North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences: Underground

Hiddenite crystal with card Mr. William Earl Hidden, July 24, 1905

This antique was my favorite object on display in the Museum’s “Underground” exhibit. A card from William Hidden (1853-1918), a mineralogist sent to North Carolina by Thomas Edison to look for platinum, and for whom the gem is named.

See the complete flickr set here.

Science Etecetera Saturnday, 20080329

Large Hadron Collider

Before the first atomic bomb was set off, physicists had to prove it wouldn’t set the Earth on fire. Now there is a lawsuit to prevent turning on the Large Hadron Collider for fears that it might create black holes, stranglets, and magnetic monopoles that could hypothetically destroy us all.

Al Gore totally pimp-slaps skeptics on Global Warming.

Hackers have attacked epileptics by posting seizure-inducing images to the Epilepsy Foundation’s forums.

For $10k, Celestis Inc will put a small amount of your cremated ashes on the Moon, as soon as Odyssey Moon Ltd. starts putting rovers up there.

For $5.50, MyBabyTree.org will plant a tree in Indonesia and give you its coordinates in Google Earth so you can watch it grow.

A snag in futurist hopes for space elevators, the gravitational pull of the Sun and Moon would produce waves in the cable. Simulation below:

The dittohead spin sheep-herding machine is in full force ridiculing tonight’s Earth Hour.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has entered the food chain.

Science meets the humanities with Galapagos Poetry.

Squid Beaks are an amazing merging of materials from hard to soft that will inspire biomimicry in technology.

Moment of Science, Levitating Frogs with superconductivity (HT oranchak)

29-MAR-2008 @ 2000 Local: Earth Hour 2008

Earth at Night Image by NASA

Tonight at 8:00 pm is Earth Hour 2008, brainchild of Australia’s World Wildlife Fund. The idea is to turn off all your lights between the hours of 8 and 9 pm your local time. People all over the world are taking part, and even cities are shutting down lights around their landmarks and government buildings. Let’s get ready to do some looting!!!

Ha! Ha! Kidding. Kidding. I’ve signed up to take part as a symbolic gesture. The astronomer in me romanticizes the idea of a massive intentional blackout rolling across our planet’s time zones. Light pollution is a serious problem, but there won’t be enough participation in Elizabeth City to bring the stars back, and the event takes place too early for truly dark skies.

Maybe I’ll spend the hour reading a book by LED light, or is that cheating? How about if I read that book by the light of my cell phone. Technically that’s not a light, but the battery was charged before and after the Earth Hour, so I’m using the same electricity. I own an oil lamp. That’s not an electric light, but isn’t that a much less efficient use of energy?

I wish the WWF was a little bit clearer about this. The spirit of the event is obviously to save electricity, but people like me sit in front of our computers in the dark anyway. If I turn off my computer, then I’m just sitting in the dark, when I could be blogging about LEDs, Solar Panels, Wind Energy, and all the other innovations that will really get us out of this mess.

Sitting in the dark like stone age humans isn’t the best strategy for working our way through Global Warming, innovation is. We need to innovate our way out of this problem, overcome the oil-industry tax breaks and corporate special interests that are preventing us from evolving technologically so they can keep us reliant on their antiquated patents.

I’ll turn off my lights for the hour tonight, but I have a sinking feeling that this plays into skeptics’ arguments that environmentalism wants to deprive us of all our modern innovations, when the reality is that we would prefer technology to evolve onto better things.

Science Etcetera Venusday, 20080328

Engraving by W. Swanenburg of the anatomical theater in Leiden, 1610.

The history of anatomy and autopsy theater from the Enlightenment.

Want to save 6.6 pounds of paper, 0.08 trees, and 171 pounds of greehouse gases a year? Switch to online bill payments.

The mesquite girdler oncideres rhodostica is a beetle living in the Chihuahua desert that farms shrubs for its larvae.

Study shows that the more informed people are about global warming, the more apathetic they are to fighting it.

Global warming is thawing frozen corpses carrying smallpox in the Siberian tundra.

