Fringy, science-stuff, maybe fact or fiction?

To all the kids who survived the 1930's, 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets. There weren't any plugs in the electric outlets and some of us learned not to stick scissors blades into them.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no crumple zones to absorb accident damage, no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pick up truck on a warm day was always a special treat. When we rode our bikes, we had no helmets to protect our heads. We undertook some risks when we hitchhiked or rode the Pawley family bus system (later the county bus system) in Dade County.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle. This was particularly risky in west Hialeah if you drank from the well water hose because most of us were on septic tanks instead of the sewer system and probably most of western Dade County was that way back in the 50's and 60's.

We fished along canals and lakes chock full of water moccasins on land frequented by rattlesnakes. Sometimes we swam or were pushed into the same canals and we survived.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and none of us actually died from this. We did have a crude saying for those friends who used too much lip over the bottle opening though.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter, drank McArthur's or Velda Farms' whole milk chock full of fat, ate ice cream full of fat, ate too many Royal Castle hamburgers and too much pizza, and drank Kool-Aid made with sugar, but we weren't overweight because we were always outside playing!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. Some parents would yell or whistle loudly when it was time to come home. Other than that, no one was able to reach us all day long. And we were just fine.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels on cable or satellite TV, no video movies or DVD's, no surround-sound or CD's, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or chat rooms! A lot of us didn't have air-conditioning in our homes until the 70's, but it seemed like we had ocean breezes to cool us off somehow.

We had FRIENDS and we went outside and found them! We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. Some of us ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th thru 14th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to friends' homes and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!

Little League had tryouts, often at parks miles away that we had to ride bikes to, and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law and the police officers who nailed us!

These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. But we had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all!

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 01:30 | link | comments (3)

Evaporating Planet

 

Planet HD 209458b is evaporating. It is so close to its parent star that its heated atmosphere is simply expanding away into space. Some astronomers studying this distant planetary system now believe they have detected water vapor among the gases being liberated.

This controversial claim, if true, would mark the first instance of planetary water beyond our solar system, and indicate anew that life might be sustainable elsewhere in the universe. Although spectroscopic observations from the Hubble Space Telescope are the basis for the water detection claim, the planetary system is too small and faint to image. The image is an artist's concept of the HD 209458b system.

Image Credit: NASA, European Space Agency, Alfred Vidal-Madjar (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, CNRS)


+ Full Resolution (476 Kb)

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 14:25 | link | comments (2)

We have come a long way?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to http://www.pbase.com/donboyd/memories_nationalads.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 22:46 | link | comments (2)

 

Warts, on a person.

 

 

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 20:05 | link | comments (1)

Proof of entitlement mentality 
 
It's time again for the annual "Stella Awards"! For those unfamiliar 
with these awards, they are named after 81-year-old Stella Liebeck who 
spilled hot coffee on herself and successfully sued the McDonald's in New 
Mexico where she purchased the coffee. You remember, she took the lid off 
the coffee and put it between her knees while she was driving. Who would 
ever think one could get burned doing that, right? 
 
 
That's right; these are awards for the most outlandish lawsuits and 
verdicts in the U.S. You know, the kinds of cases that make you scratch your 
head. So keep your head scratcher handy. 

 
Here are the Stella's for the past year: 
 
 
7TH PLACE : 
Kathleen Robertson of Austin , Texas was awarded $80,000 by a jury of 
her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running 
inside a furniture store. The store owners were understandably surprised by 
the verdict, considering the running toddler was her own son. 
 
6TH PLACE : 
Carl Truman, 19, of Los Angeles , California won $74,000 plus medical 
expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Truman 
apparently didn't notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he 
was trying to steal his neighbor's hubcaps. 
 
 
Go ahead, grab your head scratcher. 
 
5TH PLACE : 
Terrence Dickson, of Bristol , Pennsylvania , who was leaving a house 
he had just burglarized by way of the garage. Unfortunately for Dickson, the 
automatic garage door opener malfunctioned and he could not get the garage 
door to open. Worse, he couldn't re-enter the house because the door 
connecting the garage to the house locked when Dickson pulled it shut. 
Forced to sit for eight, count 'em, EIGHT, days on a case of Pepsi and a 
large b ag of dry dog food, he sued the homeowner's insurance company 
claiming undue mental Anguish. 
 
Amazingly, the jury said the insurance company must pay Dickson 
$500,000 for his anguish. We should all have this kind of anguish. 
Keep scratching. There are more... 
 
