Tom McMahon

2003 Photos Show Warping In Minneapolis Bridge 4 Years Before Collapse

2003 Photos Show Warping In Minneapolis Bridge 4 Years Before Collapse

Before that bridge collapsed I didn't even know what a gusset was.

Madison, Wisconsin: Ice Quake On Lake Mendota

Madison, Wisconsin: Ice Quake On Lake Mendota

Ice quakes, usually accompanied by loud cracking noises, are caused by large shifts in ice and are most commonly triggered by drastic temperature changes. Police received dozens of calls about the rumbling disturbance. (If you're a Wisconsin blogger who still doesn't have Wisconsinology on your blogroll, then you're really a closet Chicago Bears fan.)

How Do Hand Warmers Work?

An excerpt from ScienceIQ.com:

Most warmers work through a simple chemical reaction similar to rusting that occurs when warmers are exposed to air. That is why keeping them under wraps until needed is a must. The warmer is a mixture of iron, water, cellulose, vermiculite, activated carbon and salt. When the iron in the warmer is exposed to oxygen in the air, it oxidizes. In the process of doing so, heat is created. The salt acts as a catalyst and the carbon helps disperse the heat through the warmer. The vermiculite acts as an insulator, keeping the heat from dissipating too rapidly, while the polypropylene helps the air to mix with the ingredients while holding in moisture. The chemical reaction occurs slowly enough to allow the warmer to last for hours. But eventually all the iron is converted to iron oxide and the process stops. So don't expect to see hand warmers replacing central heating anytime soon. But for a cold day, this simple chemical reaction can do the trick.

Just How Many Greenhouse Gases Are Generated Every Year by the Eternal Flame Over JFK’s Grave?

Just How Many Greenhouse Gases Are Generated Every Year by the Eternal Flame Over JFK’s Grave?

A little Wikipedia background:

The selection of an eternal flame to commemorate President Kennedy was the first time in the world that an individual known person was given such an honor (as opposed to an Unknown Soldier). Previously, the only eternal flame within the U.S. was the torch burning constantly at the battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in honor of the dead from the American Civil War. That flame had been lit by President Franklin Roosevelt on the 75th anniversary of the battle in 1938.

So in our collective grief we went a little overboard, eh? Now a town in England is replacing their eternal flame with a large LED globe that will use less power than a lightbulb and change colour every five seconds. The environment, you know. Certainly we Yanks could do the same.

Why So Many Scientists Are Afraid To Voice Skepticism About Global Warming

"So you spent 10 years becoming a PhD in meteorology, you got a research job. And you decide you`re going to research the effect of human activity on global climate. And if you were to put out a research report that said not much and it doesn`t seem too bad, you`ve probably wasted all your 10 years."

               -- Weather Channel Founder John Coleman

The Sykes-Swapping Women Of Northern England

Excerpts from Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope:

Who's your Daddy? Is it true 10-15% of children in modern society were not sired by their putative fathers?

... Seen this way, the numbers yield a pretty convincing pattern. The median nonpaternity rate for the high-confidence group was a not-too-scandalous 1.7 percent, whereas the low-confidence group showed an unsurprisingly high rate of 29.8 percent — about what one might gather from watching a few weeks of Maury Povich. If you combine the first group with the can't-conclude group, which showed a rate of 16.7 percent, you get a rate around 3.3 percent, or a ninth of the low-confidence rate. While Anderson cautions that there's currently no way to figure out what percentage of total births are low- or high-confidence, and thus what a societywide nonpaternity rate might be, he does use figures from a paternity confidence study he conducted in Albuquerque to guess that the rate for that city as a whole would be under 4 percent. ...

While papers focusing on specific population segments may be of limited use due to sample-size issues, some fascinating small-scale research also supports the macro findings. For a 2000 study Oxford scientists collected DNA from 48 men with the last name Sykes living in a particular section of northern England. On genotyping the subjects' Y chromosomes, the researchers found that (a) unexpectedly, there seemed to have been a single ur-Sykes with whom 44 percent of the living Sykeses shared a unique string of genetic info, and (b) over 700 years the Sykes nonpaternity rate had been about 1.3 percent per generation. Now, if one Sykes's wife got together with another Sykes on the side, any resulting nonpaternity wouldn't show up here. But assuming that women who married Sykeses were neither atypically unadventurous nor surprisingly prone to Sykes-swapping, this too suggests that cuckoldry isn't nearly the undying scourge it's been made out to be.

Virtual Painter: Installing A New Dome On Yerkes Observatory

Virtual Painter: Installing A New Dome On Yerkes Observatory

The largest refracting telescope in the world, located right here in Wisconsin. Click on the image to biggify.

