To Run Or Not To Run, That is The Question.


“To run or not to run” that is the question. Here in the Pacific Northwest we have a little rain from time to time to time, but not so often or so rarely that it becomes an issue, rather more it’s something to accommodate to. Hence, most of us carry umbrellas, sometimes large, but usually small so that you don’t notice that we are prepared.

Of course not all inhabitants of the planet are so fortunate as us temperate rain forest dwellers and have to make decisions when the clouds darken. Bocci is the latest physicist to worry seriously about the consequences of being stuck in the street umbrella- less when a drop makes its presence felt (1).

 “To run or not to run” that is the question. But what is the answer? Well a dyed-in-the-wool physicist is not going to treat this lightly, but is going to study velocities, areas and such like as a body moves forward through the hydrogical flux (rain to normal mortals).

 Of course physicists like to simplify to mark the route clearly and the tendency is to choose a sphere, however this was not the case in this example. The person was simplified as a two-dimensional planar square person, or a cylinder,  whose velocity was changed, as was that of the weather.

Before you dismiss this idealized person, stay and bow down, they are of course your politicians – 2-dimensional, moving at a constant velocity regardless of reality, etc. etc. – doesn't that describe them? They also modeled some people as cylinders who I guess represent the independents in the audience who spin about their axes.

To the general conclusions. Well the bad news. It depends on how hard it’s raining, how much wind and how fast you can move.

Great, stick with us Northwesterners – take your umbrella and leave the applied math for your next family party.


  1. http://iopscience.iop.org/0143-0807/33/5/1321/pdf/0143-0807_33_5_1321.pdf


Seeing Is Definitely Believing


Seeing is definitely believing when it comes to our social network or personal website pages. We pick the most promising snapshot from our portfolio and there it is for our world image. OK it may not have been taken this week, or even this year, but it’s how we should look.

Academics are an interesting subset of the species, dedicated as they are to study, seeking after truth and eschewing the razz-ma-tazz of the commercial world, so I was drawn to the survey of the profile pictures of over 5,800 academics by the large team of Churches et al from the U of South Australia and Flinders U that popped up in last weeks Public Library of Science (1,2).

Being from the psychology schools, the authors weren’t setting up a beauty contest, but were checking which they decided was their best face to put forward – their left side or their right side. With no agents to advise, they had to fall back on their own base instincts. Gender bias will come into it, how could it not? But the big surprise is the two-culture split a la C.P.Snow.

That’s right! Arts guys are lefties and science guys are righties. In English, and the Performing Arts the women favored the left cheek forward. In chemistry, Math, and Engineering, the photographer had definitely to be on their right side.

With men, the arts were not so clear-cut. Performing arts guys plumped right. Interestingly, in Fine Arts those of either gender persuasion went right. Perhaps the activities in the fine arts these days are more technical with installations etc.

The one that fascinated me was the psychologist group. The females were very definitely in the arts camp with a strong preference for the left side. Perhaps teasing out a patients inner feelings and dosing them with empathy is an art form.

In contrast male psychologists tend right and this leaves me to wonder if they really want to be measuring people’s responses quantitatively, and viewing patients more as lab rats for experiments, than mending them.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0038940
  2. http://www.improbable.com/2012/07/19/left-v-right-how-academics-face-pose-on-the-web/


Green Living In Urban Canyons


Many of us would like to sample green living in urban canyons rather than suffer the dull grey, hot polluted atmosphere in many of our crowded cities. Big open squares and green parks help, but we have to plod between these oases in the urban desert.

Pugh et al hit on a solution and have published it in Environmental Science & Technology (1,2). They propose that the walls, and possibly roofs, should be planted up and down. The greenery can act as a filter for the NOX’s and all those particulates that our diesel engines are spewing out.

Tough evergreens that are drought resistant would be best, so ivy is a good candidate and climbing walls would have to be provided if sufficient height is to be safely attained. Tree lined streets can help a little, but they can also trap the noxious nasties down at street level.

The authors set up computer models of airflow in street canyons and showed that cross flows produce air circulation within the canyons. Aligned canyons, of course will have plenty of flow down them. Deep well-covered canyons should work well. For example a fully covered green canyon twice as high as it is deep could clean out 45% of the dirty diesel particulates. The paper suggests that 40% of NOX’s and 60% of particulates could be attainable.

Green living in urban canyons would have other fun benefits with birds having a huge increase in free real estate for raising their families. The insect life would be in constant supply so we’d all win.

