TIME magazine has an excellent write-up on the on-going efforts – and progress made – to build a fusion reactor to solve the world’s needs for cheap energy. Check it out here. The engineering challenges are mind-boggling, but so are the possibilities, if humanity can ever solve the challenge of harnessing the energy released by controlled nuclear fusion. From the TIME article : The endgame for these companies isn’t acquisition by Google followed by a round of appletinis. It’s an energy source so cheap and clean and plentiful that it would create an inflection point in human history, an energy singularity that would leave no industry untouched.
The Experiminta Science Center is just a block from the Marriott hotel as well, and it was great to see such unabashed enthusiasm for math and science on display. My pictures are of some items that interested me, but there are many other interactive displays geared toward school kids of all ages. Here is the link for Rott’s Chaotic Pendulum.
Sorry! but I could not resist the mirrors. Inside the 3-sided mirror caleidoscope, ‘wide’ me, ‘skinny’ me, ‘upside down’ me in a giant spoon mirror, and ‘center of attention’ me in a ceiling mirror.Here’s a tornado in a tube .. a six foot high display of what happens when hot air and cool air mixes and gets a twist.These colorful (and playful) 3-D math representations all have names, which I suspect were assigned by the mathematician that had spare time to play around with Mathlab (a graphic modeller of mathematical equations) !
What do these emoji sentences convey? 1. (The message sender is blue). Will you come with me to the movies tonight? 2. (The message sender is green). I heard that your friend’s little sister said that I am coming to the (birthday) party.Rott’s Chaotic Pendulum consists of a middle piece that can rotate around its center (the black segment in the middle) .. but then it has additional segments attached to its ends that can rotate through 360 degrees as well. The trace of the tip of one of the attached segments is quite unexpectedly ‘chaotic’.
I was surprised to learn, from looking at my Frankfurt map, that the Senckenberg Naturmuseum was barely a five-minute walk from my hotel. Well, you have to go then, I told myself, and hurry up ! The museum closed at 6, along with every other establishment in Germany*.
*Shopping malls close a little later, at 9 pm .. but there is not much open on Sunday (convenience stores at gas stations are). I think that’s a good thing .. even with the Saturday evening rush that I got caught in at a grocery store just trying to buy a yogurt and bananas.
Here is the entrance to the Senckenberg Naturmuseum (museum of natural history) here in Frankfurt.This is the main exhibition hall. One the left is an Iguanodon, and on the right a complete Diplodocus skeleton, gifted from the American Museum of Natural History in 1907. Diplodocuses roamed around on earth 156-147 million years ago.Ready for your close-up (encounter with a 5-ton iguanodon?) Lucky for humans the beasts died out 110 million years ago.These are two woolly mammoth skeletons : on the left the ‘Mühldorfer mammoth’, a complete skeleton found east of Munich. On the right the American woolly mammoth, found in Little Britain in the New York State area. Most woolly mammoth populations disappeared between 14,000 to 10,000 years ago.Saber-toothed cats lived for 42 million years until about 11,000 years ago. This specimen’s bones were found in California.Open wide! Lucky for us this big fin whale does not eat humans! A close relative of the bigger blue whale, this skeleton lines the entire wall in the big exhibition room.Here’s the Coelacanth, the famous ‘dino-fish’ with bones and all, and a lung. A live fish was caught in a net off the South African coast in 1938, a sensational find for the archaeologist community, and today methods have been put in place to try to prevent catching the rare fish in fish nets.
I like the pictures and the tailors’ tapes on this tailor shop and offices for the sharply dressed man (and woman)., on Bleichstraße.The old and the new : in front Eschenheimer Tower (built in 1810) that guarded the old city’s Gothic walls, behind it the Jumeirah Frankfurt Hotel that opened in 2011.This is the Alte Oper, the old opera house. The original building was badly damaged in a World War II night raid, and only the facade remained. It took several decades before the building was restored.The early evening view from my hotel window. The little red aircraft warning lights are already lit up. The building with the pyramid is the Messeturm (offices); the silvery stepped building in the middle the West End Tower; the black building two more to the left of it is the Frankfurter Büro Center, home of my German namesake company, PwC.
I was blissfully unaware of the Juan de Fuca Plate tectonic plate, the edge of which runs alongside the Seattle coast, when I moved here in 2000. That did not last long, because in 2001 there was a 6.8 magnitude earthquake in Washington State, the Nisqually earthquake. It was deep down and caused some property damage but there were no casualties. A new compelling article by Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker with alarmist undertones and cataclysmic scenarios reminds us of the 9.0 magnitude Cascadia earthquake from Jan 26, 1700. And that the area is overdue for the next 9.0 earthquake. The logic is irrefutable : ‘ .. we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line—and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.
It’s Shark Week on Discovery Channel here in the USA .. and here is a goblin shark gobbling up a fish. These stills are from the Discovery website, here. This creature is a living fossil – in that it is the only one remaining from a family of sharks with a lineage dating back 125 million years. Its specialized jaws can snap forward to capture prey. The elongated flattened snout is covered with ‘ampullae of Lorenzini’ that enable it to sense minute electric fields, as little as a 10 millionth of a volt.
There was a smattering of stargazers and their telescopes out at Volunteer Park on Tuesday night when I walked by there. I soon found out the excitement was over the two brightest planets in the night sky – Venus and Jupiter – that were to appear very close together in the night sky. They only appear to do so, though, because of their locations in the night sky. At the time of the conjunction, Venus was 49 million miles from Earth while Jupiter was more than 10 times farther, 564 million miles. Check out this video from NASA. As time goes by, the planets appear closer together.
We went to the annual Greenwood Car Show on Saturday. It is organized by the Greenwood Knights and a fundraiser event for local non-profit organizations. Vintage car owners are invited to exhibit their driving machines along Greenwood Avenue North in the Greenwood and Phinney neighborhoods of Seattle.
Here’s the scene at Saturday’s Greenwood Autoshow. This is a 1970 second-generation Corvette Stingray. The chrome bumper on the front soon after disappeared (in model years after 1972).This restored Seattle City bus hails from 1963. It is 40 ft long and seats 51 people. The bus was built in Loudonville, Ohio and dubbed a “Transi-Cruiser”, one of a fleet of buses that enabled Seattle Transit to extend service north of 85th Street to 145th Street.
Check out the pages from my Time-Life Science Library book that I bought for $7 from Amazon. I remember the book from when I was growing up, and I wanted it especially for the explanation of the effects of relativity, illustrated by a fantastical train called the Relativity Express and the doings of the evil Agent X. The Relativity Express will get you there in a flash : it travels at ¾ the speed of light !
[From Wikipedia] What the (evil) rhinovirus molecule looks like up close.One of the 200+ virus strains implicated in the cause of the common cold have infiltrated my system. So I ran out to the pharmacist on Wednesday night. Help! I said, I need something that will make my nose stop running and sneezing, but still leave my sinuses clear so that I can fly on Thursday. He gave me an antihistamine, which seemed to help. I don’t have a fever, so it’s probably not the flu. I read on line that one can actually have the flu and not run a fever!
Below is my personal little ‘food pyramid’ from the lunch cafeteria here at work, clockwise : orange juice drink, tofu with greens, white rice, potato with red pepper, green beans with pork bits, chicken thigh. Very nice. Below it is the old food pyramid which has since been replaced by a new one in 2002. The new one looks much more complicated. And I suppose the steps says ‘it’s not only about food, make sure you get enough exercise’.
