Free Dippy
This is Dippy the Diplodocus — though whether anyone called him that before he was embroiled in controversy is a matter of, um…controversy. He’s been in London’s Natural History Museum since 1905, a gift from Andrew Carnegie to Edward VII. He was moved into the Wal*Mart greeter spot in 1979, where he has delighted and inspired school children for 35 years.
And he’s coming down.
The Museum is having a bit of clear up and the issue with Dippy is, he ain’t real. He’s a painstaking plaster cast (or as one Independent writer put it its ‘very existence is a malicious lie’) of a diplodocus skeleton that was dug up in Wyoming in 1898. The original is in Pittsburgh.
Haha, just kidding! The real reason is, they’re replacing him with the skeleton of a blue whale because gaia and shit.
The change is part of a ‘decade of transformation’ planned at the museum by its director, Sir Michael Dixon.
Explaining the decision, Sir Michael said: ‘As the largest known animal to have ever lived on Earth, the story of the blue whale reminds us of the scale of our responsibility to the planet.
Blahblahblah…challenge the way people think…never been more urgent…under threat…species and ecosystems are being destroyed…poignant reminder…make a real difference. Boo! Phooey! Bring back the plaster dinosaur!
There’s a hashtag and shit, but it’s hard to turn an ecowarrior. Dippy is doomed.
January 29, 2015 — 10:31 pm
Comments: 15
A title to include the word “baa”
File this under d’oh — why didn’t I think of that? Important documents have been written on parchment for thousands of years, right? Some still are. Parchment is made from the skin of cows, goats and sheep, right? We’ve got millions and millions of ’em. In the case of many documents, with actual dates written on.
In other words, stuff that can be DNA sampled!
Eh? Eh? Millions of precisely dated DNA samples going back millenia. What an awesome reservoir of information! I mean, if you think the evolution of domestic animals is interesting (and who doesn’t?).
If you’re at all interested (and who isn’t?) have a look at the Royal Society’s longer explanation of some of the ongoing studies. Good stuff.
Some samples, for example, show the DNA of several species…meaning that a variety of different animal hides were being batch-processed. Thereby telling us a little bit about industrial production methods.
Selective breeding didn’t start until the 18th C in Britain and, apparently, the shift from somewhat random characteristics to breeding for specifics is showing up the in the record.
Oh, and the Dead Sea scrolls were written on ibex and goat skin.
By the way, if you hit the Society link and are fascinated (as I was) by the thumbnail in the sidebar, the cover of the January 2015 Philosophical Transactions, I am sorry to tell you that is a photo of a pile of bones, not the skull of a single fabulous monster. Boo.
December 10, 2014 — 7:59 pm
Comments: 6
Real headline from a fake newspaper
I don’t know if Ace or anybody picked up on this reeking gem last week, but I’m still trying to wrap my braincell around it. It’s from the Daily Telegraph — once the best center-right newspaper I know. Brace yourselves. Ready? Here we go:
How the Nobel Prize has favoured white western men for more than 100 years
Complete with helpful maps and graphics.
Let’s leave aside for a moment that Alfred Nobel was a white western man. He might have called this thing “a prize for people who are a whole lot like me.” He could have called it “white western men who do white western man things awesomely well.” His money. He could’ve done.
But I’m sure he’d have been happy if people from other places invented lots of amazing things. Even people from brown places. Gosh, even the ladies.
Who doesn’t look at the actual results and think, “wow — white western men kick all kinds of science ass!”?
How did we get to a place where you have a contest with clear winners and clear losers, first reaction is the winners must have cheated and the losers must be victims?
October 14, 2014 — 9:21 pm
Comments: 13
Repeat after me, “correlation…”
This goofy looking sod is Tyler Vigan and he’s studying for his doctorate at Harvard. But that doesn’t matter right now. He also runs a site called Spurious Correlations.
He’s written a little algorithm that compares shit tons of data sets and finds correlations. Really stupid pointless ones, for the most part (if his algorithm has found any likely meaningful ones, he doesn’t say). Like, there’s a 0.992558 correlation between the divorce rate in Maine and the US per capita consumption of margarine.
