Going places

Holy moly!!!



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Nightwatch

Night sky over Norcia last night by my buddy, Emanuele Persiani. I commented: "WOW! Ho bisogno di guardare verso il cielo più spesso!" I should look up into the sky more often!

He replies, "soprattutto quando non c'è la luna!" Especially when there's no moon.

This neat moon-phase calendar says we're two days away from the dark-night. Just a little sliver left.

“I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia”

― Ptolemy, Almagest



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Eclipse

We got at most about 55% here and in Rome. According to the national Italian astronomical organisation, they got 69% in Milan, which was the most in this country. Totality could be seen only in the Faroe Islands in Iceland.

After we had all the lunar coverage we were going to get here, I watched the live feed by SLOOH from the Faroe Islands. At totality, the screen went absolutely black until they removed the filters from the cameras, and BAM!

Spectacular! The Baily's Beads, the little ring of lights where the sun shone over the moon's craters, then two solar prominences, then as the moon moved on, the Diamond Ring effect.

I was outside for most of it with the pinhole camera I made. The light did indeed get noticably dimmer, and took on a strange quality. At the peak of our coverage, all the dogs and cats in the neighbourhood went bananas, barking and howling and running madly around. Which was cool.

While all this was going on, the guy from the ferramenta came by with my new trestle table, and he showed me the photos he took with welder's glass. We watched the coverage for a few minutes, and he said there was going to be a total eclipse visible from Norcia in about 15 years. So put it on your calendars.

Then I planted my nasturtium seeds and all was well with the universe.


I vaguely remember a near-total eclipse in Victoria from my early school days, and they told us, of course, that we couldn't watch it directly but taught us how to make pinhole cameras to see it. I looked it up on the innernet and voy-lah! Because, Science!



Best pic. With my eye (stupid camera!) it looked a lot cooler, like a cookie with a big bite taken out.



Nature Girl doing her nerdy Amateur Naturalist thing...





V. annoyed that the camera couldn't pick it up, but at this stage it looked like a little Pac-man.



Slightly off topic - Daffs!!




Peak. The light all around was very weird.


The BBC's footage of totality in the Faroe Islands.

I thought it was pretty funny listening to the commenters from SLOOH talking about what an "amazing coincidence" it is that the moon is precisely the right size and distance from the earth to create total eclipses.

The closest we'll come to a totality in this area again will be August 12th, 2026 but it will be close to sunset. We'll get most of the eclipse but then the sun will drop below the horizon, at about 8 pm. The next total eclipse that will be completely visible, weather permitting, will be in 2187. I can't guarantee I'll be able to get pics.



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Euclid Book 1

or, why I wish I had a blackboard in my living room.

There's this great thing on YouTube, "Mathematicsonline" that has a whole bunch of beginner Euclid. But his playlists are all messed up and out of order, so I'm putting them together.


Here, now you can learn something while you surf.

A long time ago I found a reason to upgrade my math skills (I may have told y'all this story before.) so I enrolled in this rather neat thing they had in Vancouver to help adults catch up with educational things they'd missed for various reasons in school. It wasn't exactly "adult upgrading". Being the Left Coast, they gave much thought to creating something that wouldn't hurt our "self esteem" (ie: our egos) so they set it up, quite ingeniously, to have upgrading "streams" in the various subjects into which you could find your starting point and go forward as fast or as slow as you wanted and as far as you wanted. In theory, you could start with first grade math and go all the way through to calculus (or whatever) and physics, (assuming they could find a teacher who knew it).

It was staffed by retired university professors and people like that who wanted to help out but who knew what they were doing. It was a drop-in sort of thing, so you just went when you could. Everyone was very friendly and supportive, and they were careful not to make you feel like an idiot for having blown off your education the first time round. It was pretty great, actually, and if there were ever to be a highschool set up like that, it might be worth a try for homeschooling types.

So, anyway, I started with a tested math level of about grade nine and quickly discovered that my math troubles had been more connected to my difficult home situation than anyone had previously thought, and I shot ahead like a mathematical bullet. I was greatly relieved, actually, since I had thought all that time that I was somehow mentally defective. That the math part of my brain simply didn't work as well as normal people's. It turns out that I'd just had lousy teachers, starting with my mother.

