My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?

--- Galileo in a letter to Kepler in 1610

Though humiliated and forced to recant his most important works by the ecclesiastical authorities, the great man's finger remains to this day upright, defiant and unwavering.

While we're on the subject of fingers, allow me to point out [sic] some interesting dactylic research.

Men who work in the so-called "hard" sciences, that is, sciences which are mathematical and precise (physics etc.), generally have hands that differ from the general male population. Specifically, they tend to have index fingers which are at least as long or slightly longer than their ring fingers. The wider male population, on the other hand [sic], tend to have ring fingers which are longer than their index fingers.

This same pattern is also reflected amongst computer programmers where finger ratio has been correlated to test scores.

While most of us have, at one time or another, had our palms scrutinised for lines and creases by someone with an interest in palmistry and fortune telling, I'm pretty sure not a lot of people have given much thought to the relative lengths of their fingers. Surprisingly, we can learn quite a bit about our destinies by examining them.

How much precisely? Well, cross my palm with silver¹ and let me tell ye.

Here we have a picture taken by Hubble's near infrared camera of Jupiter being eclipsed by three of its moons, Io, Europa and Calisto. You can also see in the picture two of the moons that are causing the shadows. Io, appearing here as a white speck due to its sulphurous surface and Europa, shown in icy blue. Jupiter's colours depict clouds of different altitudes.

I have this vision of two alien astronauts in a spaceship looking down through our planet's thick atmosphere and saying to one another "Ewww...it must be really mushy down there, I sure hope we land on something hard."

Currently, Cassini is in the process of being positioned for the most exciting part of its mission, the detachment of the tiny Huygens space probe which will descend into the Titan atmosphere. Judging from the information that has already been garnered about Titan's geologically active surface, this is likely to be very interesting indeed.

According to this 1997 press release from the European Space Agency, the space-probe Huygens was scheduled to detach from Cassini today (6th November, 2004) and start its slow decent into Titan's murky atmosphere. But if you consult the current schedule you'll note that this detachment is actually not planned to happen until the 24th of December.

Why the change in plans? Well, in the words of one John Zarnecki of Britain’s Open University, "We have a technical term for what went wrong here..."

"It’s called a cock-up."

The Cassini spacecraft has a flaw in its basic design which means that if the Huygens probe had been launched as originally planned, the signal sent back would have been hopelessly scrambled and the centrepiece of an otherwise wildly successful $3.2 billion mission would have ended as an embarrassing failure.

For millennia, Japanese have borrowed, assimilated and absorbed many things from China.

Nowadays they inhale them as well.

^{(image of Chinese pollution being carried out to sea on a westerly air current)}

[link]

Assume for the minute that the huge meteor that slammed into the Earth at Chicxulub 65 million years ago, blackened the skies sufficiently so as to plunge the entire planet into winter and change the climate irreversibly. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this scenario is not the well-publicised extinction of the dinosaurs but rather the survival of many other species, especially the ones that today differ very little from their Cretaceous predecessors.

Exhibit A, the humble honeybee.

Bees evolved during the Jurassic period in symbiosis with flowering plants around 125 million years ago. The bee pictured here, encased in amber for the past 80 million years, is of the species Cretotrigona prisca. This is a species that survived the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event and is almost identical to its modern-day cousin Dactylurina which today lives in tropical Africa.

Bees are notoriously sensitive to temperature and cannot stand very cold conditions. The mere fact of the survival of this tropical variety (which must also have relied upon the presence of flowering plants) implies a lower limit to the depth of this Chicxulub-induced winter. Drops in global temperatures of between 7 and 12 degrees celsius are often advanced, however based on what is known about the Cretaceous period and about bees in general, estimates of the severity of this dip would need to be reduced considerably, probably by more than half.

"I'm not trying to say an asteroid impact didn't happen," says researcher, Jacqueline M. Kozisek of the University of New Orleans. "I'm just trying to narrow down the effects."

Basically, the dinosaurs must have been wimps.

I'm not sure what to make of this story from Sumatra. Villagers claim that in the nearby jungle there lives an ape that walks like a man which they call sedapa or orang pendek ("short man"). A similar creature known as the batutut is said to inhabit the jungles of Borneo.