 
 
4TH PLACE : 
Jerry Williams, of Little Rock , Arkansas , garnered 4th Place in 
the Stella's when he was awarded $14,500 plus medical expenses after being 
bitten on the butt by his next door neighbor's beagle - even though the 
beagle was on a chain in its owner's fenced yard Williams did not get as 
much as he asked for because the jury believed the beagle might have been 
provoked at the time of the butt bite because Williams had climbed over the 
fence into the yard and repeatedly shot the dog with a pellet gun. 
  
Grrrrr ... Scratch, scratch. 
 
 
 
3RD PLACE : 
Amber Carson of Lancaster , Pennsylvania because a jury ordered a 
Philadelphia restaurant to pay her $113,500 after she slipped on a spilled 
soft drink and broke her tailbone. The reason the soft drink was on the 
floor: Ms. Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during 
an argument. What ever happened to people being responsible for their own 
actions? 
 
 
Scratch, scratch, scratch. Hang in there; there are only two more 
Stellas to go.. 

 
 
2ND PLACE : 
Kara Walton, of Claymont , Delaware sued the owner of a night club in 
a nearby city because she fell from the bathroom window to the floor, 
knocking out her two front teeth. Even though Ms. Walton was trying to sneak 
through the ladies room window to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge, the 
jury said the night club had to pay her $12,000....oh, yeah, 
plus dental expenses. Go figure. 
 
 
 
1ST PLACE : (May I have a fanfare played on 50 kazoos please) 

 This year's runaway First Place Stella Award winner was Mrs. Merv 
Grazinski, of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma , who purchased a new 32-foot Winnebago 
motor home. On her first trip home, from an OU football game, having driven 
on to the freeway, she set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the 
driver's seat to go to the back of the Winnebago to make herself a sandwich 
Not surprisingly, the motor home left the freeway, crashed and overturned. 
Also not surprisingly, Mrs. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not putting in the 
owner's manual that she couldn't actually leave the driver's seat while the 
cruise control was set The Oklahoma jury awarded her, are you sitting down, 
$1,750,000 PLUS a new motor home. Winnebago actually changed their manuals 
as a result of this suit, just incase Mrs. Grazinski has any relatives who 
might also buy a motor home. 
 
  
Are we, as a society, getting more stupid...?

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 08:16 | link | comments (6)

For fellow students going through academic hell:

 

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 21:26 | link | comments (1)

Vector calculus

Vector calculus (also called vector analysis) is a field of mathematics concerned with multivariate real analysis of vectors in a metric space with two or more dimensions (some results can only be applied to three dimensions^[1]). It consists of a suite of formulae and problem solving techniques very useful for engineering and physics. Vector analysis has its origin in quaternion analysis, and was formulated by the American scientist J. Willard Gibbs and the British applied mathematician Oliver Heaviside.

Vector calculus is concerned with scalar fields, which associate a scalar to every point in space, and vector fields, which associate a vector to every point in space. For example, the temperature of a swimming pool is a scalar field: to each point we associate a scalar value of temperature. The water flow in the same pool is a vector field: to each point we associate a velocity vector.

Vector calculus operations are functions between scalar and vector fields. They are typically expressed in terms of the del operator (). Four operations are important in vector calculus:

Operation	Notation	Description	Domain/Range
Gradient		Measures the rate and direction of change in a scalar field.	Maps scalar fields to vector fields.
Curl		Measures a vector field's tendency to rotate about a point.	Maps vector fields to vector fields.
Divergence		Measures the magnitude of a vector field's source or sink at a given point.	Maps vector fields to scalar fields.
Laplacian		A composition of the divergence and gradient operations.	Maps scalar fields to scalar fields.

A quantity called the Jacobian is useful for studying functions when both the domain and range of the function are multivariable, such as a change of variables during integration.

Likewise, there are several important theorems related to these operators which generalize the fundamental theorem of calculus to higher dimension:

 

Theorem	Statement	Description
Gradient theorem		The line integral through a gradient (vector) field equals the difference in its scalar field at the endpoints of the curve

 

Green's theorem		The integral of the scalar curl of a vector field over some region in the plane equals the line integral of the vector field over the curve bounding the region.

 

Stokes' theorem		The integral of the curl of a vector field over a surface equals the line integral of the vector field over the curve bounding the surface.

 

Divergence theorem		The integral of the divergence of a vector field over some solid equals the integral of the flux through the surface bounding the solid.