She, with her undergraduate degree in Math and her authorship of a math text and then her engineering degree, had no idea how to teach someone who "didn't get it," and all of our attempts at either teaching me math or doing math homework had ended up with the following screaming match: "I can't do it! I just CAN'T DO IT!!!" "I DON'T KNOW WHY, AREN'T YOU SUPPOSED TO BE MY KID?"

Anyway, I was glad to discover that there wasn't actually anything wrong with my brain except a habit of panicking whenever I sat down with a math book. If they'd had YouTube at the time, I'd have not bothered ever touching a math book again.

Ultimately, the thing I learned about myself was that I LOVED geometry. There was that memorable moment when I realised what geometry and philosophy had to do with each other: geometry was just a kind of way of diagramming the underlying nature of reality, and proving that it is real, that the rules that set up everything, the universe (and presumably whatever there is other than the universe) are absolute, immutable and non-contradictory, that the universe was rational.

Ahhhhhh... rational...Mmmmmm...



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The Laws of Nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God."

Euclid

One smart SOB.



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Dirigibles.5

Get ON with it, you people!

I want one of these now worse than I ever wanted a flying jet car. I flatly refuse to go to my grave before flying in one, so on yer bikes!

And, a blast from the past,


the arrival of the Graf Zeppelin in New York in 1929.

Why didn't the 20th century work out better, dammit?

And this:

the Aeroscraft Cruiser. In fact, I think I just want to live on one. Never set foot on this crap planet again.



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Art + Science = Amazingly Cool

Recently got interested in a series of YouTube videos on the incredible intricacies of the chemistry and mechanics of sub-microscopic biological systems. There's a whole universe of stuff going on inside you right now.





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Pop Science Is Cool Quiz

1)

2)

1) What is it?

2) Where is it from?



Plus, bonus video of terrifying baddass Japanese ninja honeybees totally...
cooking to death a deadly giant hornet.

It's actually one of the most dangerous insects on the planet. Called in Asia the Yak-Killer Hornet, it kills more people in Japan than all the poisonous snakes put together.

Cool huh?



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Mind boggling

Most amazing nature show about the intelligence of crows.




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Gotta get me one!

Looking at technology and science websites last night. Found some wonderful things.

Did you know that there is an aeronautics company that is developing cargo airships?
Yes, you read that right. It makes you think that maybe thousands of helium balloons lifting up a whole house and sailing down to the Amazon isn't that far-fetched.

They require very little ground infrastructure, no flight crew or air traffic control (which is done on board by the co-pilot) and can be landed like a helicopter on nearly any flat bit of land. They can go into climates that fixed-wing aircraft can't go like the high arctic, very tall mountain regions, even on the surface of water, and can withstand an incredible range of external temperatures.

They can be used for ground surveillance and to drop of cargo, supplies or "humanitarian aid" to horrible places where no aircraft can land. Most incredibly, they have the advantage of being able to carry thousands of tonnes of stuff, things like heavy equipment, tanks, containers worth of supplies.

And they can stay in the air for three weeks. One guy working to develop this technology said it's not so much like a slow airplane, but like a fast ship, that doesn't have to stay on the ocean, but can deliver the goods right to the middle of your disaster zone.


Oh MAN do I ever want one of these!

I think one of the best signs that the world is getting better, coming to its senses, will be the proliferation and popularity of dirigibles for travel.



And they have a blog!

Also, microscopes...

I wanted a microscope especially keenly this month. The leaves of my precious (and now gigantic) hibiscus plant started yellowing and falling off. I was greatly puzzled since there seemed to be no sign of a bug infestation. But upon consulting Wiki, and looking very closely with both my magnifying lenses, I discovered that it was infested with red spider mites, which are too small to see unaided. The only give-away was a nearly impossibly fine webbing strung between the teeth of the leaves, so small it was almost invisible even with the lenses. Fortunately, they responded well to a little aphid spray.