The Crucifixion Of James Watson

Excerpts from John Derbyshire:

Nobody knows — nor will know, not for a century or so, anyway — what the human race owes to this brilliant scientist, one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA. He got the Nobel Prize for his work (sharing the prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins). Now the mangled corpse of his reputation is being dragged round the walls of the city behind a chariot, to the howling glee of people who aren’t worthy to squeeze the paste onto Watson’s toothbrush for him. ...

He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes [i.e. in his new book, the U.K. promotion of which was the occasion of this interview] that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”. ...

The hot buttons here were “intelligence” and “intellectual capacities of peoples.” Those are scientific topics, belonging to psychometry, anthropology, human phylogeny and ontogeny. I think it is fair to assume that a 79-year-old man who has spent his whole working life among top-flight researchers in the human sciences, probably knows something about those topics.

True, the science is not settled here; but it is none the less science. The dire condition of populations from sub-Saharan Africa ancestry is an observable fact about the world. It calls for some explanation. That these populations took paths through evolutionary space that left them less capable at dealing with modernity than other populations, is not scientifically implausible. It may be the case; or it may not; but... We are not permitted to talk about it? What is this, North Korea?

Grenada Vet Student: Toad Spit Poisoning

A report from my former UltraGlobalMegaCorp co-worker Tom Hanson who chucked it all to become a first-year veterinary student in Grenada:

Rascal- a 6 month old boxer who's owner saw him playing with a frog and then Rascal bit it and killed it. The owner tossed the frog over the fence and then noticed Rascal starting to sieze....yup it was a big toad not a frog. She rushes him to the hospital where he was diagnosed with Buffotoxicosis (toad spit poisoning). It was not pretty...his eyes were fixed in 2 different directions and he was unresponsive. The vet recognized that his pupils were pinpricks and gave mannitol (reduces cerebral swelling) and said it was like a light switch was flipped and he came around completely! The day I was there Rascal was going home!

(I thought J-Walk and Toad would appreciate this one.)

The Santa Ana Winds

An excerpt from Varifrank:

Once upon a time, I lived in Anaheim right next to the big amusement park dedicated to a mouse. One day during a Santa Ana wind, I went to work in the morning and as I drove down Katella Ave, I looked behind me to see a small fire at the top of a telephone pole just a few streets away with a fireturck or two at the bottom trying desperately to put it out.

The small fire I saw that morning ended up engulfing and devouring several blocks of homes, apartments and stores. It became a fire big enough to be seen from where I worked in Tustin. It started because one palm frond on one palm tree touched a powerline and it just spread down the street, block after block after that. And thats how it goes, you go to work in a neighborhood of homes, you come back into the debris of disaster, all because of a few knots of wind blowing down from the desert. One minute you live in the center of calm suburban normality, the next minute its all under a foot of ash. Once the firestorm gets started, theres nothing in the world that will stop it. It stops when its done, not because of anything you do.

Weird Telescopes

Weird Telescopes

Schiefspieglers, Yolos, and Off-Axis Newtonians are just the beginning. A really wonderful page by Dave Stevick. Fun.

No More County-Based Storm Warnings

 
No More County-Based Storm Warnings

Have You Ever Noticed That The Sole Mission Of The Space Shuttle Is To Do More Repairs On The Space Shuttle?

That question was asked by Kathy Shaidle, and answered by Joe Sherlock:

The Space Shuttle is like vintage cars owned by several of my friends. The vehicles are impressive to look at but every time they're taken on the smallest road trip, they break down. And it's never something simple either. It's always some obscure vacuum diaphragm thingie that is unrepairable and that NAPA hasn't stocked for decades. Until the part is replaced, the car won't start ... and/or run. And the only diaphragm available is a "fair-to-good" used part from an obscure junkyard in the middle of Nebraska. The proprietor doesn't take credit cards and won't mail it "until yer check clears, city boy."

Speaking of the Shuttle, how can a piece of foam 'gouge' a ceramic tile? All the foam I've ever encountered bends, smooshes, disintegrates or crushes on impact. And ceramic isn't ductile enough to gouge ... it chips or cracks. The diagnosis makes no sense.

I'm starting to think that NASA is staffed by former service writers from car dealerships.

Detroit Lakes, Minnesota: An Example Of That Much Publicized Y2K Climate Software Glitch

Detroit Lakes, Minnesota: An Example Of That Much Publicized Y2K Climate Software Glitch

Wisconsin, The Home For High Voltage Tesla Coil Fun For The Whole Family!

