The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Science Art: Honey Ant, Webster’s New International

Does anyone else remember these from Insects Do The Strangest Things? Oh, what a fine children’s book that is.

From Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, 1911, G & C Miriam Co. Springfield, MA, [found here.]

Entered on 31 August 2008 at 6:47 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

The iPhone girl.

This isn’t research as much as social observation, but have you heard about the iPhone girl? I noticed her story on reddit but she’s popping up all over the place:

China’s “human flesh search engine” is in hot pursuit of an unnamed Chinese factory worker after photographs of her showed up unexpectedly on a new iPhone 3G purchased recently in Britain.

…

FoxConn representatives have confirmed to several Chinese newspapers that the woman – dubbed the “iPhone girl” – is an employee of the company.

The spokesman said workers had most probably been testing the phone’s camera and had forgotten to delete the photos. He said those involved would not be fired for the mistake.

“Small mistakes are unavoidable,” the news agency AFP quoted FoxConn spokesman Liu Kun as saying. “I would call this a beautiful mistake.”

He said the factory worker in the photos was “quite nervous” after her face appeared on websites and in newspapers.

I try not to use copyrighted images here, but she did stick it as the background of a new iPhone, so here:

You want to see technology putting a human face on production? Here. A human face. In the factory.

In a perfect world, she would marry Zhou Xixi, the “Ringtone King of China,” and they would make beautiful, quirky music and images together.

Entered on 29 August 2008 at 6:11 in the Music, Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

The keen migratory instincts of cows.

It seems like this story hit everywhere at once, but it’s still marvelous. Here’s the BBC version of how cows always face north:

Images from Google Earth have confirmed that cattle tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction.

Wild deer also display this behaviour – a phenomenon that has apparently gone unnoticed by herdsmen and hunters for thousands of years.

In the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences, scientists say the Earth’s magnetic fields may influence the behaviour of these animals.

I’m sure I read about this in some scouting guide or survival manual years ago, but I can’t think of when or where.

Like living, bovine iron filings, grazing across a gigantic magnetic field.

Entered on 28 August 2008 at 6:20 in the Science file | 1 Observation |  Print

Unplugged.

So, the BBC is talking about one of Nikola Tesla’s dreams (he of the AC current and the plasma ball) coming true in an Intel lab, where engineers are broadcasting power wirelessly:

Intel’s technology relies on an idea called magnetic induction. It is a principle similar to the way a trained singer can shatter a glass using their voice; the glass absorbs acoustic energy at its natural frequency.

At the wall socket, power is put into magnetic fields at a transmitting resonator – basically an antenna. The receiving resonator is tuned to efficiently absorb energy from the magnetic field, whereas nearby objects do not.

…

Intel’s demonstration has built on work done originally by Marin Soljacic, a physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, researcher Alanson Sample showed how to make a 60-watt light bulb glow from an energy source three feet away.

As a model, they’re using the idea of a laptop that recharges whenever it’s in the same room as the transmitter, but if you think about it, that’s just a tiny part of what this system could do.

This could change everything.

Entered on 27 August 2008 at 6:51 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Hello, Poindexter.

You may or may not have noticed a new link in the “fellow travellers” area down there on the right.

It’s to Hello, Poindexter!, the blog of Heather D’Angelo, who sometimes tours the world as one-third of the ethereal indie-pop combo Au Revoir Simone, and who sometimes studies Astrophysics at Columbia University.

For a good sense of how these worlds collide, check out her cosmological back-of-the-tour-van interview with Dr. Subodh Patil.

(I found this, as I have found so many good things, via Fluxblog.)

Heather D’Angelo, the Guild of Scientific Troubadours salutes you!

Entered on 26 August 2008 at 6:12 in the Guild Affairs, Music file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Red Dwarf Flare

_{Click to embiggen vastly}

From the NASA Image Galleries:

On April 25, 2008, NASA’s Swift satellite picked up a record-setting flare from a star known as EV Lacertae. This flare was thousands of times more powerful than the greatest observed solar flare. But because EV Lacertae is much farther from Earth than the sun, the flare did not appear as bright as a solar flare. Still, it was the brightest flare ever seen from a star other than the sun.

