A cut-out bird destroyed by iinet

Just imagine how much of my time is being wasted, repairing the vandalism exacted upon me by the marketing geniuses at iinet: does anybody know a good lawyer?

Because iinet banjaxed my website, the form for this paper bird is no longer available for readers of my book Playwiths, so here it is: now in two parts:

And here is the context:

This needs a printed sheet, a rubber band, two pairs of scissors and some sticky tape. Here is where you can get a PDF of the design sheet: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/scifun/paper_plane.pdf

OK, that's what the iinet marketing numpties threw out, now below is what readers would see in the book:

Follow the steps!

Fold the sheet down the centre line so that when you cut out one half, the other half matches it. I used the big scissors to trim the sheet, and the fine scissors to make the finer cuts.

The finished product.

The trick with cutting narrow inlets is to make several cuts, so there are no tears in the paper. Then carefully fit the wings in as shown here. You will need to tape a rubber band into the nose, before you bend the tail out, then throw it gently. It will fly in a surprising way. Can you do anything about this? Do you care, so long as it flies?

The smelter and the smith

 Here is a peek from a new assemblage, a large historical background to science. It is the stuff that did not fit in my Murdoch Book 100 Discoveries, or 100 große Sprünge: Die bedeutendsten Entdeckungen und Erfindungen der Menschheit, (Spektrum Akademischer Verlag).

The idea is to look at the enabling knowledge that opened up science for us.

There were seven metals known in ancient times: gold, mercury, tin, lead, silver, copper, and iron (on rare occasions, it was found as the metal in meteorites). Most of the time, people who wanted to get some metal had to treat an ore in some way, to smelt it to get the metal. Around the same time that coiled pots were showing up around Çatal Höyük, people began to smelt lead, copper and other metals from their ores. The copper might have been from deposits of copper metal (‘native copper’), but lead beads from the same area must have been smelted from lead ore.

A suitable ore had to be available, and then somebody needed to find or know a way to smelt the ore and use the metal. Zinc has probably been smelted in India for at least 2300 years, maybe 3000 years, but the first European zinc was only prepared in 1736 (possibly using technology learned from India, as the method was identical). In the Middle east, where copper ore was available from Cyprus, the early Bronze Age coincided with the start of writing and the development of city states, but bronze was probably in use even earlier, in what is now Thailand.

In some places, like sub-Saharan Africa, there was no Bronze Age at all. People jumped straight from the New Stone Age (Neolithic) direct to the Iron Age, probably because they had iron ore but no copper ore, though perhaps the iron technology was imported. Iron was probably being smelted and worked in the Middle East around 1100 BCE, and it appeared 600 years later in West Africa.

Tin could have been smelted by accident if the right rocks were used to make a fireplace. People say copper and lead might have been discovered the same way, but this is unlikely, because copper smelting needs 1100°C and carbon monoxide to reduce the oxide to metal.

Lead could form by accident if a piece of the ore became buried in the ashes with limited oxygen, but both copper and lead were more likely to form in a potter’s kiln. One attractive theory is that potters began decorating their pots with minerals to add colour, noticed the metals that formed on the pots, and began experimenting.

Charcoal is dry and has 10% of the mass of the wood it came from, so charcoal fires burn hotter, if they have enough (but not too much) oxygen. With good charcoal and the right amount of air, a temperature of 1500°C is possible if the fire is surrounded to keep the heat in. An open fireplace with coals is unlikely to get higher than 600°C, even when a high wind blows through it, because the same high wind that promotes burning also carries away much of the heat. In other words, making metal needed the heat of a kiln or an oven, not the heat of an open fire. It was an art, not luck.

Copper is a soft metal, good enough to make maces but not blades, so Çatal Höyük is generally referred to as a chalcolithic site, a place where copper and stone were both used. Somewhere, somehow, somebody learned to make bronze, an alloy of copper with arsenic or tin. The earliest examples of copper/arsenic bronze come from Asia Minor in about 4200 BCE, while the harder copper/tin bronze was used from about 3200 BCE.

We can come up with plausible yarns to account for people making copper metal, but iron remains a bit of a mystery. It has a strong attraction to oxygen, which is why iron rusts so easily, and why iron oxide is a common iron ore. At around 900°C, the oxygen is more strongly attracted to carbon, so if iron oxide is collected from a bog or some other place, it can be converted to the metal. It takes a great deal more heat to melt iron, but the metal that forms at 900°C can be hammered and worked in a bloomery, and shaped into tools.

Smelting and refining did not always bring blessings. Cores taken from lake beds in the Andes reveal that Peruvians were smelting copper 1000 years ago, but around the year 1450, they switched to silver, which leaves a different pattern of pollution. They probably began smelting more silver because the Incas demanded that taxes be paid in silver. When the conquistadors took over in 1533, the silver-smelting pollution increased tenfold.

The ice of Greenland shows clear traces of pollution from copper production, dating back to about 500 BCE. This probably came mainly from the production of copper and bronze around the Mediterranean, even as they entered the Iron Age. The real advantage of iron was that it was cheap and easy to make iron weapons in large numbers. Even if gentlemen preferred bronze, a thousand poorly-trained peasants with shoddy iron stabbers can overwhelm 300 trained warriors with superb bronze swords.

In the end, a smith needed to shape and toughen the metal.

