Weird science facts, March 30 — April 5

Posted on April 7, 2011 by skullsinthestars

Whoops — forgot to post the week’s Twitter #weirdscifacts yesterday!  Here they are, in all their odd glory:

382. Mar 30: Ergotism — when eating grain can drive you insane! (and kill you!) The fungus Claviceps purpurea can infect the grain of rye, and it was so common historically that people didn’t distinguish between the fungus and the real grain.  Ingesting it can cause seizures, convulsions and even hallucinations, as well as gangrene leading to loss of limbs. An outbreak of ergotism in 1039 led to a hospital being built in the name of St. Anthony in order to treat the victims, and this led to ergotism being named “St. Anthony’s Fire”.

383. Mar 31: Lineus longissimus — the bootlace worm — 5 to 10 mm in width, can grow at least 98 ft long!

384. Apr 01: One of earliest videogames, Tennis for Two, created on oscilloscope in 1958 to entertain bored visitors to Brookhaven Lab. Tennis for Two was created by physicist William Higinbotham.  Though it was wildly popular during its short run, Higinbotham never patented the idea, apparently because the lab would have owned the intellectual property. And no, it’s not an April Fool’s joke.

385. Apr 02:  In 1798, physicist E-G. Robert made an optical ghost show (phantasmagoria) that convinced the audience they were real ghosts! Robert was, like myself, a physicist specializing in optics.  He apparently saw an early “magic lantern” show and improved the process to the point that he was able to shock and frighten the first audiences of his own shows.

386. Apr 03: In 1650, chemist Robert Boyle paid a man to be repeatedly bitten by snakes to test whether a hot iron rod could cure him. (Fact comes from @history_geek‘s excellent book, Blood Work!)

387. Apr 04: Oersted made the only major sci discovery in front of a lecture audience! Via my own recent blog post on the subject.  Oersted was essentially teaching a class, and decided to test his theory that electricity and magnetism were related.  He had no time to test the apparatus before the lecture, so his classroom became the first place that the link between electricity and magnetism was shown!

388. Apr 05: The Mobius gear!  (h/t @patrickneville & @ktraphagen ) A Möbius strip is a one-sided surface; I discuss them in the context of optics in this earlier blog post.  The idea that such an odd shape could be made into a functioning gear system is simply bizarre.

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9 days until The Giant’s Shoulders #34!

Posted on April 6, 2011 by skullsinthestars

This is your monthly reminder that there are only nine days left until the deadline for the 34th edition of The Giant’s Shoulders, the history of science blog carnival!  This month’s edition will be held by Jai Virdi at From the Hands of Quacks, an excellent blog on the history of science and history of medicine.  Submissions should be submitted by April 15  either direct to the host or to Blog Carnival.com.

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Thomas Berger’s Neighbors

Posted on April 5, 2011 by skullsinthestars

The fiction that I read and discuss on this blog falls under the broad but relatively unknown category of “weird fiction”, which can include fantasy, sci-fi and horror as well as plenty of stories that are genuinely unclassifiable.  Most of these tales involve some element of the fantastic — the supernatural, impossible technologies, and so forth — but it is certainly not a prerequisite, at least in my mind.  Plenty of stories are stunningly “weird”, even “bizarre”, without having a single alien or sparkly vampire.

With this in mind, I recently acquired and read Thomas Berger’s 1980 novel, Neighbors:

I have known about the book for a long time thanks to the movie version that came out in 1981 starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd; it was Belushi’s last film before his untimely death in 1982.  Never heard of the film?  It is still relatively obscure; it got mixed reviews on release, and seems to have faded quickly from the public’s conscience — there hasn’t even been a DVD release.

I’ll say some words about the movie version at the end of the post, but I wanted to share my thoughts on Berger’s book, which I can best describe as a genuinely unnerving story of suburban paranoia.

Continue reading →

Posted in Weird fiction | 3 Comments

The birth of electromagnetism (1820)

Posted on April 3, 2011 by skullsinthestars

It is oddly fitting that the birth of electromagnetism, and an entirely new direction in physics, started with the tiniest twitch of a compass needle.  In the year 1820, Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) observed the twitch of said compass needle in the presence of an electric current, providing the first definite evidence of a link between electricity and magnetism that would set the tone for much of modern physics.

The story of Oersted’s experiment is the stuff of physics legend, but like most legends it is often misremembered and exaggerated.  Nevertheless, it is a fascinating piece of work and a piece of scientific history worth recounting.

Continue reading →

Posted in History of science, Physics | 11 Comments

Weird science facts, March 23 — March 29

Posted on March 30, 2011 by skullsinthestars

Here are the Twitter #weirdscifacts for the past week!

