There is just something about 8,000 tons per square inch of pressure

 

On January 23rd, 1960, the bathysphere Trieste dove to the deepest part of any ocean on the face of the Earth.  The Mariana Trench. near Guam is 35,797 feet deep.  Auguste Picard and USN Lt. Don Walsh dove to the bottom in the Trieste on that day more than 52 years ago.  The only way to see outside of the craft was through a small, but very thick, tapered block of plexiglass--which at the time was the only clear material that could withstand the tremendous pressure of almost seven miles of water pressing down on it.  Only one problem.  It cracked when the Trieste was about 9/10ths of the way down.  The entire vessel shuddered.  They continued but ended up spending a truncated twenty minutes on the bottom--no doubt warily eying the window the whole time.  

 

Well, James Cameron, known more for making blockbusters like the Titanic than for making history, became the third person, and the only solo diver, to reach the bottom of the earth.  And guess what?  The laws of physics have not changed in the past five decades.  His vessel cracked, also.  This time it sprung a leak of hydraulic fluid.  It cut his time on the bottom short, too.

Chemistry is cool

Michigan State Chemistry Professor put together a little demonstration for the High School kids who participated in the Chemistry Olympiad.

Spring came early this year

I just walked outside and it is somewhere north of 70 degrees in Boston.  But that is not what I meant.  I meant it really did come early this year.  On March 20th, to be exact, and actually on the 19th for certain time zones.  The equinox happens when the Sun's path across the sky crosses the equator.  The vernal equinox is today, signalling the start of Spring.  In fact, this is the earliest the Sun has crossed the equator since 1896.  If you are like me, you automatically think of March 21st as the day heralding in Spring.  However, in the past hundred years, the vernal equinox has only fallen on March 21st a grand total of 36 times.  So just how long are the seasons this year?  This long:

Winter: 88.994 days
Spring: 92.758 days
Summer: 93.651 days
Autumn: 89.842 days

So for all of us north of the equator keeping track, we are getting 7.573 more days of the warm seasons than we have to endure of the cold seasons.  Happy Spring.

Remember the discovery of a faster than light particle

Oops. Never mind.  Einstein can roll back over in his grave.  Relativity remains immutable, at least for now.  Turns out those whacky scientists had a loose connection. And by that I do not mean in their brains, though that may be the case, too.  The experiment used a GPS receiver to correct the timing of the neutrinos flight around the CERN particle accelerator.  The GPS receiver was connected to the OPERA  computer to measure the speed of the neutrinos.  Well, it turns out that the fiber optic cable was a tad loose.  They tightened it and, voila, the neutrinos obeyed the laws of physics and stayed on the right side of the speed of light.

The 14 year old boy who achieved nuclear fusion in his garage

And to think, I got mad at my son when he put a hole in a window with a BB gun.  Taylor Wilson built a fusion reactor in his garage.

Darn! I thought it was real

Turns out the woolly mammoth video was a fake! And I was all excited, too.

Them MIT guys sure is smart

How would you like to mow your lawn then power up your house with the clippings.  This guy at MIT, Andreus Mershin, figured out how to do just that. First you mow the lawn or rake the leaves. Then you stir the yard waste into a bunch of cheap and plentiful chemicals. Take the resulting muck and paint it in your roof. Voila, instant electricity. Not much, at least not yet, but electricity. After extracting the chlorophyll, Professor Mershin's process is described as follows:

These molecules are then stabilized and spread on a glass substrate that’s covered in a forest of zinc oxide nanowires and titanium dioxide “sponges.” When sunlight hits the panels, both the titanium dioxide and the new material absorb light and turn it into electricity, and the nanowires carry the electricity away. In essence, Mershin has replaced the layer of silicon in conventional photovoltaic cells with a slurry of photosynthesizing molecules. “It’s like an electric nanoforest,” he says.

