Netsurfer Science 03.12

You're feeling good about yourself, getting pretty puffed up, in fact, and then they challenge you with this mission - or so they pretend, to your acceptance. Can you really turn it down? We certainly don't think so! "What mission?", you ask. Why, the mission to design an animated sodacreature that rivals any of those already at the sodaplay site. There are several variables to play around with, including gravity, friction, and spring length, and as for the design well, pretty much anything goes as long as it can be built using straight lines. Building something is a cinch; animating it is somewhat more challenging. Some of the creatures here are pretty hilarious and they can be modified by You, the Omnipotent, into even more side-splittingly funny creations. Just try to run one of these things without spilling your coffee! We suspect that there are probably some fundamental laws of the universe to deduce here, by patient experimentation and careful observation. So, study the controls, adjust the frequencies, and see what you can come up with. And, well, we'd tell you more, but this place is a scream and we've been away from the site too long already; we just have to get back to sodaplay. Click on it yourself and you're doomed!
http://sodaplay.com/index.htm

EARTH SYSTEMS
No matter where you go, there you are

Maps of the Past

What makes Christopher R. Scotese site so compelling is its easy ability to draw maps showing what the world looked like at various periods in the past. Fact is, back in the Precambrian, you really wouldnt recognize the place - nor in the Ordovician, the Permian, the Jurassic, the Eocene, the Miocene, and so on. The text is brief and to the point because the maps are everything here. Also interesting is the temperature profile of the past two billion years, which superficially at least makes current concern about global warming look plain silly (click on climate history). In human terms, the process of plate tectonics is grindingly slow, but even 50 million years can make a profound difference. And the thing about movement of the continents is that it hasnt stopped, so you can also step ahead and see what our world might look like in 50 million years: California sliding up the coast, intruding into Canadian waters and on up into Alaska. A hundred million years: the closing of the Atlantic Ocean. Or, 250 million: Africa nestled up against the eastern seaboard of North America. And beyond these interesting slices of past and future you can read some of the authors work on maps or order professional mapping software.
http://www.scotese.com/earth.htm

Future Forests

Although, for many scientists, the jury is still out on global warming and paleontology suggests we're living in an abnormally cool time, for people worried about global warming Future Forests provides an interesting way to help address the situation. What these photosynthetically aware folk do is provide a way to let individuals and companies buy trees to cancel or partly cancel the carbon dioxide produced by their activities. For individuals each tree costs 4, and you can use a calculator to see how many trees you'd have to buy to become carbon neutral, or determine how many to neutralize the CO₂ load of a particular activity. In North America, a person must plant 30 trees to become carbon neutral. In the UK you can get by with only 15 - and Australia only 14. Future Forests also helps companies assess their CO₂ load and work out how to reduce or neutralize it. There's a link to an article entitled 'Responsible carbon sequestration by forestry', which answers many technical questions about the approach and its limitations. Deforestation accounts for more carbon dioxide by far than burning fossil fuels in automobiles, so clearly reforestation can help address the terrestrial carbon sink situation. Once you hand over your money, you get a planting certificate and a map showing you where your trees are planted. This is a well designed, attractive site, which works best with Shockwave, although there's a plain Joe version as well.
http://www.futureforests.com/indexch.html

COMPUTING AND ENGINEERING
Open the pod bay doors, Hal

The Rainhill Trials

In this age of the automobile and the 30-wheeler it's easy to forget that trains revolutionized transportation of people and freight. For over a hundred years, long before they tarmacked over all the green stuff, the iron road dominated transportation. The Rainhill Trials Web site captures something of the excitement of the early days of railroading with its reproduced reports of the 1829 competition to select the most appropriate steam locomotive to use for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, still under construction. The weekly reports from the Mechanics Magazine are complete with engravings that show details of the five contenders for the 500 prize - the Novelty, the Rocket, the Sans Pareil, the Cycloped, and the Perseverance - and they provide fascinating information about the contest itself and a sense of the excitement the contest created. The machines of the time weren't exactly the 6000 HP AC traction diesel electrics of today but were a marvel for their day. In the event, only one engine managed to cover the required 70 miles. Shall we tell you how it ended? Nah! Wouldn't want to spoil your fun, but does the name Stephenson ring a bell?
http://www.resco.co.uk/rainhill/index.html