Wisconsin, The Home For High Voltage Tesla Coil Fun For The Whole Family!

From Dark Roasted Blend:

There is a company, located in Wisconsin backwoods, near Wisconsin Dells - "Resonance Research", which is the world's largest manufacturer of Tesla coils, Van de Graaff generators, and various other high voltage machines. They can set you up for some high energy experimentation.

A Moon Of A Moon? Possible, But In The Long Run, Not Likely

A Moon Of A Moon? Possible, But In The Long Run, Not Likely

An answer from physicsforum.com:

Q: Are there any moons in our solar system that have moons? Or is this not possible, due to instability?

A: There are no such systems. I don't believe such a situation is theoretically impossible in an arbitrary planetary system, though it would probably be impossible in our own solar system. Most of the moons in the solar system are quite small compared to their parent planets, and are also quite close. For example, the first Lagrange point between the Earth and Earth's Moon is about 9/10 of the way from the Earth to the Moon. This is the point where the Earth's and Moon's gravity are equal in magnitude, and it's only 38,400 km from the Moon's center. Any satellite of the Moon that got further away than that would get tugged into an orbit around the Earth instead.

Russell W. Porter: Artic Explorer, Cutaway Artist, And Builder of the 200-Inch Palomar Telescope

Russell W. Porter (1871-1949) is one of those really interesting guys that few people have ever heard of. He first got interested in the Artic in 1892:

Porter caught what he would call Arctic fever when, in 1892, he attended a lecture by Robert Peary, who described his latest explorations in northern Greenland, which he had proved to be an island. The next year, the scientist Frederick Cook came to Boston to advertise a summer cruise up the coast of Greenland. Porter negotiated passage on Cook's voyage by offering to serve as surveyor and artist.

This would be the first of Porter's eight northern adventures over the next 15 years. The first ended above the Arctic Circle, when the small steamship was first damaged on a reef and then collided with an iceberg. The crew was rescued by Eskimos and returned to Boston by fishing boat.

Eskimo Boy, Umanak, Greenland, 1896, Watercolor

Porter's turn-of-the-century Artic sketches are fascinating. After his Artic fever had cooled, Porter became the "Father of Amateur Telescope Making":

It all began on August 17, 1920 when fifteen men and one woman signed up to learn how to grind their own mirrors and make powerful reflecting telescopes. Most of the men were machinists, tool makers or pattern makers at the Jones and Lamson Machine Company in Springfield. The lone woman was a school teacher.

Their instructor, Russell W. Porter, was well prepared to guide them through the demanding though rewarding steps which required them to work to accuracies one-thousandth as large as they were used to in their daily precision machine work. Porter had spent years on the Maine coast teaching himself the art and science of building telescopes. This practically nonexistent hobby he took up to satisfy a drive which had slowly grown during his eleven years as an arctic explorer with Perry, Cook, Fiala and others. That drive was to learn more about astronomy.

Today the Springfield Telescope Makers are still going strong at their world-famous Stellafane Observatory.  And Porter went on to play a pivotal role in the construction of the 200-inch reflector telescope at Mt. Palomar:

Porter Cutaway Drawing of Mt. Palomar

Just how good were Porter's drawings?

Famed artist Maxfield Parrish was quoted as saying the following about Porter's drawings: "If these drawings had been made from the telescope and its machinery after it had been erected they would have been of exceptional excellence, giving an uncanny sense of reality, with shadows accurately cast and well nigh perfect perspective; but to think that any artist had his pictorial imagination in such working order as to construct these pictures with no other mechanical data than blue prints of plans and elevation of the various intricate forms is simply beyond belief."

I've known about Russell Porter ever since I was a kid. And now you do too!

The 15-Year Global Journey of the Rubber Ducks

The 15-Year Global Journey of the Rubber Ducks

You can listen to the NPR interview here.

Dartmouth Chemist Karen Wetterhahn: Killed By Two Drops of Dimethylmercury

It happened on August 14, 1996. Excerpts from the story in the Dartmouth Alumni magazine:

The Wednesday in August that stole Karen Wetterhahn’s life seemed to be just another day in the lab. The chemist needed to transfer a small amount of a chemical from one container to another. As she always did when working in her lab, Wetterhahn donned her protective lab coat, goggles, and disposable latex gloves. Because the chemical she would be working with that day was dimethylmercury, a highly toxic and volatile liquid compound, the transfer would be done in a chemical fume hood. The ventilated hood would place a glass barrier between her and the mercury and create a convection current to draw vapors away from the air she would breathe.

