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The Science Fiction author, author of over 500 SF and general science books, Vice President of Mensa, and President of the American Humanist Society would be 88 today.

Isaac Asimov Credit: Rowena Morrill License

An interesting fact about Asimov and other great minds like Richard Feynman, was that they were supporters of reforming the spelling of English words. Asimov argued that the inconsistent and non-phonetic way we spell words in English contributes to illiteracy in American children.

Why don’t “comb,” “tomb,” and “bomb” rhyme/rime? Why do “they,” “say,” and “weigh” rhyme/rime? Our children don’t have difficulty learning to read and write because they are lacking in intelligence or proper study-habits, they have difficulty because they are learning a spelling system maintained by idiots.

Here’s a fantastic video illustrating the preposterousness of English spelling (ht oranchak).

The Spelling Society works to raise awareness of the problems caused by the irregularity of English spelling and improve literacy through spelling reform.

Science Etcetera 2008 Tag Cloud Via TagCrowd

CNN making the boneheaded decision to dump its science unit, the Origin of Blue Eyes fitting another interesting piece of the human origins puzzle into place, and “Dwarf Planets” becoming “Plutoids” earn an honorable mention for science news in 2008, and the Large Hadron Collider will make next year’s top 10 list, when it starts working properly.

Here are my picks for the best science developments in 2008:

1. The Svalbard Seed Vault in Longyearbyen, Norway went into deep freeze, preserving the world’s seed collections against any number of threats, from Global Warming to regional environmental damage. The vault is a monument to prescient thinking, an Ark for weathering our current environmental storms.

Svalbard Seed Vault

2. Once numbered at less than 100,000, a recent census found 125,000 western lowland gorillas found living in the Republic of Congo. Although still listed as “critically endangered,” the numbers show that conservation efforts do work, and that similar actions must be taken for other primates around the world.
3. The Interior Department officially listed the polar bear as a threatened species, acknowledging melting sea ice as the culprit, but without taking any position on Global Warming.
4. The first Photo of an Exoplanet was confirmed from two photographs taken by the Hubble Space telescope in 2004 and 2006, a Jupiter-mass object that orbits the star Fomalhaut every 872 years.

Planet Orbiting the star Fomalhaut Every 872 Years

5. Closer to home an Electron was filmed for the first time, riding on a light wave after being pulled away from an atom.



6. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) was signed into law, which bars discriminating against people based on their genetic information concerning health insurance and employment.
7. The Phoenix Lander proved conclusively the existence of water on Mars, and kept us on the edge of our seats with its electrical problems and issues getting soil samples into its ovens for analysis.

First Images from the Phoenix Mars Lander

8. Craig Venter’s organization synthesized an entire bacterial genome from scratch, the second of three steps toward JCVI’s goal of creating a fully synthetic organism.
9. Working models and computer simulations of the Antikythera device revealed the Greeks were using a very sophisticated astronomical calculator, which was also capable of predicting eclipses and the Olympic Games 2,100 years ago.



10. My personal favorite development for this year was Science Debate 2008, which successfully got the presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain to answer questions about science, and, even more amazingly, brought the scientific community together into its most effective lobby, which is like herding cats.

Science Debate 2008

Other News Sources Take on the Year in Science:

• Discover Top 100 Stories of 2008
• Discovery 10 Stories You May Have Missed in 2008 (But Shouldn’t)
• Science’s Breakthrough of the Year
• CBC News 2008: The Year in Science
• Live Science Top 5 Incredible Science Discoveries of 2008
• Charlotte Examiners Top 10 Science Stories of 2008
• TIME’s Top 10 Scientific Discoveries
• NPR Science Friday The Biggest Science Stories of 2008
• National Geographic TOP TEN NEWS STORIES: Most Viewed of 2008
• New Scientist News review 2008: The year in science
• New Scientist Most extreme news stories of 2008
• Wired Top 10 New Organisms of 2008

“O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?”
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Does the economy have you down? The stress of the holidays getting to you? Tired of getting off work at 5pm to find its dark outside and you missed the daylight?

Then cheer up! As of today (in the Northern Hemisphere) at 12:04 UTC (8:04AM EST) the days will grow longer and the nights shorter until the summer solstice, when the trend reverses.

The Winter Solstice

Lots of cultures around the world have celebrations this week, and have been doing so since humans started keeping track of the seasons.