I went jogging last night

No too far, about two miles, but I purposely picked a very hilly route.  I do a kind of interval workout where I sprint up the hills and jog down them.  I do most of my aerobic workouts on my nordic track cross country ski machine which is very low impact.  Every so often I crave the fresh air so I suck it up and actually run.  Then I pay the price for it the next day.  So today I feel very old.  However, I am just a whipper snapper in cosmic clock of things on earth as it turns out.  An Australian scientist sequenced the DNA of a type of giant sea grass found in the Mediterranean.  Turns out some of those patches are 200,000 years old.  By far the oldest living organism on the planet.  Gee, I may have to run a marathon tonight.

Wouldn't it be cool to look in on the world's longest running scientific experiment?

Well, now you can via webcam.  This particular experiment has been going for the past 85 years.  It seems that one Professor Parnell in the Physics department at the University of Queensland wanted demonstrate that fluid mechanics applied to all fluids, including brittle ones like tar pitch, even if they move VERY slowly,  So he heated up the coal derivative and put it in a glass funnel that he had pinched shut.  Three years later in 1930 he cut the end off the funnel.  Starting on that date the first drop started to form.  More than eight decades later, about one drop per decade has fallen into the beaker below.  If my math is right, that would make tar pitch more than 100 billion times more viscous than water (all right, that would be their calculations, but some of my best ideas are other people's).  Alas, Professor Parnell only lived to see the first drop fall in 1938 and was dead before the second one dropped in 1954.  Well technically, he didn't see it actually fall.  In fact, no one has ever seen a drop of tar pitch hit the beaker.  Keep looking to the webcam and you may be the first!

We can rebuild him. We have the technology.



Technically, that should be "her" not him, but we really do have the technology. Barbara Campbell really does have a bionic eye.  Barbara has the genetic disease of retinitis pigmentosa.  It is degenerative and she was blind by the time she was 30.  All of her the photoreceptor cells in her retina were gone.  She was sentenced to a lifetime in darkness.  Until, that is, this past year when at 56 Barbara got a reprieve.  Second Sight Medical Products, in a feat worthy of Steve Austin himself, rescued her with its prototype Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System.  Inside Technology Spectrum describes the process and equipment as follows:

The process that allows the blind to see starts with a pair of sunglasses, which sport a tiny video camera mounted in the bridge just above the nose. The camera captures an image and sends it down a wire to a visual processing unit hanging on the patient's belt. That VPU—which is a little larger than a smartphone—­converts the world's complexities into a 60-pixel image in black and white, which it sends back to transponders on the glasses. From there the image goes wirelessly to antennas wrapped around the sides of the eyeballs, and from there to the 60-electrode arrays that are tacked to the delicate retinas.

Barbara says she can make out streets and buildings.  And they are just getting started.  Hmmm.  Maybe she is more like Data on Star Trek . . .

This is why physicists drive me nuts

Maybe that is unfair.  Abstract academicians drive me nuts.  Just think of the mental energy Rhett Allain used up in his blog at Wired trying to figure out if the Angry Birds game accurately reflected the fact that the launch speed of the red birds was slower at a steeper angle as it would be if you were really using a sling shot to launch the birds:

The last time I looked at the launch speed in Angry Birds, there was a problem. The problem was that it wasn’t trivial to get the position-time data of the flung birds. But that was quite some time ago. That was before the Google Chrome version of Angry Birds. With this, I can use screen capture software with my computer.There is another reason to revisit the launch speed in Angry Birds. The result from my last attempt wasn’t as clear as I had hoped. If the birds were shot from a sling shot that acted like a real spring, higher launch angles should have lower launch speeds (since the bird must move up vertically during the launch). I won’t re-derive this, but if the sling shot is indeed a spring, the following relationship should be true.
I guess I should say that s is the distance the sling shot is pulled back and k is the spring constant. But the point is that if I make a plot of launch velocity squared versus the sine of the launch angle, it should be a linear function. Here is the plot I first created.My conclusion was that the launch speed was constant and independent of the angle even though there was one data point quite out of line.Second TryHow about more data and better data? I want to look at that same plot, but what do I need to collect from each shot? I need:

• The x-velocity of the bird. This is pretty easy to get since this should be constant. The slope of the x-t plot will be the x-velocity.

