The Homely Scientist

Ever wonder if your computer and your Net connection could do more for the world than saving on stamps and paper?  Well, yes it can.  While donating your “spare” CPU cycles is actually not really doing what you think it is–the computer can’t switch into a low-power state with minimal CPU resources with those screensavers going–there are other ways to use your computer and the net for good.  This list of seven things is a great place to start.

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About 10,000 years ago humans started domesticating plants and animals–commonly called the Agricultural Revolution.  In doing this people had to stop their nomadic/hunter-gatherer ways and settle down.  Yes, animals were domesticated first in all likelihood–much easier to move your cow/sheep/goat/horse/dog with you as you move than a patch of grains growing.

Settling down and the development of agriculture is generally seen as the first step to modern human society.  People found they had time to do other things and the need to invent things (plows, pumps, more and different tools)–it all started from there.

One of the big questions has always been why would they do this anyway?  Hunter-gatherers have more leisure time than farmers.  They eat just as well.   But that’s now, what about 10,00 years ago?  What was happening then.  10,000 years ago the Earth’s climate was moving from a glacial to interglacial state.  Ice sheets were retreating, sea level was fluctuating, the atmosphere was changing, and it was getting warmer.  All together these factors might have been the catalyst to make stopping in one place to grow food a better survival option than continuing to wander about.

Via Arstechnica and Wired there is research that is putting these pieces together:

It ends up with the big mystery: why did people suddenly think domesticating plants was a good idea? The 10,000 year figure is suspiciously close to the rapid climactic changes that accompanied the end of the last ice age, suggesting that changing temperatures might have disrupted food supplies enough to make domestic plants essential. The end of the ice age also pushed atmospheric carbon levels up by nearly 50 percent, which may have triggered favorable changes in the plants themselves. But it ends on an enigmatic note: maybe there was something cultural going on that we may never be able to reconstruct….” Source: Beyond the Beyond - Wired Blogs

This will be a hard thing to prove, but the work I used to do in paleoecology would be used to try to understand what was going on.  Building models and profiles of how vegetation was changing one could start to see if some areas were suddenly better for some plants over others.  And if the plants that do better can be eaten, well you can see where this is going.

Implications for now is how fast this can happen.  What happens if areas that are breadbaskets now become deserts later?  Would we be ready to start farming in areas that aren’t suitable now?

Makes you wonder sometimes if shouldn’t have just stayed nomadic wanderers.

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We all know that TV and movies often don’t jive with science, as Star Wars turns 30 this week Bob MacDonald of the CBC reflects on how lots of Star Wars really didn’t jive with science.

Don’t get me wrong: Science fiction is wonderful. The imaginations of fantasy and fiction writers carry us beyond the ordinary to places where the good guys wear white, the bad guys are cloaked in black, good triumphs over evil, hero and heroine make a perfect couple … it’s Roy Rogers riding a white spaceship, the Three Musketeers with light sabres, what fun. But Star Wars, and the long train of imitator movies that followed, began the miss-education of science, where people believe that sound travels in space or gravity magically appears as soon as you step inside a spaceship - even though the ship itself is floating weightless in the void.

Of course you can’t hear explosions in space, and I think the recent Battlestar Galatica did a good job at having the space craft behave as they should in space, which is decidedly more boring IMHO, but I wonder if artificial gravity isn’t a possibility. Maybe the much vaunted “warp field” can allow faster-than-light travel, but not mess with Relativity.

Who knows. And you have to keep dreamin’ Remember people thought Edison, Marconi, and maybe others were nuts and their ideas violated the laws nature/physics/science.

Tags: Science Fiction, Star Wars, futurist

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I had a little fender bender last week. Nothing major and no one hurt (very low-speed thing), but I had to get an estimate done for the repair. While I was chatting with the guy doing the estimate I mentioned how my mom used to say “bumpers are for bumping” … sorta in reference to parallel parking…now a days though, not so much. In fact your car bumper is more for esthetics than collision protection. The protection parts are behind the bumper. The bumper, in fact is designed to shatter and therefore disperse the energy of the collision instead of absorb it.

Pretty amazing that cars are safer now, but the parts tend to just explode instead of twist, buckle and bend.

Tags: car safety

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Tony over at Astronomy Buff went to see Spidey 3 recently.  I haven’t seen it yet, but will probably go soon–maybe even this weekend.  Regardless, like a lot of SciFi, sometimes the “sci” is way to “fi”, if you catch my drift.  How many times have I been watching a TV show or movie and just groaned at the science (or shear and utter lack there of) in the program?  I’ve lost count.  I think the same thing happens to Tony:

I love science fiction and, to a lesser extent, the comic book stuff. I see all the movies and read a great many books. I think science fiction plays an important role in our overall scientific progress.
Source: Astronomy Buff - The Physics of Spiderman 3

But … I don’t groan or over-analyze the flaws in the show all the time.  Sometimes, in fact most of the time, I suspend my belief in all things science and just enjoy the show.

Beyond the standard stuff (superheroes, etc) that doesn’t happen in our world, just letting the science slide is a good thing to do now and then.

Of course, I do get rather miffed if my kids think the science of entertainment is anything like the science of reality.  Those times are, however, great teachable moments about how things really are and really work.

So enjoy the movies, just make sure your kids have it right in the end!

