[Video] If the Earth Has Rings Like Saturn's

Do want!

Pale Blue Dot (Video)

I have blogged about it before, but I don't think a good thing can ever be shared more than it should be. Behold the Pale Blue Dot, one of the most famous astronomy pictures of all time.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem like any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider that little dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you loved, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there's no hint that help could come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes; settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

A Great Video to Wake Up To

Have you seen this video by Discovery Channel? It's so catchy and uplifting.

I love the mountains
I love the clear blue skies
I love big bridges
I love when great whites fly
I love the whole world and all its sights and sounds
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada

I love the ocean
I love real dirty things
I love to go fast
I love Egyptian kings
I love the whole world and all its craziness
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada

I love tornados
I love arachnids
I love hot magma
I love the giant squids
I love the whole world, its such a brilliant place
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada

And you have this XKCD comic: (what introduced me to the video above)


Update: You can download the MP3 and Video here.

Have You Ever Thrown A Boomerang... In Weightlessness?

At first I actually typed the title as "Have you ever thrown a boomerang in zero gravity". And you know why I changed the word to weightlessness instead. :P

Anyway, this is Japanese astronaut Takao Doi, on board of the International Space Station, who has proved that a boomerang returns to the person throwing it even in the zero-gravity conditions. The idea came to him by request from his friend Yashuhiro Togai, a world boomerang champion. The result is exactly what the science behind boomerangs predicts.

Interesting huh. :)

Some Questions About Water

When my housemates and I were having dinner yesterday night, someone brought out some interesting questions:

1. There is a boat on a lake, and inside the boat there is a guy and a stone. The guy throws the stone out of the boat. Will the water level of the lake rise, fall, or remain the same? Here the water level is in reference to the land, not the water level of the boat. Also, assume that the total water volume of the lake is constant.
   
   
2. What if instead of a stone, the person breaks a wooden plank from the boat and throw it into the lake? Assume that the plank is less dense than the water.
   
   
3. You are swimming on the lake. You peed. What will happen to the water level of the lake? What if you are diving instead of swimming?
   
   
4. You are sitting on a bath tub with the plug on and some water in the tub. You peed. What will happen to the water level?
   
   
5. Same with 4, but instead of peeing, you poo-ed. What will happen to the water level? What about fart? (Thanks to Thow Kong for the brilliant question. :P)

Question 1 is supposedly one of the questions asked during the Oxford university interview. If you are able to solve number 1, you should be able to do the rest since they are kind of similar. Contact Thow Kong for the answer to the last question.

Perspective

I have always loved to use the word "perspective" in my writing, but I could never have done this word as much justice as this page:

Universcale

The Other Side Revealed!

Two years ago, I wrote this post on the joyous day of my homecoming. Not many people realised what it meant.

The answer is: they are the antipodes of my travel origin and destination.

In other words, if I digg a hole straight down from Melbourne and go through the whole Earth's interior, I will come out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. If If I digg a hole from Malaysia, it will come out some where in Ecuador, South America!

Try to find out where your favourite location's antipode is: Link. If you stay in US, don't bother: you are going to drink salt water in Indian Ocean. The next time your kid ask you "what's at the other end of the Earth", don't tell them it's China.


Note: This is part of my effort to clear up my "unfinished posts".

Global Warming in Classical Chinese

I was reading on Global Warming when I noticed the classical Chinese version of the article (Yes they do have classical Chinese version of Wikipedia!).

全球暖化者，天地日暖也。蓋百年以來，其勢日明，其害日顯，此固由人為也。工業日進，污染日甚，溫室氣體日濃，熱無以去，遂俳佪於天地間。萬物因而易，異象因而生。海面日漲、氣候突變、水旱交侵，致使農業廢失、物種亡絕、病蟲日增。萬民見害，苦之久矣。諸國遂盟，訂《京都議定書》，力減溫室氣體之釋，以緩此變。惟其成功與否，尚未可知。

这段落读起来好像是古代历史，不像是现代环境危机哦！

Surely You Are Joking, Mr. Feynman

I have a new favourite quote. It's from Richard Feynman, the maverick physicist.

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the [US] national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

I have been going out a lot recently, so this is just a filler for the blog while I am recovering from fatigue. :)

Zero Gravity (2)

This post is a continuation of an earlier post.

Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.

Fred Hoyle

So somehow, people always use the term "zero gravity" to describe space as though it somehow escaped Earth's gravitational pull and is effectively receiving no attraction from the gigantic rock at all. You see terms like "there's no gravity in space" all over the place, spoken even by the astronauts themselves.

For example, let's look at a snippet from a supposedly educational article in The Star:

Half of all astronauts suffer space motion sickness when they encounter microgravity and feel as if they are falling. This affects our neurovestibular system, which is what helps our body keep proper orientation while on Earth. This feeling is not dissimilar to the sensation felt after you have been on a terrifying roller-coaster ride. It simply means that your body doesn’t know which way is up, down, left or right.

This paragraph is misleading.

When the astronauts encounter microgravity (a term used erroneously in the context of "zero gravity"), they don't only feel "as if they are falling" - they ARE actually falling. The astronauts feel weightless because the International Space Station is in an orbit around the Earth, and an orbit is a free-fall. And you feel weightless when you are free-falling.

I am not a textbook author, so I might not be good at explaining it. But here is a great explanation I found through a fabulous web page (which by the way, clarifies a lot of scientific misconceptions I blogged about some time in the past):

Everyone knows that the gravity in outer space is zero. Everyone is wrong.

Gravity in space is not zero, it can actually be fairly strong. Suppose you climbed to the top of a ladder that's about 300 miles tall. You would be up in the vacuum of space, but you would not be weightless at all. You'd only weigh about fifteen percent less than you do on the ground. While 300 miles out in space, a 115lb person would weigh about 100lb. Yet a spacecraft can orbit 'weightlessly' at the height of your ladder! While you're up there, you might see the Space Shuttle zip right by you. The people inside it would seem as weightless as always. Yet on your tall ladder, you'd feel nearly normal weight. What's going on?

The reason that the shuttle astronauts act weightless is that they're inside a container which is FALLING! If the shuttle were to sit unmoving on top of your ladder (it's a strong ladder,) the shuttle would no longer be falling, and its occupants would feel nearly normal weight. And if you were to leap from your ladder, you would feel just as weightless as an astronaut (at least you'd feel weightless until you hit the ground!)

So, if the orbiting shuttle is really falling, why doesn't it hit the earth? It's because the shuttle is not only falling down, it is moving very fast sideways as it falls, so it falls in a curve. It moves so fast that the curved path of its fall is the same as the curve of the earth, so the Shuttle falls and falls and never comes down. Gravity strongly affects the astronauts in a spacecraft: the Earth is strongly pulling on them so they fall towards it. But they are moving sideways so fast that they continually miss the Earth. This process is called "orbiting," and the proper word for the seeming lack of gravity is called "Free Fall." You shouldn't say that astronauts are "weightless," because if you do, then anyone and anything that is falling would also be "weightless." When you jump out of an airplane, do you become weightless? And if you drop a book, does gravity stop affecting it; should you say it becomes weightless? If so, then why does it fall? If "weight" is the force which pulls objects towards the Earth, then this force is still there even when objects fall.

So, to experience GENUINE free fall just like the astronauts, simply jump into the air! Better yet, jump off a diving board at the pool, or bounce on a trampoline, or go skydiving. Bungee-jumpers know what the astronauts experience.

So there we have it: Astronauts are not floating in zero gravity, they are constantly falling under the gravitational force. They feel just like a bungee jumper, a skydiver, or a person in a roller coaster going down a gigantic drop.

The concept of "zero-gravity" and freefall should be explained with the diagram on the right.

Say you are on top of a high mountain, and you throw an unfortunate guy forward with great force. If you throw him just lightly, he might land on, say, point D. If you throw him with even more velocity, he might end up landing on point E, F, or even B. But throw the poor boy with a sufficient velocity, and he will never land, as he will just keep on curving around the earth and missing the ground constantly. That is exactly what happens to a satellite in an orbit. An orbit is just a kind of freefall, on a special type of projectile motion which takes a form of an ellipse or a sphere.

