This is the view of the solar eclipse just after sunrise yesterday (Tuesday 04/01/2011) from my study window. Like what eclipse? Typical of the UK to cock it up; can’t this country get anything right? Bah Humbug!
This is also my first photo for the “52 weeks” (ie. a photo a week) I’m doing this year. I hope I can keep up the standard of getting something off-beat each week. Watch this space.
I’ve been reading quite a bit over Christmas, so this week there’s a good selection of quotes; something for almost everyone here …
In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.
[Paul Harvey]
If people turn to look at you on the street, you are not well dressed.
[The Economist; unknown author and date]
You can’t prove that there isn’t a magic teapot floating around on the dark side of the moon with a dwarf inside of it that reads romance novels and shoots lightning out of its boobs but, it seems pretty unlikely, doesn’t it?
[Kurt Hummel]
A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, which instrument it is in the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements but not with as much strength, though it is deficient only in power of maintaining equilibrium.
[Leonardo da Vinci, The Flight of Birds, 1505]
Newton saw an apple fall and deduced Gravitation. You and I might have seen millions of apples fall and only deduced pig-feeding.
[Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher; Letter to the Times, 12 January 1920]
All dog-lovers must be interested in Lieutenant-Commander Elwell-Sutton’s account of his white whippet which insists on singing to the accompaniment of his (or, may I hope, his young son’s?) accordion – presumably one of those gigantic new instruments, invented, I think, in Italy, which make noises as loud as those made by cinema organs, and rather like them. This dog’s taste is low; but a musical ear is a musical ear.
[Sir John Squire; letter to the Times, 11 January 1936]
They [18th and early 19th century Quakers] became a bourgeois coterie of bankers, brewers and cocoa-grocers.
[Mr Ben Vincent, letter to the Times, 13 March 1974]
[The correct] forking technique is called the Continental method. It’s the method used in Europe as well as anywhere else that the British have killed the locals.
[Scott Adams]
Alice: Would you please tell me which way I ought to walk from here?
Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don’t much care where –
Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you walk.
Alice: – so long as I get somewhere.
Cheshire Cat: Oh, you’re sure to do that, if you only walk long enough.
[Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland]
Two, totally unrelated, oddities that have impinged on my eyes today. The first is from BBC News:
Abbey Road zebra crossing from Beatles cover listed
This seems to be a nonsense. How do you list a zebra crossing? What is being listed? What is there now is not the same crossing as when the Beatles created Abbey Road: the road has been resurfaced, the zebra stripes repainted and zig-zigs added. Or is there to be an archaeological excavation to see if the Beatles’ era road surface remains? Or is the current road never to be resurfaced or repainted?
Secondly …
Mutant Mouse Chirps Like a Bird
“It’s furry like a mouse but sings like a bird […] It’s a mutant mouse developed by the genetic engineers at the University of Osaka that is able to tweet and chip like a bird, instead of a mouse’s normal squeak […] The research group currently has over a hundred singing mice […] it seems that they use their chirp in different ways than normal mice use their squeaks. The more conventional squeaks are used when a mouse is stressed, while the singing mouse seems to use its chirp in different environments, including in the presence of mates.”
Douglas Adams thou shouldst be living at this time!
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose,
but queerer than we can suppose.[JBS Haldane]
I’ve today spotted the following on PubMed. The mind boggles!
Removal of a Long PVC Pipe Strangulated in the Penis by Hot-Melt Method.
Jiatao J, Bin X, Huamao Y, Jianguo H, Bing L, Yinghao S.
Department of Urology, Changhai Hospital, […] China.Abstract
Introduction. Penile incarceration for erotic or autoerotic purposes has been reported in a wide range of age groups, and often presents a significant challenge to urologic surgeons. No ready method has been reported for removing a polyvinylchloride (PVC) pipe entrapped on the penis. Aim. To present our experience in using hot-melt method to remove a constricted PVC pipe on the penis. Methods. A long melting split was made on the PVC pipe entrapped on the penis by using the long narrow branch of forceps heated on a gas stove. Results. The heated forceps was able to make a melt split on the PVC pipe. Consequently, the PVC pipe was removed by pulling the edges of the pipe apart without much difficulty. The total operation time was 20 minutes. Conclusion. Penile incarceration is a urologic emergency, for which resourcefulness is required in some unexpected cases. Hot-melting has proved to be an easy and effective method for removing penile strangulation by a PVC pipe. To our knowledge, it is the first report about the removal of PVC pipe entrapped on a penis.