Shipping may also have been a factor. Ships would certainly have been up to carrying Cypriot copper ore or metal by 2000 BCE, possibly much earlier, but it is tempting to wonder if tin or tin ore was being carried to the Mediterranean from Cornwall by then: tin was certainly being mined and worked in Cornwall in about 2150 BCE. All around, the general picture of early metal working is clear, but many of the finds leave us still wondering. From Weland to Ogoun to Cullann to mpu Gandring, in many cultures (look them up!), the smith is seen as having the powers of a magician—and no wonder...

It pays to advertise

If you don't know about Polymoth Books, click here.

I wish to announce a rather crazy scheme on my part: a package of 22 of the best books I have written this century, all curated and presented as DRM-free PDF files. Librarians just need to email me at petermacinnis44@gmail.com.

Note that all of the books are available as Kindle e-books and Amazon Print-on-demand books as well (but I can do mates rates).

The main aim of this PDF scheme is to set my intellectual property loose in schools. Teacher-librarians will be allowed to make class sets of any book (or books), for one term, once they have paid a one-off fee of AUD$50 for the collection, on either a CD-ROM or a USB stick. That includes postage and GST, but you need to order, get an invoice and pay first.

At the end of the term, I ask that TLs delete the files from devices, but if they wish, they can immediately copy them again. I rely on the ethics of TLs, and won't be checking. I also have no plan to check the credentials of purchasers, and will declare all such to be honorary teacher-librarians. My aim is to influence minds, not to make money, so if you fulfil any TL-like role, that's good enough for me. Ordinary librarians count as well, and friends are welcome.

Some of the books in this scheme came out through mainstream publishers and some of them won awards, but were allowed to lapse by lazy publishers, others were excellent ideas that nervous publishers shied away from. All have been seized back, meticulously curated and brought up to date. It has to be conceded that small portions of text (and some illustrations) may appear in more than one volume, because there are certain themes I harp on.

Any good educator does exactly that, repeating the key points.

As you can read on a link that I will post by the end of the month, this century, my work has been awarded:

• Seven CBCA long listings (notables), two CBCA short listings, one Honour Book and one Book of the Year;
• One Short Listing in the NSW Premier's History Awards, Young People's History Prize ;
• Two Australian Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing;
• One WA Premier's Book Award for Children's Literature;
• One international White Ravens List entry (Germany);
• One Wilderness Society Short List entry, and
• Two Whitley awards.

In other words, there's some serious intellectual merit here.

The titles involved are: 

Australia's Hidden Heroes; sample here

Australia's Pioneers Heroes and Fools; a sort of sample here

Australian Backyard Explorer; sample here

Australian Backyard Naturalist; sample here

Curious Minds; sort of sample here

Kokoda Track: 101 Days; sample here

Looking at Small Things; sample here

Mistaken for Granite; sample here

The Monster Maintenance Manual; sample here

Mr Darwin's Incredible Shrinking World; sample here

Nature of North Head; sample here

Not Your Usual Bushrangers; sample here

Not Your Usual Clever Ideas; sample here

Not Your Usual Gold Stories; sample here

Not Your Usual Treatments; sample here

Not Your Usual Villains; sample here

Old Grandpa's Book of Practical Poems; sort of sample here

Playwiths; sample here

The Lawn a Social History; sample here

The Speed of Nearly Everything; sample here

They Saw The Difference;  (sample) and 

You Missed a Bit. Typical example

I already have a marketing operation in place, and dead-tree versions of all of these books (and also individual e-books with DRM) are available from Polymoth Books, and you can find out about the contents of each title through that link.

I will, in the near future, be providing sample chapters or excerpts through this blog, each bearing the title of the book they come from.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some files to sort.

Oersted's experiment

 This is from a book I am about to start pitching:

Hans Oersted is remembered in the name of the unit of magnetic field strength, the oersted. He was also the person who coined the term ‘electromagnetic’. With that sort of introduction, it should not be hard to work out that it was Oersted who first observed the magnetic effect of an electric current. All the same, Oersted was trained in metaphysics (a branch of philosophy), rather than in physics.

Nonetheless, in 1806, he became professor of physics and chemistry at Copenhagen. As well as being the first to prepare metallic aluminium, Oersted is remembered for his discovery of electromagnetism, which he made during a lecture. His discovery of the electromagnetic effect was immediately translated into several languages, though not entirely reliably. The 1826 English source I found for his work contained a contradiction which was not in the 1820 French version I happened to have to hand, so my quotation below is a mix of the two versions.

If he had written in Latin, and we had all been forced to learn Latin, this problem would not have arisen, but even by the 1820s, Latin was no longer universally understood.

The first experiments…were set on foot in the classes for electricity, galvanism and magnetism, which were held by me in the winter just past. By these experiments it seemed…that the magnetic needle was moved from its position by the help of the galvanic apparatus…when the galvanic circuit was closed, but not when open, as certain very celebrated physicists in vain attempted several years ago…

A modern re-enactment of Oersted’s experiment. My choice of the aluminium ruler was deliberate.

You can see the way this worked in the illustration above, but as this is simple enough for the reader to try, let me note that the entire apparatus is one compass, one AA cell, a length of insulated wire and some sticky tape, plus an aluminium ruler which is optional, but it would have pleased Oersted. I bared one end of the wire, taped it to one end of the dry cell (this was sloppy practice but good enough) and bared the other end.

