(Brimstone fires spring up. Dense clouds roll past. Heavy Gatling guns boom. Pandemonium. Troops deploy. Gallop of hoofs. Artillery. Hoarse commands. Bells clang. Backers shout. Drunkards bawl. Whores screech. Foghorns hoot. Cries of valour. Shrieks of dying. Pikes clash on cuirasses. Thieves rob the slain. Birds of prey, winging from the sea, rising from marsh lands, swooping from eyries, hover screaming, gannets, connorants, vultures, goshawks, climbing woodcocks, peregrines, merlin, blackgrouse, sea eagles, gulls, albatrosses, barnacle geese. The midnight sun is darkened. The earth trembles. The dead of Dublin from Prospect and Mount Jerome in white sheepskin overcoats and black goat-fell cloaks arise and appear to many. A chasm opens with a noiseless yawn. Tom Rochford, winner in athletes singlet and breeches, arrives at the head of the national hurdle handicap and leaps into the void. He is followed by a race of runners and leapers. In wild attitudes they spring from the brink. Their bodies plunge. Factory lasses with fancy clothes toss redhot Yorkshire baraabombs. Society ladies lift their skirts above their heads to protect themselves. laughing witches in red cutty sarks ride through the air on broomsticks. Quakerlyster plasters blisters. It rains dragon’s teeth. Armed heroes spring up from furrows. They exchange in amity the pass of knights of the red cross and fight duels with cavalry sabres: Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan, Smith O’Brien against Daniel O’Connell, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt, Justin M’Carthy against Parnell, Arthur Griffith against John Redmond John O’Leary against liar O’Johnny, lord Edward Fitzgerald against lord Gerald Fitzedward, The O’Donoghue of the Glens against The Glens of The Donoghue. On an eminence, the centre of the earth, rises the field altar of Saint Barbara. Black candles rise from its gospel and epistle horns. From the high barbicans of the tower two shafts of light fall on the smokepalled altarstone. On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, goddess of unreason, lies naked, fettered, a chalice resting on her swollen belly. Father Malachi O’Flynn, in a long petticoat and reversed chasuble, his two left feet back to the front, celebrates camp mash. The Reverend Mr Hugh C. Haines love MA. in a plain cassock and mortar board, his head and collar back to the front, holds over the celebrants head an open umbrella.)

{ James Joyce, Ulysses, 15, 1914-21 | Continue reading }

Port Royal Jamaica is the only submerged city in the Western Hemisphere. (…)

Port Royal was a city of cultural and commercial exchange. The city was a commercial center of trade in African slaves, sugar, and other goods.

Port Royal was also a hot spot for cut throat pirates. (…) The economy was flooded by the wages of a common artisan’s honest day’s pay, and revenue from under the table deals of pirates, gamblers, and tavern keepers. Women of ill repute frequented the taverns, and sailors who made a semi-honest living at sea lavishly spent their earnings on these ladies of the evening. (…)

The heyday of mischief and ill-gotten gain came to a cataclysmic halt on the morning of June 7, 1692 when an earthquake and tidal wave submerged the infamous city.

The disaster took 2,000 lives on impact, and 3,000 more lives were lost due to injuries and disease following the earthquake. Moreover, the catastrophic event drove history down to the depths of the sea.

{ Water Wide Web | Continue reading }

Experts are now applying forensic techniques to retrieve evidence from underwater crime scenes in an effort to uphold laws that protect coral life and other marine mammals.

Underwater crimes include events such as anchors tearing through coral reefs, spills, using bleach or cyanide to stun tropical fish for the aquarium trade and more.

{ Water Wide Web | Continue reading }

How long does it take for a liter of water to go through our body?

For normal people it should take about 2 to 3 hours…

But it depends on several things.

First, the water has to be absorbed. For example, if someone has really bad diarrhea or is vomiting, the fluid won’t be absorbed.

Second, it depends on what is in the water. If it is pure water rather than water with salt in it, the pure water will be excreted faster than salt water.

Third, if someone is dehydrated, say, was playing soccer for two hours and sweated out two more litres water than he drank, the fluid would stay in his body and his rate of urine production will stay really low until he drinks more.