• The y-velocity of the bird at launch. This isn’t as easy. I can do a couple of things: I could look at the maximum height of the bird or find the velocity from a quadratic fit to the data. Both of these will take some time. A third way would be to just look at the first few data points and use change in y position over change in time.

• The launch angle. If I have both the horizontal and vertical velocities — this is pretty straightforward.

Let me test the vertical velocity measurement. Here is a plot of the vertical position for a particular shot:Tracker Video can fit a quadratic function to the data. The velocity would just be the first derivative of this function with respect to time, so I get:CAUTION. The variable a is NOT the acceleration but rather the coefficient in front of the t term. But moving on. Looking back at the data, I see that the bird was launched at a time of 57.87 seconds. So, putting in this time and the values of the fitting coefficients I get an initial y-velocity of 20.76 m/s.What about another method? What if I just fit a linear function to the first two data points? Like this:This gives an initial y-velocity of 20.65 m/s. Not too bad (and much quicker).More DataOK, I have more data. Now for the plot. This is the launch velocity squared versus the sine of the launch angle. Remember, if the sling shot acts like a real sling shot, this should be linear.Curses! Foiled again! It is that one dumb data point that is off. You know why? It is because I try to be cool. I think, “Hey, how about a shoot an angry bird down?” This is what happens. But I have one more trick. Let me show a distribution of the starting velocities for these shots.From this data, I get an average launch speed of 23.1 m/s with a standard deviation of 2.4 m/s (even with that crazy data point). So, I am sticking with my original post. The launch speed in Angry Birds is constant. Maybe for homework, you can compare this to the launch speed for the other birds. (This data just looked at the red bird.) I suspect they are all the same.Oh, one final tip. If you want to collect data from Angry Birds in Chrome, zoom the screen all the way out before you shoot the bird. This way, the background in the game will stay in the same place and you won’t have to move the coordinate system.

Stephen Hawking just post an employment want ad

As I read this article about how Stephen Hawking was posting an ad for a new assistant to maintain his complex electronic system to allow him to "talk", I thought back to the time when I was in the midst of reading "A Brief History of Time" for the sixth or seventh time.  I sadly but readily admit to my intellectual limitations.  And I am reminded of how low my mind is on the human scale every time I read that Hawking book.  But it really sunk through to me the time I read it (again) when my son was about three or maybe four years old.  He was old enough to grasp complex thoughts and to sort of articulate the obvious questions (why is the sky blue?), but it was very challenging to articulate a meaningful, but pedagogical answer.  I would have to go through several iterations in my mind where I abstracted complex thoughts to very, very simple ones so my young son would get the most basic abstract of the complex answer.  As I read, and then repeatedly re-read, each paragraph of Hawkings' book until the core concepts seeped bit into my muddled mind, it dawned on me: he had regressively iterated the very complex concepts in a similar manner as I did with my young son so the far lesser intellect could, with great thought and mental effort, grasp the simplest essences of the vast and incredibly complex universe that he saw intuitively.

The world's first hacker



I suppose the proposition of who was the world's first hacker may vary depending of the definition you ascribe to "hacking".  Nonetheless, I am going with Nevil Maskelyne and the date was 1903.  Better still, he hacked the world's then Steve Jobs: the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi.  Marconi had set up a big public unveil of his new "secure" wireless transmission system at the Royal Institution's prestigious London lecture hall.  Maskelyne, pissed because Marconi's broad patents blocked his advance of similar ideas, hacked into the demonstration just before Marconi's wireless signal was to arrive and wow the collected crowd.  So instead of a triumphant presentation of Marconi's new technology, those present in the hall heard a Morse code string of epithets followed by funny poem accusing the Italian scientist of "diddling the public."  The New Scientist has a great article about the event:

Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture theatre began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem accusing Marconi of "diddling the public". Their demonstration had been hacked - and this was more than 100 years before the mischief playing out on the internet today. Who was the Royal Institution hacker? How did the cheeky messages get there? And why?

