Monday, June 25, 2012

Mit einem Felsblock von Salz.

I was sick with the flu last week so I skipped NS class, and all my limited patience was able to get out of my classmates was that they talked about rocks.

Like these, only less artsy.

This was terrible news for me because I've wanted to use an image of Adolf Hitler in this post but I can't think of how I can connect him to that topic now. But my resolve is rock-solid so I'll go on ahead and do it anyway:

"Rock-solid!" Verstehen sie?

Glad that's out of the way. Now we can talk about other creepy, more Jew-friendly (Jew-friendlier?) things. Like Easter . . . Island. Specifically the stone statues they have over there. One such statue is seen below playing a friendly game of sensory-deprivation-tug-of-war with the locals:

There's cautionary tale in there somewhere.

These things are called moai, and they are part of an ancient Polynesian civilization's mythos. Unfortunately for them, what started out as adorable became the end of them all. Believe it or not, there really is a cautionary tale in there.

LA Times tells us:

"UCLA anthropologist Jared Diamond famously detailed what the called the "ecocide" of Rapa Nui in his 2005 book "Collapse." When Polynesians first settled the island about AD 800, they had the misfortune to select one that was dry, cool and remote -- and thus poorly fertilized by windblown dust or volcanic ash. They chopped down forests to provide wood for construction and for moving the moai, and the trees didn't return. The denuded landscape allowed winds to blow off the topsoil, and fertility fell sharply. When the natives no longer had wood for building fishing canoes, they killed and ate all the birds. Before the Dutch arrived at the island on Easter Sunday in 1722, the population had descended into cannibalism and barbarity. Diamond called it "the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by over-exploiting its own resources."
However, archaeologists Carl Lipo of Cal State Long Beach and Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii argue that the moai-dragging peoples were not stupid:
". . .the stones could be "walked" by as few as 18 people with ropes by tilting them back and forth on their bases. That version jibes well with the islanders' own mythology, which claims that the moai walked across the island."
And also:
"The first inhabitants dined on the rats, but the animals had no other natural predators and overran the island. Buried nuts from the extinct Easter Island palms show distinctive teethmarks from the rats. They probably also ate birds' eggs. With the rats eating the palm nuts, the trees could not be reseeded naturally ."
Fine. They were stupid.

Shows what happens when humans tip the delicate balance that keeps nature alive: whoever does the tipping dies. Except Michael Jackson. He can tip any balance he wants, he can make gravity his little bitch, but he's not. Gonna. Oh. What am I talking about? See, in my absence, my teacher also played a "rock song" at the AVP. I've no idea what song it was, but I do know it's a pun. Because it's a song. About rocks.

He apparently enjoyed it so I can only assume it was as good (and hopefully less apelike) as this:



I promise to be less of a slob next week.

Sources:
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-stoneheads-easter-island-20120620,0,6247582.story

Photo courtesy:

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Who is this Sheldon Guy? Is He Hotter than Brian Cox?

I wanted to start with an infographic about the Big Bang theory. So I went to Google and I got:

Something uncomfortable like this.


Something asian like this.

Or a sparkly combination of both.

The popularity of niche market entertainment forces one to use keywords like "big bag theory origin of the universe", which sounds like the title of an astronomy major's upcoming docu-movie. Or a really bad Sci-Fy feature.

What it really is is a scientific theory on how the universe began. From what little my mind and my patience are able to grasp, the Big Bang Theory is a widely-accepted possible explanation on how everything came to be. It posits that before the beginning of time, all the forces of nature condensed at one point. This point was all there is, and it was dense and hot beyond imagination. I have reason to believe (read: people tell me) that this ball-of-everything then exploded, thus the name of the theory.

BUT!  I did a little digging and I wound up in talkorigins.org and found to little surprise that everything I know is a cruel and insiduous lie.
" The simplest description of the theory would be something like: "In the distant past, the universe was very dense and hot; since then it has expanded, becoming less dense and cooler." The word "expanded" should not be taken to mean that matter flies apart -- rather, it refers to the idea that space itself is becoming larger. "
Here, talkorigins also says:
"In most popularized science sources, BBT is often described with something like "The universe came into being due to the explosion of a point in which all matter was concentrated." Not surprisingly, this is probably the standard impression which most people have of the theory. Occasionally, one even hears "In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded."There are several misconceptions hidden in these statements:
  • The BBT is not about the origin of the universe. Rather, its primary focus is the development of the universe over time.
  • BBT does not imply that the universe was ever point-like.
  • The origin of the universe was not an explosion of matter into already existing space.
The famous cosmologist P. J. E. Peebles stated this succinctly in the January 2001 edition of Scientific American (the whole issue was about cosmology and is worth reading!): "That the universe is expanding and cooling is the essence of the big bang theory. You will notice I have said nothing about an 'explosion' - the big bang theory describes how our universe is evolving, not how it began." (p. 44). The March 2005 issue also contained an excellent article pointing out and correcting many of the usual misconceptions about BBT."
Pictured: Lies?

