Category Archives: science

amusements, environment, science

Fact of the Week: Blue Moons

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The term “blue moon” comes from the traditional agricultural naming of the full moons throughout the year.

The 12 full moons we see each year are named according to their relationship with the equinoxes and solstices. The names vary in different regions, but well-known examples are the harvest moon, which is the first full moon after the autumnal equinox, and the hunter’s moon, which is the second full moon after the autumnal equinox. Similarly the Lenten moon, the last full moon of winter, is always in Lent, and the egg moon (or the Easter moon, or paschal moon), which is the first full moon of spring, is always in the week before Easter.

By this system there are usually three full moons between an equinox and a solstice, or vice versa. However, because the lunar cycle is slightly too short for there to always be three full moons in this stretch of time, occasionally there are four full moons. When this happens, to ensure that the full moons continue to be named correctly with respect to the solstices and equinoxes, the third of the four full moons is called a blue moon.

There are seven blue moons in every 19 year period. The last blue moon was on 21 November 2010, and the next will be on 21 August 2013.

[Aidan Copeland in “The Last Word”, New Scientist, 1 October 2011]

food+drink, memes, music, personal, quotes, science

Ten Things – October

Number 10 in my monthly series of “Ten Things” for 2011. Each month I list one thing from each of ten categories which will remain the same for each month of 2011. So at the end of the year you have ten lists of twelve things about me.

  1. Something I Like: Tea
  2. Something I Won’t Do: Halloween
  3. Something I Want To Do: Fly on Flightdeck of an Airliner
  4. A Blog I Like: Bad Science
  5. A Book I Like: Nick McCamley; Secret Underground Cities: an Account of Some of Britain’s Subterranean Defence, Factory and Storage Sites in the Second World War
  6. Some Music I Like: Moody Blues, Octave
  7. A Food I Like: Swiss Chard
  8. A Food or Drink I Dislike: Milk
  9. A Word I Like: Persiflage
  10. A Quote I Like: Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And East is East and West is West and if you take cranberries and stew them like apple sauce they taste more like prunes than a rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know? [Groucho Marx]
amusements, science

No Sense of the Ridiculous

Three snippets from the “Feedback” column of this week’s New Scientist. Some people really do have no sense of the ridiculous.

“Generations of medical students and doctors have been taught to tell their patients to ‘never put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear’,” Michael Glanfield, himself a doctor, assures us. The Asda supermarket chain has clearly taken this advice to heart. The warning on its own brand “D” battery, which has a diameter of 3.3 centimetres, states “…if swallowed or lodged in the ear or nose seek prompt medical attention”.

Geoffrey Hardman is grateful to transportdirect.info for warning him: “Certain combinations of outward and return journeys would result in you needing to leave your destination before arriving at it”.

“By now you will have noticed that the sole purpose of our exotic expeditions is to gather gems for Feedback,” says regular contributor Jenny Narraway. Her latest is the multilingual wording on a waste bin seen on a walking holiday in the Azores. It said: “Lixo Indiferenciado” for Portuguese speakers, “Poubelle Indiferencie” for French speakers and, for the English, “Undistinguished trash”.

Why is the waste bin on a walking holiday, one wonders?

amusements, links, science

Sublimely Ridiculous

This week’s selection of things which attracted my attention and which you may have missed …

Can the human body combust spontaneously? Most of us think not, unless you’re an Irish Coroner.

Fake degree? Check. Fake Rolex? Check. Fake girlfriend? What? You want fake girlfriend? OK, then see here and here.

Bored with your current home? Fancy your own Lord of the Rings film set? Then build your own Hobbit home. Must admit it looks comfy, but where’s the bathroom?

Now you’ve mastered being an architect here’s just the thing for your design studio … Use your Amazon Kindle as an Etch-a-Sketch. Sadly available only in the US.

And finally the big news of the week: Wasabi fire alarm scoops Ig Nobel prize! Yes, it’s that time of year when the Ig Nobel awards are announced. If you’ve missed out on them before they are serious scientific prizes which honour achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think”. Full reports here and here.

