Today is 22/7. No prizes for guessing what that means – yes, its Pi Approximation Day! March 14th (3.14) is also celebrated as Pi Day, but I kind of prefer the 22/7 version.
Pi, that curious little number that seems to pop up every time we start going in circles. A number so important that it even got its own name – not many numbers can claim that distinction!
Pi, or π, is a mathematical constant that represents the ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter, or π = C/d. It is what’s known as an irrational number – a number that cannot be expressed as a ratio between two integers. Being irrational, it has an infinite number of digits in its decimal representation, and it does not end with a repeating sequence of digits. It is also a trancendental number – a number that cannot be expressed with a finite sequence of algebraic operations.
In addition to its application in geometry and trigonometry, the constant π is found in many formulae, in a variety of sciences, including physics, number theory, thermodynamics, statistics, electromagnetism and mechanics.
The value of π (to 5 decimal places) is 3.14159, which is also approximately the value of 22 divided by 7. Calculating the value of π to higher and higher degrees of accuracy have been a challenge to mathematicians and computer scientists through the ages. Utilising the latest computing technology, the digital representation of π has now been calculated to more than 10 trillion digits. Memorising π to a large number of digits (a practice called piphology) is another challenge taken up by many pi-fanatics, and the current record stands at an astounding 67 890 digits, recited in 2005 in China by Lu Chao over a period of more than 24 hours. (Wow, he probably doesn’t get out much!)
A nice trick to remember the first few digits of pi is to use a poem or sentence where the lengths of the words correspond to the digits in pi. A well-known example, courtesy of English scientist James Jeans, is “How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics”, cleverly representing pi’s first 15 digits.
Such is the pervasiveness of the number π that it can even boast numerous appearances in modern popular culture, from TV series (Simpsons, Twin Peaks) to novels (Carl Sagan’s “Contact”) to pop music (Kate Bush’s “Pi“).
Today we celebrate an event that may be somewhat unthinkable on this day to our Northern Hemisphere friends, especially everyone suffering in the US heat. On this day, back in 1983, the coldest ever temperature on earth was recorded at Vostok Station, Antarctica.
So how cold was it? Well, believe it or not, but exactly 19 years ago, the poor folk at Vostok Station recorded an icy -89.2°C (-128.6°F).
That’s pretty darn chilly… Certainly not a temperature you want to be exposed to for any length of time. Prolonged exposure to very cold temperatures has some interesting effects on the body.
Goose pimples and shivers
When the temperature falls below 8°C, touch sensitivity starts being compromised. Goose pimples appear, lifting hair follicles as the body tries to protect itself from the cold. Unfortunately this does not help us humans much, because we don’t have enough body hair to have a significant effect, but you can imagine how this can be very useful to an animal with a dense fur coat.
The next step is shivering, as the body starts to increase its heat production by working the muscles – shivering is said to increase the body’s heat production five-fold.
Skin discolouration
Your skin also starts doing strange things. From below 10°C, the surface blood vessels start to dilate (your skin becomes red). As it gets colder, the blood vessels start constricting again, to avoid heat loss through your extremities. This is followed by alternating periods of dilation and constriction, as the body tries to balance the supply of oxygen and nutrients to the skin, with protection from heat loss. So you may start sporting an interesting blend of red and white skin tones.
Frostbite
During extended exposure to cold, the body has to start making decisions on how its available heat should be best applied. In order to keep vital organs warm and avoid hypothermia, our extremities – fingers, feet, ears, nose – will be allowed to cool down, and blood flow to the extremities will also be reduced (to avoid blood cooling down as it circulates to the extremities). If this situation persists, it can lead to frost-bite, where the cells close to the skin surface start freezing and die. When heat returns to these cells, it results in swelling and blisters, forming a hardened black layer.
In extreme conditions, the frostbite can reach deeper layers of muscle and bone, resulting in permanent tissue damage, and ultimately amputation of body parts – a fate that has befallen many polar explorers and extreme mountaineers.
Hypothermia
Even though the body will do its best to maintain its core temperature, even sacrificing body parts in the process, it cannot keep up the heat if exposure to extreme cold continues. Next the body will slow its metabolism to minimize blood flow and limit energy loss. At some point, however, the body core starts to cool, and hypothermia sets in. Not much of a core drop is needed for this – clinically, hypothermia sets in when the core temperature drops below 35°C.
First symptoms of hypothermia include reduced motor skills and slowed reaction times. Judgment also becomes impaired, with the dangerous result that the hypothermia sufferer may lose the ability to recognize the condition.
As the core temperature drops below 35°C, the body starts shivering more violently in an attempt to reverse the situation. You get more sluggish and tired, with a strong need to give up and go to sleep. Below 32°C the shivering stops, as there is no energy to keep it going, resulting in even quicker heat loss.
