I didn’t know that octopi had three hearts!

Photons and electromagnetic waves are hardly topics I choose to think about on a regular basis. Once in a while, I’ll be reminded that it takes 8 minutes for light from the sun to reach the earth, but that’s about it. My father would often say to me when I was a child, looking up to the stars, that I was seeing millions of years into the past. Technically, we see nothing but the past.

Light is both energy and mass at the same time. Light can fall; that’s why black holes are named that way—surrounding light gets sucked inside.

In 2005 it was predicted that there was an attractive and repulsive force component to light. They have since discovered the attractive force, but have only now discovered the repulsive force.

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Physics and science in general have become a passion of mine a long time ago. I now find that as time goes by, I am ever more humbled by what we have found out about nature. I recently spoke about my appreciation for Richard Feynman. Some of his lectures on physics have been made available by audio on box sets, which could be purchased at over $150 US. The first time I heard the audio of the lectures at Caltech, I had never heard of the man. To say I was mesmerized would be an understatement. He was an expert at effectively communicating science and knew how to add humor to the material being taught. It helped me begin to gather what was being taught and appreciate its meaning.

I say all this, hoping I still have your attention. If I do, you may be interested in the other discovery I made today.

In the 1960’s, a young man by the name of Bill Gates stumbled on those same lectures and loved them as much as I. Since then, he has purchased the rights to the video of his lectures and has posted them online for free, in what is called Project Tuva. The catch is that you have to download the video player required to see all that is to be seen on the website of Microsoft Research, Silverlight. It is hardly an inconvenience, as it is a 10 second download, and a quicker install, and very much worth your time, if you are interested.

Now you may watch the lectures, in excellent quality, with great extras that are still unobtrusive. I’m not in marketing, but if there was any trick I knew to get people to at least watch the first of the lectures, then I would do it.

If I got a single person to watch even a single lecture by having posted this, it would be worth far more than my time and effort. It just may lead to someone starting think about light a little bit more.

I wish there was a machine like this:

That way, I could upload in people’s minds whatever it takes to fully appreciate, say, Richard Feynman. Everything from his lectures to when he tells the story about his (hilarious) stint at Los Alamos. Once you get to know how funny, kind and brilliant this man is, then you can fully appreciate chats like these:

But then again, such a machine could just as easily corrupt many people’s minds if false information were purposely forced upon them. I think it would have more of an impact than the Atomic Bomb on our entire race.

Here are things I’ve read recently, but don’t have the time to write about:

• 10 of the 20 basic amino acids necessary for life may be destined, thermodynamically, to occur whenever they can. The simple version can be found here, the medium summary here, and the actual article here. Not that anyone will be interested in reading them.

• Ants that are taking over the world

• Not surprising at all: Dolphins who have trained their human captors

• Matthew Good’s Canada Day post is worth reading, just to savor the awesome follow-up. (Gee, that website layout almost looks like my own!)

And last but not least,

• Al-Jazeera English could be broadcasting in Canada by fall. Let the rumble of the West begin. I couldn’t be happier.

University of Colorado at Boulder has released details of it’s research on Mars, and the results are fascinating.

Sediment data from the European Space Agency’s Infrared Imaging Surveyor, and high-res images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, HiRISE, provide unambiguous evidence of this large lake.

What is of particular is not only the fact of this lake’s existence, it’s when it existed. From Astrobiology Magazine (emphasis added):

In addition, the evidence shows the lake existed during a time when Mars is generally believed to have been cold and dry, which is at odds with current theories proposed by many planetary scientists, he said. “Not only does this research prove there was a long-lived lake system on Mars, but we can see that the lake formed after the warm, wet period is thought to have dissipated.”

Planetary scientists think the oldest surfaces on Mars formed during the wet and warm Noachan epoch from about 4.1 billion to 3.7 billion years ago that featured a bombardment of large meteors and extensive flooding. The newly discovered lake is believed to have formed during the Hesperian epoch and postdates the end of the warm and wet period on Mars by 300 million years, according to the study.

Now we know where to look for a search for life on Mars. Deep under this ancient lake, there are chances that microorganisms can be found. As mind-numbingly awesome as this is, there are still people out there who aren’t impressed by possible life on other planets, and still think this research is a waste of resources.

I was on Youtube, preparing for a post I’ll be writing soon, when I saw an icon of planet Earth next to the Youtube logo. I clocked on it to find The Home Project.

