Category: Geeking Science

Geeking Science: Two Types of Creativity

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Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

Drawing from various journals and studies, Ms. Livni presents information about the two stages of creativity and when people peak.

The first is Conceptional Innovators. These twenty-somethings have learned just enough to be dangerous. With basic stills of their craft in hand, they make things. They don’t ask, they just do – breaking conventions left and right. The firebrands of the world. Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein. They spend their long (or short – depending on how the public receives their work) lives defining the fields they invent – painters, poets, scientists. Their visions are firm.

No doubt a lot of conceptional innovators actually just reinvent the wheel, since they never actual got to the point in their field to find the wheel has been around for centuries, and get lost in the background noise of their fields. Their passion pushes thing forward. And a lot of conceptional  innovators make a wrong assumption – they learned enough to be dangerous, but in their case, was only dangerous to themselves.

Still, the groundbreaking work of the mid-twenty people change the world.

At the other end, in their mid-fifties, are the Experimental Innovators. People who had ideas but wanted to test them. Job and family got in the way, but it gave them time to really explore, test things, experiment with different ways, go back and try again. These older people have had time to learn more than one field, and their innovations often traverse between specialties, creating new connections. Charles Darwin and Virginia Woolf rocked the world, but only after their hairs turned gray.

You are never too old to change the world. The young aren’t the only ones to come up with Creative Thoughts.

You are never to young to change the world. The old don’t know everything.

Bibliography

Livni, Ephrat. “The two types of creativity that peak at different ages.” Quartz. 2019 April 28. (https://qz.com/1606423/the-two-types-of-creativity-peak-at-very-different-ages – last viewed 11/17/2023)

Geeking Science: Clean Water

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Image From the Internet Hive Mind

The order of human survival need is air, water, food … with shelter being mixed in depending on temperature, weather, and danger. I’ve created a little mnemonic for need to help me: three minutes air, three days water, three weeks food.

Just three days without water on a water planet, but the water available is mostly salt water. Fresh water is very limited. Only 2-3% of planetary water is freshwater, with half of that locked up in ice and snow and another chunk running underground accessible only through technology like wells. (Better Meets Reality) Then we need to limit that clean water total more by what humanity has contaminated. We need to clean our water cycle before that three-day window becomes too cloudy to see us through to healthy lives.

One of the places in need of cleanup is the ocean. For years humanity dumped trash into the rivers and ocean, and now we are paying the consequences. A lot of our trash floats – especially the plastics. And sun and time breaks it down on the surface of the ocean into microplastics. Why is the microplastics important? Needs One and Three mentioned above – air: ocean photosynthesis provides for 50% of the oxygen our planet needs for the planetary animal life to breathe (Conversation, The) and – food – 17% of our meat (Costello) and 2% of the calorie intake from all food sources (FAO). If the air (oxygen) goes away in the ocean, humans can continue to breathe on land just fine thanks to land plants, but all food sources in the oceans will go away.

And with microplastics being consumed by plants and animals in the ocean, those plastics are hitting our dinner plates now. Last year’s water bottle is this year’s tuna fish salad sandwich – yum!

We need to fix the mess we made in the oceans, in the rivers which run to the oceans (and provide ground water for humanity’s cities to drink), and in our streets – which wash into our storm water systems which dump into our rivers which run into our oceans. You remember my litter saga, something that I continue to participate in daily? Yeah, part of the reason I collect all the trash is to keep the bottles and plastic out of the storm water systems. My little part in keeping our water cycle clean.

(If you are not familiar with the difference between storm water systems and sewer systems, a good source is here: https://h2oc.org/blog/storm-drain-vs-sewer-whats-the-difference/ but the TL/DR version is sewer water is in a closed system from house to sewer plant, where the hazardous materials are reduced to “acceptable” levels, and a storm water system takes the rain water (and any containments it picks up in the lawns, streets, and parking lots) and dumps it into the nearest stream/water source to be carried to the ocean untreated. – sorry about this Rabbit Hole, but after working on the Soil and Water Board storm water is very dear to my heart.)

Humanity managed to clean up most of the air problems. Smog no longer is dissolving buildings with acid rain; people can travel through city streets without struggling for breath.

