One of my favorite biologists, John Maynard Smith, was once an engineer like myself. He designed planes in WWII and then decided biology was more interesting. He made a complete and total career change, citing that airplanes were “noisy and old fashioned”. Anyway he still loved flying things, and wrote a really neat essay about the evolution of powered flight. He describes how birds evolved tails first for stable gliding but later began to evolve toward instability as they developed powered flight. It’s really neat.
Birds aren’t the only animals that fly though. I found this awesome video of a fish flying for 45 seconds! It even uses it’s tail to swat the water and develop thrust. It is amazing. I salute that crazy flying fish.
Speaking of flying animals and biologists, the earliest bird fossil is now on exihibt at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. It is called an Archaeopteryx it is about 150 million years old. I HAVE to go see this one.
I have a special bond with some of the things I learn. Just think of how many things you learn throughout a normal day, it’s staggering… but most of it is trivial and dull. In fact, most of the things I learn at work or just going about my day pass right through me, like the plot of a bad paperback novel. There are a few things that have poetry to them, or at least to me.
For instance, I’m taking a human physiology class and we are studying the nervous system. The nervous system is incredibly complex, and filled with all kinds of beautiful nuances. Anyway, at it’s core are little electrical currents that are created and propagated out through the body. These are very small currents, very faint… on the order of millivolts.
That is interesting enough but on my drive home I was treated to a wonderful lightning storm off in the big Texas sky. I could see the blue flashes of light speckle the bellies of the clouds all the way home. It was beautiful but the flashes were all pointless and random right? It’s amazing to think that that is what I AM. My thoughts, my personality, and my memories are all tied up in these little flashes of lightning in my head that might seem equally as pointless to say a frog or a rock. So I drove on with that happy realization and figured maybe that lightning wasn’t so random…. and for a moment I think the lights in the sky and I understood each other.
I went to Fry’s this weekend and walked out with a telescope. Yes, I bought a telescope on impulse but I simply couldn’t resist. This isn’t just any telescope though; this is a truly “Desktop” telescope! Seriously, the tube isn’t much bigger than a liter bottle and I can pick the whole thing up with one arm easily.
I love it.
It’s made by Celestron and is marketed as a “first scope” and at 50 bucks it’s a steal. First off I think it’s really cool they covered the tube with the names of old astronomers. I remember at MIT that Killian court (the main courtyard with “the dome”) had the names of scientists lining the upper trim of the stone walls. As corny as this sounds, it was inspiring. It was inspiring to finish a test or finish learning some new concept and walk out through that court and see those names… Archimides, Darwin, Newton, and Copernicus. There were literally a hundred of them lining the entire courtyard, I felt like I was a part of something bigger, something important. In a smaller way, that is what this telescope does. This telescope isn’t much stronger than what Galileo used, isn’t it just as amazing?
Ok, I got side tracked, I often do. Now for the specs of the scope, it has a 3 inch mirror as its base and comes with 20mm and 4 mm eyepieces. These equate to roughly x15 and x75 power eyepieces. The optical quality of the scope is sound but the 75 power eyepiece is really too much for this caliber of scope. That being said, it’s still awesome! Remember, it’s NOT the Hubble. It’s not the Hubble and I don’t live in the desert of New Mexico. Nevertheless, Sarah and I took it out and immediately saw the rings of Saturn! Saturn’s rings are very thin right now and the image still has significant aberration but we could definitely see the rings. When Jupiter comes back out it will also be able to image the 4 Galilean moons and the planet’s disc. This scope is really mostly for viewing faint star clusters, bright nebula and globular clusters. I can’t wait to spend more time with it.
So this telescope is a reflector type telescope. The image comes from a mirror on one end that focuses lots of light right onto the eyepiece. The size of the mirror doesn’t do any magnification; it just increases the amount of light the telescope can gather. It’s effectively like stretching out your pupil to the size of the mirror, or 3 inches The actual magnification of the image is done by the eyepieces. So what’s the reason you can’t just keep magnifying up (past 75 power for instance)?
Well there are two reasons. The first is because the mirror isn’t perfect. The mirror is effectively warped in some areas and that translates to an imperfect image at the eyepiece entrance. Also, there is only so much “light” in an image. If you magnify it, it gets duller and at some point the whole thing will get washed out.
Here is the kicker though, most faint things like nebula in the sky are actually quite big “angularly”. This means you don’t really need to magnify them all that much. What is really needed is a biggish mirror because nebula are very, very faint. This telescope is a great compromise between mirror size, mirror quality, magnification and price! What a great way to celebrate 401 years with the astronomical telescope.
What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where non other have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea – to discover a great thought – an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plow had gone over before… To be the first – that is the idea. To do something, say something, see something before anybody else – these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasure are tame and commonplace… These are the men who have really lived – who have actually comprehended what pleasure is – who have crowded lifetimes of ecstasy into a single moment.
I have to admit, I love robots. I grew up reading all kinds of science fiction and it was unavoidable. I remember reading all of the I, Robot stories by Isaac Asimov and being completely inundated by robots in movies. Remember Johnny 5 from Short Circuit? What about Robocop, The Terminator, Rosie the Maid, the Tin Man, Transformers, and of course the Cylons, The Matrix machine intelligences and Data from Star Trek. My favorite robot of all though is Marvin, the paranoid android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Robots have filled my imagination for my entire life.