Night Vision

These two sites illuminate the subject of night vision scopes and binoculars. These devices use the principle of light amplification to enhance our ability to see in low light conditions. They do this by focusing light onto photo cathodes, which employ a phosphor screen that generates photons to provide an amplified image. Different devices have different levels of light amplification and optical magnification. The first site is the briefer and less detailed of the two. The second provides considerable technical detail, technical definitions, and commentary on suitability, capability, and usability. It also discusses the various generations of devices and their performance characteristics. Taken together, the two sites shed plenty of light on an interesting topic.
How I: http://www.pimall.com/nais/n.nv.html
How II: http://adventuresupply.com/hownvworks.html

ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away

Stellar Evolution and Death

It is the fate of all stars to die, but the manner of their death and the way in which they approach it varies enormously. This article tells you why. Part of NASA's Observatorium series, Stellar Evolution and Death describes the evolution of stars and the dramatic events that occur over their lifetime and during their final years. The document is well written, nicely illustrated, and utterly fascinating. While it glosses over complex detail, it provides a fairly sound understanding of the basic processes that occur in stars and why and how stars of different masses end in different ways. Why and how do supernovae occur? What is a white dwarf? What is the likely fate of our sun? How long do these processes take? Why do bigger, more massive stars behave differently from lighter stars like our sun? All these questions and many more are taken up and answered convincingly in this exciting account. This isn't just a wild, improbable story - the pictures and charts nail it down hard. The story of stars is a stunning one and this stellar site does it proud.
http://observe.ivv.nasa.gov/nasa/space/stellardeath/stellardeath_intro.html

NASA Spacesuits

Spacesuits of varying designs have served American astronauts well for nearly 40 years. Not only are they stylish and futuristic, they also serve to provide the wearer with a continuous supply of oxygen, prevent body fluids from boiling away, protect the wearer from micrometeoroids, extremes of heat, cold, and harmful radiation, and seek to minimize chafing during extended extravehicular activities. The history of these suits, a description of the models used on the space shuttles today, and a nice .gif of the manned maneuvering unit can be found at this NASA page. Hope that the pod bay doors remain functional, because without one of these suits, closing your eyes and holding your breath probably wont be effective for very long.
NASA: http://vesuvius.jsc.nasa.gov/er/seh/suitnasa.html
Suit hazard: http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/07/14/contaminated.spacesuit.02/index.html

MATHEMATICS, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY
42

Yo! Yo Yo Physics

Even a so-so yo yo coaxes a grin as it spins its modest act of treason against the law of gravity. Actually, a yo yo works with gravity, combined with rotational kinetic energy, when it climbs back up the string. Read the scientific explanation at PhysLINK.com. Then, check out the Yomega company's Web site for a look at just how sublime the humble yo yo has become. Subtle design features distinguish the autoreturn, the transaxle, the roller bearing, the fixed axle models. Name another sport where you can outfit yourself with top-of-the-line engineering for $9.95.
PhysLINK: http://www.physlink.com/ae18.cfm
Yomega: http://www.yomega.com/

SNO Detector

Neutrinos are some of the trickiest, slipperiest, particles there are, penetrating pretty much through anything they encounter after their birth in thermonuclear fusion processes in our sun and other stars as well as during supernovae. Very little is known about them because they are hard to detect. Detecting them and thus learning more about them is why the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) exists. Built about two miles underground in Inco Limited's Creighton Mine, Thunder Bay, Ontario, to isolate it from cosmic rays that would otherwise give spurious signals, SNO is the most powerful neutrino detector in the world. It uses 1000 tonnes of heavy water valued at $300 million on loan from Atomic Energy of Canada Limited to capture a very small fraction of the neutrinos passing through. Sensors mounted on a sphere surrounding the heavy water detect the faint Cerenkov light emitted by neutrinos interacting with the heavy water. The SNO Web site gives a fascinating glimpse into this important topic, fundamental to understanding the detailed physics of the universe. Our assay: 'SNO good passing this one by.
http://www.town.walden.on.ca/Business/Sudbury%20Neutrino%20Observatory/sno.htm

