Would you say, she’s:

a) attractive
b) average
c) both

and, of course, why?

(hint: wordplay.)

Answer … tomorrow below … (more…)

On October 28th, at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, The World Cultural Council will present the 2006 Albert Einstein World Award of Science to –our pride and joy– Nobel laureate Ahmed Zewail, the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Physics and professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology.

Prof. Ahmed Zewail’s contribution has literally changed the view of the dynamics of matter and created new femtoscience disciplines, with applications in many areas, including the potential for molecular control with atomic precision.

Over the past seven years, Prof. Zewail has established a new field of research and founded the multi-disciplinary Center of Physical Biology at Caltech. This is a new integrated science of structure and dynamics, with the aim of deciphering the fundamental physics of chemical and biological behaviour, from atoms to cells. Prof Zewail is thus breaking ground at the interface of physics, chemistry and biology. The genesis of these accomplishments was his breakthrough development of 4D imaging, or visualization, of molecular and cellular systems, directly in the four dimensions of space and time, and this seminal work of ultrafast electron microscopy and diffraction has already been published.

On a humane level, Prof. Zewail’s contributions are equally impressive. He is renowned for his tireless efforts to help the less fortunate, for his determination to help his native country, Egypt, and region, for his public lectures on world affairs and for his endeavour to inspire young people in matters of science and technology as well as to put forward peaceful solutions to complex world problems. He is also fully involved with his own home institution, Caltech, and serves on many national and international boards and advisory committees.

Ok, so we all know it is bad, but just how bad? … Dr. Loffredo, you are the Director of the Cancer Genetics and Epidemiology program at Georgetown University Medical Center, and you have been studying tobacco use in Egypt since 1997, surely you can tell us?

People who use these devices don’t realize that they could be inhaling what is believed to be the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes in one typical 30-60 minute session with a waterpipe, because such a large quantity of pure, shredded tobacco is used.

Holy! But … at least the water absorbs the toxins, no?

… that is true to some extent if the toxins are water soluble, but tar isn’t, and tar contains the carcinogens. We believe that, compared to the typical cigarette smoker, waterpipe smokers are exposed to larger total amounts of nicotine, carbon monoxide and certain other toxins. And…

There’s an and?

because the tobacco is burning at a lower temperature, it is more tolerable to inhale deeply, and in fact you need more force to pull air through the high resistance of the water pathway. That means the tobacco smoke can be penetrating deeper in a person’s respiratory tract than cigarette smoke does. The damage could be even worse than seen in cigarette smokers, but we haven’t done studies long enough to quantify the true cancer risk.

Oh, so you haven’t really quantified the risk …

Even so, the incidence of lung cancer is increasing rapidly in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries, comparable to lung cancer rates in the U.S. after cigarette smoking became newly fashionable

But… but… but… it’s sooo good.

DNA, over at mindbleed, points to a conversation between Chomsky and Trivers about (self-)deception, politics, and sociology. Here is a video of that conversation:

I love the fact that one can do experiments to test such ideas. Trivers talks about a few such experiments (towards the end of the conversation.) How I didn’t go into sociology, I don’t know.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the winners in its 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. In the photography category, first place was awarded to An Egyptian Child Mummy by Paul Brown et. al.

As reported in Science; this unwrapped 2000-year-old mummy is for a 4-/5-year-old girl, who was named Sherit by the Rosicrucian museum, where it’s been hosted for the past 75 years. 60,000 two-dimensional CT scans, and clever 3D reconstruction algorithms enabled the researchers to “photograph” the interior of the mummy. Amazing. They could even tell that she didn’t die of trauma or infectious disease.

Also pretty cool from past years’ competitions: a 2005 honorable mention in the non-interactive media category: Evolutionary Morphing: Statistical Interpolation of Ancestral Morphology Along an Evolutionary Tree.

It’s two o’clock in the morning, and you’re stumped by a hard problem. Your neural network is as paralyzed as Cairo traffic on a Thursday night… Finally, after going on first gear for way too long, it starts to loosen up, only for you to realize that you’ve run out of gas.