I taped the dry cell to the ruler (or to the rule if you are a pedant), taped the compass to the ruler to stabilise it, and that was it. As you can see, a single dry cell was enough to bring about a noticeable swing. Incidentally, if you reverse the wire (and as a result, the current), the swing reverses, and the same reversal happens if the wire is under the compass.

One of the great continuing arguments in science relates to the need to justify research in advance, usually for the benefit of bean counters, weasels and other parasites, by showing what research is useful for. Even the most useless-looking piece of science can become useful, as Karl Pearson was to discover. Here, Lord Kelvin reflects upon Oersted’s researches:

Oersted would never have made his great discovery of the action of galvanic currents on magnets had he stopped in his researches to consider in what manner they could possibly be turned to practical account; and so we would not now be able to boast of the wonders done by the electric telegraphs. Indeed, no great law in Natural Philosophy has ever been discovered for its practical implications, but the instances are innumerable of investigations apparently quite useless in this narrow sense of the word which have led to the most valuable results.
—Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), 1846, quoted R. A. Gregory, Discovery (1916), 241.

Aside from Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta, the main players in the unravelling of Faraday’s electromagnetism include Georg Ohm, Hans Oersted, and James Clerk Maxwell, who brought us to the point where we could see light as an electromagnetic wave, much as Michael Faraday had expected, leading on to George FitzGerald, and then to Heinrich Hertz, Guglielmo Marconi and beyond.

There are also the users of electricity and magnetism, from Joseph Henry and Edward Davy, who both invented an electric relay, Charles Wheatstone, Alexander Graham Bell, and people like Joseph Swan, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla who made our modern uses of electricity possible.

There was far more to magnetism than compasses for navigation. After Oersted found that a variable current in a wire would make a compass needle deflect from its usual direction, André Marie Ampère (1775–1836), found that like currents attract, then he discovered the solenoid in 1826: this was a coil of insulated wire with a current passing through it, and it would be the basis of transformers, electric motors, relays and electromagnets. The most common and audible household use of the solenoid today is probably in the switching systems which commonly turn the water flow on and off in washing machines.

Ampère completed his work while believing incorrectly in two ‘magnetic fluids’, which he called a northern fluid, and a southern fluid. So long as he observed correctly, and so long as his theory allowed him to make sensible predictions to test, it mattered little. Then in 1831, Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, and soon after, invented the very first electric motors.

Following on from this in 1845, Faraday discovered what we now call the Faraday effect, where a magnetic field makes the plane of polarised light rotate. This later influenced James Clerk Maxwell to come up with the idea of electromagnetic radiation, which led to Hertz inventing radio. And it all came from one simple observation by Oersted, a lifetime earlier!

Science is like that…

And that, by the way, is my preferred name for the book.

Finding iodine

There are thirty recognized isotopes of iodine, but only one of these, iodine–127, is counted among the stable isotopes, and is found in nature. Radioactive iodine-125 is routinely used in tracing problems with the thyroid gland, and another isotope, iodine-131 has been commonly used to treat overactive thyroid conditions. The “iodine” which is commonly used on small wounds is tincture of iodine, a solution of potassium iodide and iodine in ethanol.

Iodine is element number 53 in the periodic table, atomic weight 126.90. This element was first isolated in 1811 by Bernard Courtois (1777 - 1838). 

Like the Germans in the First World war, the French found themselves restricted by a British naval blockade which stopped them accessing American sources of potash during the Napoleonic wars.  The potassium carbonate was used to make potassium nitrate for French gunpowder, but the seaweed also contained a variety of other chemicals, one of which was an iodide.

In treating seaweed ash with acid to get rid of sulfur compounds, Courtois noticed a purple vapour, which condensed to make crystals of iodine. He later passed this information on to Sir Humphry Davy, who proposed the name “iodine”, from the Greek word for the colour violet, iodes. The credit for suggesting the name is sometimes given to Joseph Gay-Lussac, but this is incorrect.

As mentioned above, iodine is needed in the production of thyroxin, and a deficiency in dietary iodine leads to goitre, so that foods (especially table salt and bread) in many parts of the world now have traces of iodine added, although this is unnecessary in areas where seafood is available.

Part of the hormone ‘picture’ was already there in 1905, because a number of diseases were linked to disorders in particular glands: goiter and cretinism were associated with an enlarged thyroid gland, but this was rightly regarded as a deficiency disease caused by a lack of iodine. Many folk remedies used iodised salts or sea foods rich in iodine, even before we knew iodine existed (the element was detected in 1813). Its role in preventing goitre became more obvious after Eugen Baumann (1849–1896) showed in 1896 that iodine was only concentrated in the thyroid gland.

Curiously, Courtois also discovered that major fascination for undergraduates of a certain kind, nitrogen triiodide, which forms tremendously unstable crystals that will even explode when hot water falls on them.

I have no intention of revealing how I discovered this fact, as I conclude now that I had a lucky escape: Pierre Dulong  lost three fingers and an eye investigating this substance — which may explain why, when he was formulating what is now called “Dulong and Petit’s Law”, he chickened out, and did not investigate tellurium, fraudulently manufacturing the data for that and several other elements.

The reason is probably that when you handle tellurium, it is absorbed, and you get “tellurium breath “. Not to mince words, you stink of stale garlic for months after working with tellurium compounds. Dulong  either feared that, or perhaps he was attached to his remaining fingers and wished to stay that way.

