Stamp of the day: Compass

Sometimes you get a feeling of being lost, in a country, in the woods, in society.... when you do it is good to have a compass, whether it is a real one or an inner one. Compasses stands for direction, continuity and safety, at least for me. In these days, when GPS has taken over the world´s all traffic direction, lighthouses are endangered and people don´t look at maps anymore.

I would not part from my compass (or map), and keep it with me when traveling. Sure, I use my GPS, but electronic devices can malfunction. My compass does not, even though a magnet could affect it and set you on a wrong course (NEVER put your radio under the deck of the kayak, and the compass on top.....).

This is a new stamp from the Swedish Post Office.

Color.... dyes from our food

There is a great little article in a New York Times issue about how to use food scraps to dye shirts and towels with onions, cabbage, curry or whatever is left over in the kitchen.  Fascinating. An earlier article talk about dye plants available in the garden. such as marigolds, Oxalis, and madder (Rubia, which of course makes red).

The article ends with these words, which I like a lot:

Will these gorgeous new hues be permanent? Short answer: who knows? If it’s any consolation, on a celestial scale, nothing lasts. Cosmologists suggest the universe has passed through its own dye bath over the eons, shifting from bluish to reddish.

How often do you see the physical phenomenon of red shift being mentioned in a craft article? :) Nice.

Now I want to go out and boil up lots of weeds, but it is winter...

Are we there yet?

Now, THIS is worth reading.  Fantastic.

Fascinating sunrays

Tangled up Active Region [hd video], originally uploaded by NASA Goddard Photo and Video.

Check out this video posted by NASA on Flickr. Isn't it amazing?

Bits and pieces from the internet, business edition

One company that I really like, Burt's Bees, who make nice natural lipbalms and schampoos, are now owned by Clorox.  Ick, how did that happen?  I found out because I was thinking about investing a little money in LUSH stocks, a similar company, but it turns out that it is still privately owned with no stocks (which I now think is a good thing).  Clorox is not mentioned on Burt's Bees website, hmmm... I wonder why?. Read more here about green-washing and big nasty companies gobbling up small nice ones.

The New York Times have decided that if you read a lot of their articles online you will have to pay a monthly fee and become a subscriber.  However, if you follow a link from a blog or other media site, you should be able to read it for free. If you read something on an iphone it costs your more than from a laptop, and if you are rich and have an ipad, you have to pay 133% more than if you just have a laptop ($35 per month).  I think they are crazy.  So, from March 28, there might be much fewer New York Times articles e-mailed by me to some of you, but maybe more posted here on the blog for you to see.  We will see how it goes. 

Newsweek has changed owner and editor, and I like most of it so far, except for the font for the headings.  But the articles are more interesting, and less about celebrities and more daring and thoughtful. Tina Brown, the current editor, is going in the right direction.  I have subscribed since the early 1990s, wow, that is 20 years, and a year ago I was ready to quit, but now I am giving them a 2nd chance.   NPR, International Women's Day, Ignorant Americans... that is a bit different from before.

These strange black and white photos are not straightforward business.  What is going on here?

I wonder what the French business woman that praised nuclear energy as the best thing ever in the recent Newsweek is thinking now, since her article was published just a few days before the Japanese tsunami and earthquake that led to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima.  She is probably thinking just the same thing as before, but many other people are not.

The same viewpoint was featured in this 1 minute energy video which is rather cool until it ends with a nuclear power plant and a city were mindless people dance to rock music on a roof of a building.  But the graphics were good, steam trains and viking ships... it is just the ending that really bothers me, especially considering what has happened in Japan.  Guess where the oldest American nuclear reactor is?  Yep, in New Jersey. 

Food and radioactivity, a good read

There is a very good and clear blogpost on Daily Kos about radioactivity in food, and I recommend reading it if you want to know more.  It also reprinted this excellent description of the difference between being 'exposed' to 'contaminated', from a Vermont brochure:

If you have a manure pile and you are close enough to smell it, you are exposed. If you go across the road to your neighbor’s house you will not expose or contaminate them. If, on the other hand, you also step in the manure, you are now contaminated. If you go across the road to your neighbors’ house without decontaminating your shoe or boot, you will expose your neighbors and probably contaminate their house. It you do contaminate your neighbor’s house, they may also contaminate themselves. 

Radiation is similar. An exposed but uncontaminated person or animal does not pose a risk to other people or animals. Contamination can be detected with radiation meters. External contamination can be removed by vigorous washing with soap and water.