Enjoy your weekend!

current affairs, environment, links, medical, science, sexuality, topographical

It's Been a Busy Week!

There seems to have been a lot going on this week which drew my attention but which I didn’t get to write about here. So here’s a summary (in no particular order) …

First an interesting item on how belief can kill. It’s a curious phenomenon but even so I can’t bring myself to read the book. See The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills.

Much more interesting and useful is a long article on the National Geographic site about the workings of Teenage Brains and how this should be seen as a sensible evolutionary trait. It might also help all of us understand and relate with teenagers. It certainly seems to explain quite a lot.

Next an investigative journalism piece about the Fukishima Disaster and especially the long-term effects on the Japanese population. The suggestion is that the effects of stress etc. will be far more significant than the actual radiation doses (I guess excluding the immediately affected workers). For my money the article still doesn’t delve deep enough — but the journo writing it probably couldn’t get access to do so.

Law and Lawyers has written several pieces about the worrying machinations of the Metropolitan Police in attempting to get The Guardian to reveal some of its sources. First they were going to use the Official Secrets Act, then PACE 1984. For now though it seems the dogs of war remain caged.

Also this week Obiterj at Law and Lawyers has pointed out that the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011 comes into force. This means the next General Election will be on 7 May 2015 — unless both Houses of Parliament decide otherwise by a two-thirds majority.

Which for a scientist somewhat pales into insignificance beside the apparent result from a team at CERN that they have detected neutrinos doing the impossible and travelling faster than light. But hold on guys, they don’t quite relieve it either and they’re asking the scientific community for help to test their results. Good scientific commentary by Adrian Cho at Wired and Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy.

Finally back to earth. There’s been lots of twittering in the dovecotes about female orgasm, how it relates to evolutionary pressures and to male orgasm. Also some good demonstrations on how to demolish a (supposedly) scientific study. The best of the critiques I’ve seen is from Scicurious. Maybe you girls should just be allowed to enjoy it?

Have an orgasmic weekend!

science, thoughts

We Live in Peaceful Times

What do you mean, you don’t agree? According to Michael Shermer in his article The Decline of Violence in the October 2011 issue of Scientific American, there is very much less violence now, per head of population, than there was in times of old.

English philosopher Thomas Hobbes​ … argued in his 1651 book, Leviathan, that … acts of violence would be commonplace without a strong state to enforce the rule of law. But aren’t they? What about 9/11 and 7/7, Auschwitz and Rwanda … What about all the murders, rapes and child molestation cases we hear about so often? Can anyone seriously argue that violence is in decline?
…
Take homicide. Using old court and county records in England, scholars calculate that rates have plummeted by a factor of 10, 50 and, in some cases, 100—for example, from 110 homicides per 100,000 people per year in 14th-century Oxford to fewer than one homicide per 100,000 in mid-20th-century London. Similar patterns have been documented in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Scandinavia.
…
As for wars, prehistoric peoples were far more murderous than states in percentages of the population killed in combat, [Harvard University social scientist Steven] Pinker told me: “On average, nonstate societies kill around 15 percent of their people in wars, whereas today’s states kill a few hundredths of a percent.”

I have no reason to doubt either Shermer or Pinker, but, yes, I was surprised too.

medical, science

Colour Test

Apparently 1 in 255 women and 1 in 12 men have some form of colour sight deficiency. Well yes, we know that red-green colour blindness is a largely male inherited trait. But of course it’s more complicated than that.

Thanks to Ed Yong over at Discover Blogs I’ve just found this rather strange, and quite tricky colour acuity test. It’s not a test for colour blindness as such but more about how well you differentiate colours.

Try it. It’ll take about 5 minutes.

Oh and I scored 7, which seems pretty good (0 is best; 100 is worst).

There’s a lot more on colour vision and colour blindness on Wikipedia.

amusements, science

Fact of the Week

You can’t comb a hairy ball smoothly. Or to state it more correctly in topology: any smooth vector field on a sphere has a singular point.

[from Ian Stewart, Professor Stewart’s Hoard of Mathematical Treasures]