Everything (other than Dulong's fingers, perhaps) is connected.

Macedonio Melloni, a forgotten genius

This is just a filler to say I aten't dead yet. I'm just fairly busy.

Macedonio Melloni (1798 - 1854) is little-known, which is why this is a brief account. Still, what there is seems quite interesting, and it sets the scene for several other stories, so I will share it with you.

First, some background. William Herschel did many things in astronomy. Among other things, he took the temperature of different parts of the spectrum, and found that the hottest part of the Sun’s spectrum was beyond the visible range. Using a thermometer, he discovered the infrared part of the spectrum.

Now back to Melloni: if you heat a junction between two different metals, you generate a very small current. In order to be able to measure the current, you need to multiply it by linking a number of these junctions together, to make a battery of them, like the pile of cell units that Alessandro Volta made. This is why we call Melloni’s invention a thermopile.

Source: https://muxindia.wordpress.com/2014/11/06/passive-infrared-sensor-pir-sensor/

As well, Melloni developed ways of concentrating the heat from distant sources, and he found out how to use rock salt to make lenses to focus the heat rays, in the same way we use glass lenses to focus light rays. He established that the infrared rays were in every way like light: they could be refracted, reflected, polarised and made to interfere with each other, exactly like light.

Melloni really deserves to be better known, for while Herschel’s discovery of the infrared is a commonplace, few people realise that Melloni’s investigations laid a practical framework within which James Clerk Maxwell could propose the existence of a continuous electromagnetic spectrum.

Everything in science is connected, which is why we can usually spot fraudulent science at a glance. It doesn't connect with all the other bits...

Pneumatic transports of delight

No, this is not a reference to Brave New World, but to something that turned up in my FB feed this morning, concerning ways of getting cash away from the sticky fingers of shop assistants.

Some ran on wires, others ran through tubes, and as a small boy, these things made me aware that sometimes, rarely, Heath Robinson gadgets might work.

At the age of 8, I tried making Meccano versions of the run-on-wires models, without success. I knew about the pneumatic versions, but the Meccano sets had inconvenient holes, so I gave up.

In what follows, the pics are more detailed than they appear here: click on them to see them in all their glory.

As it happens, I wrote about such things in my Not Your Usual Clever Ideas, available on Kindle (it includes shoe guns, sharkproof suits and pile drivers powered by gunpowder and the 'rowing bike' seen on the left), but here's the detail on the stranger ways that things were moved by air pressure.

In 1868, all eyes were upon the new device, the pneumatic telegraph, which was going to revolutionise the world by allowing one to send actual documents hurtling to their destination. This was the pneumatic telegraph, which was all the rage in the 1860s.

The Pneumatic Dispatch Company in London declared its hand in 1861, when they set up a quarter of a mile (400 metres) of test tubing at Battersea, near the Victoria railway bridge. This included irregular curves and gradients to show that the terrain would be no obstacle to a working system. Carriages were introduced and air was drawn out in front of them to give a pressure differential of "seven to eleven inches of water".

Atmospheric pressure is taken today as 100 kilopascals, and it supports about 400 inches of water, so we are talking here of a pressure in the 2-3 kilopascal range, about the same difference as that between the top and bottom of a 300-metre building, so not that great. Still, this gentle difference was enough to accelerate the rail cars to 25 mph (40 km/hr), and the individual cast iron tubes were 9 feet (2.7 metres) long and about 850 mm high.

There was no seal, which would have caused frictional loss, so there was a small amount of "windage", and most importantly, Parliament had granted them the power to "open the streets", to lay the tubes that would no doubt soon link all of the post offices in the world's greatest metropolis.

By 1862, the company was meeting to vote on an increase in capital to fund extended works and to obtain new machinery, and a further £50 000 was subscribed, though several members opposed the motion, one of them declaring the system a financial failure which ought to abandoned. The details of the company are not very clear, but a 1929 enquiry mentioned "the Post Office Tunnel", constructed by the company in 1866, and found to be less than air-tight. The Post Office bought it in 1921, and the tunnel ended its days as a conduit for telephone cables.

By 1863, 110 mails passed through the pneumatic despatch tube from the station to the district post-office during each day, and, said a report in Scientific American, the occasional human was allowed to ride in the carts.

For some years, the system was used to carry parcels from the railway to the Post Office. In the USA, though, there were far more ambitious plans. By 1867, these extended to mail sorting systems that would carry letters in scurrying carts, hither and thither, under the streets of American cities.

That was nothing, though, to the grand plans of the Waterloos and Whitehall Pneumatic Railway Company which planned to send parcels under the Thames in a giant tube, 12 feet 9 inches (3.9 metres) in diameter. This would connect the various lines which were by then operating on either side of the river. The illustration shows sections of the tube being prepared on dry land before being lowered into the river.

The tube systems operated successfully in a few cities, but they had their greatest penetration in stores, where trusted cashiers, locked in cages, received cash and dockets by pneumatic tube, and sent receipts and change back, again by tube, to be handed to the customer.

If you want the original images, here are the sources.

---

[1] Scientific American 5 October 1861, 209.

[2] Scientific American 5 January18 67, 1.