It had all started in 1887 when Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865. Discharging a capacitor into two separated electrodes, Hertz ionised the air in the gap between them, creating a spark. Miraculously, another spark zipped between two electrodes a few metres away: an electromagnetic wave from the first spark had induced a current between the second electrode pair. It meant long and short bursts of energy - "Hertzian waves" - could be broadcast to represent the dots and dashes of Morse code. Wireless telegraphy was born, and Marconi and his company were at the vanguard. Marconi claimed that his wireless messages could be sent privately over great distances. "I can tune my instruments so that no other instrument that is not similarly tuned can tap my messages," Marconi boasted to London's St James Gazette in February 1903.

That things would not go smoothly for Marconi and Fleming at the Royal Institution that day in June was soon apparent. Minutes before Fleming was due to receive Marconi's Morse messages from Cornwall, the hush was broken by a rhythmic ticking noise sputtering from the theatre's brass projection lantern, used to display the lecturer's slides. To the untrained ear, it sounded like a projector on the blink. But Arthur Blok, Fleming's assistant, quickly recognised the tippity-tap of a human hand keying a message in Morse. Someone, Blok reasoned, was beaming powerful wireless pulses into the theatre and they were strong enough to interfere with the projector's electric arc discharge lamp.

Mentally decoding the missive, Blok realised it was spelling one facetious word, over and over: "Rats". A glance at the output of the nearby Morse printer confirmed this. The incoming Morse then got more personal, mocking Marconi: "There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily," it trilled. Further rude epithets - apposite lines from Shakespeare - followed.

The stream of invective ceased moments before Marconi's signals from Poldhu arrived. The demo continued, but the damage was done: if somebody could intrude on the wireless frequency in such a way, it was clearly nowhere near as secure as Marconi claimed. And it was likely that they could eavesdrop on supposedly private messages too.

Marconi would have been peeved, to say the least, but he did not respond directly to the insults in public. He had no truck with sceptics and naysayers: "I will not demonstrate to any man who throws doubt upon the system," he said at the time. Fleming, however, fired off a fuming letter to The Times of London. He dubbed the hack "scientific hooliganism", and "an outrage against the traditions of the Royal Institution". He asked the newspaper's readers to help him find the culprit.

He didn't have to wait long. Four days later a gleeful letter confessing to the hack was printed by The Times. The writer justified his actions on the grounds of the security holes it revealed for the public good. Its author was Nevil Maskelyne, a mustachioed 39-year-old British music hall magician. Maskelyne came from an inventive family - his father came up with the coin-activated "spend-a-penny" locks in pay toilets. Maskelyne, however, was more interested in wireless technology, so taught himself the principles. He would use Morse code in "mind-reading" magic tricks to secretly communicate with a stooge. He worked out how to use a spark-gap transmitter to remotely ignite gunpowder. And in 1900, Maskelyne sent wireless messages between a ground station and a balloon 10 miles away. But, as author Sungook Hong relates in the book Wireless, his ambitions were frustrated by Marconi's broad patents, leaving him embittered towards the Italian. Maskelyne would soon find a way to vent his spleen.

One of the big losers from Marconi's technology looked likely to be the wired telegraphy industry. Telegraphy companies owned expensive land and sea cable networks, and operated flotillas of ships with expert crews to lay and service their submarine cables. Marconi presented a wireless threat to their wired hegemony, and they were in no mood to roll over.

The Eastern Telegraph Company ran the communications hub of the British Empire from the seaside hamlet of Porthcurno, west Cornwall, where its submarine cables led to Indonesia, India, Africa, South America and Australia. Following Marconi's feat of transatlantic wireless messaging on 12 December 1901, ETC hired Maskelyne to undertake extended spying operations.

Maskelyne built a 50-metre radio mast (the remnants of which still exist) on the cliffs west of Porthcurno to see if he could eavesdrop on messages the Marconi Company was beaming to vessels as part of its highly successful ship-to-shore messaging business. Writing in the journal The Electrician on 7 November 1902, Maskelyne gleefully revealed the lack of security. "I received Marconi messages with a 25-foot collecting circuit [aerial] raised on a scaffold pole. When eventually the mast was erected the problem was not interception but how to deal with the enormous excess of energy."

