Daibhid's Journal

As I mentioned last week, I havent seen "The Giggle" yet because I went to Edinburgh for some amdram Discworld from the company that did Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Fringe this year. But since I'm trying to get back into the swing of things here, I thought I'd talk about that instead.

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1. Recycling scientists prefer the term "single use packaging" to "single use plastic", because the problem isn't the material, but what happens to it.

2. The carbon footprint of a plastic water bottle is 1,000 times that of tapwater and this doesn't even include its end of life. Even if they're put in the recycling only 9% will actually be recycled.

3. Not only can young people hear higher frequencies than older people, but the younger they are, the better they can hear them. This means that the annoying "mosquito sound" used to convince teenagers to move on is absolute agony to babies, who don't have that option.

4. Sound travels so well underwater that, before we introduced noisy ships to the oceans, whales in the Arctic and Antarctic could probably hear each other. Despite this, humans were so convinced the ocean was basically silent, that we invented sonically-triggered mines, and were then baffled when they were triggered by the fish dawn chorus, because it hadn't occurred to us that was a thing.

5. While I'm happy to sit for over an hour in a lecture theatre in Edinburgh listening to people talking science, for some reason I have a much lower attention span when I'm in my own kitchen watching a video.

1. Nobody knows how genetics works. The sequencing of the human genome has led to biologists no longer even being certain they know what a gene is, and the one thing we still thought definitely worked on Mendelian rules - genetic disorders - sometimes doesn't, with people occasionally having two copies of a damaged gene and being fine.

2. When beavers were illegally released in England (not to be confused with the intentional reintroduction in Scotland), the authorities had to check what kind of beaver they were, because European beavers are a reintroduction of a formerly native species and that's probably okay, but American beavers with exactly the same behaviours and characteristics would have been an environmental catastrophe somehow.

3. The convention of SI units is that they're abbreviated with a capital if they're named after a person (K for kelvin, N for newton, etc.) The litre is another example, named after Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre, one of the founders of the French metric movement, and the scion of a long line of wine bottle manufacturers, who produced the first litre bottles. Also, Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre is entirely fictional, having been completely made up to pretend compliance with the above, when the real reason is that a lowercase l can be mistaken for a 1. While this was initially a joke, some sources have reported it as fact.

4.The Golden Gate Bridge has a "zipper lane" -  a divider that can be moved from one side to the other, shifting the lanes from six northbound, four southbound to the reverse, thereby adapting to the morning and evening rush hours going in different directions.

5. The procedures for dealing with a lost mobile phone when you're 150 miles from the box it came in and more interested in getting it back than making an insurance claim, do not appear to be entirely fit for purpose. Still, I got to visit Rebus's nick, so that was interesting.

This was ages ago, haven't I written it up yet? Okay, here we go.

It was a good Fringe. I was only down for three days, but I saw The Reduced Shakespeare Company's Shakespeare's Long Lost First Play (abridged), Mort by the group who did Faust Eric last year, and stand-up by Mitch Benn, Robert Newman and Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden. And they were all excellent.
( Saturday: RSC and Mort )

( Sunday: Mitch Benn and Robert Newman )

( Monday: Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden )

Spent much of the day in Dynamic Earth. I've been a couple of times before but it's still neat.
( More anout Dynamic Earth )
( Faust^W Eric )
( Elephant House )

1) The difference between scientists and engineers working on Rosetta is that scientists thought "The comet's shaped like a duck! That's fascinating!" and the engineers though "Oh my god! How do we land on that?"

2) The Royal Astronomical Society has a drinking song based on Halley's Comet.

3) If you filled a bike's tires with hydrogen instead of air, it would reduce the weight by only 10g. A more effective idea would be carbon nanotube spokes, which we might see within 10 years. Or rather, we wouldn't see them; it would look like the wheels were spokeless.

4) A plant grown under both a normal bulb and an infra red bulb will push more energy into the height at the expense of the roots, because it thinks it's in the shade.

5) "Serious games" is the new name for educational games. Kids with cancer who play a shoot-'em-up where you're a nanobot zapping cancer cells are better at taking their medication because they understand what's going on more.

6) The performers at the Lab Notes musical comedy event were awesome, and I need to check out their CDs.

1) Evolutionary biologists don't really know if there's an evolutionary advantage to a sense of humour. Or at least they don't know what to say when someone plays clips of The Comic Strip Presents... and says "So, evolutionarily speaking, what's going on when we laugh at that?"

2) Olber's Paradox, proposed in the early 19th century, is that if the universe is infinite, the light from all the stars should illuminate the night sky. The explanation; that light takes time to travel, and hasn't had time to reach us yet, can also be used to support the Big Bang theory (because if the universe has been in a steady state forever, the light would have had time to reach us).

3) Never plan to spend an entire afternoon at the National Library of Scotland's exhibition hall, because it's tiny. (Especially since the science fiction exhibition I went to was actually in the foyer of the exhibition hall, and comprised two cases of books and a framed print of Starblazer covers.)

4) According to top sf writer Ken MacLeod and a sociologist, humanity is doomed and has been since the 80s. So that was a nice, cheery note to end on.

The Scotsman have had a poetry competition for Homecoming. Apparently they've had responses not just from across Scotland, but from all over the world.

By a curious coincidence, the winners are all from Edinburgh, just like the judges and, of course, The Scotsman.

Stuff I learnt at the Science Festival this year:

1. Near the centre of the galaxy there are stars twice as massive as stars are supposed to get. It's believed the graviational forces are smooshing ordinary stars together.

2. In some parts of America, the Native Americans use Daylight Saving Time, but the colonists don't. So if you've booked a guide for the trail park, the park-keeper will probably give you the wrong time...

3. None of the measurements used in the calender fit astronomical observations exactly, and talk is afoot to stop fiddling with them so they do (the "leap seconds"). This will be good news for everyone whose profession relies on extremely accurate timekeeping, except astronomers.

5. The trans-Plutonian object unofficially named "Xena" has a moon. Which has been unoffically named "Gabrielle".

4. If the first episode of Doctor Who is on while you're away, check the video before you decide to watch Rory Bremner instead of the repeat 8-(...