Flaming bagpipes

Over the last couple of months I've seen two short videos posted on Facebook, in which bagpipe players, playing their instruments, caused bursts of flame to come out of the drones.  Drones are the pipes which stick out of the bags and produce a single tone each.  The two videos I saw were:

Unicycling Darth Vader Upgrades to Flaming Bagpipes
The Badpiper Thunderstruck

You can find more videos, if you're interested, by searching for "flaming bagpipes" on YouTube.

Now, I like bagpipes, a taste I inherited from my mother; not everyone does.  But to the best of my knowledge, the chanter (the one the piper fingers) and the drones are made of wood, although Wikipedia doesn't confirm this directly.  And I definitely learned from Wikipedia that bagpipe drones are either reed instruments (like a clarinet) or double-reed instruments (like an oboe).  This explains a lot about the way bagpipes sound, actually.

This leaves a huge question in my mind:  how the devil do you blow a huge blast of flame through a wooden reed or double reed instrument without incinerating the whole boiling, and the bagpiper too?  And yet both of these bagpipers continued to play while intermittently shooting bursts of flame out of the drones.

I spent part of last weekend at the East Bay Mini Maker Faire in Oakland, California. Mini Maker Faires usually have flame-throwers somewhere; this one had a guy (from Sheet Metal Alchemist) with a tower of flamethrowers; you could set them off by swinging a mallet at a lever, just like the old "ring the bell" carny act, except this one produces a huge burst of flame in the air above you.  I asked the guy about the bagpipes, but he said no, he didn't know anything about flaming bagpipes.  He sounded interested, though. 

Now, one group which is always at the Mini Maker Faire is The Crucible, an Oakland non-profit specializing in art production involving fire.  I dropped in at their booth and posed my question, and learned some very interesting things from a man there.  I regret that I didn't think to ask his name; he was an older man with a white beard, wearing a hat, sitting next to the booth.

We both agreed that anyone doing this has to put some kind of gas source (The Crucible uses propane) inside the bag.  It would have to have a jet poking up inside the drone, and some kind of spark arrangement on the jet to light it; finally it would have to have either one or two switches the player could use to control the gas flow and the spark (separately or together).  My consultant pointed out that the flow of gas up the tube, before ignition, would cool the area somewhat.  Also, if the flame only lasts for a second or two (and I didn't see any that lasted much longer than that), it probably won't affect the wood of the drone at all; and, of course, the flame will go away the instant the gas flow stops. 

Now, what about the reed or double reed?  Reeds are usually at the end of the instrument where the air is blown in; in a bagpipe drone, that's inside the bag.  If you tapped the gas source into the drone above the reed, it wouldn't be affected by the flame at all.  The gas doesn't have to pass through the reed, although the air from the bag does.

Without talking to someone who's actually created one of these things, this is all pure speculation.  But at least I'm no longer wondering why the whole megillah doesn't burst into flame.

Ignorance

"This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased." -- Charles Dickens

All the posts I've seen about the Todd Akin affair in Missouri seem to focus on his deplorable opinions about the availability of abortion. 

I'm not surprised at his opinions.  He merely said out loud what the majority of the Republican Party management already believes.  What amazes me is the lack of comment on his level of ignorance.  He actually seems to believe that a woman's physiology can tell a rape from some other kind of sexual encounter, and can produce a "magic juice" which will prevent pregnancy.  Notice that he didn't apologize for the comment about the female physical reaction to rape; he apologized (and so he should!) for the term "legitimate rape."

There is a "magic juice" which will prevent pregnancy, but you have to buy it at a pharmacy; it's called the "morning after pill."  And many of the people who are horrified at the legal availability of abortion want to ban it, too.

Even Mao Tse-Tung admitted that "women hold up half the sky."  Women are half the human race, and Rep. Akin has no clue how the female physiology operates, even though he is a married man.  (Wikipedia doesn't mention any children.)  Even more appalling, this man is on the House Science Committee.  Based on his public statements, his understanding of human physiology is non-existent.  His Wikipedia bio says he's an "engineer", but when you look at the article detail you see that his degree is in "management engineering," whatever that is. 