That’s lots of fun, and I invite you to browse his charts. Could come in handy next time you get into an argument with a green. But his bigger point is that computers are terrific at sifting and finding correlations, but they’re absolutely crap at weeding the meaningful ones from the silly ones. “Meaning” isn’t an easily quantifiable characteristic.
If I asked you to tell me the current population of Uruguay, I assume you don’t know. Thing is, if you don’t know, somehow you knew instantly that you don’t know. Many years ago, I read that this is something they haven’t worked out how to do build into computers: how to recognize instantly when they don’t have data, without sifting through all the data they DO have. I’ve been puzzling ever that ever since. Somehow, I think those problems are related.
p.s. Did you have any idea that seven hundred people died in 2009 by becoming entangled in their bedsheets?
May 27, 2014 — 9:39 pm
Comments: 21
Geek toys
Back in the States, I used to buy magnets from these guys — K&J Magnetics. They sell magnets in all strengths, sizes and shapes, because you never know when you want to stick something to something else or find a screw in a leafpile. If you know what I mean. Oh, don’t question me.
Anyway, the send out *lots* of mailings and a few interesting articles, such as this one, about magnetic strip technology. How it works, how to fuck it up.
Can a neodymium magnet erase or scramble the data on a magnetic strip?
Yes. If you rub a neodymium magnet directly across the magnetic stripe, with the magnet touching the card, the data is likely to be erased or scrambled.
How strong must the magnetic field be to erase these magnetic strips?
The magnetic strip on credit cards come in two varieties. The high-coercivity ones, like a typical credit card, require a field strength of somewhere around 4,000 gauss to demagnetize. The low-coercivity ones that are often re-written, like hotel keys or gift cards, require about 300 gauss.
Worth a read, if you have the slightest interest.
I recommend these guys for all your magnet needs. And I trust that you would never, ever fuck up somebody’s credit cards without a really valid reason. You’re just too good a person.
January 7, 2014 — 11:50 pm
Comments: 11
I almost get it
I’m seriously innumerate. I’m sure I’ve mentioned that. It’s not something I’m proud of (I hate it when people are proud of being bad at stuff). I have a feeling mathematics encompasses some of the most interesting shit ever, and I’m totally locked out of the party.
But every once in a while — especially when math is expressed in something visual — I allllmost get it.
Take fifteen simple, independent pendulums of graduating lengths. The longest swings back and forth 51 times in 60 seconds. Each successive, shorter pendulum completes one extra back and forth in that same period. Start them all swinging at once with a board thingie, and this is exactly how I imagine it would look. Except that period in the middle when they all go kind of wild-ass and un-wavy.
This has been around the web for a while; I just found it kind of hypnotic to watch.
February 15, 2012 — 10:59 pm
Comments: 20
Don’t try this in California
Ninja rocks. They are neither ninjas nor rocks.
They’re little bits of aluminum oxide ceramic, like the insulator on a sparkplug. Even a small piece flung at tempered glass will make it shatter thoroughly and relatively quietly (that’s the ninja part). Ideal for smash and grabs.
So much so that California has declared them de facto burglary tools. A court in Washington state accepted posession as proof of intent to burgle.
It works because aluminum oxide is very hard and the surface tension of tempered glass is very high. On the Mohs scale of mineral hardness (which measures the ability of one mineral to scratch another), diamonds are 10, aluminum oxide ceramic is 9, tempered glass is 6.5. So a light blow with a very hard object breaks the surface tension of tempered glass and makes it do what it’s supposed to do: shatter into a kzillion tiny relatively harmless pieces.
I suppose it would work even better if you threw diamonds, but that would probably miss the point of a smash and grab.
Plenty of video on YouTube. Like here (warning – extreame).
February 13, 2012 — 9:36 pm
Comments: 25
Scientists discover the point of sex
Apparently, it helps us survive the cooties. Where would we be without science?
Yeah, that’s all I got. It’s Friday. I’m going to go play video games.
Good weekend, everyone!
