Carl Zimmer, the blogging science journalist, mentioned in a recent post that he has a biologist friend with a DNA tattoo on his shoulder. He went on to offer to post pictures of any scientific tattoos that people cared to send him. So many people sent him pictures that he started a Flickr photo set on the topic. There are currently 81 photos there.
People are sometimes surprised when they see scientists being passionate or emotional. But science, after all, is just a way for people, often passionate angry people, to come to agreement in spite of their emotions. Logic channels energy, but it can’t create it. I like these tattoos because they hint at something dark and subtle in the part of the lawn that Occam’s razor can’t trim.
Yes, I know this is a suggestive silhouette that was no doubt created by a man. BUT: see if the visual effect does not bend your brain.
Clockwise? Counterclockwise?
The question is very simple: is this figure, as viewed from the top, rotating clockwise or counterclockwise? If you’re like me, you’ll have an immediate and unshakable opinion on the matter. One glance and I was certain it was clockwise. I was so certain that I was extremely puzzled when I read that it’s possible to perceive this as rotating in the other direction. It made sense; there are no depth cues to the profile. And yet I could not imagine how I might jump start my brain into seeing it go the other way. My eye flitted away from the screen briefly, and then POP! I’m now seeing it spin counterclockwise. Now I can’t see it go the other way. Can you switch your brain from one direction to another on demand?
This short piece in the Australian Herald Sun puts a pop psychology gloss on it, which is probably about as meaningful as a horoscope, but the claim is that if you’re a clockwiser, then you’re a right-brained bearded herbal tea drinker. And you wear those weird, comfortable shoes. Otherwise, you went to MIT. Those being the only two kinds of people in the world and all.
After a little Googling, I came across this impressive site dedicated to optical illusions. His take on the spinning girl effect is that you can reverse the direction by looking at the shadow. Work for you?
Here is a video, taken from a helicopter, of a cruise ship taking a beating from massive seas.
You look at this video and you think, Good God! What must it have been like to be inside that boat?
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this kind of thing anymore, but this being the web, you jolly well can find out what it was like to be inside that boat. Here’s a link to a Spanish news video about the experience: Inside The Rough Cruise Ship Video
I once saw a TV special on the disastrous Sydney-Hobart Race of 1998. This was a big regatta that sailed straight into the teeth of an enormous storm. Boats sank, people died, and since they were rich enough to own racing yachts, this story hit the news in a big way. The funny thing I noticed from the show was this: rough seas don’t look that rough from a hovering helicopter. There was plenty of video footage of visibly frightened people clinging to boats, and it just didn’t look that bad. But I know full well that if I were plunging to the bottom of every trough, sick with apprehension about the structural soundness of my ship (not to mention seasick), I would be just as scared.
That’s one reason I was fascinated by this cruise ship video. Once again, the seas don’t look so bad until you see the dramatic effect on the wallowing barge.
So what was the real story with the cruise ship? The ship was the Olympic Voyager, and the event was a Valentine’s Day storm in 2005 that knocked out her engines. What you’re watching is a large ship (though not big by modern cruise ship standards), designed to be fast, unable to make way in a massive swell. Without enough speed to give her steerage, she’s taking the seas in a particularly bad way. Here’s the full story from MSNBC: Once-hobbled Spanish cruise ship out of danger.
Web research has the ability to make a story pop out of the screen into three dimensions. Because you’re able to come at things from so many different angles, from inside and outside the boat and so on, you can develop a larger sense of the events that occurred. This story was hard to track down though, because this one video was so popular that it washed everything else out of the search results. It took a while to sift through the dozens of sites that simply reposted the video along with its minimal and somewhat incorrect text description. I was pleased, though, to eventually find this review from an earlier voyage:
Much of the time it was actually quite dangerous to try to walk anywhere on the ship, because the pitching and lurching of the ship was often violent. Day after day of staggering is not a pleasant experience. The fundamental problem seems to be that the ship simply cannot handle water that is rougher than a ripple.
Speedy though she is, my advice is to avoid the Olympic Voyager.
I saw this over at the Popular Science blog: Consumer Reports has crash test videos for every single car ever made in the whole world. Okay, that’s probably an exaggeration, but I bet they have your car. They had mine. There’s something disturbing about watching your car get smashed, particularly if the color matches and the safety rating is poor and you can practically hear the poor crash test dummy’s pretend spinal column snapping like a pretzel stick.
Watch a few of the videos, and you’ll realize how many times Jeff Bartlett had to say the same basic information over and over and over. That guy earned his money the week they put these videos together.
And finally: poor Ford Fusion. So trying. So trying so hard. So only-just-acceptable on the smash-your-occupant rating (okay, to be fair, they got better in model year 2007).
Why is it that there is enough capital to bring creative destruction to the American airline industry (by which I mean new domestic competition like JetBlue and Virgin America), but not to the American automotive industry?
I flew to Seattle last week for the Microsoft Symposium on Social Computing. The best price I got for the flight was from JetBlue. I know they hit some turbulence earlier this year, but my experience was very good. I was impressed with a few things. For one, I had never experienced live network TV while flying before. It’s such a simple thing, but it feels absolutely revolutionary: I can change channels… wow. As a bonus, I happened to be in the air during one of the few recent games where the Red Sox beat the Yankees. I’m sure that fact alone made me feel kindly disposed toward the airline.
And once you get used to the fact that food isn’t part of the ticket price, it stops being such a big deal. Quit crying about it! Once you pull those prices apart, the trip gets cheaper and the food gets better.
