Tag Archives: science

leap seconds

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This just in – the Earth’s rotation speed is not perfectly constant, and it has recently sped up. This has to do with tiny changes in the relative movements of the Earth, Moon, and Sun. It probably has always been happening and we have just recently developed the technology to measure it more accurately.

…starting in 2016, Earth started to spin unusually fast.

For instance, on July 4 of 2024, Earth set a new record by completing its daily spin 1.66 milliseconds faster than usual. Around one year later on July 10, 2025, it spun 1.36 milliseconds faster than usual, with other shorter-than-usual days occurring on July 9 and July 22. This has led experts to warn about a “negative” leap second—subtracting a second from UTC—to keep UTC aligned with UT1 as early as 2029.

Subtracting a second doesn’t seem like that big a deal. I certainly remember a few seconds being added in my lifetime. But apparently, this has caused serious problems for modern infrastructure and industries such as computers, GPS, and banking. The decision is made by something called the General Conference on Weights and Measures, and the leap seconds were causing enough problems that they decided in 2022 not to add them any more. The solution they are considering is to add (or subtract? I had trouble following the article) a whole leap hour, which would have to be done much less frequently. It makes sense to me – over decades or centuries, I suppose not making the small time adjustments would result in astronomical events (solstices and equinoxes – what are the plurals of these words) and the weather eventually not matching the calendar (although let’s be honest, the weather is f-ed anyway…). That would actually happen pretty fast if we didn’t add the one leap day every four years – in my 50 year lifetime, the calendar would already be off by 10 days or so compared to the Earth’s actual journey around the sun.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has a good podcast that explains (along with some fart jokes) that this actually happened in the centuries after the Roman calendar was invented. At that time it became noticeable, the authority on timekeeping was the Pope, and the Pope decided to skip 10 days in October one year. Problem solved. (I suppose people outside the Catholic world had their own calendars, their own observations/calculations of astronomical events, and their own ways of dealing with these changes.) Even not considering the recent changes scientists are now able to measure, Tyson explains that there would need to be some additional adjustments from time to time.

Now, I say if we start messing with the calendar it is also time to go to 13 months, where each month has exactly 4 weeks, except there is an extra New Year’s Eve. Then every four years there can be two New Years Eveses. Let’s throw ourselves one little bone every four years and make leap day a holiday. Or maybe an election day which is also a holiday. It just makes sense. And to hell with daylight savings time! Let’s make it happen.

Albert Einstein – not the nicest guy?

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Albert Einstein might not have been a guy you would want to sit down and have a beer with. He was happiest thinking alone in a quiet room (or entire house). His first marriage sounds quite rocky, although it lasted 16 years and produced three children. His second marriage was to a cousin – a first cousin, their mothers were sisters and she did not have to change her name because it was already Einstein. They did not have biological children, but she had two children from a previous marriage which he adopted. But of course, he is not known for developing any special or general theories of harmonious human social relations.

Jupiter and the Sun orbit each other

This is just a random science tidbit. Two bodies with mass will always interact just a little bit, but in the case of the Earth our effect on the Sun is so small as to be negligible. In the case of Jupiter, it is not. Jupiter is so massive that it moves the Sun just a little bit, so they are actually technically orbiting each other. As for exactly what gravity is and where it came from, I can’t tell you, but I am grateful for it.

2022 findings on human evolution and anthropology

Highlights of things that caught my eye from this Smithsonian article:

