February 2010 Archives

Image by Alaskan Dude via Flickr

Grizzly bears have entered polar bear territory, setting the stage for deadly bear versus bear encounters to come, suggests a study recently published in the journal Canadian Field Naturalist.

Should the bears meet, the grizzlies could do some serious damage.

No doubt about that, but polar bears have a definite size advantage. In one-on-one confrontation, my money's on the polar bear. My question is this: what happens if, rather than fighting, the two species breed? And fuse into some unholy sort of unstoppable ultra-bear with an insatiable taste for human flesh?

Image via Wikipedia

Prehistoric seas were filled with giant plankton-eating fish which died out at the same time as the dinosaurs, new fossil evidence suggests.

Scientists from Glasgow, Oxford and the United States have identified fossil evidence which shows the fish existed between 66 and 172 million years ago.

A Japanese spider crab believed to be the biggest ever seen in Britain is set to go on show at Birmingham's National Sea Life Centre.

Dubbed Crabzilla, his front feeding limbs are more than 5ft (1.5m) long and end in big claws.

In the meantime, the Open_Sailing project is trying to develop (via open source) solutions to enable humans to inhabit the oceans. From their website:

We urgently need a new generation of semi-permanent affordable and sustainable architecture to explore and study the oceans, understand biodiversity, monitor climate change, address marine pollution, invent new modes of sustainable aquaculture, create data mesh networks, produce renewable energies, for navigation safety purposes and much more.

I'm not so sure that I'd be eager to live in the ocean, given its other denizens. The Open_Sailing project sounds fascinating anyhow, though - they're developing, among other things, "an architecture that behaves like a super-organism, reacting to the weather conditions and other variables, reconfiguring itself" and "a mobile aquaculture to sustain human long term life at sea." Check out their concept video below:

Open_Sailing 4 minutes concept on Vimeo.

Image via Wikipedia

Indeed the rhyme

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again

....does not tell us at all that Humpty was an egg. However its etymology has a number of variations, and it was in Lewis Carroll's 1871 book "Through the Looking Glass" (that used this rhyme), where the book's illustrator John Tenniel first drew Humpty as an egg, sitting on a wall.

An 1810 version of the rhyme also does not explicitly state that the subject is an egg because it was originally posed as the riddle as such:

Humpty Dumpty sate on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
Threescore men and threescore more,
Cannot place Humpty dumpty as he was before.

Furthermore, "humpty dumpty" was an eighteenth-century reduplicative (linguistic root) slang for a short and clumsy person.

Shakespeare's hunchbacked Egg, the 'Wall' being either the name of his horse (called 'White Surrey' in Shakespeare's play) or a reference to the supporters who deserted him. During the battle of Bosworth Field, Richard fell off his steed and was said to have been 'hacked into pieces.' (Though the play depicts Richard as a hunchback, other historical sources suggest that he was not.)

physicists have been accelerating gold nuclei around a 2.4-mile underground ring to 99.995 percent of the speed of light and then colliding them in an effort to melt protons and neutrons and free their constituents -- quarks and gluons. The goal has been a state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma, which theorists believe existed when the universe was only a microsecond old.

The departure from normal physics manifested itself in the apparent ability of the briefly freed quarks to tell right from left. That breaks one of the fundamental laws of nature, known as parity, which requires that the laws of physics remain unchanged if we view nature in a mirror.

See more here!

• The Introvert's Corner - a blog about introversion. Tagline: "How to live a quiet life in a noisy world."
• Exploded views of everyday objects - ever wondered about the inside of an Etch-a-sketch? Check it out. Among other things. 
• Man creates vacuum-cleaner powered Spiderman device with which to climb walls
• (Unemployed) man (from my neighborhood) creates decked-out igloo with which to escape the harsh realities of the economy
• The interesting relationship between hallucinations and math (it's not just the boredom that does it, apparently)
• Scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, via high-speed collisions, cause a mixture to reach the temperature of 4 trillion degrees Celsius.
  

• Have scientists developed a treatment for autism? Apparently, an oxytocin hormone has been shown to increase social interaction. My question is, will "neurodiversity" advocates protest this? They argue that there's nothing "wrong" with autism and Asperger's patients, they're just "different." From their point of view, this might seem like an X-Men 3 type of situation. 
• The marshmallow test: kids are guinea pigs in this test of self-control. Can they resist the marshmallow in front of them in the hopes of receiving an extra one after five minutes?
• New transistors mimic the human brain.
• Was the Alaska purchase (aka "Seward's Folly) worth it? Maybe not. (And not just because of Sarah Palin.)
• A second brain in the gut

A team led by Northwestern University chemistry professor Bartosz A. Grzybowski has shown that an acidic droplet can successfully navigate a complex maze (J. Am. Chem. Soc., DOI: 10.1021/ja9076793).