375. Mar 23: What do walruses use their tusks for?  Pulling their chubby selves out of the water onto ice, for one.

376. Mar 24: Non-Newtonian fluids — solid or liquid, depending on how hard you hit them! (post by @JenLucPiquant!)

377. Mar 25: Squid have mirror eyeballs — dielectric mirror eyeballs! (h/t @hectocotyli)

378. Mar 26:  Gut bacteria may influence thoughts and behavior! O_o  “You are what helps you eat”?

379. Mar 27: The fanwing — a third type of powered lift for aircraft?

380. Mar 28: The 1755 Lisbon earthquake influenced the philosophy of thinkers such as Kant, Rousseau and Voltaire.

381. Mar 29: Giraffes they have a sponge-like collection of veins and arteries in the neck which regulates the flow of blood when they dip their heads to drink. (h/t @anthinpractice)  This collection is called the rete mirabile (“wonderful net”).

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What did Robert E. Howard think of women?

Posted on March 28, 2011 by skullsinthestars

In reading classic weird fiction of the 1930s an earlier, one must always keep in mind that the authors were a product of their time.  Racism and sexism are sadly common in reading older stories, and the depiction of negative stereotypes can mar otherwise imaginative and classic stories for the unprepared reader.  For instance, H.P. Lovecraft had distinctly racist views that were expressed in stories on the horrors of miscegenation such as Arthur Jermyn and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and Sax Rohmer’s The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu exploits a fear of the “yellow menace”, namely Asian immigrants.

One might expect that Robert E. Howard (1906-1936), whose work inspired the name of this blog, could be easily characterized as sexist and even misogynistic.  The stories of Conan the Barbarian are filled with nubile serving girls, scantily clad dancers, and the like.  Conan is not above manhandling ladies, and in one story — The Frost Giant’s Daughter — he comes disturbingly close to rape.

It turns out, however, that a closer look at Howard’s writings show a much more complicated view of women. In particular, one set of remarkable correspondence shows that he was in some ways progressive and quite ahead of his time — though in others he wasn’t.

Continue reading →

Posted in Robert E. Howard | 14 Comments

My interview on Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour (guest-hosted by ScienceComedian)!

Posted on March 25, 2011 by skullsinthestars

Last night I did an interview on The Twit Netcast Network, on Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour, about a variety of science topics!  Brian Malow, aka the Science Comedian, guest-hosted the episode and was the one to invite me on.

Here is the link to the episode, titled, “Let there be light“.  We discussed a range of topics, including Young’s double slit experiment, optical cloaking, solar sails, and weird science facts.  Brian posted some helpful links related to the discussion on the show here, and I thought I’d supplement them with some of my own.

For those interested in reading more about optical cloaking and invisibility, I recently wrote a post for Scientific American’s guest blog that covers the concepts involved.  I also have discussed the history of invisibility physics in a series of posts right here.

In the interview, we discussed the momentum of light and the concept of an “optical wing”.  I wrote a detailed post on the subject early this year.

I also did a detailed post some time ago about Young’s double slit experiment, discussed early in the interview.  For that matter, I’ve been doing an ongoing series of “optics basics” posts to try and explain the fundamentals of optics in a non-technical manner.

One of the more contentious comments I made during the interview was a statement that flight involves more complicated and subtle effects than simply the Bernoulli force.  There are a couple of places online that discuss this reasonably well and in more detail — see here and here, for instance.  There is also a good discussion of “Bernoulli” vs. “Newton” at this NASA page.

Anyone interested in seeing the video of my skydive from a hot air balloon, check here.

All of my #weirdscifacts on Twitter are being archived on the blog; the link to the category is here.

Finally, let me say thank you again to Brian for the invitation to be interviewed (and for doing an excellent job hosting), and to all the folks on the Twit Netcast Network for making it happen!  Also, thanks to everyone who listened or will listen in the future! If you have any comments or thoughts on the interview, I’d love to hear them.

Posted in Optics, Personal | 3 Comments

Weird science facts, March 16 — March 22

Posted on March 23, 2011 by skullsinthestars

I’m still going!  Here are the Twitter #weirdscifacts for March 16th to March 22nd.

368. Mar 16:  Elephants — coordinating their efforts and cheating at it, too! (Story by @rkrulwich at @npr)

369. Mar 17: Early treatment of Syphilis: cut a live frog in half and apply it to the infected penis. For ladies, they could put chicken on the area or breathe in Mercury vapor (the main and most effective cure until 1800s). (h/t @seelix, and: eeew!)

370. Mar 18: The later life of Marie Curie — scandals, slander, and even a duel on her behalf.

371. Mar 19: Giant bladder kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) can grow up to *2 ft* per day.  (1 inch/hour!!!)

