Test Your Knowledge: Common Materials

Explain what the following materials are:

• concrete


• fiberglass


• gasoline


• plastic


• steel

We all discuss and think of many things with a lot of familiarity, but we don't necessarily know a lot about them.

Arboralopecia

We had a freeze last night. Our pecan tree reacted strongly. When I straggled out of bed this morning, I saw it dumping its leaves on the ground. The leaf fall has basically ended because there's nothing left to fall. I didn't see it start, but I don't think it took more than a couple hours. The lawn under it is now under many layers of leaves. You can hear the leaves falling.

Gotta rewrite the song: "Leaves are falling, loudly falling, tumbling to the ground. Yellow yellow green brown yellow, tumbling to the ground."



ISN'T THIS EXCITING?!?!?! I'll bet this is totally what Chen, Hurley, and Karim had in mind when they founded YouTube. I am at the forefront of 21st century journalism! I'm gonna be on Oprah!

Spider and web

 

 

 

I've never seen a spider like that before. It looks more like a crab to me.

 

When we came back later, it had snagged a bee.

Black beetle

 

 

 

 

I'm pretty impressed with the quality of the macro mode on my subcompact point-and-shoot.

A flock of (not) seagulls

 

 

 

Saw these this past evening. I couldn't get a good shot of them because I was in the car. They were awesomely close at one point, just a couple hundred feet overhead. They were some kind of large wading bird (my favorite kind).

Big ol' turtle

 

 

 

Saw this one at Northwest District Park. There's not much in the pictures for scale. I think it was a very solid 18 to 24 inches in length. I'm guessing it's old. Are turtles one of the animals that never stop growing?

NOM NOM NOM NOM

 

 

 

In front of our neighbor's house this morning. The snake is alive and twitching. I don't know what kind it is.

Birdwatch update

 

 

 

Note the down side of having such a nest at your house. The piles of brown I think are the indigestible remnants of crawfish.

Heron chick sighting

 

The blanket octopus

Yikes:

The male blanket octopus spends his existence drifting along waiting to meet with a female. If the male meets a female, he fills one of his tentacles with sperm and tears it from his body. He gives this sperm-filled tentacle to the female which she then uses to fertilize her eggs. Afterwards, the female leaves the male who floats away and dies.

Double yikes:

An unusual defense mechanism in the species has evolved: blanket octopuses are immune to the poisonous Portuguese man o' war, whose tentacles the female rips off and uses later for defensive purposes.

Sound perceptions

You must try this.

Optimism: On the 10,000th try there was light.

I've seen this billboard from the Foundation For a Better Life, an organization that I find vaguely suspicious for no discernible reason. This billboard is historically inaccurate, or at least misleading. It implies that it took Thomas Edison by himself 10,000 attempts before he made a working light bulb. If that were true, it would be stupid. Only an idiot would keep trying after 5,000 complete failures.

Incorrect implication the first: Edison didn't invent the light bulb. The light bulb was actually invented in 1802, decades before Edison was even born. It just wasn't a practical one. Just getting light out of an incandescent bulb wasn't hard. What was difficult was making it bright and durable.

Incorrect implication the second: Edison worked alone. Edison had an army of (underappreciated) assistants doing much of the work (as described in the biography The Wizard of Menlo Park). He also built on the work of others (as detailed in the afore-linked Wikipedia article), including the key innovations of the evacuated glass bulb and the carbon filament.

What Edison and his team of assistants managed to do in the late 1870s was to perfect the state of the art in electrical lighting. It was a valuable effort, but it isn't nearly the grand leap the billboard implies. I'm not even convinced they really did try 10,000 different types of filaments. Even a thousand seems unlikely, but I don't have a better number. Regardless, the billboard is deceptive.

Test Your Knowledge: The electromagnetic spectrum

Name the 7 main components of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Giant crystals in Mexico

Amazing pictures of enormous crystals found in an underground mine in Mexico. It looks like Superman's Fortress of Solitude. You can read some words, too. If you're into that.

Black and White Mothography

 

This neat moth was just outside my door when we came home from a walk on Saturday. Actually, it's still there. I wonder if it's dead...

Test Your Knowledge: the Sun and the Moon

Within 10%, in the units of your choice (but not AU), how far away are the sun and the moon?

Test Your Knowledge: Einstein's Miraculous Year

For a long time, I've been wanting to post a sampling of things that I think you should know off the top of your head if you consider yourself well educated. Test Your Knowledge, or, Things Y'oughta Know. I know, it's rather presumptuous. Who am I to say? Of course I'll pick things that I already know. But you're here, so...

First up, Albert Einstein's "annus mirabilis," 1905. In that year, Einstein published not one, not two, but four amazing and ground-breaking papers in physics explaining physical phenomena or proposing new theories. What were the topics of at least two of the four papers? I only remembered three; only when I was checking my answers on Wikipedia did I learn of the one published September 27. I'm reading a book that mentioned the second one listed in the Wikipedia article, which prompted this post, but I would have known that one anyway.