[3] Scientific American 16 March 1867, 165.  6

Of cubes and Smart Lazy

As I grow more into Advanced Middle Age, so I am attending to the leftovers, things like my Playwiths web site. I was amazed to discover last year that this had drawn in 4 million visitors.

OK, it's been going since about 1995, but 170,000 visitors a year isn't shabby for what began as a single page, constructed as a teaching tool for teachers from my feeder schools. As you can see if you look, it grew.

Anyhow, last year, I was on a train to Fairy Meadow to have lunch with some Illawarra schoolkids (it's an annual gig), and it struck me that there was probably a book in it.  On the train I had been ruminating on the fact that I had three more books that I would like to get done, but adding this one to the list made good sense. I got out the notebook and sketched an outline.

Six months later, it's largely done, but this note is about a bit of maths that hit me this morning, that just had to go in. Yes, I'm still fiddling, even as I pitch the book, and the writing, plus the fiddling, explain the dearth of posts here.

First, by way of background, I play with numbers to put myself to sleep or just to relax. In the dentist's chair, I calculate the square or cube root of a prime number (usually 17) in my head. It's just the way I am.

On the side, I know things that are interesting, like the story of Ramanujan and the number 1729, but I posed a question on the site and in the book: how can you use those four numerals in that precise order to create a sum generating each of the integers up to 50 (sums like -17 + 29 = 12, or 1 - 7 - 2 + 9 = 1).  Here are some of the harder answers to the game of 1729.

The original thing that got me interested in 1729 was that Srinivasa Ramanujan famously called it the smallest number that is the sum of two cubes in two ways (1^3 + 10^3 = 9^3 + 10^3), but during the writing of the book, I realised that this is not the case. Here's the proof:

6^3 + (-5)^3 = 4^3 + 3^3 = 91.

Well, that's interesting, but I happen to know that 1729=7x13x19, so it has three factors in arithmetic progression, which is interesting, but 91=7x13, which is Interesting.

With me so far? This morning, as the currawongs shredded the pre-dawn calm this morning, I began thinking about the simple pattern of differences between successive squares. I can illustrate this best with a snippet of spreadsheet:

Now why did I generate that, and how? The why: I am Smart Lazy, which means using available tools. The how: here are the codes I used in Excel, in a smaller snippet:

Entering the code is easy, if you use the Fill Down and Fill Right commands in Excel: look them up.

Well that table of manipulated squares has some nice patterns, but being a fiddler, I moved to cubes. This time, you see the codes first: notice the highlighted cells.

Can clever people see how little I had to change in the spreadsheet? That's what Smart Lazy is about! Look at the codes below to work out what diff(1), diff(2) etc. are about.

Notice that I have highlighted certain cells. The 7, 19 and 91, highlighted in yellow, are INTERESTING, but they may be just coincidence, and those do happen if you push enough numbers around. Here's a short quote from the book

The speed of light in terafurlongs per fortnight is 1.803, close enough for government work to the metric equivalent of a fathom, showing that any measured value can be given almost any number by a judicious choice of units. Any reasoning based on the coincidence of two values needs to be questioned closely to see if the coincidence is just, well, a coincidence—or the work of somebody using peculiar units to get a result.

For example, the number of islands in the Hawaiian island chain is 137, and the ratio 1/137, often referred to as alpha, is the fine structure constant in physics. This value represents the probability that an electron will emit or absorb a photon. It is the square of the charge of the electron divided by the speed of light times Planck’s constant, and it is just a number: there are no dimensions or units involved at all.

The significance of alpha was first spelled out in 1915 by a physicist named Arnold Sommerfeld—at the time, measurement errors made the value closer to 136—and physics ever since has been littered with efforts to explain the number.

Meanly, I have left out all the best bits of that story: you'll have to watch out for the book. No publisher yet, but I am pitching Playwiths at the moment.

Now go back to the other numbers, the ones highlighted in blue, all of which can be expressed in terms of the sums or differences of cubes.

117 = 5^3-2^3

217 = 6^3+1^3

513 = 8^3+1^3

728 = 9^3-1^3

999 = 10^3-1^3

1027 = 10^3+3^3

1736 = 12^3+2^3

Coincidence? I doubt it, but I have no idea why it happens. I’m not saying how I did it, but of the first 2000 integers, 150 of them can be expressed as the sum (or difference) of two cubes. I will admit to using both a spreadsheet and a word processor with a SORT function.

Still, the book is called Playwiths: why not play with it?

PS: there are other patterns there that I have left for others to discover. I didn't miss them: the margins of this page were too narrow for them to all fit in. Try 208 and 1216 in the diff(4) column, for starters...

 The book is called Playwiths. Play with it!

Australian Backyard Earth Scientist

I have now turned back to earth science for younger readers again, as the editor's responses come my way from the Number One editor at the National Library of Australia, Jo Karmel. This is the fifth book we have worked on together (or seventh, if you count new editions separately), and there's another on the way

Anyhow, by the time we are finished, Australian Backyard Earth Scientist is going to be a good book, but here are some left-overs, more suited to older readers. These might have been epigraphs, but we don't do those for younger readers. Here are the unused quotes, and a few pics from my short-list (~250 shots at last count).

You can find more extra shots at these links:
ABES Teaching Pictures
ABES Teaching Pictures 2
ABES Teaching Pictures 3

ABES Teaching Pictures 4

ABES Teaching Pictures 5

ABES Teaching Pictures 6

Earth science

Folds, Mt Pilatus, Switzerland.

