9:53 pm in Books, Interesting, Science, Science Fiction by Faceless Librarian
Oh, hi.
Been looking at books on Amazon, just snooping around for interesting stuff. Then I noticed this. It’s one of those things where I wonder if there’s a series I didn’t know about.
3:55 pm in Books, Science, Syndicated by Faceless Librarian
When we first opened, my boss asked if there was any place in the library we wanted to “adopt� as being the place where we set up displays based on the items in that area. Naturally I chose the science section. Since then, I’ve kept a display going that’s basically just suggested items, books, and the like. Nothing much, and certainly not at all eye catching. Then today, I decided to do something a little different.
I wanted to bring some attention to that area, maybe educate a little and, of course, whip a few items for the patrons to try out. Now then, that’s pretty easy when you think about it and there are some other things I have in mind for that area. Still, for the time being, I think this is better than what I had and that’s the most important thing. Here, take a look:
So I snagged a colourful and humourous SCIENCE image. It has no point but to be funny and kind of label the science display. Other than that, pure amusement for myself and other geeks. For those not as into science, it also presents a look at the subject as something that may not be as bone dry as they think. I stuck the image into a clear, plastic stand so it’s fairly well protected and will stand on its own. I’ll change this out every so often with similar images. They may not always be funny, but they will serve as eye candy.
On the top shelf, I’m going to have something new every week. I want a beautiful science related image and then, next to it, a little bit about what that image is. For the very first one, I did something simple that anyone could do. I found a gorgeous picture of the Large Hadron Collider and then I bounced over to Wikipedia and grabbed a clip from an article on the subject. (Of course, I cited my source on the paper.) This way, there are two eye catching images related to the section along with a quickie blurb about something in the realm of scientific niftyness.
In other words, I’m actually displaying something now, rather than just standing books on their ends.
2:29 pm in Science, Syndicated by Faceless Librarian
So this morning I was setting up a display over in our science section. I wanted to do something to liven it up, call attention to it, and otherwise make it something a little more interesting than just some suggested books. Remembering a few images that I quite liked I went and found them, and then it hit me. There’s this really funny image by Randall Munroe that would be great for this area. I didn’t want to use it right away, but I wanted a print out of it ready to go.
Since it was going to be a print out, I wanted the biggest, highest resolution image I could find. I tried Google Images, and got a decent one, but then I decided to try Bing Image Search and see if it got me anything different.
It did.
Actually it got me stuff so different, it doesn’t even make sense. Just as an aside, the image below is clickable for the embiggening, but doing so might not be totally safe for work.
AND THAT SHOULD TELL YOU SOMETHING ABOUT HOW WELL THIS SEARCH WORKED.
6:47 am in Image Junky, Interesting, Science by Faceless Librarian
I can’t explain why, but I am a total freak for octopi. Yes, I said octopi. I’m a cranky old man and back in my day, kids were taught that the plural of octopus is octopi, dammit. Octopuses. That doesn’t even look right to me. It’s kinda like moose. See that? MOOSE. That’s the plural of moose. One moose. Two moose. Anyone speaking of mooses is goddamn insane.
But I digress.
Octopi are curiously smart cephalopods. They can figure out how to open jars, how to get food from the outside of their tanks. There have been numerous cases where a captive octopus plays pranks on its keepers. Their only problem? Long term memory- they don’t have one. So today’s octopus figures out how to open a jar of food. Then tomorrow, the poor thing will have to figure it out all over again. Then again, I think that’s also a sign of intelligence. Okay, so they can’t remember something, but they’re smart enough to figure it out over and over again. Not bad really.
8:40 pm in Interesting, Science, Science Fiction by Faceless Librarian
I’m not going to get into the whole Bigfoot or Sasquatch thing because, quite frankly, it’s stupid. But there’s a classic piece of film often used as “evidence” of the creature’s existence because the creature in the film doesn’t walk like a man. Or at least that’s the story. Obviously it’s a bit hard to tell when the camera shooting the film is bobbing up and down like a porn starlet blowing her co-star. However, there are ways to go through the thing frame by frame and steady it. When you do, you get this:
10:35 am in Art, Interesting, Pop Culture, Randomness, Science by Faceless Librarian
Sure, why not? I like the fact that one is a ninja… with GUNS!
8:21 am in Interesting, Ladies and Gentlemen, Music, Science by Faceless Librarian
Look! There’s more!
Ladies and gentlemen, Doctors deGrasse Tyson, Sagan, Feynman, and Nye.
8:36 am in Ladies and Gentlemen, Music, Randomness, Science by Faceless Librarian
I… I um. I don’t even know what to write.
The weird thing is, this is actually kind of good. Actually, I think it is good. I mean it’s not top ten material. You won’t hear it on Casey Kasem but… well, actually, it’s probably a good thing you won’t hear it on Casey’s Top 40.
Anyway, um… Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Sagan and Dr. Hawking.
8:16 am in Interesting, Randomness, Science by Faceless Librarian
Steady cams are built on a universal joint mounted on a three point gimbal set up which serves to remove the frenetic motions of the cameraperson by separating him/her from the camera three times via a dual axis gimbal.