I’m reluctant to call this a documentary – I’d say it’s more of a commentary.  Regardless, I’d suggest for anyone to watch it in it’s entirety. I know I enjoyed it.

It’s 20 past midnight, and I’m looking at photos of insects getting it on. I blame StumbleUpon, so don’t get any dirty ideas!

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An anonymous commenter also provided this awesome link:

It’s eas for me to be an animal lover. I just have to spend a few minutes with my own dog, to see that she does indeed have her own personality. She has feelings, needs, and a certain level of intelligence. If these are to be attributed to  dog, why not to other animals as well?

Just watching the any episode of the Planet Earth series (probably the most valuable set of movies in my entire collection) proves just the same. Most people would be surprised to know how much interspecies collaboration, both on land and in water (where predator and prey call a truce to clean each other!), social behaviour (pardon the cheesy music), homosexuality (see also NYC’s Museum of Sex) , ingenuity, forward thinking, war waging and weapons crafting there is in the animal kingdom.

Ants alone are freaking incredible. If they see a fellow of the colony infected by a contagious spore, a worker will carry the infected as far from the rest of the colony as possible. Have you sen some of their tunnel systems?

After a while, animals have become “humanized” for me. It breaks my heart to see someone stomp on an insect for no reason. I see beauty in everything from swine to bioluminescence.You see, I don’t just like animals if I find them “cute”. There’s reasoning behind it.

I want to respond to some of the (awesome) comments recently left, but I don’t have much time at the moment. I have tons of work on the go, a banquet to attend, a fundraiser and I need to find a way to squeeze in some time to celebrate my 23rd orbit around the sun.

So without further ado, I give you a distraction:

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This is one of my alltime fave youtube videos (skip to 3:45 for the best part)

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And here’s a phenomenal film done by an artist in Buenos Aires

Ever since I read Ayn Rand, I’ve been questioning why people can have altruistic values. Why do I want to help out in Costa Rica? Why do people want to help out at a soup kitchen? For the longest time, I wanted to think that we were all born with this instinct. I figured that any child, without external influences (although impossible), would have some sense of empathy/altruism.

Then I got to thinking that we are only benevolent because of basic economics, we expect someone else to scratch our back in return somehow. Or we expect some sort of gratification, ie: “We give to the poor anonymously so we can feel good about ourselves.”

After being shown this National Geographic video, where a leopard takes care of the day old baby of the baboon she killed, I was somehow convinced that we are indeed naturally altruistic, we actually don’t help out because we expect some sort of reward.

But then it hit me, it’s both.

I think we are altruistic, but only because we may differ in degrees of inherent empathy. I think the leopard helped out this baby baboon only because she was trying to suppress feelings of pity. That, my friends is incredibly selfish. So I guess selfishness, combined with empathy, is in fact a part of helping others!

Whew! I’d be glad to hear your take on it too. Cheers!

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I still believe in an inherent sense of empathy. However, I believe there is also a natural, socio-evolutionary cause. Basically, from what little I have observed in nature, and from documentaries including, but not limited to BBC’s Planet Earth, I believe that all creatures, not just man, seek the very same things out of life. Those being, after basic security, love and happiness.

I think it’s too bad that there are some who have never detected emotion from any household pet. Observe young mammals and you will see them play and socialize. In some areas of the ocean deep, predators such as barracudas will call out a truce in certain sanctuaries near the floor, allowing what would otherwise be prey to come and eat off mouldy build-up on their scales, before clearing the area in order to feed off of others. Dolphins have sex for pleasure and so do monkeys, who also groom one another. Hell, I’ve seen deer have threesomes, and to male lions go at it.

It seems as though the priorities in all animals are the same, basic survival, and then pleasure. In the realm of social creatures such as humans or honeybees, scratching someone’s back will usually help assure that someone else will eventually scratch your own; caring for aged parents, for example. In the case of bees, use of the stinger rips out their guts and kills them, so why make the sacrifice? Because it’s possible that the individua in question is only alive because a past threat was thwarted by past peers.

Socrates believed that everyone has a conscience, or an inherent sense of justice. I would tend to agree, as I would like to think I not only feel, but act upon the golden rule “do unto others as you would have done to yourself”. But that raises the question of why some people need religion in order to justify that feeling. I would argue that many self-professed religious persons do not feel as inclined to that golden rule, but that is for another post.