Next up on the Earth-cleaning list, water. That honey-do list includes the superfund sites, ground contamination, river cleanup, and ocean cleanup, especially the five ocean garbage patches. The Ocean Cleanup is working on both rivers and oceans. The initial thought was cleaning the oceans, but they quickly realized that if trash continued to run into the oceans, they were fighting a Sisyphus battle. Trash flowing from the rivers needed to stop too. Now the attack is two-prong: keep new trash from entering the ocean and removing the trash already in the ocean.

Water cleanup requires global assistance. The Ocean Cleanup thinks, with support, they can remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040.

I spent a couple hours exploring The Ocean Cleanup website, and I think, if they get the help they need, they might succeed. Won’t that be something?

Explore this project of humanity at its best (by way of the Dutch) here: https://theoceancleanup.com/

Remember the Earth is our home and we don’t have another. Sure we might-can “Geoform” other planets some day, but, guess what, we could practice for that by geo-forming where we are right now. If we can’t fix it, when we know most of the basics of this environmental system, then why do we think we will do better with a blank slate.

Ah, that is it – we are comparing planetary environmental systems to a painted picture where a blank slate is easier to deal with than an penciled and inked piece by someone else. But that is a very poor comparison, better would be we are dealing with a running engine. Starting from a “blank slate” for an engine means we have to create all the parts, then assemble them, while each part is moving. Using our own Earth to practice on, troubleshooting an engine that we know the sound of … that is much easier. At this time, there is no Planet B.

We are better off Geeking the Science to keep this one humming along a little longer. Let’s get this “water hose” fixed in our planetary engine.

Biography

Better Meets Reality. “How Much Water is There on Earth? (Ocean, Fresh & Drinkable Water.” 18 August 2018, last updated 27 July 2022. (https://bettermeetsreality.com/how-much-water-is-there-on-earth-ocean-freshwater-drinkable/ – last viewed 11/10/2023)

Costello, Chrisopher, etal. “The future of food from the sea.” Nature. 19 August 2020. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2616-y – last viewed 11/10/2023)

The Conversation. “Humans will always have oxygen to breathe, but we can’t say the same for ocean life.” 12 August 2021. (https://theconversation.com/humans-will-always-have-oxygen-to-breathe-but-we-cant-say-the-same-for-ocean-life-165148 – last viewed 11/10/2023)

FAO.org. “Food from the Oceans.” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 2017. (https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/1099024/ – last viewed 11/10/2023)

The Ocean Cleanup. “The Largest Cleanup in History.” (https://theoceancleanup.com/ – last viewed 11/10/2023)

H2OC Stormwater Program. “Storm Drain vs. Sewer: What’s the Difference?” 30 September 2020. (https://h2oc.org/blog/storm-drain-vs-sewer-whats-the-difference/ – last viewed 11/10/2023)

Geeking Science: Self-burying seeds

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Image from the Carnegie Mellon University

Humans have been sowing seeds for generations; sometimes digging holes with fingers, dropping the seeds in, and burying them in the dirt, and other times following the more traditional method of plants themselves – scattering them in the wind and hoping for the best. One is labor intensive and the other is just a play against statistics, praying to the capacious weather gods that the birds and weather will be on our side.

But what happens when you absolutely must plant things in hard to reach areas, for example, reforesting an area after a fire? Today’s drones answer half the equation with accessibility – flying easily to places that could take hours and remarkable physical danger – but that doesn’t get the seeds planted.

Wouldn’t it be nice if seeds could plant themselves?

Scientists recently stole an idea from seeds and upgraded it. Erodium have a stalk that taps into different moisture reactions to create a screw action for burying its seeds. It works okay – the plant exists in nature after all, but the natural best results depends on uneven soil with crevices because up-and-down for the one tail seed changes with each flip until the bury is successful. Once buried, the one-way directional hairs keeps the seed from popping back out and the stalk continues to wind and bury the seed deeper.

To upgrade the design, engineers at Carnegie Mellon University found that three coiled tails create nearly a 80% success rate. In a world with birds, rain washes, and rocky soil, this is amazing.

The device is made from biodegradable wood. And the carrier area can hold pine and other tree seeds, or crop seed. Plus it can been used to deploy and bury “nematodes (worms used as natural pesticides), fertilizers, and fungi.” (Spice) Other real-world applications outside of farming is reducing landslides by increasing deep-root vegetation and using the corkscrews “to implant sensors for environmental monitoring.” (Spice)

The inventors are still working on how to create and deliver these carriers at scale needed for farming crops and reforestation, but the device itself works great.

