Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Brand-new data came out yesterday–the best picture yet of the early, early universe. Jim Peebles (who long ago taught me graduate quantum mechanics) flew down to St. Thomas yesterday with four papers in an unopened envelope; he had pledged not to look at them until exactly noon. Did he wait? I asked. I did, said Jim Peebles.

Wired calls it “the smoking gun” for inflation; the NYT calls it the “earliest signs yet of a violent baby universe.”

I also love this quote from the NYT article:

“Inflation theory, which was invented by Alan H. Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been the workhorse of Big Bang cosmology for the last 25 years…

Dr. Guth, who is at a conference in the Caribbean, was said to be walking around with a big smile.”

I can confirm that Alan Guth is smiling, since I sat next to him at breakfast this morning. But then, so were all the rest of us–what a beautiful morning!

And if Frank hadn’t left his computer in the room, I’d be out enjoying it, instead of sitting here blogging.

Sick of signing her novels, Margaret Atwood invented a long-distance pen, says Wired. Thanks to her Unotchit, Atwood can sit in her livingroom manipulating one robotic pen, while across the Atlantic its spindly twin scrawls her signature onto somebody’s brand-new Oryx and Crake.

Take out the Atlantic Ocean, and this looks just like Thomas Jefferson’s double-pen setup for making quick copies. (Play with it in QuickTime.)

“The finest invention of the present age” — that’s what Jefferson called it.

In 1804.

As my mom would say, it seems great minds think alike.

What does it sound like?

Listen for yourself as the baby Hippocampus erectus nibbles, tink-clinking like alien faint wind-chimes. Then stick around to play UCSD’s seahorse game…

This moment of zen tranquility comes to you via Marc Abrahams of the Ig Nobels. Did you notice that his blog has a new URL now? Thanks, Marc.

Throw a box into a cage full of chimpanzees, they fight for the box.
Throw a box into a cage full of bonobos, they have sex inside it.

Ira Flatow

Just a small sample of outside-the-box chitchat over breakfast this morning, with Ira Flatow and Star-Trek-deconstructionist Lawrence Krauss, not to mention Frank Wilczek. In other news, Frank is playing Sudoku with Mathematica, Lawrence has a new beard as well as a new book (Hiding in the Mirror : The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond), and Betsy Devine has much more good stuff than she can blog.

Fans of Science Friday, do you recognize this picture?

Well, if not, why not? It’s on the very first page of results if you Google-image-search for
ira flatow.

The image comes from a website describing a new book called
Math and the Mona Lisa: The Art and Science of Leonardo da Vinci–that sounds pretty good. Which goes to show you won’t go far wrong searching for Renaissance podcast-man Ira Flatow.

Microbiologist Rita R. Colwell addressed today’s APS meeting on “Oceans, Climate, and Health: The Cholera Paradigm.” Epidemic diseases now fly over the global travel networks “almost as fast as money.”

Although cholera outbreaks rise, and fast, in response to rising ocean surface temperatures, the US isn’t likely to be hit severely because we have good infrastructure delivering tapwater.

But mosquito-borne diseases may be another story. As air temperatures rise (spring flowers come two weeks earlier in DC than they did a decade ago), disease vector mosquitos travel north, adapting in realtime to shift their reproduction to shorter days and earlier spring seasons.

Scary stuff, fascinating talk. Just one of many, this year at the APS meeting.

“Horses don’t like me, but wolves like me,” says Lulu* over dinner tonight.

“And rhinoceroses,” adds her husband.

“Oh, yes, Robby the Rhino liked me very much. But that was because he saw me with my friend Jane, the veterinarian who collected his specimen.” We then pester Lulu until she tells us this story:

Robby the Rhino was a very fine rhino. His sperm was in much demand, so for many years it was collected by a man who would sit in the back of a Volkswagen Beetle with an artificial vagina. Robby the Rhino would mount the Volkswagen, and produce his specimen.

But as time went on, poor Robby became arthritic. He could no longer mount the Volkswagen. So Jane used to collect his specimen, stimulating him while he walked and hobbled and limped around inside his enclosure.

I was visiting [the big US city] where Jane lived, and she invited me to come visit Robby at the zoo. She was wearing a white zip-up lab coat, and she gave me one also. As soon as Robby caught sight of Jane in her white coat, he got…very happy. We went into his cage, and Jane was working on collecting his specimen. Then she said to me, “Lulu, he likes to have his nose patted. Why don’t you pat his nose?”

Now, a rhinoceros has a very, very big nose. With a horn on the end of it. I’m thinking that if I get close enough to touch him that I could be mincemeat. And then I look out of the cage, and there is a five-year-old boy with his grandparents, all of them staring at what Jane is doing.

So while Jane is saying, “Just pat his nose, he likes it,” I’m thinking that when I do that, they’ll be staring at me. But then I remind myself that not one person in [big American city] knows me, so I get up my courage and I pat Robbie’s nose. And then he gives Jane his specimen. He really did like it.

Now Robby the Rhino is dead, but his sperm lives on. And I, for one, will never forget this story!

No, that isn’t a nightmare low-residue menu–it’s three different foods introduced in 1937.

And, for a few more factoids from the Food Timeline:

• Beans and walnuts are the oldest of the 14 superfoods–their use dates back to 7000 BC.
• Popcorn was invented about 3600 BC; butter wasn’t discovered until 600 years later.
• Marshmallows and liquorice both date back to about 2000 BC.
• I am older than Marshmallow Peeps but younger than Bisquick.

Wired News has the story and pix–so do about a billion other sources.

Damn, next year we are sooooo doing better than attending in effigy!

No, not those ancient take-out boxes I just excavated from fridge…the BBC has news (and horrible photos) of some 4,000 year-old noodles unearthed in China.

The article quotes Professor Houyuan Lu: “Prior to the discovery of noodles at Lajia, the earliest written record of noodles is traced to a book written during the East Han Dynasty sometime between AD 25 and 220, although it remained a subject of debate whether the Chinese, the Italians, or the Arabs invented it first…Our discovery indicates that noodles were first produced in China,”

In other words “Take that, you anti-Marco-Polo-ite Italian pasta patriots! Neener neener to those who claim the Arabs were first! All your spaghetti are belong to us!”

But wasn’t that tactful of the BBC to hold back this news until after Columbus Day?

I’m sorry I ever hinted Brits weren’t polite…