Party Balloons Will Become Extinct

Party balloons might disappear in the future in order to preserve limited supplies of helium, slashdot article Scientists Speak Out Against Wasting Helium In Balloons, BBC report Helium shortage prompts scientist's balloon use warning.

Of course once breeder reactors are available maybe helium can be created by splitting hydrogen. The wold needs to invest heavily in nuclear technology so we can escape the carbon trap we are currently in.

Best comment in the slashdot thread was by cellocgw, also the first comment in the thread. 

There may be a free-market solution. Let's float a trial balloon and see how everyone reacts.

Test Your Vocabulary

The above is my score from Test My Vocabulary. Take the test and see if you can get a score better than me. I dare you.

Theoretical, Historical and Current Air Lanes of The World

Years ago on this blog I posted a link to a study of shipping lanes in the 18th and 19th centuries, Windjammer and East Indiaman Shipping Lanes. Now very little commercial cargo is shipped on sailing ships. Instead now there are container ships and air cargo. Weirdly there is a coincidence. Fed Ex according to Wiki shipped 15 million tonne kilometers in 2004.  One clipper, The Blackadder, with a tonnage of 900 tons on a trip to Sydney was capable of shpping 20 million tonne kilometers in one 2 month voyage.

Here is a map of the air lanes of the world published as of 1944 from The Atlas of Global Geography. Link from Thande in Things that look like alternate history, but aren't at AH.com. Look at how Canada is nearly empty of air routes. And how the USSR has dense network of air routes compared to China, India and the Middle East.

Here is a map from 1920 about possible air lanes from The People's Atlas. This atlas was published so soon after WW1 with the result one of the only sections that is not prewar is this section. Helpfully it also has pictures of warplanes drawn to scale. As you can see the scale it presumes that commercial air travel was going to limp along at 100 miles per hour. What may please the those futurists who drew this map is that four airlines that were founded in 1920 still exist.

Here is an illustration of the air traffic in 2008 based on observed contrails. It is from a blog concerned with contrails, Contrail Science. The image below comes from a blog post about the growth of air travel in last 30 years, 30 Years of Airline Travel. The paper that blogpost is based on is not available.

Archives, Computers And The End of Histroy

Solzhenitsyn is one of the last major writers to leave behind a vast archives of handwritten manuscripts. (His successors will bequeath their hard drives if they dare.)

David Remnick,

 In the Archives: the Widow's Peak,

The New Yorker, June 18, 2012

Computers make it easy to duplicate, manipulate, search, relocate information. At the same time it makes it easier lose stuff down the memory hole either by action, inaction, error, or mechanical failure. But any simple filing cabinet has a solidity that makes it hard to chuck out the window. I have came across several different predictions about our future data storage needs from sci-fi witters and/or futurists.  There is the scenario that we must eventually need to go space so we can find new places to store our records. In Raj Whitehall's world everything was in computer databanks, when computers failed. So all records, history, knowledge is lost. I have read other futurists that suggest this is the likely outcome and that future history will note a "dark age" where there are scattered and fragmentary records in proprietary obsolete formats.

Computers are great for ephemera, but there needs to be hard copies for posterity.

God's Eye View of the Universe.

To move across the milky way would take light 40,000 years, and this video spans the distance of a galaxy in a millisecond or two. So, 40,000 years is 14,610,000 days, is 350,640,000 hours, is 21,038,400,000 minutes, is 1,262,304,000,000 seconds, is 1,262,304,000,000,000 milliseconds. If we say that that the "camera" in this video is spanning the distance of a milky-way sized galaxy in 1 millisecond, then it's travelling at 1,262,304,000,000,000 times the speed of light. VERY rough estimate.

Nic Foster, explaining
what we are seeing
in the comments section of this video
on YouTube.

Explanation of this video/simulation/animation from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, The First Public Data Release from BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey .  

This video seems to be part of the Total Perspective Vortex as makes galaxies appear as meaningless specks of light. That is the view of the egoist needing validation of the universe. This animation makes your sized galaxy feel small and weak.

I Got Young Ears

Created by Oatmeal

Maybe this why I can't stand the music liked by young people.

Smokey the Bear's Google Map Hack

Came across an interesting Google Map hack that maps forest fires, US wildfires. Unfortunately it only maps American forest fires.I would like something that ties together all world wide forest fires.

Remember what evil Smokey the Bear says, only you can prevent forests.

Too Many Cameras

Remember the Monty Python skit about a collector of of the boiled eggs of birds watchers, see here for bad camera pointed at TV screen. The problem is the observer effect. I long time ago I came across a definition of family from the south pacific: father, mother, brother, sister, anthropologist. Maybe there needs to be less observation and more theorizing and synthesis. Read here about an Austrian Pol who ran a foul of cameras set up to track wild life.

Ötzi The Biker

This image is from Album: A New Face for Ötzi the Iceman Mummy. It is part of an article/slide show about Ötzi the Ice Man. Found this link in a Fox News (horrors) article about Ötzi, 'Iceman' mummy holds world's oldest blood cells.

The comments for these pictures are uses a facebook app. Because of that the comments are more pop cultural than scientific.

OMG... IT'S KRIS KRISTOFFERSON!

