Netsurfer Science 04.03

Galileo has been locked in Jupiter's gravitational bear hug for over five years now, already into its 29th orbit of the gas giant. During all that time a treasure trove of images has been transmitted to Earth and this NASA site is where to find them. The place is large enough easily to justify its own search facility. Images can be searched by scientific objective, orbit number, or key word, and they can be downloaded in various sizes and formats. They are numerous and stunning enough that you could sit mesmerized by your computer monitor for days, oblivious to the world around you. The Jupiter system has often been described as a solar system within a solar system, with its huge number of satellites, including volcanically restless Io, icy Europa, cratered Callisto, and magnetic Ganymede, all well represented in the image libraries, along with pictures of the Earth, Venus, some asteroids, and a comet taken during Galileo's long, clever journey to Jupiter. This is a stunning place, full of visual wonders, an d an enormously useful and fascinating resource.
http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov/

EARTH SYSTEMS
No matter where you go, there you are

The Salinity of Rivers

Consider a strange world where canals take water away from the fields, rather than to them; sinks have no drains; rivers flow upstream; crops have drainage below, rather than sprinklers above; fresh-water rivers are lined with desalination plants; clean-water policies pollute the environment, and public funds benefit private agriculture. No, it's not in the imaginations of Wells, Carroll or Swift; it's right in the US, where nearly 40% of food production is supported by such a system. As more and more river water is diverted for agricultural and industrial uses, the salts that evaporation leaves behind become an increasing problem both for the growers and unfortunate downstream residents. A veritable house of cards keeps things (nearly) in equilibrium, but one wonders how long this can be supported and expanded. And, at what expense? Whose idea was it to grow crops in the desert, anyway?
http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/salton/TheSalinityofRivers.html

Ocean Drilling Program

The Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) is an international partnership of scientists and research institutions that explores the geological history and structure of the planet through the drilling and analysis of undersea core samples of rocks and sediments from around the world. Data from ODP are available here at the program's website. While the site does have photographs, press releases, information on the drilling ship, maps, and so on, you should be aware that this isn't a Mr. Science kind of website, but rather a vast and detailed database of thousands of documents. Included are the ship's logs, preliminary reports, and scientific results.There are also picture galleries, related research links, and information on how to participate in a research cruise as either a scientist or a student trainee. Most data pages are also available in .pdf format. So, if petrology, sedimentology, paleomagnetism, or microbiology is your passion, this is a research resource that you should not overlook.
http://www-odp.tamu.edu/

COMPUTING AND ENGINEERING
Open the pod bay doors, Hal

Centre for Intelligent Machines

Sounds ominous, but this isn't where mad scientists are plotting miniaturized versions of HAL or worse. It's a sober laboratory at Montreal's McGill University, with the important aim of developing the knowledge needed so humans don't have to tell machines every little thing they need to know to do something properly. The small, multidisciplinary team of professors, assistants and grad students focuses on control, robotics, and perception. Each focus has its own content here, with no common design. While the control group has nothing much of interest except the names of the professors involved, the other two provide details of past and current projects, contracts, and lic.
http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/

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.

Starry Night Backyard Special Edition

Space.com Canada; ASIN:B000059WJ0

There's never been a grander Rorschach test than the night sky. What do you see here? And here? And here? Lions and snakes and bears. Oh, my! Anyone interested in the night sky (or the daytime sky, for that matter) will appreciate the marvelous Starry Night Backyard Special Edition. Set your location and Starry Night draws the heavens as they appear on your horizon minute by minute. Orion marches across your backyard and your screen. The Hydra slithers over your back fence. Starry Night names each star in the constellations and describes their distance from your backyard (in light years, of course). The ghostly denizens - crows and maidens and archers - materialize and shimmer on your command. An excellent text accompanies. Stay current with what's happening in your sky tonight with a connection to Space.com or glimpse what your heirs will see in the sky 8000 years hence. Some of these celestial programs assume a good deal of knowledge on the part of the user; Starry Night will appeal to families, anyone who