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

— Proverb, dating back to the 16th century.

To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of the rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which obstructs his view, and renders indistinguishable the different species of stone, is no less than a serious subject of regret.

― James Hutton, Theory of the Earth, vol. 3, 46.

A rock or stone is not a subject that, of itself, may interest a philosopher to study; but, when he comes to see the necessity of those hard bodies, in the constitution of this earth, or for the permanency of the land on which we dwell, and when he finds that there are means wisely provided for the renovation of this necessary decaying part, as well as that of every other, he then, with pleasure, contemplates this manifestation of design, and thus connects the mineral system of this earth with that by which the heavenly bodies are made to move perpetually in their orbits.

— James Hutton. Theory of the Earth, with Proofs and Illustrations, Vol. 1 (1795), 276.

An historian should, if possible, be at once profoundly acquainted with ethics, politics, jurisprudence, the military art, theology; in a word, with all branches of knowledge … It would be no less desirable that a geologist should be well versed in chemistry, natural philosophy, mineralogy, zoology, comparative anatomy, botany; in short, in every science relating to organic and inorganic nature.

— Sir Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, Vol. 1, 3, 1835.

…the successive series of stratified formations are piled on one another, almost like courses of masonry.

— William Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, Bridgewater Treatise 6, Vol. 1, 37, 1836.

Folds and faults, S. coast NSW.

[When] spring and summer come round, how easily may the hammer be buckled round the waist, and the student emerge from the dust of town into the joyous air of the country, for a few delightful hours among the rocks.

— Sir Archibald Geikie, in The Story of a Boulder: or, Gleanings from the Note-book of a Field Geologist (1858), viii.

Apart from its healthful mental training as a branch of ordinary education, geology as an open-air pursuit affords an admirable training in habits of observation, furnishes a delightful relief from the cares and routine of everyday life, takes us into the open fields and the free fresh face of nature, leads us into all manner of sequestered nooks, whither hardly any other occupation or interest would be likely to send us, sets before us problems of the highest interest regarding the history of the ground beneath our feet, and thus gives a new charm to scenery which may be already replete with attractions.

— Sir Archibald Geikie, Outlines of Field-Geology (1900), 251-2.

Experimental geology has this in common with all other branches of our science, petrology and palaeontology included, that in the long run it withers indoors.

— Phillip H. Kuenen’ 'Experiments in Geology', Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow (1958), 23, 25.

No Geology without Marine Geology!

— Phillip H. Kuenen, Title of paper, Geologische Rundschau, 47(1), 1958, 1 – 10.

Geology itself is only chemistry with the element of time added.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aspects of Culture, The American and Continental Monthly, Volume 1, April 1870, 5.

Beneath all the wealth of detail in a geological map lies an elegant, orderly simplicity.

— Tuzo Wilson, As quoted G.D. Garland in obituary 'John Tuzo Wilson', Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (Nov 1995), 552.

Atoms

Hexagonal packing can turn up unexpectedly.

To understand the very large, we must understand the very small.

— Democritus (470 – 380 BC)

… in the field some amount of information concerning igneous rocks can be obtained by rubbing down the chip on a grindstone and using a whetstone, carborundum file, or water of Ayr stone for the final grinding. By these and other methods … there are obtained slices of rocks which, though thick, uneven, scratched, and all that is bad, from the point of view of the professional maker of thin sections, are nevertheless capable of yielding much information. With a pocket lens it is possible to make out from such a 'thin' section the nature of the minerals present, the texture and the nature of the rock.

— Frank Rutley, Elements of Mineralogy, 22nd edition, 1915, p. 104.

The difference between a piece of stone and an atom is that an atom is highly organised, whereas the stone is not. The atom is a pattern, and the molecule is a pattern, and the crystal is a pattern; but the stone, although it is made up of these patterns, is just a mere confusion. It's only when life appears that you begin to get organisation on a larger scale. Life takes the atoms and molecules and crystals; but, instead of making a mess of them like the stone, it combines them into new and more elaborate patterns of its own.

— Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963), Time Must Have a Stop. London: Chatto and Windus, 1945, chapter 14.

A crystal lacks rhythm from excess of pattern, while a fog is unrhythmic in that it exhibits a patternless confusion of detail.

— A. N. Whitehead (1861 – 1947), An Introduction to Mathematics. Oxford: OUP, 1948.

 Change

One generation passeth away and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.

— Holy Bible, Ecclesiastes, 1:4

To explain the observed phenomena, we may dispense with sudden, violent and general catastrophes, and regard the ancient and present fluctuations . . . as belonging to one continuous and uniform series of events.

— Sir Charles Lyell (1797 – 1875), Principles of Geology.

Rather more than a century ago Sir Charles Lyell, then an Oxford student, noticed that a small lake on his father's Scotch estate was capable of depositing an appreciable layer of limestone on its bottom within quite a few years — and on his discovery that rocks could be built up as well as worn away is based a large part of modern geology.

— A. W. Haslett, Unsolved Problems of Science, London 1937.

Thermal mud, Orakei Korako, New Zealand

Compared with what we think of as long periods in our everyday calculations, there must have been enormous time and considerable variations in circumstances for nature to lead the organisation of animals to the degree of complexity and development that we see today.

— Chevalier de Lamarck (1744 – 1829), Philosophie Zoologique.

