12/6/12  Fastest Bow in the West

I like a good swashbuckling celluloid romp as much as the next guy. As long as the next guy thinks swashbuckling celluloid romp means Robin Hood and not Miss Tranny Shack, despite both being men in tights. In any case, in such a flick you can generally count on the occasional sword fight. How much these fencing duels were like how folks back in the day really fought, I couldn't say. One assumes a real life fight to the death would be no holds barred. Eye gouging, biting, kicking, whatever it took.

I seem to recall a story to that effect, but don't know from where or when. It concerned an expert swordsman advising a man who was set to fight a duel. This dueler was older and smaller than his opponent, so a long fencing match was beyond his strength and stamina. The blade maestro told him, "Run at your opponent screaming like a madman, jump in the air and bring the sword down on the top of his head as hard as you can." Not very swashbuckling, but I guess it worked.

Another thing you'll often see in these types of "historical" flicks is bows and arrows. As with the swordplayacting, one wonders how accurately Hollywood portrays the way ancient archers arched, if that's the way to put it. We haven't been using the things in warfare for quite some time now. Have we lost some of the techniques? I can't answer that. But this short video might.

Errol Flynn as Robin Hood split an arrow in the dead center of a bullseye. Lars Andersen can loose three arrows, hitting three moving targets, while running backwards, in under a second and a half. Whose skills would be more useful in combat?

11/13/12  Subdivided Subcontinent

To some Britain means England. Don't say that to a Scot nationalist. To them the English are foreigners. Just mention King Edward I and prepare for an earful. Old Longshanks wasn't called the "Hammer of the Scots" for nothing. Then again, the Scots will divide themselves between highlanders and lowlanders. Highland Scots further subdivide themselves into clans. You'll find this same sort of thing all over Europe. All the same, they have nothing in this regard compared to India.

Due to its caste system Indian demographics are something else again. By discouraging intermarriage, caste has subdivided Indians into multiple what you might call micro-ethnicities. A leading population geneticist, L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, estimates there are 43,000 endogamous communities in India. That's a whole lot of little villages where everyone is related to everyone else in the village, and unrelated to outsiders.

As you can imagine, this made for a pretty closed community. As a result life for the rural Indian villager has been isolated and limited for no little while. In 1952, the fifth anniversary of independence, the government initiated a survey to discern whether the average villager had learned yet that the British had left India. The study was abandoned when early results indicated most villagers didn't know the British had ever arrived.

10/24/12  Sub-file Under Have You Ever Noticed/Wondered?

I imagine most of us have used a carpenter's tape rule. There's a couple little things about them that may seem curious when first encountered. The little hook-like tab on the end is loose, it slides in and out with a slotted attachment. There are little black diamonds every 19 and 3/16 inches. What are the purposes of these?

The loose tab is probably easy to figure out without my explanation. The slot is the width of the tab. It slides out for making outside measurements, and slides in for making inside measurements. It adjusts for the width of the tab. Pretty simple. On the other hand, you may not have ever used, or even noticed, the little black diamonds. What is the use of measuring things at 19-3/16 inch intervals?

Standard sized sheet goods, like plywood or osb, are four feet by eight feet. Studs, joists, and rafters are usually evenly spaced. Commonly at 12 inches, 16 inches, 24 inches. These work out evenly for an eight foot, or 96 inch span. Which is handy for nailing on the standard sheet good which is 96 inches long. Divide 96" by 8 you get 12". Divide by 6 you get 16". Divide by 4 you get 24".

Now then, if you divide 96" by 5 you get 19-3/16". So the little black diamonds mark where to put studs, joists, or rafters when you want five per eight feet. Actually six per eight feet because you have one at each end. This spacing is not all that common, but if you were to use it the little black diamonds make it easy so you don't have to calculate or remember what each 19-3/16" interval is on a tape measure.

10/4/12  Latin Greek

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit. Perhaps you've run across that sequence before. It's a bit of standard placeholder text used by graphic designers to mock up a page when a manuscript is not available. Oddly enough, they call this greek text even though it appears to be Latin using Roman letterforms. The curious might wonder, is it real Latin or gibberish, and what might it mean.

It is real Latin. Mostly. It's Latin with bits missing here and there. It comes from Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum, a treatise on the theory of ethics from 45 BC. The original goes as follows, Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit... Which translates as, "There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..."