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

Solar Max

We are in the middle of solar max, the high point of an 11-year cycle of activity on the Sun. Except for worrying about sunburn, most of us aren't aware that the Sun is in a state of almost constant flux, creating solar winds, gigantic magnetic storms, and coronal mass ejections, outpourings of hot gases that dwarf the Earth in size and fly right at us at breakneck speeds. 'Though we're protected on the surface by Earths own magnetic fields, space weather can wreak havoc on almost anything that can be affected by magnetic fluxes. During the last solar max (1989), many satellites suffered hits and the entire Quebec power grid shut down. Eleven years later, we have many more vulnerable satellites and have more concern than ever about power outages. This NASA site is filled with detailed data and analysis from an amazing array of instruments on Earth, in space, and international in scope, including SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. There is information, updated constantly, that covers solar and mag netic windstorms, the unique magnetosphere that surrounds Earth, and surprising graphics; the Sun is not yellow, but orange.
http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/istp/outreach/solarmax/index.html

MATHEMATICS, PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY
42

Britney Spear's Semiconductor Physics

Britney Spears is a pretty girl and here pretty pictures of her, not the raunchy kind you sometimes see, get us to look at physics. It's an unusual approach, which certainly has its attractive features. Each topic has at least one picture of Britney, sometimes more, except for edge emitting lasers, which has none for some reason -so just isn't worth bothering with. Clearly, once you've raced through this laser physics stuff, every time you see a picture of her some equation will pop unbidden into your mind - at least we think that's how it's supposed to work - not to mention what happens when you see an equation! Once you've mastered the main course, there's a link to the illustrated Britney's Lip-Glossary of Semiconductor Physics. And, of course, there's some wallpaper to perk up the computer scenery. The hard part here will be not clicking on into the BOMIS Spears ring sites and not getting much physics done. Nice pictur.., er equations.
http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm

Chemical and Biological Warfare

These pages were developed by students taking Chemistry 450 at Cal Poly, in the spring of 1996, the objective being to give a summary of chemical and biological warfare and weapons (CBW), as well as efforts to outlaw them. Apart from the content, which varies widely from poor to good, this place is an interesting demonstration of what works and what doesn't using the Web as a communications tool. Evidently, each group of students did its own thing, the result being a wide, interesting range of approaches using the Internet. Some work very well, while others substitute design, not all of it effective, for content. There's an interesting introduction pointing out that CBW is the harmful side of biotechnology, which has a very bright good side, and that it's a lot easier to engage in than nuclear technology. Not all the content is as competent, however. For example, the chemical warfare in World War I and ancient times is disappointingly empty. On the whole, though, the material is interesting and the variety of design and communication styles is an instructive demonstration of how the Internet opens new communication possibilities while still insisting on boring old rules about presentation.
http://www.calpoly.edu/~drjones/chemwarf.html

ARCHEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY
What is past is prologue

Museum Notes

The Newfoundland Museum is a pleasant place to stop a while. Breathe in the air. Experience the quiet. Slow down, put the TSE or NASDAQ out of your mind for once, and just shusssh. We start with a review of the Beothuks, Native inhabitants of Newfoundland who became extinct following the European invasion. We'd always heard that settlers hunted them like animals, but it appears that the Beothuks died out not because they were murdered (as such), but mainly because they lost access to the sea and the food sources it represented. Once we've digested that woeful tale, we turn to an account of the museum's own checkered past, and so it goes through 14 intriguing, eclectic, and unpredictable documents. Somehow this place reminds us that however much we overlay ourselves with fashion, with the new and trendy, we are always and at all times humans sharing a long past full of tragic and amazing twists and turns from the first stirrings long, long ago. Mysteriously, you meet yourself here, the act of preserving rooting us in a context, a culture, a people, a nation, a common species. Strange what ideas quiet contemplation puts into your head! Using the high tech tool of the Internet, still a relatively new technology, to cement ourselves to the past is nicely ironic, and apt.
http://www.nfmuseum.com/notes.htm