We may confidently come to the conclusion, that the forces which slowly and by little starts uplift continents, and that those which at successive periods pour forth volcanic matter from open orifices, are identical.

— Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World, 2nd edn. (1845), ch. XIV, 311.

… millions of our race are now supported by lands situated where deep seas once prevailed in earlier ages. In many districts not yet occupied by man, land animals and forests now abound where the anchor once sank into the oozy bottom.

— Sir Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, Vol. 1, 373, 1835.

While a glacier is moving, it rubs and wears down the bottom on which it moves, scrapes its surface (now smooth), triturates the broken-off material that is found between the ice and the rock, pulverizes or reduces it to a clayey paste, rounds angular blocks that resist its pressure, and polishes those having a larger surface. At the surface of the glacier, other processes occur. Fragments of rocks that are broken-off from the neighbouring walls and fall on the ice, remain there or can be transported to the sides; they advance in this way on the top of the glacier, without moving or rubbing against each other … and arrive at the extremity of the glacier with their angles, sharp edges, and their uneven surfaces intact.

— Louis Agassiz, La théorie des glaciers et ses progrès les plus récents. Bibl. universelle de Genève, (3), Vol. 41, p.127. Trans. Karin Verrecchia.

On the morning of May 8th, 1902, the clocks of St. Pierre ticked on towards ten minutes of 8 when they would stop forever. Against a background of bright sunshine, a huge column of vapour rose from the cone of Mont Pelée.

A salvo of reports as from heavy artillery. Then, choked by lava boiled to white heat by fires in the depths of the earth, Pelée with a terrific explosion blew its head off.

— Fairfax Downey, 'Last Days of St. Pierre', in Disaster Fighters, G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Temperature gradients in ordinary [volcanically] quiet areas range from less than 10 to as much as 50 degrees Celsius per kilometre.

— A. E. Benfield, 'The Earth's Heat', Scientific American Reader (1953), page 71.

Volcanic bombs in the making, Mt Yasur, Tanna, Vanuatu.

Naturally a good deal of thought has been given to how the immense energy of volcanoes might be harnessed for man's use. It has been done on a relatively minor scale in several countries, notably Italy and Iceland.

— A. E. Benfield, 'The Earth's Heat', Scientific American Reader (1953), page 86.

Just as the level of Stone Age finds gives an average sinkage of 9 inches in a hundred years, so calculations based on Roman remains suggest a similar figure… Presumably it is still doing so to-day, although it will be another five hundred or a thousand years before the problem of maintaining the Thames embankment will begin to become acute.

— A. W. Haslett, Unsolved Problems of Science, London 1937. (The Thames Barrier went into operation in 1986!).

Field reversals, occurring roughly every million years, are the most dramatic of the wide range of phenomena exhibited by the earth's magnetic field. And the next reversal on Earth may not be so far away: if the current rate of decay of the Earth's dipole component is maintained, it will vanish in less than 2000 years' time.

— Jeremy Bloxham, 'Evidence for asymmetry and fluctuation', Nature, 322: 13, 1986

Time

The poor world is almost six thousand years old . . .

— William Shakespeare (1564-1616), As You Like It, IV, i, 95

There are said to be a billion billion insects on the earth at any moment, most of them with very short life expectancies by our standards.

— Lewis Thomas (1913 – ), The Lives of a Cell, Penguin Books, 1978.

We can be certain that the radiation did not change appreciably during the last 500 million years; because during all this time life existed on earth, which means that the temperature of the earth during the whole period must have been very nearly what it is today. This temperature is determined by the sun's radiation.

— Hans Albrecht Bethe (1906-000), The Sky, December 1940.

More recently, advances in physics have given us methods to put absolute dates, in millions of years, on rocks and the fossils that they contain. These methods depend on the fact that particular radioactive elements decay at precisely known rates. It is as though precision-made miniature stopwatches had been conveniently buried in the rocks. Each stopwatch was started at the moment that it was laid down. All that the palaeontologist has to do is dig it up and read off the time on the dial.

— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin, 1986.

 

Slate blocks, Norway.

According to this view of the matter, there is nothing casual in the formation of Metamorphic Rocks. All strata, once buried deep enough, (and due TIME allowed!!!) must assume that state,—none can escape. All records of former worlds must ultimately perish.

— Sir John Herschel, Letter to Mr Murchison, quoted in the Appendix to Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment (1838), 240.

Fossils

… implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

— Charles Dickens, Bleak House, London, 1852, page 1.

Life has come to be regarded by the majority of biologists as forming one vast genealogical tree, the roots of which are buried deep down in the lowest fossiliferous strata, and the tops of whose branches, constituting the life that now exists on the globe, are alone seen above the surface.

— John Gibson, 'Fossil fishes of Scotland' in Science Gleanings in Many Fields (1884).

Fossils in marble, Sydney.

We are lucky to have fossils at all. It is a remarkably fortunate fact of geology that bones, shells and other hard parts of animals, before they decay, can occasionally leave an imprint which later acts as a mould, which shapes hardening rock into a permanent memory of the animal. We don't know what proportion of animals are fossilized after their death — I personally would consider it a very great honour to be fossilized — but it is certainly very small indeed.

— Richard Dawkins (1941 – ), The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin Books, 1988, p. 225.

