Observe The Banana

I have often thought that futurists had a great racket going. They sit around and make up a bunch of random nonsense about what they think the future will be like, and apparently some of them even managed to get paid for it. It usually looks to me like their predictions are based on no more expertise or research than you or I might be able to come up with over a beer at the corner bar, and years later they are of course never held accountable when their predictions are wildly wrong.
In the July (2008) issue of Discover magazine in “Why Laughing Matters” Jim Holt offers a very interesting hypothesis on what they do wrong, “the repeated sins of futurologists is that they often extrapolate from what is new rather than from what is old”.

(click for more…)

In case a successful descent and landing of the Phoenix Lander on to the surface of Mars wasn’t exciting enough, they actually managed to photograph it from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter while it came down.  Here is a photo of it hanging from its parachute.

Here is a Zoom:

This is really amazing, or as the Planetary Society puts it, “a speeding bullet photographed by a speeding bullet.” I wonder if they knew they could do this successfully, or if they pointed the camera, hoped for the best and just got really lucky. Either way, very cool!

Here is a shot from NASA showing the lander on the surface, again from the Orbiter

[Link to OMG!! Parachute!!!! Photo!!!!!]

NASA Phoenix Lander Home Page

Today is March 14, or 3/14 which is international Pi day. How will you celebrate it? We have settled on the old standby and made a pie. B made her amazing Kaluha cream pie actually - yum (Basically a dream whip and chocolate pudding pie with a splash of Kaluha for added flavor). There are lots of fun pi day things on the web, a good place to start is http://www.piday.org/ . Interestingly, March 14 also happens to be Albert Einstein’s birthday.
In our household, the number pi will always somehow be linked to the expression of perfection by our favorite robot in love:

In October of 2006 Iceland began commercial whaling again. They had been doing only scientific whaling since 1986. They harvesting of whales is done in a controlled sustainable way with strict quotas, but many organizations including environmental groups and the whale watching industry are still opposed to it. Only 1.1% of Icelandic adults actually eat whale once a week or more. As seen in the whale Kebab ad above, some people are able to approach the subject with a sense of humor. Below is a clip from the local paper, “The Grapevine”.

The other day my son was listing some unusual foods he would like to try someday, and along with snake meat, frogs legs and an insect of some kind, he included camel cheese. I did not know if there was such a thing so I looked in to it a little. Turns out that cheese is not one of the otherwise many functions and products usually provided by camels. For some reason camel milk does not react well with the bacterial starter they usually add to milk to get it to curdle. But now, thanks to modern science they have come up with a different starter solution that allows one to make cheese from camel milk. Learn more about it at The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.

I recently learned some fun facts about Niagara falls that I had not known. First of all, as amazing as it appears now, apparently the current flow of water over the falls is a mere fraction of what was witnessed by the first europeans to discover the falls. Between 50% and 75% of the flow is now diverted through huge tunnels to hyrdoelectric plants. Second, the falls are slowing moving upriver due to erosion. They used to recede an average of 3 ft per year until the major diversion was done in the 1950’s to produce electricity. They now recede around 1 ft per ten years. Learn more at Wikipedia.

The Sneeze reveals the secret of bananas, just when they thought they were safe.

And not without controversy.

from NewScientist.com news service

“Goggles that simulate a strobe-lighting effect could prevent the nauseating effects of space sickness – and that of more down-to-Earth travel.
[...]

Reschke suggests astronauts could wear the glasses during the early part of space missions to help them adjust. This would be preferable to anti-motion sickness drugs, which frequently make people drowsy.”

Maybe there is hope yet for those of us who can get queasy turning around to fast on an office chair…
LINK

LiveScience.com - Light Travels Backward and Faster than Light
It sounds nuts, but a scientist says his team has made light go backward. And this is not a simple trick of mirrors.

Previous work has slowed light to a crawl. But in the new research, a pulse of light is given a negative speed and—as if just to make your head spin—the researcher says the experiment made light appear to exceed its theoretical speed limit. Link