Back at work

If you notice a decline in the number or quality of my blog entries, it’s because I’ve started a new contract and expect to be very busy for the next little while. It’s difficult to be perky and attentive at work, learn a new raft of acronyms, faces, office maze, systems, and methods. I tend to come home and crawl into bed right after supper, neglecting chores such as hydrating the cat or digging up vital paperwork. Blogging has to come third or fourth after important family tasks, especially until I get into the rhythm of a new project.

"The Skeekit-Woogle Test" and other stories

The venerable Analog magazine, which publishes science fiction for people interested in science, now offers supplementary online articles on “The Science Behind the Story.”

The story in the title is about synesthesia, cross-wiring in the brain so that impression on one sense is perceived as another. However, many of us have a trace of it.

E.g. Over half of the population would say that higher pitched sounds are brighter whereas lower pitches sound darker.

In the story, the two test words were Skeekit and Woogle, and the two ideas were a shard of broken glass and a shelled, hard-boiled egg. I recommend it, and I also plan to browse the “Science Behind the Story” articles for myself.

The Ice Age that Wasn’t

In the latest Analog, Richard A. Lovett reviewed a book by William F. Ruddiman with an intriguing hypothesis. Ruddiman thinks that early in our history, e.g. the last twelve thousand years, human activity has prevented an ice age that would otherwise have happened. The book is an expansion of Ruddiman’s paper in Climatic Change, 61(3), December 2003, pp. 261-93.

Twelve thousand years ago was the beginning of agriculture, and the beginning of widespread land clearing. Ruddiman’s hypothesis takes into account three variations in the Earth’s orbit: a 41,000-year cycle in the tilt of the earth’s axis; a 26,000-year cycle caused by the earth’s precession around the sun; and a 100,000-year variation in the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit.
I won’t go into details here, but ice cores goning back as far as 400,000 years seem t support the hypothesis. Do grab the April/07 Analog and read the article for yourself, dig up your dog-eared March/05 Scientific American, or look for Plows, Plagues & Petroleum.

William F. Ruddiman is a retired professor from the University of Virginia.