Two important questions for any invention – 1) can it be done and 2) how do we make enough for the invention to be useful. We have the “yes” for the first, now we need to Geek the Science on the second.

Bibliography

Nature video. “This device corkscrews itself into the ground like a seed.” YouTube. February 2023. (video imbedded above)

Science Friday. “A New Twist on Sowing Seeds.” 24 February 2023. (https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/corkscrew-seed-self-planting/ – last viewed 11/10/2023)

Spice, Byron. “Engineered Magic: Wooden Seed Carriers Mimic the Behavior of Self-Burying Seeds.” Carnegie Mellon University. 15 February 2023. (https://news.pantheon.cmu.edu/stories/archives/2023/february/engineered-magic-wooden-seed-carriers-mimic-the-behavior-of-self-burying-seeds – last viewed 11/10/2023)

Theresa, Deena. “This bioinspired seed carrier has a 80 percent success rate.” Interesting Engineering. 15 February 2023. (https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/bioinspired-seed-carrier – last viewed 11/10/2023)

Williams, Mary. “Inspired by nature: Self-burying seeds.” Plant Science Research Weekly. 24 February 2023. (https://plantae.org/inspired-by-nature-self-burying-seeds/#:~:text=Burrowing%20underground%20gives%20the%20seed%20protection%20from%20being,is%20hygromorphism%20%E2%80%93%20movement%20in%20response%20to%20water. – last viewed 11/10/2023)

Geeking Science: Space Pics

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Pictures about space features in the Planetary Society email magazine “The Downlink”

SUN RAYS ON MARS NASA’s Curiosity rover recently captured this image of the setting sun’s rays shining through iridescent clouds high in the Martian atmosphere. Although we see rays like this all the time on Earth around dawn and dusk, it was the first time that the phenomenon (also known as sunbeams or crepuscular rays) has been seen so clearly on Mars. February 2, 2023 (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

Although crepuscular rays are a common sight on Earth, we don’t often get to see them from this perspective. In this image captured from aboard the International Space Station in 2011, you can see how clouds blocking the setting Sun’s light create alternating shadows and beams of sunlight. Image credit: NASA.

It’s not every day you can plan to photograph an asteroid streaking through the sky. This meter-sized asteroid was spotted by Hungarian astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky only a few hours before it collided with our planet on Feb. 13, giving Dutch photographer Gijs de Reijke enough time to travel to the predicted location of impact and set up for the perfect shot. Image credit: Gijs de Reijke.

The concept of this picture is just amazing. First to find the asteroid. Second to report it quickly to the world. Third for a photographer to be ready and get where they can take the picture. Fourth to actual get the picture. Total Geeking this picture.

Geeking Science: P is for Psychopath

Erin Penn 6 Comments

Image from Dreamtime (paid for)

In “Hope for the Future” (1/28/2024), I created a small slice of the future run by psychopath. And if I continue the Gas Station Killer (first post appearing at 2/7/2021) series far enough, the serial killer(s) posing and modus operandi will lead the police to their doorstep(s). Unlike ADHD and autism, the killer versions of neuro-spicy have little benefit in a healthy society, hunter-gatherer or modern, but they do provide a ton of fun material for writers of thrillers and mysteries. The challenge is to present them realistically without reminding people (too much) that these types are monsters are real.

Psychopath and sociopath are used interchangeably by non-specialists, but neither are defined in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders.” There the diagnosis becomes defined as “antisocial personality disorder (ASPD)”. Under 18, the diagnose is “conduct disorder”.  In either case, going against societies standards, even quantified ones like laws, without remorse, is standard. Lying, tricking, and endangering others is done without empathy. Some going against society restrictions is expected, especially during teenage years, but people with ASPD have it in unhealthy levels. (Baby)