  • “there is no strong relationship between eating more meat and the evolution of larger brains in our ancestors.” [sorry, Liver King] But learning to cook meat was probably important. We knew how to make and control fire for hundreds of thousands of years before we started using it for cooking, probably starting with fish.
  • Beer is about as old as agriculture, with the oldest known examples originating in Egypt. “Dating to 5,800 years ago, hundreds of years before Egypt’s first pharaoh, this beer was thick like a porridge rather than watery and probably used for both daily consumption and ritual purposes.” [Sounds like alcoholic oatmeal, and maybe not so delicious, but it fits with the idea of beer as a basic food.]
  • Dogs came from wolves, which we know, but the precise group of wolves serving as the genetic ancestor of modern dogs has not been found [aliens?].
  • The earliest known chicken domestication occurred in modern-day Thailand, and again is about as old as agriculture.
  • One of the oldest “possible hominims” (6-7 million years) was identified in modern day Chad. They could walk, but based on their bodies still spent a lot of time in trees. [Stop the planet of the apes, I want to get off!]
  • Modern humans and Neanderthals were both around in modern-day Europe as long as 50,000 years ago, meaning they co-existed and interbred for longer than previously thought. The Nobel Prize went to a scientist who sequenced the Neanderthal genome in 2010.
  • Chimpanzees and gorillas sometimes hang out and let their children play together in the wild.
  • Evidence of successful limb amputations (meaning the patients lived) predates agriculture. This might seem gross, but is evidence of “advanced medical knowledge”.
  • Humans have more genetic defenses against dementia than other animals, and this may have resulted somewhat by accident thanks to genes that evolved to cope with gonorrhea.

Troy McClure was Phil Hartman. Rest in peace, Phil Hartman.

what is “heat lightning”?

So-called heat lightning is a thunderstorm that is very tall and very far away. According to this article, sound from thunder will only travel about 15 miles, but if lightning is high enough you can see it 100-200 miles away. So this suggests to me that if you hear thunder, the storm is probably close enough you should go inside to be safe, but if you only see lightning and don’t hear thunder (assuming you are in a reasonably quiet location), it might be okay to stay outside.

why daylight savings time is unhealthy

There is a clear consensus that everybody hates setting the clocks ahead and losing sleep. There seems to be movement toward doing away with this dumb tradition and going towards all daylight savings time all year. But at least one scientist says the evidence points toward going all standard time all year.

  • There is evidence for increased strokes, heart attacks, and sleep deprivation during daylight saving time, the latter particularly affecting teenagers. There is also evidence of increased obesity, diabetes, cancer, lower income and higher health care costs in the western portions of time zones, where the shift in dawn and dusk is most pronounced.
  • The lack of morning light disrupts the body’s natural rhythms when we are trying to wake up.
  • Increased light in the evening makes it harder to fall asleep. This is particularly hard on adolescents and young adults, who have trouble falling asleep already for biological reasons and often have to wake up early for school, leading to chronic sleep deprivation affecting their already wacked-out bodies and minds.
  • Standard time is a better match for the natural rhythm of the sun, with the sun directly overhead around noon.

I would add that the time shift causes trouble in science and other technical fields, where we try to measure stuff over time and make sense of it. It also causes practical problems for people who have to travel or collaborate with colleagues across time zones (which is already challenging). Once I got a roomful of people together at 7 a.m. in Singapore for a meeting led by U.S. staff, only to find that the U.S. had changed its clocks the night before and the meeting was over. Those people were a little mad at me. I bought them doughnuts. A lesson learned there is to let your calendar software handle time zones and not try to do the math yourself. The U.S. is not even the worst – Australia has half-hour time shifts that are different in different cities not that far apart. The time shift is dumb, let’s just stop doing it.

twists and turns of mRNA research

This Science article (which seems to be discussing a Nature article) has an interesting discussion of how scientific and technological research has a lot of twists and turns and dead ends.

That Nature piece will also give non-scientists a realistic picture of what development of a new technology is like in this field. Everyone builds on everyone else’s work, and when a big discovery is finally clear to everyone, you’ll find that you can leaf back through the history, turning over page after page until you get to experiments from years (decades) before that in hindsight were the earliest signs of the Big Thing. You might wonder how come no one noticed these at the time, or put more resources behind them, but the truth is that at any given time there are a lot of experiments and ideas floating around that have the potential to turn into something big, some day. Looking back from the ones that finally worked out brings massive amounts of survivorship bias into your thinking. Most big things don’t work out – every experienced scientist can look back and wonder at all the time they spent on various things that (in retrospect) bore no fruit and were (in retrospect!) never going to. But you don’t see that at the time.