July 8, 2011 — 9:52 pm
Comments: 28
Science: both creepy and wonderful
Y’all know I love a good murder. Well, here’s a weird one. Today in Winchester Crown Court, Italian Danilo Restivo was sentenced to never-ever getting out of prison, which is pretty unusual for here. Let’s see if I can’t unpack this and tell it right way around.
Danilo Restivo has a hair fetish. As a result of various Crime Watch type programs, 28 women in Italy and an unspecified number in England positively identified Restivo as the man who had come up behind them in a public place and hacked the bottom few inches of their hair off. Apparently without ever being nabbed for it.
In 2002, while Restivo was living in Bournemouth, he murdered his neighbor across the hall, 48 year old Heather Barnetts. He bludgeoned, stabbed and mutilated the hell out of her. In her right hand, he put a lock of somebody else’s hair. In her left hand, he put a lock of her own hair. When her children, 11 and 14, came home from school and found her body, he came across the hall to comfort them. Nice touch.
It took them eight years to accumulate enough evidence to arrest him. Shortly before he was charged, it occurred to Italian authorities that a friend of Restivo’s had disappeared seventeen years ago on the way to meet him at a church in Potenza.
Yep, sure enough, there was sixteen-year-old Elisa Claps’ mummified body in the loft of the church (that’s sixteen years alive, seventeen dessicating in the attic). Exactly like Barnett — bludgeoned and mutilated, pants at half mast, bra cut away, somebody else’s hair in her hand. He’s headed to Italy to stand trial for that one.
A strange enough murder case on its own, but here’s what made it post-worthy:
Five years after Ms Barnett’s death, in 2007, a scientific breakthrough gave the inquiry hope.
Dr Stuart Black, of the University of Reading, undertook chemical and isotope analysis of the hair strands, which represented nine months’ growth.
The results revealed the owner was a UK resident who had visited eastern Spain, between Valencia and Almeria, or the Marseille to Perpignan area of southern France, for up to six days, some 11 weeks before the hair was cut.
They then went to the urban area of Tampa, Florida, US, for eight days some two to two-and-a-half weeks before the hair was cut, and had changed their diet twice in the previous months.
Despite all that, they never identified the owner of the strand of hair in Ms Barnett’s right hand, but — holy shit, did you know they could get that level of detail from a strand of hair now? I know they’ve identified the country of origin from the bones in several stone age burials around here, also from isotopes, but jeeeeeezus that’s specific.
I’d love to know what isotopes are unique to urban Tampa, and how they get in your hair.
June 30, 2011 — 9:56 pm
Comments: 6
Eh. So I’m a banana.
I’ve been wearing this around Second Life for a while. It’s so me.
In SL, you can be anything you want to be. A dinosaur. A flower. An astronaut.
And seemingly 90% of players want to be slutty-looking girls with huge tits. Including the men.
It’s so depressing.
Anyhoo, it seemed like the right graphic to put next to this story from the excellent Watt’s Up With That blog. It’s a timely repost from a February article.
The Cliff’s Notes version: lots of foods are radioactive. Bananas are especially radioactive. Radioactive enough to set off the bomb-detection doo-dads at our ports. Radioactive enough to give you a measurable dose if you stand next to a crate of the treacherous yellow bastards.
So proponents of nuclear energy use the banana equivalent dose as a way of expressing the risk of various radiation exposures. How many bananas would you have to eat to get similarly irradiated?
We don’t have any numbers coming out of Japan yet (and when we do get them, I freely admit those numbers might be bad), but to use an example from Three Mile Island — after the accident, the NRC found traces of radioactive iodine in the milk. I’m sure it was a story at the time. That’s the kind of place you get radiation poisoning — not so much from breathing it, but the stuff gets in the air, gets in the grass, gets in the cow, gets in the milk.
So how much radiation was in the milk? You’d have to drink seventy-five twelve-ounce glasses of contaminated milk to equal the radiation dose from eating a single banana.
A little perspective from a giant animated bruised banana. Good weekend, all!
March 18, 2011 — 11:51 pm
Comments: 24