All I want for Christmas . . .

By: | December 1, 2010

Would I lie to you, honey? (Notice the pyrex says 66 degrees and the Taylor says 62. Hmmmm.)

Each year my mother asks for my Christmas list. No, I’m not eight. I’m more than two decades older than that. Yet she still asks. And I still send one. (I also cc Santa just to be on the safe side.)

This year, I’m inclined to ask for a kitchen thermometer. It’s not that I don’t have a thermometer. I do. In fact, I have three of them — two dial thermometers and a digital thermometer with a removable probe on a cable (pictured above). But I don’t trust them. One was too cheap (“You get what you pay for,” says the voice in my head). One got wet (and now may or may not be accurate). And the other rapidly flashes between Celsius and Fahrenheit. I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to do that. And none of them agree. What I’m after is the Cadillac of thermometers: ThermoWorks New Splash-Proof Super-Fast Thermapen. The drawback is the shock-inducing cost. Are you sitting down? The Thermapen is $96. Most other kitchen thermometers are in the $15-$20 range. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose, Stardust, & Entropy

By: | November 30, 2010

Abstruse Goose added a mysterious little tag that says something like, “Now, how many pop culture references can you find?”  None for me, not one, geezer that I apparently am.  But I did get the astronomy/physics references.

The stardust one:  maybe you already know this but most every element — the lithium in our batteries, gold in our rings, carbon in our own selves — was made in the last drastic moments of those supernoved stars I was telling you about, and then flung out into space to be made into more stars and their planets and whatever the planets come up with in the way of life.   So literally, actually stardust.

The worldline in space/time:  make a graph, time on one axis, space or location on the other,  put a little particle down in the bottom left corner, and set it loose.   As it moves from location to location through space, it inevitably moves forward in time, and the little line connecting its locations and times is called its worldline.  The universe has a worldline, and so do we.  That word is a piece of physics poetry.

The increasing entropy/thermodynamic equilibrium one:  that’s the heat death of the universe.  I already told you about that too. So in simple gratitude, you ought to at least explain the pop references to me.

http://abstrusegoose.com/317

Palm Revelations

By: | November 29, 2010

Last week, I had my palm read for the first time.

I was spending the day with scientists who study the microscopic bugs living on our skin. (It’s actually not as creepy or smelly as you might think.) One of the researchers, a young and energetic dermatologist, was giving me the grand tour of the lab when I happened to mention that my sister had eczema — an itchy red rash — when we were growing up. Then, right in the middle of a long, sterile corridor, the doctor suddenly stopped and demanded my hand.
Continue reading →

Biological Astronomy

By: | November 26, 2010

I haven’t had anything to do with biology since I wrote an article years ago about sleeping pills.  I found out that the drugs used by 60-gazillion insomniacs to put themselves to sleep are not the chemicals the brain uses to put us to sleep naturally.  Can’t neuroscientists just find those brain chemicals and sell them to us?  I called and asked; the answer is not that neuroscientists can’t find the chemicals, but that they find way, way too many.  Not only that, but each chemical seems also to affect some different and important part of the body: the immune system, the body’s clock, digestion, blood pressure.  I was indignant:  all those causes for just one effect, and each cause having other effects?  What ever happened to the principle of parsimony?  I gave up on biology and ever since, have stuck closely to astronomy:  the laws of the universe are parsimonious. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose & Maxwell’s Demon

By: | November 23, 2010

This one’s going to take a little explanation.  Maxwell was James Clerk Maxwell, famous 19th century physicist.  He made up his demon as a way around a then-new and depressing law of physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  The Second Law said that when things are left alone and nothing’s done to them, hot things always become cold, but cold things never heat up.   The reason this is depressing is because the Second Law, if it ran on long enough, would end in what 19th century physicists called the heat death of the universe.

Anyway, Maxwell thought if he had a container divided into two rooms, one hot and one cold, and a door between the rooms, then a smart little demon could stand at the door and let the cold flow into the hot room but not the heat into the cold room, and thus thwart the Second Law.   He couldn’t do it and generations of physicists since have agreed it couldn’t be done.  Looks like the universe is stuck with the heat death, the death of heat.  I don’t know why Abstruse Goose is so cheery about it.

http://abstrusegoose.com/319

Hogwarts for Archaeologists

By: | November 22, 2010

When I first saw the magical, Harry-Potter-like images taken by the folks at the Nottingham Caves Survey in England, my jaw clunked on my desk. Archaeologists have enthused for some time now over the potential of laser scanning for recording ancient sites, but until now the results looked merely brisk and workmanlike. But these new 3-D pictures of the secret subterranean world beneath the ancient city of Nottingham are taking this work to a whole new level. These images–like the one above of a secret 14th century passageway leading to Nottingham Castle–resemble works of surrealism and fantasy. But they are pure science.

First,  a quick word about Nottingham.   Continue reading →

Science Metaphors (cont.): Sigma & Faith

By: | November 19, 2010

I’m riddled with anxieties and have no faith whatever.  My book is dopey and nobody’s reading it and I have no ideas for another one.  Print publishing is dying anyway.   And the deader it gets, the less likely it is to publish anything I write, even if I did have an idea.   I could take care of these anxieties with some nice pills, but I thought I’d try a calming statistical assessment first.  Science, of course, excels at such assessments and what I really admire is when it steels its nerves, narrows its eyes, and assesses its own work.  “We’ve found an exoplanet and it’s at the 2-sigma level,” they say, while they silently try to radiate confidence. Continue reading →