372. Mar 20: Thiomargarita namibensis — a bacterium so large (0.1mm -0.3mm) it can be seen w/ naked eye.

373. Mar 21:  In 1778 Paris, fashionable ladies never went out in bad weather without their lightning hats. As I’ve noted in an earlier post, the lightning rod was introduced by Benjamin Franklin in the 1750s.  Apparently by 1778, people were so convinced of their effectiveness that they incorporated them into their fashion!  It was, obviously, a passing fad.

374. Mar 22: The Tardigrade, or water bear: a microscopic organism that can survive at temps close to absolute zero or high as 304F. (Water bears can also survive for almost a decade without water, and shrug off radiation that would kill just about any other living thing.  And they’re so cute!)

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Optics basics: vector fields

Posted on March 20, 2011 by skullsinthestars

In my regular discussions of optics and electromagnetic fields in general, I use a lot of pictures with arrows on them.  For instance, my post on Faraday’s law has the curious figure,

where the red arrows represent the “electric field” and the blue arrows represent the “magnetic field”.  As another example, I’ve illustrated an electromagnetic wave numerous times by the following collection of arrows,

where the red arrows are again the electric field and the blue arrows are the magnetic field (we won’t concern ourselves with the difference between B and H for now).

As a longtime physicist, it is easy to forget that the meaning of these arrows is not necessarily obvious to an outsider.  The individual arrows are referred to as vectors; the collection of a group of these vectors over a region of space is known as a vector field.  The word “field” is appropriately descriptive: just as a “corn field” is a collection of corn arranged throughout a region of land, a “vector field” is a collection of vectors arranged throughout a region of space.

I’ve tried to explain the meaning of vector fields in individual posts when they have appeared; but it was time to put all these ideas in one place.  In this article we will address the concept of a vector field, and explain what such fields mean for electricity, magnetism, and light waves.

Continue reading →

Posted in Optics basics, Physics | 4 Comments

Weird science facts — a full year of facts edition!!!!!

Posted on March 16, 2011 by skullsinthestars

This past Sunday, I officially reached my goal of doing a full year’s worth of #weirdscifacts on Twitter — 365 days in a row of posting weird science!!!!!!!!!

I will probably wind down my facts sometime in the future — despite prodding from the Twitter community, I’m not sure I have the energy (or the facts) to fill another full year.  Nevertheless, I’ll keep doing them as long as I can keep finding facts and keep myself entertained.

Something else I’ve been mulling over: would it be worth it to try and make the collection of #weirdscifacts into a book and/or a daily calendar?  I’d be interested to hear what folks have to say!

Without further ado, here are the past week’s facts:

360. Mar 08: When G. Washington died in 1799, a doctor offered to resurrect him via blood transfusion! This fact comes via @history_geek‘s excellent book “Blood Work”, which I am currently reading.  Washington likely died in part due to the “treatments” of his doctors.  The suggested resurrection, done via a transfusion of animal blood, was declined by the family.

361. Mar 09: The sad case of the radium girls: death by painting watch dials. In an era of deregulation and corporate negligence, this story seems especially timely.  The radium girls case led to great advances in the rights of workers to sue their employers for occupational diseases.

362. Mar 10: Milburn Model 27L electric car, top speed 23 mph, range 90 miles.  Made in 1923. These are impressive statistics for an electric car that was made nearly 90 years ago!  I encountered the Milburn at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago; photo and description.

363. Mar 11: Japan’s quake shortened length of day by 1.26 microseconds. A figure skater (like myself) can change the speed of a spin by pulling one’s arms in and out.  The earthquake in Japan shifted the distribution of mass on the spinning Earth, changing its spin rate much like a figure skater does.

364. Mar 12: For all the destruction of the Japanese tsunami, it is relatively small compared to others in history.

365. Mar 13: number 365!!!!!! In terms of cell count, humans are 90% microbial and 10% human! (h/t @kwinkunks)

366. Mar 14: Happy #weirdscifacts Pi day! In 2005, Lu Chao successfully recited 67,890 digits of Pi from memory in 24 hours. Chao planned to recite 90,000 digits, but slipped up at the 67k mark.  I find this astonishing because I can’t remember a 16-digit credit card number.  It took Chao 24 hours to finish reciting.

367. Mar 15: The Megatherium Club (1857-1866), and the shenanigans that got them booted from the Smithsonian castle. Quoting Wikipedia, “They spent their weekdays in the rigorous and exacting work of describing and classifying species. But their nights were spent in revelry.”

Posted in Weirdscifacts | 6 Comments