Wetterhahn prudently asked her colleague David Lemal to help her with one part of the procedure—opening the sealed glass vial. Lemal chilled the vial in ice water to lower the vapor pressure of its contents. He scored around the top of the ampule with a file, cleanly snapped the top off, and left the lab. Using a syringe-like pipette, Wetterhahn drew a small amount of the dimethylmercury out of the vial, deposited it into a pencil-thin glass sample tube, then pipetted the rest into a small screw-top storage vial. In the process a drop or two of the liquid dripped from the pipette onto her left glove. She sealed and labeled the sample tube and storage vial—dimethylmercury 8/14/96 KEW—peeled off her gloves, left them in the fume hood, then thoroughly washed her hands. All standard procedures.

Karen Wetterhahn went home to her husband and two children. She should have gone straight to the hospital. For the dimethylmercury that had landed on her glove had penetrated the latex and then her skin and was already beginning a slow, unseen journey into her blood and into her brain.

Quantum Teleportation

Quantum Teleportation

Excerpts from research.ibm.com:

Teleportation is the name given by science fiction writers to the feat of making an object or person disintegrate in one place while a perfect replica appears somewhere else. How this is accomplished is usually not explained in detail, but the general idea seems to be that the original object is scanned in such a way as to extract all the information from it, then this information is transmitted to the receiving location and used to construct the replica, not necessarily from the actual material of the original, but perhaps from atoms of the same kinds, arranged in exactly the same pattern as the original. A teleportation machine would be like a fax machine, except that it would work on 3-dimensional objects as well as documents, it would produce an exact copy rather than an approximate facsimile, and it would destroy the original in the process of scanning it. A few science fiction writers consider teleporters that preserve the original, and the plot gets complicated when the original and teleported versions of the same person meet; but the more common kind of teleporter destroys the original, functioning as a super transportation device, not as a perfect replicator of souls and bodies. ...

As the figure suggests, the unscanned part of the information is conveyed from A to C by an intermediary object B, which interacts first with C and then with A. What? Can it really be correct to say "first with C and then with A"? Surely, in order to convey something from A to C, the delivery vehicle must visit A before C, not the other way around. But there is a subtle, unscannable kind of information that, unlike any material cargo, and even unlike ordinary information, can indeed be delivered in such a backward fashion. This subtle kind of information, also called "Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) correlation" or "entanglement", has been at least partly understood since the 1930s when it was discussed in a famous paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen. In the 1960s John Bell showed that a pair of entangled particles, which were once in contact but later move too far apart to interact directly, can exhibit individually random behavior that is too strongly correlated to be explained by classical statistics. Experiments on photons and other particles have repeatedly confirmed these correlations, thereby providing strong evidence for the validity of quantum mechanics, which neatly explains them. Another well-known fact about EPR correlations is that they cannot by themselves deliver a meaningful and controllable message. It was thought that their only usefulness was in proving the validity of quantum mechanics. But now it is known that, through the phenomenon of quantum teleportation, they can deliver exactly that part of the information in an object which is too delicate to be scanned out and delivered by conventional methods.

I'm glad I was able to clear that up before the weekend ;-)

The Barringer Meteor Crater: Where The Cosmic Apocalypse Meets Good Old-Fashioned American Capitalism

The Barringer Meteor Crater: Where The Cosmic Apocalypse Meets Good Old-Fashioned American Capitalism

Excerpts from another fine article at Roadside America:

Whenever a big enough rock tumbles from outer space and smacks into Earth, cataclysmic disaster is almost assured. But on the plus side, if anyone survives, the resulting hole becomes an instant tourist attraction. ...

Meteor Crater was blasted out of the surrounding sandstone about 50,000 years ago, and the dry Arizona climate has kept it close to impact-fresh ever since. That stroke of good fortune, however, was wasted on America's geologists, who for years insisted that the Crater was just another dead volcano.

Daniel Barringer, a mining engineer from Philadelphia, believed otherwise. He bought the Crater in 1903, convinced that it was made by a huge meteorite. He also believed that if he could find that meteorite, buried somewhere beneath the crater floor, he'd be rich. Daniel was right about the Crater, wrong about the meteorite. He drilled a 1,400-foot-deep shaft, found nothing, and died in 1929 when he ran out of money.

The Barringer family still owns the Crater, and has made a tidier profit as a tourist attraction than Daniel ever would have made from the meteorite. The Crater is such a big natural wonder that some people mistakenly believe it's owned by the government, and are sometimes unhappy to discover that they have to pay retail price to see it. But, you know, the Barringers have sunk a lot of cash into this place. They built a six-mile-long paved road between it and the interstate, and a nice visitor's center and museum, and even an elevator to take you to the rim if you don't want to climb the stairs.

