Sequoias endured 500 years of fiery drought, tree rings show

Hard scientific evidence of the MWP from ancient trees.

source

1000 year old natural remedy kills modern super bugs (MRSA)

Anglo-Saxon remedy kills hospital superbug MRSA

source

Fascinating. Considering that care is needed to make a version that is effective.  How many other old scientific remedies are there?  And how many were hand waved away as useless?

Very cool science, photographs of molecules

Scientists capture first images of molecules before and after reaction

Almost speed of light thought experiment from xkcd

What happens to a baseball if pitched really fast?

Faraday, the electric motor, and SIWOTI (someone is wrong on the internet)

Sometimes while researching things, I come across web pages that are just wrong, and usually I ignore them.

Not today.

Farday is well known as the inventor of the electric motor, the man who discovered the link between electricity and magnetism.  These facts are never in dispute.

This web page just leaves him out of the first paragraph of the story, which is about the invention of the electric motor!

The invention of the electric motor 1800-1854
A short history of electric motors - Part 1
Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Martin Doppelbauer

With the invention of the battery (Allessandro Volta, 1800), the generation of a magnetic field from electric current (Hans Christian Oersted, 1820) and the electromagnet (William Sturgeon, 1825) the foundation for building electric motors was laid.  

This can not be tolerated.  Faraday demonstrated his invention in 1820.

Faraday is the inventor

Faraday is the important person in the story

FARADAY IS THE MAN!

Now that I blogged about this, I'm sure the problem has been solved.  Duty calls!

SIWOTI syndrome

Fukushima radiation field of 3.75 Sv/h above Unit 3, March 17 2011

Thursday, 17 March

During the morning Self-Defense Force helicopters drop water four times on the spent-fuel pools of units 3 and 4.^[43] They measure radiation field of 3.75 Sv/h above Unit 3.^[44] In the afternoon it is reported that the unit 4 spent-fuel pool was filled with water and none of the fuel rods were exposed.^[45] 

Official Transcript

And there is a notable point -- 300 feet 2 above Unit 3 in the air there is a dose reading of  375 R per hour.

375 Rem is 3.75 Sievert

An hour in that sort of radiation is almost certain death.

Since radiation levels are subject to the inverse square law, at 150 feet above Building 3 the dose would be  15 Sieverts an hour, deadly, and enough to make anyone sick very quickly.  Which is why the helicopters stayed so high up when dropping water.

Lets convert time to the metric system

Inspired by a topic.

Why not divide the day into 10 metric hours, each hour 100 metric minutes, each minute 100 metric seconds?  That how the metric system works.

Makes everything easier.

Right.

It would make everything easier. In fact, the French actually did this.

For some reason it never caught on.

Another Crown Flash video

Youtube video

Starts here

The start of that video has a really strange video or two jets and an orb, which I have no explanation for at all.

Statins

What to make of this?

For the first time ever I linked to this blog

When responding to a blog post by the great Scott Adams.

Now I feel bad I have neglected this blog of late.

660 views on the original blog entry before I linked to it. 

This is not a place of honor

How do you warn people far into the future about radioactivity?

How to calculate dose and shielding for radioactive materials

Calculator

The amphidromic point, amphidromic systems

Good starting point - The dynamic theory of tides

1932 Bulletin of the National Research Council, Issues 77-80 (theorizes about multiple nodes for each harmonic)

Animation showing amphidromic systems and nodes - page where animation is from

Uni of Alaska

At and near the system's central point the tidal range is nil

The tidal range is zero at the amphidromic point and increases with distance from this point,

Principles of Tidal Sedimentology

Image from book

Elements of Marine Ecology

Essentials of Oceanography

Oceanography: An Invitation to Marine Science

Virginia Institute of Marine Science

page with many sources many no longer working

from an online Oceanography quiz


The center of an open-ocean tidal system is called a(n) __________.
(a) cotidal point
(b) amphidromic point
(c) ebb current
(d) tidal bore

(b) amphidromic point

The center of an open ocean tidal system is called a(n) __________.
(a) amphidromic center.
(b) cotidal center
(c) rotary center
(d) seiche
(e) tidal flux

(a) amphidromic center.