How and where this bit of text being used as a placeholder started is unclear. There's some indication it traces back to the early days of movable type when most scholarly books where in Latin. It's lasting power is easily understood. If you need greek copy it's easier to simply copy than to write or find something else. As they say, why re-invent the wheel.

On a related note, you may have run across this sentence which sounds like something from a children's book, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." This is an example of a pangram, a phrase containing every letter of the alphabet. Typographers often use it to show what every letterform of a particular typeface looks like in text rather than as an alphabetical table.

7/31/12  How Cold is Space?

Thing is, space is not very cold at all. It's not hot or lukewarm, either. Temperature is the measure of matter's kinetic energy. A vacuum doesn't contain any matter and so there's nothing there to have a lot or a little kinetic energy, in other words to have a temperature. Meaning space, a vacuum, has no temperature at all.

Think of it like momentum, a ball flying through the air. You can speed up or slow down the ball, change its momentum. You can't speed up or slow down a vacuum because there's nothing there to speed up or slow down. Measuring the speed of nothing is meaningless. It has no speed. It has no color. It has no weight. Being nothing, it has nothing. In the same way, it has no temperature either.

One of the greatest dangers to space-walking astronauts is not freezing in their suits, but dissipating excess body heat. The reason being in a vacuum the free exchange of temperature is nearly impossible. There's no convection or conduction in a vacuum. On NASA's Staying Cool in Space web page it states the "ISS (International Space Station) needs huge radiators to get rid of its excess heat." The ISS requires 14 honeycombed ammonia-tubing-filled aluminum panels totaling 1680 square feet to stay cool.

On the other hand, some object in deep space away from a source of heat can be very cold indeed. About three degrees above absolute zero. All the same, the space around it will still have no temperature at all.

2/13/12  As the World Turns

How many degrees does the earth rotate in a day? How many times does the earth rotate on its axis in one year? We might be tempted to say the earth rotates a full 360 degrees per day, and rotates 365 ¼ times a year. If we did, we'd be wrong.

Let's look at a simpler example of a rotating planet which orbits a star in four days. The same side of the planet will face the star four times per orbit. In one day the planet will travel one quarter of the way around, or 90° of orbit. If the planet travels a quarter of the orbit and rotates once around its axis, the side facing the star at point A will be facing 90 degrees away from the star at point B. (Top)

To get the same side facing the star it must rotate an additional 90° to make up for the 90° of orbit. So in one day the planet rotates 450°. (Bottom) Which means the planet will rotate 5 times in one orbit around the star to make four days in a year.

The same thing applies to the earth orbiting the sun. One day requires almost one extra degree, about 360.985° of rotation. In one year the earth needs one extra rotation to make up for the turn in the orbit, meaning it rotates 366 ¼ times on its axis per year.

A 360.985° rotation to get the same side of the earth facing the sun is called a solar day. A 360° rotation is called a sidereal day. Does this make any difference? It does if you're into astronomy. It means to examine outer space you need to look in different directions depending on the time of year.

For instance, to look at distant galaxy C at noon at point A the planet would have to look over its right shoulder, so to speak. At point B the planet would have to look over its left shoulder. But if you or the planet didn't care to look at galaxy C, I guess it doesn't much matter. Which is why this is filed under trivia.

1/18/12  Kill or Bee Killed

Starting about five years ago stories circulated of an alarming development, bee hives were suddenly dying out. The phenonmenon was called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). All sorts of reasons were suggested why it was happening. The usual suspects were rounded up; pesticides, polution, genetically modified crops. We were killing off the bees. Disaster loomed.

And now, the rest of the bee story perhaps you haven't heard. CCD is natural, nothing new, and bees are not going to disappear any time soon.

Lawrence Harder from the department of biology at the University of Calgary and Marcelo Aizen from Buenos Aires set the record straight: There has been no worldwide collapse in honey bee populations; The bee disaster scenario relies on data which is too regional and doesn't represent global trends; Managed hives have increased by 45 percent over the last five years.

So, the die-offs are isolated and not widespread. Bees as species are not in danger. Still, what's killing bees in those cases? Turns out the culprit is mother nature and not man; namely parasites, fungi and pathogens.

Bees are subject to parasitic Varroa mites and tracheal mites. Pathogens include the Israeli acute paralysis virus and two other viruses that transform the shape of wings or cause a disease only affecting queen bee larvae.