So this has all led to me owning two programmable robots and they are loads of fun! One of them is actually built by a company started by my college roommate from MIT. It is a great way to learn about electronics, be creative, and work with something that actually interacts with the real world. It is fun to interface new sensors, program new behaviors and watch them evolve in front of you. I can only imagine what kind of impact this would have had on me as a child. Electronics have become so miniaturized and cost effective that every kid should be exposed to these amazing little devices.
As long as they don’t grow up to build a robot that takes over the world.
I read a lot of science books and a lot of them take an almost fiendish pride in reminding us how “insignificant” we are. I disagree. They mention how the earth is very small, a grain in a vast ocean of useless space and time. They remind us that at one time people thought the entire universe revolved around us. Now we know we are the third planet to revolve around an average middle aged star in the backwater of an ordinary galaxy. One of billions. Sigh. Time for a sulk?
This is all true but there IS something we are the center of. We are, in a very real way, at the exact center of “reality”. The entire universe is made up of an amazingly ENORMOUS range of scale. At the smallest of these scales is the subatomic world and at the largest is the entire visible universe. This constitutes the sum total of what we believe to be reality. As far as we can tell, we exist exactly halfway between these two extremes! The atomic scale is 10^-25 centimeter and the universe is at the 10^25 centimeter scale. We and all other biological systems on earth exist at the centimeter scale. Weird huh? This seems to be the scale at which the universe can organize into the most “complex” stuff. Life is the most complex thing within the solar system and probably the universe. You could rearrange all the atoms of the Sun’s core and it would still shine. You can rearrange all the galaxies in the universe and it would still hum along. Life however is special. We are too complicated for that trick. In fact our brains are the most complicated thing for light years around. So, if you didn’t already know it we are cosmically special
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
I’ve been trying to think of a good analogy for the complexity and beauty in nature. The best thing I can come up with is music. For instance, a piece of piano music is made up of only a few dozen discrete tones. If a kid came and bashed away on the keys it would sound like useless noise. However, these same notes can be put together in endlessly fascinating and beautiful ways, themselves a small but wonderful subset of all possible combinations. In a piece of music these tones build on each other, complement each other and establish multiple layers of harmony and rhythm.
I’m glad we live on a planet brimming with the music of chemical elements… the music of life. Every other place in the solar system is either a rock or ball of gas, the discordant jumble of notes. Everything here is really a symphony.
I’ve been sick a few times this past month and it was hell. It was so bad I had to go on a course of antibiotics to help wipe out the infection. That got me thinking though, how do antibiotics even work? It’s just a pill, so how does the chemical know to go and kill only the bad bacteria, why not all our cells? Does it kill the “good” bacteria in our gut?
Well the bacteria are single celled little creatures that have something our human cells don’t, a rigid cell wall. This cell wall is made up of something called peptidoglycan. All antibiotics that end in –cillin work by interfering with the creation of that bacterial cell wall. They have a compound called beta-lactam that binds to these cell walls and inhibit its construction. So each particle of antibiotic is like a homing missile sent to take down the walls of the “bad cells”. Well kind of. They actually interfere with our “good” gut bacteria as well. A few studies show that it takes weeks for our gut flora to get back to normal working order. A small price to pay maybe.
Bacteria are very innovative though. I’m taking a molecular biology class and its really fascinating. One of the things we talk about a lot are “plasmids”. Plasmids are little pieces of circular DNA outside of the normal DNA jumble of a bacteria cell. It exists outside and can “evolve” or change very rapidly. It is through this that they can evolve proteins relatively quickly to be resistant to anything that comes along. So with this little trick, some evolved the ability to create a secondary protein to bind to the beta-lactam ring and make it useless. They essentially then became antibiotic resistant. Fortunately there are other antibiotics that work in many different ways. Unfortunately, bacteria now have plasmids so the race is and will forever be on.
I whipped out an orange from my lunch bag today and it was as large as a baby’s head. Amazing! The thing weighed about a pound and looked to be in perfect health, glowing a bright rich… well orange color. I thought to myself, why the heck is this orange so big? Well first of all it’s a navel orange. The navel orange comes from a single mutation in a normal orange tree that happened in 1820 in a Brazilian orchard. This tree made oranges that were actually growing a SECOND orange in its “head”. So it was effectively a conjoined twin orange, a hideous mutant freak, right? Wrong, it was delicious and the planters new they had hit on something big. The mutation also did something else to this delectable fruit abomination, it made it sterile. Navel Oranges have no seeds, another good thing! For us anyway. It’s not for the tree because now there is no way to for this wonderful sin against nature to procreate. The only thing the Brazilian planters could do was cut off parts of the tree and graft it to other trees. Yup, that is possible with plants. You can cut parts of the flowering plant and stick it onto the roots of another and they naturally fuse together and grow. (Interestingly, some farmers graft tomato stems on potato roots making a plant that has tomatoes on top and potatoes on the bottom!) Anyway, a cutting from that original Brazilian mutant tree was sent to Riverside and the rest is history. In effect, every navel orange in the world is a genetic clone of oranges from that first tree. We are all eating essentially the fruit of one tree that has remained in existence for over a hundred years.
