Super Bowl Sunday and Disagreeable Scientists

I stumbled across this article talking about the experiences of an NFL player who went to Afghanistan for the Super Bowl. As a sports fiend, it is a good reminder of bigger and more important matters.

On a wholly different note, I have been caught up in reading this book: A Short History of Nearly Everything. It's a science book, but it is written by a non-scientist to be accesible to non-scientists. The style is engaging, the points interesting, and a reminder of how amazingly huge creation is. It is cause for me to step back in wonder at the unbelievably complexity of the world.

I was caught when I read part of a chapter about Einstein and the Theory of General Relativity in Borders. I knew it would be interesting when it reminded me that if Jupiter was the size of a period on a piece of paper, Pluto would be 35 feet away... and that's only 1/50,000th of the way (if Jupiter is the size of a period on a page, the edge is somewhere near Tonapah) to the Oort Cloud - the edge of the solar system, which is 2 light years away - halfway to the nearest star.

It reminded me of a line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - "Space is huge. Really huge. You just wouldn't believe how amazingly, mind-bogglingly huge it is."

10 Ways to Destroy the Earth

Not just erradicate all life, but make it no longer a planet.

Black holes, explosions, and self-replicating machines.

Science is FUN!

Historical Basis for Flood Story?

I admit that I am unsure about the Biblical flood story as being perfectly accurate - that the whole world was entirely flooded with water from rains and "the founts of the deep." But it is also reasonable that there is historical precedent for the story, that it is more than just a fairy tale - I wasn't there, after all, so as to say this or that did or did not happen. This article in the New York Times describes a meteoric impact some 4,800 years ago that would have made a tsunami 600 feet high in the Indian Ocean.

4,800 years seems about right for Noah's day. Interesting.

Things To See In My Lifetime

And it happens right in my backyard. I can't believe I was thinking of going up to the Black Rock around this time and didn't...

Now I have to wait for next year. But it's worth the wait to see amateur rockets blasting into space.

Deal, or no Deal?

Have you seen this show? I never watched it, but it is on before NBC's new show "Heroes," which I like. It's a pretty simple take on expected return - multiplying the probability of a variety of outcomes by the payoff of each outcome. In this case, there's a fixed distribution of numbers, each with an identical probability. There's flashy lights and absurd drama to stretch it out, but it would be boring TV if not for that.

What I find interesting is that they have a commercial for a "play at home" game, with six cases. If you call or text message in, you get to pick a case. There is a random drawing of people who choose the correct case for $10,000 every night. What you would expect in a random world is that each number gets a roughly equal number of votes. But that's not the case. Tonight, two seperate numbers each had almost 40% of the votes.

I can't help but wonder why, and I have no answers.

Science and The Mummy

You may recall, shortly before Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz release the cursed mummy in Egypt, some workers stumble onto an old Egyptian trap - tryg to pry open a box, they are sprayed with a liquid that causes their faces to melt.

"Salt Acid," the grizzled tomb raider says knowingly.

Sorry, but that's just plain ridiculous. I know the movie invokes the power of Ra and has an undead monster sucking the fluids and plucking organs from some unfortunate Brits, but for some reason, it's the "salt acid" that bugs me. It's inherently contradictory.

An acid is the combination of a Hydrogen ion, H+ with a negative ion, like Cl- or SO4- in water. A base is the combination of a hydroxyl group, OH- with a positive ion, like Na+ or K+ in water.

When you combine an acid and a base, they cancel each other out (as we learn from MacGyver). They do this by combining the H+ and OH- into a good old H2O. What about the other parts? They mix together, too, to form a salt. (such as NaCl - good old table salt - from mixing sodium hydroxide with hydrochloric acid).

Thus, a salt is not, ever, a type of acid. It's just stupid.

Beauty

If you have not yet seen the Extended Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, go watch it now. When you are through, watch the short film in the special edition about the young filmmaker that inspired the song "Into the West" that closes the movie. In particular, watch the first of the two fils he made which are included on this disk.

There is a line in that film about "Things so beautiful it makes you hurt to look at them." I had one such moment while visiting the Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive. The link of the day took my breath away.

For me, beauty is an echo of a perfect world now shattered, a reminder of how it ought to be. Beauty reminds us that death and decay are not how things were meant to be. I love sunsets, not just because of the colors, but because of the brilliance of the sun peeking through the clouds that so often obscure our vision.

Sometimes to make it through the day I grit my teeth, stare at the ground before me and stagger forward one step at a time. And then, as for Sam on the slopes of Mount Doom, I spy "beauty that this darkness cannot touch." And while I long for the day when I need not view that from a distance, I am encouraged in the meantime just knowing it is there.