This is a sugar cane. Looks tasty, right? If only we stuck to eating things that look good before processing...
That term, ‘evaporated cane juice’, is everywhere now — because it sounds more natural. But it turns out evaporating cane juice is simply how sugar is made: you get the juice out of some cane, dry it out (meaning, evaporate it), then separate the molasses from the crystals and voila: white sugar. The only difference with evaporated cane juice is that the molasses aren’t fully separated out — so all the evil sugar is still in there, plus some brown goo. And no, molasses are not good for you.
In fact, juicing anything is not good for you: it’s like extracting the crack from a cocaine plant. An apple, orange or what have you contains a lot of fiber, so when you eat it you get its fructose — which has a lot of energy but is not great for you — but all the fiber will keep you from eating too much of it. (The fiber will also do wonders for your digestive system.) But when you juice fruit, all you’re doing is getting rid of the great fiber and concentrating the high-calorie part of the plant into a liquid. So stop processing perfectly good plants: just eat the much healthier unjuiced fruit.
But back to the main point: sugar, high fructose corn syrup, evaporated cane juice — same poison, different names.
It might sound like a stupid question at first, because of all the black darkness in between the stars, but the answer is actually evidence of one of the fundamental properties of our universe. The problem comes in when you realize there shouldn’t be any darkness at night: there are trillions of trillions of stars in the universe, and their light should literally be filling up the sky all the time. So then why is it mostly dark? Some stars are really far away and their light hasn’t gotten here yet, but there are still plenty of stars whose light should be flooding our tiny planet. Which it is — we just can’t see it, because by the time the light gets here, it’s infrared.
Night Sky. Photo by Scott Wylie
If the universe were constant and stars stayed in the same position, the night sky would be indeed be filled with light. But because the universe is expanding, stars are constantly moving away from each other, and therefore away from us, too. That motion causes redshift, which is what happens to light from an object that is moving away: the wavelength increases due to the Doppler effect, and since color is dictated by the wavelength of light, it first appears more and more red and then infrared, which we can’t see anymore. So the sky is dark because most of the light that we would normally see — from all the countless stars — has been shifted to infrared on its way to Earth — because the universe is expanding.
Easter Island (whose native name is Rapa Nui) in the South Pacific is generally seen as an example of the Tragedy of the Commons: inhabitants selfishly depleted the island’s shared natural resources, leading to their own eventual doom. Settlers arrived there in 800 A.D. and found a lush island filled with forests, then over the next thousand years proceeded to cut the trees down and make canoes for fishing, houses for living, and tools for farming. But they didn’t realize how fragile the ecosystem on the island was, and that the trees, once cut, would be very difficult to grow back. After several centuries, there were virtually no trees on the island, and since it’s one of the most isolated places on earth and was therefore devoid of trade, this meant there were no more canoes, houses or farming tools. And even if there were, without protection from the trees, fierce winds eroded the soil so much that farming was next to impossible. Eventually, lack of food and the resulting violence decimated the population.
Ahu Tongariki near Rano Raraku, a 15-moai ahu excavated and restored in the 1990s
Dutch explorers discovered the island on Easter Sunday (hence its Western name) in 1622, about 75 years after the last forests had disappeared; they described the island as having rich soil and being cultivated, and of course having a shore lined with giant statues. Roughly 50 years later, Spanish explorers found it and also mentioned the statues, but said the land was largely uncultivated. Four years after that, James Cook said the soil was poor and the statues neglected, with some having fallen down. In 1786, French explorers reported only 10% of the island was cultivated and finally, in 1825, a British ship reported no standing statues.
The prevalent theory is that the impressive statues, which were central to the Rapa Nui religion, had all been toppled in a quick 50 years — after having watched over the shore for centuries — because the islanders didn’t think to protect the environment they all shared. The fact is that the island was slowly deforested, which led to soil erosion and a lack of fishing canoes, which led to a lack of food, which led to civil war and eventually cannibalism. By 1877, thanks to additional deaths from genocide committed by slave traders in the 1860s and the smallpox introduced by them, the island’s population was down to 111 people — from about 3,000 when it was first discovered by Europeans, and probably around 10,000 a few decades before that. In 1888, it was annexed by Chile (the closest large country) as a result of a treaty with the remaining natives. The tragedy is told in a 2006 book called Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed.
Statues on Easter Island in various states of restoration in 2004. Photo by Phillie Casablanca.