Stupid.

How do you make yourself feel a little smarter than the average zoo resident? Well, bring the level of difficulty down. Way down. And no problem is easier than one that you already know the solution to.

This brings us to tonight’s puzzle: The hunter and the monkey. It’s a classic physics puzzle about, what else, a hunter who is trying to shoot, ehem, a monkey on a tree. (Or–for the PETA card-carrying member–a coconut carried by a monkey on a palm tree. Don’t ask why the hunter/gatherer wants the particular coconut that the monkey has, or why they would even want to shoot a coconut in the first place. But I digress.) The monkey drops (the coconut) from the tree in the same instant the hunter fires his shot. The question is (assuming no air resistance) where should the hunter aim? I guess your choices are: above, at, or below the monkey. Oh, and of course we shouldn’t forget the dreadful second part of the question, and why?

I know the answer to this one. (So, I feel better already.) It goes [something] like this:

(Sorry for the tease. If you can’t wait till tomorrow for the answer, look it up.)

The hunter should aim straight at the monkey (coconut), the reason being (from wikipedia):

To answer this question, recall that according to Galileo’s Law, all objects near the Earth’s surface fall with the same constant acceleration, 9.8 meters per second per second (32 feet per second per second), regardless of the object’s weight. Furthermore, horizontal motions and vertical motions are independent: gravity acts only upon an object’s vertical velocity, not upon its velocity in the horizontal direction… The hunter’s dart, therefore, falls with the same acceleration as the monkey.

The article on wikipedia also explains other ways of looking at the problem in terms of reference frame transformations.

Or, if you’d rather see an animation, click on this image.

Turns out The Mediterranean Sea is not the only mediterranean sea — the Red Sea is one as well.

From Wikipedia:

A mediterranean sea, in oceanography, is a mostly enclosed sea that has limited exchange of deep water with outer oceans and where the water circulation is dominated by salinity and temperature differences rather than winds.

There are two types of mediterranean sea. A concentration basin has a higher salinity than the outer ocean due to evaporation, and its water exchange consists of inflow of the fresher oceanic water in the upper layer and outflow of the saltier mediterranean water in the lower layer of the connecting channel.

A dilution basin has a lower salinity due to freshwater gains such as rainfall and rivers, and its water exchange consists of outflow of the fresher mediterranean water in the upper layer and inflow of the saltier oceanic water in the lower layer of the channel. Renewal of deep water may not be sufficient to supply oxygen to the bottom.

Are you curious to know which type the Mediterranean Sea is? How about the Red Sea?

If you’re a (normal) person who has (normal) trouble visualising all this hyper-dimensional speak that physicists are springing on us, claiming is essential to understanding our universe, maybe this flash animation can help.
Keep in mind, however, the author’s preamble:

The “theory of reality” that I advance on this website and in the book “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” is not the one that is commonly accepted by today’s physicists.

This, I appreciate, as much as I don’t know what to do with. (I am not going to fuss about it anymore cause it’s not that important, unless I am asked to elaborate.) Over at the pontiff’s, where I first found the link to this animation, other commenters have expressed their reservations as well. Regardless of what you think of the logic, the flash animation is well crafted.

I love questions. In particular, the not-so-obvious ones, as serious or as frivolous as they may be; these kinds of questions:

Did the second man on the moon say anything profound?

Sometimes the answer is not as interesting or insightful as the question, then again, it just might be:

Beautiful, beautiful. Magnificent desolation.

Speaking of questions about the moon, someone actually asked themselves, “which areas of the moon are rich in Iron and Titanium, and which are not?” The answer: see figure.

we’re all empty on the inside!

The folks at Phrenopolis tried this visualization:

And you thought there was a lot of empty space in the solar system. Well, there’s even more nothing inside an atom. A hydrogen atom is only about a ten millionth of a millimeter in diameter, but the proton in the middle is a hundred thousand times smaller, and the electron whizzing around the outside is a thousand times smaller than THAT. The rest of the atom is empty. I tried to picture it, and I couldn’t. So I put together this page - and I still can’t picture it.

(via inkycircus)