Sunday Shrinking
This is a second try. Somehow Firefox + Scribefire managed to eat my blot. No assistance from Arab Power.
Scots sheep shrinking. Sounds like some tabloid headline that some street arab (Holmesian sense here) would be hawking at an intersection. Rather, the evidence is that Scots sheep are shrinking and according to the sassenachs at Imperial C it is because of global climate change – read WARMING! [Link] Now if we get past the whole mistrust thing here, after all, they are sassenachs and thus beyond description in any polite assemblage or trust by anyone lacking a noosed rope around his neck, but if we do for the nonce accept their claim we have to admit that it does make a bit of sense.
AFter all, if an animal lives in an environment where heat transfer from the animal to environment can be dangerous, then Nature tends to find ways to reduce that heat loss. One way of doing this is to adjust the ratio of surface area to volume of the animal. So as much as this is not that old joke with the tag line “Assume a spherical sheep,” [1] that is how you minimize the ratio. [2] And the bigger the temperature difference between the animal and its environment, the bigger the animal needs to be to preserve internal temperature. So, if the temperature of the environment goes up, the animal gets smaller.
And no, I am not going to prat about human obesity now.
While we are prattling about masses of things, it seems that a middle weight gravitational singularity has been observed. [Link] This ‘black hole’, HLX-1, which sounds like the title for a bad (redundant) Disney science fiction movie, has a mass of about 500 Sols. This gives us a solitary data point in the middle of what has previously been a bimodal distribution.
I shall refrain from commenting that the illustrative photograph bears a starling resemblance to the spaceship of a recurrent television/movie SF series,
While on such deviations, it seems that the recently touted ‘Ida’ as a missing link has been challenged if not devalued. [Link] Researchers from Pittsburgh claim that Ida has been replaced, superseded?, by Ganlea. More pointedly, the whole geographic thing has been complicated again. Now, instead of all primates radiated from Africa, it’s now from Africa to ASia to Africa and out again, or some such.
The attention catching thing here was the metaphors. One has to wonder about mixing up the whole tree thing with a chain thing. Shouldn’t we talk about a missing branch or, at least, branching, rather than a link? I see very few links in the tress in Nawth Alibam, and the ones I do are always the result of a some human wrapping a chain about a tree and forgetting about it and the tree growing about the chain. Of course, maybe that is what is happening here as well?
On which note, the folks at the campus of the Boneyard have done a research that indicates that humans ignore information given them that conflicts with their beliefs. [Link] I have to admit this comes as a great surprise to me living here in Greater Metropolitan Arab where there are more churches than businesses and none of them permit any thought or criticism – except of each other. It is, however, comforting to know that what we have known here in Alibam for a couple of hundred years has been scientifically demonstrated. But then, the people on campus did get a bit strange in the summer. Had something to do with the heat and too large a radius.
On which note, the folks at a cosmetics company have had a competition for ‘most famous female scientist.’ [Link] The first place taker is Marie Skodowsky Curie, who certainly seems to deserve the designation, although we have to wonder what being a female nerd has to do with cosmetics? This is not to say that I have not known female nerds who have and have not used appearance altering palliatives, and that some of both would not have had their appearance enhanced by switching their want, but why? Is this some diabolical scheme to convince female consumers that using their paint and powder will enhance their mental capacities?
I could comment on who my choices would have been, but you wouldn’t know them.
And lastly, on the matter of Potempkinism, a discourse on password hiding. [Link] It seems some information assurance/security pundits have decided that hiding passwords behind asterisks has negative effect. Boo Yah! I strongly agree. Except maybe where there are people standing behind one, like at an ATM or in a MalWart. In which case, why aren’t the keys covered from sight as well? But the whole password hiding thing should be a matter of individual choice and not Orwellian diktat.
[1] The joke referred to shearing in Australia, as I recall.
[2] The ratio of area to volume for a sphere is 3/radius. I leave the derivation as an exercise for the reader to shew.