He would be 91 today:

Of all the creatures who had yet walked on Earth, the man-apes were the first to look steadfastly at the Moon. And though he could not remember it, when he was very young Moon-Watcher would sometimes reach out and try to touch that ghostly face rising above the hills.

He had never succeeded, and now he was old enough to understand why. For first, of course, he must find a high enough tree to climb.

Arthur C. Clark, 2001

2008 marks the 50th anniversary of the National Defense Education act, a direct response to the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite into Earth orbit. The act employed one of the most brilliant strategic responses to an outside military threat ever devised: dramatically improve education for all Americans.

The act’s goal was to bring “American education to levels consistent with the needs of our society,” and contained ten titles designed to improve the nation’s schools. These included prohibiting federal control over curriculum, administration, or personnel; provide $295 million in low-interest loans to college students; $300 million in assistance for science, mathematics, and foreign-language instruction; and $18 million in research into how to use television and radio for educational purposes.

On January 12, 1961 Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his State of the Union address, called the act “a milestone in the history of American education.” Today, President-Elect Barack Obama’s website notes the importance of the act in improving national security, space programs, economic growth, and innovation for the second half of the 20^th century.

The 109^th Congress in February 2006 introduced the 21^st Century National Defense Education Act, but never made it to committee, possibly due to the beuracratic burden some argued it would place on public schools. The 1958 act was also not without controversy, as when 20 colleges and universities refused to accept funds from it in protest of the act’s requirement for loan recipients to take a loyalty oath to the United States, which contradicted the first title.

Despite these controversies, it is the spirit of the act that deserves reflection as we face the threats of terrorism and economic hardship, the idea that all our problems are best fought with a well-informed, highly educated public:

The National Defense Education Act recognizes that education is a national unifying force, and it regards an educated citizenry as the country’s most precious resource. Its ten Titles are designed to motivate the discovery of intelligent and talented young men and women and stimulate them to devote themselves to the sciences, foreign languages, technology, and in general to those intellectual pursuits that will enrich personal life, strengthen resistance to totalitarianism, and enhance the quality of American leadership on the international scene. - Arthur S. Flemming

Google has a timeline of news stories about the act in books, newspapers, and academic journals.

YeYeah, that’s right. I’ve figured out a way to science-theme out Thanksgiving. I’ve heard cicadas taste like shrimp, which makes sense as they are arthropods like crabs and lobster. Alligator tastes like fishy chicken, which makes sense as reptiles are the bridge between fish and birds.

Tyrannosaurus rex’s closest living relative is the chicken, so take a moment tonight to savor the flavor in that context.

Turkeys and Other Birds are Dinosaur Descendants Credit: Yo Soy

More evidence for why that turkey you are eating tonight probably tastes a lot like dinosaur can be found here.

     We living creatures are the mud that gets to sit up and look around at all the other mud. And then we lay back down again. Lucky us; lucky mud.
     - Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Credit: Vidiot

Eleven is an unbalanced number, a prime number we cannot count to on our hands; yet, there is a fractal-like nature to 11, a number whose first digit represents the second digit to the power of 10. The same holds true for single digit numbers multiplied by 11, such as 22, 33, 44… 99. We use a base-10 number system because we have 10 digits on our hands, a society using base-11 would need one extra digit on one hand. They would be asymmetrical beings.

Kurt Vonnegut Credit: mike dialect

Such a society, as implausible as it sounds, would fit perfectly in Kurt Vonnegut’s SF universe. In his book Galapagos human survivors of an apocalypse stranded on the island evolve flippers and become aquatic, in Slapstick mutant siblings become super-geniuses through incest (hi ho), in Timequake a temporal hiccup forces everyone to relive the last decade over again exactly as it happened before, in The Sirens of Titan all of human history is the result of alien race’s manipulations to produce a replacement part for a stranded robot, and in Slaughterhouse-Five a WWII soldier becomes unstuck in time, traveling back and forth to points throughout his life, including a point where he is an exhibit in an alien zoo. Vonnegut indisputably wrote science fiction, but took issue with being categorized as such. Still, he praised the genre for bridging the gap between C.P. Snow’s two cultures:

But listen–about the editors and anthologists and publishers who keep the science-fiction field separate and alive: they are uniformly brilliant and sensitive and well-informed. They are among the precious few Americans in whose minds C.P. Snow’s two cultures sweetly intertwine. They publish so much bad stuff because good stuff is hard to find, and because they feel it is their duty to encourage any writer, no matter how frightful, who has guts enough to include technology in the human equation. Good for them. They want buxom images of the new reality.