Voyager 1 is one of the most successful space missions of all time. (See the Bad Astronomy blog and NASA for lots more detail.) Launched in 1977, it visited Jupiter and then Saturn, providing better close-ups of the two planets than had ever been seen before. But it sailed on, crossing the orbits of both Uranus and Neptune (its sister, Voyager 2, actually flew by these two planets). Now after 33 years, it is 17 billion kilometres (10.6 billion miles) from the Sun and has reached the point where the solar wind has slowed to a stop. In another 3-4 years it will truly be in interstellar space and entirely beyond the sun’s influence.
Just imagine! Voyager was built and launched before personal computers were everywhere (it was 4 years before IBM PC was announced), before cell phones were a commodity and when the internet was still a research and defence tool! It is based on Z80 (remember the Sinclair ZX80?) and/or 1807 computer chips. It is still phoning home to send back streams of useful data and its battery/power supply is expected to last until 2025 – that’ll be almost 50 years in service! Even more amazing is the thought that Voyager 1 has already been flying for almost a third of the time since the Wright Brothers first heavier than air flight in 1903.
And Voyager 1’s sister Voyager 2 is doing much the same, but flying in a totally different direction. What’s more earlier this year engineers reset the software in Voyager 2 to correct a fault which was corrupting its data transmissions. And that’s with a transmission delay of around 15 hours! – so 15 hours for the signal to reach Voyager and at least another 15 hours before you know if its received and working.
On top of that these two spacecraft are fractionally not where they should be according to our best theories of ballistics. That in itself is proving to be interesting new science as the cosmologists try to understand why this is.
As one a commenter at Bad Astronomy says:
I’m not sure what’s most amazing – that this machine is still working after 30 years in deep space (hell, how many machines do you know that can work non-stop without maintenance for 30 years in a nice warm garage?), the incredible distance that this probe has brought our eyes to by proxy, the fact that it’s literally leaving the breath of the sun behind and venturing into the still coldness of interstellar space, or the fact that we can actually communicate with the probe over such distances.
However you look at it this is some stunning achievement!
If you’re interested in archaeology, history, science, engineering or Lego go read the unbearable lightness of LEGO.
I knew about the Antikythera Mechanism, a supposed 2000 year old Greek computing machine recovered from an ancient shipwreck in 1900. But I didn’t know anyone had worked out in such detail what it did, let alone built a working model – in Lego!
The Cocktail Party Physics piece, and the videos etc. it links to, tell more of the story.
It’s a fascinating read even though I still have this sinking feeling the mechanism is going to turn out to be one of those elaborate Victorian hoaxes. Hope I’m wrong, though.
From the Feedback column of New Scientist, 4 December 2011 …
Composing witty error messages has long been one of the ways […] in which geeks try to show their human side. We’re not so sure what species of side is exhibited by the geeks responsible for the nLab, a website devoted to “collaborative work on Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy” in the context of “category theory”, which is … er … a set of mathematical tools for describing general abstract structures in mathematics and relations between them. And the general abstract relations between those relations, and so on up …
It is perhaps inevitable that the holding page they have prepared for times when the nLab site isn’t working […] announces that it is […]
“currently experiencing some difficulties due to local fluctuations in reality. The Lab Elves are working hard to patch reality. In the meantime, edits on the nLab have been temporarily disabled since the fundamentals of mathematics may vary during these spasmodic variations. Normal service will be restored once we are sure what ‘normal’ is.”
Just three this week …
It is good to rub and polish your mind against that of others.
[Michel de Montaigne]Our life depends on others so much that at the root of our existence is a fundamental need for love. That is why it is good to cultivate an authentic sense of responsibility and concern for the welfare of others.
[Dalai Lama]I’m selfish, impatient, and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I’m out of control and at times I’m hard to handle, but if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.
[Marliyn Monroe]
This week’s rather scrawny crop …
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign – that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
[Jonathan Swift]The more we learn about irrational beliefs, the clearer it becomes that they are perfectly normal
[Editorial, New Scientist, 13/11/2010]You can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in.
[Arlo Guthrie]You are not what you were born, but what you have it in yourself to be.
[From the film Kingdom of Heaven (2005)]