When a man this ignorant about the basic workings of the human body is not only elected to Congress but assigned to the House Science Committee, this country is in very deep trouble.  I've been disturbed for some time at the growing rejection of science in many quarters - in some cases because our education system fails to teach it; in other cases because people like Rep. Akin (who also supports a Master of Divinity degree) choose instead to believe the Bible, and to assume that anything not in the Bible isn't true.  (Note:  I have no actual evidence that Rep. Akin is a Biblical fundamentalist, I am making an assumption.) 

Science got us to the top of the heap, but we won't stay there if we walk away from science.  I've made a hobby all my life of studying the Middle Ages, a period when science didn't exist and religion ruled.  We could go back there, folks.  We could indeed.

The Anatomy Class

While we were in Denver, we visited the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.  They were presenting an exhibit (it closed July 18) called Body Worlds - the story of the heart, which we visited.  Let's start with the short summary from the museum's page:

Dr. Gunther von Hagens, a German scientist, developed a plastination technique in 1977 that preserves the human body in motion. The anatomical exhibitions by von Hagens showcase the muscular structure of the human body, and have been exhibited in such far-flung locales as Singapore and Spain.

Click the next link for details on the plastination process, in as much detail as you want.  In summary, the plastination process removes water and fats from the tissues of deceased animals, including humans, and replaces them with polymers, which preserves them indefinitely from decay.  In color.  The Egyptians never dreamed of embalming like this.  The Body Worlds exhibits (this is the second one) take human bodies, and organs, which have been plastinated, and display them in motion, showing internal organs, muscles and sinews - in short, everything but the skin, which they normally remove for display.  And the full-sized display figures (the plastinates) are amazing - posed as in extreme athletic feats, like throwing a javelin, or jumping on skis. 

Human bodies?  Yes.  You can will your body to the Institute for Plastination, to be preserved in this way and used for scientific education.  You can choose to be anonymous, or not.  Because the entire bodies are plastinated, organs and joints can be sectioned to display tumors or other illnesses. 

Make no mistake, I was impressed.  The plastinate displays are astounding.  The details of organs, joints, the vascular system - all in details that even doctors rarely see.  You learn more about the human body in this exhibit than you do in most introductory anatomy classes.

And yet - it gave me the creeps.  It didn't upset my stomach - my stomach doesn't upset easily - but there were signs all through the exhibit to notify the staff if anybody in your party felt dizzy or faint, so I guess some people do get queasy.  But really - when you die, is this what you want done with your carcass?  To have it mounted in a museum display, down the hall from the stuffed antelopes?  I have very mixed feelings about the process.  I'm normally all for scientific education, I'm all for investigation and teaching; and the displays of individual organs and joints (all preserved through plastination and all originally human) were fascinating.  But the plastinate displays had a whiff of P. T. Barnum about them that disturbed me, and still does.

Death is the great mystery that separates us from animals, who don't know that they will die.  It seems to me that it should be treated with more dignity than this.

Somebody's Backyard

Irony is always arresting if not necessarily always funny.  The irony this Earth Day is the burning oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, on which NPR is reporting regularly.  I heard a clip about it on Morning Edition today.  The fire is now big enough that it shows on satellite images.  If you listen to the clip, you'll hear industry analyst Scott Burke (sp?), of Oppenheimer, say this:  

"The good thing about being offshore is that it's far enough away that you're not going to be polluting somebody's backyard, or it's not causing any potential danger to a neighborhood or anything like that, so politically I think the fallout should be relatively contained."

I listened to the clip about 5 times to make sure I quoted him accurately.  Is that what you really think, Mr. Burke?  As long as nobody sees this mess when they look out their kitchen window, it'll all be fine.  The 11 missing oil rig workers are just a cost of business.  

Look, BP isn't polluting somebody's back yard, here.  They're polluting everybody's back yard.  The oil slick from this thing is now one mile by five miles in size.  We call the seas by different names, but essentially the Earth has one ocean.  This is one localized instance of the general fouling of our own nest that we've been doing for 200 years.  We've actually been doing it for a lot longer; but only in the last 200 years have there been enough of us using efficient enough tools that we can really do a thorough job.  Throwing the soup bone out the door into the yard, while mildly messy, isn't in the same class as spilling five square miles of oil in the Gulf of Mexico - and besides, the dog will eat the bone.  Apart from some bacteria (which we should be cultivating for this) I can't think of anything that eats petroleum.

