Category: Geeking Science

Geeking Science: Reading and the Brain

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

When I surface from a book and sounds return to my ears, I’m always amazed at how deep a book can take you. Peripheral vision goes as I focus on the words. Sounds processing diminishes as my eyes turn over the words to process through the hearing and speech centers. And when I emerge, the aches and pains of my body return. And, strangely, the last scent and taste described in the scene linger against my nose and tongue.

Reading is intense.

It activates our brain feel the words before us – a crackling fire teases our ears and warms our fingers, a favorite sweater pulls our hair as the hero yanks it over his head, and a punch whistling before the heroine’s face causes our heart to jump in a fight or flight mix.

This gives writers a very particular power. “According to neuroscience, we have two different types of memory: semantic and episodic.” (DeFreitas)

Semantic is library storage – things learned and then shelved. They go moldy over time if they are not taken down and brushed off. For some people, Algebra is no longer a thing and for others, the history dates memorized to carefully pass tests in high school. If you can web them into other things, sharing shelf space, they stay clean longer and are easier to restore – checks are similar to deposits and paying bills online. It might take a moment to remember all the details needed to write a check at this point, but so long as you keep the rest of the banking-system shelf active, it can be done.

Episodic memory is capturing a whole scene. The time you cried your heart out because you lost a card game, going off to overnight camp the first time, a first kiss. You remember names, and smells, and lights, and emotions.

It’s like reading a scene in a book.

Now here is the Geeking Science part to tap into for NaNoWriMo – please use this power for good. You want people to remember something – not just the facts, but the emotions, write the information to activate the episodic memory, not the semantic. We all remember The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank’s Diary) because of the emotions, not the facts. People argue about whether the holocaust occurred, but that book, that gave teens something to hang history onto.

Create stories to expose people new thoughts, new people, new concepts, new science. They might never really “get” it when they read it in a newspaper, but the fiction reaches them. They see it, they hear it, they smell it. They feel it.

Now, go write.

Go read.

Bibliography

DeFreitas, Susan. “The Fascinating Neuroscience of the Scene.” Jane Friedman. 8 June 2023. (https://janefriedman.com/the-fascinating-neuroscience-of-scene/ – last viewed 11/16/2023)

Geeking Science: Ready to Fly to Titan

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Come out and hang ten on Titian, flying around Saturn’s rings…

T-shirt design available here: https://balooie.com/surfing-titan-t-shirt/

Ready to surf on Titan? We got pictures of a shoreline thanks to space probes…

PANORAMA OF THE “SHORELINE” ON TITAN Panorama of the “Shoreline” on Titan, stitched from Huygens DISR Side-Looking and Medium-Resolution Imager raw data. Image: ESA / NASA / JPL / UA; image processing and panorama: René Pascal

Excuse me, I need to just stop and Geek a moment.

We got a frigging shoreline picture from a moon of Saturn.

Wow.

Ok, back to why I’m here Geeking Science … can you believe it is not that?

No, really it isn’t the shoreline. It is the Dragonfly.

Not a dragonfly.

Photo by Ashish Khanna on Unsplash

But THE Dragonfly

NASA’s (presently concept-only but working toward reality) drone the size of an SUV to be deployed to Titian around 2034 (if we can keep our Congress looking forward and out).  Titian has a great dense atmosphere. While Ingenuity has been slugging it out in the thin air of Mars during its over fifty flights, the Dragonfly will have plenty to work with.

At the moment, they are still testing out the eight rotor design (video below). As drone technology continues to mature on Earth, the tech will be adjusted to work on other worlds with different atmospheres. Instead of exploring worlds by inches, flights will let us cover yards and maybe even miles. And in an atmosphere like Titian we can drop in something the size of a large car and all the technology we can shove in that space. How much are we going to learn having all the instrumentation available? Considering how many different things normally fit into the small probes, I am completely Geeking about the flying space lab we will be sending to Titian … with initial results coming back before children born this year turn ten are old enough to vote if everything goes right. (see update below about timeline correction)

Interested in this tech? You can follow the Dragonfly development at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory site here: https://dragonfly.jhuapl.edu/

(And let me give kudos to whomever designed the Dragonfly logo … it’s gorgeous.)

UPDATE – TIMELINE CORRECTION: Budget reductions have reduced the mission budget by nearly 20%. This could push the launch date from 2027, and cascading the previously timeline of arrival at Titan in 2034. (The Downlink, Planetary Society, 12 May 2023)

Geeking Science: Roads

Erin Penn Leave a comment

Photo by Matt Duncan on Unsplash

Does anyone else Geek out about roads and road engineering? No? Just me then.

Well, I am going to completely Geek Out about the science of road engineering for a little bit.

Roads are FREAKING COOL!

These are one of the few places where you can see incremental improvements and how much a difference they make in our lives. For example, Rumble Strips invented in 1952 – they can be rolled into newly laid pavement or cut into existing pavement (Wikipedia – Rumble Strip) – are still undergoing improvement about where they need to be put and how. There is one on my postal delivery route down the enter of the lane, on a wide curve where it is easy to drift into oncoming traffic. I have been reminded of drifting at that location more than once; and considering the paint wear, so have others.