But recently, a couple of archaeologists have threaded a different story through those same facts and published it in a book called The Statues That Walked: Unraveling The Mystery of Easter Island. Their theory is that the original Polynesian settlers of the island arrived in 1200 A.D., (400 years after the generally accepted date) and purposely brought rats with them on their canoes along with chickens, in order to eat them. Once on the island, however, without any natural predators, the rats flourished on their own and ate the nuts of the now-extinct and slow-growing Easter Island palm tree, thereby preventing their reseeding. And so the trees were decimated due to rats brought by the settlers, not directly by the settlers’ hands. Even so, they figured out ways around soil erosion: stone enclosures were built around farms to protect them from winds, and the soil was enriched with volcanic gravel. They practiced population control and generally lived a sustainable existence until the Europeans came, who introduced new diseases and new status symbols aside from the giant statues. Eventually, the Rapa Nui started dying en masse and stopped caring about the statues, which subsequently fell into disrepair. These archaeologists also believe that obsidian weapons that have been discovered were actually farming tools, and that there was no civil war.
Location of Easter Island
One other difference in their theory: how the statues got to the shore from the dormant volcano where they were made, miles away. (Statues at various stages of completion have been found in a quarry in the volcano and on the route from there to the beach.) Mainstream thinking is that the statues were made at the quarry, then rolled on logs to the shore. But while the authors of the alternative theory don’t believe oral tradition about violence and cannibalism, they do believe the tradition which says the statues walked to the shore. And what’s more, it may actually be true: in a video of experiments funded by National Geographic, it’s clear that a very large and heavy statue can be made to walk with a few strong ropes and three groups of people pulling it from one side and the other. The secret: the statues’ giant heads and potbelly design makes them heavy in the front, giving them forward momentum and allowing the islanders to use gravity to help propel the statue forward.
Minute Physics decided this issue is important enough to make a video about even though it has nothing to do with physics, so here is why you’re reading ‘Ye Olde Shoppe’ the wrong way: in the olden days, the sound “th” had its own letter, Þ, called thorn. This letter appears in Scandinavian languages and was probably introduced by the Vikings, during numerous invasions of England during the 9th and 10th centuries (Old Norse and Old English were similar languages, both having come from Northern Germany). During this time, words like “this” and “that” would have been written “Þis” and “Þat”, if Old English were anything like Modern English.
The first page of the Old English text of Beowulf, with words containing the letter thorn circled
Then the English were conquered for the last time, in 1066 by an entirely different sort of Vikings: Normans, who had settled in the part of northern France now known as Normandy, who spoke French and who instituted it as the language of the aristocracy in England. Over time, the ruling class did adopt English, but it became heavily influenced by French. These French-speaking English didn’t like the letter thorn, so they started using “th” instead of “Þ”, and it obviously caught on. But for centuries after the Norman conquest, thorn was still used.
In fact, it was still in use when the printing press was invented 400 years later, but since printing presses came from continental Europe, the typed alphabets were Latin and didn’t include the letter thorn and other Norse runes. Having to make do with what they had, English writers figured that ‘y’ looked close enough to ”Þ” and started using it instead. And that’s how “Þe olde” became “ye olde”. Interestingly “ye“, pronounced like you’d think, actually meant the same thing back in those days as “y’all” does in the South now.
This taco house will not put up the French spelling of "þe"
All Scandinavian languages eventually followed suit with English and started using “th” instead of “Þ” — except for Icelandic, who still uses thorn and another Old English letter called eth(ð). As for English, there’s little chance of it going back to ”Þ”, especially since words like “thorn” would become ”Þorn” and probably be either read as “born” or “porn”. And just for confusion, there’s a letter called sho(Ϸ) that looks very similar to thorn, but comes from the Greek alphabet and has nothing to do with English.
Interleave: don’t just keep trying to learn one thing until you master it, but rather move on to something else for a while. The something else should be related though, so maybe break up a subject like the Cold War into decades.
Change venues periodically: if you study in only one location, you’ll only remember the stuff in that location.
Learn, wait a while, then recall: if you just learn a thing once, it’ll get more and more buried the longer you don’t recall it. But if you wait some time, until you can just barely remember it, then study it again, it will help you recall it easier the next time. In a sense, it’s like practicing retrieving that particular memory, because we have so many facts in our heads that we need that practice.
So come back and read this in three days from a different location.
One of the coolest things about math is when it can actually be applied to the real world, like when it helps you figure out in what direction to shoot a cannon ball to hit your nemesis’ house, or how to beat the house at Black Jack. But even those applications are almost always about physics or chemistry and rarely about biology, since life can’t be bothered with such rational things as math.
The video below is therefore very cool because it shows that the leaves in plants are generally spaced in a mathematical series, because that’s the optimal way for leaves to grow such that they fill in the most available space. And because of that simple fact, plant growth can be predicted mathematically, which makes math that much more interesting.
C.G.P Grey’s newest video explains how Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas and other similar characters were all thrown into the American melting pot, out of which emerged Santa Claus.
The real-life Santa village in Finland he mentioned is called Rovaniemi, and it has a pretty good Internet presence, including a website and a YouTube channel.