Due to the shape of the North Sea, it develops two amphidromic points.
(a) True
(b) False

(a) True


An amphidromic point is ____________.
(a) a "no tide" point in the ocean around which the tide crest rotates through one tidal cycle
(b) a place in the ocean where tides are highest
(c) a place in the ocean where tidal datum is displaced to the right (in the northern hemisphere),
or to the south (in the southern hemisphere)
(d) a "no tide" point at the coast where there is a daily high tide, but no low tide

(a) a "no tide" point in the ocean around which the tide crest rotates through one tidal cycle

New theory about currents (pdf)

The Tides, once more (perhaps the final word)

Just came across this on Physics Stack, excellent answer, and explanations of why there are no bulges moving under the moon.

Does Earth really have two high-tide bulges on opposite sides?

There is no tidal bulge.

This was one of Newton's few mistakes. Newton did get the tidal forcing function correct, but the response to that forcing in the oceans: completely wrong.

Newton's equilibrium theory of the tides with its two tidal bulges is falsified by observation. If this hypothesis was correct, high tide would occur when the Moon is at zenith and at nadir. Most places on the Earth's oceans do have a high tide every 12.421 hours, but whether those high tides occur at zenith and nadir is sheer luck. In most places, there's a predictable offset from the Moon's zenith/nadir and the time of high tide, and that offset is not zero.

One of the most confounding places with regard to the tides is Newton's back yard. If Newton's equilibrium theory was correct, high tide would occur at more or less the same time across the North Sea. That is not what is observed. At any time of day, one can always find a place in the North Sea that is experiencing high tide, and another that is simultaneously experiencing low tide.

Read the complete page for more info

(not fair use to quote the entire article)

Archived here (let's all support archive.org)

While there aren't actually two bulges, many many publications still show it, and teach it.
An example of a University course that teaches there are two bulges

Model of arctic tides

Hudson Strait tides (possibly the largest tides on the planet)

Earth tides

Earth tides and earthquakes

(edit June 27 2015)

Just found this blog post, I like his questions, ones anyone might ask when hearing the old (and wrong) explanation of the two bulges.

Here is a 16 day animation from the TOPEX satellite that shows what tides actually look like worldwide.

(edit Aug 22 2021) Blog about the ocean tides

Sodium and other alkali explosions finally explained

Sodium and other alkali explosions finally explained

more here

and here

Science and expensive Coffee makers (fixing a Keurig coffee maker with a paper clip)

Thanks to this this blog entry I was able to fix a Keurig Mini coffee maker, after repeated calls to the customer service did nothing but cause aggravation. It was only making a third of a cup.

Long story short, unplug, empty the water, shove sewing  needle (or paper clip) up into the Keurig needle that dispenses the hot water, Jiggle it around, then descale with vinegar, to get all the coffee grounds out of the system.

Science!  And thanks to that blogger linked to. Comments are closed or I would have thanked them personally on the blog.

Thanks internet, and if this helps one Keurig owner, my work here is done.

Also, YouTube has a bunch of videos of different fixes.  This one is close to the money for the fix.  Try at your own risk. None of this is recommended by Keurig.

The Salton Sea and earthquakes?

No time to investigate, but fascinating.

http://science.kqed.org/quest/2011/06/30/salton-sea-15-months-pregnant/

Remember the Salton Sea?  Joseph E. Stevens, inHoover Dam tells that Charles Rockwood saw opportunity in diverting the Colorado River to irrigate the Imperial Valley.  (Today this is a major agricultural and metropolitan area just north of the Mexico border, and south of the Salton Sea.)  In 1901 they finished their canal, fed by a rickety headgate on the Colorado River, and the Imperial Valley began to bloom.  Yet after three years, the canal filled with silt, and the water supply to the Imperial Valley became a trickle.  

Map of the Imperial Valley and Salton Sea
Credit: USGS

To avoid interference from the U.S. government, Rockwood's company decided to create a new canal and breach the Colorado River bank inside Mexico.  They were desperate - money was drying up faster than the water, so they irresponsibly dug into the riverbank without a headgate.  All was well until the Colorado River had a large flood.  The soil gave way and the river began to experience a cutback.  After filling the Salton Sink, which to this day retains some of that water, the river began eroding back along its bank at a rate greater than one mile a day.  It had the potential to create another great canyon, and to permanently empty the Colorado into the desert, never to reach the sea again.  

The owner of the Southern Pacific Railroad, which had been profiting handsomely from the growth of the Imperial Valley was strongly encouraged by President Teddy Roosevelt to fix the problem.  It took a constant shuttle of freight cars carrying timber, rock, and other fill material to stop the cutback.  Only after two years was the Colorado River returned to its original channel and emptying into the Gulf of California.

http://www.zarkanderson.com/2010/06/gulf-oil-spill-similar-to-the-salton-sea.html