Image Credit: Casey Reed/NASA

Entered on 24 August 2008 at 6:33 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: When the Lights Go Out.

SONG: “When the Lights Go Out.” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Sleep-deprived brains alternate between normal activity and ‘power failure’”, Labspaces.net, 21 May 2008, as used in the post “Lights Out.”

ABSTRACT: I often feel like romantic love and blackouts have a lot in common. I also live in a house with small children and dogs and lots of bills, so sleep-disruption is pretty much a way of life. And, you know, I miss being able to lie down without spontaneously losing consciousness. Especially when there’s a lovely lady in the bed beside me. But, zap!, there I go. From what I read, this is one of the most widespread problems in modern society (that’s what I tell myself in the morning while blearily humming The Diodes into my pillowcase).

This song used no string instruments, now that I think of it. It’s built on a very simple mellotron loop with a few effects tossed in. There’s a very processed sample of a MIDI file of the Chinese national anthem. There are some fake drums from Jammer. There’s a hulusi. And there’s me, singing. I don’t know if I was trying to imitate Stephin Merritt imitating Cole Porter or if I was more inspired by Winnie-the-Pooh, but it all rhymes. I did the music early and wrote the final verses and bridge about 15 minutes before recording, because as well as having trouble with sleep I also have trouble with deadlines. But I made it. Now, to rest.

Entered on 23 August 2008 at 7:11 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Bad choices and birth control.

LiveScience makes clear that sometimes, contraception isn’t the best decision. Or, well, doesn’t help you make the best decisions… because birth control pills befuddle women’s mate radar:

That’s because beneath a woman’s flowery fragrance or a guy’s musk the body sends out aromatic molecules that indicate genetic compatibility.

Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes are involved in immune response and other functions, and the best mates are those that have different MHC smells than you. The new study reveals, however, that when women are on the pill they prefer guys with matching MHC odors.

This might explain quite a few confusing bits of the latter half of the 20th century.

Entered on 22 August 2008 at 14:33 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

The plausibly deniable death ray.

The great thing about laser weapons, New Scientist says, isn’t just that you can fry your enemy from miles away. You can also shrug your shoulders and say, “No, really, I didn’t zap that guy!”:

As the term suggests, “plausible deniability” is used to describe situations where those responsible for an event could plausibly claim to have had no involvement in it.

Corley and Kaiser did not respond to requests from New Scientist to expand on their comments. But John Pike, analyst with defence think-tank Global Security, based in Virginia, says the implications are clear.

“The target would never know what hit them,” says Pike. “Further, there would be no munition fragments that could be used to identify the source of the strike.”

Entered on 21 August 2008 at 6:28 in the Science file | 2 Observations |  Print

*More* spouses?

New Scientist has just given me stress-induced palpitations with their finding that the more wives, the longer-lived the man:

After accounting for socioeconomic differences, men aged over 60 from 140 countries that practice polygamy to varying degrees lived on average 12% longer than men from 49 mostly monogamous nations, says Virpi Lummaa, an ecologist at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Lummaa presented her findings last week at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology’s annual meeting in Ithaca, New York.

…

One answer seems to be a phenomenon called the grandmother effect. For every 10 years a woman survives past the menopause, she gains two additional grandchildren, Lummaa says. It seems that doting on and spoiling grandchildren aids their survival, as well as furthering some of their grandmother’s genes.

…[But for men,] it seems that fathering more kids with more wives leads to increased male longevity. Men, then, live long because they’re fertile well into their grey years.

So apparently the researchers didn’t examine the metric between the length of lifespan and the length of the “honey-do” list… which suddenly seems terribly imperative to me.

Entered on 20 August 2008 at 16:00 in the Science file | 2 Observations |  Print