Science Made Cool

Piling On

It's very seldom one has the chance to declare that one of the world's foremost geniuses is dead wrong, and I'm certainly not going to pass up the opportunity. Dr. Stephen Hawking is a world-renowned physicist, an expert on cosmology and black holes, among other topics. He's a Very Smart Guy. He held Newton's chair as Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge (although in Newton's day it wasn't motorized). He is, as has been mentioned, a Very Smart Guy Indeed. But that doesn't stop him from being wrong.

Looking Straight at the Sun

The first images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory were released this week, and they're stunning. They're also giving us a better look at our sun's dynamic behavior than we've ever had before. Get a load of that solar flare.

              
 

You can see more images (and movies) here and read more about the mission here. 

Photo: NASA/Goddard/SDO AIA Team

Cool Ad

Just look at it.  Hope it squeezes some more visitors into the Copenhagen Zoo.

Thanks to Eric Mead for the pointer. 

Food of the Gods

Mushrooms are one of my favorite foods. During a trip to Japan a couple of years ago I was delighted to discover that pretty much the whole nation shares my taste for edible fungi. Mushrooms for breakfast! Japan is a major mushroom producer and importer, so it's not surprising that Japanese biologists spend a lot of time studying mushrooms. Presumably most of them are not as borderline-lunatic as this guy mentioned in an earlier 'blog post.

Because they're such a favorite, mushrooms show up in Japanese pop culture -- most famously in the Mario games from Nintendo, and in the cult movie classic Matango: Fungus of Terror.

Becoming Robots

More weird, cool, slightly creepy, and ultimately very sad news from Japan. A crew of engineers at Tokyo Agriculture and Technical University have been developing a power-assist suit which can amplify the wearer's strength by as much as 62 percent. Who are they building it for? Crime-fighting heroes? Super-soldiers? Plucky alien-fighting teenagers?

Farmers. Japanese farmers, whose average age is now getting so high most of them are having trouble doing basic farm chores. So instead of the country allowing more immigration, or finding a way to encourage larger families, the farmers can simply wear robot suits.

The "greying" of the country is a problem affecting many sectors of Japanese society, and apparently there's no social problem in the Empire of Japan that can't be cured by throwing robots at it.  

The AMNH Dinosaur app: Alas, more flash than substance

When I heard that the American Museum of Natural History had released a free app for iPhone and iPod Touch based on their phenomenal dinosaur fossil halls, I could hardly wait to try it out. The museum advertised it as a way to “explore the fossil halls in depth,” and I was eager to see how they would translate their information-rich exhibits of significant fossils collected over the past century to an interactive hand-held format. Maybe my expectations were too high. Dinosaurs is beautiful to look at, but there’s not much substance under its visually arresting skin.

The application opens with a photograph of a Tyrannosaurus rex skull, which dissolves into an ingenious photographic mosaic of the image. Color photographs make up the skull itself, set against a lighter background made of black and white drawings and photos from the museum’s archives. Tapping the mosaic image lets you zoom in to see individual photographs, and an “info” button lets you display a more detailed description of each picture. A “Stories” button at the bottom of the screen brings up a list of 6 specific dinosaur fossils in the museum’s collection. Tapping each of these fossil images brings up a nice illustrated article by Lowell Dingus describing how the fossil was collected and what the animal was like in life. Barring updates, those are the only six dinosaurs you’re really going to learn about in depth – the photo mosaic contains over 800 images, but the descriptions attached to each of them are no more than a couple of lines long. What’s worse, there’s no indexing or search function, making it tough to re-find specific pictures.

It’s very pretty but frankly, I found it disappointing. The mosaic is a lovely opening screen, but the fact that it makes up most of the program seems to me to be a missed opportunity. Wouldn’t it be better if the mosaic photos were jumping off points for more in-depth explorations? What if clicking on a photo of a Triceratops skull showed you how that species fit in the tree of dinosaur relationships? Or clicking the photo of the famous Oviraptor fossil on its nest opened a discussion of what’s known about parental care in dinosaurs? Or clicking the archival photos of Barnum Brown or Roy Chapman Andrews opened their biographies or their field notebooks? The science and history of paleontology is incredibly rich: I hope that future updates of the app take better advantage of it. 

Movies And Your Brain

Recently I've been interested in the neurology of storytelling. As a writer, it's only prudent for me to attempt to learn as much as possible about how my readers' brains are processing the stuff I write. Perhaps someday it will be possible to quantify what makes good writing, so that even billboard ads and Twitter updates will be like perfect little haikus.

Or not.

I ran across a recent article on PhysOrg about how the distribution of shot lengths within a film tend to fit a Fourier transform model. (I'm no mathematician myself so I had to take that part on pure faith.) To simplify:  the length of the shots correlates inversely with their number, along a particular curve. So a film has lots of quick cuts, a smaller number of longer shots, and then very few really long uninterrupted shots. Action movies are the best fit, while noir films of the 1940s appear to diverge the most in their distribution of shot lengths.

Epic!

Today's Irregular Webcomic strip includes an absolutely epic rant by David Morgan-Mar about the evils of Monopoly. Not monopolies in business, but the game Monopoly. (Scroll down beneath the comic strip to behold its ranty majesty.)

What's particularly interesting is that all the things people dislike about Monopoly were conscious design decisions by its creator. Elizabeth Magie was a follower of the "single tax" movement founded by Henry George, and she designed "The Landlord's Game" to show the evils of private ownership of land -- following orthodox 19th century crackpot economic doctrine, the rich gradually acquire all the land and everyone else winds up penniless. In other words, it's supposed to be no fun. But millions (possibly billions) of people have played it for a century despite that.

They should all be playing Bone Wars instead.

No Fooling

The mighty Language Log 'blog has some very good news today, quoting a British Court of Appeals decision in favor of journalist Simon Singh. Mr. Singh was sued by a group of British chiropractors after he published an article citing studies which contradicted some of the assertions of their particular brand of quackery. This is a big deal because Britain has very plaintiff-friendly libel laws, and various nut-cults, quacks, and crooks have been bringing suit there against critics as a way of silencing them. This decision may represent a return to sanity for British courts.

Also from the U.K.: a classic science video from the B.B.C., via Ephemeral Isle.