  1. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es300826w
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18873391



Saving The Rainforest One Nut At A Time


Different plants have different strategies for dispersing their seeds far and wide. Without that, they are vulnerable to being stuck in a backwater and overcome by other plants. One tried and tested technique is to produce a tasty fleshy fruit with an indigestible seed, which, in the fullness of time, will be neatly deposited some distance from the parent plant. Big fruits with big seeds need big beasties to munch away and be saving the rainforest one nut at a time.

Back in the Pleistocene, this was the job of very big beasties, but what is happening now that they aren’t around? Trees like the Black Palm have continued to produce large very hard nuts so how do these continue to spread? Jansen et al lay the blame squarely at the paws of the agouti with a little bit of help from the spiny rat with squirrels and land crabs being dilettante about it too, occasionally (1,2).

The program meant supplying some 16 agoutis with their own VHF radio so they could be in constant contact at all times. Video cameras were set up at their seed caches (50+). But the big idea was to dry and radio tag 590 nuts. The comings and goings were monitored in great detail – one could be forgiven for comparing to London coming up to the Olympics.

Exciting results followed. The first hiding place for 90% of the nuts was within 50 meters of its initial location, but then a great deal of dishonest agouti behavior surfaced with multiple agoutis stealing nuts and hiding them somewhere else. In the end, about 10% of the nuts made it 200 meter or more away.

In the course of a year, some were eaten others suffered the ignominy of being de-tagged. These tended to be ones that had been moved a lot and were often a good way away from their starting point when contact was lost. In the end 1 in 7 of the nuts survived until the next year and 1 in 3 nuts made it out to more than 100 meters from its starting place.

These stats are easily good enough to ensure dispersal so the agouties are saving the rainforest one nut at a time by handling stolen nuts.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18856362
  2. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/10/1205184109.full.pdf



Some Social Networks Are More Equal Than Others.


Biology is full of networks and social species have social networks. Some are loose, small aggregates, while some are large complex networks. Some social networks are more equal than others in that large insect networks, ant colonies for example, are structured by job function that may change with age (also honey bees for example), but others may represent a power hierarchy (baboons for example).

Waters and Fewell from Arizona State U set up a couple of seed harvester ant colonies in their lab and decorated the individuals so that they could be recognized on tape. The aim of the game was to film the ants going about their everyday tasks and to record who ‘chatted’ to whom. (‘Chatting’ was taken as being indicated by the laying on of antennae by one to another.)

5 social networks were observed to develop in one colony, while 7 were seen in the other. The local substructures were compared to a random network generated by a computer and The structure which turned out to be the least random, that is it occurred frequently in 88% of the networks, was the feed forward loop.

The feed forward loop is a term used in control systems where two units feed information to a third without any feedback. So ant 1 tells ants 2 and 3 that she has the goodies and then ant 2 gees-up ant 3 thereby ensuring ant 3 is left in no doubt and is working harder. Information transfer efficiency is the aim of the game.

It seems that the ant communication is all about efficiency without much room for social chit-chat within their social networks.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040337

Is we are what we read as good a truism as we are what we eat?


Is we are what we read as good a truism as we are what we eat the question of the moment. We have a tendency to read or watch stuff that is familiar and leaves us in our comfort zone. From reading we naturally take to writing stuff that reflects our views – how could we expect any less?

Twenge et al in this past weeks issue of the Public Library of Science have analyzed American book published in the past 50 years to see if we have become more self centered (1). They used the crowd out there in the form of Amazon Mechanical Turk with Google Books Ngram phrase service to measure the changes in words and phrases over their half century.

The big question was what words and phrases needed measuring? These were determined by consensus as words that represent individualism or communal concepts. A similar task was done with the identification of the most popular individualistic phrases.

Millions of books and a great deal of data mining later, the results are in. On tenterhooks? Well, not to beat about the bush and hang this out unnecessarily, the books have it, the books in American English show an increasing use of words and phrases indicating self interest over the past fifty years.

This hasn’t been a huge change, but the stats indicate a significant one. We should note right off that 87% of the books were works of non-fiction. One could expect self-help books to have a lot of “self” in them and a lot of autobiographies to have a lot of “I.”

Another factor that the authors explore is the possibility of the phraseology of current speech being different, but of course, if we are more about “me” today we would say me and I more.

I am still not sure if we are what we read? The question of which came first – the reader or the book – is a big chicken and egg problem.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040181