Mantis Shrimp

Mantis shrimp, a.k.a., stomatopods, are some freaky creatures. They're neither mantis nor shrimp, but a different kind of arthropod in the crustacean sub-phylum. What's so special about them? They're weird-looking, they can attack prey with the force of a bullet to literally smash their shells (or the walls of an aquarium), and their amazing eyes can perceive a form of light that I didn't even know existed. Who needs science fiction with these things around?

Colorized ponies

The eye plays tricks.

Perception is not reality?

Studies of itching and perception (warning: slightly disturbing) suggest "perception is the brain's best guess about what is happening in the outside world." It can be confused, tricked, or manipulated. Our brains are complex, amazing, and imperfect. Fascinating stuff.

Birds of Summer

Looks like the herons have taken off. Except one. An old, picked-over heron carcass appeared in our backyard today. I don't know how, because the thing was just feathers and bone now. I hope whatever happened doesn't keep the rest of them from coming back next year.

Update (June 27): Turns out at least one live bird remains. It's an adult.

An engineer's best friend?

The end is near for the diamond jewelry industry.

The largest single-crystal diamond ever grown in a lab is about .7 inches by .2 inches by .2 inches, or 15 carats. The stone isn't under military guard or at a hidden location. It's in a room crowded with gauges and microscopes, along with the odd bicycle and congo drum, on a leafy campus surrounded by Washington, D.C.'s Rock Creek Park. Russell Hemley, director of the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Lab, started working on growing diamonds with CVD in 1995. He pulls a diamond out of his khakis. It would be hard to mistake this diamond for anything sold at Tiffany. The rectangular stone looks like a thick piece of tinted glass.

Emphasis mine. The whole diamond jewelry thing is rather absurd. I'll be happy to see it go, though it won't go down quietly:

The diamond-mining companies have been fighting back, arguing that all that glitters is not diamond. De Beers' ads and its Web sites insist that diamonds should be natural, unprocessed and millions of years old. "Diamonds are rare and special things with an inherent value that does not exist in factory-made synthetics," says spokeswoman Lynette Gould. "When people want to celebrate a unique relationship they want a unique diamond, not a three-day-old factory-made stone."

People might be dumb enough to buy that initially. I give that a few years. The thing is, you can't tell, especially from casual inspection, what's natural and what's lab-grown. All it takes is a couple of women in a social circle to be willing to accept a lab-grown diamond triple the size of their friends' natural rocks at the same price, and the levee will burst.

A flock of herons

Wednesday night, while I was taking out the recycling, I got stared down by no fewer than 7 Yellow-Crowned Night Herons. At least 3 of those were juveniles, one was still chicky, and 2 were clearly adults. They grow fast; it's been only a month since I found the barely-hatched (or hatched-on-impact) chick on my lawn. At least one of the juveniles can fly. I'm guessing they won't be around much longer; this is about the time last year when the initial pair of juveniles came and went.

Maybe next year will see a whole flock settling on my street. I don't know if that'll be a good thing; their poops are enormous. There's a gross white oval about 4 feet across on my front lawn directly underneath one of the nests.

I'm not easily distracted...

I'm wise. I have a "broad attention span." Now what were you saying again?

a carbon tax is more complicated than I thought

Very interesting analysis, especially re: non CO2 greenhouse gases and the incredibly difficult problem of figuring out exactly how big the external costs of coal or any other energy source are.

toilets and the coriolis effect

FYI, water in toilets in the Southern Hemisphere does not actually drain in the opposite direction. Just search for "coriolis toilet" for more.

chicka chicka boom boom

I dropped the chick off this morning at the Wildlife Rescue. It seemed no worse for its wear, though the volunteer discovered some flies had planted eggs on it. Ick. I was going to post a little video of it squirming in an empty mushroom box, but Google is being uncooperative. I don't think I got any recording of it peeping. It peeped in the car with me on the way over. I don't think it'll miss me.

Update: coincidentally, I just installed Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" on my work laptop.

Attempting a rescue

 

When I came home from work, the chick was still alive. I called Wildlife Rescue. They told me to keep it warm, and to bring it in tomorrow. If it was the wind that knocked it out, it's survived for two days; I hope it makes it through tonight. It's on a heating pad wrapped up in a towel. They told me not to feed it.

two dead chicks

The strong winds we've had recently appear to have blown one egg out of each of the Yellow-Crowned Night Heron nests in our front yard. It's hard to tell whether the chicks had hatched already; the egg shells were on the ground as well as the chicks. One was dead, the other soon to be so. Its futile struggles were disturbingly similar to the weak, random movements of a young infant. I sure hope there are more in the nest. Wikipedia claims there are usually 3-5 eggs.

Kitties forever

Someone, somewhere, sometime in the next 20 years, is going to genetically engineer a cat that never grows up. Kittens are more fun than cats, after all.