Then there was the business with the scale insect I plucked from one of my balcony plants. It was carrying a huge egg sac which looked fascinating under the lens, and which I would loved to have love to draw if I'd had sufficient magnification.

I wish I could go back to my 20 year-old self and say, 'Stop all this futzing around, and go to England and study biology. You'll be much happier as a field naturalist working for British Wildlife than a pro-life activist." But maybe it's not too late to do something with this interest.



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Whoah!

Click fullscreen.

Seriously, do.



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What. The. Hell?

Someone has said it's a cnidarian called a "Deepstaria enigmatica," which taxonomic designation filled me with skepticism.

But apparently, they're a real thing.

Seriously Nature, is it really necessary to be this weird?

I've mentioned before how I feel about radial symmetry, right?




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3.5x-90x Trinocular Stereo Microscope + USB Digital Camera and 54 LED Ring Light

Beautiful isn't it?

It's what I want for my birthday.

It's something I don't talk about very much, but that I've always regretted. I didn't stay in university, mostly because I couldn't justify the enormous debt that was going to accrue and at the time I was there, in my early 20s, I really had no idea what my interests were. But I really wish I had had the self-knowledge and the courage then to go into the natural sciences.

So little did I know myself and so deeply afraid was I of Doing It Wrong, that I finally realised I needed to understand myself better before committing to such enormous, long-term expenses. Like a lot of modern people that age, I had no sense at all of what I really loved, no sense of my natural aptitudes or even interests and I was never calm enough to have time to figure it out. The result of having been cut loose without guidance at too early an age.

I'm glad now that I didn't stay. It really would have been time and most of all money wasted. (Japanese? French philosophy? What the...?). But it's a shame, now that I do know myself better, that I am of an age where I have no more interest in making a massive directional change. I'm very happy with what I do and fairly proud of myself for having worked and read my way into it on my own, and I don't want to go "back to school".

It wasn't until I was in my 20s, as I noted below, that I discovered that I was not really bad at maths after all and that if I had wanted to, I could certainly have upgraded and worked my way up to undergraduate level to start with biology.

Long-time readers may have noticed that this is a serious side interest. Botany, gardening, zoology, wildflowers, taxonomy, ecology (as it was called in the olden days)... Natural History, in short. It is a big ambition in art to combine these interests and do botanical painting. I hope to do a botanical and entomological catalogue of local Italian wildflowers, plants and insects. Maybe even a medicinal herbal. Certainly, one of the reasons I was most happy that cancer is (probably) over, is that now I have time to pursue these things.

It all started in childhood, and was mostly my mother's doing.

When I was still quite small, mum started her university studies, a double major in marine biology and mathematics at UVic. And she spent a lot of time with me, teaching me about the things she was studying. And of course, we had a library of books on it all, field guides, taxonomic keys and the giant, two-volume Larousse Encyclopedia of Animal Life. From an early age, I started on the books by Gerald Durrell, a personal hero. And of course, I had a sizable collection of Nature Things.

Essentially, I was homeschooled before it was trendy. Mum was studying marine biology with Alan Austin, and took courses in the summer. Well, she couldn't afford a babysitter and it was the 70s and the Left Coast so no one minded, least of all me, that she would just take me with her to classes, labs and field trips.

I'll never forget the Saturday afternoon when I was about nine and she had a lecture. I was allowed to spend the afternoon by myself in one of the salt water labs. This was a room of wonders. It had a big white tank in which were kept the specimens found on the beaches around the Islands. Alan was a specialist in seaweed, so there were all sorts of different species in the tank that were kept alive with a cycle of fresh sea water at the right temperature (cold). Fortunately, along with the seaweed collections were always little critters, various crustaceans, invertebrates, star fish, tiny crabs, and whatnot that clung to the seaweed.

Also in this lab were a set of binocular dissecting microscopes which I had been shown how to use. These were wonderful machines. They were fairly low power microscopes designed so that the viewer could see the object in 3-D, which meant no microtechnique slides were necessary. You could put the whole critter under the scope. It was dual-light, with a light on top and one underneath the glass plate to eliminate shadows.

