Snooki Knows Why The Sea Is Salty

In the Aug. 6, 2011 edition of the New York Post, Snooki Polizzi said, "I don’t really like the beach. I hate sharks, and the water’s all whale sperm. That’s why the ocean’s salty."

Um…

The organization Sense About Science asked oceanographer, Dr. Simon Boxall of the University of Southampton to comment.

Snooki – it would take a lot of whale sperm to make the sea that salty! The salt in the sea comes from many millions of years of water flowing over rocks and minerals. It slowly dissolves them leading to the ‘salty’ nature of the seas – it’s not just salt but every material on the planet including gold. Salt water actually keeps our oceans free from many human pathogens (microorganisms that cause disease) – so why not give the beach another try and get back in the water?

For more celebrities spouting about science, see this pamphlet from Sense About Science.

Some highlights are

• Suzi Quattro (teenage males from the 70s know who she is) thinks that colon cleansers prevent sore throats.
• A former Presidential candidate believes vaccines cause mental retardation.
• Gwyneth Paltrow 'gooping' on detox diets.
• Bill O'Reilly knows that no one can explain the cause of tides.

Everything We Hear, Everything We See

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”  Marcus Aurelius.

Marcus Aurelius was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 C.E. and is one of the greatest of Stoic philosophers.  Although Stoicism does have a natural philosophy, that is, a physics, this article is not about Stoic science, nor is it a comment on the news media.

I saw this quote and realized how it - unintentionally - emphasizes how little of the universe humans actually experience directly.  We have contact with the universe through our senses.  Historically, the senses consist of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, although we possess many more senses such as balance, temperature, and pain.

The human eye responds to certain frequencies of light. Those frequencies or colors we can see are represented by the rainbow.  How we see other colors like brown, pink, and teal is a cool problem in physics and neurobiology/psychology.  There are other 'colors' though.  Radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, X rays, and gamma rays complete the rainbow (electromagnetic spectrum).

You can visualize (pun intended) an electromagnetic wave as an oscillating electric and magnetic field.  If you've played with a balloon with a static charge, you've played with an electric field.  Same for playing with a magnet.  See Maxwell's Silver Magnet for more on electric and magnetic fields.

Sound on the other hand occurs whenever a substance, usually air, vibrates.  In most science texts, the range of human hearing is given as 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz.  Note that the unit Hz is an abbreviation for Hertz and means the number of vibrations per second.  If you place your hand on a audio speaker you can actually feel these sounds.

However only young 'uns can hear up to 20,000 Hz.  Once people reach the age of 20, their hearing starts to degrade.  I have heard anecdotes that children can be easily annoyed when they hear high frequency sounds that their parents can't hear.  You can purchase ringtones for your phone that only young people can hear.

Are their sounds lower than 20 Hz or higher than 20,000 Hz?  Infrasonic tones are those that are lower than 20 Hz.  Earthquakes are a sound wave (remember sound is a vibration) that have frequencies in the infrasonic region.  The stories of birds and livestock being aware of earthquakes before people are sometimes explained as these creatures being able to detect these low frequencies.  There are studies to suggest that infrasonic sounds can cause people to have feelings of nervousness, fear, and anxiety.

Sounds at the other extreme are called ultrasonic.  Ultrasonic cleansers are a popular and safe way to clean jewelry and golf clubs.  How high can ultrasonic tones go?  There's no theoretical limit.  

In condensed matter physics, the study of nearly everything that's not a gas or plasma, there is a phenomenon called a phonon.  A phonon is a particle of sound the same way a photon is a particle of light.  It's quite common for phonon frequencies to be in the THz region.  That's TeraHertz; 10^15 Hz = 1,000,000,000,000,000 Hz.

What piece of these spectrums to we experience?  A  tiny, tiny, tiny,…, tiny piece.  From the Abstruse Goose comes the graph below.  [WARNING! Notice the axes of the graph.  Each tick mark is a power of 10.  That is, each mark is 10 times bigger than the previous one and 10 times smaller than the next.  I tried to graph this on a regular (linear graph for you math and science folks), but i quickly realized that you wouldn't see anything.]

I feel small.

But on the other hand, everything we know about biology, chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy, and the other fields comes from scientists using their puny senses and rational thought to find ways to not only measure, but to comprehend aspects of nature from the Higgs boson, to my favorite molecule ethanol, to huge molecules like DNA, to cellular structures, to tectonic motion, to extrasolar planets, to galactic motion, and all the way to the Big Bang.

I feel huge.

The Old Testament Universe

Diagram from James L. Christian, Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering, 6th ed.,(Harcourt, 1994), p. 512.

I'll just link to the blog that originally posted this figure.  He discusses the relevant biblical passages.

Stupid People Killed This Baby

This is Dana Elizabeth McCaffery.  She lived for 33 days.  She contracted pertussis, also known as whooping cough.  There is no treatment for whooping cough.  

How did this beautiful baby catch pertussis? 

All children should get the series of DTaP shot that protects from diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. The first in the series come at 2 months.  Four other shots come later.  There's another vaccine Tdap that's meant for people ages 11  to 64.

What should have protected Dana is herd immunity.  When a sufficient number of people in a community are resistant, the few who are susceptible are protected from the disease, because the probability of a susceptible person coming into contact with an infected person is small.

