From time to time I get to musing on all manner of things here on The Cow, and today I bring you some thoughts about nature and self-similarity.
This morning at dawn I was lying half-awake listening to the song of a chirpy early-rising Turdus merula, better known as the Common Blackbird. The Blackbird was introduced to Australia, in Melbourne where I am now living, in the 1850s as part of the regrettable We-Wish-It-Was-More-Like-England makeover that the colonists were hell-bent on giving this completely un-Englandlike continent.
The Blackbird’s song is very pretty and very recognizable – listen to the end part of this sample:*
What I realized as I was listening though, was that the little guy† wasn’t just doing the same exact phrase over and over – there were little variations each and every time – just like he was improvising on his little blackbirdy theme. No two riffs were exactly alike.
This got me to speculating about another well-known natural phenomenon in which no two elements are exactly alike, but are very similar in structure and beauty and precision: the snowflake.
And so I began to wonder if the song of the Common Blackbird might in fact be the aural equivalent of the crystalline structure of the snowflake.‡
I don’t really know why I should have made that connection, but there you go. Put it down to my hypnopompic state if you like. But I leave you with this thought: self-similarity is rife in nature. It is embedded everywhere from the mathematics of fractals to the formation of snow crystals and the songs of birds. Its presence is felt in almost every natural process somehow or other. Think about it: it really does not need to be this way. All things considered, the natural world could be completely random. And yet order arises spontaneously everywhere it can.
‡For a totally absorbing read, go visit this website dedicated to the fastidious, and one must say, obsessive, Wilson Bentley, a man who dedicated his life to the observation and photographic recording of snow crystals.
So I’m watching this science show on the tv and the presenter starts talking about another thing that science has found that we shouldn’t be eating because it will, like, kill you! The chemical in question, so the pretty tv-journo-scientist tells me, is called acrylamide, and is bad, bad, bad!
“So what?” I hear you say, “I don’t hold with those kinds of food additives anyways! I’ll just avoid anything that they add it to!”
Brace yourselves Acowlytes. The news is not good. One of the most common places that these nosy scientists have found acrylamide is in fried or roasted potatoes. You know that crunchy, golden crusty coating on the potato? The best bit? That’s where you get yer mother-lode of acrylamide.
Oh noes! ROAST POTATOES! Someone has found that ROAST POTATOES are bad for you! That surely must be a Sign of the End Times!
This is what it says about acrylamide at Wikipedia:
There is evidence that exposure to large doses can cause damage to the male reproductive glands. Direct exposure to pure acrylamide by inhalation, skin absorption, or eye contact irritates the exposed mucous membranes, e.g. the nose, and can also cause sweating, urinary incontinence, nausea, myalgia, speech disorders, numbness, paresthesia, and weakened legs and hands. In addition, the acrylamide monomer is a potent neurotoxin. Ingested acrylamide is metabolised to a chemically reactive epoxide, glycidamide
Let me translate: Don’t eat roast potatoes. Don’t touch roast potatoes. And never, never, never inhale roast potatoes or cram them in your eyes or up your nose.
Look at those symptoms: Urinary incontinence! Paresthesia! Myalgia. Damage to the male reproductive glands! And it’s a neurotoxin for chrissakes! It will further come as no surprise that acrylamide is linked to cancer as well. If you are a consumer of certain brands of potato chips* that use olestra, you can for good measure add anal leakage to this catalogue of woes.
The bit about speech disorders is true for sure – even reading about all this has rendered me speechless!
Fortunately, there is a crispy golden salty light at the end of the horrible scientific chemical tunnel; other scientists (the kind who I’d much rather hang out with) at J.R. Simplot Co. of Idaho, have developed a genetically modified potato with an altered gene structure that will ‘rebuff’ acrylamide and make a safe-to-eat roast potato or French fry.
Tetherd Cow Ahead’s financial tip for this week is to put your money into J. R. Simplot Co. If there’s ever anything that’s going to turn around the negative public view of genetic modification it’s the salvation of the fried potato. It may be the only hope we have.
*Olean is a company that manufactures Olestra. If you followed the link, you will have seen the somewhat disconcerting counter on their site that ticks out ‘The Number of Servings of Oleanâ„¢ Consumed’ (it’s currently at about 5 billion). Now reflect on that counter as a measure of the flow of anal leakage…
… and since we’re astrologizing, did you all catch the total lunar eclipse and corresponding ‘Blood Moon’ last night? The park near my house was filled with folks looking skyward, which for me was almost as big a thrill as the event itself.