The possibility of Indonesia being the last home of various species of pre-modern hominids is certainly very tantalizing. We know that Homo erectus made it to Java about 1.7 million years ago (Java Man) and the latest discoveries on Flores confirm that they were widely travelled within the archipelago. The problem really comes down to the fact that virtually all cultures have folktales about little people (and giants as well) and that Indonesian culture, more so than many others, is filled with an astonishing range of gods, ghosts and mysterious creatures. Also, alas, cryptozoology is just one of those areas where the signal-to-nut ratio is exceedingly poor and I'm sure a lot of tales are easily obtained from the locals by paying tourists.

Nevertheless, folktales are always an interesting subject matter and Richard Roberts, who is one of the co-authors of the paper announcing the discovery of Homo floresiensis, has an interesting one to tell from Flores.

Yumihiki Doji or "Archer Boy" is considered the pinnacle of Karakuri, mechanical automata from Edo period Japan. This is a reproduction built in 1998 by Tamaya Shobei, a Karakuri master but its famous prototype was built in the 1850's by Tanaka Hisashige, founder of the Toshiba Corporation.

The archer sits on a stand about 30cm high which contains the mechanism. He picks up an arrow and shoots it at a target, repeating this 4 times. One out of every ten arrows misses its target, which is intentional, to create an element of suspense for the audience¹.

Much more on Karakuri may be found here and a larger version of the animation here (1.7 MB).

^{1 - In other words, it's a feature not a bug.}

This cartogram of the recent US election results by M. T. Gastner, C. R. Shalizi, and M. E. J. Newman adjusts area for population size. It also colours each county by the size of the strength of the majority for either party.

UPDATE: Tim may provides a link to lots of other cartograms.

Phobos means fear and, frankly, the larger of Mars' two moons has plenty to worry about. It is on a downward spiral, slowly descending towards the Martian surface. Within 100 million years the moon will be torn apart by the tidal force of Mar's gravity and form a short-lived ring before raining down as massive meteor shower upon the Martian surface.

The ESA has just released this new image of the moon which shows it with unprecedented detail. The image was taken with the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft. The image on the website shows the 3D as a red-blue anaglyph which needs to be viewed with red-blue glasses. I know a lot of people don't have these handy so I have taken the liberty to separate out the colours and reconstitute them as two separate images which can be viewed in three dimensions by the cross-eye method.

As usual all caveats apply. If you break your eyes looking at these images, you own both halves.


The main idea to understand about this picture in 3D is that this moon is not round. It was probably originally captured by Mars from the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter.

In 1948, the US Library of Congress purchased a remarkable collection of photographic plates by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii who had been commissioned from 1905 to 1915 by the Czar to make a photographic record of the Russian Empire. Prokudin-Gorskii used his commission to push the bounds of photography at the time by perfecting a technique of colour photography that had been invented half a century earlier by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

This was handed to me the other day by a street-corner philosopher who was evidently also a doctor in the magick art of the Kabbalah.

- In a cashless society it may be possible that all food and products may have to be ordered using a computer.

- The computer is an important part of our society. For many it is almost impossible to get by without one.

- A study was done on the spelling of the word Computer. Each letter was given a number in a multiple of 6. Each letter in the word computer was given a number corresponding to its place in the alphabet and then the total number was calculated. THIS WAS THE RESULT.

The Letters are as follows: A = 6 B = 12 C = 18 D = 24 E = 30 F = 36 G = 42 H = 48 I = 54 J = 60 K = 66 L = 72 M = 78 N = 84 O = 90 P = 96 Q = 102 R = 108 S = 114 T = 120 U = 126 V = 132 W = 138 X = 144 Y = 150 Z = 156

C = 18
O = 90
M = 78
P = 96
U = 126
T = 120
E = 30
R = 108
___
666

I'm sure I don't need to spell out to you what that means.

_{In case you were wondering, the text had been typed on a wordprocessor and printed on a bubblejet. The font was Times Roman.}

Dragons are associated with benevolence and longevity in Chinese folklore so it should come as no surprise that they are intimately connected with the number nine in Chinese numerology.

The massive impact at Chicxulub in the Yucatan pennisula happened 300,000 years too early to have caused the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs. It seems to me that we are really going have to start looking around for some alternative explanations to the impact theory.

Apologies for the long page download times lately. It's because my stats meter has chosen to stop working. I've disconnected it until such time as it manages to get a grip.


UPDATE: It's back but for how long I wonder.


UPDATE: Gerard Van der Leun provides the answer that I should have thought of.


