I’m interested in the idea of connectivity and the inter-relatedness of things. I also like maps. So, I found this recent piece in New Scientist, Issue 2704 [15 April 2009] which describes and presents a series of showing various networks of routes across the globe intriguing. Apparently, the most remote place on the planet is on the Tibetan plateau – it would take 21 days (1 in a car and 20 on foot) to get to the nearest city of more than 50,000 people. Hmmmm, I wonder whether anyone has put a geocache there…
Author: Tim
Green conflict
I grew up in Bridgwater, Somerset, a town on the muddy banks of the River Parrett that flows out into the muddy expanses of the Severn Estuary. The Severn Estuary is famous for its huge tidal range (peaking at 13m) and for it tidal bore and consequently the Parrett also has a high tidal range and its own (somewhat smaller) bore which I did actually get to see once. Even when I lived in that region (and I am talking 25-30 years ago) there was talk of building a tidal barrage across the Severn to generate electricity and although no such barrage has been built, the idea of building one resurfaces from time to time and is particularly topical in our current fossil fuel dependent world.
Predictably, the idea of building a tidal barrage across the Severn is controversial, particularly in terms of the impact of any such scheme on wildlife and ecosystems and so whilst the environmental lobby might be expected to support such a scheme to generate energy from a renewable source, the environmental lobby might also be expected to oppose a scheme. This conflict is nicely set out in a recent article in New Scientist, Issue 2704 [18 April 2009]. Do we go for large schemes that generate lots of power but have obvious big impacts on the environment or do we stick with small schemes to minimise impacts but end up without much gain in energy generation or is there a middle ground? This is a question that is going to keep cropping up and my gut instinct is that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer.
How touching…
Yesterday evening I was standing waiting for my eldest daughter to return to school after a rounders tournament. Across the road in front of me was a new block of appartments, the ground floor of which had been a surf clothing shop which had rapidly gone bust only to be replaced by a new surf clothing shop (do people ever learn?). Anyway, this new shop isn’t open yet but the owners are clearly getting everything ready because the shop window dummies on which clothes will be displayed were standing in place waiting to be dressed. When I looked carefully I noticed that whoever had positioned these dummies had a sense of humour. I don’t feel that I need to say anymore… rather I will share with you a snap I took of the scene. It’s not a particularly high resolution shot, but I reckon it’s good enough for you to get the picture 😉
Record ripples
Years ago I did quite a bit of research trying to develop computer models for the formation of sand ripples. These models took individual (model) grains of sand and moved them around repeatedly according to a set of simple, sensible rules. For example, sand grains that were sitting at the top of bumps moved further forwards than grains in lower, and so potentially more sheltered, positions. When it comes to research I do have a tendency to follow my instinct and at that time I had an idea that if you leave a set of ripples to develop over really long timescales they just get bigger and bigger. However, in practice, it would look like they had stopped growing because once they become large any noticeable change in their size takes absolutely ages to show up (apart from my intuition there is also some other evidence from mathematical models that this might be true – up to a point).
So, I was interested to read in New Scientist, Issue 2703 [11 April 2009] about some wind-blow ripples that have been found on the Puna plateau in Argentina which are up to 2.3 metres high and 43 metres long (which is three times the height and two times the length of the previous record ripples). I don’t know any details, but it does seem to me that the Puna plateau is exactly the sort of place where ripples might be able to develop unhindered for really long time periods, so these massive ripples provide me with some reassurance that my instinct was correct. Apparently, there may be even bigger ripples on Mars…
Blink
The last book I read was another piece of non-fiction, namely Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink” (see Malcolm Gladwell’s website for further details). This is a book about the process of making snap judgements about things and about how we should value this kind of judgement properly but also act with caution in relation to them. The book ranges around a lot of different subject matter and although I found it all interesting I was particularly struck by the section on bad judgements made by armed police and the similarity between their perception when under the stress of chase scenarios and when gun fire is underway and the perception of individuals with autism. In both cases, the people involved seem to stop seeing other people around them as people and only see them as objects, the consequence being that that do not pick up on the valuable visual clues provided by the human face and use the ability of the human brain to instantly read these clues. A couple of days after reading this book I was listening to a Scientific American podcast that was reporting on some new research on toddlers with autism. This suggested that toddlers with autism did not look at people’s eyes (the “window to the soul”) but instead look at the mouth if there is speech or hands (e.g. if someone claps). I was struck by the parallel here – autism seems to involve children looking directly at the source of physical disturbance (e.g. mouth/hands producing a noise) and not seeing people as people and armed police making bad decisions seem to be transfixed by the noise of gunfire, stop looking at faces to gauge more about their target’s real behaviour or intentions – both groups stop perceiving others as people and respond to them only as objects. This is definitely a simplistic way of looking at things but the coincidence of the two ideas does seem to point in something like a single direction.
