Clipmarks | Rustee's clips

Does War Influence Ingenuity?

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:47:53 GMT

clipped by: Rustee
clipper's remarks:

We're told that "necessity is the mother of invention," but history doesn't really bear that out. The true mother of invention is our powerful driving internal need to invent. We invent because we want to invent. It's freedom that's the real mother of invention.

Clip Source: www.uh.edu

The common wisdom tells us that war speeds up invention -- that airplane performance, ship technology, and engine design all raced ahead during WW-I and II -- that governments can speed the creation of ideas. But there's good reason to ask if this is really true.

I'll use airplane speeds to show why I have doubts, but any other technology would show the same thing. Airplane speeds are a good thing to look at because we know how badly everybody wanted to speed up their planes during WW-I and II.

The remarkable fact is that throughout its history the speed of flight has doubled every nine years. The rate of increase has been dead steady from the first primitive airships in the 1880s right up until orbital flight made speed a non-issue. That nine-year doubling has been absolutely untouched by war, depression, or presidential proclamations.

What government commitment does increase during war is production.

But human ingenuity is quite a different creature.

Click here for audio of Episode 35.

Tags: science, history, war

Science, Technology, & Engineering - What They Mean

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:29:07 GMT

clipped by: Rustee

Clip Source: www.uh.edu

The word science comes from the Latin word scientia, which means knowledge. We apply the word science to ordered or systematic knowledge. A scientist identifies what's known about things and puts that knowledge into some kind of order.

Part of the word technology goes back to a nice Greek word, techni. Techni means art and skill -- what a painter, stonemason, millwright, or glassblower might do. But the other part of the word is its ending, ology, which means the study or the lore or even the science of something. Technology is the lore or the science of techni -- of making and doing.

The last of the three words -- engineering -- comes from the Latin word ingeniare, which means to devise. A lot of other English words are related to this word: ingenuity, which means inventiveness, and engine, which can be taken to mean any machine of our devising -- any "engine of our ingenuity." So an engineer is, first and foremost, a deviser of machines.

Click here for audio of Episode 12.

Tags: language, science

Geriatric Star Giving Birth

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:17:40 GMT

clipped by: Rustee
clipper's remarks:

There’s no evidence of planets around BP Piscium, but the disk could be giving birth to some — a new generation of planets for a geriatric star.

Clip Source: stardate.org

The Sun is moving through Pisces this month, so the constellation’s stars are hidden in the Sun’s glare. One of those hidden stars is known as BP Piscium, and it’s a bit of an oddball. It appears to be an old star that’s giving birth to new planets.

The star itself is about twice as massive as the Sun. Its composition and gravity indicate that it’s late in life, so it’s puffed up like a big balloon.

But a research team led by astronomers at UCLA found that most of the energy that we receive from BP Piscium appears to come from a giant disk of dust that encircles the star.

Disks like these are the birthplaces of planets. But planets should form around young stars — not old, bloated ones like BP Piscium.

The astronomers who studied BP Piscium and a similar star suggest that it started life with a small companion star in a close orbit. But as BP Piscium aged, it puffed up and engulfed its smaller sibling.

This material has since formed a disk, which is growing thicker.

Tags: astronomy, science