December 24, 2010
Pulp from the Latin ‘pulpa’ (animal or plant pulp, pith of wood). Pulp is the fibrous material used to make paper. It is also refers to the juice vesicles of a citrus fruit. The adjective meaning ‘sensational’ is from pulp magazines, named for the wood pulp paper used in cheaply made magazines and books. Pulp magazines (often referred to as ‘the pulps’), also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. Pulps were printed on inexpensive paper with ragged, untrimmed edges.
Pulp is also name of a 1972 British comedy thriller starring Michael Caine as a writer of cheap paperback detective novels. The English alternative rock band Pulp formed six years later drew its name from the film. Pulp is also the title of the last novel by American writer Charles Bukowski. Additionally, Pulp refers to the central part of a tooth, commonly referred to as the nerve, it branches out and continues down each root through the canals of the tooth and stops just shy of the apex, or tip of the tooth. Red pulp and white pulp describes tissue in the spleen, an organ which creates blood cells.
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December 19, 2010
A sonic boom is created when an object travels faster than the speed of sound. When an airplane reaches the speed of sound, it makes such an explosive noise it can be seen with the naked eye. The visible part of a sonic boom is actually air that becomes compressed by sound waves. The thunder that a storm makes is also a sonic boom caused by lightning forcing air to move faster than the speed of sound.
The first plane to travel at the speed of sound was the Bell X-1 in 1947 and was piloted by Chuck Yeager. The cracking sound a bullwhip makes when properly wielded is, in fact, a small sonic boom. A bullwhip tapers down from the handle section to the cracker. The end of the whip, called the cracker, has much less mass than the handle section. When the whip is sharply swung, the energy is transferred down the length of the tapering whip.
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December 19, 2010
Fibromyalgia [fahy-broh-mahy-al-juh] (latin for muscle and connective tissue pain) is a medical disorder characterized by chronic widespread pain and allodynia (pain in response to something that should not cause pain, like a light touch). It is estimated to affect 2–4% of the population, with a female to male incidence ratio of approximately 9:1, but is considered a controversial diagnosis, due to lacking scientific consensus to its cause. Not all members of the medical community consider it a disease because of a lack of abnormalities on physical examination and the absence of objective diagnostic tests.
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December 17, 2010
The Manhattan Project was the codename for a project conducted during World War II to develop the first atomic bomb, before the Germans or the Japanese. The project was led by the United States, and included participation from the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946 the project was under the command of Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr. of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific director.
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December 16, 2010
In mathematics, the Klein bottle is a geometrical object, named after the German mathematician Felix Klein. He described it in 1882, and named it Klein’sche Fläche (Klein surface). Like the Möbius strip, it only has one surface. Mathematicians call this a non-orientable surface. Klein bottles only exist in four-dimensional space, but a model of a Klein bottle can be made in 3D.
This model is different from the original because at some point the shape touches itself. In 3D, part of the shape is ‘inside’ the rest. Because the surface is non-orientable, there is no ‘inside’ or ‘outside.’ This means that if a liquid were filled ‘in the bottle,’ it would run down its surface. This may not be true for the 3D models of the bottle.
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December 16, 2010
Many mathematicians derive aesthetic pleasure from their work, and from mathematics in general. They express this pleasure by describing mathematics as beautiful. Sometimes mathematicians describe mathematics as an art form or, at a minimum, as a creative activity. Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős expressed his views on the ineffability of mathematics when he said, ‘Why are numbers beautiful? It’s like asking why is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.’
Comparisons are often made with music and poetry. British mathematician Bertrand Russell expressed his sense of mathematical beauty in these words: ‘Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.’
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December 16, 2010
The Möbius strip [mo-bee-uhs] is a surface with only one side and only one edge. It can be made using a strip of paper by gluing the two ends together with a half-twist. The twisting is possible in two directions; so there are two different (mirror-image) Möbius strips.
The Möbius strip was discovered independently by the German mathematicians August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing in 1858. The Mobius strip is known for its unusual properties. A bug crawling along the center line of the loop would go around twice before coming back to its starting point. Cutting along the center line of the loop creates one longer band, not two.
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December 16, 2010
Topology [tuh-pol-uh-jee] is the study of how spaces are organized, how the objects are structured in terms of position. It also studies how spaces are connected. Topology has sometimes been called rubber-sheet geometry, because in topology there is no difference between a circle and a square (a circle made out of a rubber band can be stretched into a square) but there is a difference between a circle and a figure eight (you cannot stretch a figure eight into a circle without tearing).
The spaces studied in topology are called topological spaces. They vary from familiar manifolds to some very exotic constructions.
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December 15, 2010
The Gini coefficient is a measure of statistical dispersion developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini in 1912. It has found application in the study of inequalities in disciplines as diverse as economics, health science, ecology, chemistry and engineering. It is commonly used as a measure of inequality of income or wealth. Worldwide, on a scale of 0 (total equality) to 1 (total inequality) Gini coefficients for income range from approximately 0.23 (Sweden) to 0.70 (Namibia) although not every country has been assessed.
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December 14, 2010
Kangaroo care is a technique shown to increase survivability rates in newborns wherein the infant is held, skin-to-skin, with an adult. Kangaroo care for pre-term infants may be restricted to a few hours per day, but if they are medically stable that time may be extended. Some parents may keep their babies in-arms for many hours per day. Kangaroo care, named for the similarity to how certain marsupials carry their young, was initially developed to care for preterm infants in areas where incubators are either unavailable or unreliable.
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December 14, 2010
Taxonomy [tak-son-uh-mee] is the practice and science of classification. The word finds its roots in the Greek ‘taxis’ (meaning ‘order’ or ‘arrangement’) and ‘nomos’ (meaning ‘law’ or ‘science’).
Taxonomies are typically organized by generalization-specialization relationships, or less formally, parent-child relationships: the subtype has the same properties, behaviors, and constraints as the supertype plus one or more. For example: car is a subtype of vehicle, so any car is also a vehicle, but not every vehicle is a car.
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December 14, 2010
Getting Things Done (GTD) is an organizational method created by David Allen, described in a book of the same name. The Getting Things Done method rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them externally. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks.
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