Now it’s the turn of Antarctic ice
After months of reading reports of ice melting in the Arctic, the media attention seems to have switched to the southern hemisphere with a series of stories about changes to the ice in Antarctica. I guess it makes sense that the focus of attention would be in the northern hemisphere at the end of the northern hemisphere summer and then switch to the southern hemisphere at the end of the southern hemisphere summer (just about now). New Scientist, Issue 2703 [11 April 2009] carries a short item on the collapse of an ice bridge that connected two islands to the Wilkins ice shelf which has left the shelf vulnerable to the action of the ocean. The observations (from satellite images) show that ice shelves can very quickly become unstable. However, it is not just short timescale changes that are in the news, as the same issue of New Scientist has an article about the changes undergone by Antartica’s ice over millions of years. The article describes how ice cores have revealed huge fluctuations in the ice over geological timescales. The findings are important for climate modelling and the initial suggestion is that rates of sea level rise in the near future could be larger than currently predicted.
Remaining on an Antarctic ice theme, New Scientist, Issue 2705 [25 April 2009] reports on new research which offers an explanation for why Antarctic sea ice seems to be growing in extent even though global temperatures are warming. Apparently the answer lies with the hole in the ozone layer which results in changed weather patterns around Antarctic which have created stronger cold-air storms which have enhanced sea ice formation in certain regions. The report notes that as the ozone hole closes this effect will die away and Antarctic sea ice should start to do what it ought to do in a warming world, namely, melt.
The Falls
I like to mix fiction and non-fiction reading and often alternate between the two. The last book I completed was “The Falls” which is the twelfth Inspector Rebus novel by Ian Rankin. This one has an interesting plot that is not simply a crime investigation but also has quite a bit of character development compared to some of the other books in the series. As usual with Ian Rankin, it was a throughly enjoyable read although I was left with a feeling that if they had investigated the obvious suspects properly in the first place and hadn’t muddied the waters by involving a number of external people in the police investigation then things might have proceeded an awful lot quicker. On the other hand, it wouldn’t have been such a good story!
Reach for the stars
Listening to a recent Scientific American podcast on my way into work this morning I stumbled upon an item about a project called Galaxy Zoo. This is an internet-based science project that anyone can sign up to help with in which “citizen scientists” (ordinary people) look at pictures of galaxies and classify them by following a sequence of simple questions. This is a highly efficient way of sifting through the mass of galaxy images captured by space telescpes so that scientists can then focus in on particular types of galaxies that they are interested in. It is a good approach because the human brain is really good at visual processing and can perform the classification task more reliably that a computer algorithm. So, if you fancy a bit of star-gazing you can sign up at the Galaxy Zoo website and join in.
Down down, deeper and down
There’s a report on the BBC website about a new robotic submarine that is currently undergoing final preparations ahead of an attempted dive to the deepest part of the world’s oceans, The Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench (~11,000 metres down). This depth is deeper than Mount Everest is high (incidentally, did you know that George Everest’s name was actually pronounced Eve-Rest rather than the Ever-Est that we now use to describe the mountain that was named after him?). The robotic submarine has been developed by scientists and engineers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the USA and is named Nereus (after the son of Pontus [the sea] and Gaia [the Earth] in Greek mythology). Challenger Deep has previously been visited only twice before, both times by human-operated vehicles, so there is plenty of potential for Nereus to turn up some interesting information. The Challenger Deep is part of a major subduction zone in the western Pacific in which oceanic crust that forms the base of the Pacific Ocean is forced down and underneath the oceanic crust that neighbours the Asian landmass and for this reason it is a major earthquake region. At this kind of depth the pressure experienced due to the weight of water supported is over 1000 times greater than the pressure we experience at sea level (due to the weight of the overlying air in the atmosphere).
The heat is on
We hear a lot about global warming these days – increasing temperatures that result from higher concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which trap heat emitted from the Earth’s surface. But the planet is heating up for another reason, namely that all of the energy that we use that is generated from non-renewable sources eventually ends up being dissipated as heat. The problem is neatly presented in a recent essay in New Sciensist, Issue 2702 [4 April 2009] by astrophysicist Eric Chaisson from Tufts University, Massachusetts, USA. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that energy eventually tends to dissipate into heat and so everything we do that utilises energy ends up generating heat that can nothing but warm the planet. Currently, this kind of heat input to the Earth system has only increased the temperature of the biosphere by 0.1 degrees Celsius but as energy use soars in the future a 3 degrees Celsius rise within 300 years is not unlikely – on top of “ordinary” global warming this is a significant amount. However, there is a way out of this problem, namely to generate energy from renewable sources. This works because energy from renewable sources is already accounted for in the global thermal budget, for example solar energy already warms the Earth so if we use some of it to generate electricity which then ends up dissipating as heat we’re not adding more heat to the system. This is another good argument for increasing our use of renewable energy sources (along with the fact that this would reduce greenhouse gas emissions) and it turns out that there’s is loads of power available in this way (there is ~7000 more power in the sunlight arriving on Earth as the current power consumption of all humans). It almost seems like a no-brainer to me.