Climate History

What with today's concern about global warming, it would be timely for those of us who take an interest in climatology to understand the fluctuations in the planet's overall climate, which has been changing constantly over eons, and there is plenty to learn at this site from the generally excellent Paleomap Project. How is the historical record of the climate determined? By mapping the distribution of ancient coals, desert deposits, tropical soils, salt deposits, and glacial materials, as well as the fossils of plants and animals that are sensitive to climate. There are also pages on the methods of mapping past positions of the continents and how continental topographies are subject to relatively rapid changes; indeed one must be aware that many familiar topographical features are ephemeral as a result of rising or falling shore lines. The website features 27 world maps of each of the major geological eras and an animation of the changing location of the Earth's climate belts through time.
http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm

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

Tarantula's Burrow

We hope the title is enough to scare away arachnophobes, but just to be sure: if you don't like spiders, don't click here unless you're into habituation therapy or just like to terrify yourself. Arachnophiles, however, come on in because there is a visual feast of images and text about spiders, especially tarantulas, lists of dealers, descriptions of the disposition of various types - which range from docile to highly aggressive - games, puzzles, jokes, care sheets, spider animations (works with Internet Explorer browser only: fie!), and articles with facts and intriguing details. Do we really need to defend the eight-legged, silk-secreting things? If so, let's just say they help to keep the insects down, even if their image isn't helped by their method of turning the insides of their prey to liquid before sucking them up for supper. The site also provides similar treatment for scorpions, snakes, and snails, thus constituting a quartet of less than widely loved creatures. Among the games, we liked splat man, where you have to guess the right letters to save the spider from getting splatted. Now, let's have no deliberate cheating. Be nice!
http://www.arachnophiliac.com/burrow/home.htm

Fighting 19th-Century Cholera Epidemics

You might liken 19th-century doctor John Snow to a fire fighter; after he died, epidemiologists revealed the nature of the cholera microbe itself, but Snow put out the fire it spread throughout the world. In 1854, as the pandemic ignited for the third time, jumping from continent to continent, blazing through London, killing thousands, mostly in poor neighborhoods, Snow stopped an outbreak in Soho; he simply had officials remove the handle from a public water pump at Broad and Lexington. Meticulous research had led the anesthesiologist to believe cholera spreads through contaminated water and food, instead of through the air, as was commonly thought. UCLA's School of Public Health documents many aspects of Snow's tremendous contributions to epidemiology.
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow.html

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

Six Nations Democracy

There's a slight whiff of overthrow-the-establishment about this place, but it's designed to make the point that the people of the Six Nations, or the Iroquois Confederacy as the French called them, have a proud and long-standing democratic tradition that in turn influenced the American founding fathers. It makes this point by providing a long series of excerpts from writings and illustrations on this theme. Like the earlier Athenian democracy, the early Native American democracy may have worked as well as it did because of the relatively small number of people involved. Whether it has any lessons for the ills of voter indifference and alienation that afflict most modern, highly populous democracies, parliamentary or republican, is questionable. The site is thought provoking, and interesting from an historical perspective.
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/

Zulu Culture

Some of the Nguni people eventually established themselves in the White Unfolozi River area of South Africa. There Malandela begat Zulu, meaning heaven, his second son and after whom the clan came to be named. Zulu begat Punga, Punga begat Mageba, and his sons gave rise to other sons in the usual way until Senzangakhona fathered a boy named Shaka born in 1787, the result of a liaison with a woman from a nearby clan. Shaka put the Zulu on the map. Under his leadership, the Zulu became prosperous, numerous and feared. Ambitious, cruel, and ruthless, Shaka developed the short fighting spear and the chest and horn battle formation used to confront, surround, and annihilate opponents. His leadership was no model of enlightenment but, under him, the Zulu became powerful enough that they were later able to contend with the British and trekkers, for a while at least. All this is told in this brief overview of Zulu history and cultural traditions, mostly extracted from a book, and fascinatingly decorated. The battles are here, of course, but also information about Zulu cuisine, clothes, dances, drums, and religion. This is a brief look at a fascinating people.
http://www.kzn-deat.gov.za/tourism/culture/intro/intro.htm