Everybody's fussing about whether humans are or aren't responsible for climate change; of course we are.  It's just a special case of the larger practice we've had for the last 200 years of dumping everything we have no immediate use for out into the world we live in.  As I said, we're fouling our own nest.  We're the only animal that does.  The trouble with Mother Nature is that she always bats last.  If we make the world too hot and messy for the human race to continue to live in, we will die; but Mother Nature will go on.  She has no opinion about the relative merits of a world inhabited by us versus a world inhabited by cockroaches.
 

The Single Number

Why is the human race so fascinated with single numbers for evaluating things?  The classic is "your IQ number" - a single number that's supposed to sum up "how intelligent you are."  Leaving out all the extended (and valid) criticisms that IQ tests are culturally biased, Stephen Jay Gould made it clear (in his book The Mismeasure of Man, 1981) that "your IQ number" is an artifact of the mathematical methods used to analyze the scores from IQ tests.  The researchers could have chosen to use a multivariate method that returned several scores - they chose to go with The Number.

Look at your credit score.  Whether you can get a loan or a new credit card depends on The Number, compiled from your financial history by Fair, Isaac & Co.  A whole industry of financial advice has grown up to teach people how to "tweak" their FICO scores, because of the influence of that Number.

Probably the most devastating Single Number we've had to deal with recently was the output of the Gaussian Copula formula developed by David X. Li (see Felix Salmon's Recipe for Disaster in Wired Magazine, 2/23/09, for a detailed analysis).  As the article will explain in probably more detail than most of you want to read (I still recommend it), Li's formula produced a single number that allowed traders to estimate the risk of default on extremely complex financial debt instruments.  It didn't, as it happened, account for all the possibilities - specifically a broad fall in overall house values.  But most of the people who used it to guide their day-to-day trading didn't understand it well enough to gauge its limitations.  It was quick and easy to use, and it gave them The Number.  And here we all are.

We do this all the time.  It's a regular habit.  I don't know if it's because we're intellectually lazy (most of us are, of course), or because we have a mystical faith that "the experts" must be right.  But we'd be much better off if we questioned these Numbers more closely, and perhaps didn't assume that they are an absolute guide to The Truth.  The idea that you can get The Truth from a single Number is just - too good to be true.
 

Bombs in Baghdad

Does it seem to you that the Iraqi government isn't doing a very good job catching suicide bombers these days??  Does to me.  But it didn't make much sense until yesterday; now, it makes all too much sense.

Yesterday, James Randi (The Amazing Randi, a lifelong opponent of pseudoscience, snake oil sales, and general fakery) posted a link to this article on CrunchGear:

Magic wand bomb detector deemed fraudulent, inventor imprisoned

You can and should go read this yourself, but to summarize for the impatient:  the Iraqi government has spent $85 million (which we probably gave them) on so-called "bomb detectors" which are essentially - dowsing rods.  That's right.  You wave them at a car and they sense bombs.  Not.  The British government has just jailed the inventor on fraud charges (currently out on bail) and banned the export of this device.  The Iraqi government claims the jailing was because the inventor has refused to reveal to the U.S. and U.K. governments how the device works.  Unfortunately, the actual reason is because these governments understand exactly how the device does NOT work.  Sandia National Labs and the FBI flagged this device as a fraud in 1995.

Do the bombs in Baghdad make more sense now?

You can find more comments and links on the subject at the James Randi Educational Foundation.  Keep in mind that the JREF has a standing offer of $1 million to anyone who can prove that a device like this works in a controlled test.  No one has ever won it, certainly no one associated with this device.

Phil Plait from the Bad Astronomy blog posted another article on the subject at JREF in which he quotes an Iraqi general as saying he likes the devices because they're fast:  "Checking cars with dogs, however, is a slow process, whereas the wands take only a few seconds per vehicle."  But if they used dogs, they might actually find some bombs.

