Mendeliev would be proud to see the “Elemental Haiku” ;-)
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
January Is My Poetry Month
Posted in Literature, Science on 26/01/2022|
An international group of scientists, led by Prof. Wim Thiery, has created a website with a simple purpose: “Here you can find out how many more climate extremes you will face across your lifetime relative to a world without climate change.“
The good news is that the future will not bring substantially more crop failures – but that’s assuming that European and Central Asian farmers will continue to be able to pay the technology and means (water!) to keep up their production. But look at the other numbers! Belgium and Germany had dramatic floods last summer; do we want that to happen again (and more)? Not to mention the last three weather phenomena: those are frightening numbers, no?
Solar Power: Is There An Alternative?
Posted in Science, Society, Technology on 16/10/2021|
Check out this entertaining but educational video:
As far as I know, there is no real alternative in the short term: it’s too soon to tell whether nuclear fusion reactors will be able to generate a substantial part of the world energy needs in the first half of this century…
Sifting Statements To Get To Facts
Posted in Knowledge Management, Science, Society on 13/04/2021|
John Udell made it to my RSS reader a long time ago. His writing, often on subjects that I’m interested in, is thoughtful and deep. In this age of disinformation he calls for an approach I find evident, but that needs repeating: in real life there is more than just black and white, there is lots of grey.
Teaching students to value sources that acknowledge uncertainty, and discount ones that don’t, ought to be part of any strategy to improve news literacy.
The “Acknowledgment of uncertainty” is a nice term to describe the need for reasoned thinking and talking about complex subjects like vaccination or politics. The SIFT method mentioned in the text might help with that, so why not give a go?
Sifting for Gold – Image by Won-Tolla (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
California wildfires? Must be a consequence of “bad forest management”.
Storms and hurricanes in the Mexican Gulf? That must be a consequence of “bad ocean management”, no?
Composer James Beckwith has been at work with the COVID-19 infection and mortality numbers. You could say that he lets the virus play a tune – and it’s not a pretty melody. Let this be a warning to all those who think that the epidemic is gone, or the virus weakened: the numbers are not getting better after June (even if that might seem to be the case in your little corner of the world)!
I hope James can provide one or more updated versions in the future.
Global Warming Visualized
Posted in Science on 24/06/2020|
Professor Ed Hawkins (University of Reading) has constructed a visual representation of the of the change in temperature as measured in each country over the past 100+ years: blue means “colder than average”, red means “warmer than average”. Check it out yourself at https://showyourstripes.info/.
Source: https://showyourstripes.info/ (Ed Hawkins) – click on the image to see the stripes for other parts of the world.
Since a large part of the Earth’s surface is covered in water, it is also interesting to have a look at the graphs for the oceans. There are striking differences in the temperature evolution of the North and South Atlantic Ocean respectively. Even more extreme is the graph for the Arctic waters: look at all that red in the last 15 years!
Source: https://showyourstripes.info/ (Ed Hawkins) – click on the image to see the stripes for other parts of the world.
An Exercise In Complete Ridiculousness – Perfect Art
Posted in Design and Art, Science, Technology on 15/03/2020|
Yes, that is how one of the comments on TechSpot describes the machine built by Daniel de Bruin. Mashable calls it the Googol Visualizer Machine, and that is what it is:
… the first gear needs to make one googol rotations just to turn the last gear one complete rotation.
Click the picture to see it running on YouTube
A googol is a 1 followed by a hundred zeroes in the decimal system – go read the Wikipedia for a explanation. That will also explain where Larry and Sergei got the name for the most famous search engine on the Internet ;-)
Mathematics And Statistics: Low Sunshine Numbers On A Palidrome Day
Posted in Personal, Science, Technology on 02/02/2020|
Today is a special day for calendar geeks: it’s a rare “global palindrome day”. In the words of the Solihull School Maths Department:
But I’m here to report that January 2020 was quite dark: sunshine was sparse, as reflected in our solar electricity numbers. Looking at the numbers, it’s clear that the months of January in the last three years gave us a lot less sunshine than before. Let’s hope that this is “just” statistical variability, no?