HYLE

Students of chemistry will do well to reflect on more than balanced equations and pretty colors in the test tube; they should consider the philosophical underpinnings and implications of the science. HYLE is a refereed, international, biannual, free (online) journal for such contemplations, touching here and there on epistemology, ontology, ethics, and contemplation of benzene rings. The site contains a book review service, bibliography, forum, conference announcements and other resources. The current issue offers articles that reflect on "The Epistemological Status of Theoretical Models of Molecular Structure," physical models as tools of cognition, an examination of stereoformulas, the significance of molecular materiality, and the role of molecular models as toys.
http://www.uni-karlsruhe.de/~philosophie/hyle.html

Calculus That Schmecks

Were you one of the legions of high school students who hated calculus because it had no practical application? If so, this site might change your mind about the science shaped by Fermat and Descartes. Really. Stop looking at your computer screen like the people at NSS were replaced by math-loving pod people! Four labs are featured on this site: a rainbow lab where you learn how rainbows are formed; a numerical lab where you learn how to 'integrate' discrete data sets involving carbon dioxide concentrations in a river and model automotive velocities; a beams lab where you learn a little bit of engineering; and a lab where you model population growth. Each lab is divided into small sections, and each section is relatively easy to follow. Go ahead, give calculus another chance. It really can be - if not fun - at least interesting.
http://www.geom.umn.edu/education/calc-init/

ARCHEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY
What is past is prologue

Marl Pit Dinosaur Stuns World

This dinosaur didn't talk but its find spoke volumes. In the summer of 1858, while visiting Haddonfield, New Jersey, William Parker Foulke, a Victorian gentleman interested in fossils, heard that workers had found huge bones in a local marl pit twenty years previously. He decided to dig into this tale, and soon discovered the first ever (almost) complete dinosaur skeleton. The discovery of Hadrosaurus foulkii created a sensation and triggered a global fascination with dinosaurs that persists to this day. This nicely constructed site brings back some of the excitement of the discovery, discusses the significance of the find, and provides maps of the area and pictures of the pit today. The sections are bite-sized, the cumulative effect quite spell-binding, and the site manages to bring alive without pandering to sensationalism and hype the quiet curiosity about the natural world that resulted in the find. In a fascinating footnote to this story, the location of the Haddonfield Hadrosaurus site was lost for a number of years until 1984 when Boy Scout Christopher Brees organized a project to find and mark it.
http://www.levins.com/dinosaur.html

Numismatists: They're Only in It for the Money

To the numismatist, money is not the root of all evil, but the very root of western civilization. Thanks to careful study of coins minted mainly in Rome and in the ancient kingdom of Parthia, historians have been able to piece together fragments of history spanning from about the second century BCE through the fourth century in the area comprising Parthia. At one point, this kingdom included what we now know as Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaidzhan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. Written records are scarce, but gold, silver and base metals survive to tell tales of military conquest and shifting political fortunes. The Parthian Empire site is part of a numismatic Web ring.
http://www.parthia.com/

Museum of Antiquities

The Museum of Antiquities physically located up there in Newcastle upon Tyne and offering free admission for virtual and nonvirtual visitor alike, is the principal museum of archaeology in northeast England. The strengths of the online version probably are the exhibits of material from the Roman occupation of Britain, especially the Hadrian's wall education Web site. You don't quite get the experience of visiting Hadrian's wall on a dreary dull day of drizzle, but it's impressive all the same. Also interesting is the Armamentarium, a detailed online book of Roman arms and armor; Mithraeum, a temple to the Roman god Mithras; and, Flints and Stones, a display about the late Stone Age. With content as fascinating and interesting as this, it's a pity that the presentation, which is overly fond of frames, doesn't match or even impedes the effect. Just some free advice here, Guys: this museum could do with a modern Web design makeover.
http://museums.ncl.ac.uk/archive/