Why is the U.S. government giving Iraq all the money we're giving them if they're going to spend it on dowsing rods??

Thoughts on Climate Change

In the August 2009 issue of Scientific American (no link; they now require a digital subscription; your library has the issue), author Kate Wong considers some of the reasons the Neanderthals may have died out, since there's now considerable evidence that they coexisted with homo sapiens for around 15,000 years.  Analysis of isotopes trapped in "primeval ice, ocean sediments, and pollen retrieved from such locales as Greenland, Venezuela and Italy" seems to show that, during a period known as "oxygen isotope stage 3" (OIS-3), which ran from around 65,000 years ago to 25,000 years ago, the climate became wildly unstable heading into the last glacial maximum: 

So rapid were these oscillations that over the course of an individual's lifetime, all the plants and animals that a person had grown up with could vanish and be replaced with unfamiliar flora and fauna.  And then, just as quickly, the environment could change back again.

The Neanderthals were preliterate; they had no way to pass information on hunting, edible plants, survival techniques, and so on, to the next generation, except orally.  Later in the article, Ms. Wong notes that until around 30,000 years ago, neither homo sapiens nor Neanderthals lived long enough to be grandparents; around that time, homo sapiens began to live to see their grandchildren - but not Neanderthals.  Living long enough to be grandparents is a tremendous evolutionary advantage - additional help in child rearing, plus the transmission of learning and experience to the new generation.

Was it lack of the ability to pass on workable survival techniques that did in the Neanderthals?  Or was it merely those wild climate swings, themselves?  How would we cope with a climate that took an area from forest to open grassland within a generation?  How will we, if it happens to us?  The climate swings the team studied covered 40,000 years - longer than recorded human history.  We're worried about human caused climate changes (well, some of us are) - we need to remember that climate changes we didn't cause may be just as significant and just as threatening.

Climate Change Data

A recent newsbrief from Scientific American reports that climate change skeptics are using normal variations in scientific data on the climate to attack the principle that the climate is changing, caused by us - a principle believed by 97% of the 3,000 scientists surveyed by the University of Illinois in January.  Apparently an automated system of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) published obviously incorrect data on Arctic sea ice, and the skeptic community went nuts - "they don't know what they're talking about!"  In fact, NSIDC discovered it had a faulty sensor, fixed it, corrected the data, and audited all their past data; but - "they don't know what they're talking about."

OK, the first point here is that if we provided a genuine education in the scientific method, enough people would understand peer review and data revision in the light of new information that these arguments wouldn't fly.  But, regrettably, we don't.  Even the students who manage to graduate with the ability to read and write stand a sporting chance of not understanding the concepts that drive scientific investigation, or the idea that it's possible to correct errors.

But the paragraph that really caught my eye summarized the opinions of one Marc Morano of the site Climate Depot, a leading climate change skeptic:

Rather he believes that “lack of warming in recent years” has helped his cause—although this decade is the hottest in recorded history, there hasn’t been a record-breaking year in 10 years. Moreover, recent papers suggest that natural climate fluctuations might continue to mask the expected warming trend for up to three decades.

You can boil a living frog to death if you start him out in a pan of cold water and raise the temperature very gradually.  Are we sitting in a pan of water?  How hot is it, anyway?

Causal Dynamical Triangulations

What? You ask. Say what? And well you might. But this is the working description of the most exciting cosmological theory I've read about in probably twenty years. It was written up in the July 2008 Scientific American and you can find the article here, entitled The Self-Organizing Quantum Universe.

I began to try to summarize it; and realized that I don't know enough about it to do it justice. Read the article yourself - it's surprisingly accessible - but here's what excites me about it:

I read cosmology and quantum physics articles as a challenge. I don't understand the math; I want to see if I can read the words and get a feel for what they're talking about. I have a general feel for quantum theory - the broad concept that any entity from an atom to the universe exists in what they call "superposition", which means that it "exists" in all possible states simultaneously, and only "collapses" into a single state when you measure it. (I told you this wasn't my world.) But quantum theories don't explain gravity and never really have.