Finding Beauty While Walking On The Beach At Night
Posted in Science on 20/10/2019|
I saw the word ‘Yooperlites‘ on BoingBoing, along with a name that reminded me of Finland. Suspecting a silly story, my first reaction was to skip the post… Luckily for me, I did not do that. The image accompanying the post made it clear that the subject was not silly, but a thing of beauty.
If, like me, you don’t know what a Yooperlite is, you have to watch the story:
(Click on the image to see the video report of this discovery)
I will admit to being jealous of Erik Rintamaki, for having the luck to just walk on the beach and discover a type of rock that is not just beautiful to look at, but also completely new – at least in the state of Michigan. Yooperlite is a syenite rocks that is rich in fluorescent sodalite; I wonder if something like it could be found here in Europe.
Celebrate One Of The Greatest Events Of The 20th Century
Posted in Science, Technology on 20/07/2019|
I was just 11 at the time, and I did see some of the TV images of the moon landing during the summer of 1969. Anything to do with rockets and space, as well as the required “futuristic” technology to make things happen in that domain, still makes me sit up and pay attention. It’s no wonder, looking back at this, that I still read mainly SF books; like Star Trek; try to remain in touch with the latest developments in physics and tech; and continue to tinker with computers (at a very, very modest scale).
Thus I agree with Ars Technica, writing:
Today, the Moon landings still take our breath away. On July 20, 1969, NASA pulled off arguably the greatest technical achievement of the 20th century.
(Click the image to go to the Lego™ shop)
To celebrate that achievement, Lego™ is selling a 1,087 piece set of the Apollo 11 Lunar Lander. I know, that is essentially “good marketing” on their part. But this is one of the few sets I would consider buying these days – because of the significance of the Apollo 11 missions, not because it would fit in the collection of thousands of bricks I still have from my youth ;-) Thanks for pointing this set out to me, Ars!
Don’t You Like Pi(e)?
Posted in Science on 14/03/2019|
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Etcetera…
2018 Was Warm And Sunny In Belgium
Posted in Personal, Science, Technology on 03/01/2019|
Meteorologists have confirmed it repeatedly, these last few days, and our photovoltaic panels agree: 2018 was a sunny year! In fact, during their stay on our roof only two years produced more electricity: 2010 and 2011 – which are not accidentally the first years after the installation.
Climatologists have been saying for a long time that climate change will manifest itself through more extreme weather. I suppose warmer and dryer summers here in Europe are an example of that, just like droughts in Syria and California, no?
In an MIT Technology Review website article titled “The day I tasted climate change” James Temple describes the rather grim reality of living in a region where wildfires are becoming more and more frequent.
Climate change doesn’t ignite wildfires, but it’s intensifying the hot, dry summer conditions that have helped fuel some of California’s deadliest and most destructive fires in recent years.
I’ve long understood that the dangers of global warming are real and rising. I’ve seen its power firsthand in the form of receding glaciers, dried lake beds, and Sierra tree stands taken down by bark beetles.
This is the first time, though, that I smelled and tasted it in my home.
In 2016 we had a short vacation on the island Madeira. Although the wildfires there had already been put out weeks before our arrival, we could still smell the soot and the burned landscape… and that was enough to scare us of being close to such fires.
James Temple is much more knowledgeable on climate change than me, and his conclusion reads as a dire warning, unfortunately:
When I started writing seriously about climate change a little more than five years ago, the dangers largely seemed distant and abstract. Without realizing it, most of this time I’ve carried along an assumption that we will somehow, eventually, confront the problem in a meaningful way. We don’t have a choice. So sooner or later, we’ll do the right thing.
But after two years closely reporting and writing on clean energy technologies here, it has slowly dawned on me that, well, maybe not. While we absolutely could accomplish much of the necessary transformation with existing or emerging technologies, the sheer scale of the overhaul required and the depth of the entrenched interests may add up to insurmountable levels of inertia.
While I’m still remaining optimistic about humanity’s ability to cope, a little voice in the back of my head now questions that optimism…
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