[Read more about this diagram and its explanation in this Wikipedia article - Newton's Cannonball]

It might be just my personal peeve, but I have always been appalled by how little clarification is given about the term "zero gravity" in the media. When I was young, I had always thought that there is zero gravity pull in the space, and it was until quite late that I realized all the astronauts were just free-falling. And more people should learn about this misconception if we really want to educate our people about the space.

Zero Gravity (1)

Warning: The following is going to be a nerdy rumbling. If you have no interest in physics, space, gravity or whatsoever, you should avoid this article so that you don't fall asleep and wake up blaming me for it. :)

I have a peeve about the term "zero gravity".

In the flurry of space tourism news in recent weeks, the term "zero gravity", or "microgravity" cropped out like m-u-s-h-r-o-o-m-s after a monsoon season. And I am disturbed by the fact that the misleading terms have been taken used so rampantly without further explanation in the media.

To begin with, let's look at a few examples from the news articles:

Living in space is quite different than on Earth. That difference, of course, lies in that trifling matter we call gravity or, rather, the lack of it.

As it left the earth's atmosphere, the rocket achieved zero gravity within the next four minutes and soared into the stratosphere.

When the rocket motors start to roar, our angkasawan will begin to experience an increasing G-force in proportion to the increase in acceleration.

[snip]

This period of high-acceleration will last for 8 to 9 minutes until the rocket ship travels 100km above the Earth and reaches the necessary speed of 18,000mph, sufficient to carry it all the way to the International Space Station (ISS). This will take about 50 minutes after the engines stop firing and during this time, zero-G will prevail and this is when astronauts will experience that sense of weightlessness most people associate with being in space...

[snip]

The good news is that once you arrive onboard the ISS, zero-G is nullified as there will be a “synthetic gravity” produced by spinning the space station around its centre. This is a very necessary factor for the well-being of the astronauts as microgravity exposure alters the human body in many ways.

Half of all astronauts suffer space motion sickness when they encounter microgravity and feel as if they are falling. This affects our neurovestibular system, which is what helps our body keep proper orientation while on Earth. This feeling is not dissimilar to the sensation felt after you have been on a terrifying roller-coaster ride. It simply means that your body doesn’t know which way is up, down, left or right.

All the news articles sound very convincing. After all, as a child, haven't we all seen how astronauts float effortlessly in the outer space when there are no gravity forces, and didn't everyone enthusiastically make "angkasawan" our childhood ambition because of the sheer fun of floating? Everyone knows there is no gravity in the outer space, outside the Earth's atmosphere!

So, what's wrong with me and my peeve with "zero gravity", you may ask.

The problem begins with the word "gravity". Gravity, as first expounded mathematically by Isaac Newton, is a mutual force that exists between any two objects with a mass. This force is directly proportional to the mass of both objects, but inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the two objects. The fact that there is a gravitational force pulling us towards the ground all the time, is due to the force between the gigantic rock ball and all the various molecules that make up our body.

Mathematically, the relationship is as stated on the right.

• F is the gravity force
• G is a constant (6.67300 × 10^-11)
• The two m's are the two masses
• r is the distance.

So say, what is the gravity force acting on myself right now? The earth's mass is 5.9742 × 10^24kg, my mass is 70kg, the distance between myself and the centre of Earth is 6 378.1km. So, if you do the calculation (check out the link!), it turns out that there is a gravity force of about 686 newtons between myself and the Earth.

So, what happens if I go on a sightseeing trip in ISS?

The International Space Station is an artificial satellite which flies about 319.6 km to 346.9 km above the Earth's surface. Okay, let us redo the calculation of the gravity force in action when I am up there... Surprise, surprise, the answer is 620 newton! The gravity force is only about 10% less than what it is for me right now!

Isn't all that confusing? There is supposed to be zero gravity in the ISS! That's what the newspaper and the astronauts told us! Aren't they floating in space?

What's wrong in here?


[To be continued...]
[Continued in this post]

Clockwise? Anti-Clockwise?

What can you see? Clockwise rotation? Anti-clockwise rotation? Both?

