Some people thought this was evidence of life on Mars, but it’s just a rock. It is cool how the light and shadows does make it resemble a humanlike form. Just think though, if it were a human, how much SPF they would need to protect themselves from the sun rays with Mars’ nice and thin atmosphere 
.
In thinking of what I should write about as a “Christmastime blog”, I thought of things such as the science behind the Christmas Star (and how much the jury is still out on what exactly it could be, should it be some astronomical event), how Mars is particularly close to Earth today and therefore brighter than usual, so you could tell your young kids that it could be Rudolph leading Santa’s team, or perhaps breaking down how does Santa exactly get to all those kids houses in one night? (This link provides some curious animations of how things would look at near light speed travel.)But in the end though, I thought it would be cool to do something nice and simple. Something that you could do with your kids over the Christmas break – grow some Borax crystal snowflakes!
So, what do you need?
Now what you’ll want to do is to shape a snowflake frame from the pipe cleaners, such that one of the pipe cleaners is vertical, and the other two cross in the middle, twisting them together in the middle so that all of the points are equally apart from each other. Next tie the string to one of the points and string along to each pipe cleaner point to make the snowflake shape.
After this tie a length of string from the top point of the snowflake to the pencil, so that the flake will be entirely in the jar, but not touching the bottom.
Now pour the boiling water into the jar and begin adding the Borax into it, stirring in one tablespoon at a time, until you begin to see a little no longer dissolving into the water (now its supersaturated). If you want to use the food coloring, add it in at this point.
Now place the snowflake frame into the solution, using the pencil to hang at the top of the jar and let sit overnight. By the next day, you should have crystals growing on the snowflake!
And if you wanted to get the more scientific details about Borax, you can go here.
Wishing everyone a Happy, Healthy, and Safe Christmas and Holiday Season!
Look closely at the two pictures… do you see a small resemblance? Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the two dimensional molecular diagram of Tryptophan looks just a little bit like a turkey… Okay, so it’s really more the gluttonous amount of food that you eat (and perhaps the accompanying bit of alcohol) that has more to do with that after-feast sleepiness, but it’s fun to bring up alongside the turkey that amino acid we all love to blame for our post meal couch potatoesque lethargy.
Happy Thanksgiving To All!
I know I’ve focused many of the recent posts on the more technical computer related arena. I thought for this one, I was overdue to focus (at least visually) on some of the great outdoor environment. Autumn is my favorite season and as some recent business found me on a couple of road trips to Albany, NY, I took the opportunity to bring along the camera to see what kind of shots I could grab. I was eager to try some of the features of my digital camera that I have learned about in the last few weeks. As it also so happens, I took the family, on the weekend between each of these road trips, to a day hike to Walden Pond in Concord, MA. I think these shots are among some of the better I have taken. Thumbnails are below. All photos were taken with my Kodak EasyShare DX7590. (The cabin at Walden Pond is the replica of the cabin Henry David Thoreau lived in for two years on Walden Pond.)
Hudson River – Albany, NY
The Berkshires – Lee and Lenox, MA
Walden Pond – Concord, MA
I know it’s been a long time since my last post, and I did mention in a previous post that I would be trying Linux as my main OS. Here is the result of that latest attempt – Linux Mint. It is a distro that is based on Ubunutu, but provides more “out of the box”. (Funny that term sticks when there is no box.) It provides the ability to play DVDs and other media. But I also find it’s a bit more than Ubuntu + codecs. This distro has some tweaks to the Gnome UI that make it more uniquely theirs. Upon first login, you will see one instead of the more traditional two Gnome toolbars, and they have included a Linux Mint Menu, which is a bit more streamlined. It has Places and System on the left, and to the right are the Applications, sorted by category.
I chose to dual boot this with Windows XP. If Linux is to be my main OS on this box, then really the only thing I would use Windows for is a handful of games I like to play occasionally. So a VM would not work well in this situation. When installing Linux Mint into the spare room on my hard drive (I had installed Windows into a partition a little less than half the size of the total 300GB), it found Windows without issue and added it as a menu entry into Grub. Another nice thing Linux Mint has is a graphical based Grub by default.
Once the install was complete, the first boot of Mint had a quick first time configuration utility. It allowed for the enabling of the root account (disabled by default in Ubuntu), for those that like the more traditional *nix approach. Although even if root is enabled, when you do any administrative tasks, it still does so by sudo, so the password it prompts for will be your user account’s password. The enabling of root will allow for login as root, or to change to root in terminal (su –). Of course, the same thing can be accomplished in Ubuntu by doing a sudo passwd root in the terminal. Also in the utility, you can turn off Mint’s “fortune cookie” like sayings that will appear when opening a terminal, similar to a motd. Some will draw a chuckle, but I find them a bit gimmicky, so I have disabled them.
Like any linux I have used, the GUI (whether it be Gnome or KDE) is customizable. I like the Linux Mint Menu, but prefer a more traditional two bar approach when I use Gnome. So I added the second bar, and added the desktop pager, and icons to launch apps, etc. Beryl is included and I had no issues getting it to work properly (the system has an Nvidia 6200 video card). You’ll notice the Linux Mint Menu is labeled “Celena”. All of the Linux Mint releases have a name associated with it. You can easily change this by right clicking on the menu and choose Preferences. This will launch the Gnome config editor to the proper key to change. Change “applet_text” to whatever you wish it to be. In my case, I changed it to “Eintein”, the name of the system (which you specify in the setup).
This is a good looking disto, and so far I have had no issues to speak of. If you have an opportunity to install this on a VM or test box, I would definitely give it a look. If you like it, and it works well on your system, perhaps it could be your Linux of choice.
Linux Mint Desktop After Some Personalization
Linux Mint Menu
When one thinks of Einstein, the thought probably conjures up the notion of the scientific legend. Or, it perhaps also brings to mind how his name has become synonymous with genius. But the root of this sort of folk lore was an actual man. Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson reveals this man to us. It reveals not only the science (which is well written, readable, and blends into the commentary, not interrupting it), and how he worked to bring about his theories, but also his personal life: his family and working relationships; as well as his social, political, and religious views. It also shows how the times in which he lived shaped him.
This is a great book not only for those who follow science, but also those students of history, political science, or in fact, anyone.
One of the most prevalent forms of science that touches us directly in our daily lives is that of medical science. With all the great strides that have been made in this field, the human factor cannot be diminished – nor should it! Check out this great story of how the this human factor plays such a big role. Enny Wiederhold has been dubbed the Baby Whisperer for her ability to calm and sooth preemie babies as a retired nurse volunteering in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. I can attest for Enny’s way with preemies as she has helped take care of our son during his two month stay at Brigham & Women’s in 2005 (he is a 30 week preemie that weighed 2 lbs., 6 oz. at birth). It is people like Enny, and all NICU nurses and neonatologists that help along the difficult path stemming from prematurity; one that does not truly end with “graduation” from the NICU.
So it’s great to see a story like this that is really a salute to all those NICU volunteers, nurses, neonatologists, and other specialists for their dedication.
The Science Attic 