I had also been given a student's dissecting kit and kept a notebook.

Well, needless to say the afternoon went quickly. I'll never forget finding a tiny starfish; it could not have been more than 5mm in diameter. I flipped it over and sat there for a good half hour, drawing pictures in my notebook and just watching it with its incredible multitude of colours and mathematical perfection, waving its little sucker-ended legs at me. I watched this amazing thing flip itself over several times. Incredible. (No! of course I didn't cut it up! What would be the point of that? Starfish just grow more starfish out of the cut up pieces. And besides, I was not a mean kid.)

I had less luck with a tiny hermit crab. I picked it out of the tank by its shell and I guess it panicked. It plopped right back into the water and scrambled under a leaf. I felt awful, and carefully placed its shell near where it had landed, and spent some time watching it to make sure it climbed back in. Since then I've been careful to pick hermit crabs up in my palm. They don't bite, after all.

My mother taught me how to make a trap using a jar and a net to collect interesting things from freshwater ponds and streams, how to build an underwater viewer (with a juice tin and cellophane) so you can stand in the water waist deep and look at the creatures swimming around you and how to do accurate field notes.

I wish I had kept going. One of the things that makes me mad about the Modern World is that the irrationalists have taken over the biological sciences and turned them into exercises in idiot leftist politics. When I lived in England, stomping around the countryside, I went through a period where I seriously reconsidered upgrading maths and getting into environmental sciences. I looked all over the place in vain for college programmes that didn't stink of the pseudo-religious claptrap that has become intertwined with this field.

Anyway, since that long-ago Saturday afternoon in the salt water lab, I have yearned for my own dissecting microscope. Of course, I had always thought when I was a kid that such things were only bought by universities and were impossibly expensive. But I've since learned that anyone can buy one, and there have been significant improvements on the one I used way back when. They're still pretty pricey, but in the hundreds of dollars range, not thousands.

A good trinocular stereo microscope will have a magnification of 20x-40x-60x-80x, zoom lenses, dual lighting system with fibre optic lights (no heat to cook your specimens), a boom stand so you can get bigger things under it and best of all, a third viewer with a built-in or attachable digital camera and USB, so you can take pictures and make videos of what you're looking at.

I've always wanted to be a Mad Scientist, or at least a Naturalist. But I'm going to have to save my pennies, because neither I nor anyone I know has the spare dosh for a toy like this.

But...

pretty snazzy huh? Some day. And of course, you have to get all the cool stuff to go with it. Collecting jars and bottles, nets and things to poke and magnify with. Wonders!

One could make splendid micro-still lifes with one of these. Portraits of tiny, magical and mysterious things from another world, nearly invisible, but right under our feet.



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Space weather report

Lots of solar activity, a group of sunspots will be visible for those with solar filters on their telescopes. Slightly less hazardous will be the full moon in 2 days 23 hours, but the big news is the asteroid near-miss report from NASA JPL in California.

Quite a big asteroid going past in our neighbourhood tomorrow, near-Earth asteroid 2005 YU55. About 400 meters or 1,300 feet in diameter, or about the size of a medium sized stadium, and will be passing about 202,000 miles away. 0.85 lunar distances. Quite close.

You won't see it though. It's going to be raining in Rome, so, as Vicky pointed out, even if it were a giant flaming ball, we'd miss it. But it is a type-c asteroid, the c is for "carbonaceous" which means it's quite dark and you will need special long-exposure equipment to see it if the sky is clear where you are.

As for it's potential, err...impact:

"Astronomers estimate objects in the 50 meters range impact on the Earth about once every thousand years and produce explosions equal to 10 megatons of TNT (several times the Hiroshima bomb). We know one such impact occurred in Siberia on June 30, 1908, and flattened more than a thousand square kilometers of forest."

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Small is bright

as well as beautiful.

But I do have one question about this whole "living in darkness" thing.

Why no windows?



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Aw man...

How come I never find anything this good?

I need to go for more walks.



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You know Google Earth?

Well, now

Google Mars!

Oh man, science! Just when you thought it couldn't get any cooler!


