SWATH stands for Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull. SWATH ships are much more stable in almost any sea condition compared to traditional ships (monohulls), catamarans, or hydrofoils. A SWATH ship is similar to a catamaran, except that the SWATH ship has much more hull underwater than a catamaran. It's like having a platform above water attached via struts to two submarines below water.
Category: science
Which releases more radioactivity? Coal electricity plants or nuclear?
Take a coal-fired plant generating electricity and a nuclear fission electricty plant. If both are running properly (within regulations), which one releases more radioactivity into the environment?
The coal plant does. Here are some links to studies on the topic:
- A U.S. Geological Service (USGS) report from 1997
- A Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL) report from 2001
Of course, worst-case disaster scenarios for nuclear plants release large amounts of radiation.
And the end-of-life for nuclear power results in concentrated radiation. Of course, end-of-life coal-fired plants also leave behind their own environemental toxins, but those tend to break down more quickly.
The fallacy of the "Bible Code"
Famous skeptic Michael Shermer does a good job poking holes in Michael Drosnin's Bible Code II bestseller in Shermer's 12 May 2003 column in Scientific American. The column applies to these types of "codes" in general.
I liked this part in particular:
… in 1997 Drosnin proposed this test of his thesis [about bible codes]: "When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them."
Australian mathematician Brendan McKay did just that, locating no fewer than nine political assassinations secreted in the great novel, along with additional discoveries in War and Peace and other tomes (see http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html). American physicist David E. Thomas predicted the Chicago Bulls's NBA championship in 1998 from his code search of Leo Tolstoy's novel. He also recently unearthed "the Bible code is a silly, dumb, fake, false, evil, nasty, dismal fraud and snake-oil hoax" from Bible Code II (see http://www.nmsr.org/biblecod.htm).
In addition to his Moby Dick and War and Peace analysis, Brendan McKay has a nice collection of links about these type of codes.
World Wind — Interactive Earth viewer
Ok, so this is so freaking cool:
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
It's a 180 MB download, but man is it worth it. You get a globe that you can click-n-drag to rotate around, and can zoom in with your mouse wheel (or both-click). As you zoom in, you can tell World Wind to download high resolution satellite and arial imagery, all the way down to 1 meter per pixel for cities in the US.
You'll need a high-speed internet connection, and a recent computer (one purchased in the last couple of years).
I recommend this site to learn more about WorldWind
http://www.worldwindcentral.com/wiki/Main_Page
The "official" site is not very helpful.
Mars orbiters take pictures of each other
Martian orbital space is getting crowded enough that the orbiters can take pictures of each other as shown in this NASA press release.
I remember what a big deal it was when the first Viking lander touched down. Now NASA has multiple satellites and vehicles on the ground at the same time. And don't forget the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express orbiter. Welcome to the 21st century.
Hidden messages in junk DNA?
From Scott Adams' Dilbert Newsletter #60:
Sometimes my brain ties together things that are better left alone. Here are three things I've thought about recently:
- Microchip designers often embed microscopic messages on the surface of the chip as a way of signing their work.
- DNA has a lot of "junk" parts that don't seem to have any function.
- A lot of people think evolution is obviously "designed" by someone.
I wonder if any cryptographers have looked at that junk DNA to see if it's a message from the designer. I'm guessing that it's a code that says something like, "I am Kaloopah, from the star system Nebulon IV. I have sent this evolution program into space as my eighth grade science project."
Scientific American magazine catches the April Fool's spirit
Okay, We Give Up
There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.
In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.
Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.
How to destroy the Earth
Sam Hughes maintains a detailed analysis of what it would take to destroy the Earth. Needless to say it's a lot harder than most sci-fi movies make it look.
His mission statement for the analysis is:
For the purposes of what I hope to be a technically and scientifically accurate document, I will define our goal thus: by any means necessary, to render the Earth into a form in which it may no longer be considered a planet. Such forms include, but are most definitely not limited to: two or more planets; any number of smaller asteroids; a quantum singularity; a dust cloud.
Logarithmic map of the universe
It's a tall map, with the center of earth at the bottom, and the edge of the universe at the top.
http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~mju
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