Indigenous Peoples Time Line

Phil Konstantin, a member of the Cherokee nation of Oklahoma, California Highway Patrol officer, and prolific writer has assembled an intriguing chronicle featuring 3000 historical events involving the indigenous peoples of North America. Reading randomly gives a compelling, if grim, impression of mostly European settlers using every dirty trick in the book to displace North American Natives from their lands. At first, there was always somewhere else for the Native peoples to go, but later space would run out, with sad consequences. Phil's labor of love is full and fascinating. The event descriptions are the heart of the site, but there's more here as well, including a link to a moving commentary about the death of his wife, killed in a car crash in 1999. This is a site that's worth dipping into from time to time, rather than devouring in one long marathon.
http://members.tripod.com/~PHILKON/index.html

Folk Philosophies and Globalization

The term 'folk philosophies' addresses that system of rules - shared, mostly unconscious - pertaining to everyday wisdom. You could translate it, more or less, with the words 'common sense'. As these rules make up a large part of the matrix of the representations of the external world within our minds, their absence, due to many factors typical of our time, bears toward chaos. Those few forewords are meant only as an enticement for your hunger for knowledge, which can be sated reading the full paper on crowd psychology and ideology. It offers a good start point for anyone to ponder the century just ended.
http://www.analysis.com/vs/vs87c.html

SCIENCE LITE
Where are you, Mulder?

ACME Klein Bottles

Have you ever confused someone with a Mbius Strip, a long, narrow strip of paper whose ends meet to form a loop, but with a twist in it? It really has only one side, so you couldn't paint it with two colors without colors meeting somewhere along the flat surface. A Klein bottle is like that, but extended into the next dimension. It has an indeterminate volume, because the boundary between the inside and the outside of the bottle may only be arbitrarily assigned. Sure enough, the containers can hold liquids, but the notion of 'inside' and 'outside' is a bit confused. They're for sale at this site, and they look pretty cool. Imagine the look on Aunt Martha's face when you ask her to refill the salad dressing cruet. What do you suppose would happen if you put Schrodinger's cat inside a Klein Bottle?
http://www.kleinbottle.com/

Schrodinger's Cat

Erwin Schrodinger is the Austrian physicist who proposed the thought-experiment that lifted the world of quantum uncertainties to the macroscopic level, to the perplexity of many. It was the Principle of Uncertainty that told him that the properties of a given subatomic particle could not be perfectly known - the observer himself interfered with the measurements in a way that could not be prevented; in fact, it seemed as if, paradoxically, the initial state were dependent upon the later observer. It was Schrodinger who imagined that if you could base a physical experiment on a subatomic property, then the results of that experiment would persist in a strange sort of limbo where the either/or results of that experiment would both be true, at least until the observer does what he has been hired to do (i.e., observe). And what better test subject could there be to place in such a limbo than a cat? The first site, from Room 103, describes the feline dilemma as a friendly teacher would, and comes from a site that has number of answers to perplexing science questions. Other links cover various other aspects of the paradox, some to far reaches of the Web. (The validity of any of the links may depend on your actually clicking on them.)
Room 103: http://www.room103.com/archive/q_schrodengercat.htm
Interactive Schrodinger's cat: http://www.phobe.com/s_cat/s_cat.html
Schrodinger's equation: http://online.redwoods.cc.ca.us/DEPTS/science/chem/storage/Schrod/
Equation (detailed): http://world.std.com/~sweetser/quaternions/quantum/schrodinger/schrodinger.html
Schrodinger bio: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bpschr.html
Schrodinger's stamp: http://www.wizard.net/~aldonna/stamps/schrodinger.htm
Matt Whitaker views: http://www.bridgewater.edu/~rbowman/phys420/matt/schrodinger.htm
Another page: http://www.redrival.com/mdc/
Schrodinger's dog: http://hep.uchicago.edu/~covault/schro_dog.html
Schrodinger's cat-ion experiment: http://www.phys.uni.torun.pl/~jkob/physnews96/node116.html
Schrodinger's superconductor: http://www.lahaaland.com/science/physics/physics241.html
Schrodinger's crater: http://www.space.edu/moon/atlas/Farside/Schrodinger.html
As a poem: http://lalaland.cl.msu.edu/~vanhoose/humor/0228.html
Animal rights perspective: http://www.rupa.com/pipermail/jokes/2000-January/000670.html
Rock band: http://www.schrodingerscat.co.nz/
Schrodinger's cat anxiety: http://www.blakjak.demon.co.uk/schrdgr.htm
Schrodinger-inspired art: http://www.nadia.org.uk/quantum.html
Schrodinger's screensaver: http://www.pparc.ac.uk/Ed/Sv/Download.asp
Schrodinger's election: http://www.spectacle.org/1200/election.html