Fourth, it depends on the time of day. Usually, people’s rate of urine production decreases in the middle of the night and increases around the time we wakes up.

Finally, it depends on the state of health of the person. If a person has kidney disease, the urine production might not increase as much. If a person has heart disease, the fluid May build up in his tissues instead of being excreted.

The reference is a paper where students drank water in the morning and determined how long it took for the water to be excreted. In this paper, it looks like they urinated out about 400 or 500 ml of water over about 2 hours, before the rate of urine production slowed down.

{ MadSci }

The water runs down the throat, past the epiglottis (which is closed so that water doesn’t end up in the lungs) and down through the oesophagus into the stomach.

In the stomach, water is needed to assist in the processing and digestion of food. So far, the body has not absorbed any water. The only thing that has happened is that any thirst was probably quenched and the amount of saliva has increased.
The water and food are mixed into a dough and kneaded out into the intestines.

In the small intestine, the body starts to absorb fluid, as well as vitamins and other nutrients from the dough. These nutrients are absorbed by the blood and transported to all the body’s cells…

The large intestine’s task is to absorb as much liquid as possible from the thin batter, so that the body can make use of this liquid and achieve a proper balance of body fluids. This is Important, as 60% of the human body is made of water.

The liquid is absorbed by the blood vessels in the large intestine and transported by the blood to the kidneys. In the kidneys, blood is purified and water is converted into urine which flows through the ureters to the bladder. When the bladder contains about 200 - 400ml of urine, signals are usually sent to the brain to promote urination.

{ lofric }

The question now, as humanity pours greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate, is not whether Antarctica will begin to warm in earnest, but how rapidly. The melting of Antarctica’s northernmost region — the Antarctic Peninsula — is already well underway, representing the first breach in an enormous citadel of cold that holds 90 percent of the world’s ice.

{ Environment 360 | Yale | Continue reading }

photo { Tony Stamolis }

Take a look at the periodic table and you’ll find that almost all the elements up to the atomic number 94 occur on Earth in relatively decent amounts. In addition, nuclear physicists can prepare samples of elements up to 104 because they form as by-products of the decay of other elements.

Beyond that, the so-called superheavy elements have to be made by hand, using particle accelerators to fuse nuclei together. In this way, physicists have fashioned elements with atomic numbers all the way up to 118. Atoms of these elements survive for only a fraction of a second before decaying, which is why they don’t occur naturally on Earth.

But these elements are more stable than physicists originally thought, leading to the prediction that there ought to be an “island of stability” for superheavy elements further up the periodic table.

That raises an interesting question: why don’t we see these elements on Earth? The answer, according to Amnon Marinov at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is that we do see them, but only in concentrations too small for most analytical techniques to detect.

He’s even claimed to have found the superheavy element 122 in a sample of thorium.

Today, Marinov is back with a similar claim. He says that the superheavy element 111, also known as roentgenium, is chemically similar to gold and so ought to be found in tiny quantities in any lump of gold.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

illustration { Lil Fuchs }

In my column in Skeptical Inquirer (November/December 1996), I dealt with the major cases of alleged spontaneous human combustion (SHC) reported in Larry E. Arnold’s book Ablaze! The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion (1995). (…)

Obviously, the Hess case had nothing to do with spontaneous human combustion, as Larry Arnold should have realized.

Arnold, who is not a physicist but a Pennsylvania school bus driver, had no justification for asking ominously, “Did Hess succumb to SHC?” The unburned clothing should have led any sensible investigator to one of the possibilities limited by that fact: for example, that Hess had been burned previously, or his skin injuries were caused by steam or hot water, chemical liquids or vapors, or some type of radiation (possibly even extreme sunburn through loosely woven clothing).

{ Skeptical Inquirer | COntinue reading }

If you’ve never started a fire in a fireplace (and no, those automatic electric fireplace don’t count), then this guide is for you.