Born on 11/11/1922 or 19221111, I’d like to suggest “Powers of Eleven Day” to celebrate Kurt Vonnegut’s legacy. This coincides perfectly with the fact that 11/11 is also Veterans Day, as Kurt Vonnegut was a WWII veteran who survived the Bombing of Dresden as a POW, and the fact that Veterans Day takes place on the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I, which occured at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.

Fun facts about 11:

Centered Decagonal Numbers

M-Theory

Undecagon

11-cell hendecachoron

From School House Rock The Good Eleven by Bob Dorough:

Powers of eleven (via quadibloc)
   2                                          121
   3                                         1331
   4                                        14641
   5                                       161051
   6                                      1771561
   7                                     19487171
   8                                    214358881
   9                                   2357947691
  10                                 2 5937424601
  11                                28 5311670611
  12                               313 8428376721
  13                              3452 2712143931
  14                             37974 9833583241
  15                            417724 8169415651
  16                           4594972 9863572161
  17                          50544702 8499293771
  18                         555991731 3492231481
  19                        6115909044 8414546291
  20                      6 7274999493 2560009201
  21                     74 0024994425 8160101211
  22                    814 0274938683 9761113321
  23                   8954 3024325523 7372246531
  24                  98497 3267580761 1094711841
  25                1083470 5943388372 2041830251
  26               11918176 5377272094 2460132761
  27              131099941 9149993036 7061460371
  28             1442099361 0649923403 7676064081
  29           1 5863092971 7149157441 4436704891
  30          17 4494022688 8640731855 8803753801
  31         191 9434249577 5048050414 6841291811
  32        2111 3776745352 5528554561 5254209921
  33       23225 1544198878 0814100176 7796309131
  34      255476 6986187658 8955101944 5759400441
  35     2810243 6848064247 8506121390 3353404851
  36    30912680 5328706726 3567335293 6887453361
  37   340039485 8615773989 9240688230 5761986971
  38  3740434344 4773513889 1647570536 3381856681

In honor of Take a Child Outside Week, because nature is the best classroom:

Snowflake Credit: AriCee

“Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown.”
- Humphrey Davy

“Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding.”
- Jacob Brownowski

In honor of Take a Child Outside Week, because nature is the best classroom:

Shell Credit: cobalt123

“Science is a mechanism, a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It’s a system for testing your thoughts against the universe, and seeing whether they match.”
- Isaac Asimov

“It can’t be Nature, for it is not sense.”
- Charles Churchill

“Nature never says one thing, Wisdom another.”
- Juvenal

In honor of Take a Child Outside Week, because nature is the best classroom:

sunflower Helianthus annuus Credit: Esdras Calderan

“God could cause us considerable embarrassment by revealing all the secrets of nature to us: we should not know what to do for sheer apathy and boredom.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world sparkles with light.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

In honor of Take a Child Outside Week, because nature is the best classroom:

spiderweb Credit: Noel Zia Lee

“Man, being the servant and interpreter of nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature: beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.”
- Sir Francis Bacon

“We cannot command nature except by obeying her.”
- Sir Francis Bacon

In honor of Take a Child Outside Week, because nature is the best classroom:

Cactus Credit: Colin Warren

“There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge. . . observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.”
- Denis Diderot

“Nature does not give to those who will not spend.”
- R. J. Baughan

In honor of Take a Child Outside Week, because nature is the best classroom:

Honeycomb Credit: justus.thane

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest–a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
- Albert Einstein

“Human beings are part of nature. Anything they do is natural. It’s impossible for anything in nature to do anything unnatural.”
- Philip Jose Farmer

Last year I ran a series of photos and quotes in celebration of Take a Child Outside Week that purely rejoiced in nature. For this year’s event, running from September 24th through the 30th, I’ve chosen quotes emphasizing the importance of nature in education and understanding ourselves:

Hawaiian Tree Fern Credit: brewbook

“Sit down before a fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.”
- Thomas Henry Huxley

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”
- Albert Einstein