SCIENCE AND ART
Puttin' on the Ritz

The Leaning Tower of Pisa

Last autumn, PBS's Nova chronicled the most successful attempt in 900 years to right the leaning tower of Pisa. In late 1998, engineers started using a soil displacement drilling method to get the tower to move a full inch, which, in tower terms, is a lot. Nova's site posts an interview with the soil specialist who came up with the plan. Read about the other Pisa plans that failed, and about famous monuments around the world which have been saved. The Pisa Cathedral has its own site, which displays an astounding collection of 6400 photographs documenting the tower's every column, every arch and, of course, the bells at the top. For historic context, The Christian Science Monitor offers a brief piece on religious architecture of the 12th century, when construction of the bell tower was started.
Nova: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pisa/
Official site: http://torre.duomo.pisa.it/index_eng.html
Monitor: http://www.endex.com/gf/buildings/ltpisa/ltpcsm121699.htm

Netsurfer Recommendations

Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the cover or title to order the item at a hefty discount from Amazon.com and Beyond.com and send a few pennies our way as well.

The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories
J.L. Heilbron
Harvard Univ Pr; ISBN: 0674854330

Pity the poor Church of Rome in the Middle Ages, poised for but not yet ready to slip into the Renaissance. At the same time that it was holding fast to a literal interpretation of the Bible that put the Earth at the center of the Universe, only a heliocentric model was adequate for setting a more or less reliable calendar and - most critically - predicting the dates of Easter. Indeed, adopting a new Copernican model for a calendar would have acknowledged the superiority of at least some element of other theologies or ideologies. Still, the Church, having tied Easter to the first full moon of spring, needed to punctuate its primacy by setting its holiest observance with certainty. What to do, what to do. Science and the Catholic Church resorted to semantics. While a heliocentric theory couldn't be propounded, a heliocentric hypothesis made an artful tool for calculation. As it turned out, the supposed purposes of 'pagan' sites like Stonehenge were as well served by the soaring cathedrals of the Middle Ages, where sun streamed past skylights, pierced through dark vaulted upper reaches, and fell in sharp shafts onto meridian lines worked into the floor or lighted relics and statuary predictably on sacred anniversaries. Oriented to catch the sun precisely, cathedrals became sacred observatories. Heilbron makes the case that tensions between religion and science of the time are shallowly understood now, that so long as science could help God without actually confronting Him, the Church's selectively blind eye allowed - and even helped - science to flourish. The story he tells is elegant, but it's not simply history. Readers may be surprised by how thoroughly Heilbron wants them to understand the depth of the science of the day and the doctrinal conundrums with which it wrestled. You don't have to review your high school geometry texts to understand the book, but brushing up on the subject would certainly add to your appreciation of several sections.

MEDICINE, BIOLOGY AND ZOOLOGY
It's alive! It's alive!

How to Avoid a Bacterial Catastrophe

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (probably best know by its abbreviated form, the CDC) offers an online editions of its 4th edition of 'Biosafety in microbiological and biomedical laboratories', a comprehensive book aimed at laboratories that deal with more or less dangerous microbial agents. The guidelines range from laboratory practice to equipment to facility design and construction. Four levels of biosafety are defined - well known among fans of science drama - depending on the grade of infectiousness of the bacteria treated. It's a very large document, but then so are the potential consequences of being without it.
http://www.cdc.gov/od/ohs/biosfty/bmbl4/bmbl4toc.htm