Increasingly expansive attempts to develop a "theory of everything" (including gravity) have postulated ever-increasing crowds of elementary particles (quarks, gluons, etc.) and even minuscule vibrating "strings" - and the theories based on these predict universes that exist in dozens of dimensions, all so small they can't be detected. Nothing they predict resembles anything you can see when you look around, or point a telescope at the universe. And their theories are so complicated they require massive supercomputers to work out the mathematics of the simulations. Frankly, they've never made any sense to me; and they've always made me think of the epicycles that medieval philosophers developed, to explain why their increasingly precise measurements of planetary motion didn't match what the Ptolemaic theory predicted.

It's probably too much to suggest that this team of scientists - a Dane, a Pole, and a German - is the equivalent of Copernicus and his heliocentrism. For one thing, I doubt anyone will actually burn at the stake for advocating their theory. But the theory, which they call causal dynamical triangulations, has a number of points in common with Copernicus':

• It's based on a few simple assumptions, using only very basic quantum principles.
  
• The calculations are simple enough that they can do their simulations on a laptop. (Keep in mind that today's laptops have a lot of computing horsepower!)
• What it predicts looks remarkably like what we see.
• When they change details in their simulations, the results barely change at all.

What made me sit up and shout, "Yes!" when I read it was the basis of their theory: causality. They assume that "events occur in a specific temporal sequence of cause and effect, rather than as a haphazard jumble." Also, "the distinction between cause and effect is fundamental to nature, rather than a derived property."

All cosmological theories assume basic building blocks, which have certain properties. In the authors' theory, each triangular building block is assigned an arrow of time, pointing from past to future; and the rules governing gluing building blocks together require that their arrows of time point in the same direction. The spacetime this predicts looks like the four-dimensional spacetime we live in, and conforms to the predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity (which has never been disproved). I was actually reminded of the computer game "Life", where you define a starting state and a fairly simple set of rules, and let the program run to produce a world.

Additionally, as far as the authors can tell to date, the universe predicted by this theory is fractal - that is, it looks the same at any scale, as far down as one can measure. I don't know why this appeals to me, except that as far as I can tell, the living universe tends to be fractal.

I don't know if this will appeal to anyone else the way it did to me, but it fascinated me and I had to share it.

Life on Mars

Phoenix has landed safely on Mars, to great exaltation. Now we're going to find out if there ever was life on Mars.

Why do we care so much?

Mind you, I don't object to scientific exploration for its own sake; we know a number of very useful and interesting things that we found out while just looking to see what was there. But we sent men to the Moon, and we've sent a number of exploring space craft to Mars, and we've landed three craft on Mars now, and the justification seems to be not, what does the place look like? but, is anybody else there?

So far, nobody else is there. I'll go farther and make a prediction, which the Phoenix team at JPL will be spending the next 10 years or so trying to disprove: nobody else ever was there. There has never been life on Mars. There certainly has never been our variety of life on Mars, the kind that's based on liquid water. And not on any of the other planets in this system either.

All our science fiction is based on the assumption that we're not alone. Writers have peopled "space" with a delightful and amazing population of "aliens", from Andre Norton's Zacathans to Larry Niven's K'zin to Anne McCaffrey's telepathic species and beyond (and I haven't read nearly as much sci-fi as some people), with one specification for all these unlikely creatures: we can talk to them.

Apparently, talking among ourselves isn't enough for us, despite the fact that we spend more time fighting each other than talking. Why would we think we'd do anything with "aliens" except fight them, given how we treat each other?

Based on the evidence I've seen, reading all the astronomy articles in Scientific American and other lay journals for 30 years, Ockham's Razor seems to imply that there isn't anyone else out there. We're asking these questions because of a long sequence of coincidences that produced a planet with enough water, and the right temperature range (most of the time), and the right chemicals, and so on, that over millions of years a mammalian species evolved which developed the ability to - ask questions. (And before you bring it up, no, I don't buy the argument that God created all this in 4004 B.C.) Most of the planets we've been able to observe so far are prima facie unable to support life - wrong temperature range, not enough carbon or oxygen, etc. Most of the stars we've been able to observe are prima facie unable to support life - too big, too hot, too small, too cool. Stars like our sun are a minority. They aren't rare, there are just a lot of other types.