If you liked this video, Mr. Grey has a few other interesting ones:
The venerable C.G.P. Grey is back with another interesting and educational video, this time tackling the problems with the American Electoral College. (If that term is a fuzzy memory from high school government class, he also has a good five-minute video on how it works). The problems he points out with the system:
It’s unfair to people living in large states, because of a rule that redistributes some electors to smaller states, to keep presidential candidates from ignoring them. As a consequence, a vote from a person in Vermont counts for three Texans’ votes and someone in Wyoming counts for four Californians.
But candidates still ignore the small states, which get pretty much no visits or money from candidates.
What’s more, they also ignore the big states, like California, Texas and New York. Why? Because where candidates spend their resources is in big “battleground” states — the ones that could go either way. These days, Texas is a lock for Republicans, while California and New York are firmly Democratic; so why even bother preaching to the choir? Instead, candidates focus on a handful of states like Florida and Ohio that have big populations from both parties.
In fact, in the two months before the 2008 elections, just four states (FL, OH, PA, VA) received the majority of visits and money. So the opinions of the citizens in those four states tend to dominate politics, making it really unfair for someone in Colorado, for example.
It is technically possible to win the presidency with 22% of the popular vote. That means 78% of the people could vote for Obama in 2012, and he could still lose. This should absolutely not be possible in any democracy, much less in a country with the United States’ stature.
Throughout American history, there have been three elections in which someone became president with less than 50% of the popular vote — most recently, G.W. Bush in 2000. That means that 5% of the 56 elections since 1788 have failed. Any critical system that has a 5% failure rate is broken: if the electric utility failed that often, you’d have no power for more than two weeks a year; if the DMV failed that often, 5% of drivers would be blind or kids.
Clearly, much of government is broken — e.g., the economic system, the justice system — because they have much higher failure rates. However, at least we’re doing the best we can for most of them. But that’s not true for the electoral system: as he points out in the first video, the electoral college was created because in the 18th century, information traveled at the speed of a horse: having a small-ish group vote at the same time and place was the best way to do an election. But now, information travels at the speed of light and the electoral college is just simply archaic.
If you liked this video, Mr. Grey has a few other interesting ones:
C.G.P. Grey — the guy who explained the difference between England, Britain and the U.K., and taught us that there’s no good way to figure out how many continents there are — has a new video all about Daylight Saving Time (DST), the curse of which is about to end in a couple of weeks, at least until next year. The video tries to be somewhat objective, but makes a few good points on why DST is bad:
In hot climates, it doesn’t save energy. The biggest reason for that is the invention of air conditioning: in the summer when it’s hot out, people won’t enjoy the summer heat, but rather stay inside with the A/C. Now, they might not turn on the lights because the sun’s still up (and this is what DST was meant to do), but the A/C consumes more energy than a dozen light bulbs.
Overall, there are conflicting studies that show both that DST saves energy and that it wastes more energy. In either case, the savings or waste is less than 1%, which is about 4$/year per household. Is that worth the hassle?
No, it’s not, because there are a lot of human costs associated with the time change: heart attacks and suicides spike the week after the time change; coordinating international meetings (which is pretty common these days) is a productivity loser, because different countries change times at different dates and not even our techy gadgets can keep up with all of them. Not only that, but even within the US, there are places where DST is not observed — like Hawaii and Arizona.
We’ve seen before that being bilingual is a pretty good thing for the brain, because it makes it really good at focusing on one thing and tuning out all the noise, better at multitasking, and more creative at problem-solving. The New York Times now has an article about research being done on babies to see what happens when they first start to learn to speak. This research shows that babies first start being able to make out word sounds at about 6 months old and over the next 3 months or so, the brain hones in the language(s) around them. Each language has a specific kind of sound to it, and so if a baby grows up around English, his brain will focus in on sounds that sound like English, and by 10-12 months old he’ll get significantly worse at paying attention to non-English sounds.
Baby in a Magnetoencephalography (MEG) machine
However, if the baby is exposed to two languages, for example English and Mandarin, at 12 months he’ll be just as good at picking out the English sounds as the Mandarin sounds, and just as bad at picking out other sounds (for example, Turkish) as a monolingual kid. This shows how the brain goes from being a blank slate for language to becoming specialized at hearing languages that matter to the baby. There are a couple of interesting nuances too:
Babies respond to two languages only when real, live persons speak it to them. Just playing audio or video of people speaking it has no impact whatsoever.
When 4 months old, babies can differentiate between languages just by seeing the people speaking them, without hearing any sound. By 8 months old, monolingual babies lose this ability, but bilingual ones still have it.
The related TED presentation done by the researchers makes for a pretty interesting 10 minutes:
