À la Recherche du Temps Perdu

"As the owner of a very small Boston-based helicopter charter company, I spent one morning this week with an experienced FAA safety inspector who came to my house in his government-issued car to inspect our records.  I am a charter operator licensed in the special 'single pilot 135’ category (generally owner-operators), which means no one but me can fly paying customers.  He looked at my random drug testing programme to make sure everything was in place.  I’m subject to the same drug testing requirements as United Airlines.  I’m the drug testing coordinator for our company, so I’m responsible for scheduling drug tests and surprising employees when it is their turn to be tested.  As it happens, I’m also the only 'safety-sensitive employee’ subject to drug testing, so basically I’m responsible for periodically surprising myself with a random drug test.  As a supervisor, I need to take training so that I can recognise when an employee is on drugs.  But I’m the only employee, so really this is training so that I can figure out if I myself am on drugs.  As an employee, I need to take a second training course so that I learn about all the ways my employer might surprise me with a random drug test.  I’m also the employer, so really I’m learning about how I might trap myself.  Given the costs of this guy’s salary, pension, government-issued car, supervisor, and office space, I estimate this records inspection cost the US taxpayer $500.  Just a handful of these inspections would have paid for an online system that could eliminate the need for inspectors to drive to folks’ hangars and houses.  Within 5 minutes after the FAA inspector left, I received a phone call.  'I’m from the FAA and we’d like to schedule an audit of your drug testing programme.’  I said a fully-qualified FAA inspector was barely out of the driveway who just went through every document I had.  'He was from the Flight Standards District Office — that’s a completely different department.  We’ll send 2 inspectors up from Atlanta next month.’” – Philip Greenspun

People who are primed to think well of themselves behave less altruistically than those whose moral identity is threatened.  They donate less to charity and become less likely to make decisions for the good of the environment.  The choice to behave morally is a balancing act between the desire to do good and the cost of doing good, in time, effort and/or money.  The point at which these balance is tied to our individual sense of self-worth.  Ethical behaviour allows a license for laxer morality without disrupting that balance.  Citizens of the United States are especially proud of a history of (supposedly) doing good, seeing their country as having saved the world from Nazism and Communism, of creating and sustaining modern medicine, of educating the world via the best universities, of being the main innovators in computer tech, of upholding the highest standards of civil and gender rights, of being unusually devoted to religion, et cetera.  All this self-respect, deserved or not, probably makes American citizens more willing to do bad, both individually and collectively.  Dear US citizens: please ask yourself how sure you can be that your actions on the world stage are actually for good.

Illusory superiority is a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others.  This is evident in a variety of areas including intelligence, performance on tasks or tests, and possession of desirable characteristics or personality traits.  It is one of many positive illusions relating to the self, and is a phenomenon studied in social psychology.  Illusory superiority is often referred to as the above-average effect.  Other terms include superiority bias, leniency error, sense of relative superiority, the primus inter pares effect, and the Lake Wobegon effect (named after Garrison Keillor’s fictional town where “all the children are above average”).  One of the main effects of illusory superiority in IQ is the Downing effect, which describes the tendency of people with a below-average IQ to overestimate their IQ and of people with an above-average IQ to underestimate it.  The propensity to predictably misjudge one’s own IQ was first noted by C L Downing, who conducted the first cross-cultural studies on perceived “intelligence”.  His studies showed that the ability to accurately estimate others’ IQ was proportional to one’s own IQ — the lower the IQ, the less capable one is of appreciating and accurately appraising another’s IQ.  Therefore individuals with a lower IQ are more likely to rate themselves as having a higher IQ than those around them.  Conversely, in people with a higher IQ, men are more likely to overestimate their intelligence by 5 points, while women are more likely to underestimate their IQ by a similar margin.  Note: self-determined individuals with a personality oriented towards growth and learning are less prone to these illusions.

There’s little correlation between a group’s collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members.  But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises.  Researchers gave subjects aged 18 to 60 standard intelligence tests and assigned them randomly to teams.  Each team was asked to complete several tasks — including brainstorming, decision making, and visual puzzles — and to solve one complex problem.  Teams were given intelligence scores based on their performance.  Though the teams that had members with higher IQs didn’t earn much higher scores, those that had more women did.  They concluded that women tend to score higher on tests of social sensitivity than men do.  What is really important is to have people who are high in social sensitivity, whether they are men or women.  What do you hear about great groups?  Not that the members are all really smart but that they all listen to each other.  They share criticism constructively.  They have open minds.  They’re not autocratic.

Spinning disks of water whirl like giant Frisbees in the ocean off Brazil.  These huge clusters are born as the warm North Brazil Current (NBC) moves northward along the northeastern coast of Brazil.  This current is fed by the Amazon River and the South Equatorial Current that flows east-to-west between the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, providing a rich supply of nutrients to areas north of the equator.  Just northwest of Brazil, winds drive part of the NBC eastward along the equator.  Every now and then, this turn is especially sharp and the current loops around.  The looping action pinches off a huge clockwise-spinning disk of warm water that travels northwest like a Frisbee moves through air .  In a new study, investigators describe 10 loops sampled between 1998 and 2000, finding they are bigger, faster and taller than previously thought — about 250 miles (400 kilometres) wide, the biggest such eddies in the oceans.  They swirl at speeds of more than 3.3 feet per second (1 metre per second), fast for an ocean current.  They are best seen as solid parcels of water, enclosed within a band of lower-speed water that shields them from their surroundings.  Many bulge toward the centre, reaching up to about 15 inches (38 centimeters) above the ocean surface around the huge eddies.  These rings play a key role in global climate, transporting ocean heat from the equator northward, eventually feeding the Gulf Stream.  Versions spin below the ocean’s surface, though these have not as yet been studied.

Astronomers celebrated a remarkable event on 11 July.  It was exactly one year since the planet Neptune was discovered.  Readers should note a caveat, however.  That year is a Neptunian one.  The great icy world was first pinpointed 164.79 years from then – on 23 September 1846.  And as Neptune takes 164.79 Earthly years to circle the sun, it only recently completed its first full orbit since its detection by humans — hence those anniversary celebrations.  As to the nature of the planet, this was only revealed in full in 1989 when the US probe Voyager 2 swept past it and sent back images of a seemingly serene blue world – though later analysis revealed dark spots on its surface that are vast cyclonic storms.

A rapid and accurate test has been developed to tell the difference between bacterial and viral infections.  Those common afflictions often have similar symptoms but vastly different treatments — antibiotics work for bacterial infections but not for viruses.  It is important to determine the source of an infection in order to quickly start the right treatment.  If left untreated until results of a throat culture, for instance, are in, bacterial infections can get worse.  But needlessly giving antibiotics to patients with a viral infection contributes to the growing problem of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.  Current diagnostic methods to sort out the two kinds of infection are time-consuming and not always completely accurate.  The new test enables doctors to rapidly make the right diagnosis.  The immune systems of patients with bacterial infections behaves differently than the immune systems of patients with viral infections.  The test is based on those differences.  Bacteria (singular: bacterium) are HUGE unicellular microorganisms, typically a few micrometres long and have many shapes including curved rods, spheres, rods, and spirals.  Viruses (from the Latin noun virus, meaning toxin or poison) is a sub-microscopic particle (ranging in size from 20–300 nanometres) that can infect the cells of a biological organism and can causes various cancers, including liver cancer (from the hepatitis B and C viruses), cervical cancer (from human papilloma virus) and lymphomas (from the Epstein–Barr virus).

Located 750 light-years from Earth, a young, sunlike star has been found with jets that blast epic quantities of water into interstellar space, shooting out droplets that move faster than a speeding bullet.  The discovery suggests that protostars may be seeding the universe with water.  The amount shooting out equals a hundred million times the water flowing through the Amazon River every second at velocities reaching 200,000 kilometres [124,000 miles] per hour, which is about 80 times faster than bullets flying out of a machine gun.  Located in the northern constellation Perseus, the protostar is no more than 100,000 years old and remains swaddled in a large cloud — gas and dust from which the star was born.  Water forms on the star, where temperatures are a few thousand degrees Celsius.  But once the droplets enter the outward-spewing jets of gas, 180,000°Fahrenheit (100,000°C) temperatures blast the water back into gaseous form.  Once the hot gases hit the much cooler surrounding material — at about 5,000 times the distance from the sun to the earth — they decelerate, creating a shock front where the gases cool down rapidly, condense, and re-form as water.  It appears to be a stellar rite of passage, researchers say, which may shed new light on the earliest stages of our own sun’s life — and how water fits into that picture.

"In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy.  The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.  The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.  The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.  Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.  And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.” — Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, writing in New York Times Company versus the United States in the Pentagon Papers case.

Storing the sun’s heat in chemical form — rather than converting it to electricity or storing the heat itself in a heavily insulated container — has significant advantages.  Thermo-chemical storage of solar energy uses a molecule whose structure changes when exposed to sunlight and can remain stable in that form indefinitely.  But when nudged by a stimulus — a catalyst, a small temperature change, a flash of light — it can quickly snap back to its other form, releasing the stored energy in a burst of heat.  In principle, the chemical material can be stored for long periods without losing any energy.  The problem?  Until now, the chemicals required to accomplish this soon degraded or else they included the rare and very expensive element ruthenium.  Fulvalene diruthenium was known as the best non-degradable chemical for reversibly storing solar energy.  But now, MIT researchers have developed a novel application that looks to be a cheaper alternative.  Carbon nanotubes are tiny cylinders of pure carbon.  Mixed with azobenzene, the resulting molecules gain properties not available in the separate materials.  They become more efficient at storing energy in a given amount of space — about 10,000 times higher in energy density in fact — making them comparable to lithium-ion batteries.  The key to controlling solar thermal storage is the proper energy barrier separating the two stable states the molecule can adopt: too low a barrier, and the molecule returns too easily to its “uncharged” state, failing to store energy for long periods; too high and it would not be able to easily release its energy when needed.

The average person speaks at a rate of a little over 150 words per minute.  That means that a full page of text, which contains an average of 600 words, represents 4 minutes of time. — James Erwin, Editor, Des Moines, Iowa, USA

Eric Guth, from Portland, Oregon in the USA, has made it his mission to track down the coolest glacier caves.  Here is shown the glacier at the Parque Nacional Los Glaciares in Argentine, Patagonia.  Pictured is Eric’s friend Justin Gardiner.  This shot was taken in January 2010.  The 30-year-old regularly camps for days inside the eerie glaciers which can reach unbelievable temperatures: sometimes as low as 20° below freezing.

This was filmed from 4-11 April 2011 on El Teide, Spain´s highest mountain.  At 3,718 metres, it is one of the best places in the world to photograph the stars (perhaps one of the reasons Teide Observatory is located there).  The film’s goal was to capture the Milky Way (which it admirably did).  A large sandstorm hit the Sahara Desert on 9 April and reached El Teide at approximately 3am, making it nearly impossible to see the sky.  The time lapse camera was set for a 5-hour sequence of the night sky and managed to capture the sandstorm backlit by Grand Canary Island, making it look like golden clouds (it begins at 00:32 on the clip).

Trolltunga (located in Norway) means “troll’s tongue” — an obvious name to be given to this horizontal slab of rock that sticks out above Skjeggedal in Odda, Norway.  It is a popular trekking destination.  The river is 350 metres below.

Neanderthal physical traits:

• Occipital bun: a protuberance of the occipital bone (back of the head) that looks like a hair knot.  You have it if you can feel a rounded bone just above the back of your neck (same height as the ears).
• Retromolar space posterior to the third molar: that is, an empty space behind the “wisdom teeth”.
• Supraorbital torus: protruding eyebrow bone (including big deep eye cavity between the eye and eyebrow).
• Bigger, rounder eyes than average.
• Broad, projecting nose: angle of the nose bone going more upward than average (not falling straight like a “Greek nose”).
• Little or no protruding chin.
• Increased facial blood supply: could result in the cheeks being red (like blushing) when doing physical exercise or when the weather is cold.
• Short, bowed shoulder blades: that is, shoulder bones curving toward the front more than average.
• Large round finger tips: typically “flat” and wide finger tips, especially the thumb (if your thumb is more than 1.5 centimetres wide).
• Rufosity: having red hair, or brown hair with red pigments, or natural freckles.
• Fair skin, hair and eyes: Neanderthals are believed to have had blue or green eyes, as well as fair skin and light hair.  Having spent 5x longer in northern latitudes than Homo Sapiens, it is only natural that they should have developed these adaptive traits first, and that the first modern humans that arrived in Europe inherited the whole package through interbreeding.

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, through a series of questionnaires and interviews, determined which members of a large group surveyed considered themselves lucky — or unlucky.  He then performed an intriguing experiment: He gave both the “lucky” and the “unlucky” people a newspaper and asked them to look through it and tell him how many photographs were inside.  He found that on average the unlucky people took two minutes to count all the photographs, whereas the lucky ones determined the number in a few seconds.  How could the “lucky” people do this?  Because they found a message on the second page that read, “Stop counting.  There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” So why didn’t the unlucky people see it?  Because they were so intent on counting all the photographs that they missed the message.  Wiseman noted, "Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else.  Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what else is there, rather than just what they are looking for.”  Via the New Shelton wet/dry.

The artist, Pawel Hynek, said he had intended to create a funny picture, but somehow “it became sad.”  I thought this was a photograph at first, and was quite pleased to discover the whole thing was rendered.

Friends Forever!

A ferrofluid (from the Latin ferrum, meaning iron) is a liquid which becomes strongly polarised in the presence of a magnetic field.  Ferrofluids are composed of nanoscale ferromagnetic particles suspended in a carrier fluid, usually an organic solvent or water.  The ferromagnetic nano-particles are coated with a surfactant to prevent their agglomeration (due to van der Waals and magnetic forces).  Although the name may suggest otherwise, ferrofluids do not display ferromagnetism, since they do not retain magnetisation in the absence of an externally applied field.  A steel sculpture coated with ferrofluid and subjected to changing magnetisation demonstrates the fluid being pulled in the direction of increasing flux density to form peaks.  As fluid accumulates at the ridges, the flux density at the surface decreases.  The central part of the sculpture is a conical spiral with multiple rows of peaks.  Horizontal cavities on the crown cause a discontinuity in the flux density gradient, so fluid accumulates until these cavities are bridged by fountains.  As accumulation becomes too heavy to sustain, it falls in large drops.  (The video has nice music as well.)  Each of these videos demonstrates the principle.  If You only watch one, I would suggest the second one.  Each is about 3 minutes long.