 

The use of vector calculus may require the handedness of the coordinate system to be taken into account (see cross product and handedness for more detail). Most of the analytic results are easily understood, in a more general form, using the machinery of differential geometry, of which vector calculus forms a subset.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 07:37 | link | comments (1)

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 09:34 | link | comments

Environmental science

Environmental science is the study of interactions among physical, chemical, and biological components of the environment. It is an interdisciplinary science overlapping the categories in Natural sciences, Engineering sciences and Social sciences. In nature, Environmental science focuses on pollution and degradation of the environment related to human activities and their impact on biodiversity and sustainability. As an interdisciplinary field, environmental science also applies knowledge from economics, law and social sciences. It can be applied to cyberspace environment also. In nature, Physics is used to understand the flux of material and energy interaction and construct mathematical models of environmental phenomena. Chemistry is applied to understand the molecular interactions among natural systems. Biology is fundamental to describing the effects within the plant and animal kingdoms.

Environmental science came alive as a substantive, active field of scientific investigation in the 1960s and 1970s. This was driven by the need for a large multi-disciplined team to analyze complex environmental problems, the arrival of substantive environmental laws requiring specific environmental protocols of investigation, and growing public awareness of a need for action in addressing environmental problems.

Environmental science encompasses issues such as climate change, conservation, biodiversity, groundwater and soil contamination, use of natural resources, waste management, sustainable development, air pollution and noise pollution. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of environmental science, teams of professionals commonly work together to conduct environmental research or to produce Environmental Impact Statements, as required by the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) or under state laws. Other professional organizations engender work in environmental science and aid in communication among the diverse sciences.

Sub-categories

Atmospheric sciences examines the new phenomenology of the Earth's gaseous outer layer with emphasis upon interrelation to other systems. Atmospheric sciences comprises meteorological studies, greenhouse gas phenomena, atmospheric dispersion modeling of airborne contaminants,^[1][2] sound propagation phenomena related to noise pollution, and even light pollution

Taking the example of the global warming phenomena, physicists create computer models of atmospheric circulation and infra-red radiation transmission, chemists examine the inventory of atmospheric chemicals and their reactions, biologists analyze the plant and animal contributions to carbon dioxide fluxes, and specialists such as meteorologists and oceanographers add additional breadth in understanding the atmospheric dynamics.

Ecology studies typically analyze the dynamics among an interrelated set of populations, or a population and some aspect of its environment. These studies could address endangered species, predator/prey interactions, habitat integrity, effects upon populations by environmental contaminants, or impact analysis of proposed land development upon species viability.

An interdisciplinary analysis of an ecological system which is being impacted by one or more stressors might include several related environmental science fields. For example one might examine an estuarine setting where a proposed industrial development could impact certain species by water pollution and air pollution. For this study biologists would describe the flora and fauna, chemists would analyze the transport of water pollutants to the marsh, physicists would calculate air pollution emissions and geologists would assist in understanding the marsh soils and bay muds.

Environmental chemistry is the study of chemical alterations in the environment. Principal areas of study include soil contamination and water pollution. The topics of analysis involve chemical degradation in the environment, multi-phase transport of chemicals (for example, evaporation of a solvent containing lake to yield solvent as an air pollutant), and chemical effects upon biota.

As an example study, consider the case of a leaking solvent tank which has entered the soil upgradient of a habitat of an endangered species of amphibian. Physicists would develop a computer model to understand the extent of soil contamination and subsurface transport of solvent, chemists would analyze the molecular bonding of the solvent to the specific soil type and biologists would study the impacts upon soil arthropods, plants and ultimately pond dwelling copepods who are the food of the endangered amphibian.

Geosciences include Environmental Geology, Hydrology, Physical Geography, Climatology and Geomorphology. It may also embrace oceanography and other related fields.

As an example study of soils erosion, calculations would be made of surface runoff by soil scientists. Hydrologists would assist in examining sediment transport in overland flow. Physicists would contribute by assessing the changes in light transmission in the receiving waters. Biologists would analyze subsequent impacts to aquatic flora and fauna from increases in water turbidity.

Environmental assessment is the process of appraisal through which environmental protection and sustainable development may be considered. Environmental assessments typically involve collection of field data, this can be from stakeholders and the ambient environment, and serves to harmonize the linkages between the different branches of the environment and development.

Regulations driving the studies

In the U.S. the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 set forth requirements for analysis of major projects in terms of specific environmental criteria. Numerous state laws have echoed these mandates, applying the principles to local scale actions. The upshot has been an explosion of documentation and study of environmental consequences before the fact of development actions.