"I personally find most exciting that such a simple system can exhibit apparently 'intelligent' behavior," Louisiana State University chemistry professor John A. Pojman comments. "This approach may be useful as a pumping method for microfluidics or a way to convert chemical energy to mechanical motion in small devices. I am eager to see if they can generalize it to other types of gradients," he says.

draw every person in New York. I will be drawing people everyday and posting as frequently as I can. It is possible that I will draw you without you knowing it. I draw in Subway stations and museums and restaurants and on street corners. I try not to be in the way when I am drawing or be too noticeable. Whenever I have a new batch of drawings I will post them on this blog. If you would like to increase the chances of a portrait of YOU appearing on this blog please email me (art@jasonpolan.com) a street corner or other public place that you will be standing at for a duration of two minutes (I will be on the corner of 14th street and 8th avenue on the North-east corner of the street from 2:42-2:44pm this Thursday wearing a bright yellow jacket and navy rubber boots, for example). Please give me more than a 24 hour warning and please make it a scenario that is not too difficult for you to accomplish (the corner outside of the store you work at during lunch time, or in front of a museum you were going to go to on a Saturday) because I may unfortunately miss you and do not want you to have to invest more than 2 minutes of your time in case I cannot make it.

• Burials made easy: a screw-in coffin
• The lost lizard people of Los Angeles may be lost, but we at least know where they were
• Check out this Batman and Robin comic generator for endless fun
  

Climate change will make the world more fragrant.

As CO2 levels increase and the world warms, land use, precipitation and the availability of water will also change.

In response to all these disruptions, plants will emit greater levels of fragrant chemicals called biogenic volatile organic compounds.

That will then alter how plants interact with one another and defend themselves against pests, according to a major scientific review.

According to the scientists leading the review, the world may already be becoming more fragrant, as plants have already begun emitting more smelly chemicals.

"The increase is exponential," says Professor Josep Penuelas, of the Global Ecology Unit at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain.

"It may have increased already by 10% in the past 30 years and may increase 30 to 40% with the two to three degrees (Celsius) warming projected for the next decades."

Image via Wikipedia

This camouflaged Dutch ship successfully disguised itself as a small tropical island and avoided the Japanese Navy after the Battle of the Java Sea.

HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen was stationed in the Dutch East Indies when WW II began. After the destruction of the Allied Fleet by the Japanese during the Battle of the Java Sea in February 1942, Crijnssen's captain was ordered to escape with his ship to Australia. Covered with tree branches, the minesweeper crossed the Japanese naval lines camouflaged as a tropical island.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The "holographic principle" challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.

Marie Byrd Land and Bir Tawil Triangle are the only two land areas on Earth not claimed by any country.

Marie Byrd Land is a portion of Antarctica so remote that no country in the world bothered to claim it. It's the single largest unclaimed territory on Earth.

Bir Tawil Triangle likely has no owner because of some administrative snafu. First of all, despite of its name, it's not a triangle at all. In fact, it has a trapezoidal shape. In 1899, when the British drew the map between Egypt and Sudan, Bir Tawil was put in Sudan's territory (which Egypt accepted). However, in 1902, when Sudan drew its own map, it put Bir Tawil on the Egyptian side! So far, neither country bothered to lay claim to this patch of land.

It was no big loss, however, as Bir Tawil is full of sand and a whole lot of nothing.

Combining Robert Morris' Box With the Sound of Its Own Making with Baudrillard's writing on the art auction this sculpture exists in eternal transactional flux. It is a physical sculpture that is perpetually attempting to auction itself on eBay.

Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself.

If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.

The sculpture, entitled "A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter", recently sold on eBay for $6,350.00 and is now being shipped to its next "owner".

You can read more here.

- Publishing Food #2 - Edible Geography looks at miniature cookbooks and chocolate letters and robotic food chefs.
- Fore-Edge book painting comes in classic and modern forms
- Brian Dettmer's book art
- American Woodworker shows people how to make a Lumber Library to show off fancy woods. Another Wood Book.
- Typo of the Day for Librarians - a compilation of common library catalog typos.
- The International Edible Books festival album pages always make me hungry, for words and snacks
- A few more library mash-ups from an old MetaFilter post. And BibliOdyssey is always good for more biblioporn.

In memory of Steve Cisler, Apple's digital librarian and all-around awesome guy.

There's more here.

• Apparently, hundreds of small earthquakes have been rattling Yellowstone National Park for the last two weeks. This is especially unnerving considering another recent article about how scientists are worried that the Haitian earthquake indicates increased seismic activity in this part of the world.
• The body takes abstract thoughts literally
• Bad news for those of you who've pissed off bees: they can hold a grudge. It seems that honeybees can remember human faces.
• Bad news for those of you who've pissed off robots: it seems that robots have evolved to learn hunting and cooperation.
• octopuses (octopi/octopodes?) are pretty smart. I don't recommend pissing them off.