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Well I was in San Francisco covering the Web 2.0 Expo for the Blog World Expo.  SF is an awesome city and I wish I had more time there because I would have checked out the Exploratorium, earthquake stuff (though I got a tweet today I think that there were some quakes there recently) and other major SF coolness (come on the cable cars are just awesome).

But … I did get to be geek dad this weekend with A.  She needed a simple machine that could go 2 meters (6.5 feet).  Actually it has to use two simple machines.  And bonus points were given if it could carry something.  More if it could come back.  How did it go?  Well I’ll tell you in a min.

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You know what yesterday’s post about the kid who made a fusion rector in his basement reminded me of?  Star Trek: First Contact.  Wait, stop shaking your head and hear me out.  Okay the premise of the movie is simple.  Picard, et al must travel back in time to keep the Borg from stopping the first warp drive test (and thus preventing first contact and what would become Starfleet).  Fine, so what’s this have to do with a 17 year old making a fusion reactor in his basement with parts from eBay?

Don’t get it yet?

Think about it.  One person with a crazy idea in his/her basement tinkering until it works (or explodes).  See, that is what gives me hope when thinking about the destruction we’ve wrought upon ourselves.  People, ordinary people, get ideas.  Then they tinker.  They scrounge for parts.  Then they make something amazing.

So, who’s got a prototype warp drive cooking in their basement?

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When I’m in the right mood, I like to watch those shows that tell you how consumer products are made.  It’s kinda geeky, but sometimes pretty interesting.

Just watching this afternoon I learned that it only takes 5 minutes for paper to go from hitting the conveyor belt to being cellulose insulation.  Five minutes!  Holey smokes!

Anyway, no matter what my favourite “how is it made” topic is how the ancient Greeks and Romans pressed olives for oil.  See I had to take an “Ancient Technology” class as a part of my Anthro major (I also had to take Chem for my Geo minor …. we don’t talk about that).  I still have the text book.  Why?  Because the stuff in there is just so amazing.  Let’s take olive oil.

You get olive oil by pressing whole olives.  Simple right?  Eh, not so fast there buddy.  See the olive still has the pit in it.  You crush the pit, your oil becomes bitter and well I don’t think you’d like the penalty for that (think lots of rowing and some dude banging a drum).

Okay, you say, we’ll just gently press the olive with a rock or something (this is ancient Greece and Rome remember).  Okay, what about then you have lots of different sizes of olives?  Hmm.  Solution?  A carefully balanced stone wheel that would only press the right amount, but could float up or down depending on the size of the olive!

I’m sure there are fancy ways of doing it today, but I always think of that solution as an example of how you apply basic science to real problems.

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To bodly go where no one has gone before … a five year mission …   Okay let’s stop there.  Five year mission!  Yikes!  As NASA is working on getting back on the Moon and establishing a colony there, Mars is in their sights too.  Sending people to Mars.  The dream of many young, potential space traveller (and some older ones too).  Turns out that (with current propulsion technology) the six month trip out, time there, and time back NASA is pretty concerned about how the astronauts themselves will fair.  From the Discovery Channel News…

Anxiety, loneliness and tensions with crewmates, a daily battle to maintain fitness and avoid accidents, DNA-shredding radiation from solar flares or cosmic rays — all these make mental and physical health the key to whether a long-term mission will succeed or fail catastrophically.

Benny Elmann-Larsen, coordinator of physiology in human space flight at the European Space Agency, says psychological stress could be the biggest problem of all.

“The human factor is the most uncertain factor,” Elmann-Larsen said.
Source: Discovery Channel :: News - Space :: People Make Space Exploration Tricky

Yeah, that might be a problem.  Somehow the idea of someone going nuts on a space craft (read flying bomb) isn’t very pleasant.  Are they making progress?  Umm, not really.  Some experiments they’ve done thus far have resulted in fist fights, sexual harrassment, and other unpleasantness.

Looks like unless we can make the trip shorter, we’re going to have problems.

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This is Tris your favorite geek scientist.  Well at least I hope on your favorite geek scientist.  So I’m not actually writing this blog post, I’m dictating it!  One of the great new features in Windows Vista is speech recognition, so I’m dictating this post into windows live writer instead of typing it.

Speech recognition software as been around for a long time, but until recently computers haven’t been fast enough to really make it worthwhile for most people.  Not only that, you had to buy extra software, in addition to a microphone, to make it work.

This got me thinking about the work my dad did with his paraplegic patients, and the really amazing things that he did even in the early eighties with computers to help people live their lives better.  One of the coolest things I remember, because voice recognition was really not feasible that time, were the computers that quadriplegics and could control with a straw!

It was pretty amazing to watch, a quadriplegic using just his mouth to control a computer.  By nudging the straw up down left and right and using a series of puffs and sucking on the straw, he could do just about anything on computers of that time.  I know it’s got a lot better, now computers wererudimentary and so was software.  But really, this is one of the great things about using science to help people.  You see a problem, and apply the science and technology of the day to make someone’s life better.

So while I’m sitting here, barely touching the keyboard, I can imagine how much better someone’s life could be using the new technology available today.

Of course, even the software amusing now isn’t perfect.  I do have to correct the words that are chosen sometimes, I do have to manually add it the text as well.  Part of this is, that I’m speaking instead of writing, which adds a whole different style and aspect to how I’m writing or dictating, as it were.

So what advances in science have you seen that you think will be able to be applied to help the disabled?

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