Don’t understand? Well, here, let me show you with this cereal bowl that I need to buy for my kids (cough cough and myCOUGHself) so they don’t spill things so often. Basically, you could almost run across a room with this and not spill the cereal as long as you didn’t fall over. In other words, BRILLIANT!
9:59 am in Science by Faceless Librarian
An upcoming mission to Jupiter and two of its satellites is giving me a big science hard on. The Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM) is a joint effort by NASA and ESA to study the Jovian satellites most likely to have underground oceans. Speficially, they wish to study Europa and Ganymede to see if there are underground oceans and if they might harbour life.
But I don’t need to explain this when Dr. Pappalardo can do a far better job.
9:35 am in Science, Syndicated by Faceless Librarian
Face it, most of the people in Hollywood and various entertainment industries are pants-on-head stupid. They rattle on about linking autism to vaccinations, about thetans and aliens implanting souls, and then they open their mouths about politics and their brains fall out on the floor.
There was a time when Hollywood stars actually did things and weren’t afraid to show off their intelligence. Today, it seems that if a star is a nerd, then they might be shunned. But harken back to the days when sexy screen queen Hedy Lamarr burned up the cinemas. She was a decent actress, entertaining, hot, and smarter than your average bear in that she invented things.
Things?
Yes, you know, things like remote controlled torpedoes and radio frequency hopping. Seriously, this was a woman of science and she knew what the hell she was doing. If she had any fault in her ideas, it’s that they were just about 10 years ahead of their time.
9:32 am in Science, Syndicated by Faceless Librarian
Have you ever been confronted with a question and you know the answer, but you also think “Jeez, everybody knows that.”? It’s a very human response and we do it more often than we might think. We’ll become so well versed in something, especially if it’s something we consider obvious, and then we think that everybody is just as knowledgeable as we are. Then, when we find someone who isn’t, we think there’s something wrong with it.
The act of imposing our knowledge upon others is the subject of some new research and it’s fascinating. Kids are more susceptible to it, but that doesn’t mean adults won’t do it either. Perhaps James Burke put it best when he said “You see what your knowledge is telling you” and we’ll think it odd that people don’t see it too, even when they’ve got no way of knowing what we know.
6:57 pm in Science by Faceless Librarian
If you’ve never read anything by Dr. Michio Kaku, I highly recommend you go find something, anything, that he’s written. He’s also on the Science Channel along with hosting a few documentary projects along the way. The man is a brilliant theoretical physicist and incredibly entertaining to listen to.
But, to get you started, here’s a few (nine) videos of him tackling questions like alien life, time travel, and teleportation. Absolutely fascinating!
3:32 pm in Science by Faceless Librarian
Certain things sound straight out of science fiction.
Imagine a planetary system something like our solar system. All of the planets should revolve around the star in the same direction and that direction is consistent with the rotational direction of the star. Say you’re viewing a system from above and the star is rotating clockwise. Then all the planets should be orbiting the star in a clockwise direction to.
Well, astronomers have found a planet that is orbiting in a direction counter to the rotation of the star. Planet HAT-P-7b, orbiting the star GSC 03547-01402, has an orbital inclination of 180 degrees. What’s that mean? Well, when something is flipped 180 degrees, it’s facing the other way, right? The same thing goes with orbital inclination, that is, it indicates a retrograde orbital rotation.
So what causes something like this?
The theory I give the most credit is one which states that something with a huge gravitational well, either another star or another massive planet, intersected with the orbit of this planet. It may have even hit the planet, but it’s hard to be sure. Either way, the gravitational encounter threw the planet around like a billiards ball and when things finally settled down, it wound up orbiting backwards.
It makes you feel a little lucky that we live in a somewhat less exciting planetary system, doesn’t it?
3:29 pm in Science, Syndicated by Faceless Librarian
An article about the real fairness and randomness involved in a coin toss circulated the net this week and it spoke to several things I’ve thought about, but had no method to actually prove.
The idea that a coin has a 50% chance of landing on either face seemed off to me. Most coins have more detail on one side and to achieve that detail, more of the coin must be stamped or removed. This changes the weight on one side and it also effects the aerodynamics. Truly, the only fair coin, I figured, would be one that’s smooth on both sides.
True randomness is actually hard to come by. Even the random number generators in programmes and video games aren’t completely random. Except for the most sophisticated, their outputs will show some predictability after a given amount of time.
Edit: @aard pointed out another article which further illustrates the issues with coin flipping and randomness.
9:43 am in Science, Syndicated by Faceless Librarian
Most computer and information scientists believe that the next big leap forward in computing will be the invention of a quantum computer. Actually, there are people already at work on such a device and very basic prototypes are under scrutiny. However, there’s a problem with quantum computing and it has to with a certain cat.
