Sign, sign, everwhere a sign

Damn Interesting has a . . . damn interesting . . . article up about the efforts being made to devise warning signs for our radioactive waste dumps.

We need to erect a warning that could be understood by people tens of thousands of years in the future. To keep these future people from, you know. Digging that crap up and poisoning the entire planet with it.

It’s like a perverse twist on “we can send a man to the moon, but . . .”

We can’t even guarantee that the CD we buy today will be readable in 15 years, but . . .

Phew.

Chunka chunka great big asteroid

Scientists didn’t think it was possible to find pieces of large asteroids that have struck the Earth’s surface.

When a large impactor strikes the Earth, a colossal amount of heat is produced; and the asteroid material is believed to vaporise or fuse with the surrounding rocks. A 10-km-diameter impactor is thought to generate temperatures of between 1,700-14,000C.

But as reported by the BBC, chunks of asteroid have been discovered in a 145 million-year-old, 100 mile-wide crater in Africa.

Whither the weather data

This has happened to me more than once. Finding weather forecasts on the ‘net is easy. But whenever I’ve tried finding how much rainfall accumulation Rochester has had over a specific period in the past, I’ve always come up dry. ha ha ha.

Closest I ever got was a NOAA site [update: link now defunct] where the last two days’ worth of data is kept online.

It’s funny how most of the time a search engine will spit back what you want, but once in awhile you hit a combo of too much clutter plus not enough specificity in available search terms. And then you’re sunk.

So I gave up using google’s neurons and turned to the old fashioned kind: I emailed Dr. Scott M. Rochette, Assistant Professor of Meteorology at SUNY Brockport.

And Dr. Rochette came through for me. He knew of a resource — happened to be on the same National Weather Service site I linked above — which lets you request past monthly data. Thanks, Dr. Rochette.

Here’s the page. Why I didn’t find it through their site map, I don’t know, but I sure missed it.

And why do I need this, you ask?

No reason, really, except that I’ve started keeping a rain gauge (nothing special, just an old fashioned clear plastic gauge) (now watch, my dad will be blogging about his electronic gauge next) and I was curious how my readings matched up to the official ones.

For the month of April: official rainfall was 2.18 inches. My reading was 2.4. (Probably the airport is dryer because of all those plane wings flapping. ha ha ha kidding again)

Joking aside we could use more rain — the ground is awfully dry for spring.

And now, I’m going to tag this so the one other person in the Greater Rochester Area who someday looks for this information can find it, once this post is crawled a few times.

Just doing my part.

Your lyin’ . . . microexpressions

Mark Frank, a professor of communication in the School of Informatics at the University at Buffalo, has taken the art of reading “tells” — unconscious signals that reveal our true emotional states — to a whole new level.

First, Frank “identified and isolated specific and sometimes involuntary movements” of 44 human facial muscles. Movements in these muscles can reveal that a person is feeling “fear, distrust, distress and other emotions related to deception.”

Then Frank developed a computer program to automate the categorization of those expressions, based on a numbering system developed by another facial expression researcher, Paul Ekman. The program makes it a lot faster to analyze expressions.

Before this automation was developed, it took up to three hours of playing, rewinding and replaying, videotapes to analyze a single minute of blinks and twitches.

Frank cautions that “one micro-expression or collection of them is not proof of anything.” They are merely clues. Still, his expertise is being sought by a wide variety of law enforcement and military investigators.

While its application is law enforcement is interesting, I find the subject fascinating for other reasons: when I write fiction, I like to reveal characters’ reactions by subtle changes in their body language and facial expressions. By necessity, of course, many of these will be broader than the kind of muscle twitches Frank studies — someone avoids eye contact, or touches his upper lip, or droops her shoulders slightly. But don’t you love the idea that, as work like Frank’s becomes more mainstream, it will help to enrich the “code” writers can use to communicate a character’s inner state?

You also have to think that controlling microexpressions is one talent that separates “wooden” actors from gifted ones.

This part of the article really cracked me up, though.

Frank says he began to develop identification skills when he was bouncer in a Buffalo bar. He says he trained himself to spot behavior that suggested that patrons were underage, packing a .22 or itching for a fight. He developed a sixth sense that allowed him to spot potential troublemakers by the way they looked when they walked in “like they were trying to get away with something,” he says. These were, for the individuals in question, high-stakes situations.