I just downloaded Google Earth 5.0 and thought this would be an appropriate intro



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Science: still the coolest

Remember the egg-and-frying-pan "This is your brain on drugs" ads?


Well, this is engineers on grants.

Intelligent Design person: "Oh yeah? Well how do you explain the platypus then?"

Darwinist: "Oh yeah? Well how do you explain the platypus then?"



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Science is cool: PET and MRI scans

So, just been idly surfing around doing important internet research, and reading all about MRI and PET scans, which I will be having next week, (...should we succeed in appeasing the capricious socialized medicine bureaucracy kami ...) and it is tremendously interesting.

I have been strictly forbidden by my team of bullies caregiving friends to read anything about cervical cancer, recurrence rates, survival rates or look at any scary pictures on Google Images (tends to make me freak out/have panic attacks/phone people in tears at three am... which I'm told is very annoying), but I have been reading all about MRI and PET technology.

Did you know that a PET involves you emitting gamma rays? Yeah! No kidding.

...a radiotracer is either injected into a vein, swallowed or inhaled as a gas and eventually accumulates in the organ or area of your body being examined, where it gives off energy in the form of gamma rays [Coo-Whul!]. This energy is detected by a device called a gamma camera, a (positron emission tomography) PET scanner and/or probe. These devices work together with a computer to measure the amount of radiotracer absorbed by your body and to produce special pictures offering details on both the structure and function of organs and tissues.

In some centers, nuclear medicine images can be superimposed with computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to produce special views, a practice known as image fusion or co-registration. These views allow the information from two different studies to be correlated and interpreted on one image, leading to more precise information and accurate diagnoses. In addition, manufacturers are now making single photon emission computed tomography/computed tomography (SPECT/CT) and positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) units that are able to perform both imaging studies at the same time.

I don't know about you, but I'm still back there with "gamma rays" And yes, I thought exactly what you're thinking. "Hulk SMASH!"

Also, I see from around the medical net that people tend to do what I have been forbidden to do, and use the info online to diagnose themselves (or, according to my own more nuanced version, work themselves up into a screaming panic attack). This note was appended to the image I have linked to above:

"Note: Images are shown for illustrative purposes. Do not attempt to draw conclusions or make diagnoses by comparing these images to other medical images, particularly your own. Only qualified physicians should interpret images; the radiologist is the physician expert trained in medical imaging."

But really! a machine that reads your insides, down to the cellular level, by making you emit photons...

Science: it's really just AMAY-ZINGly cool!

BTW: want to know some statistics on MRIs? It will make good fuel for argument about that whole socialist medicine thing.

Number of MRI machines in Canada as of 2008: 222 (a increase of 28% since 2003)
Number per million Canadians: 6
Number of MRIs per million recommended by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD): 7

Italy ("two-tier" optional user-pay system) was in the top five in 2005 with 15 machines per million people, after Japan (40.1), US (26.6), Iceland (20.3) and Austria (16.3). Canada was 16th on the list with 6.1 and the UK was 18th with 5.4. A report compiled by the Canadian health department explained the disparity of MRI availability between countries thus:

A wide range of factors may explain the variations in the international supply pattern of medical imaging services and technologies. In the case of Japan, for example, the high rate of MRIs per million population (40.1) has been partly attributed to the market situation of the medical engineering industry, as well as socio-cultural factors such as a bias toward new technologies.

Does that mean that Canada's medical community has a bias against new technologies, or just that their government is incompetent and can't figure out that more MRIs (and consequently shorter wait lists) mean more people surviving things like cancer? Just askin'.

Furthermore, decisions by individual countries about which types of imaging technology to invest in, and how many machines to acquire, may depend on a variety of domestic factors, including the state of the assessment of the appropriateness of a particular technology’s use in different clinical situations and environments.

Because under socialist medicine, it's not the doctor that decides whether a particular diagnostic tool is "appropriate," it's the state.

Number of computed tomography (CT) scans per 1000
Canada: 103 (2007)
US: 207
Belgium: 138
England: 54
Denmark: 34

Number of MRI scans Canada: 31/1000
Number in US: 88.9/1000



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