In the zoo in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, a veterinarian from Germany uses a power saw to give a pedicure to a 39-year-old Asian elephant.

The baby, Porky, at near left was the winner of the recent Ugly Baby contest.  Porky’s father (see photo right), who was unable to be present for the judging, brags that HE was even uglier when he was a baby.  (Actually, I suspect there is a real interesting story behind the pig picture which I am unlikely to ever know.)

Remembrance Day vigils honour those who’ve given their lives in war.  Lloyds of London staff hold their annual Rememberance Day service at the Lloyds Building, designed by architect Richard Rogers, in the City of London 11 November 2010.

The Lloyds Building is designed to be mobbed on the escalators and balconies?  That’s just being prudent?  They overbuild their headquarters just so people can go a little crazy?  Interesting.

This shot is a blend of two — to get the aircraft to work, the walls became too dark.  So the aircraft and upper floors are one shot and the floors below that are from a second shot.  The plane’s flight path crosses the building’s courtyard regularly, so skillfully combining pictures with different exposures was the difficult part.

Behind the scenes of The Blackguard (1925, directed by Graham Cutts), art direction by Alfred Hitchcock: Hitchcock either engaged [German director F W] Murnau in conversation, or overheard him tell others: “What you see on the set does not matter.  All that matters is what you see on the screen.” Hitchcock never missed an opportunity to quote this remark, which became a cornerstone of his own approach.  The reality didn’t matter if the illusion was effective.  He then emulated Murnau by hiring a slew of dwarves to stand far from the camera in The Blackguard, creating an artificial perspective for a crowd scene.  (Excerpted from Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light by Patrick McGilligan.)  Via Tywkiwdbi.

Angelika Maria "Geli" Raubal was Adolf Hitler’s half niece.  She was also rumoured to be Adolf Hitler’s lover.  On the morning of 19 September 1931, members of Hitler’s staff found Geli Raubal dead from a gunshot wound to the lung in her room in Hitler’s Munich apartment.  She was 23.  The official cause of death was listed as suicide.  The finding of suicide was based on the fact that her door had been locked from the inside.  No autopsy was conducted, although a doctor estimated that her death had occurred the previous day.  Her death occurred when the entire Hitler household staff was off duty except for one deaf worker.  Her brother said that she had been happy in the days preceding the beginning of her visit to Munich.  She left a note behind, addressed to a friend in Vienna that read: “When I come to Vienna — hopefully very soon — we’ll drive to Semmering, an…”  The note was left unfinished.  Hitler kept a bust or portrait of Raubal in each of his bedrooms; his entourage was instructed never to say her name.  It was said of Raubal’s death, “That was when the seeds of inhumanity began to grow inside Hitler.”  Some extant theories as to how Geli died:

• She killed herself following a “flaming row” with Hitler, who discovered that she was pregnant by a Jewish art teacher in Linz.
• Since she was killed by a bullet fired from Hitler’s gun, a Walther (it was said to be a rare occurrence for Hitler to leave his gun behind), it was rumoured that Hitler shot her (or ordered her to be shot) for infidelity or other reasons.
• It was said that Geli had been badly beaten by Hitler before she shot herself.
• She committed suicide because she was expecting Hitler’s child.
• Some people claimed she was murdered by Heinrich Himmler because she threatened blackmail.

Gorgeous (but, sadly, anonymous) corkscrewed tree.

The Disappearing Rabbit Trick.  BAM!  Tracks suddenly end where the wingprints of an owl start.  This picture was taken by a teacher in Bethel, Alaska.

Charles Joseph Minard was a pioneer in the use of graphics in engineering and statistics.  He is famous for the chart at left (click it for a large view or here for an even larger view), the Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813, a flow map he published in 1869.  (However, this Wikipedia page says — as of when I write this — 1861.)  The subject is Napoléon’s disastrous Russian campaign of 1812.  The graph displays several variables in a single two-dimensional image:

• the army’s location and direction, showing where units split off and rejoined,
• the declining size of the army (note, for example, the crossing of the Berezina river on the retreat),
• the low temperatures during the retreat.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore iPad App Trailer.  All I can say about this is, “Why didn’t I do it?” I even thought of something similar but aimed at an older audience — but I never pursued it.

It gets worse from here.  This is an extract from “Pinky and the Brain: You Said a Mouseful”, season 1 episode 48.  Video of this tongue twister scene.