Everybody’s got to start somewhere, right?

From the depths

It’s a given that kids love dinosaurs. But there’s another group of critters that have the same kind of appeal — scary, exotic looks, strange names, and you won’t run into them in your back yard.

Deep sea creatures.

Another way they are similar to dinosaurs — and share the same sort of cache — is that we still know so little about their world.

Here’s a BBC article on the results of a recent deep sea trawl that has resulted in the discovery of some new species of fish and other creatures from the watery depths.

Do you know your own mind?

Project Implicit is an online timed “Implicit Associaton Test” that lets you compare your conscious preferences to what they call “automatic” preferences — preferences of which you are not conscious.

The IAT was originally developed as a device for exploring the unconscious roots of thinking and feeling. This web site has been constructed for a different purpose — to offer the IAT to interested individuals as a tool to gain greater awareness about their own unconscious preferences and beliefs.

It works by flashing words at you; you assign the words to categories. Some of the words are obviously positive or negative. Some of the words are not. The test is looking for when you “accidentally” miscategorize a word. It’s kind of like inducing Freudian slips.

The topic of each session is assigned randomly. I got “coffee vs. tea.” My test results read:

Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for Tea compared to Coffee.

That’s news to me.

I drink a cup of coffee every morning . I often drink a cup of tea in the afternoon. I enjoy my afternoon tea — I view it as a treat. But I don’t look forward to it with the same, ahem, intensity that I seek my morning coffee.

OTOH, I’ve been exposed to a lot of claims that tea is the more healthful drink, and perhaps my ambivalence about my coffee dependency bled through a bit. Plus I’m, ahem, something of an Anglophile. For a variety of reasons, some too delicate to mention. So maybe that’s skewed me toward the cuppa . . . still, “strong preference”? That’s pretty . . . strong.

The test has been used to identify more controversial “automatic preferences,” including detecting unconscious racism. Is it valid for such applications? I don’t know.

If you try it, drop a note in the comments about your experience, or blog about it and I’ll link back to you.

Power up

Damn Interesting has a piece up about nanobatteries (with a clever ending, ha ha ha) that concludes they are “still too expensive or impractical to be put to everyday use.”

Here’s another interesting development in battery design (Wall Street Journal article so subscription required):

Dr. [Angela] Belcher, a materials scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, heads a team that has successfully created a battery assembled by a benign biological virus that binds to gold and cobalt oxide.

The new material “has three times the electricity-generating capacity of traditional battery materials of the same size” and will enable batteries smaller than hearing aid batteries.

But that’s not all. Get a load of this:

Besides high power, the technology promises batteries that are flexible and transparent. That raises the possibility that a small portable video screen — such as the one on a cellphone — could be coated with the viral-battery material instead of being attached to a separate battery. Other applications might involve medical use such as battery power for tiny devices threaded through arteries.

A tiny, clear battery. Just don’t drop it.

Or mix it up with your contacts.

Here’s the MIT press release on the new battery material.

The sky is more than pretty

Blue light apparently delivers the wavelengths needed to regulate our circadian rythmns, according to research described in Science Daily.

Blue sky is a mixture of wavelengths dominated by short wavelength light that gives a blue visual sensation. According to Mark Rea, Ph.D., LRC director, the circadian system is essentially a blue sky detector.

“Blue sky is ideal for stimulating the circadian system because it’s the right color and intensity, and it’s on at the correct time for the right duration — the entire day,” said Rea.

LRC is the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

They performed a study in which they exposed elderly people to blue light, and found that the subjects slept more between midnight and 6 a.m.

We’re not meant to be indoors all day. No wonder so many of us aren’t getting enough sleep.

I wonder, also, about the effect of wearing sunglasses . . .

City living

Here’s an interesting article in New Scientist about an emerging subspecialty in behaviorism/evolutionary biology: how animals adapt when they move into urban areas.

I blogged about urban coyotes here, with a link to an article that briefly discusses how coyote behavior is different in urban environments than rural ones.

It’s an area that will yield a lot of surprising insights in the future, I predict.