Suck it Edison! An 1860 French recording predates Edison’s invention by two decades.

A new algorithm will solve a Rubik’s Cube in 25 moves, and the Computer Scientists thinks he can get it down to 24.

The Christian Crusaders left a genetic footprint in the Middle East.

Earth continents 250 million years from now.

Green gone bad. In California, you can have your neighbors’ trees cut down if they shade your new solar panels.

Further proof that the market does not reward sustainability, Toyota must sell more SUVs to offset selling the Prius.

There is a scientific basis for meditation making people more compassionate.

Here’s a shocker, neaderthals wore make-up and had language.

DIY DNA and Paternity tests.

Moment of Science, Time-Lapsed Twining Motion of Climbing Vines:

Quoted in ABC Science

I’m quoted in Fran Malloy’s ABC Science article Internet connectivity about social networking and it’s effects on culture.

This is a bit awkward, seeing as how I recently knocked on the ABC for hosting science quacks.

Numerical Tic-Tac-Toe

Here’s a cool spin on a game you probably haven’t played since you solved it in elementary school. You and another player take turns naming numbers one through nine. Each number may only be used once. The player who collects any three numbers that add up to 15 wins. If all numbers are used up without someone getting 15, the game is a draw.

Once two players have figured out all the strategies to winning the game, it becomes easy, and imperative, to prevent the opponent from winning. Just like Tic-Tac-Toe, two experienced players will have games that always end in a draw, which is important for teaching an advanced Artificial Intelligence why nobody wins playing Global Thermo-Nuclear Warfare–sorry, had a flashback to the 1983 movie War Games there.

In the research paper The Game of JAM: An Isomorph of Tic-Tac-Toe, John A. Michon notes how this game promotes a different way of thinking about a classic problem (he refers to this game as “Number Scrabble”):

Although the games are mathematically equivalent, they are likely to differ psychologically, because they require different sorts of information. Number Scrabble is a numerical game requiring addition and subtraction of numbers, whereas Tic-Tac-Toe requires a spatial representation, which can only be disposed of with some difficulty, even by fairly experienced players.

Tic-Tac-Toe and the Numerical version are Mathematically equivalent, and we can plot this out visually. In the table below, all rows, columns, and diagonals add up to 15.

4	3	8
9	5	1
2	7	6

Plaing Tic-Tac-Toe on this grid is the same as playing the numerical version. You can find a shockwave demonstration of this principle to play for yourself. This website calls the game Add Fast.

Taking the number five opens up four paths to victory. The numbers {1, 3, 7, 9} each open another path. {2, 4, 6, 8} are the least valuable strategically.

This seems like a cool game to play with your kids. When they get good at it, show them the relationship to Tic-Tac-Toe. Or you can learn the number-grid, and amaze your friends by kicking their butts at this game.

Science Etcetera Jupiterday, 20080327

Unknown Nebula

Ohhhh… Ahhhhh…

Smoking in the first five months has negligible health effects on unborn children (HT Clint).

The bizarre reality behind squid sex.

Two-thirds of NASA’s major new programs are over budget or behind schedule. Might be why Alan Stern stepped down as head of science programs at NASA.

CT scans can reduce lung cancer deaths by 80 percent says research funded by a cigarette company.

Biggest Rabbit Ever.

China’s government admits that Three Gorges Dam is an environmental disaster.

Nokia, Pioneer, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and many other companies are infringing on the patent for LEDs.

Counter-intuitive, but training fish to jump into nets could make for an environmentally-friendly way to farm them.

Bill Gates plays it, Radiohead plays it, the cool game for geeks Contract Bridge.

Hydrogen sulfide gas, which smells of rotten eggs, produces suspended animation in mice.

90 percent of the hibernating bats in four caves and mines in New York have died since last winter.

A lack of oxygen and an overabundance a lack of molydenum prevented animal life from appearing on Earth for 2 billion years.

Spiders save energy by living upside-down.

Humans lived in Europe 1.3 million years ago.

Researchers have identified all 1,116 proteins found in human spit.