It still amazes me, though, how confused and ill-informed people continue to be about events like this. As I walked up the street to the park, glancing up at the beginning of the eclipse, an old bloke said to me knowingly “Better get a good look – you’ll never see that again in your lifetime…”*
Lunar eclipses occur frequently, sometimes two or three times in a year, total eclipses a little less frequently. ‘Blood’ or ‘Hunter’s’ moons appear whenever there is a total lunar eclipse.† I’ve already seen a few, and I hope to see a few more, all things going well.
Acts 2:20 ~ The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.
Of course the religious loonies leap upon this sort of thing with gusto. As an omen, the red moon is surely the lamest of portents to choose – by my calculation, the Earth has seen at least two thousand of these since the apostle Peter penned the above prediction. Even if you assume that St Peter was referring to a combination of solar & lunar eclipses, it’s not such a rare thing for those things to occur in tandem.
If you want to know when your next Blood Moon occurs, you can do no better than fire up the Javascript Lunar Eclipse Explorer at NASA. Plug in your capital city and your century and you’re set to plan your next End Times Picnic!
*Of course, it is possible that he was clairvoyant, and the real meaning of his pronouncement was that I’ll be turning up my toes before the next lunar eclipse occurs…
†Unless there are extenuating circumstances – a lunar eclipse on December 30, 1982 was almost completely dark. Dust from the recently erupting Mexican volcano El Chichon clouded the atmosphere to such an extent that it occluded the sun’s rays, preventing them from casting their filtered red light on the moon.
Trendhunter is carrying a story about a fashion show that was recently staged by Diesel for their 2008 Spring/Summer Collection. They lead with the headline Holographic Fashion Show – Diesel’s Fashion Show Adds New Dimension and breathlessly claim (undoubtedly cribbing from the Diesel press release) that this it ‘the first time that holograms have been projected along a traditional catwalk’.
Dear oh dear. It looks like the Reverend is obliged once more to step into the fray with his Big Stick of Reason and bash a few heads with it.
The Claim: That this runway show is using some fancy-schmancy system to make holograms of digitally created underwater creatures swirl around and ‘interact’ with the models.
The Implication: That you will see fully realised holographic 3D images floating in ‘thin air’.
The Actuality: The system being used is a simple theatrical trick more than a century old, even if it does use some clever hi-tech riffs. It is not holography.
For starters, this isn’t even the first time that a fashion show has used this particular technique on the catwalk, so Diesel’s trumpeting of this great new idea is a tad overblown. Last year in August, an Alexander McQueen show conjured a ‘holographic’ Kate Moss as the finale to their fashion spectacular. It was done pretty much the same way as this effort, although on a smaller scale.
Here’s a vid of the Diesel presentation from YouTube. You only need to watch a bit of it to get the idea.
Now, I want to say at the outset that I don’t aim to diminish the achievements of the clever technical people and artists behind this show. The effect they have created is pretty cool, for what it actually is. Which is not anything to do with holograms.
The trick they are using here is a variation of an old stage illusion called Pepper’s Ghost. If you have been to Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion you have seen this effect in the Ghostly Ballroom.
There’s a very comprehensive explanation of the Pepper’s Ghost illusion at Wikipedia, but it’s an easy enough idea to understand. Have you ever stood in front of a window at night, and looked outside into the lit street and seen your reflection superimposed over the view? That’s how Pepper’s Ghost works.
In the classic method the audience in a theatre is looking through an angled piece of glass at a dimly-lit stage. The glass is unlit, and therefore completely invisible. In the wings of the stage is a blacked out area with lights that can be dimmed. An actor dressed in light-coloured clothing stands here waiting in the dark, and when the lights come up, the audience sees a full-sized transparent ghostly apparition in front of their eyes, apparently right on the stage (it is a reflection, in the glass, of the now illuminated off-stage actor). The actor can move within the confines of the off-stage black set, and even interact with onstage characters with some minimal preparatory choreography. If you don’t know what you’re seeing, it’s a pretty neat effect.*
The Diesel show isn’t using exactly this technique. My guess is that it exploits a combination of the Pepper’s Ghost principle and the use of a synchronised video projection system on screens below and right along each side of the stage.