Unconsciousness sets in when the body core drops below 30°C. In a final primal attempt to avoid death, the heart rate and breathing slows down severely, to the point where the metabolism is so slow that the sufferer basically appears to be dead.
Below 28°C cardiac arrhythmias become more common. If the sufferer has not yet died, the heart finally stops beating at a core temperature of about 20°C.
Gender and age matters
Interestingly, women can survive extreme cold better than men. The temperature gradient from skin to body core is greater in women – women’s bodies will more readily allow the skin surface and extremities to cool down, while better protecting core temperature. So while a woman may sooner suffer frostbite, her warm core is likely to keep her alive longer. Women also tent to have a higher subcutaneous fat percentage, further helping to protect core temperature.
Age also plays a role, with people losing their ability to handle extreme cold as they age. Children are more likely to recover from the effects of extreme hypothermia – their organs appear less likely to be affected by physical stresses that may be fatal to older organs.
Brrrrrr! Chilling stuff! Suddenly the chilly New Zealand mornings seem decidedy mild. Enjoy the weather – whether you’re basking in the northern summer heat or shivering in the southern winter cold. It could have been worse!
As part of the Apollo Space Program, initiated by President John F Kennedy, Apollo 11 was the mission that fulfilled the dream of putting man on the moon. Apollo 11, launched on 16 July 1969 with a Saturn V rocket, carried three astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin Aldrin, to their historic date with destiny.
On 20 July, lunar module “Eagle” landed on the moon, prompting the first of Neil Armstrong’s famous quotes, “The Eagle has landed”. After touch down, Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the surface of the moon, and millions of people the world over, listening breathlessly, were treated to his second immortal sound bite, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”. After Armstrong’s pioneering step, Aldrin also got an opportunity to walk on the moon (with much less fanfare), while poor Michael Collins never got the chance, remaining alone in lunar orbit while the Eagle touched down.
The Apollo Space Program, and especially the week of the moon landing, remains one of the most momentous events in modern human history – a time when man felt truly immortal, and capable of anything. Since the historic first landing, five more landings took place between 1969 and 1972, with a total of 12 men experiencing the privilege of landing on the moon. Of course after the thrill of the initial landing, public interest dwindled, and I bet very few people will be able to name the 10 men who landed on the moon after Armstrong and Aldrin.
Since the golden age of moon exploration, from the late Sixties to early Seventies, numerous unmanned moon landings have occurred, including missions from the USA, the Soviet Union, Japan, the European Space Agency, China and India. Of these, most have been planned crash landings, with only the USA and Soviet Union achieving unmanned “soft landings”.
The Google Lunar X Prize competition, aimed at promoting the state of the art in private space exploration, offers a $20 million award for the first privately funded team to land a robotic probe on the Moon.
Of course the moon landing has also become a very popular subject for some elaborate conspiracy theories, with many groups and individuals presenting compelling ‘evidence’ that the landing never happened, and that it was all an elaborately staged hoax by NASA.
But that’s another story…
To celebrate Moon Day, why don’t you kick back and watch your favourite space movie? Or make a playlist of songs about the moon to be the soundtrack to your day.
Today we celebrate the birthday of Samuel Colt (July 19, 1814 – January 10, 1862). He did not grow to be very old, but in his lifetime he did establish an American icon, Colt’s Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company (now known as Colt’s Manufacturing Company). Through his company, he developed the first viable mass produced revolver.
After a number of unsuccessful attempts at getting a gun-making business off the ground, Colt got his break when the Texas Rangers ordered 1000 of his revolvers in 1847, during the American Civil War with Mexico. His guns were also used by both the North and the South during the American Civil War. The 1872 Colt Single Action Army revolver (also known as the Model P, the Peacemaker and the Colt 45) has become one of the best known sidearms in history.
Even though he did not invent the revolver, he did contribute meaningful practical adaptations to the design. Samuel Colt’s real innovation, however, lay in his use of an assembly line approach to manufacturing and using interchangeable parts in the construction of his guns. This approach, enabling him to be more efficient and cost-effective than his competition, placed him at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. In Colt’s words, “The first workman would receive two or three of the most important parts and would affix these and pass them on to the next who add a part and pass the growing article on to another who would do the same, and so on until the complete arm is put together.”
Colt was also an advertising and marketing pioneer, employing techniques like celebrity endorsement and corporate gifts to promote his wares. He may at times have gone a bit too far in terms of ‘marketing’, however, having often been accused of promoting his weapons through bribery, threats and monopoly.
Reading up on the man, its clear that Colt was a larger than life character who thought big, lived extravagantly, and didn’t shy away from conflict and controversy.
In 2006, Samuel Colt was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
This day in 1968 marks a very important moment in the history of personal computing – it is the day that semiconductor giant Intel was founded.
