Surface Area of the Earth

Meanwhile, have some fun with this interactive graphic brought to you by charts bin!

 

Video: Almost Like Resurrection

Tech Time: Peterson Field Guide App

>

There’s a Peterson Field Guide to Backyard Birds app from Wildtonesthat’s compatible with the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the iPad. There are over 180 birds – far more types than we get in our yard – so chances are excellent you’ll be able to identify the feathered creatures passing their time in your “habitat.”

It includes arrows to the key field marks.

There’s an illustrated index by family.

I think this is the way I’m finally going to get through that Peterson Field Guide sitting on my bookshelf. I’ll keep you posted. Let’s hear from you, too, about the birds you find with your copy of this splendid app.

Roger Tory Peterson

A Field Guide to the Birds, giving field marks of all species found in eastern North America by Roger Tory Peterson, 1934

Sketching

Field Marks

Taking notes on an osprey

Great Baltimore Fire of 1904

Before the fire:

Baltimore burns:

Fireboats in the Harbor:

Engine at Work:

The damage is done:

Note: Thanks to the Maryland and US Archives

Dusty Naval Guys

Here they are. The men who take up my brain-space, time, and energy as I complete my book for Springer Verlag, tentatively titled, “Modeling Ships and Space Craft: The Science and Art of Mastering the Oceans and Sky”

William Froude who championed and proved the value of scale model testing in the 1870′s.

David Watson Taylor who designed and built the first model basin in the US in the early 1900′s.

Alfred Thayer Mahan who made such a convincing case for the link between the strength of a navy and the prosperity of a country in 1890 that he changed the world.

A Science Hall of Fame With a Twist

On January 14, Science ran a Gonzo Scientist piece entitled, “The Science Hall of Fame.” John Bohannon details the ways in which this particular Science Hall of Fame (SH0F), curated by Adrian Veres and John Bohannon, measures fame in terms of the number of times a person’s name has appeared in books over the centuries. The impact is measured “in milliDarwins (mD): one-thousandth of the average annual frequency that Charles Darwin’s name appers in English-language books from the year he was 30 years old (1839) until 2000,” as explained in the SHoF piece.

The data set was created by a team led by Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden. It is “based on the trillions of words within Google Books, which currently represents 15 million books, 12% of those ever published,” according to The Science Hall of Fame piece.

You can either go to the SHoF and see the results for yourself or… go into the data to see what you can come up with. I, of course, immediately went into the data to see how my favorite trio of dusty naval guys made out.

Turns out Alfred Thayer Mahan, the one who started the whole naval defense is key to a country’s prosperity thing in 1890 has a graph that looks like this:
David Watson Taylor, noted hydrodynamicist and the man who designed and ran the first model basin in the US in the early 1900′s fared thus:
William Froude, the man who championed model testing as a viable way to predict the performance of full-sized ships before they were constructed in the late 1870′s generated this chart:
Charting them together, it’s easy to see that Froude outshone them all, which is only fitting since he’s the one who proved the theory and got the ball rolling:
But let’s face it. Charles Darwin kicked their butts:

Great Moments in NASA History: Sam the Space Monkey

Remember Sam? The Rhesus monkey who took a spin on Little Joe 2 as part of the Mercury program back in the early 60′s? Here he is, before and after the flight, showing off his model of the Mercury fiberglass contour couch.

This first image is of Sam before the flight. He’d look a bit stressed if that wasn’t an anthropomorphic interpretation!

This second image is of Sam after the flight. He looks a little — what can I say — under the weather. Only the scientist knows for sure.

(Images courtesy of NASA)