This is how I think it works: look closely at the runway in the Diesel show. You can just see a hazy barrier that runs all the way along the stage between the audience and the models. I’m guessing that it’s some kind of glass, or perspex or possibly plastic film. Something clear and reflective. It would have been humungously expensive and a real bitch to set up. It’s angled from the floor at the side of the runway over the heads of the audience. The makers of the illusion boast that it’s the first time that this kind of illusion could be seen from both sides of the catwalk at once – that would be impossible using the conventional Pepper’s Ghost with just one piece of glass. I think therefore, that there are probably two reflection panes, and if you look even more carefully at the YouTube vid you can see a thin line at the top of the heads of the models that is probably the edge of the pane on the other side of the catwalk, conducting a little bit of internal reflection inside the glass. Note that this thin blue line is behind the models, and all the other images are in front of them. Having two panes of reflection would require two synchronous video projections, one on either side of the runway†. Because of the properties of this kind of reflection, the audience only sees an image on their own side, and not the one on the opposite side. Optically, the projected images would appear to be the same distance from the glass pane as the pane is from the projection screen. Probably in this case, the floating creatures would seem to occupy centre stage with the models.
The projection equipment and the screens are lower than the audience (maybe some of it is under the runway) and hidden by barriers that run all the way along the sides of the stage. The models can ‘interact’ with the images because they can in all likelihood see the projection screens down the right and left of the catwalk at their feet.
Here – I made a little animation that shows how it could be achieved:
The projected image is mostly likely corrected for the distortion of the slanted screens (unlike my example) and despite the claims of viZoo, who invented the technology‡, I don’t for a moment buy the idea that the image you are seeing is 3D. It might be a 2D projection of a rendered 3D object, but it is not 3 dimensional looking in the way that a real projected moving hologram would be (if you could actually do such a thing, which you can’t).
It’s a really, really clever piece of wizardry, for sure, but it isn’t done with holograms. And it reminds us that some of the best ideas are the very simplest.
Oh, and the clothes? No, I didn’t notice them either.
*I once saw the technique used in a Star Trek show at Universal Studios where members of the audience were dematerialized in the Enterprise ‘transporter room’. It was a marvellous effect and I was so unprepared for it that I was completely flummoxed for a second or two.
†Or, perhaps, some kind of prismatic image splitter on each projector to make two identical images, one for each side.
‡And who, incidentally, never once claim on their site that their system creates holograms.
I was browsing over at Nurse Myra’s this morning and on following one of her links discovered a sterling example of one of my all-time pet peeves: The Meaningless Scientific Diagram.
I’m sure you know the kind of thing – you’ve almost certainly seen it in those TV commercials for washing powder where a personage in white coat is telling you all about the ‘scientific’ basis for how the stuff gets your shirts whiter than white. Sooner or later, up comes a graphical ‘explanation’ of the virtues of the product. It usually involves arrows, a dumb, proprietary, vaguely scientific name like HydroLux or OxyFizz, and a formula.
And it always means absolutely nothing.
In this particular case it was a website for a product from ‘St Herb’ called Nano Breast Cream. Don’t panic ladies – it’s not a cream for causing your endowments to shrink to sub-molecular size, but in fact uses the miracle of nanoparticles to do exactly the opposite! Aside from ‘protecting your breasts from free radicals and visible cleavage*’ it enhances your bust from 1 to 3 cup sizes! Marvellous!
And this is how it works:
I don’t know about you, but one look at that diagram and I’m entirely confused convinced!
Elsewhere on the wonderful St Herb‡ site there is some explanation of the difference between liposomes and nanosomes with further visual aids:
I like this kind of diagram much better than the earlier one. I don’t know what the heck it’s saying about lipo or nano anything, but it is a striking endorsement of visible cleavage.
For a particularly good laugh, take a look at the instructions for how to apply Nano Breast Cream. Pay special attention to Frame 1 – I think she has a volunteer to help with the experiment!
Girls, I’m willing to wager that once you find yourself in the situation of having a friend towel your breasts dry, the issue of size is merely academic. I probably don’t need to draw you a diagram.
*These are very puzzling claims. I don’t know of any research that indicates that free radicals are a detriment to breasts. Maybe they mean the kind of radicals that you get in university pubs? They can be a bit free and grabby after a few drinks. And then there’s the visible cleavage problem. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that some girls actually go out of their way to create visible cleavage.
‡St Herb. Ahhhh. Doesn’t that name just fill you with reassuring friendly naturalness! Either that or it conjures up an image of dirty old man called Herbert who is thinking anything but saintly thoughts about massaging women’s chests.
About a year ago here on The Cow we had cause to examine the Irish company Steorn and their announcement of the discovery of a remarkable way of creating unlimited amounts ‘free energy’.
As you may remember, Steorn was challenging scientists to disprove their claim that the laws of physics are entirely wrong and promising that you’d never ever have to put your mobile phone on charge again.
Well, Steorn are still chugging along (powered by some kind of energy – mostly produced by hot air I’m guessing) and have wheeled out a gadget to silence the naysayers once and for all! Catchily titled ‘Orbo’, early photos show that the machine looks like nothing so much as a few plastic pipes and some Meccano.