This is an interesting test posted on the Daily Telegraph website, and it is purported to test whether you are a left-brained or right-brained person. But from my one semester of neuroscience, I would say that the left-brain / right-brain dichotomy thing is mostly bullshit. While there are indeed dominant spheres for language processing (most people are left-sided, some people are right-sided, even less are both-sided) as well as spatial perception (which is usually on the right side); the left-side = rational, right-side = emotional / linguistic / artistic theory is a hypothesis and has not been substantiated scientifically. It is often exaggerated in popular psychology and often is used to sell "boost your left brain" or "train to use both your brains" kind of pseudoscience stuff.

After some searching around, I discovered a few web pages which discusses this image and the left-brain-vs-right-brain issue in more detail:

• Brain-sidedness and Its Tests - Real Dichotomy or Real Myth?
• Wikipedia: Lateralization of Brain Function (The discussion of that page is interesting)

Interesting, huh?

Source: The Right Brain vs Left Brain via Facebook

Petition to McDonald's

Top scientists agree: "With the present rate of human consumption, the earth's supply of gravity will be exhausted before the 24th century."

An Intriguing Game

Unfortunately the world works just like this game. Sometimes we imagine, if everyone obeys traffic rules, the traffic congestion would be dramatically reduced. But people break the rules. If every country in the world destroys their nuclear weapons, this will be a much safer world. But we will never live to see a day with a nuclear-free world. If everyone unites and strive for the greater good, this will be a much better world. But human won't unite. The reason? The same as in this game. As long as there are competitions, there will be "good" and "bad" people who assume their own niches in the equilibrium of the complex net of interactions. Game theory dictates it.

Game theory is fascinating. Since I first learnt about it some years ago, I have been absolutely enchanted by how it seems to apply to everything in this world - including, but not restricted to animal behaviours (including human's), evolution, cultural revolution, economics, politics, nuclear warfare, global warming treaties etc. The implications of game theory just seem to pop up everywhere.

What is game theory?

Game theory is just what it says - the theory of games. Examples of theory of games could range from anything as simple as how to tackle tic-tac-toe, to what happens when two players play checkers perfectly (which was solved just recently). However, in its modern word usage, game theory is not about winning and losing in a table-top game (which is in the field of combinatorial game theory) - it's more about everything that involves competition, everything that involves different parties aspiring to maximize their own return (among others). Basically this covers almost every organic interaction. Games, in the context of game theory, are played between countries and populations.

Consider this interesting game:

An investment game is played in a group of 4. In each round of the game, each player will make a choice of investing 10 dollars or investing nothing. At the end of each round, the sum of the investment by the four players is pooled together, and each player (regardless of the amount he has invested) will get 40% of the sum in the pool. For example, if everyone invests 10 dollars, then there will be 40 dollars in the pool, and therefore everyone will get 16 dollars at the end which means a 6-dollar profit.

By doing some analysis, the outcomes of the game can be described as follows:
4 x 10 dollars: Everyone earns 6 dollars - a total profit of 24 dollars.
3 x 10 dollars: 3 player who invested will earn 2 dollars, the person who didn't invest earns 12 dollars. A total profit of -6 dollars.
2 x 10 dollars: The 2 investing players LOSE 2 dollars, the 2 non-investing players earn 8 dollars each. A total profit of 12 dollars.
1 x 10 dollars: The investing player LOSES 6 dollars, the 3 non-investing players earn 4 dollars each. Total profit of 12 dollars.
0 x 10 dollars: Nobody invests, nobody earns or loses anything. Total profit is zero.

At the first glance of the game, it seems that it would be ideal if everyone just keeps on investing in every round - that would be the best outcome, everyone earns and the total profit is the highest. However, a few rounds into the game, someone might realize - hey wait, if the other three players continue to invest and I stop, I will earn 12 dollars, more than the previous scenario! And hence some people will stop investing. Then some other player may stop investing as well, and now the two non-investors get 8 dollars, at the expense of the investors' loss! In some rounds everyone might get selfish, and it ends up as the 0 x 10 dollar case - at this point some people realize that someone has got to invest to keep it going. So in the end the game will bounce somewhere between all the scenarios, but it will not stay at the 4 x 10 dollars, the supposedly best option for everyone.

Unfortunately the world works just like this game. Sometimes we imagine, if everyone obeys traffic rules, the traffic congestion would be dramatically reduced. But people break the rules. If every country in the world destroys their nuclear weapons, this will be a much safer world. But we will never live to see a day with a nuclear-free world. If everyone unites and strive for the greater good, this will be a much better world. But human won't unite. The reason? The same as in this game. In this page, you can see how the theory behind this game applies to real-life scenarios, ranging from political science, economics to athletic competitions.