Spooky Interaction

From NewScientist.com:

A quantum communication has been sent across a record 144 kilometres (90 miles) using a process which may one day be used to send secret messages across space via a network of satellites.

Quantum teleportation involves "entangling" two particles so that any change to the state of one also occurs instantly in its twin, wherever it may be.

The researchers entangle a pair of photons and then fire a single photon at one of the pair. The resulting interaction changes the state of both entangled photons, effectively teleporting a quantum bit of information - known as a qubit - from one place to another.

The entangled photons behave "like psychic twins", the researchers say: even if they are far apart, a disturbance to one affects the other - an oddity that Albert Einstein dubbed "spooky interaction."

Just How Clever Are Ravens?

Just How Clever Are Ravens?

From a fascinating article in Der Spiegel:

One of the trickiest challenges consists in making the raven sit on a bar with a piece of meat suspended vertically below it by a long string. What can the raven do to get at the dangling meal? There is only one solution: The raven has to use its beak to carefully pull the string a short way up. It then has to shape the string into a loop and place one talon on that loop. Then it has to pull the string up a little further and repeat the process. Done properly, the procedure allows the raven to gradually move the meat upward.

Too much trouble for a bird? The smartest ravens examined in Grünau patiently considered the challenge and then pulled the meat up. They discovered the right procedure right away. It seems they mentally rehearsed the problem before getting started.

Kurt Vonnegut's Brother Bernard Invented Silver Iodide Cloud Seeding While At General Electric

Kurt Vonnegut's Brother Bernard Invented Silver Iodide Cloud Seeding While At General Electric

Explained by everything2.com:

The cloud seeding technique was accidentally discovered by Vincent Joseph Schaefer (1906-1993) at a GE lab in Schenectady. Schaefer was interested in how ice forms on wings as planes pass through clouds. He used a home freezer to create clouds. One day in 1946, he added dry ice to his "cloud hatchery" to cool the internal temperature down. Much to his surprise, the clouds not only formed, but began to rain. Curious if this could be duplicated in Real Life, on November 13, 1946 he had a plane fly into a cloud over Mount Greylock, Massachusetts and seed the cloud with several pounds of dry ice pellets (the term cloud seeding likely got the name because the pellets looked like seeds).

A bit of a joker, Schaefer one day repeated his cloud seeding demonstration for GE brass, and he was able to get the dry ice pellets to disperse such that they "cut" GE's logo into the cloud on a rather massive scale.

Interestingly enough, Bernard Vonnegut (the brother of author Kurt Vonnegut) was an associate of Schaefer. He too was interested in the cloud seeding phenomenon. He suspected that if one could introduce a substance that was molecularly similar to ice, better results could be achieve. A literature search suggested silver iodide, which did indeed prove to be more effective than dry ice.

Bernard Vonnegut's earlier weather-related work was a project for the Army Signal Corps, wherein he worked on a project somewhat opposite of creating rain clouds. The Army wanted him to develop a method for clearing fog and overcast skies. This was probably the basis for Vonnegut's famous Ice-Nine invention in Cat's Cradle.

Snow Donuts aka Snow Doughnuts aka Snow Rollers

Snow Donuts

From The Seattle Times report with Mike Stanford, an avalanche-control expert with the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT).:

Stanford found frozen doughnuts of snow on the top of Washington Pass in the North Cascades this week when he was doing avalanche-control work. At first he couldn't believe his eyes: Perfectly shaped doughnuts had rolled down the mountainside and frozen in place.

He said it's only the second time in his 30 years of working in the snow that he's seen anything like it. The larger of the snow rollers, as they are commonly called, was about 24 inches tall, he said, large enough for him to put his head through the hole.

Stanford said snow rollers form when there is a hard layer on the snow, covered by several more inches of dense snow. "Then you add a steep slope and a trigger such as a clump of snow falling out of a tree or off of a rock face."

As gravity pulls a clump down, it usually rolls down the hill and collapses, creating what the WSDOT calls a pinwheel. Or it will not roll at all, and come down in an avalanche of snow. But if the snow is the perfect density and temperature, it rolls down leaving a hole in the center, Stanford said.

Back in February 2003 Central Illinois experienced widespread snow rollers. From the National Weather Service report:

Snowfall of 1 to 4 inches occurred across central Illinois the morning of February 11.  That evening, as a strong cold front pushed through the area, wind gusts of 40 to 60 mph were noted in many areas.