When you think about it, this is really only fitting seeing that he also sent enough traffic to cause sitemeter to meltdown in the first place ;-)

This is the Forum, the ancient heart of the city of Rome. Sometimes it is referred to as the Forum Romanum in order to distinguish it from the other forums (fora) that grew up and around the city, but this was not its original name. It was simply The Forum, and the name still resonates with us today as a place to meet.

One of the really interesting developments in Martian exploration this year has been the discovery of methane in the planet's atmosphere. Methane breaks down when exposed to the ultraviolet radiation that bathes the planet's thin atmosphere so it's mere existence opens up the possibility that there is something below the Martian surface that is producing it.

We're not just talking about pre-Clovis anymore, the latest news is that the first migration into the Americas may have even been pre-European and by that I mean really, really early.

The notion that the first people migrated to the Americas from Siberia via a land-bridge across the Bering Strait about 14,000 years ago continues to be the orthodox view in paleontological circles. These days, however, most scientists are open to the possibility that earlier migrations might have been occurred and evidence has been mounting for arrival dates ranging from 18,000-30,000 years ago.

But very few, I suspect, would have been expecting the latest results coming out of the Topper site at Allendale county in South Carolina. The team there working under Dr. Albert Goodyear has for several years been collecting evidence of artifacts in soil strata between 15,000 and 16,000 years of age. But in their latest dig they have uncovered a layer which has been radiocarbon dated to between 50,300 and 51,700 years old.

If true, this finding will upset more than a few apple carts because this date puts human migration to the Americas as early as the earliest human migration anywhere, period. Modern humans are thought to have arisen in Africa between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago before swiftly migrating to Asia by boat and on foot and arriving at Australia and Central Asia about 50,000 years ago. The first settlement of Europe is thought to have been only about 40,000 years ago.

To think that modern humans might have been walking around in America long before the last ice age is really quite amazing. We can only wait to see whether these dates can be independently confirmed. It's worth noting here that radiocarbon analysis does have some significant issues when attempting to date things of this age.

Anything that is less than about 50 or 60 000 years can be radiocarbon dated. Beyond 60 000 years there is hardly any radiocarbon left in a sample that is original. Often, in very old material, there is contamination which can significantly affect the accuracy of a date. Dating material from the archaeological or geological record beyond 30 000 years can be very difficult indeed unless the depositional situation of the sample is favourable and scientists can remove any contamination. Even a small amount of c14 from a contaminant can produce an incorrect date in an old sample. Often, radiocarbon daters release dates as being 'greater than 50 000 years' or 'greater than 45 000 years' because of the difficulty in reliably giving a date at this age.

An older article which has some background on the work being done at the Topper site can be found here.

^{Thanks, Peter.}

This is an article sent to me by Peter a while back. It has a nice story about the first measurement of the speed of light by Olav Römer in 1676 but the real highlight is a "howto" on measuring the speed of light yourself in your kitchen using a block of chocolate and a microwave oven.

Something is pumping out methane on Mars and its source is unlikely to be volcanic. Sulphur dioxide, the most abundant volcanic gas on Earth is absent in the Martian atmosphere and so the seepage of volcanic gasses is unlikely to be a significant source of methane. This article at the Planetary Society gives a really good round up of the current thinking about Mars, its atmospheric methane and the implications it has for the search of life there:

The Case for Methane Expands, but Theories about Abundance and Source Diverge

Not a new idea certainly but I think it's interesting that the U.S. Department of Energy is suggesting that solar powered generators based on stirling engines could soon bring down the cost of sun power to a level comparable with fossil fuels and hydroelectricty.

The stirling engine was invented in 1816 by the Reverend Robert Stirling

who, alarmed at the danger of explosion inherent in the design of steam engines and the fatalities it caused, came up with his own engine design which operated at a much lower pressure. Stirling's engine differs from the stream engine and the internal combustion engine in that it is completely sealed and does not vent gas to the atmosphere outside. Like a steam engine, however, it works with an external heat source which makes it well suited to power generation applications and because it is completely sealed it is also extremely quiet.

Despite its advantages, Stirling engines have never really entered the mainstream and have been restricted to niche applications such as submarines where noise is an important consideration. They are also demanding to manufacture, tend to rather large and, bang for buck, the internal combustion engine beats them hands down.

However, in the context of zero-emission, renewable power generation with very low noise levels, they may finally be able to come into their own. For solar power generation, the Stirling engine is considerably more efficient than its better known technology competitor - the photovoltaic solar cell.