Science

So how could technological progress be accelerated? I suspect we will always need human brains to formulate experiments and make the final call on interpreting results. But it seems as though computers/robots should be able to perform experiments. If they can perform a lot more iterations/permutations of experiments in a fraction of the time that humans could, the cost of dead ends should be much lower. The humans won’t have to worry as much about which experiments they think are most promising, they can just tell the computer to perform them all. If we have really good computer models of how the physical world works, the need for physical experiments should be reduced. That seems like the model to me – first a round of automated numerical/computational experiments on a huge number of permutations, then a round of automated physical experiments on a subset of promising alternatives, then rounds of human-guided and/or human-performed experiments on additional subsets until you hone in on a new solution.

Of course, for this to work, you have to do the basic research to build the accurate conceptual models followed by the computer models, and you have to design the experiments. And you have to be able to measure and accurately distinguish the more promising results from the less promising. There will still be false positives leading to dead ends after much effort, and false negatives where a game-changing breakthrough is left in the dustbin because it was not identified.

That is another idea though – commit resources and brains to making additional passes through the dustbin of rejected results periodically, especially as computers continue to improve and conceptual breakthroughs continue to be made.

I doubt I am the first to think of anything above, and I bet much of it is being applied. To things like nuclear weapons, depressingly. But it seems like a framework for bumping up the pace of progress. The other half of the equation, of course, is throwing more brains and money into the mix. Then there is the long game of educating the next generation of brains now so they are online 20 years from now when you need them to take over.

AI and fusion

This article talks about machine learning/AI helping to make sense of the data from fusion experiments, and maybe eventually designing and even running the experiments. It’s interesting to think about computers speeding up progress by being able to design and run experiments orders of magnitude faster than humans could. If it works well, they could fail a million or a billion times in short order and there would still be value in a single success. You could also imagine a computer going down a rabbit hole and coming up with a result that humans are not able to explain or replicate, and then you would have to think about what to do with that result. There’s also the question of whether a computer can ever truly “understand” a system, but I guess constructed a model, whether mental or mathematical, testing it against observation, tweaking it, and then testing it against more observation is basically how we do it.

yes, you can eat Cicadas

The bulk of the Brood X cicadas are likely to come out in May (if 2004 is a good guide to what to expect) and be centered around D.C. and Baltimore. The edge of the blob just touches Philadelphia, and there are scatterings in southern and Central Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee and Georgia. I wonder how they get scattered the way they do – do they start out everywhere and then local populations gradually go extinct over time? Besides a clear map and an empirical probability density function (but they don’t call it that, not wanting to scare readers!), this Washington Post article reminded me that the Cicada swarm is actually made up of three similar but different species. That also is weird and interesting.

Also, here is a cicada cookbook from the University of Maryland. I have tried fried crickets in Asia but I don’t think I can bring myself to try Cicadas. As the into to the cookbook points out though, shrimp and crayfish are basically bugs that we westerners eat, so your ick factor is mostly just a matter of cultural conditioning. The cookbook also has this interesting comparison of protein in insects vs. other animals we humans like to eat:

Many people all over the world eat insects and other arthropods both as a delicacy and staple. This is sensible because insects are nutritious. Insects provide as much protein pound per pound as lean beef. For example, every 100 gram serving of each, termites provide 617 calories of energy while lean ground beef gives 219 and cod gives 170 (3). Although their amino acid content is not as well-balanced for human nutrition, this can be easily corrected by including fiber and other plant proteins into your diet. Insects are also a good source of minerals and some vitamins, especially for people who have limited access to other animal proteins.

University of Maryland

So termites sound like a pretty good survival food. Even if you live in some wasteland where nothing else will grow, there is likely some wood around that you could feed to them. You can then feed them to chickens or rats if you want, but it may be most efficient to just eat them if you can handle it. I don’t think I handle it – termites are in the cockroach family, I while I can handle the crickets for sale in Asian street markets, I cannot handle the “water bugs” which are basically cockroaches. But maybe if someone can grind them into a flour or paste I can use to thicken my soup, it could be a nutritious supplement and I might not have to think about it so much.