Front Ears of Science
There isn’t much happening this week around the Front Ears of Science, but the scientists we cover make so many mistakes that there are quite a few Corrections and Clarifications at the end of the column. Well, everyone enjoys a pratfall, as long as it’s on someone else’s prat.
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Deep Discount Global Cooling
Schemes for cooling the earth to offset global warming usually call for some gigantic piece of geoengineering like building a huge sunshade in space — “a trillion dollar pie-in-the-sky idea” in the words of Andy Ridgwell at the University of Bristol.
He and his colleagues have a simpler idea — shiny plant leaves, which would reflect some of the sun’s energy back into space. By planting crop varieties that reflect more sunlight, they figure we could shave off 2 degrees Fahrenheit across a wide swath of North America, Europe and Asia.
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Bring that Avalanche Indoors
At Montana State University in Bozeman, the National Science Foundation has built a $2 million “cold lab” where scientists can study how snow changes physically during an avalanche — which would help in forecasting likely slides. Or so they claim.
The real reason may be that they feared for the life of engineering professor Ed Adams and his post-docs. Before the cold lab was installed, their method for getting the inside scoop was to hole up in a small shack on the side of a mountain, then send another researcher up the slope to set off a bomb and trigger an avalanche.
The Yetis must have been in stitches.
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Fingers of Fate
Hold up your right hand. Is the ring finger noticeably longer than the index finger?
Then you were born to make tons of money as a futures trader or a sports star. As reported in The Economist (Jan. 17) a study by John Coates and associates at the University of Cambridge found that over a period of two years, men with long ring fingers made five times as much money in rapid-fire futures trading as their shorter-fingered brethren.
Previous research had established that men with significantly elongated ring fingers also excel at competitive sports.
The difference traces back to a period in the middle of a pregnancy when testosterone levels typically surge, and higher levels tend to extend the ring finger of the foetus — for some reason more so for male babies than female.
And here we thought that long fingers just helped the quarterback throw a tight spiral.
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Sinners, Repent!
To the Templeton Foundation in its ceaseless quest to reconcile science with religion, we renew the challenge posed originally by C.S. Lewis (in Mere Christianity) and, more recently, by Daniel Dennett (in Breaking the Spell):
Namely, that only a good person is capable of true repentance, but only a bad person needs it.
And what’s true of God is equally true of mammon: only a person with piles of money can qualify for a loan.
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CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS
The article on Johannes Kepler’s cornflakes addiction (Front Ears of Science, Nov. 17) erroneously reported that Kepler arrived at Oxford in 1293. This should have stated that he arrived at Cambridge wearing oxfords, size 12EE.
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In “Bush League Batting Averages” (Oct. 12) the statement is made that Bush administration appointments to science-related agencies included 410 ignorant assholes. The correct figure is 1,762.
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We regret having reported that the Egyptian cubit’s alleged length of one ten millionth the distance from the equator to the pole was a figment of Isaac Newton’s imagination. It is the longstanding policy of this journal that the words “figment” and “Newton” never appear in the same sentence.
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Photo caption errata: In the December 3rd edition, the photo at the top of page 7 is erroneously identified as Margaret Mead rather than the technically more accurate “Piglet squid (helicocranchia pfefferi)”.
Sorry, Old Girl
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