William R Warren Jr

Looks like he was born to ride.

Dennis Ray Wingo

Just a small mild irredendist comment. Ötzi was found 92 metres inside Italy. Or to say 92 metres inside Italian occupied Austrian South Tyrol. Don't tell me that the issue is resolved.  The Gruber–De Gasperi Agreement was signed in 1946, not a time when the Austria had a lot of diplomatic leverage and was still occupied by the Soviets among  others.

I Love the Whole World

This TV ad for the Discovery Channel is an adaption of an old campfire song.

Here are the lyrics that someone has transcribed.

I love the mountains
I love the great clear skies
I love big bridges
I love how great whites fly
I love the whole world and all its sights and sounds
boombiada boombiada boombiada boombiada boombiada
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
boombiada "" "" ""
I love tornadoes
I love arachnids
I love hot magma
I love the giant squid
I love the whole world its such a brilliant place
boombiada '''''''' (forever)

(from a link on Adfreak)

Update

The original video disappeared, the new one is twice as long. The lyrics above now only apply to the first half of the video.

American Dialect Maps

The fictional character Henry Higgins is an expect of of different British dialects and combination thereof. Here is series of American dialect maps derived a survey of internet users in 2002 put together by some linguists then at Harvard. Although it is a billed as a survey of "North American English" only the locations of American participants are mapped. The survey has asks participants questions of pronouncement and usage. The map above is one map for the question "What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?".

Personally, I heard/read of liquid sun(shine) as a metaphor for nuclear fire.

Home Appliances Fed On Rotting Flesh.

Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots from Auger-Loizeau on Vimeo.

Years ago there was a bug zapper ad featuring Vincent Price. As the bugs were consumed he would chortle an evil laugh. Unfortunately I can't find it on Youtube. These innovative designs are part of an experiment in "predatory cyborg furniture". The only design that seems really gross is the coffee table that eats mice.

This is also got a mention on NPR, Meat-Eating Furniture, and slashdot, Designers Create Meat Eating Furniture.

Where Polar Bears Come Fromm

Many people looks at myths as explanations for how things have happened. However in my view myths are less explanation than explanation within in a world view, culture and religion. They more stories that stress the importance of a culture's world view, gods and heroes, than flat and culture free science and history. The story of creation is more a story of why "the heavens and the earth" were created, Genesis (1.1), then an explanation of how.

This short flash animation, Drunk Science, explains where polar bears come from.

The Shipping News - Past & Present

The image above is a detail from a Globe & Mail ROB graphic, The Global Shipping News. Three years ago this blog has an entry on Windjammer and East Indiaman Shipping Lanes. The link was from a economic history blog. That map was created by going through ship logs to find relative positions of a couple hundred ships from the 17th to 19th centuries. There is a new crowd source project, Old Weather, out there to look in the same logs, types of logs, to gets weather readings that can be graphed in time and space. This project is also looking at a different collection of ships than the Windjammer one. Old Weather is getting people to transcribe logs from Royal Navy ships from the late 19th and early 20th century. The other project had looked at English, French and Dutch in both commercial and government hands.

Galaxy Zoo

Galaxy Zoo is crowd sourced project to classify galaxies. In the talk given by Chris Lintott, one the Galaxy Zookeepers explains the image above, watch on Big Ideas, listen on Big Ideas, explains the need for us to help astronomers. The problem is that our technology allows us to many, many, many more galaxy than in the past when galaxy photos could be published, on in thin books,

Cellular Biology as a Game

Cell Craft is game that teaches the basics of cellular biology. In the game you have perform certain actions that cell do all leading to cell division and beyond. I was unable to finish. I knew nothing about about cellular biology before this game and now I know I nearly nothing.

Total Perspective Vortex

Total Perspective Vortex was a torture device The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy designed to make you feel insignificant and life meaningless. In the TPV the victim is shown, with VR, the entirety of the universe.

Now this game/toy/program, The Scale of the Universe, from Newgrounds does this as well, minus hopefully the mind destroying effects.

I'm Dreaming of a Nerd Christmas

slashdot has a story on the engineering of Santa Claus, The Science of Santa. It is a discussion based on a New Scientist article, The Science of Santa. And based on the book, The Truth about Santa. The article and nook are both written by Gregory Mone.

There are some amusing comments on slashdot.

yanyan provides a link to a previous calculations of Santa, Santa Claus: an Engineering Analysis.

girlintraining gives this acidic cimment on nerds:

Amazing. They believe in advanced quantum physics AND Santa. Most ordinary people would just say "he doesn't exist" around the age of 9 and move on. But not geeks!

Brains are Important

But
But
But Bender need brain for smart making.

Philip J Fry on the need for brains in
Futurama S02E014

Cool Art Project and the Heartless Corporation That Ripped it Off

This short film gives you context and scale to imagine yourself on a trip to space. I first saw the copy of this film. Toshiba has a new ad out that replicates this with a higher budget and better electronics. Here is more detail on Escape Vehicle No. 6 from Simon Faithfull, the artist who created the project.

Toshiba and its ad agency is trying very hard to be like marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe they were described in current and far future editions as; "a bunch of mindless jerks [who'll be / who were] the first against the wall when the revolution comes."