To be protected from pertussis, at least 94% of the community needs to be vaccinated.  Dana had the poor luck to be born in a community with one of Australia's lowest vaccination rates.

Why are people not being vaccinated?  The only answer I have to that question is - stupidity.

Vaccines may be the second most important advance in medical science, second only to proper sanitation.  Vaccination has eradicated smallpox.  Polio is unheard of.  As a child, I had the measles, mumps, and chicken pox (with the scars to prove it).  What child gets these once common diseases today?  The MMR vaccine was introduced in the United States in 1971, and the varicella (chicken pox) vaccine was developed in 1995.

But thanks to stupid people like Jenny McCarthy, the National Vaccine Information Center, and Andrew Wakefield, there is a decline in the number of vaccinations.  Andrew Wakefield started this nonsense with a paper published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, that has fully retracted the paper and called the paper "false."  The British organization responsible for maintaining medical standards, the General Medical Council, found that Wakefield acted with "callous disregard" toward children and with "dishonesty."

I'm inclined to be a but more tolerant of Jenny McCarthy, because she's a mother who truly has the health of her child in mind.  But my tolerance goes only so far when her anti-scientific opinions endanger the health of an entire community.

The anti-vaccine National Vaccine Information Center's tag line is "Your Health. Your Family.  Your Choice."  I wonder what Dana's parents feel about "your choice."

I encourage anyone to investigate the science of vaccines.  Here's a few recommended sites:

Science-Based Medicine (vaccines),

Science-Based Medicine (herd immunity),

A DTaP pamphlet for the Center for Disease Control,

An Open Letter from Dana's Parents.

If science doesn't convince you, then see if you can watch this video of a 7 week old infant suffering from pertussis.

Santa Claus Science - Part 1

How does Santa do it?  Deliver all those presents to the children of the world.  Let's consider what his task entails.

There are 6.79 billion people in the world, 1.855 billion are children.  Sad as it may seem to some, but I don't think Santa visits all the good children of the Earth.  Santa only visits Christians.  Since Christians are 32% of the Earth's population, it seems reasonable to assume Santa has to visit 594 million youngsters under the age of 15.

Suppose each child gets one present, and that present has a mass of 1 kg.  (2.2 lb.s of weight for you non-SI people).  Santa gets to lug around 564,000 tonnes of toys.  Reindeer can pull up to twice its weight.  The jolly one then has to harness over 3 million reindeer to his sleigh. 

Speaking of the sleigh - let's assume each present fits in a cubic box 15 centimeters (6 inches) on a side.  With 594,000,000 presents to deliver, Santa is going to need a large sled.  He needs to haul 2 million cubic meters of presents.  Since the world's largest supertanker has a capacity of 670,000 cubic meters, the rotund one will need three of them and an additional 8 million reindeer.

11 million reindeer.   Imagine all that poop.

A Trillion YouTube Hits

I was listening to KPCC last night, and they reported that YouTube had one trillion hits this year.  One freaking' trillion! There's only 300 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Let me put this into perspective.  If someone were to give you $1,000,000 (one million) with the requirement that you had to spend $1000 a day, it would take you 1000 days.  2 years, 38 weeks, and 4 days.

Let's suppose then that someone gives you $1,000,000,000 (a billion) with the same stipulation.  You won't be done shopping for 2,739 years, 37 weeks, and 6 days.

So low long would it take to spend a $1,000,000,000,000 (a trillion)? Over 2.7 million years.

So people of the world spent so much time on the Internet that they watched one trillion YouTube videos?  I have no idea how long an average video lasts, but let me assume the average one is three minutes long.  That means people were watching 5.7 million years worth of videos just this year.

KPCC also reported what the most watched video was this year.  Rebecca Black's Friday.  

"It's Friday, Friday, get-en down on Friday. Everybody's looking' forward to the weekend.  Partyin, partying, yah!  Partyin, partying, yah! Fun, fun, fun, fun…"

13,901,677 views.  Each lasting 3 minutes 38 seconds.  A freaking' eternity.

What Really Matters

I have had to spend a great deal of time and energy thinking about and dealing with the charges leveled against my colleagues, and I am fatigued, tired, worn out, weary, and pooped.

But last night I was reminded why I do what I do.  

My Physics 213 students have spent three (long!) semesters with me in PHY 211, 212, and 213.   It may be a bit egotistical for me to say this, but I believe my engineering and science majors are the best students Rio Hondo has, and I am privileged to able to teach and mentor them.  I make sure they work hard, and they return the favor.  I frustrate them with all my questions, and  they frustrate me when they don't get it as fast or as deeply as I want them, too. 

So after these three semesters which now seems to have gone too fast , I take them out to Pizza Mania, and we spend a couple of hours away from the books and the classroom.  The conversation can go from what we're doing during the break to where they are transferring, to some research one student is doing with rats and methamphetamine, and then to this crazy video of a solar flare passing Mercury.

What I have always come away with from this event - including a full stomach - is that they get it.  They understand what they've been doing these past three semesters.  

As we left the restaurant and said goodbye, they all said "thanks,"  and I realize there's one thing they didn't get.  It's that I thank them for everything they've done for themselves.