Intel was founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. They initially wanted to name the company “Moore Noyce”, but that sounded too much like “more noise”, so they settled on their initials for the name NM Electronics. The name Intel, derived from Integrated Electronics, was adopted later the same year. Intel produced their first product, a RAM chip, in 1969, and memory chips represented the majority of its business for the first decade. In the meantime they also produced microprocessors, for example releasing the 8080 microprocessor, which was deployed in a vast array of products, from cash registers and traffic lights to computers, in 1974.
The success of IBM microcomputers in the early 80’s prompted Intel to increase its efforts to gain dominance in the microprocessor market. Their subsequent x86 series of microprocessors, followed by the Pentium series, became staples in most personal computers from the 1990’s onwards. Initially a company famous only among engineers and computer scientists, the ‘Intel Inside’ marketing campaign turned Intel into a household name.
The 1990’s represented an era of unprecedented growth for the company as primary hardware supplier for the personal computer industry. After 2000, changes in market dynamics and increased competition slowed the company’s growth, but Intel has been able to sufficiently adapt to remain relevant in the fast-changing IT sector. In June 2005, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced Apple’s transition from its PowerPC architecture to Intel-based architecture, and by mid 2006 the entire Apple Mac consumer line was sporting Intel processors.
Intel currently remains, by revenue, the world’s largest semiconductor chip maker. If you’re reading this on a desktop computer or laptop, you are in all likelihood doing so on an “Intel Inside” system.
17 July is not just another ordinary day; just like a yellow pig is not just another ordinary pig. Today is Yellow Pig Day, the day to take a moment to honour the magical, mathematic pig that has inspired mathematicians for years.
The yellow pig was invented in the early 60’s by two Princeton maths students, Michael Spivak and David C. Kelly, while working on an assignment to identify unique properties of the number 17. After some intense mental gymnastics (and possibly a few pints at the local pub), when they finally ran out of ideas, they thought up the yellow pig, a mythical 17-eyelashed creature (that’s eight lashes on one eye and nine on the other, of course).
Spivak has since written a number of mathematics textbooks, where he regularly includes hidden references to yellow pigs, while David Kelly presents an annual mathematics summer school to high school students, where he introduces them to the “Cult of the Yellow Pig”. He is rumoured to be the proud owner of an impressive collection of between 289 (17 squared) and 4913 (17 cubed) yellow pigs. When asked about the significance of a yellow pig, he responds, “If you have to ask, you just won’t understand.”
Through Spivak and Kelly’s efforts, yellow pigs have become popular toys among mathematicians. Yellow Pig Day is also celebrated at various (mainly US) University Maths Departments, with the singing of yellow pig carols and the eating of yellow pig cake.
By the way, if you’re unsure about the significance of the number 17, look no further than this list. There’s no doubt the number is as special and magical as the yellow pig itself…
So today is World Snake Day. Which is quite an amusing thought when you live in New Zealand, where there are no snakes. OK, that’s not exactly true – we have snakes, but not of the terrestrial variety – a few sea snakes have been known to laze around our waters, if somewhat irregularly.
So why don’t we have any land snakes in New Zealand? After all, eons ago, when the New Zealand land mass first broke away from Australia, mammals and snakes were already sufficiently distributed that in all likelihood the island of New Zealand started out with its fair share of snakes.
It turns out that over many millions of years, as the climate changed and the world went through the most recent ice age, the snakes on the island, as well as most mammals, were unable to survive, and they became extinct. While numerous animal species have since been reintroduced to New Zealand, and various species of birds have returned, snakes were kept out, maintaining our current snake-free habitat. Similarly, many other island countries such as Hawaii, Ireland, Greenland and Antarctica are also snake-free.
To be honest, I am quite happy with the situation as is – like Indiana Jones, I’m not a great fan of the slimy suborder of Serpentes. Not that I don’t find them fascinating, but after numerous close encounters of the slithering kind, while hiking and travelling in Africa, I just prefer my current situation of having a significant body of water between me and them.
Here’s to all the snake lovers out there – I hope you have a great World Snake Day, wherever you are. Me, I think I’ll be snacking on some jelly snakes to celebrate.
Way back in 1869, French chemist Hippolyte Mege-Mouries entered a contest held by Emperor Napoleon III, who offered a prize to anyone who could come up with an satisfactory substitute for butter, for use by the French armed forces. Mege-Mouries won, and patented his butter-replacement on 15 July 1869.
Mege-Mouries called his invention oleomargarine – the name that, after shortening, became the trade name ‘margarine’. (In some places it is still colloquially called ‘oleo’.) He set up a manufacturing operation for his margarine, but it did not prove successful, so he eventually sold his patent in 1871 to Jurgens, a Dutch company that became part of Unilever.