And guess what Cow Fans? They have a working model ready for ALL THE WORLD TO SEE! Well, actually, not so much. You see, Steorn recently announced that Orbo would be unveiled for public scrutiny at the London Kinetica Museum on July 4th. This event was to coincide with a simultaneous streaming on the Steorn site (presumably from somewhere deep withing the Steorn Free Energy Complex) of live video of a ‘simpler’ (their word) version of the machine ‘lifting a weight’. But, darn, golly gosh, just as everyone was tensing up for the complete re-writing of human history, a few problems seemed to have materialized out of nowhere and, well, they had to cancel the viewing and the web demo at the last moment. Colour me surprised.
It seems that heat from the lights in the room where Orbo was to be exhibited at Kinetica somehow interfered with its capacity to create unlimited energy, delicate little thing that it is. One hopes that the consumer model will be a little more robust if Steorn’s plans to roll out Orbo as part of their scheme to solve all the problems of Africa aren’t to appear a little dismal. It gets a little warm in Africa from time to time, or so I’m told.
It isn’t explained anywhere why the Kinetica ‘heat-from-the-lights’ setback should have had any material effect on the planned webcam stream but there you go.
It’s interesting to observe that Sean McCarthy has now come down unequivocally on the side of claiming to have disproved the Laws of Thermodynamics. He says as much on the Steorn site:
The sum of these claims for our Orbo technology is a violation of the principle of conservation of energy, perhaps the most fundamental of scientific principles.
This is an extraordinary position to attempt to defend. I can’t even say it’s controversial – it’s BEYOND controversy.
Scanning through the Steorn website is a perplexing experience. It seems that these guys really do believe in what they’re doing. One is forced to contemplate the following possibilities:
1. They have rewritten the Laws of Physics as we know them.
2. A fairly large group of well-presented and reasonably intelligent people have somehow fooled themselves into believing Possibility #1.
3. They’re pulling our collective legs.
4. They are consummate swindlers, hoping to profit by pulling in the dollars from gullible suckers.
5. There’s something else going on.
Taken in order: Possibility #1 is by far the most unlikely of events. It is true that there have been occasional turbulent upheavals in scientific thinking, but very very few of those come entirely out of the blue without any indications at all from the prevailing body of scientific knowledge. To clarify, the principles that Steorn are suggesting they have discovered overshadow any other scientific revolution you can name. On the other hand, Steorn is in the company of almost countless numbers of people who have thought they had discovered such miracles.
Which brings us to Possibility #2. I guess it is feasible, but I find it hard to believe that none of these people are aware that they are the latest in a very long line of people to have made such claims to their detriment. But I never underestimate the capacity of human beings to comprehensively delude themselves if the conditions are favourable.
Possibility #3: If it’s a joke they’ve dragged it on for an awfully long time, and we all know the secret of good humour – it’s in the timing.
Possibility #4: Where I’m placing my money. Although there’s one further possibility that hadn’t occurred to me until recently…
Which is Possibility #5. Something else. It came to my attention on Tech Blorge last week that the whole Steorn thing might actually be something other than what it seems, specifically, some kind of viral marketing test or information dissemination experiment. The favourite in this field would appear to be a viral for Halo 3, but in my opinion that seems unlikely. It just doesn’t feel right. But there is definitely something fishy about the Steorn site – as the Tech Blorge guys say, it looks more like it’s been put up by some slick advertising types than the usual free energy type of nitwit. It is feasible that Steorn is wheeling in a Trojan Horse.
Are they idiots? Are they conmen? Are they having a jolly old time running everyone around in circles?
Sean McCarthy seems happy to grasp the bull by the horns:
We were very aware that there would be cries of fraud and scam and so on, and I think that we’ve done far more to mitigate and to demonstrate that we’re not a hoax and we’re not a scam than any company could be reasonably expected to do.
Yes Sean. You’ve done everything EXCEPT actually demonstrate that your idea works. Really. If your machine does what you say IT’S A SPECTACULAR RESULT. It’s not a maybe-it-does-maybe-it-doesn’t kinda scenario surely? Show us the money Steorn, that’s ALL you have to do!
UPDATE: This video on YouTube clinches it for me – they are swindlers. This is the most nonsensical piece of rubbish and misdirection I’ve seen in a long time. Wait till the bit where Sean says “…and that’s the science!” and consider what’s gone before. That’s the science? Sean, that was a humungously cretinous piece of waffle. That’s not science by a long shot.