How about the raised pavement markers (patented in 1967) and the reflective paint used on roads? The visibility at night really helps. As does edge lanes, especially on two-lane rural roads. Can you imagine not knowing where the edge of the road is?  I remember when guessing the edge was a thing I had to do all the time … I love that white line of reflective paint to my right when driving down dark rural roads since its widespread addition with the turn of the century. And all the road lines – each contain a message – dashed is safe to pass, yellow means bad and white is good (Yellow on the left and white on the right means I’m traveling in the right direction, even if I can’t see any other signs). Brilliant. I’m talking about the raised pavement markers reflecting on highways on dark stormy nights. Age makes even the reflective paint lines hard to see; those plastic markers even work with astigmatism.

Does anyone else think about stormwater and roads and admire all the ways road engineering works to move the water off the impermeable surface to prevent road flooding and hydroplaning? When I started driving back in the early eighties, hydroplaning was common, but between road improvements, tire improvements, and car improvements (especially with the anti-lock brakes being added as a common safety device in the late eighties), I rarely feel loss of control.

Going into curves where the road is tilted, so you don’t have to slow down and you retain control easily is awesome. For a time, I lived on a road where the road was not tilted right. Both ways needed a sign saying “SLOW – 25 mph”; that was a true maximum speed. Drivers who didn’t heed that slow down from the 35 mph before and after the curve, ended up in my yard all the time. Having the engineers tip highways correctly makes me happy.

The slight bow in the road also is cool beans to have the stormwater divert off the road to either side, into the drains which run it to the nearest stream.

Related to water is the berms and center areas and their vegetation. Berms built up on the side of the roads decrease sound pollution when the soil and plants absorb the extra sound waves. The center areas and berms on highways not only mitigate traffic accidents, and control flooding with by providing ground with permeable surfaces, they reduce eyestrain – green and plants being kinder on the eyes than black asphalt and white concrete. The soil areas also, thanks to recent innovations of adding wildflower meadows, provide opportunities to create biodiversity for the planet. In urban settings, trees planted along roads reduce the sun hitting the streets, reducing the road heat sink as well as capturing rain water and decreasing street flooding.

Green reduces stress – scenic parkways increase relaxation. (Green Cities) My city has a parkway – green median, treelined, great berms – which runs through town about a mile south the “main street” with all the shops, malls, and doubles as a highway. Whenever I have the option of the parkway, I grab it even if the travel distance is longer. Strangely, because of the stop and go lights on the main street, the timing ends up being the same no matter which one I take.

More recent engineering designs for roads include:

  1. Safety edges – instead of a dropoff of pavement at the side of the road, installing a bevel making it easier to pull off the road if there is no shoulder and to get back on the road surface.
  2. Pedestrian Islands – when crossing multiple lanes of traffic, put an island in the median for the walkers to stop paying attention of traffic traveling one way, and start paying attention to traffic coming the other way.
  3. Reflective Backplates – instead of traffic signals being lights hanging against the dark, being lost in the tall building lights of an urban environment, yellow squares offset the lights from the back behind them, increasing visibility. (7 Roadway)

Image Source: https://www.pwmag.com/roadways/video-lighthawk-alpolic-350-traffic-signal-back-plate-from-korman-signs_o

All these inventions and innovations for Roads. The constant improvement. Isn’t it freaking Geeking cool?

In case you ever wonder what I think about as I drive to writing conventions.

Do you have any favorite road engineering features? Comment below.

Bibliography

“7 Roadway Engineering Design Strategies to Make Road Safer for Drivers.” Traffic Safety Store. 18 September 2018. (https://www.trafficsafetystore.com/blog/7-roadway-engineering-design-strategies-to-make-roads-safer-for-drivers/ – last viewed 11/10/2023)

Cole, Steve. “The History (Invention) of Road and Pavement Striping.” Performed Thermoplastic. 15 August 2022. (https://preformedthermoplastic.com/the-history-invention-of-road-and-pavement-striping/ – last viewed 11/10/2023)

“Green Cities: Good Health.” University of Washington. (https://depts.washington.edu/hhwb/Thm_SafeStreets.html – last viewed 11/10/2023)

Greenfield, Patrick. “Wildflower meadows to line England’s new roads in boost for biodiversity.” The Guardian. 1 December 2020. (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/01/wildflower-meadows-to-line-all-major-new-uk-roads-in-boost-for-biodiversity-aoe – last viewed 11/10/2023)

“The History of Anti-Lock Brakes.” Did you know cars. (https://didyouknowcars.com/history-of-anti-lock-brakes/ – last viewed 11/10/2023)

Owen, Erika. “Why the Lines on Our Roads Look the Way They Do.” Travel + Leisure. 2 August 2016. (https://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/road-trips/history-of-lines-on-roads – last viewed 11/10/2023)

Wikipedia. “Raised Pavement Marker.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_pavement_marker – last viewed 11/10/2023)

Wikipedia. “Rumble Strip.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_strip – last viewed 11/10/2023)

Geeking Science: Two Types of Creativity

Erin Penn Leave a comment

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)