This catastrophe in Japan brings back memories of the Chernobyl accident ('Tjernobyl' in Swedish) in 1986, during my last year of high school in Sweden.  The day or two after it happened me and friends were scheduled to leave for a birding trip to Hungary during spring break, but since we didn't know where the radioactive cloud would land we aimed for southern France and the Camargue delta instead. We had no books, plans, or maps for southern France, but we couldn't risk going to a place that might mean we got radioactive dust on us.  

When we came back to Sweden all cars wheels were checked with Geiger counters at the border, and we found out that the cloud had changed direction and hit the Baltic countries and Scandinavia.  For many years thereafter you could (=should) not each wild mushrooms, berries, and reindeer meat from northern Sweden, due to Cesium 137 contamination.  The reindeers eat the lichens which has accumulated the radioactive particles. 

Swirly patterns

swirly, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

This pattern was created on a giant flat disk filled with blue water and (probably) ground up mother-of-pearl, and spun round and round by a couple of kids at Liberty Science Center in NJ, USA. Isn't it gorgeous?

The scale of the universe

This is just enormously cool:  link

Incredible coal, graphite, diamonds, buckyballs, and nanotubes...

What do they all have in common?  They are made from carbon, the atom of life (for Earth at least).  And two researchers have now won the Nobel Prize in Physics for creating graphene, a single-atom thin layer of carbon arranged in large sheets.  They created it by peeling it off graphite with scotch tape... incredulous. More from the article in New York Times:

It is not only the thinnest material in the world, but also one of the strongest. If scaled up to the thickness of plastic refrigerator wrap, a sheet of graphene stretched over a coffee cup could support the weight of a truck bearing down on a pencil point [...]. 

[...] graphene is able to conduct electricity as well as copper does and to conduct heat better than any other known material, and it is completely transparent. Physicists say that it could eventually rival silicon as a basis for computer chips, serve as a sensitive pollution-monitoring material, improve flat screen televisions, and enable the creation of new materials and novel tests of quantum weirdness, among other things.

So, in one single material, you go from scotch tape to quantum weirdness, that's something. Science can really be lovely and amazing. Oh, did I mention that graphene is invisible too?

OK snapshot: ångslupsvåg (Steam boat wave)

On Lake Mälaren, outside Stockholm.

Comment from LS: OK's snapshots are all taken with an iPhone. 

Bits and pieces

Protons are colliding under the Alps and making small big bangs! Read more in this New York Times article that explains it.

Why You Can’t Work at Work. "With its constant commotion, unnecessary meetings, and infuriating wastes of time, the modern workplace optimizes interruptions and makes us all work longer, less focused hours." So true.  Here is a video with Jason Fried to watch if you like. I agree with so much of this.  I went to a talk about how to deal with too much e-mail last week, and will blog about it soon.  Work is becoming chopped liver-time, not a place to think and make things.  Guess why I try to work at home one day a week just to get peace and quiet and get writing done? And I don't even have a manager. But I get sometimes 100 e-mails in a day.

Strychnine, anyone?  I want to read this book.

And then just for fun...

Stamp of the day: Power tower

Not that many stamps have radio towers on them...
"The VLF transmitter Grimeton was used until the 1950's for transatlantic radio telegraphy to Radio Central in Long Island, New York, USA. From the 1960's until 1996 it was used for transmitting orders to submarines in the Swedish Navy." read more here...

New words for real things

Just got a very funny e-mail about the "winners of the Washington Post's annual Mensa Invitational, which once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition". These are hilarious. Some research on the web tells us though that the newspaper Washington Post has no such real competition, however, they are playing along. Apparently this list has circulated on the internet for many years, with readers adding new definitions along the way. Anyway, some of these new words and definitions are very funny. I think bozone might be my favorite, or maybe Belzebug. Here you go, enjoy:

Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the Person who doesn't get it.

Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

Decafalon (n.): The gruelling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

Glibido: All talk and no action.

Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.

The Atomic View

A thing to ponder:

There are no objects, only time-delimited assemblages of particles.

I don't know who said it, but it is pretty true, isn't it? But you have to think pretty long-term for some things, like when you think about a gold nugget or other rock, hardwood floors, and plastic-based diapers. Then there are the ephemeral things that changes and decomposes/rusts/withers/disassembles quickly, such as books, clouds, wool mittens, and pizza. It is pretty amazing that all these things are made from the same thing - particles of elements.