The Horse Interactive

The subject matter of The Horse Interactive is, well, you're clever folk, so we don't have to spell everything out, surely! Still, to answer you nagging questions we can tell you that this online version of The Horse magazine provides a generous selection of feature articles, columns and answers to readers questions from each issue of the print version all the way back to October 1997. The site is divided into three main sections. The Essential Horse has horse health and stuff, the Essential Scoop news and the like, and Knowledge Bank is a medical resource. And of course there's a market place guide to merchants who sell stuff you need when you own a horse - or several.
http://www.thehorse.com/

ANTHROPOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY, ECONOMICS, AND GEOGRAPHY
All that we see or seem

Shattered Windows Pro and Con

Crime is a topic far more complex than most politicians admit, as this trio of sources, taken together, makes clear. Reading them together - well, OK, one after the other - is a valuable exercise, as sensible policies need clear-headed analyses, objective interpretation, and unemotional consideration. First up are two on the application of the shattered window theory of crime, which in oversimplified terms is that minor crime, unchecked, begets more crime. The Atlantic magazine article, 'Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety', explains the theory lucidly and discusses how it has been applied to great success in New York and elsewhere. The Wordarchive article, 'The contribution of broken windows theory to crime prevention', is shorter and a useful supplement. So far so good, but then comes the final site, which smashes it all to pieces. In 'Shattering broken windows: An analysis of San Francisco's alternative crime policies' we learn that that city did just the opposite of New York, practicing not zeal in dealing with minor community crimes but indifference and tolerance, yet reaped an even more impressive reduction in crime statistics. So what's going on here? Whatever else we learn, one thing is certain: Be suspicious of politicians spouting simple remedies (as if we needed to be reminded).
Atlantic article: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/crime/windows.htm
Wordarchive: http://www.wordarchive.com/articles/culture/440/firstskirt949870928
San Francisco experience: http://www.cjcj.org/jpi/windows.html

Measuring Wealth and Power, Poverty and Inequality

Economists, sociologists, information theorists, and many others who practice in the twilight between the laboratory and the gates of heaven/hell must have quantifiable measurements upon which they agree/agree to disagree. German engineer G. Kluge has assembled a page explaining how the most common of these measurement systems work. He lays out the algorithms used in many spread sheets to quantify how much wealth various social groups have within a larger society. This is not easy material, but for the social scientist, it's a great introduction to redundancy and entropy, and equality and inequality coefficients from Hoover, Coulter, Gini and many others.
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/SMIPP/frmentro.htm

RESIDUE
We can't be sure what else is out there

Absinthe

It's not quaffed with regularity by the masses now, more a kind of exotic libation, a show-off kind of thing, probably best appreciated, he sniffed, by quiet connoisseurs. Absinthe is green, and very, very alcoholic (60%). The high potency liqueur was once very popular mainly for its ability to provide a cheap alcoholic buzz. Later it was banned in many countries because of its supposedly insidious effects on morality and industry. With neat art nouveau embellishments, this is a fascinating site if things alcoholic are of interest, either in their own right, or through their cultural and societal impacts, if you must have a highbrow reason for getting involved. Explore the reference section first to find out something about the drink before you take your exploring curiosity further. The site has plenty to amuse and inform, with pictures of some of the classic labels, tasting notes, availability info and assorted other comments. There are quotes from famous folk including Alexander Dumas and Oscar Wilde about the potent drink, allegedly invented by Dr. Pierre Ordinaire in 1792, as an all-purpose remedy and cure-all. This is a site with some decorative flair - or is it just too much access to the green stuff itself? Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder?
http://www.sepulchritude.com/chapelperilous/absinthe/

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CREDITS

Publisher: Arthur Bebak Editor: Judith David Contributing Editor: Production Manager: Bill Woodcock Netsurfer Communications, Inc. President: Arthur Bebak Vice President: S.M. Lieu	Writers and Netsurfers: Jason Alderman Jonathan Baum Kate Brown Davide di Lazzaro Geoff Fox Craig Kott Michael Luke Elizabeth Rollins
NETSURFER SCIENCE © 2000 Netsurfer Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. NETSURFER SCIENCE is a trademark of Netsurfer Communications, Inc.