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

Science As Culture

Process Press in the UK now offers an online version of one of its magazines, Science as Culture. Articles contrast and compare schools and viewpoints in academic and popular scientific thought. A recent piece by Val Dusek tackles influences trickling down from the fascination with all things genomic; 'Sociobiology sanitized: The evolutionary psychology and genic selectionism debates' posits that the new evolutionary psychologists are yesteryear's sociobiologists without the offensive racist baggage with which that school was saddled, albeit unfairly. While the editors of this site may have a zest for provocative material, we cannot help but notice the proofreaders are less interested in their jobs.
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/rmy/dusek.html

Natural Life

Natural Life is the Web site of a Canadian print magazine of the same name. Described as "your guide to sustainable healthy living", the material mainly concerns environmental issues and individual responsibility. It should be no surprise to find here articles by and about Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth, and topics such as farmers concerned about loss of the family farm, and organic foods. Although there's little appreciation for pesticides or GM products here, which some argue are essential to feed the rising world population, the tone doesn't seem particularly strident. It aims to inform and alert readers, and envisions that readers will get involved and make healthy choices in their own lives The general store is kind of quaint, featuring books, music and wholesome, nonviolent games, as well as hemp products, including clothing. The magazine is very generous with its contents; current and back issues all seem to be here in their entirety, including want ads and editorials.
http://www.life.ca/index.html

PSEUDOSCIENCE, BAD SCIENCE, AND WORSE
I rarely use it myself, Sir. It promotes rust.

Spontaneous Human Combustion

There's no doubt that a human body will burn under the right circumstances, but the notion of someone abruptly bursting into flames and dying without a source of heat, fuel, or ignition is preposterous, of course. That doesn't deter the author of this site, who painstakingly examines cases involving conflagration of the human type. Most, he admits, can be explained without invoking notions of spontaneity, but others, well, they're unexplained so constitute possibles, he thinks. Still we defy anyone to come away very convinced that there is such a thing. First, the number of possible cases seems tiny. Second, given that many cases can be explained, the logical assumption with those that can't is that we simply don't know what happened. Sure, some mysterious cause is possible, but it's not likely. For all the absurdity of the proposition, this site is nicely done and entertaining. Apparently, there are different types of this unpleasant, hot phenomenon, not all of which are fatal. Some leave only ashes, some a portion of the body. In non-fatal cases, sometimes flames shoot out of the victim, sometimes only smoke, and others involve the spontaneous appearance of burns, or so the author claims. It's amusing in a way, going into such details for what is, in the end, bunk.
http://www.sonic.net/~anomaly/articles/ga00003.shtml

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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 Davide di Lazzaro Craig Kott Michael Luke Bruce Rappaport Elizabeth Rollins Roy J. Winkler
NETSURFER SCIENCE © 2001 Netsurfer Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. NETSURFER SCIENCE is a trademark of Netsurfer Communications, Inc.