Read more about Stirling engines here.

In order to make it as rational a unit of measure as possible, the kilogram was originally defined in terms of the mass of one litre of pure water at a temperature of 4 degrees Celsius and at standard atmospheric pressure.

In practice, however, this definition soon proved to be unworkable because of the circularity of a definition that involved pressure which in turn involved mass in kilograms. Now the standard definition of a kilogram is that it is equal to the standard kilogram, the international prototype of the kilogram, a 39 x 39 mm platinum-iridium cylinder made in 1889 which is stored at the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures in Paris.

It's remarkable to consider that, while every other unit of the metric system is rationally defined in terms of a universal constant (such as the speed of light or the charge of an electron), the kilogram - a unit of measure so important to daily life - is based on a mere chunk of metal which is stored in a vault like some kind of religious relic.

Imagine what kind of damage could be wrought by a cruise missile landing on a single French government building. Frankly, I can think of only one nation in the world with the capability and the inclination to commit such an act of total bastardry.

"I went into another Room, where the Walls and Ceiling were all hung round with Cobwebs, except a narrow passage for the Artist to go in and out. At my Entrance he called aloud to me not to disturb his Webs. He lamented the fatal Mistake the World had been so long in of using Silk-Worms, while we had such plenty of domestick Insects, who infinitely excelled the Former, because they understood how to weave as well as spin."

--- Gulliver's visit to the the Academy at Lagado. Voyage to Laputa, Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

While spider web is considerably stronger than the silk produced by silkworms, there have been several practical problems that have prevented its production on a commercial scale. For one thing, unlike silkworms spiders are very territorial and this fact alone makes them unsuitable for domestication.


As a way around the problem of commercially breeding spiders and harvesting their web, a team of scientists has recently succeeded in producing spider web fibre by genetically engineering a culture of caterpillar cells. These cells were induced to produce the fibre proteins by infecting them with a virus which was carrying the web producing genes of a domestic spider.


The fibres spontaneously produced in this way very closely match naturally produced web both in terms of its diameter (one-thousandth of a millimeter) and its chemical resistance. The team is now focusing on how to produce the proteins without needing the insect cell culture.


Spider dragline silk, which is characterised by its great strength and elasticity, is six times stronger than nylon and steel fibre of equal diameter. Likely applications include the manufacture of surgical thread, micro-conductors, optical fibres, bulletproof vests and new kinds of fabrics.

Now if they can only couple this with the ability to electrostatically stick to walls using the van der Waals force just like geckos do then surely my custom-made Spider-Man costume can't be that far off.

The SeeLinder, a cylindrical three-dimensional colour television that can be viewed from any angle and doesn't even require the viewer to don funny glasses.


The principle behind it very straightforward. So much so in fact that I could've sworn that I invented it myself sometime in a dream. And if I didn't actually already invent it, I'm almost certain that I would have invented it eventually so this might actually be an example of someone pre-stealing one of my ideas.

It seems my post on the SeeLinder has generated a bit of interest but one question that keeps cropping up is how can you film a subject in three dimensions? I'm not sure how the Japanese inventors have solved this problem but the prospect of arranging 360 cameras into a circle is probably not it. I can think of one way do it which only needs a relatively small number of cameras, perhaps 6 and makes use of a clever type of image interpolation known as View Morphing.

This is also something that I also happen to think is really, really cool.

Ten Cents an Dance

Ten cents a dance,
that's what they pay me
Gosh, how they weigh me down
Ten cents a dance,
pansies and rough guys
Tough guys who tear my gown
Seven to midnight I hear drums
Loudly the saxophone blows
Trumpets are tearing my eardrums
Customers crush my toes

Sometimes I think I've found my hero
But it's a queer romance
All that you need is a ticket
Come on, big boy, ten cents a dance!



Those are very likely not the words that Betty Bolton is singing in this particular clip but this song was her best known hit. Unfortunately the clip is silent so we don't get to hear her famous contralto singing voice but what you can see is pretty damned remarkable in itself. It's a fragment of a very early television broadcast from the early 1930s which had been recorded off the air waves by amateur enthusiast using a home gramophone recording system (you can watch the rest of the sequence here as a RealMedia clip).

This is a video disc made decades ahead of its time and one which offers us a glimpse - however imperfect - into the long vanished world of mechanical televison.