David Davies, a Welsh mine foreman, was the first to make really large collections of plant material from different coal seams. He showed that even when the plants did not differ very much, there were differences in the proportions of different kinds, just as in one meadow you will find a great deal of clover among the grass, in another very little.
J.B.S.Haldane (1892-1964) Everything Has a History, Allen and Unwin 1951, page 50.

 

Fossils in a limy sandstone, W.A.

If a single well-verified mammal skull were to turn up in 500 million years-old rocks, our whole modern theory of evolution would be utterly destroyed. Incidentally, this is sufficient answer to the canard, put about by creationists and their journalistic fellow travellers, that the whole theory of evolution is an 'unfalsifiable' tautology. Ironically, it is also why creationists are so keen on the fake human footprints, which were carved during the depression to fool tourists, in the dinosaur beds of Texas.

— Richard Dawkins (1941 – ), The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin Books, 1988, page 225.

Soil

Erosion in a spoil heap, South Australia.

In the agricultural sense soils are the superficial layers, usually less than a foot in thickness, of disintegrated and decomposed rock material, which is mingled with organic matter, and furnishes the necessary conditions and materials for plant growth.

— G. W. Tyrrell, The Principles of Petrology, Methuen, 1929, p. 184.

As to the ground or soil, it is in general but very indifft — in some parts nothing but hard, solid rock, in others a black sand full of ant hills.  In some spots, however, it is better, in one place especially we have found some good strong clay of wh they have already begun to make bricks wh are said to be very good.

The Governor has taken several excursions inland many miles into the Country.  First a little to the Northward — here the ground and country are most wretched, nothing to be seen but impassable Rocks, thickets, & swamps.  Next he went more towards the S.W.  Here he met with better ground — also with blue shale, a thing likely to be of great service to the Settlement.  The wood is in general very ordinary & bad for building.

— George Mackaness (ed.), Some Letters of Rev. Richard Johnson, B.A., First Chaplain of New South Wales, 2 parts: Australian Historical Monographs, new series vols XX and XXI, Sydney: D.S.Ford, 1954, part I, page 19 (letter dated May 8, 1788). 

Some idea may be formed of the appearance of the country by what is seen on the South Head Road, near the Light House. At the distance of a mile from the Heads, the spectator comes to a spot from which he can behold nothing but rock blackened, with the effects of fire. Every tree, shrub, flower, or atom of grass, has been burnt to the very root; and accustomed as the eye is here to look with indifference upon large tracts of land around, with scorched and half consumed trees, one cannot contemplate the scenes we allude to without becoming sensible of an extraordinary sensation, produced by the air of desolation with which one is surrounded.

Cattle at this season are much distressed for want of water. The stockmen are obliged to drive them to the distance of many miles, even for the scanty supply which a small creek or rivulet affords.

— The Australian (Sydney), 9 December 1826, 3.

Simulating sedimentation.

We are wealthy and wasteful but this can't go on. If we don't eat dog biscuits, we could end up eating our dog instead.

— Magnus Pyke (1908 – 1992)

Now I submit that we cannot say much which is sympathetic to our time unless we have assimilated our immediate tradition, which for this country is the conquest of soil and climate. Accordingly, it is a function of Biology in the University to provide this ingredient in education.

— Professor Eric Ashby, The Place of Biology in Australian Education, inaugural lecture, Sydney, 1939.

Climate and weather

In parts of Siberia the southern boundary of permanently frozen ground is receding poleward several dozen yards per annum.

— George Kimble, Scientific American, 1950.

While all the evidence goes to show that carbonic acid is now an almost invariable constituent of the air, it is one that requires least change in the physical conditions under which the earth exists to effect a change in its proportion. Minute as the proportion is, the delicacy of its relation to animal and vegetable life on the earth makes the maintenance of the apparently unstable equilibrium a matter of serious concern to mankind.

— Scientific American, October 1883, quoted in Scientific American, October 1983, p. 11

Occasional droughts occur throughout the colony at periods varying from ten to fifteen years: and periodical floods of a destructive character have at various times caused a serious loss of life and property.

— George French Angas, Australia: a Popular Account, 1866, 140.

We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of the element of air, which by unquestioned experiments is known to have weight, and so much, indeed, that near the surface of the earth, where it is most dense it weighs about one four-hundredth of the weight of water [actually more like 1/775]. Those who have written about twilight, moreover, have observed that the vaporous and visible air rises above us to about [80 kilometres]; I do not believe its height to be so great, since if it were, I could show that the vacuum would be able to offer much greater resistance than it does…

— Evangelista Torricelli, in a letter to Michelangelo Ricci, 1644.

Not that there is anything very mysterious ... if it is remembered that a barometer is merely a weighing balance under another name. Instead of weighing a letter or a parcel against a series of standardised weights, it weighs the whole mass of air above it, right to the top of the atmosphere, against a column of mercury. An area of high pressure … is the outward and ground-level sign of a mountain of air above. The mountain of air is heavy. So the mercury has to rise higher…

— A. W. Haslett, Unsolved Problems of Science, London 1937.

Attributed bits, lacking sources.

I could more easily believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven.

— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), in 1807.

I agree. But I wonder what it would have looked like if the sun had been circling the earth.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), on being told how foolish the ancients were for accepting the Ptolemaic system.

My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

— J. B. S. Haldane (1892 – 1964)

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

— Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)