Once the initial "seed" of the roller is started, it begins to roll.  It collects additional snow from the ground as it rolls along, leaving trails behind it.  The appearance is similar to building snowmen, except the snowball is more log-shaped rather than spherical, and many times they are hollow.  They can be as small as a golf ball, or as large as a 30 gallon drum, but typically they are about 10 to 12 inches in diameter.

Here's just one of the many great photos from that outbreak:

Central Illinois Snow Rollers February 2003

(via Dvorak Uncensored)

Why Does Anyone Think Science Is A Good Job?

An excerpt from Philip Greenspun:

The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:

1. age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
2. age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
3. age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
4. age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
5. age 44: with young children at home (if lucky), fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s

This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.

So this is another possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs. That is, there are fewer women in that field not because they are dumber, but because they are smarter.

An Interesting Test: Draw A Capital Letter "E" On Your Forehead

... and then read this article.

Why The Earliest Sunset, Latest Sunrise, And Shortest Day Of The Year Occur On Different Dates

Setting. The analemma at 4:52 pm EST for every day of the year. If the date is December 7th, then the Sun is at the "lowest" position of the analemma, and sunset is just occurring. The Sun has not yet set at any other position on the analemma; that is, on any other date. Thus, December 7th is the date of the earliest sunset.

That's just one of the diagrams in this very clear explanation by John Holtz. Very well done.

Leonids Put On A Spectacular Display!

Leonids Put On A Spectacular Display!

How Animals Have Fun

Excerpts from Bernie DeKoven's FunLog:

• Ravens are noted players. Two ravens played 'rodeo' on two wind-whipped power lines, taking turns trying to grasp the second wire in the bill and hang on as long as possible.
• Rat gourmands will venture from a warm nook stocked with processed rat pellets into a deathly cold room to retrieve gourmet tidbits; lizards do the same thing. It's the animal equivalent of shunning the fruit bowl and dashing out for some doughnuts on a rainy night.
• Rats accustomed to being tickled ran to the investigator's hand four times as quickly, and made seven times more ultrasonic chirps, than did rats trained to be petted.
• Dusky dolphins sneak up on gulls resting on the water; they gently grab and briefly dunk the bird before letting go; the bird flutters, kicks, preens frenziedly, then flies off.
• Calvin Klein's fragrance Obsession for Men is strongly seductive to female cheetahs.

How Toddlers Toddle

How Toddlers Toddle

Yeah, I realize that a 4-year-old isn't exactly a toddler, but still it's pretty neat that they've figured out how to quantify this.

The Methanol Alternative

An excerpt from a review by Robert Zubrin:

Importantly, methanol can also be produced (in conjunction with an auxiliary electricity source, like nuclear power) by chemically recycling carbon dioxide, which can be found naturally in the air or readily captured from atmosphere-polluting industrial emissions. The methanol produced can, in turn, be used to produce synthetic hydrocarbons and other products now obtained from fossil fuels. If successfully tapped, methanol “has the ability to liberate mankind from its dependence on fossil fuels for transportation and hydrocarbon products,” while reducing the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere.

Consider ethanol as a comparison. The commercial competitiveness of ethanol is somewhat confused by the complex influences of a variety of subsidies and tariffs. By contrast, methanol is currently selling—without any subsidy—for about $0.80/gallon. Given that methanol’s energy content is about half that of gasoline, that price is the equivalent, in energy terms, of gasoline for $1.60/gallon. In other words, we can produce a useful and economically viable vehicle fuel, using a huge domestic and Western hemispheric resource base, at prices lower than gasoline.

Fair Weather Waterspouts

One of a number of waterspouts were spotted off the shores of Kenosha and Racine yesterday morning just before 9

From the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Miami, where these things are more common than on Lake Michigan:

Waterspouts are similar to tornadoes over water. Waterspouts are generally broken into two categories: fair weather waterspouts and tornadic waterspouts.

Tornadic waterspouts are simply tornadoes that form over water, or move from land to water. They have the same characteristics as a land tornado. They are associated with severe thunderstorms, and are often accompanied by high winds and seas, large hail, and frequent dangerous lightning.

Fair Weather waterspouts are usually a less dangerous phenomena, but common over South Florida’s coastal waters from late spring to early fall. The term fair weather comes from the fact that this type of waterspout forms during fair and relatively calm weather, often during the early to mid morning and sometimes during the late afternoon. Fair weather waterspouts usually form along dark flat bases of a line of developing cumulus clouds. This type of waterspout is generally not associated with thunderstorms whereas tornadic waterspouts develop in severe thunderstorms. Tornadic waterspouts develop downward in a thunderstorm while a fair weather waterspout begins to develop on the surface of the water and works its way upward. By the time the funnel is visible, a fair weather waterspout is near maturity.