100 Educational Websites for Kids.

Science is a universal language, so even though today’s Moment is in Spanish, I think it’s possible to follow The Science of Cowboy and Cowgirl Flatulence:

Clarifying the Science Behind Global Cooling

“It is easy to lie with statistics; it is easier to lie without them.” – Frederick Mosteller

Global Cooling Trend Close-Up of Last Decade

Yesterday I posted this image of what climatologists are claiming is evidence of warming in the last decade, and explained how it actually shows a cooling trend; however, it has come to my attention that the methodology I used, while completely legitimate in a completely fallacious sense, did violate the scientific principle of Occam’s Razor, which states that the simplest explanation is the most likely.

The problem with this graph is that there are way too many dots on it, making it too complex. A much simpler graph, with fewer dots, would clear things up and show how the world has actually cooled in the last decade.

Global Cooling Trend Simplified Close-Up of Last Decade Simplified

See? Isn’t that cleaner? Easier to understand? Occam’s Razor baby. That’s right. This is what those Global Warming cooks don’t want you to see. How about we apply this principle to the whole last century of temperature data?

Global Cooling Trend over the Last Century

Warming Versus Cooling

Where’s your warming now Al Gore? Huh? As we can see from this graph, most of this century has been on a cooling trend. Take all those shaded parts that I’ve so helpfully shaded and all the non-shaded parts that I’ve so helpfully not shaded and put them on a statistical bar graph thing like you see in power point, and look what you get. You get this pic over here to the right, with the red cooling bar being much much bigger, like three times much much bigger than the warming bar.

How can anyone look at this concrete visual data and not see Global Warming’s a crock?

Here’s more on Dr. Marohasy’s global cooling assertions.

Science Etcetera Mercuryday, 20080326

Map of the Apollo 11 Moonwalk

On their moonwalk, the Apollo 11 crew barely covered a soccer field’s worth of moonscape.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica is on the verge of collapse. National Geographic has satellite photos of the ice shelf collapsing (HT Carolyn).

Dan Zarrella has fascinating anecdotes from the history of contagious laughter.

A new research paper challenges previous research connecting frog die-offs to climate change.

Russian divers draw on styrofoam cups and take them down with them on deep-sea dives, returning with cups shrunken from the pressure.

The new Star Trek movie will include the new electric hybrid car the Aptera.

Eyeglasses do not make the geek.

Sharks head to deeper water when a storm’s approaching.

ApriPoko is a robot you teach to be a universal remote with verbal instruction.

Columbia University is dismantling the Cyclotron and selling it for scrap, the particle accelerator was used in experiments that led to the development of the atomic bomb.

Results pending. Researchers are exploring the possibility that trees worsen droughts by siphoning water off of the water table.

LOL Clownfish (HT Clint)

Moment of Science, check out NG’s flash-based tour of the solar system.

National Geographic Tour of the Solar System

More Global Cooling Evidence Embarrasses the IPCC Orthodoxy

A recent article that appeared in The Australian, Climate facts to warm to, has the transcript of an important interview with Dr. Jennifer Marohasy a biologist, free market advocate, and Global Warming skeptic.

When asked “Is the Earth still warming?” Dr. Marohasy replied:

No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.

Surprising right? Why haven’t all those Global Warming Climatologists been talking about this? Especially, as Dr. Marohasy points out, they don’t deny it:

The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognizes that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued…

We can clearly see this plateau here:

Global Cooling Trend

Global Cooling Trend Close-Up

In case you can’t see it, here’s a zoom in of the last ten years to the right. You can see the obvious cooling trend. Notice the way the red median line looks like it sorta wants to curve just a little bit there? If you use your imagination, you can clearly visualize this red line actually pointing in the opposite direction.

Go ahead. Just imagine that. Imagine this picture upside down. That’s what Dr. Marohasy is talking about. Why are Climatologists at the IPCC ignoring this important fact being imagined in the brains of climate skeptics? Why? Why is the IPCC and MSM refusing to cover this important visualization research?