As long as there are competitions, there will be "good" and "bad" people who assume their own niches in the equilibrium of the complex net of interactions. Game theory dictates it.

p/s: Yes, this game is a variation of the prisoner's dilemma.

Ever Felt the "Fake Vibration"?

Do you put your mobile phone on your pocket, and sometimes you feel that it vibrated, but when you pick it up there really wasn't any call or message?

I thought I was the only person who felt it. And I thought it was just some vibration introduced by my pants.

But apparently, many other people thought they were the only one as well. A recent news article in USA Today highlighted this interesting issue and provided an explanation:

Some who experienced recurring phantom vibrations wondered whether the phenomenon had physical roots: Was it caused by nerve damage or muscle memory?

But experts say the false alarms simply demonstrate how easily habits are developed.

Psychologically, the key to deciphering phantom vibrations is "hypothesis-guided search," a theory that describes the selective monitoring of physical sensations, says Jeffrey Janata, director of the behavioral medicine program at University Hospitals in Cleveland. It suggests that when cellphone users are alert to vibrations, they are likely to experience sporadic false alarms, he says.

"You come armed with this template that leads you to be attentive to sensations that represent a cellphone vibrating," Janata says. "And it leads you to over-incorporate non-vibratory sensations and attribute them to the idea that you're receiving a phone call."

Alejandro Lleras, a sensation and perception professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, adds that learning to detect rings and vibrations is part of a perceptual learning process.

"When we learn to respond to a cellphone, we're setting perceptual filters so that we can pick out that (ring or vibration), even under noisy conditions," Lleras says. "As the filter is created, it is imperfect, and false alarms will occur. Random noise is interpreted as a real signal, when in fact, it isn't."

Phantom cellphone vibrations also can be explained by neuroplasticity — the brain's ability to form new connections in response to changes in the environment.

When cellphone users regularly experience sensations, such as vibrating, their brains become wired to those sensations, Janata says.

"Neurological connections that have been used or formed by the sensation of vibrating are easily activated," he says. "They're over-solidified, and similar sensations are incorporated into that template. They become a habit of the brain."

A whole new dimension has just been added to the adage "it's all in your mind". Allow me to end this post with my first haiku:

A phone vibration
Hurriedly I picked it up
Alas there's nothing.

Kaye Effect

Simply wow!

Virus and Bacteria

Virus and bacteria are absolutely different things. Bacteria are little single-cell critters. Virus is just a genetic component plus a protein "cap", and sometimes a oily envelope. Their structure and function are entirely different. Perhaps the only similarity between them is that they both contain species that could cause disease in humans.

But apparently some of the reporters in Australia can't really tell the difference between virus and bacteria.

Link

Eerm. Sometimes I find that the mass media isn't reliable when it comes to scientific information. Recently I have been finding some misconceptions in many newspapers, and some of them actually went on the frontpage. I remember reading things like "egg could stand on its end only during equinox" in Sinchew JitPoh when I was back in Malaysia a few months ago. Probably we could be lenient because it's not meant to be a scientific news after all. However, when it comes to scientific articles, newspapers seem to be born with a knack of giving misinformations. So ya, when the information is passed on from the scientist to the reporter, and from the reporter to the editors, we can basically forget about accuracy.

It's not all that bad, and most of the time the news are pretty accurate. However, slight mistakes do accumulate, and as the ol' trusted source of knowledge, newspaper ought to be more rigorous in their fact-checking. When we have already got urban legends spreading like wildfire online everyday, newspaper editors should try their best to avoid disseminating misinformation.

The Pale Blue Dot

Carl Sagan wrote some of the most wonderful short stories, articles and non-fictions I have ever come across. In my brief encounter with some of his works, the "Reflection on a Mote of Dust" from Pale Blue Dot turned out to be the most captivating, and shall I say, humiliating. It puts everything in a universal perspective. The "Bad Astronomy Blog" described it as "the required reading of every human on this planet", and I couldn't quite object to the superlative.