And a bit more from the BBC Weather Centre:

Whereas a tornado forms underneath a large cumulonimbus cloud and descends from the base of the cloud to the ground, the fair weather waterspout's funnel starts at sea level and is drawn upwards. The mechanism is very similar to the small 'dust devils', or swirls of rising air lifting up small pieces of debris, that we can sometimes see on hot summer days overland.

Fair weather waterspouts, which are by far the most common of the two varieties, are most likely to form over the open sea, or large lakes, in the late summer or autumn when the sea temperature is at its highest.

If, then, a cool mass of air moves over the warm sea, the air becomes very humid and unstable, and this sets up strong convection currents which may be sufficient for a water spout to develop.

I suppose I really didn't need that last little bit from the BBC, but I just get a kick out of the way they spell "Centre". And to tell you the truth, I thought all waterspouts were tornadic.

Just a thought: Wouldn't it be neat if they made a re-make of The Wizard of Oz, but instead of a tornado you had a waterspout, and all the Munchkins were wearing SCUBA tanks? I think so.

Tom Lehrer vs Wernher von Braun: Whose Work Has Been Of Greater Benefit To Mankind?

Tom Lehrer vs Wernher von Braun: Whose Work Has Been Of Greater Benefit To Mankind?

Their lives are forever linked by this song penned in the 60's by Tom Lehrer:

Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown,
"Ha, Nazi, Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.

Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town,
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.**

You too may be a big hero,
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero.
"In German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun.

Biting satire, at least it was considered so forty years ago. And old Wernher was on the wrong side in WWII, no doubt about it. (Then again, so were the Communists in Russia, at least for a while, anyway.) But the question on the table is this: Whose Work Has Been Of Greater Benefit To Mankind?

Tom Lehrer wrote some amusing songs, and invented the Jello Shot, for all you alcoholics in my reading audience. Smart, witty guy, by all accounts. But in the Benefit-to-Mankind category, not much to show for it, really.

Wernher von Braun's work, on the other hand, led to the we-all-take-it-for-granted network of modern communications and weather satellites. So we can phone Ireland for less than we used to pay to call the next county. And we know where the hurricanes are, unlike those poor souls caught by surprise in the New England hurricane of 1938.

My point is not to criticize a forgotten show-biz type like Tom Lehrer. But hey, he brought it up.

Quiz: How Long Would The Second Hand Of A Clock Have To Be For The Tip Of It To Be Travelling At The Speed Of Light?

My shipmate Lester Sutton once figured this out on a long midnight-to-4AM watch.

Why Solar Eclipses Are So Dangerous

Why Solar Eclipses Are So Dangerous

As you know, a solar eclipse occurs when the Sun comes between the Earth and the Moon. Along the Path Of Totality, there is total destruction. This is why you should never look at the Sun during an eclipse, and why you should heed warnings to evacute the Path Of Totality until the All Clear signal is given.

Politicized Science

From Peggy Noonan:

During the past week's heat wave--it hit 100 degrees in New York City Monday--I got thinking, again, of how sad and frustrating it is that the world's greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not? If it is real, is it necessarily dangerous? What exactly are the dangers? Is global warming as dangerous as, say, global cooling would be? Are we better off with an Earth that is getting hotter or, what with the modern realities of heating homes and offices, and the world energy crisis, and the need to conserve, does global heating have, in fact, some potential side benefits, and can those benefits be broadened and deepened? Also, if global warning is real, what must--must--the inhabitants of the Earth do to meet its challenges? And then what should they do to meet them?

You would think the world's greatest scientists could do this, in good faith and with complete honesty and a rigorous desire to discover the truth. And yet they can't. Because science too, like other great institutions, is poisoned by politics. Scientists have ideologies. They are politicized.

All too many of them could be expected to enter this work not as seekers for truth but agents for a point of view who are eager to use whatever data can be agreed upon to buttress their point of view.

And so, in the end, every report from every group of scientists is treated as a political document. And no one knows what to believe. So no consensus on what to do can emerge.

If global warming is real, and if it is new, and if it is caused not by nature and her cycles but man and his rapacity, and if it in fact endangers mankind, scientists will probably one day blame The People for doing nothing.

But I think The People will have a greater claim to blame the scientists, for refusing to be honest, for operating in cliques and holding to ideologies. For failing to be trustworthy.