A phorid fly, Apocephalus borealis, parasitizes bees causing them to become disoriented and abandon their hives; a primary symptom of CCD. This fly lays eggs into the bee's abdomen. As the larvae grow the host bees begin to exhibit zombie-like behavior by walking around in circles with no apparent sense of direction. Bees then leave the hive at night flying blindly toward light. It eventually dies and the fly larvae emerge.

The bottom line, parasites are the major component in CCD with fungi and disease playing a major role. Bees have been plagued by these for a very long time. Considering their ubiquity in nature, parasites, fungi and pathogens should have been the first usual suspects.

12/29/11  Brrrp... brrrrrp.... brrp... brrrp...

There are two controls on a gas-powered lawn mower that mean "strangle". One strangles fuel, the other strangles air. These are the throttle and the choke. Appropriately enough, the choke is in the throat of the carburetor.

The throttle and choke work as their names suggest, they constrict the passage of fuel or air. Think of the terminology we use. When we want more gas we "open the throttle." We strangle it less. You might say full throttle is when there's the least throttling going on.

Rotary engines on early airplanes had a two-speed throttle. It was either on or off, there was no other speed. To slow the plane the pilot would cycle the engine on and off. That's why some WWI airplanes coming in to land sound like, "Brrrp... brrrrrp.... brrp... brrrp..."

Planes don't have rotary engines now-a-days. Though they may have radial engines which look similar. Both have cylinders arranged in a circle around a central crankcase. While they look alike, there's a big difference. A radial engine is bolted in place and the crankshaft spins the propeller as you would expect. (red plane) On a rotary engine the crankshaft is fixed to the frame, the propeller is fixed to the engine and the entire engine spins. (green plane)

The spinning engine made for some rather peculiar handling characteristics. A rotary engine was like a big gyroscope on the front of the plane. If you know about gyroscopes you know about precession. Meaning, when you pitch the plane you get a force to yaw the plane. In other words, when you dove the plane would turn at the same time.

Pilots had to compensate for the gyroscope action when flying a rotary engine plane. In effect, the controls worked differently on a rotary engine plane than on other planes and so flying them was tricky. Not only that, with some maneuvers the spinning engine would sometimes rip itself out of the plane. Which might partly explain why more WWI pilots died in accidents than in aerial combat.

12/8/11  The Incredible Shrinking Man

This is purely in the realm of fantasy, but what would it mean if a person shrunk down to an inch tall? In the movie "The Incredible Shrinking Man" we get an idea, only the wrong idea.

In the film the tiny man wants to get down from a table so he rigs a rope, which is string, and climbs down. Thing is, he could have simply jumped down with no problem. Even though he's really small, the table is still only 30 inches from the floor. The acceleration over a particular distance will be the same regardless of the man's size. If a full-size man can safely jump down from a table, so can a tiny man.

In fact, a tiny man would be able to jump down more safely than a full-size man. The tiny man has a great deal less mass and so the impact at the same speed will be less. The tiny man is so light and lands with so little force he might be able to jump off the roof safely.

Here's a personal anecdote to back this up. One day sitting on my back stoop I saw a squirrel fall out of a tree from maybe 20 feet up. It landed with a thump, got up, and ran away back up the tree. A squirrel is so light it doesn't hit with as much impact as a man would falling 20 feet out of a tree. It also helps the squirrel has a higher strength to weight ratio, which is explained next.

Perhaps you've heard about how incredibly strong an ant is because it can lift 10 times its own weight. That is not so incredible, its a matter of its being small. Muscles grow heavier with size at a higher rate than they grow stronger with size. Meaning the bigger and stronger an animal gets the less it can lift relative to its weight.

The reverse is also true, the smaller it gets the more it can lift relative to its weight. The ant is not incredibly strong, its incredibly small and thus its strength to weight ratio is high. As it would be for any tiny creature, including a tiny man. A full-size man might weigh 200 pounds and it would be an effort to lift his own weight above his head. The tiny man might weigh a pound, but would have little problem lifting twice his weight above his head. Even so, he's only lifting two pounds.

The tiny man would also move like a hectic little mouse with very quick steps. When a full-size man takes a step his foot will move about two feet. It takes time to move his foot that distance at a given acceleration. On the other hand the tiny man's step is maybe a half inch. It would take very little time to move his foot that distance at the same acceleration. It's like a long and short pendulum. In one second the long pendulum makes one stroke, the short pendulum two strokes. Yet they both cover the same distance.

