Science

Last February, dad noted a story that I then mentioned also, regarding the possibility that Stonehenge might have been intended to resemble feminine genetalia (cold, hard, and immobile — apparently the designer didn’t have a very good sex life).

Five months later, the story is spreading (so to speak). Looks like we got the scoop on this one, dad! ;)

(via Iki)

A few years back, I was part of the SETI@home project, which uses spare processor cycles on your computer to help look for possible signals from life elsewhere in our galaxy. Unfortunately, various reformats, computer changes, and my own fickle interests led me to stop contributing to the project a while back.

As it turns out, though, the project has produced a list of possible candidate signals, and three members of the team will be going to the Aricebo telescope in Puerto Rico later this month to investigate 150 possible signals! Very cool!

Of course, one has to wonder how much of a bill 150 intergalactic wrong numbers would be…

Here’s a fun little story that dad pointed out, from the Discovery Channel — Female anatomy inspired Stonehenge?

The design of Stonehenge, the 4,800-year-old monument in southwestern England, was based on female sexual anatomy, according to a paper in the current Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

[Anthony Perks] noticed how the inner stone trilithons were arranged in a more elliptical, or egg-shaped, pattern than a true circle. Comparing the layout with the shape of female sexual organs showed surprising parallels.

Perks believes the labia majora could be represented by the outer stone circle and possibly the outer mound, with the inner circle serving as the labia minora, the altar stone as the clitoris and the empty geometric center outlined by bluestones representing the birth canal.

Interesting editorial over at Wired today: Go Deep! The US needs a NASA for exploring the oceans.

NASA has had its day. It’s given us technological marvels from cell phones to SETI screensavers. But we’re not mining the moon. We’re not terraforming Mars. And we’re certainly not finding any aliens. We’ve gotten completely off track: choosing to look for long-dead microbes 390 million miles away on Europa, while neglecting undiscovered life just miles off the coast of North America.

About 94 percent of life on Earth resides in the oceans. We’ve seen only about 2 percent of this vast ecosystem – the uppermost layer (home to fish, whales, scuba divers, and most known marine life). Beneath this warm lens lies a cold, dark, and life-rich realm of grand proportions. It’s home to creatures as far removed from the sun and human biology as any alien imagined by science fiction.

This is something that’s been bouncing around my brain for quite a few years now. While I certainly don’t want to see space exploration stop (and I am excited about some of the new ideas being proposed), it’s amazed me that we’re basically ignoring such a huge expanse of unexplored territory, right here on the very planet we live on. Surely some of the advances made in our exploration of space could be adapted to serve in an underwater environment, since some of the same concepts apply (such as keeping a standard pressure environment stable in an environment with a vastly different pressure — much more, rather than much less).

What new technologies could be created as we explore the new problems? Or what current technologies could be adapted and improved? We’re already seeing more and more work in hydrogen-powered automobiles — why not incorporate some miniaturized desalinization plant with a hydrogen-powered engine, and then any submersible could have a nearly infinite supply of fuel (think of a Bussard Ramscoop for a sub)? The linked Wired article mentions some of the odd chemical processes that are ocurring naturally by undewater thermal vents — who knows what kind of chemical tricks we could learn by studying these?

I just think there’s a lot to be explored in a frontier very close to home, and it’s a real shame that so little has been done in this direction as yet. Yes, I still think we need to go up — but there’s no reason we shouldn’t be going down, either.

I mentioned this briefly last March, but with the Columbia disaster, the idea of space elevators is starting to float around the ‘net again.

Forget the roar of rocketry and those bone jarring liftoffs, the elevator would be a smooth 62,000-mile (100,000-kilometer) ride up a long cable. Payloads can shimmy up the Earth-to-space cable, experiencing no large launch forces, slowly climbing from one atmosphere to a vacuum.

For a space elevator to function, a cable with one end attached to the Earth’s surface stretches upwards, reaching beyond geosynchronous orbit, at 21,700 miles (35,000-kilometer altitude). After that, simple physics takes charge.

The competing forces of gravity at the lower end and outward centripetal acceleration at the farther end keep the cable under tension. The cable remains stationary over a single position on Earth. This cable, once in position, can be scaled from Earth by mechanical means, right into Earth orbit. An object released at the cable’s far end would have sufficient energy to escape from the gravity tug of our home planet and travel to neighboring the moon or to more distant interplanetary targets.

Fascinating stuff to envision, and according to that article, it could conceivably be a reality in ten to fifteen years.

Part of the fun for me, though, was just tracking the thread across the web. I picked up on this from Doc Searls pointing to Dana Blankenhorn’s series of five blog posts about the idea. Dana’s posts led me to John Stryker pointing out some possible problems. The ensuing conversation in the comments to John’s post included some encouraging words from Michael Laine, the president of HighLift Systems, a company actively working on attempting to collect the necessary technology and funding to put this project into reality.

While this will probably come as no great surprise to those who know me, I’m solidly in the camp of people who would love to see this vision become a reality. If I had the pocket change, I’d write the check myself — unfortunately that’s a wee bit out of my range at the moment. Still, though, I’ll keep hoping.

When network engineers start discussing sex…

…the average amount of information per ejaculation is 1.56010^9^ 2 bits * 2.0010^8^, which comes out to be 6.2410^17^ bits. That’s about 78,000 terabytes of data! As a basis of comparison, were the entire text content of the Library of Congress to be scanned and stored, it would only take up about 20 terabytes. If you figure that a male orgasm lasts five seconds, you get a transmission rate of 15,600 tb/s. In comparison, an OC-96 line (like the ones that make up much of the backbone of the internet) can move .005 tb/s. Cable modems generally transmit somewhere around 1/5000^th^ of that.

(Via MeFi)

There are some gorgeous images taken by the crew of the Columbia before it broke up on reentry, courtesy of NASA. I’ve taken two of my favorites and turned them into 1024×768 desktop images, which you can grab here if you like.

On the left: “STS107-E-05697 (26 January 2003) — A quarter moon is visible in this oblique view of Earth’s horizon and airglow, recorded with a digital still camera aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia. (NASA caption)” (Original high-resolution version)

On the right: “STS107-E-05070 (18 January 2003) — The bright sun dissects the airglow above Earth’s horizon in this digital still camera’s view photographed from the Space Shuttle Columbia. (NASA caption)” (Original high-resolution version)

(From lies.com via Dave Winer)