse

This week, a total lunar eclipse will be visible from most of the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Here you can find a NASA page with the details for those in the Eastern time zone in the US. If you'd like to see what will be going on in the sky above you on any particular night, try Heavens Above. You can register for the site, but you don't have to in order to use it. I just used the "select your location" link from the main page, found myself on the subsequent map, and bookmarked the resulting page.