From early in its history, margarine (typically composed of vegetable oils) faced fierce rivalry from the dairy industry, who was concerned about the impact it would have on butter sales. In its basic form, margarine is a pearly white colour, so noting this could be a point of differentiation between margarine and butter, the dairy industry lobbied legislators to restrict the addition of artificial colouring agents in margarine. Long-standing legislative bans on added colour were put in place in the US, Canada and Australasia, with Australia and some US states only starting to allow coloured margarine by the mid 1960s and Canada hanging on to their colour restrictions until as late as 1995 (Ontario) and 2008 (Quebec). Canada clearly did not take kindly to margarine – it was completely banned there until 1948.
Even today, although butter and margarine no longer have to look different, the battle between the two camps rage as fiercely as ever. While there is general consensus that a low-fat polyunsaturated margarine is much less harmful to your heart (it doesn’t contain the cholesterol abundant in butter), the butter lobby is quick to point out that margarine is not a “natural food” and that its artificial colourants have been linked to cancer. From an environmental point of view, the margarine-manufacturing and packaging processes are said to be more intensive and thus less desirable. Then there is the moral and ethical debate, with veganism promoting plant-based margarine over animal-based butter.
Opting for butter or margarine remains a personal decision, based on taste, health, morals and cost. But with health, moral and cost arguments leaning strongly towards the margarine camp, it is no surprise that, worldwide, margarine is definitely the spread of choice, outselling butter by significant margins.
When mentioning Open Source Operating Systems, Linux is often the first to spring to mind. However, the real pioneer in the Open Source revolution was 386BSD, an operating system released as open source on this day 20 years ago.
386BSD (sometimes called “Jolix”, after the names of its developers) was developed mainly by Berkeley alumni Lynne Jolitz and William Jolitz. While a first version (0.0) was made public in March 1992, the version released on 14 July 1992 (0.1) was the first usable version, and became the basis of further development. The first completely free BSD, it ran on PC compatible computer systems based on the Intel 80386 microprocessor.
After the Jolitzes released 386BSD 0.1, a user group formed, developing and collecting bug fixes and enhancements to the system. However, differences of opinion developed between the Jolitzes and the maintainers of the patchkits. The Jolitzes tried to maintain quality-control by doing most of the development on 386BSD themselves, leading to frustratingly slow release cycles. This eventually lead to the splitting off of two subsequent BSD-based open operating systems, FreeBSD and NetBSD.
While 386BSD ended up being a rather short-lived project in itself, both FreeBSD and NetBSD went on to become critical players in the Open Source revolution, with versions of both these operating systems still being used and developed to this day.
The Jolitzes’ insight that the world needed an open-source Unix-like operating system running on Intel’s x86 microprocessors has been triumphantly borne out by history, with the success of open source operating systems like FreeBSD and Linux playing a key role in many computing developments and innovations over the past two decades.
Are you quicker with your multiplication tables than you are running down an athletics track? Can you synthesize complex molecules but have difficulty opening a bottle of jam? Do you have no problem understanding quantum physics, but fail to understand the importance of crossing the goal line in football? Well then today is your day – it’s Embrace your Geekness Day.
And if this special day is not already enough reason to look down your nose at the lesser brains around you, whip out a Rubik’s Cube and dazzle them with your mental dexterity, because 13 July is also International Puzzle Day!
It’s the 68th birthday for Erno Rubik, Hungarian sculptor, architect and puzzle inventor, who came up with the biggest selling geeky toy in history, the Rubik’s Cube. This amazing handheld puzzle sold in excess of 100 million units in the first two years after it’s 1980 release, and has to date racked up total sales of over half a billion.
I guess many of you weren’t around in 1980 when the Rubik’s cube first appeared, but it really was the bees knees – cube-solving competitions were held, super-fast cube solvers were featured on TV, books were published with different solutions to the puzzle. Even just knowing the number of permutations that can be reached by rotating the sides of the cube (ahem, not factoring in the orientation of the centre blocks, that’s about 43 quintillion, or 43 252 003 274 489 856 000, to be exact) made you look clever. It became a brief flash of glory for geeks the world over, who could suddenly appear cool by solving the puzzle faster than any of the jocks. OK, so they ended up getting roughed up even worse than usual by said jocks, in an attempt to restore the status quo, but the moment sure was sweet.
Of course you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or puzzle master to celebrate this day – mastering your smart phone is already quite an act of geeky puzzle-solving, and definitely qualifies you for a pat on the back.
But I guess the day really is one for the geeks, the nerds, the computer whizzes, the comic book lovers, the science fiction fanatics, the brainy ones. (Who, let’s face it, has since the advent of personal computers and the Internet age, become a pretty cool and exclusive group in their own right.)
Sciencelens 