But when psychopathy is added to the mix, it takes ASPD to another level. About 1% of the population has psychopathy, and 25-30% of people with ASPD have these traits. Psychopathy isn’t a disorder or a diagnosis, but more like introvert or extrovert – just a set of traits some people have. Few of these traits are good … just saying: insincere charm, easily bored, manipulation of others, no guilt, failure to accept responsibility, and usually many sexual relations, likely because of the inability to connect emotionally but the brain’s neuro-spicy bonus of immediate rewards administered at a higher priority than “average”. Given the lack of guilt, failure to accept responsibility, and the manipulation of others, if this combo is found in someone with average intelligence (and 50% of all humans are at or below average – statistics being what they are over a population), crime and getting caught doing the crime is common. 15-25% of people in prisons display psychopathy traits. (Baby)

The upside of psychopathy is little-to-no imposture syndrome and virtually no anxiety issues. Helps not to care. Hey, not all traits personality need to be negative, even in a group package like psychopathy.

Not every person with psychopathy or ASPD is a serial killer, or even a criminal. Some function in society fine, and there are even jobs tailor-made for them. For example, repossession (of cars), foreclosures (of homes), and dunning (of credit) are all necessary in a capitalistic society for a lending system to function. I had a sister who worked in a dunning call center for about two months, but it destroyed her emotionally – people in that position needed a good helping of psychopathy to survive long-term. Sure we all hate people in these positions, especially when we are on the receiving end of life raining lemons on us after covering our bodies in papercuts, and being unable to pay back loans. But if a lending system is to exist, recourse on collecting the loans are needed too. (Not sure which is worse, not having a lending system or having a lending system.)

But back to the FUN part of psychopaths for writing. Serial killers – thank goodness there is not as many of these monsters in reality as show up in fiction but aren’t they fun in a fictional setting?

There are “organized” and “disorganized.” Organized creating premeditated crimes (which mysteries love so much), and the other creating crimes of passion (perfect for thrillers).

The organized are sane, not healthy but they are sane, an important distinction. They are aware they are killing people and society will punish them for this behavior if it is discovered. To stay unfound they are usually charming and have a “normal” life, even with spouses and children. A good job is necessary to get time off and travel money. Police hate organized killers as they don’t make many mistakes and stringing together enough of the mistakes for the police to actually find them could mean a long line of bodies. Readers love a good organized psychopath for murder mysteries.

The especially fun parts for readers are Modus Operandi (MO) and the signature. In romances, a reader loves how far-flung locations change up love stories; for mystery readers, a good MO makes all the difference between their “book candy” hauls. The method of operation combines things like the type of victim, where the victim is acquired, and the weapon used. All the things that make up the crime. The signature is something the perpetrator does not have to do to commit the crime, such as leaving a riddle with the body or redressing the person in a red gown. The signature comes from the fantasies driving the un-aliving. (Bonn)

Staging and Posing may be part of the signature. For the “Gas Station Killer”, the body(s) was found posed in a gas station bathroom. This particular killer does not stage to confuse the police, although moving the body away from the kill site means a lot of evidence is missing, and the amount of people using gas station bathrooms means any evidence missed during the transfer is highly compromised. The killer is driven by their fantasy to pose the victims.

Have you even written a serial killer with an MO and signature? Comment below what parts of the science of psychology you drew from to create your antagonist (or anti-hero) below. As I indicated, I used posing for the “Gas Station Killer” signature and their MO was the type of person they chose to kill and how they drained the blood from the body. In “Hope for the Future,” I played off organized and disorganized killers on a prisons ship interacting – using their different strengths to create a functional society which could (hopefully) perpetuate itself for the members to survive. Hard to do when most of the ship has the antisocial personality disorder and the inability to follow laws. But if the convicts do not figure it out, death will be long and uncomfortable to the last few left standing at the end.

Bibliography

Baby, Dany P. (reviewer). “How Sociopathy and Psychopaths are Different.” WebMD. 16 March 2023. (https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/psychopath-sociopath-differences – last viewed 11/16/2023)

Bonn, Scott A. “Serial Killers: Modus Operandi, Signature, Staging & Posing – Understanding and classifying serial killer crime scenes.” Psychology Today. 29 June 2015. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wicked-deeds/201506/serial-killers-modus-operandi-signature-staging-posing – last viewed 11/16/2023)

Lampley, Steven. “The Psychological Phases of Serial Killers.” Psychology Today. 25 August 2020. (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/captivating-crimes/202008/the-psychological-phases-serial-killers – last viewed 11/16/2023)