Beakful

Ice cubes from automatic icemakers are crescent-shaped because that is the shape that doesn't get stuck in the tray.

Friday Beakful of Wildlife Knowledge

Since the manta ray's eyes are on the top of its body and its mouth is on the underside, it never sees itself eat.

Bonus flat fish tidbit: Flounder come into the world with an eye one each side of their head and swim upright. As they mature, one eye moves over to the other side of the head and they start swimming on their side.

Extra Bonus: Most Flounder are lefties. Their eyes migrate to the left side of their body and they swim left-side up.

Porpoising Through The News

Three Arrested at Massachussetts Baby Shower

The charges stem from a brawl in which one man was shot and several others, including the guest of honor, were beaten with a large stick. (note to self: avoid playing pinyata with these people). And I thought having to play"guess the flavor of baby food" was bad at the last baby shower I attended.

Wednesday Beakful of Metric Amusement

The metric prefix for a one followed by 24 zeroes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) is "yotta." When supercomputing gets to be about one million times faster than the highest-end stuff being worked on today, we will acheive "yottaflops."

Weekend Beakful of Acronym

It stretches the definition of acronym, but "modem" started life as a shortened version of Modulator-Demodulator.

Thursday Beakful of Acronym Knowledge

Although they are only one letter different, laser and TASER* are completely unrelated acronyms. Laser comes from Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Taser stands for Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle.

*Official guidelines on trademark use from TASER International, Inc. maintain that the word be in all caps, and that it is an adjective, not to be used as a noun or a verb. I wish them luck and hope their admin. assistant doesn't xerox the guidelines.

Penguin News

Samuel L. Jackson has signed on to narrate a spoof of March of the Penguins, scheduled for release this summer. By all accounts, Farce of the Penguins will use stock footage of penguins with the narration. The storyline sounds similar to the original March of the Penguins, but with less emphasis on the enduring power of the pair bond in chick rearing and more emphasis on the mating. Just a guess that the family values people won't be all gung-ho for this one.

New trailers are up for the more family-friendly upcoming animated penguin flick, Happy Feet. I still like the first trailer better.

We've all seen the obligatory scene in every submarine movie where the captain takes the sub below the calculated crush depth and the sub comes out OK. Now a Fairy penguin, smallest of all the penguins, has exceeded the calculated penguin crush depth. Scientists calculated that the maximum dive depth a one-kilogram penguin should be capable of reaching is 66 meters. The female Fairy went to 67 meters as recorded by the sensors she was wearing.

Wendesday Beakful of Acronym Knowledge

The polite extended form of "snafu" is Situation Normal, All Fouled Up. It should be noted that the polite form is not the original, which used a different word that begins with F.

General Announcement

If you send me email, click here and pay attention to the cartoon. It's short.

Correction

An alert and knowledgeable reader informs me that "radar" stands for "Radio Aid to Detection And Ranging."

Tuesday Beakful of Knowledge

Radar originally stood for RAdio Detection And Ranging. Similarly, sonar started as an acronym for SOund Navigation And Ranging.

You know you've been playing too much Tetris when...

...you close your eyes and see falling Tetris blocks on the inside of your eyelids. I think I am way beyond that now. I've started mentally dropping Tetris blocks into the ragged right margins of left-justified text to clear lines.

Gotta Get Me One of These

Emp. Peng. reminds me that we have nowhere to put the Blue LED Faucet Light, no matter how cool it is or how useful it might be for illuminating nighttime trips for a glass of water. The bathroom faucet is too short and the kitchen faucet is occupied by the Brita filter. Still, the idea of having blue illuminated water is appealing. Much more appealing than the orange-brown water situation we recently remedied.

Monday Beakful of Knowledge

I'm lightening up this week. The theme will be words that started out as acronyms and what they originally stood for.

Scuba: Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus

Weekend Beakful of Knowledge

Most planets don't experience total solar eclipses with the pretty corona shots (like this one). Those are only possible because the moon and the sun appear to be approximately the same size in the sky. The moons of Mars are too small to produce total eclipses on the planet

Also, it helps to have a moon. Mercury and Venus do not experience solar eclipses because they have no moons to get between them and the sun.

Friday Beakful of Knowledge

Yesterday, I promised to explain the astronomical significance of the Tropics.

The Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn mark the latitudes where the sun is directly overhead on the June and December solstices, respectively. Between those two latitudes, at some point during the year, the sun is directly overhead. North of the Tropic of Cancer and south of the Tropic of Capricorn, the sun is never directly overhead; its highest point at noon is something less than 90 degrees from the horizon. In winter, the angle of noon is lower, and in summer, the angle of noon is higher.

The word "tropic" comes from the Greek word "tropikos," meaning "to turn." Because the sun appeared to turn around on the solstices--on the winter solstice, the angle of noon stopped descending and headed back up in the sky, vice versa on the summer solstice--the word also came to be synonymous with "solstice." Hence, the latitudes of the solstices became the Tropics.

The reason they are called the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn brings us back to precession of the equinoxes. The two Tropics were named about 2000 years ago, when the sun appeared to be in the constellation Cancer on the June solstice and in the constellation Capricorn on the December solstice. Because of precession, the sun is now in the constellation Sagittarius on the December solstice and in Gemini or Taurus on the June solstice. The June solstice position crossed the official astronomical boundary into Taurus about 25 years ago, but the official and traditional boundaries differ; according to traditional boundaries, the June solstice is still in Gemini.

Beak Addendum-Sidereal and Tropical

Tropical, in today's Beakful, has nothing to do with pina coladas under a palm tree on a white sandy beach with comely ladies in bikinis. There is an astronomical reason for the latitudes around the equator being called "the tropics," but you will have to wait for tomorrow's Beakful to find out.

To clarify the difference, Tropical is basically solar time, while Sidereal is based on observation of the stars.

The differences add up to about 21 minutes a year, meaning that Tropical and Sidereal observations of the sky sync up on a cycle of about 26,000 years--and we're back to precession of the equinoxes.

Thursday Beakful of Knowledge

Precession also causes the equinox and solstice points to drift across the backdrop of stars, including the constellations that cross the zodiac. The zodiac is a line in the sky that one gets by extending the plane of the solar system (all planets except Pluto orbit on approximately the same plane) into space. Astrologers extend the zodiac zone about 8 degrees above and below that line for purposes of noting planetary alignments and such. That's about 16 times the width of the full moon.

Tropical astrology, the type used in most newspaper horoscopes, uses the solstice points of the first millennium. Since then, precession caused the astronomical solstice points to drift almost a full sign.

The dates of the Sidereal zodiac, practiced by Indian astrologers, adjust to account for precession. This adjustment means that a person’s sign under Sidereal astrology, which may not match the sign of the Tropical zodiac, more closely matches the actual position of the stars.

Both Tropical and Sidereal astrology divide the zodiac into 12 equal segments and assign each segment to a sign based on the constellation that is now or was in that general region of the sky. However, the actual constellations are not uniform sizes, and the amount of space on the zodiac is not equal. While astrology allocates 30 degrees for each sign, the constellations occupy more or less than that. In addition, a thirteenth constellation, Ophiuchus, lies on the band of the zodiac, a fact noted by Ptolemy in the second century and generally ignored by most astrologers.

This link has a handy chart of dates for the signs of the Tropical and Sidereal zodiacs, as well as the dates the sun crosses the official astronomical borders of the constellations on the zodiac.

“Zodiac” is good for 18 points in Scrabble. The word comes from the Greek words for “animal” and “circle.”

Penguin News

The first penguin chick has hatched at Malaysia's Underwater World Langkawi. The African Penguin chick is being kept in an area accessible to only authorized keepers, out of concerns of avian flu. Three other African Penguin eggs are still being incubated at the park.

Ten Gentoo penguins have been named and moved into their new homes at Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina. The penguins--now christened Alex, Bosco, Caroline, Hallie, Harmony, Jack, Maddie, Oreo, Orlando and Zoey--originate from Sea World Orlando, and have just recently come out of quarantine to join the rest of the exhibit, which features Rockhoppers and Kings.

Wednesday Beakful of Knowledge

Because of precession (see yesterday's Beakful), pole stars are not permanent. Polaris, the current north star, will eventually lose its navigational usefulness as the direction that the north pole points starts to drift away from it. Our next north star will be Gamma Cephei, aka Errai, a binary star known to have a planet. You have about 900 years to wait before the pole stars change over, and another millennium beyond that before the north pole points most closely to Gamma Cephei.

There is a south star, Sigma Octantis, but it is too dim to be of much practical use in navigation. In a couple millennia, the southern hemisphere will get a better pole star.

Mars currently has a south star, Kappa Velorum.