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Crow Using Bent Wire

• Tiny camera’s attached to crows have caught them making tools. Tool use… theory of mind… pound for gray-matter pound, these animals are much more intelligent than we are, making “Bird-Brained” no longer an insult.
• Congrats to Japan, as their lunar probe reaches orbit! Welcome to the cool kids club! You can sit next to me.
• Today Radiohead’s In Rainbows became available for download (and the site appears to be crashed as I write this. Now Trent Reznor is dumping the record labels. The RIAA is going down in flames. Burn baby! Burn! Bad is good! Down with government! (ala. the Midnight Bomber (with bombs at midnight!) from The Tick)
• If you can get out to the nation’s mall, check out the Solar Decathlon, which opens this Friday and runs through Saturday, and will feature 800 square foot open-house solar homes.
• Do you use the right or left hemisphere of your brain more often? Check out the spinning silhouette optical illusion to find out. The silhouette reverses direction on me sometimes when I look away, but I still can’t will it to happen.

Sanchi, India

• 99.9% of all species to ever roam the Earth became extinct. Will the same hold true for human civilizations? Check out the gallery of Lost Cities for some grand relics of communities long gone.
• Will the claim pan out? Controversial DNA researcher, , is poised to announce the first artificial life form on Earth, to be named Mycoplasma laboratorium.
• This computer-controlled cat door uses imaging software to identify Flo, the only cat allowed to pass through it, and also prevents Flo from entering the house with prey in her mouth. This would have been awesome at foiling my cat, Doobie, in his hobby of bringing live birds into my house to play with in very messy fashion.

surface chemistry of an organic crystal

Oh this is way past cool. Congratulations to Gerhard Ertl for winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2007, which recognizes his lifetime of work establishing an experimental school of thought for the entire discipline of modern surface chemistry.

Using many different methods of measuring reactions, including playing reactions in reverse order, Ertl was able to decrypt the chain of atomic processes that produce artificial fertilizer and the oxidation of carbon monoxide on platinum, used by catalytic converters for exhaust-cleaning in cars. His research methods have opened an entire realm of scientific research.

An entry-level explanation of the research here (PDF).

A more technical explanation here (PDF).

Today is Powers of 10 Day, 10/10/2007, which is a famous film made by Charles and Ray Eames in 1977 that takes the viewer from a picnic scene, off of Earth, out of the Solar System, galaxy, and into deep space. It’s a film concept that has been often repeated in films like Men in Black and Contact, the “God-Perspective Crane Shot.”

It’s a great film, one that stresses our place in a Universe, which is much vaster in size than our ancestors figured, yet smaller than what many of us Space Age kids thought it would be.

Google Video has the film here.

The Simpsons also did a tribute to this film.

See also the IMAX Cosmic Voyage for a modern, computer-enhanced version of this film narrated by Morgan Freeman, and he played god in a couple of movies, you know, and narrated March of the Penguins, so right there you know this short film is going to make you pee your pants with awe.

First a list of resources for teachers.

Base number system and culinary complaints aside (Hat tip to flyingsirkus), the English Imperial System is a complicated, verbose, bloated system of measurement that contributes to mathematical and scientific illiteracy in America. Using dual systems, standard for commoners, metric for scientists, cost us a $125 million Mars orbiter 1999.

Standard uses 14 different units to measure length (inch, foot, yard, mile, fathom, rod, furlong, league, mil, pole, perch, hand, link, chain). Converting between these different units requires a great deal of rote memorization, as there is nothing connecting the units. There are 12 inches in a foot (base-12?), three feet in a yard (12 X 3), and 1760 yards in a mile (no relation to three or 12). Metric may use a base-10 number system, which is not optimum, but Standard uses a a base-whatever number system, which is nonsensical.

Metric uses one unit for length, the meter combined with a prefix (micro, milli, centi, deci, deca, hecto, kilo, mega, etc… etc…). Measuring area, volume, mass, force, or whatever else you can think of works the same way: a root unit combined with a prefix. Units are related to one another as powers of ten, and we are already (almost) using metric in computing, where a 100,000 kilobytes equals 1,000 megabytes equals one gigabyte.

This post can only serve as food for thought, we still use QWERTY keyboards despite the development of more efficient layouts. So converting to a metric-based society is something that can only happen as our obsolete elders… you know… croak.

National Metric Week is brought to you by the U.S. Metric Association.

AOEUIDHTNS!!!