1. Make sure your chimney is clean and free of blockages.

2. Open the damper.

3. Prime the flue.

4. Develop an ash bed.

5. Build an “upside down” fire.

…

{ The Art of Manliness | Continue reading }

Blue space: The importance of water for preference, affect, and restorativeness ratings of natural and built scenes

Although theorists have suggested that aquatic environments or “blue space” might have particular restorative potential, to date there is little systematic empirical research on this issue. (…)

Whereas aquatic features (rivers, lakes, coasts) are frequently present in visual stimuli representing natural environments they are rarely incorporated in stimuli portraying built environments. (…)

The current research collated a set of 120 photographs of natural and built scenes, half of which contained “aquatic” elements. Proportions of “aquatic”/“green”/“built” environments in each scene (e.g. 1/3rd, 2/3rds) were also standardised. (…)

As predicted, both natural and built scenes containing water were associated with higher preferences, greater positive affect and higher perceived restorativeness than those without water.

{ Science Direct }

photo { Harri Peccinotti, Pirelli Calendar, 1969 }

Rising ocean levels brought about by climate change have created a flood of unprecedented legal questions for small island nations and their neighbors.

Among them: If a country sinks beneath the sea, is it still a country? Does it keep its seat at the United Nations? Who controls its offshore mineral rights? Its shipping lanes? Its fish?

And if entire populations are forced to relocate — as could be the case with citizens of the Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and other small island states facing extinction — what citizenship, if any, can those displaced people claim?

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

related { Ten Amazing Uninhabited Islands }

For the first time, scientists have converted information into pure energy, experimentally verifying a thought experiment first proposed 150 years ago.

The idea was originally formulated by physicist James Clerk Maxwell, but it gained controversy because it appeared to violate the second law of thermodynamics. Put in experimental terms, this law states that when hot and cold water are mixed, they will eventually reach an equilibrium middling temperature.

Maxwell proposed that a hypothetical being (later dubbed Maxwell’s demon) could separate the water into two compartments and reverse the process, isolating hot molecules from cold by letting only the hotter-than-average through a trap-door between the compartments.

Because mixed water is considered more disordered (i.e. of higher entropy) than separated water, the demon has converted a system from a state of disorder to a state of order, using only information (the knowledge of which molecules were hot and cold).

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

photo { Boru O’Brien O’Connell }

{ Akos Major }

{ Olivia Bee }

{ Emmet Malmstrom }

Like a Middle Eastern version of Las Vegas, Dubai’s biggest challenge is water, which may be everywhere in the gulf but is undrinkable without desalination plants. These produce emissions of carbon dioxide that have helped give Dubai and the other United Arab Emirates one of the world’s largest carbon footprints. They also generate enormous amounts of heated sludge, which is pumped back into the sea.

The emirates desalinate the equivalent of four billion bottles of water a day. But their backups are thin: at any given time, the region has, on average, an estimated four-day supply of fresh water.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Nicholas Haggard }

Biologists who study mutualism have long believed that the solution to cheating is to punish cheaters—but a new model suggests that the benefits gained from playing nice might be enough to deter cheating.

{ denim and tweed | Continue reading }

photos { 1. Ron Jude | 2 }

European scientists say they’ve figured out the recipe for water in space: Just add starlight.

They made the discovery while examining a dying star that is 500 light-years away from Earth, using an infrared observatory launched by the European Space Agency last year.

“This is a good example of how better instruments can change our picture completely,” said Leen Decin of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.

{ CNN | Continue reading }

artwork { Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl, 1963 }

{ Two glasses of water before meals the one true key to weight loss, say scientists. | Full story }

photo { Imp Kerr }

The Instinctive Drowning Response is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind.

To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents). (…) In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening. Drowning does not look like drowning.

1. Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled, before speech occurs.

{ gCaptain | Continue reading }

photo { Playboy, July 1970 }

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

{ James Joyce, Ulysses, published in 1922 | Continue reading }

photo { Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC }

The claim that “no one understands quantum mechanics” is often attributed to Richard Feyman, who said that to illustrate the perceived “randomness” that is at the heart of quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM. The unfortunate consequence of this phrase is that we now have people using it to claim that we know NOTHING about QM, and that no one understands it.