And what about the NASA Aqua satellite, which has been collecting data since 2002 on Earth’s atmospheric temperatures, water cycles, and sea-ice levels? Dr. Marohasy brings up the satellite’s research several times, but NASA only publishes the data that supports their preconceived notions of global warming, like melting Arctic Ice and global temperatures. There’s a lot of data supporting this cooling trend that Dr. Marohasy has so much faith-based evidence for, and the fact that NASA doesn’t have it on their website, just further proves how real it is. NASA is trying our faith.

And what about the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri’s blatant acknowledgement about the recent temperature stall? Here’s some damning highlights from the article:

Last year was among the six warmest years since records began in the 1850s and the British Met Office said last week that 2008 will be the coolest year since 2000, partly because of a La Nina event that cuts water temperatures in the Pacific.

“We are in a minor La Nina period which shows a little cooling in the Pacific Ocean,” Delju told Reuters. “The decade from 1998 to 2007 is the warmest on record and the whole trend is still continuing.”

The record year for world temperatures was 1998, ahead of 2005, according to WMO data. Among recent signs of the effects of warming, Arctic sea ice shrank last year to a record low. (emphasis mine)

“2008 will be the coolest year since 2000,” got that? Let me italicize, underline, and follow it with some exclamation marks just in case you missed it: “2008 will be the coolest year since 2000!!!”

God Bless the FreeRepublic for notifying their fanatically conservative base of this important development, who then flooded the blogosphere with this news the MSM was so blatantly ignoring, even getting the story on the front page of Digg by fanatically clicking on that “Digg It” button over and over and over again. Thanks to their activism, all those thoughtless sheep who believe the empirical evidence of Global Warming might get a clue.

I also appreciated the way these same activists got an offensive political cartoon posted to Digg under “General Sciences:”

Science is way too liberal in the way it doesn’t push conservative talking points. This cartoon will go a long way towards demonstrating what conservatives can contribute to collegiate scientific discourse.

Also featured on the radio show hosting Dr. Marohasy, was someone arguing that low fat diets cause diabetes and heart disease. I always knew all those servings of fruit and vegetables was just a liberal ploy to effeminate American men.

Science Etcetera Marsday, 20080325

Richard Dawkins has a review of Expelled online, confirming it relates Evolutionary Theory to Nazism and commenting on the hypocrisy of expelling a prominent evolutionist from seeing the film.

French, English, Lojban… The Economist magazine describes mathematics as the true International Language.

Global Warming theorists are taking part in an annual wager to guess when the Arctic ice will crack. I wonder if any skeptics would like put their money where their mouths are?

Pandas only have a few days to successfully mate each year, since the Pandas at the Smithsonian National zoo failed, zookeepers are resorting to artificial insemination.

Researchers have found that leaders can restrict information to sway public opinion. In other news, the sun is hot and the Earth orbits it.

The W Administration has made it extremely difficult to protect endangered species. 59 species have been added to the list in Bush’s 7 years of presidency, nearly the same number his father added every year of his presidency.

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research has found some surprisingly large marine life in Antarctic waters, including giant star fish and fields of sea lilies that stretch for hundreds of yards along the ocean floor.

National Geographic has time-lapsed video of a retreating glacier.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) has called for the suspension of funding to finding an HIV vaccine, which has made little progress and won’t make any for more than a decade, arguing that the money should instead be put into prevention.

Extracellular matrix is a powder made from pig bladders, and a man who sprinkled it on the missing tip of his finger grew it back.

Nazi Doctors, American Physicist enthusiastic about nuclear war, and the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment are just some of the frightening tales from the Dark Side of Science Slideshow.

Money can buy happiness, if you give it to other people.

Easter, the Christian holiday where Jesus comes out of the cave and if he sees his shadow there will be more winter, is over, leaving Wal-Mart’s overstocked with themed candies. So it’s a good time for Science Experiments with Peeps!

Science with Peeps

Between a Rock and a Hardplace: Debating Cranks

Chris Mooney has an important article online about how scientists debating fringe groups like Creationists and AGW deniers in many ways actually hurts our causes.