It's something that should be shared with everyone. As a lead, this picture was taken by Voyager 1 in 1990, from more than 6 billion kilometers from Earth. Carl Sagan was so moved by the immensity of this picture that he wrote down the following:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

We are always humbled by the observation of the natural world. The sheer scale of astronomy, and the minuscule world of the microbiology are the two extremes of the physical spectrum, but they are both sources of inspiration to us. We always think of ourselves as the most important beings that have ever existed, ignorant of the fact that both the universe and the bacteria could exterminate us in a matter of seconds. How lucky we are to be here at all.

Perhaps they are some good reasons for us to be humble.

Book-tagged

I don't like stupid blog-taggings where you are so-called "tagged" and are expected to write "interesting" things about yourself or your friends. It was fun for once or twice, but when you get tagged for more than that, things get a bit stale.

But I admit it. This one looks quite interesting. Shou Farn tagged me this time, and it's a book-tag. It's a tag to write about a book. So here we go:

1) Grab the closest book to you.
Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything"

- When I read the "tag" this afternoon, I was doing the weekly PBL research. Incidentally, the closest book to me was a medical textbook - Robbin's Pathologic Basis of Disease. It is as heavy as your regular bricks and the texts are tinier than the newspaper print. And I don't want to put it here because it's too boring for anyone to appreciate. Hence, the subject is changed to this book which is on my desk at the moment.


2)Open to page 123, go down to the 4th sentence.

3) Post the text of the following 3 sentences on your blog.

Brand became convinced that gold could somehow be distilled from human urine. (The similarity of colour seems to have been a factor in his conclusion.) He assembled fifty buckets of human urine, which he kept for months in his cellar.

By the way I strongly recommend this book to everyone.. It's meant to be the history of the universe, but you can easily read this book as the history of science as well. The author was a layman to science before he set out to write this book, and he lamented that all the scientific books and texts out there are too dry to be digested, and it hindered people from appreciating its beauty. So in a moment of epiphany, he decided that science needs not be as dull as he grew up to believe in. And he set out to "re-learn" science by his own effort, and produced this history of science / universe in a series of stories. In his own words: ...

It was as if he [the textbook author] wanted to keep the good stuff secret by making all of it soberly unfathomable. As the years passed, I began to suspect that this was not altogether a private impulse. There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting.

... I now know that there is a happy abundance of science writers who pen the most lucid and thrilling prose ... but, sadly, none of them wrote any textbook I ever used. All mine were written by men (it was always men) who held the interesting notion that everything became clear when expressed as a formula and the amusingly deluded belief that the children of America would appreciate having chapters end with a section of questions they could mull over in their own time. So I grew up convinced that science was supremely dull, but suspecting that it needn't be, and not really thinking about it at all if I could help it...

... [After a moment of epiphany] I decided that I would devote a portion of my life - three years, as it now turns out - to reading books and journals and finding saintly, patient experts prepared to answer a lot of outstandingly dumb questions. The idea was to see if it isn't possible to understand and appreciate - marvel at, enjoy even - the wonder and accomplishments of science at level that isn't too technical or demanding, but isn't entirely superficial either.

That was my idea and my hope, and that is what the book that follows is intended to do.

I am only one third through the book, but I find it so well-written and provides a really good introduction to science for science lovers, science haters and science indifferent-ers alike. So if you have some free time, grab a copy from your local library. It's worth your time.

Now for the tagging part... I would just tag a few people whom I think read interesting books (this sentence is plagiarised from Shou Farn's post since I am lazy to think of something clever to write). I hereby tag:

1. Wee Loon
2. Yee Pin
3. Winson
4. Jasmine
5. Eric
6. Ka Lip

Tell me when you are done. :)

Is Your Brain the Same Gender as You?

Is your brain male or female? Find out in this very interesting test that I found through Digg: Link

If you're interested, you can read my result here.

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Footnote: To save myself a little bit of face of having a "female" brain, I would like to clarify two things:

1. For the "rotation" section I made the mistake of choosing only one instead of two answers. Sigh, talk about reading instruction carefully.

2. As for the "female" score of "spot the difference", I think it's due to the well-trained last minute cramming skill, acquired through studying for the final exam. :P

With that I end my excuses for having a slightly female brain.