One can examine the specifics of environmental science by reading examples of Environmental Impact Statements prepared under NEPA such as: Wastewater treatment expansion options discharging into the San Diego/Tiajuana Estuary, Expansion of the San Francisco International Airport, Development of the Houston, Metro Transportation system, Expansion of the metropolitan Boston MBTA transit system, and Construction of Interstate 66 through Arlington, Virginia.

In England and Wales the Environmental Agency (EA), (EA) formed in 1996 is the leading public body for protecting and improving the environment and enforces the regulations listed on the communities and local government site (formerly the office of the deputy prime minister) which help drive the study environmental science in the UK. The Agency was set up under the Environment Act 1995 as an independent body and works closely with UK Government to enforce the regulations.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 20:17 | link | comments (3)

A Fantastic Monday Morning Sky Show

11.02.05

This is worth waking up for. On Monday morning, Nov. 5th, anyone willing to step outside before dawn will see a fantastic display of stars and planets—and maybe a couple of spaceships, too. Image right: Venus and the crescent Moon. Photo credit: Zhen Jie of Singapore. The planets: Venus, Saturn and Mars. Venus is the ridiculously luminous "star" hanging low in the east. You can’t miss it—especially because the crescent Moon is hanging nearby. The closely-spaced pair is as lovely as anything you will ever see in the heavens. If you can, tear your eyes away from Venus and the Moon. Just above them hangs Saturn, a delicate yellow beauty that cries out for the attention of your telescope; even small 'scopes reveal Saturn's breathtaking rings. And above Saturn, almost directly overhead, shines Mars. It is bright, distinctly orange, and for reasons science cannot fully explain, a little hypnotic. The stars: Too many to name! You won't be the only one looking at the planets. Orion the Hunter is there, too, outlined in the sky by an hour-glass of first magnitude stars. Joining Orion is Castor, Pollux, Regulus, Aldebaran and brightest of all, Sirius, the blue-white dog star. This stellar sprawl frames the planets in a scene guaranteed to spellbind—that is, until something comes along to break the spell. That would be the spaceships: Discovery and the International Space Station The two orbiters are due to fly over many US towns and cities on Monday morning. If things go according to plan, Discovery will undock from the ISS at 5:32 am EST (updates), which means the two ships will appear as distinct points of bright light, side-by-side, gliding together past Mars, Sirius, Orion, Venus and the Moon. Amazing! Check NASA's Skywatch web site for spotting times. What comes next may strain the credulity of some readers, but it is true. In addition to the stars, planets, spaceships and lunar close encounters, there is also an exploding comet: Image above: Comet Holmes photographed on Nov. 2nd by Tom Davis of Salisbury, North Carolina, using a 4.5 inch refracting telescope. Comet 17P/Holmes burst into view last week when something happened to the comet's core -- a collapse, a fracture, a comet-quake? No one knows!—causing the comet to surge in brightness almost a million-fold. It is now visible to the unaided eye as an expanding fuzzball in the constelation Perseus similar in brightness to the stars of the Big Dipper. To find the comet, first face Mars and then spin around 180-degrees: sky map. It's a must-see target for backyard telescopes. Nov. 5th: Set your alarm!

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 05:02 | link | comments (4)

 

Riding all around the street
Four o’clock and they’re all asleep
I’m not tired and it’s so late
Moving fast everything looks great.

My white bicycle, my white bicycle

See that man, he’s all alone
Looks so happy but he’s far from home
I Ring my bell, and smile at him
Then not go by his arriving spin

My white bicycle, my white bicycle

The rain comes down but I don’t care
The wind is blowing in my hair
Seagulls flying in the air

My white bicycle, my white bicycle

He Lifts both hands, his head in disgrace
Shines no light upon my face
Through the darkness, we still speed
My white bicycle and me

My white bicycle, my white bicycle

Policeman shouts but I don’t see him
They’re one thing I don’t believe in
Find some judge, but it’s not leavin’

My white bicycle, my white bicycle

My white bicycle, my white bicycle

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 15:44 | link | comments (4)

Pressure-temperature diagrams

The simplest phase diagrams are pressure-temperature diagrams of a single simple substance, such as water. The axes correspond to the pressure and temperature. The phase diagram shows, in pressure-temperature space, the lines of equilibrium or phase boundaries between the three phases of solid, liquid, and gas.

Posted by: NeutronNorman at 04:08 | link | comments