Sure enough, one of the Expelled trailers features the following quotation from Oxford evolutionary biologist and atheism apostle Richard Dawkins: “If people think God is interesting, the onus is on them to show that there is anything there to talk about. Otherwise they should just shut up about it.” And then in comes Ben Stein to play the rebel, the Galileo, against this oppressive scientific orthodoxy, against “Big Science” that tells the little guy to “shut up.” How’s that for enabling? (Link mine.)

A very astute observation of Dittohead reasoning. The fact that science does not have any peer-reviewed publications supporting the existence of god or disproving AGW Theory is only proof, in their minds, that the vast liberal conspiracy is in full effect, suppressing the “facts” they so desperately need to be true in order to prop-up their pre-defined ideological assumptions.

With Dittoheads–and that is who we are talking about primarily–debate is always a futile effort. How do you argue with someone who doesn’t even share the same factual foundation as the rest of the world? People who dismiss peer-reviewed research as liberal bias, who rationalize away hard facts as subjective, and take the absence of media and scientific coverage as support for their positions?

Mooney’s recommends science bloggers start ignoring the cranks as the best strategy for marginalizing them. I agree, but would also like to offer another tactic that I personally adhere to and one I think other bloggers should adopt: stop treating these cranks with respect.

The problem isn’t that science bloggers are pointing out the irrationality, lack of scientific evidence, and blatant rhetorical abuses of the Cranks. The problem is that they are doing so in a competent, fairly respectable, and dignified manner. That’s what makes the cranks feel legitimized.

When John Coleman can get up in front of an audience of AGW skeptics and argue that other people should sue Al Gore for his warnings about Global Warming, without having the spine to sue Al Gore himself, and he says this with a straight face, it’s time for bloggers to drop the academic tone and start laughing these people out of the room. Absurd statements like this prove that John Coleman is a spineless dweeb. He deserves a spanking and a “Dunce” cap, not a measured, respectful response.

First-tier bloggers like Mooney, Nisbet, PZ Meyers, etc shouldn’t stoop to this level, and neither should second tier science bloggers. It’s important legitimate science remain above the fray. Scientists are the keepers of data integrity, and I agree with Mooney that it’s best if they simply start ignoring the cranks.

Leave it to the third/fourth-tier bloggers like myself to openly ridicule these dimbulbs, as I personally have done here, here, here, here, and here. These are just my way of marginalizing what has become and increasingly silly cluster of conspiracy odd-balls.

Science Etcetera Moonday, 20080324

Super Efficient Lightbulb

Move over LEDs, a new tiny efficient light bulb puts out more light than a streetlight.

Researchers have plotted the evolution of recipes.

Reserving judgment until I see for myself, but an eye-witness account claims that Ben Stein’s Expelled blames the theory of evolution for Nazism. Goodwin’s Law.

Segway inventor Dean Kamen latest miracle, a water purifier, has been unveiled on the Colbert Report.

One in a 1,000 year droughts, air pollution five times above WHO safety standards, 50,000 kg of dead fish… Many disturbing photos of the big environmental picture.

This can also be done with test tubes and hung as a necklace, it’s a DIY Pocket Plant.

Da Vinci is an eye-controlled robot used for surgery.

Moment of Science = Water Bubble in Zero-G:

NC Museum of Natural History: Mountains to the Sea

Wildlife-Friendly Backyard

At the museum’s center is a huge recreation of North Carolina’s many ecosystems, filled with both living and taxidermied animals. One of my favorite side displays was on how to build an eco-friendly yard that invites, feeds, and shelter’s wildlife.

The Four Fundamentals of Wildlife-Friendly Landscapes:

1. Offer a year-round food supply along with a variety of feeders. Native plants that seasonally produce seeds, berries, nuts, and flower nectar are ideal.
2. Provide water for drinking and bathing. Watering holes can be a simple shallow saucer on the ground or an elaborate minipond.
3. Provide a place to rest and escape predators. Evergreen shrubs and thick vegetation lend protection to wildlife–as do rock and brush piles.
4. Create nesting spots; some animals have specific needs. Add birdhouses and leave dead trees standing when possible.

Complete Flickr set here.