Without even going into what QM is, let’s consider the following first and foremost: we have used QM to produce a zoo of devices and techniques ranging from your modern electronics to medical procedure such as MRI and PET scans, etc. Already one can question whether this is a symptom of something that no one understands? When was the last time you place your life and the lives of your loved ones in something that NO ONE understands? That is what you do when you fly in an airplane or drive in a car that nowadays use modern electronics. All of these depend on QM for their operations!

The issue here is what is meant by the word “understand”. In physics, and among physicists, we usually consider something to be “fully understood” when it has reached a universal consensus that this is the most valid description of a phenomenon. We say that we understand Newton’s Laws because it is well-tested and we know that it definitely work within a certainly range of condition. (…)

So in physics, the criteria to say that we understand something is very, very strict. It requires a well-verified theory that matches practically all of the empirical observations, and a general consensus among experts in the field that agree with it. This means that in many instances, physicists would tend to say that we don’t understand so-and-so, because there are many areas of physics that haven’t been fully answered, verified, or have reached a general consensus. To us, this does not allow us to say that we have understood it. But it certainly does not mean we know NOTHING about it. (…)

Do we understand QM? Damn right we do! Do we understand it COMPLETELY? Sure if what we mean by “completely” only includes things that we can test and measure. QM is THE most successful theory of the physical world that human has invented up to now and no experimental observation so far has contradicted it. So that alone is a very strong argument that we DO understand QM. However, if we ask if we understand how QM comes up with all the correct predictions of what nature does, or if there’s anything underlying all the QM’s predictions, then no, we don’t. (…)

I’ve been known to reply, whenever I get another question such as this, that we understand QM MORE than you understand your own family members. Why? I can use QM to make QUANTITATIVE predictions, not just qualitative ones, and make these predictions uncannily accurate. When was the last time you can do that with your family member consistently, day in, day out, a gazillion times a second? We use QM to do that and more.

{ Physics and physicists | Continue reading }

artwork { Joseph Beuys }

How long does it take for a litre of water to go through our body?

For normal people it should take about 2 to 3 hours… But it depends on several things.

First, the water has to be absorbed. For example, if someone has really bad diarrhea or is vomiting, the fluid won’t be absorbed.

Second, it depends on what is in the water. If it is pure water rather than water with salt in it, the pure water will be excreted faster than salt water.

Third, if someone is dehydrated, say, was playing soccer for two hours and sweated out two more litres water than he drank, the fluid would stay in his body and his rate of urine production will stay really low until he drinks more.

Fourth, it depends on the time of day. Usually, people’s rate of urine production decreases in the middle of the night and increases around the time we wakes up.

Finally, it depends on the state of health of the person. If a person has kidney disease, the urine production might not increase as much. If a person has heart disease, the fluid May build up in his tissues instead of being excreted.

The reference is a paper where students drank water in the morning and determined how long it took for the water to be excreted. In this paper, it looks like they urinated out about 400 or 500 ml of water over about 2 hours, before the rate of urine production slowed down.

The water runs down the throat, past the epiglottis (which is closed so that water doesn’t end up in the lungs) and down through the oesophagus into the stomach.

In the stomach, water is needed to assist in the processing and digestion of food. So far, the body has not absorbed any water. The only thing that has happened is that any thirst was probably quenched and the amount of saliva has increased.

The water and food are mixed into a dough and kneaded out into the intestines.

In the small intestine, the body starts to absorb fluid, as well as vitamins and other nutrients from the dough. These nutrients are absorbed by the blood and transported to all the body’s cells…

The large intestine’s task is to absorb as much liquid as possible from the thin batter, so that the body can make use of this liquid and achieve a proper balance of body fluids. This is Important, as 60% of the human body is made of water.

The liquid is absorbed by the blood vessels in the large intestine and transported by the blood to the kidneys. In the kidneys, blood is purified and water is converted into urine which flows through the ureters to the bladder. When the bladder contains about 200 - 400ml of urine, signals are usually sent to the brain to promote urination.

{ treebeard31 }

{ For nearly 30 years, India and Bangladesh have argued over control of a tiny rock island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have resolved the dispute for them: the island’s gone. }

photo { Christophe Kutner }