Erik’s Blog

Today, my wife and I we took full advantage of our childless weekend to do a little local tourism. One of the “must see” attractions of Cantabria, the northern region of Spain where we live, is the Cueva El Soplao, an ancient cave discovered by miners in the late nineteenth century and only opened to the public in 2005, containing some of the finest known specimens of stalactites and stalagmites in the world.

The stalactites form at a rate of about one centimeter every 150 years. Some of them are two or three meters long. That’s 45,000 years old. It’s rather mind boggling to look at a stalagmite standing as tall as I am and think that, in the time that it takes to have all the happiness, sadness, pain, pleasure, and joy of one entire human life, this structure gains a couple millimeters. And then, once you’ve contemplated the single tree, you take a step back and see the whole forest of thousands upon thousands of stalactites and stalagmites… You can’t help but have a transcendent moment and appreciate the transience of your own existence. (more…)

Sometimes it seems like parenting is one big series decisions about trading comfort for safety. My child is tall and lanky, so it has taken her forever to reach the magical 9 kg threshold in which the car seat manufacturers say she can face forward in the vehicle. In her rear-facing seat, she looks, and is, horribly uncomfortable. As her tall and lanky father who takes a couple transatlantic flights a year, I sympathize. My daughter, her mother, and I have all been looking forward to when we can flip her around to face forwards.
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I’ve always been fond of photographs of the space shuttle. There’s something truly magnificent about a space-bound rocket sitting on the launch pad. It saddens me that the shuttle era will come to and end this year. I just hope its successor doesn’t take too long to get off the ground, so to speak. When I saw some photos of the roll-out of STS-130 yesterday, I selected a couple as good tilt-shifting candidates. Below I present to you the results.
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I’m a bit of a NASA TV addict. I particularly love watching live shuttle launches and ISS docking maneuvers. The fact that we can launch ourselves up out of our atmosphere and rendezvous with a space station moving at 7.7 kilometers per second 340 km above the Earth blows my mind every single time. Yesterday, as I was watching STS-129 approach the ISS, I had to pause the video to do something else, and when I moved the Quicktime slider back up to the live feed, I noticed how much cooler it all looked at accelerated speed. So I saved the feed I’d been watching, sped it up twelve times, and put some music to it.
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Two weeks ago, I was contacted by someone claiming to be a contributing editor to a book that is about to be published, asking if I would accept money in exchange for permission to republish a blog post of mine in their book that may or may not sell millions of copies in over thirty languages. Here’s the email I received (hyperlinking mine):
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I started and finished Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbolthis past weekend. While it was a heck of a can’t-put-it-down thrill ride, the overall message and theme of the book was very disturbing to me. It seems like, after pissing off The Church with The Da Vinci Code,Brown has decided to do a 180° and fire in the other direction, at Science.

Spoiler Alert: I will not discuss any aspects of the plot in this post, nor any of the puzzles that are solved along the way. What I will discuss is thematic elements, particularly as they relate to the “science” in the book. If you want to be completely surprised by everything you read in The Lost Symbol,read no further, but I promise you can read this post and still enjoy the exciting twists of the book.

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Yesterday I was watching La Ruleta de la Suerte, Spain’s version of Wheel of Fortune. Sometimes they have puzzles in a category called “Did you know that…?” where the answer is some interesting factoid. Unfortunately, their research into these factoids is pretty lax. In this category yesterday the clue was “Anti-radiation” and the answer was “Place a cactus next to your computer”. The host later went on to explain that scientists have shown that placing a cactus next to your computer will absorb, and protect you from, the harmful radiation that your computer gives off. Intuitively this sounded to me to be what the ever-eloquent British call “a load of bollocks.”
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I recently tweeted about some cool new technology that is fast approaching and has been dubbed "augmented reality". The basic gist is that some sensors read information about a real scene and then a computer somehow projects additional virtual objects onto the scene. The easiest sensor type at the moment is the lowly computer "web"cam. The optimal setup for augmented reality, in my mind, would be transparent glasses with camera that can both see and figure their orientation. This technology already mass produced and demonstrated in the Wii Remote. Then the virtual elements of the scene would be drawn on the glasses the user is wearing. I see this as being the ultimate medium for what some people are calling Sixth Sense technology, an always online digital assistant that helps you navigate your life without ever touching an actual interface or looking at what we now consider a screen. You’d just have a little Clippy-like assistant with you at all times.
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Two weekends ago when we were looking for twigs for nesting, we stopped by one of the local malls, the Max Center in Bilbao. From the very entrance, there was a space exploration theme decorating the place which I thought was a little odd. But then in a central hallway I saw a very nice exhibit aimed at small children put on by the European Space Agency (that’s like NASA on this side of the pond). They had these two big cylinders, one for showing movies in and another that was closed when I was there, and lots of little kid-sized space suits, all under some huge dangling planets. From what I could tell, the kids would put on the space suits, enter the chamber, and learn about space exploration. Seeing all this pleased me immensely, as I am very much in favor of space exploration as a general goal for our species and to push the envelope of our understanding science. Getting kids interested in space travel is extremely important. Very cool. Go ESA!
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Evolutionary biologists have historically struggled to understand why the human animal developed a sense of humor. The best theory I have heard comes from watching when infants laugh. Babies don’t truly laugh until about the fourth or fifth month, and they do so as a response to relief after a fright. e.g. Mommy makes a scary face (fright), but baby realizes that it’s still his loving mother (relief); Daddy tosses baby into the air (fright), but catches him a second later (relief); the game of peekaboo; etc. Eventually we get to the point where we enjoy the shock-relief contrast such that we seek it out. All physical comedy is based on this principle. The man falling down is only funny after it’s clear that he’s really alright. I’ve come to classify the vast majority of British comedy as “humor from uncomfortable situations”. Monty Python and The Office are good examples. “Safe fear” is the apparent attraction of scary movies and roller coasters (neither of which appeal to me). While this fright-relief pattern is not the only dimension to comedy, it’s one of the first to develop in children and is definitely one of the principal aspects of why we laugh.
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