All change at Charles Darwin Station

The history of science in one easy to follow London Underground-style map. The web version comes with links to every scientist. It should be in every science department of every school.

Relight my fire

Now those Swiss gnomes have re-started their doomsday machine, time for a re-post a year later:

We all like to enjoy a big bang from time to time and a tiny black hole on occasion, so I'm unconcerned by all that worry around the world about some particle collision machine. Doomsday it ain't.
I'd have fancied they called it the Voltaire machine, as that illustrious French philosopher lived in that very area. He flitted back and forth across the French-Swiss border to escape from the French authorities too keen to put a damper on his enlightning mind.

May the queer force be with you

We all like to enjoy a big bang from time to time and a tiny black hole on occasion, so I'm unconcerned by all that worry around the world about some particle collision machine. Doomsday it ain't.
I'd have fancied they called it the Voltaire machine, as that illustrious French philosopher lived in that very area. He flitted back and forth across the French-Swiss border to escape from the French authorities too keen to put a damper on his enlightning mind.

Picture credit: 4Chan

When psychologists are let loose

Psychologists are a strange breed. Constantly trying to categorize your mind, behaviour and desires and then berating you for deluding yourself as to your true self - charging you all the way of course. Now their in-house magazine, Psychology Today, carried an article called Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature: Why most suicide bombers are Muslim, beautiful people have more daughters, humans are naturally polygamous, sexual harassment isn't sexist, and blonds are more attractive.
Let's go through a few of them.

Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)

"Women's desire to look like Barbie—young with small waist, large breasts, long blond hair, and blue eyes—is a direct, realistic, and sensible response to the desire of men to mate with women who look like her. There is evolutionary logic behind each of these features.
Men prefer young women in part because they tend to be healthier than older women. One accurate indicator of health is physical attractiveness; another is hair. Healthy women have lustrous, shiny hair, whereas the hair of sickly people loses its luster. Because hair grows slowly, shoulder-length hair reveals several years of a woman's health status."

The picture is wrong: it portrays heterosexual (why do these psychologists always forget that rider?) men as wanting to mate for offspring with Paris Hilton only, as if sex had no other function in the human world (apparently not according to psychologists). It illuminates the sexual fantasies of psychologists better than explaining sexual behaviour of guys.

"It is no coincidence that blond hair evolved in Scandinavia and northern Europe, probably as an alternative means for women to advertise their youth, as their bodies were concealed under heavy clothing."

Some of those psychologists must have attended one too many conference in Scandinavia to cloud their science. In no other cold climate population do women have blond hair: not the Sami, Mongolians, Iniuit or Taiga dwellers - none of their women have to use blond hair to advertise themselves because of their heavy clothing. Scandinavian women are the exception rather than the type. And what about the blond boys in Scandinavia? I do have trouble taking blonds (real and fake ones) seriously, female or male, I'm sorry about that.

Humans are naturally polygamous and Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy

"Women can share a wealthy man. Under monogamy, they are stuck with marrying a poorer man. [...] Men in monogamous societies imagine they would be better off under polygyny. What they don't realize is that, for most men who are not extremely desirable, polygyny means no wife at all, or, if they are lucky, a wife who is much less desirable than one they could get under monogamy."

Again the psychologists forget the homosexuals, now all in the name of economic advantage for women's offspring whether to share a rich man or have one poor guy. If there was polygyny many men could only have guy-on-guy sex because all the girls are taken by the richer guys. Which leads to the next statement:

Most suicide bombers are Muslim: polygyny in Arab countries, resulting in many un-marriable young men, combined with the promise of 72 virgins in paradise (some sort of afterlife reversal of polygyny compensating guys for the sexual hardship they suffered in the real world) leads to guys taking the shortcut to paradise.

The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of

"Many middle-aged men do go through midlife crises, but it's not because they are middle-aged. It's because their wives are."

And that's also why gay guys never have a midlife crisis. And yes, old girls, there is no hope for you. Getting a toy boy is obviously anti-evolutionary and mad-as-hell behaviour.

The other half a dozen statements are worth checking out, really.

Intriguing questions

Some things are guaranteed to exercise my mind because I don't know the answers, mainly because I'm too lazy to look it up on Wikipedia.
For instance, take the sun, imagine being a photon that is about to be blasted out into space by the sun. My physics tutor (and first boyfriend) told me nothng goes faster than 300,000km/second, the speed of light. Now imagine a photon on the other side of the sun which is about to be blasted out by the sun at the same time as the previously mentioned photon. When they both shoot into space at 300k km/s, relative to each other do they travel at 600k km/s away from each other? If so, they would never see each other again or be able to make contact again?
If we transpose this to the Big Bang, does this mean that the original material that was blasted out is travelling in all directions at the speed of light away from each other and so will never be able to observe each other? Not just red-shift Doppler effect but perfect invisibility? So much light and material out there in space is practically impossible to observe because it is invisible due to the speeds involved? Is basically 99% of space out there then simply unexplorable for us? Will in the distant future, due to the increase in space expansion (at an increasing rate), all galaxies be so far away from each other that they would not be visible anymore? Our radio waves would become too slow to ever reach them, let alone get any messages back from them?
Another issue, imagine your car's petrol tank. When you first bought your car and filled up, are there any petrol molecules in your tank now that have been there all that time?
Don't ask why this interests me. I'm just an Aspie.

Jupiter and moon occultation

It was quite a sight. I just got off the ferry on Waiheke Island when the moon slid over Jupiter and made it invisible for over an hour. Called an occultation, it's apparently quite rare - every 50 years or so - so I was glad there were no clouds and so everyone could see it. No binoculars or telescope needed unless you wanted to see some of Jupiter's moons disappear one by one too. It was quite eerie to see the planet suddenly extinguished by the dark side of the moon.
Several commuters were gazing up, some keeping an eye on the moon while on the ferry (one advantage of being on the harbour in the pitch dark). One said, in response to an ignorant comment that Jupiter would go in front of the moon, we'd be in big trouble if that happened!