In other words, we are unique, and we are alone, and we'd better learn how to get along with each other, because there isn't anybody else out there to get along with. As the "mindfulness" people say, wherever you go, there you are.

But it fascinates me that we're so convinced that we aren't alone, that we spend really large amounts of money and time trying to find "them." Even if, in the case of Phoenix, the definition of "them" would be some evidence the Mars may have supported liquid water in which some kind of single-celled life form may have lived long enough to reproduce for awhile.

Whatever it was, if it was, I guarantee we wouldn't have been able to talk to it.

Why are we so desperate to find "them"?? Do we think they have Answers that we don't have? Or do we just think that if "they" can survive on a planet, then we could move in and take it over from them? (An unfortunate but likely supposition; and in the case of the current Mars, patently absurd.)

If you really want to contemplate "life on Mars," go read Edgar Rice Burroughs' wonderful Mars series: John Carter, Warlord of Mars. They're great.

Hangovers

My husband just sent me a link to a NY Times op-ed piece that was making the rounds of his recovery group, and it's interesting enough that I want to share it here.

The Hangover That Lasts

Go read it - you have to have a login to NYTimes.com but they're free and they've never hassled me with spam. It isn't very long.

I'm fascinated by the conclusions (from studies on rats) about rats which engaged in the laboratory equivalent of binge drinking during adolescence, and then stopped drinking. They're capable of learning - but they're not capable of relearning. They can't admit they were wrong. They show "a tendency to stay the course, a diminished capacity for relearning and maladaptive decision-making." They "fail to recognize the ultimate consequences of [their] actions." And all this is present even after a long period of sobriety.

The one good thing the study mentions is that, in "former alcohol-drinking mice", exercise clearly stimulates "the regrowth and development of normal neural tissue". So - exercise is good for the formerly drunken brain.

And neither I nor the article's author have ever mentioned the name you're thinking!

Now how do we explain Dick Cheney?

The Noodly Universe

I was reading Scientific American tonight (November '07 issue) and they had an article on multiple universes, string theory, and "branes" ("The Great Cosmic Roller-Coaster Ride"). The article is available online, but it unfortunately lacks the illustrations that inspired me; you'll have to go to the library and look at the paper copy to see the artist's rendition of a "Calabi-Yau space." There's a picture of one here, and also in Wikipedia, along with many mathematical formulae; but the picture in SciAm had long stringy appendages sticking out of the central mass. It looked familiar; it looked strangely familiar, and then I realized:

It's the Flying Spaghetti Monster in disguise! These scientists are covert Pastafarians! "String theory" indeed - what better to make strings than spaghetti? The Universe is a physical manifestation of the FSM and the cosmic strings are His Noodly Appendages. All is now clear.

Actually, I've been reading the cosmology articles in SciAm for 30-odd years now, and as time has gone on they've gotten farther and farther out, to the point that I ask myself: do these people have any work to do?? I realize this is a serious branch of science, but the basis of science is that you establish a theory, and then you make a prediction, and then you create an experiment to test the prediction, after which you either declare victory and start writing up the article for Science, or you go back and tinker with the theory some more. (The scientific method in a nutshell.)

The trouble with cosmologists, and especially string theorists, is that they've been trying for 20 years to devise experiments that would validate their theories, and they can't do it. They'd have to create the conditions that existed within nanoseconds after the Big Bang, and then be able to stand back outside the inferno and analyze the process. I don't know why they think the experiment wouldn't incinerate the experimenter. They plan to work on very small scales, of course: just a minuscule inferno.

As I read about strings, and branes, and scalar fields, and dark matter, I get a whiff - just a whiff - of the "ether" which filled interplanetary space only about 125 years ago. The scientists of that day could no more sample the atmosphere (or lack of it) in interplanetary space, than today's cosmologists can collect a piece of dark matter in a test tube and weigh it. But they were just as convinced that it was there. Today's scientists have much better equipment and much better experimental data. But until they can verify a prediction, they're no better off than the people who believed in ether. They'll tell you the mathematics makes it work; maybe it does. Mathematics is a language I never mastered, and this is a pretty esoteric dialect. I'd still like to see a verified prediction.