The tiny man could jump up higher relative to his height as well. A house cat can jump several times its height, maybe five or six feet high. A lion would have to jump 15 to 20 feet up to do the same. It can't. It's too big and the distance is too far. It's akin to the pendulums, a matter of acceleration of mass over distance. Distance is not relative, 20 feet is 20 feet no matter how big or small you are.

The tiny man's voice and hearing would change, too. But I wouldn't worry about that. I wouldn't worry about any of this because it's pretty unlikely to ever happen.

11/21/11  Hell’s Other Kitchen

Eating is a pure, primal pleasure. A pleasure we experience several times a day, every day, for our entire lives. We do it so often we don't always appreciate just how pleasurable it is. Sometimes it might be the only really enjoyable thing we do all day.

Of course eating is important. You have to do it to stay alive. Good thing we like to do it. Besides needing food to stay alive, how important to mental health is having tasty food, food we enjoy eating? Turns out, pretty important. When eating becomes a chore, something you must do rather than something you enjoy doing... well, it's not unheard of for sick people to wither away and die because they've lost their appetite.

Which brings us to science fiction stories. You know, ones where people eat cubes of processed food and meals in a pill. Where's the pleasure in that? Would that drive you crazy? Or if not actually batty, would such a diet be depressing? Would it put you off food?

Now we finally come to the fun fact and trivia part.

Having a supply of tasty food is one of the hurdles we face when contemplating long space flights. Even frozen food doesn't last indefinitely. It turns to unappetizing mush. NASA has discovered a constant diet of such mush is depressing. A depressed crew... Houston, we have a problem. Space flight is not all rocket science. Sometimes all the little details you never thought of can be a bigger problem than you ever imagined.

8/24/11  Heroic Marketing

Other than both being drugs, what do heroin and aspirin have in common?

The German company, Bayer Pharmaceutical. Both heroin and aspirin were originally brand names of Bayer products. Bayer still makes aspirin, though no longer Aspirin™. But then, a lot of other drug companies also make aspirin as the name has become a generic term for that particular pain-killer.

On the other hand. Bayer stopped making Heroin™ in 1913. Like aspirin, a lot of other people now make heroin, though not Bayer or the other companies making aspirin. Like aspirin, heroin is no longer a brand name either.

I don't know the origin of the name aspirin, but heroin got its name from the "heroic" feeling it gave Bayer employees during testing. Just so you know, Heroin™ was originally sold as a cough remedy. At one point, Bayer even added Heroin™ to Aspirin™.

5/17/11  Doozie of a Jeep

There used to be a lot more American car companies than there are now-a-days. Auburn, Cord, Duesenberg, Kaiser, Packard, Pierce-Arrow, and Studebaker to name a handful. Some old brands were bought by or merged with one of the big three and survive as divisions, such as Buick, Cadillac, Lincoln, Mercury, Pontiac, and Jeep. Some old marks that became divisions later got axed and so are just as dead as the independently dead like Oldsmobile and Plymouth.

Some of the defunct companies sort-of still exist only their mark is long gone. Willys combined with Overland becoming Willys-Overland, which later combined with Hudson to become American Motors. AMC was bought by Chrysler and became the Jeep division and the short-lived Eagle division. Basically Chrysler acquired AMC to get Jeep.

The story of Jeep is a bit odd, as is the name. No-one really is sure where it comes from. Some say it's from how you'd say GP, which stood for general purpose. Others say it was named after a magical creature from Popeye, Eugene the Jeep.

The Jeep was developed just before WWII by American Bantam using a Go-Devil engine supplied by Willys. The U.S. War Department concluded American Bantam was too small to build enough Jeeps, so the contract and the engineering plans went to Willys. But even Willys couldn't build enough and so during the war Ford built Jeeps, too.

After the war Jeep production went back to Willys. What's curious is Overland, before it merged with Willys to become Willys-Overland, built America's first 4-wheel-drive production car back around WWI. American Bantam, which developed the Jeep, joined the ranks of the defunct.

Of all the defunct car brands mentioned above, one's name lives on in the language. Well, kind-of lives on as people don't say it much any more. In its heyday Duesenberg made fast, sleek cars popular with the rich and famous. Like a Chevrolet is called a Chevy, a Duesenberg was called a Doozie. From this came the phrase, "It's a doozie."