Space Walk

Cherub's topic at school for this half term is space and the solar system, so we have been looking at space stuff at home. We just discovered a wonderful app - if you have a Mac, an iPhone, iTouch or iPad, I highly recommend downloading Solar Walk, which allows you to wander around and explore the solar system with your fingers (or mouse). The graphics are amazing, you can see the position of the planets relative to the sun in real time, turn the planets to see the light and dark sides, zoom in to look at all the planets and their moons. Absolutely spectacular. (And at £1.79 - which I guess is probably $2.99 in the US - a bargain.)

PS. If you are reading on a feed reader, pop over and have a look at my nice new header. I decided it was finally time to move my blog on from its summer look! I also added lists of current reading for myself and Cherub to the sidebar.

Book Finds

A couple of nice out of print books I picked up on Thursday ...

Beatrix Potter's Countryside Book ... a nice little nature study guide. There are suggested activities for each season, accompanied by Beatrix Potter's illustrations - some from her books, others from her own nature studies.

The Radium Woman by Eleanor Doorly ... a biography of Marie Curie for children. I have seen this (and her other two scientific biographies, The Insect Man and The Microbe Man) before, but not at an affordable price. I have a history of France by the same author which is a gem - more on that in my next bookshelf post.

When I went to pay, it turned out that Oxfam were having a "five for five pounds" sale on children's books, so for an extra pound I added Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare" (which I have a sneaky feeling I may already have!), Monkey Puzzle for Little Cherub, and a children's cookbook.

Counterknowledge

I have just finished reading Counterknowledge by Damian Thompson, a leading British Catholic journalist and author of the Holy Smoke blog at the Daily Telegraph. The muddling of fact with fiction and the sloppy confusion of science and philosophy bug me, so I enjoyed the book. He examines why and how ideas that would once have been the province of cultists and fringe eccentrics have become mainstream, and debunks various aspects of pseudohistory (the "marriage" of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, China's "discovery" of America, the origins of western civilisation in "black Egypt", conspiracy theories), and pseudoscience ("creation science", alternative medicine, nutritionism). His debunking of individual topics is sketchy as it is a short book and his aim is an overview of the whole "counterknowledge" phenomenon, but I have seen enough of pseudohistory up close to need very little convincing. As a medieval historian I have no doubt whatsoever that the "Holy Blood and Holy Grail" genre is utter tosh, and any "science" that fails to back its claims with solid evidence raises instant red flags for me.

Thompson ends by making the point that while we generally do ourselves little or no damage by believing counterknowledge, there are areas in it can be very dangerous - for example Islamic "creationism" is making scientific discovery and progress virtually impossible in the Muslim world, and "nutritionism" has encouraged AIDS denial and the refusal of the South African government to use antiretroviral drugs, for example.

If you want a thorough debunking of The Da Vinci Code, or a reasoned discussion of the arguments for theistic evolution (to give just two examples), this is not the place to look, but as an overview of the rise of subjective opinion at the expense of objective fact it is an interesting read.

The Experiment Continues

The properties-of-elements experiment with spectacle frames continues. The results now stand at:

Non-titanium frames - two successes for Little Cherub
Titanium frames - one failure for Little Cherub

Fortunately Star was due for a new pair anyway. Her old ones are well and truly snapped.

I Love This Stuff!

Titanium.

Why, you ask?

Put it this way ... have you ever had a pair of glasses with cheap metal frames fall into the clutches of a toddler who thinks it is fun to see how much she can bend them? And have you ever had the same happen to a pair with titanium frames?

I'm pleased to report that despite having to force one arm back from a 210 degree angle, jammed over the front of the lens, the titanium frames are as good as new. That would be the titanium frames I bought (on sale! yay!) after she destroyed the last pair by doing the exact same thing.

And while I am on the subject of elements, how cool is this ... and this. Out of my price range, unfortunately.

Carl Linnaeus

Carl Linnaeus, whose work on classification made him the "father of modern biology", was born 300 years ago today. I enjoyed listening to a discussion of Linnaeus and his work on Radio 4's Material World programme this afternoon. If you are interested you can find it here and listen online.

Eureka! I think I got it!

After an enthusiastic start at the beginning of the year I have carried on reading science books in a desultory sort of way - I have started several books but not finished them. I am now reading A Short Histoy of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson ... which comes close to living up to its title. It is certainly wide ranging. I think (only think, mind you) that courtesy of Bill I have finally understood - in a vague sort of way - something that has eluded me whenever I have come across it before.

Fanfare of trumpets ... I think I get - almost - vaguely - the theory of relativity! Not that I understand how it all works, I just think I now know what it is. Earlier this year I read part of The New World of Mr Tompkins by George Gamow and Russell Stannard, and made it through the special theory of relativity before stumbling into a morass with the general theory of relativity and drowning. But now I have it! Maybe.

Speed is limited. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light. The closer something approaches that speed, the more distorted it becomes in both appearance and time - it appears both shorter and slower than it really is. This distortion is relative - only the onlooker travelling at a different speed can perceive it. That is the special theory of relativity.

The general theory of relativity works much the same way except that you have to add in an extra dimension so that everything is relative to everything else in both space and time. This fourth dimension is known as "spacetime" and provides a kind of intangible fabric that holds everything in the universe in a relative web. You can imagine the universe as a "saggy mattress" in which all things create their own dent, causing anything nearby to roll down into that dent, unless it has a bigger dent of its own. Of course, these are only relative dents, not real, tangible ones, but ... hey presto! You have an explanation for gravity! You also have an explanation for all sorts of measurable but intuitively improbable (or impossible) effects in space and time. I think.

My brain hurts. But after all that mental effort I thought I'd share the fruits of it. If there is anyone out there who is a science minded person ... have I got it right?