Two-Tone Lobster

Two-Tone Lobster

A rare two-toned lobster is seen in this Thursday, July 13, 2006, photo taken in Bar Harbor, Maine. The lobster caught by Alan Robinson in Dyer's Bay is a typical mottled green on one side; the other side is a shade of orange that looks cooked. Robinson, of Steuben, donated the lobster to the Mount Desert Oceanarium. Staff members say the odds or finding a half-and-half lobster are 1 in 50 million to 100 million.

Perfect Numbers

Excerpts from The Straight Dope:

Perfect numbers are a holdover from the days of the Pythagoreans, when mathematicians were mystics as much as anything else and put a lot more stock in coincidence. Start with a number. Find all the numbers that divide it evenly. Add them all up (other than the number itself), and sometimes you'll get your original number back again. These are the perfect numbers. For example, 6 is evenly divisible by 1, 2, and 3. 1+2+3 = 6. Others are:

• 28
• 496
• 8,128
• 33,550,336
• 137,438,691,328
• 2,305,843,008,139,952,128
• 2,658,455,991,569,831,744,654,692,615,953,842,176
• 191,561,942,608,236,107,294,793,378,084,303,638,130,997,321,548,169,216

These are the first 9 of the 38 known perfect numbers. ... So, why are only 38 perfect numbers known after all this time? Well, other than playing around with them, there's just not a lot that they're good for. I mean, if having a good list of perfect numbers could help split the atom or cure cancer you can bet mathematicians would be on the problem like Dopers on a grammatical error. As it is, we've just got more important things to work on, like whether you can untie this or that knot.

The Nuclear-Powered NR-1: The 11-Man Midget Submarine Of The US Navy

The Nuclear-Powered NR-1: The 11-Man Midget Submarine Of The US Navy

The NR-1 is what found the location of all the debris from the Space Shuttle Challenger back in 1986. Here's a bit of history on the NR-1 from Wikipedia:

It was launched on 25 January 1969, completed her initial sea trials 19 August 1969, and is homeported at Naval Submarine Base New London. It was never named or commissioned. The United States Navy is allocated a specific number of warships by the U.S. Congress. Not only did Admiral Hyman Rickover not want to "use up" one of those authorizations, but he also wanted to avoid the oversight that a warship receives from various bureaus.

So it's not the USS NR-1, it's just NR-1. More info from LT Doug Perry, the Executive Officer of the NR-1:

NR-1 is a nuclear-powered, deep-submergence submarine, capable of exploring ocean depths to 3,000 feet, which allows access to most of the world’s continental shelves. Displacing just under 400 long tons, she is roughly 1/16th the size of a Los Angeles-class submarine. Although her small size limits the underway crew to a mere three officers and eight enlisted men, the exceptional endurance of her nuclear propulsion plant allows the crew to conduct uninterrupted bottom operations for up to 30 days, restricted only by the food and air purification supplies on board. ...

Some of NR-1’s unique features include three viewing ports for visual observation, exterior lighting to support both television and still cameras, an object recovery claw, a manipulator arm for various gripping and cutting tools, and a work basket to hold items recovered from the sea. Unlike the smooth, faired black hulls of today’s SSNs and SSBNs, NR-1 is adorned with a bright orange sail, a flat superstructure deck topside, an awkward box keel underneath, and numerous protuberances around the ship, including two retract-able bottoming wheels – mounted with alcohol-filled Goodyear truck tires! These wheels give the ship her unique bottom-sitting and crawling capability. ...

Deployments on board NR-1 are akin to college or family road trips in an old Jetstream mobile home, and the amenities are Spartan. Although the hull is 145 feet long overall, the operations compartment and Engine Room combine for a total of only 58 feet, making the ship’s interior less roomy than a 737 airliner’s. Abaft the conn are equipment racks for computers, sensor electronics, and data-handling hardware. Next come the “mess decks” with a sink and one-gallon hot water heater, the convection oven, frozen and dry food storage, and a small entertainment center with a card table and book lockers in the overhead. These are followed by atmosphere control equipment and general storage, a head – without a shower – to port, and a set of bunk beds stacked four high to starboard.

Another great glimpse of life aboard can be found at A Dive On The NR-1.

Yerkes Observatory Virtual Museum And Virtual Tour

Yerkes Observatory Virtual Museum And Virtual Tour

At only 40 inches in diameter, it has long been dwarfed by other telescopes, such as the 200-inch giant on Mt. Palomar. But no matter. This is what people think of when they think of an astronomical observatory. This is the sort of telescope that Professor Pierson was looking through when he observed explosions at regular intervals coming from the planet Mars in War of the Worlds. Yes sir, this is the Real Deal.

The Virtual Museum will tell you about the history of the observatory, who Yerkes was, that sort of thing. The Virtual Tour will give you a glimpse of some of the amazing detail