Last Wednesday night, in a swanky hall at Sotheby’s in New York, auctioneer Hugh Hildesley opened bidding for a sculptural masterpiece from the Roman world. Art collectors knew this statue as A Marble Portrait Bust of the Deified Antinous, and Hildesley and his staff expected that it would sell in the two- to three-million dollar range.
That didn’t happen though. Continue reading
Like many other journalists, I’ve been following the reports this week about Julian Assange, editor-in-chief at Wikileaks. I like whistleblowers and others who shed light on dark places, and I hoped that Assange would find some way of slipping through the fingers of all those Interpol inspectors. Of course it wasn’t to be. As of last report, British authorities are holding Assange in a segregration cell in Wandsworth Prison in South London, the Victorian-era penitentiary that once housed Oscar Wilde.
I wish there were more such whistle-blowers out there, particularly in a field that I know fairly well: archaeology. As I have discovered, intelligence agencies have a particular penchant for recruiting archaeologists as spooks. Continue reading
Let’s say I were writing a book about the norgletti, a fictional extraterrestrial species, and had the choice of these four typefaces. If I asked you which one would make your reading experience most pleasurable, the choice would be obvious. The first three fonts are brash, clumsy, juvenile and just plain difficult to read.
What if I didn’t care about the ease with which you flipped through my book, but with the amount of information you retained from it? In that case, the fourth option is actually the worst choice, according to a new study.
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This happens. An astronomer said that he found, as astronomers do, something that looked unusual and that turned out to be an unusual form of a usual thing. But before he figured that out, a reporter happened to ask him what’s new, and the astronomer said he’d found this unusual thing, couldn’t figure it out, kind of mysterious. And the reporter wrote an article for the New York Times (8/17/99), “Rarely Bested Astronomers Are Stumped by a Tiny Light,” and then the Weekly World News picked it up: “New York Times Story Sends Shock Waves Through Governments: Mystery Light in Northern Sky Baffles Scientists,” and began the story, ” . . . political and religious leaders around the world are terrified that the bizarre phenomenon is another sign from God that that the End Times are near.”
Luckily the scientist and his career both survived.
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Amateur beekeeper Gita Nandan began to suspect something wasn’t right about mid-summer. That’s when her bees’ honey, normally amber, turned the color of cherry cough syrup. After a day of foraging, her bees would return to their Brooklyn hives, their distended bellies glowing bright red.
She posted photos on the Facebook page of the New York City Beekeepers Association hoping someone would be able to come up with an explanation. One person suggested that the bees had been supping off hummingbird feeders. Another said they might have ingested antifreeze. Continue reading
Big problems for astronomers: the just-launched zillion-dollar Hubble Space Telescope couldn’t be focused; a Mars probe got to Mars and then lost contact with the earth; the 300-foot Green Bank radio telescope collapsed one night into lacy rubble. Smaller problems are below.
An amateur astronomer, after observing on his back porch one night, locked his 14.5 inch Starmaster Dobsonian at the horizontal position, put a towel over the eyepiece, and called it a night. The next morning, the wind first blew the towel off, then blew the telescope out of gear so it bobbed up into a vertical position and looked at the sky. As the morning passed, the sun hit the mirror, the mirror focused the sunlight, the eyepiece caught fire, the telescope exploded into flame, the whole back porch caught fire. The amateur wasn’t entirely dismayed: he was insured and besides, it was only the 14.5 inch Starmaster that exploded, not the 20-inch.
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Did you know there’s a tenth planet—well, ninth, if you don’t count Pluto—that’s on a collision course with Earth, and the government has built a telescope in Antarctica to monitor its movements, only they don’t want the public to know about this impending doomsday because they don’t want to cause a worldwide panic? It’s true! But you don’t have to take my word for it. Just Google “South Pole Telescope collision planet Earth” and you’ll find all the evidence you need.
Okay, maybe not you, since you’ve presumably come to this site with a greater fondness for physics theories than for conspiracy theories. But a lot of people. And they’re not afraid to make their opinions known to the people they will most need to convince, if the truth is ever to see the light of day: scientists.
This thing is just simmering soup, circulating oceans, the granules on the sun’s surface, and the driver of the continental plates; it’s just convection. That is, heat rises and cold falls, updrafts and downdrafts, up in the middle and down at the sides: a cell of convection. This convective cell is called a supercell and it’s rare but is the worst kind of thunderstorm; the other kinds are single cell and multicells, and they’re bad enough. Supercells not only have a super-strong updraft, the updraft is rotating. They can stay formed-up like this for hours and they’re miles across; they’re over-sized, steady-state tornadoes. They’re mean and ugly and cause havoc. As it happens, this one didn’t. It sat in Glasgow, Montana – supercells are most common in the Great Plains – for a while, looking like your worst fear, and then moved on. I’ll bet it blew out that bushy little tree to the right though. The photographer has a lot of these pictures and if you’re complacent about nothing bad ever happening to you, you’ll want to look at them.
Photo credit: used with the kind permission of Sean Heavey