It wasn't supposed to be this easy. Marconi had patented a technology for tuning a wireless transmitter to broadcast on a precise wavelength. This tuning, Marconi claimed, meant confidential channels could be set up. Anyone who tunes in to a radio station will know that's not true, but it wasn't nearly so obvious back then. Maskelyne showed that by using an untuned broadband receiver he could listen in.

Having established interception was possible, Maskelyne wanted to draw more attention to the technology's flaws, as well as showing interference could happen. So he staged his Royal Institution hack by setting up a simple transmitter and Morse key at his father's nearby West End music hall.

The facetious messages he sent could easily have been jumbled with those Marconi himself sent from Cornwall, ruining both had they arrived simultaneously. Instead, they drew attention to a legitimate flaw in the technology - and the only damage done was to the egos of Marconi and Fleming.

Fleming continued to bluster for weeks in the newspapers about Maskelyne's assault being an insult to science. Maskelyne countered that Fleming should focus on the facts. "I would remind Professor Fleming that abuse is no argument," he replied.

In the present day, many hackers end up highlighting flawed technologies and security lapses just like Maskelyne. A little mischief has always had its virtues

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Cool. I always wanted to witness a cataclysm



And right nearby, too. Well, at least nearby in terms of our universe. The center of our galaxy is a mere 27,000 light years away. And at the center is a black hole with the mass of about 4 million suns. Apparently a gas giant is circling the 40 billion square kilometer drain. It is elongating and angling in toward the black hole. The gas cloud accelerated to a speed of about 2,350 km/sec and predictions are that the interstellar collision will occur in the middle of 2013. The gas giant only has the mass of about three earths, but that'll be enough for a great show. As that matter gets rent asunder, all sorts of spectacular energy will be released. And since it'll be in our backyard, we'll have a front row seat. Get your popcorn ready!

Who is the smartest person you have ever met?

I have been very fortunate in my life to have been exposed to a great many very intelligent people (no Borepatch, you are not on the list).  I am neither smart, nor humble, but for some reason I take great joy in coming across people who are on another level than I am intellectually.  Maybe it is akin to why I like to play tennis, pool, golf, etc. against someone who is a little better than me: their presence raises my own game.  I am often in a sense of awe over how someone could even get their minds around a problem so they could solve it.  Take, for example, Eratosthenes.  While living in Egypt about 200 BC, he calculated the circumference of the Earth to within about 2% accuracy of what we know it to be today.  For those of you that are counting, that would be 1700 years before Columbus.  He lived almost exactly on the equator.  When he stuck a stick straight into the ground using a simple plumb at noon on the equinox, he saw that it created no shadow.  He then paid someone to walk and count the number of paces from his town to Alexandria and thus measured the distance between the two.  On the next equinox, he repeated the plumbed stick in the ground in the other city and measured the small shadow that was cast because Alexandria was north of the equator.  Using Pythagoras's therom, he calculated the angles and then the distance from the surface to the center of the world.  It was simple calculation from the radius to the circumference, so he knew how far around the Earth was.  Every time I think of Eratosthenes I marvel, not just at his calculations, but even more at how the heck he thought to ask the question.

Along those lines, I once had the pleasure of meeting Richard Davisson, a truly world renowned physicist.  He had a summer home in Brooklin, Maine, a few towns down the coast from my place.  Since my parents were academicians, I often came in contact with their friends and acquaintances, one of whom was Professor Davisson.  He was the son and nephew of Nobel laureates.  Professor Davisson's storied career included working on the Manhattan Project and inventing the system that detected sub-atomic particles.  That's right, CERN owes its existence to him.  I could go on and on, but instead I will cut to my favorite Professor Daivsson quote:

"There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool."

Differential temperatures in Hell prove no physicists have ever been condemned to eternal damnation...   How the heck did he think to even ask the question?

Statement of the Obvious Department

A recent Canadian study determined that people were more likely to have unprotected sex the more they drank.

I believe the scientific term I am looking for is "duh!"

Next you'll be telling me drunk people think their romantic partners look better through beer goggles...