Erwin Schrödinger, an Austrian physicist, one proposed a thought experiement. Take a cat and put it in a box with a deadly poison. Hook the poison up to a Geiger counter which will detect radiation from a substance that decays at the rate of one atom per hour. If the counter detects a radioactive effect, the poison is released and the cat dies. If not, then the cat lives. Now, seal the box and protect it from outside influence. At that point we don’t know the fate of the cat. The radioactive substance might lose an atom, it might not. Because of this, the cat can be seen as being alive and dead at the same time.
Only when we open the box and observe the cat do we collapse the probablilties into a single reality.
This, in a nutshell, is how a quantum computer works. We take quantum superpositions in atoms or particles and change them to represent data. So instead of a transitor’s power state (on or off) representing a 1 or 0, the spin of an electron indicates a 1 or 0. However, quantum physics indicates that things like spin and superpositions can exist in multiple states at the same time, just like the cat in the box. Only when we observe them do the probabilities fall into reality.
This is called wave function collapse. Quantum mechanics says that some particles exist in multiple states simultaneously, kind of like how light behaves as both a particle and as a wave. As long as nothing observes the particle, it remains in multiple states and perhaps even in multiple places. But, as soon as something or someone observes the particle, it snaps into one state.
In other words, a quantum computer must first protect the atoms manipulating the data from direct observation. A mere glance makes the whole thing fall apart. So while progress is being made on the quantum computer, there’s a long way to go.
7:10 am in Interesting, Science by Faceless Librarian
Really, this man needs no introduction. Listen as he talks about failure and what we learn from it.
Edit: Wow. For some reason they don’t embed the full programme when you post it to another site. That’s kinda silly. Go watch the the full thing. Sorry about that folks, I’ll be more careful next time!
8:38 am in Science by Faceless Librarian
The weird thing about modern physics and quantum physics is that we have passed beyond our own dimensionality a long time ago. We can imagine points (Dimension 0) and lines (First Dimension) and then lines intersecting lines (Second Dimension) to objects that posses width, depth, and height (Third Dimension). Some of us have no trouble envisioning a Fourth Dimension, that of the nature of time as a line taking us from a point in the past to a point in the future.
But what about going beyond the Fourth Dimension? How does that work, and what lies on the lines intersecting time? This short, and fascinating, video explains the concepts quite well.
9:47 am in Science by Faceless Librarian
A few days back I posted something about a radical theory involving a tinkering with the very thing physicists don’t want anyone tinkering with: the speed of light.
Well, if that kind of theorizing is unpalatable to physicists, then here’s something just as bad to force it down. What if, just pretend with me for a bit, but what if time ran faster during the early days of the universe? Suppose that, just after the big bang, time was up and running and doing so much more quickly than it is right now. This would explain something and lead to an inescapable conclusion.
First, when we look far out into space, we also look far back in time. The light from the distant quasars took billions of years to reach us and thus we see these things as they were billions of years ago. It seems that, when we look at something far away, we notice that they’re moving away from us really quickly. But what if they only appear to be moving away quickly not because of an inherent speed, but because these things exist in a time stream much faster than our own?
This would explain why these ancient things from the dawn of the cosmos seem to be moving around so quickly. Because the time in which they existed was moving quickly than time moves now and thus it’s like watching a movie in fast forward.
The inescapable conclusion? Time is slowing down. The scary thing is that the math works out for this and it fits very well with observable evidence and marries well with the variable speed of light theory.
Are we standing at the threshold of a new era in physics that would rework the entire science?
9:28 am in Science, Syndicated by Faceless Librarian
In case y’all haven’t noticed, I’m kind of a subversive guy. While you may think that kind of thing doesn’t apply to the fields of information science and library work, you’ll find that they tie together nicely. So it gives me a little thrill when I see something that might be used for info science and counterculture.
Take a little programme called PaperBack. PaperBack takes computer files, turns them into a code, and then prints the code on a paper. It’s a method of backing up files for safe storage either on or off site. To recover the files, scan the paper with a standard scanner using the TWAIN interface.
So?
The idea of backing up a computer file to a piece of paper may sound counterintuitive. Why do that? Why not use a hard drive, or a service like Amazon S3? Those will both work dandy for many things but you’ll find that, in the event of a natural disaster, you’ll probably be unable to reach the internet for some time. The hard drive is okay, but what if it crashes or fries? I mean, you wouldn’t want to back up your entire drive like this, but what about passwords and bank information and personal stuff that you simply cannot be without? As long as you have access to a working computer and scanner, you can get your files back.
And anymore, most computer printers are all in one varieties with scanners, faxes, and other stuff.
But what of counterculture or subversion, or even legitimate use in the information sciences or library work?
Strangely enough, there are still plenty of libraries in America and all over the world with limited to nonexistent internet access. So mail them a sheaf of papers and they scan them. It’s a decent alternative for places like Iran where a flash drive may be searched, but papers hidden in a stack of other papers might go unnoticed. Internet may be monitored, but not a business person entering the country with a file box full of tax forms. One could transport computer data without any computer hardware on them whatsoever.
As Gibson said “The street finds its own uses for things.” I’m certain there are even more uses for something like PaperBack than I could ever think of.
