We are all familiar with R. Buckminster Fuller’s revolutionary ideas for buildings such as the geodesic dome. Less well known is that in 1933 he came up with a design for a futuristic car called the Dymaxion car that was front-wheel drive with rear steering and had just three wheels. The rear wheel could turn by 90o, allowing for a very tight turning circle.
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While scanning the bookshelf in my house looking for a particular volume, I happened to come across a copy of one of the most well-known Agatha Christie novels Ten Little Indians that is a detective story without a detective, consisting of a somewhat contrived plot in which ten people are invited to an isolated island by a mysterious host and then get killed off one by one in a manner that reflects the children’s poem from which the book’s title is taken.
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Suppose you are sitting in your living room and suddenly everything in front of you changed to something else, say a view of the ocean. Wouldn’t you be startled? And yet, when we watch films, a cut from one scene to another changes also the entire field of view instantaneously and yet it causes us no problems. And reports about the public viewing of the very first films suggest that this new thing did not cause viewers any problems at all. I wrote a few months ago about the research by Jeffrey M. Zacks, a professor of psychology and radiology at Washington University in St. Louis, and others about why our brains are not disoriented when we watch films with even very rapid cuts that change the entire field of view instantaneously.
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More and more jurisdictions are cracking down on the use of cell phones by drivers. To read or text while driving is of course insane, but talking on the cell phone is also bad and is being increasingly banned. Up to now, the use of hands-free devices has not come under much criticism and laws banning cell phone use have exempted them. Some new cars even have such a system built in, adding to the suggestion that its use is safe.
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I tend to give the letters to the editor column of the Plain Dealer only the most cursory of glances. One rarely learns anything from them but they do provide a window into some very strange minds. Within the space of two days, I saw two letters on climate change that boggled my mind. Here they are in full.
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Those who follow Cuba know that despite the harsh embargo that the US has imposed on that nation for over 50 years out of sheer spite because it is no longer a US client state, that country has managed to maintain a free universal health care system that is even able to send nurses and doctors to other developing countries in the world and to deal with emergencies, such as the recent Ebola outbreak in west Africa when it sent hundreds of medical professionals.
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Anyone who has learned to ride a bicycle has experienced the feeling that one will never master it until suddenly, you get the hang of it and feel that sense of exhilaration as for the first time you cruise along without fear of falling. The bike now seems so stable that you cannot imagine why it took you so long to learn. But why it is so stable is not easy to understand. I have written before about how the stability of the humble bicycle is actually quite mysterious from a physics point of view.
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When governments engage in atrocities like torture, they invariably need the assistance of people in health care professions, such as doctors and nurses, to collaborate in these practices since they have the necessary expertise to both monitor them and develop even more methods of torture. Unfortunately they usually have enough of such people to help them, either because those medical professionals are willing to overlook the appalling ethics of what they are doing or because their jobs depend upon them going along or they actually profit from it.
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Mark Griswold, a friend and colleague at my university who is a professor of radiology, gave a talk at the Microsoft builders’ event this week that highlighted the features of a new device called the HoloLens headset that overlays virtual 3D objects onto the physical environment around us and promises to revolutionize many fields of education by providing students with the ability to see complete systems that are hidden within an outer shell, like the skeletal structure or the cardiovascular system of a human body. See for yourself
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Most of this blog’s readers would have heard about the Golden Ratio, supposedly first derived by Euclid. If one takes a straight line segment and divides into two such that the ratio of the longer part to the shorter is the same as the ratio of the whole line to the longer part, some simple algebra shows that this ratio works out to be about 1.618 to one.
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