I liked the fact that the entire plane was set up for coach. I never thought of myself as having a problem with the notion of First Class seating, but it was surprisingly… soothing without those plutocratic bastards and their oh-can-I-get-you-another-drink pre-takeoff mimosas and their insufferable don’t-pee-in-our-potty lavatories and their goddamned Rich Uncle Pennybags top hats.
Another nice touch: when the captain was introducing himself and the crew before the flight, I suddenly realized he was standing in the aisle looking at us. Strike a blow against the gated community! Look your pilot in the eye!
And my conference was excellent, so all in all it was great trip.
From the Google Operating System blog I came across this: Blogger Play is a site that shows you pictures that have recently been uploaded to Blogger. It’s sort of like looking at the latest pictures on Flickr, but it’s slightly better: if you see a bizarre or intriguing picture, you can almost always work out the story by clicking through to the blog and reading about it. That’s often not possible at Flickr.
These voyeur sites have been around for a long time. They always seduce me. Whenever I come across them I always A) waste a lot of time staring at them and B) feel like I’m staring at synapses in the Great Brain. This is what people all over the world are thinking about right now. That strikes me as being worth a chunk of my time.
Okay Matt, this one’s for you. Matt Simoneau’s parents have a funny dog named Lucky. If you mention the word “beach” to her, she does an amazing simulation of an amp-mic audio feedback squeal. Here’s the video proof.
Matt wants Lucky to unseat Miss Teen South Carolina from her throne atop the most-watched YouTube videos list. Will you help him? It’s a long shot, but I bet Miss Teen South Carolina would be happy to see that happen too.
You know, parents get busted on for posting cutesy-poo stories ‘n’ snapshots of their kids, but we all have our sentimental weak spots. Even the most hardened goth-punk blogger can’t resist the occasional sneezing panda. I dare you, I dare you not to smile when you see the giggling quadruplets. It can’t be done. Go on, you crusty old web veteran. Click on that link and see if I’m right.
By way of Clive Thompson’s collision detection blog, I came across this great article on citywide drug-testing using… wait for it… raw sewage. It only takes a teaspoon to find out the poop on metropolitan pill-popping. They can get good quantitative results on fifteen kinds of drugs. So for instance, they observe that “cocaine and ecstasy tended to peak on weekends and drop on weekdays, … while methamphetamine and prescription drugs were steady throughout the week.”
This is simultaneously funny and brilliant. It will be much more widely exploited in the future. It’s a perfect example of mining valuable data from otherwise unappreciated information flows. How does a cop know when a particular drug has become a problem for his jurisdiction? Arrests and drugs busts are sure to be trailing indicators, whereas community urinalysis is an infallible leading indicator (or rather an indicator that trails by no more than a few beers and a trip to the john).
Furthermore, the extensions are obvious and sure to be pursued. Sample your city by district, by neighborhood, by building. If I was a cop, I’d want to know where trouble was brewing. I can envision a whole new kind of heat map. Imagine the possibilities… test for capsaicin and you could probably use it to find the locations of good Mexican restaurants. Of course, you wouldn’t even need a fancy test to tell if it’s asparagus season.
It’s only a matter of time until suspicious employers are dipping into the used coffee stream at work. And what better way to see what your teenager’s been up to? I can see a darn good business in combination sewage trap tappers and drug test kits. Call it the Poop ‘n’ Snoop: “Once they go, you’re in the know.”
The litter box attachment would verify your cat has licked his blow problem.
Hydrofoils have been around since the time of Alexander Graham Bell. The prolific inventor is credited with making one of the first practical boats based on this idea. But what exactly is a hydrofoil? It’s nothing more than a wing that operates underwater rather than the air. A tiny water wing moving at sufficient speed can support enormous loads. But it’s tricky to make them work well. Nevertheless, if you want to make a boat go fast, you need to minimize your contact with the fat grabby fingers of the water. You want a hydrofoil.
If you want to set the world record for sailing speed, it follows that you need a hydrofoil sailboat. Check out this video of the French Hydroptère, a boat that sails above the waves like something out of a story book. They’re hoping to break the 50 knot mark this winter.
I think this video is the male equivalent of the Dutch horses video I showed here a while back. Just as with the Dutch horses, not much happens for a good chunk of the video. It’s just a close shot of sailors in foul weather gear shouting at each other in French: “Quarente-deux! Quarente-trois!” (42! 43!) I find it thrilling. Watch the foil strut slicing through waves that would be smacking the crap out of any boat from an earlier century. I think my favorite shot is actually the interior view of crew member hanging on to the ceiling supports for dear life. It’s got to be an extreme adrenaline rush. You can bet if that boat were to pitch forward suddenly and snag its bow, it would be an explosive high-speed train wreck of a crash.
Once you start looking for hydrofoils, you see them everywhere. Here is a hydrofoil surfboard of all things. And the world speed record for human-powered locomotion over water was set by Mark Drela of MIT with a hydrofoil pedal boat called the Decavitator.
The summer is winding down, and it’s time for a nice relaxing visit to an uncrowded pool before the September stress sets in. Of course, if you live in Tokyo, it might be a little difficult to find an uncrowded swimming pool. You might end up at a place like this.
As it says on the Trends in Japan site that first posted this video, “If you get motion sickness easily, please do not watch this video.” Watching this video makes me queasy and claustrophobic. Imagine being in the middle of that.
And I can’t help but wonder about the physics of wave propagation through this flesh-and-floaties coagulation. It looks like some kind of slow motion earthquake on Coney Island. One question for you physicists: are Japanese swimmers an isotropic or anisotropic medium?
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 