To recap, what little I thought I knew about the universe was wrong. The Big Bang Theory isn't about how the universe began. There was no explosion involved, let alone an explosion of nothing that became something. Now that I'm more confused than when I started, let's turn to CERN scientist Brian Cox for a short explanation of... things.

Above: Coxlap.


Sources:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/astronomy/bigbang.html#theory
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/astronomy/bigbang.html#misconceptions

CHECKED BY PROF. CRISENCIO PANER

Monday, June 11, 2012

Ramblings and Resent


My very first aspiration was to become a scientist. About a decade later, I found myself enrolled in a curriculum that won't make me think about science for a good two years. In the afternoon of last week's Wednesday, those two years ended. This semester, I'm studying Natural Science 2.

If there are only two things I can take away from years of high school general-education science, they are that Science and Math are married, and that I can never escape them even if I tried. Not that I want to.

Who would? Man's quest for knowledge has continuously made significant advancements to the quality of life on earth. Not to mention it took people (and a few animals) off what was once thought to be the edge of the earth and into the colorful colorful outer space.

This post is dedicated to the things I  recently take particular interest in in the broad field of Natural Science:

Astronomy:
We were talking about the colorful outer space, yes? Speaking of color, have I mentioned Hubble's photographs are lies?


Pictured: Lies.


Alright, maybe lies in this context is a harsh word to use. To be fair, lets ask Space Telescope Science Institute's (producer of images from the Hubble Space Telescope) Zolt Levay:

"In the case of the Hubble, Levay explained, the images are further adjusted to boost contrast and tweak colors and brightness to emphasize certain features of the image or to make a more pleasing picture."
Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/11863/true-or-false-color-the-art-of-extraterrestrial-photography/#ixzz1xXuHEmRc

Turns out images from space are colored according to the information that people who study the universe need:
"True color would be an attempt to reproduce visually accurate color. False color, on the other hand, is an arbitrary selection of colors to represent some characteristic in the image, such as chemical composition, velocity, or distance. Additionally, by definition, any infrared or ultraviolet image would need to be represented with “false color” since those wavelengths are invisible to humans."

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/11863/true-or-false-color-the-art-of-extraterrestrial-photography/#ixzz1xXwL1CiM
Also, the sun isn't yellow. And it's not there:




Biology:
Charles Darwin made it a point to stay on the very top of the food chain. Genuis apparently comes at a terrible price.


LiveScience tells us:
"Darwin was also adventurous—he eagerly ate many of the animals that he collected, including iguanas, armadillos and rheas—and pious, taking along a bible for his five-year voyage."
Read more: http://www.livescience.com/493-life-charles-darwin-aimless-adventure-tragedy-discovery.html

He's also responsible (at least in part) for this:



Earth Science, Chemistry and Physics:
There must be some explanation why I lumped these three branches together. Applying Occam's Razor, the answer is that I've ran out of trivia now and that I'm not as well-read (in the limited sense of "well-read" applicable in this context) in these subjects as the two already mentioned.

In conclusion, at least according to the things I read about (mostly on comedy sites and the more serious occasional authoritative education sites) and the quiz show clips above, what we think we know may not be enough, or flat-out wrong. The more we understand about the world around us, the more we are capable of understanding how the world affects us, and more importantly, how we affect it. Then, we can learn to live accordingly - responsibly.

Plus, it's entertaining. This is why even though Math hates me, I  still really like science.



Sources:
http://www.universetoday.com/18689/color-of-the-sun/
http://www.universetoday.com/11863/true-or-false-color-the-art-of-extraterrestrial-photography/
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/iotd.html
http://qi.com/talk/viewtopic.php?start=0&t=3350
http://www.livescience.com/493-life-charles-darwin-aimless-adventure-tragedy-discovery.html

CHECKED BY PROF. CRISENCIO PANER.