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The Science of Super Heroes
The Week has the rundown courtesy of Sulagra Misna of World Science Festival: “The Science behind Captain America’s Shield, the Hulk’s Anger, and More.”
The Wonder of Chocolate
Thanks to Jesus Diaz for sharing this amazing video of cacao farmers in Côte d’Ivoire actually tasting chocolate for the first time!
Jesus adds:
Watching them marvel about this sweet food that comes from the beans they harvest is amazing to me. First, because it’s a joy to see their faces. Then, because it’s a stark reminder of how amazingly lucky we are.
For us westerners chocolate is just one more thing. It’s inconsequential. We like to eat it, sometimes we get delighted by it for a minute. But more often than not it’s just one more snack to stuff our fat faces with. We don’t think about it and the incredible effort and resources that are required to make it. We take it for granted along with the other billion foods and the other billion other technologies and privileges we didn’t fight for.
I’m not posting this to be preachy. This comes from a place of true wonder, to remind myself about my own comfortable numbness and the hundred things that I take for granted every day. One day something fatal will happen and then you will realize how much time you wasted whining about this or that rather than enjoying the infinite amount of awesome (yes, everything is awesome!) stuff that exists around you.
Indeed.
Quantum Cheshire Cats
Scientists have created an effect comparable to a subatomic Cheshire cat. Rather than a grin that has been separated from its cat, they have created a property of magnetic moment (I’ll not pretend I understand what that is) separated from its neutron. As Stephen Luntz explains,
In the classical world we are familiar with the idea that a property like magnetic moment cannot be separated from its object – it would be like taking the taste away from a chocolate bar so that the bar produced no sensation on the tongue, but a disembodied taste could be detected somewhere quite distinct.
However, things work differently in the world of the very small. In the 1990s, Professor Yakir Aharonov of Tel Aviv University proposed the properties could indeed be detached from particles (his book explaining it is delightfully subtitled Quantum Theory for the Perplexed). The idea develops on Schrödinger’s famous feline thought-experiment. However, instead of ending up with a live and dead cat, you have a cat without its properties, and properties without the cat. The naming after Carroll’s Cheshire moggy was inevitable.
Thus,
Denkmayr and his co-authors…temporarily removed the magnetic moment from the neutrons using an interferometer. They used a silicon crystal to split a neutron beam and reported, “The experimental results suggest that the system behaves as if the neutrons go through one beam path, while their magnetic moment travels along the other.” The beams were then reunited, leaving no disembodied magnetic moments prowling the universe.
It’s a Good Thing She Didn’t Just Blow Up the Place
Check out Aaron Goldberg, “Powering Disney’s Frozen with a Carnot Refrigerator,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics 3 (19 Feb 2014). Here’s the abstract:
Frozen is Disney’s latest film, in which the character Elsa unleashes winter on her entire kingdom. This paper quantifies the amount of water frozen and the amount of work required by a Carnot refrigerator to do so, arriving at values of 5.49772788 x 10^2 moles and 5.8 x 10^15 Joules, respectively.
You can read about how a Carnot refrigerator works here. Basically, it is possible to harness a temperature difference between two reservoirs to generate work (a Carnot engine). But you can turn the equation around and harness work to create this difference of temperature. This effect is called a Carnot refrigerator.
In layman’s terms this means
It has been shown that in Frozen, Elsa froze approximately 5.5 x 10^12 moles of water. To accomplish Elsa’s feat, a Carnot refrigerator would require 5.8 x 10^15 Joules of energy. This amount is equivalent to the energy released by the Hiroshima nuclear bomb 115 times over, or that released by 63 Nagasaki nuclear bombs. This immense number puts Elsa’s power into perspective, implying either that the Snow Queen has enormous strength, or that Disney underestimated the ramifications of their animated fantasy.
I’m going with the second option on this one, but it would still be pretty cool if Elsa could generate enough energy to basically hold her own with the likes of Superman or the incredible Hulk. That’s a movie I’d go see.
(H/T: io9)
If Amazon Goes Bad…
I’ll be the first to tell you that my fiction writing is a hobby that (somewhat) pays for itself. I’m not trying to make a living doing this, just sharing a little bit of my craziness with the world. If that changes in the future, I’ll let you know. (Not the craziness: that’s not going to change.)
A rather significant conversation among those who are trying to make a living as an indie author has to do with Amazon and what happens if the company gets too big (if it isn’t already) and decides to use its monopolistic power inappropriately.
On that front, my friend Jennifer Becton has some helpful words. If anybody knows the indie author beat, it’s Jennifer. Listen to what she has to say.
Seeing Fairies
This review of Marjorie T. Johnson’s Seeing Fairies: From the Lost Archives of the Fairy Investigation Society, Authentic Reports of Fairies in Modern Times may be of interest to some.
Agriculture and Food in Worldbuilding
Because lunchtime:
Worldbuilding: Food for the People by B. Pine.
A Cashless Fae Society?
In Children of Pride, the Fair Folk do not use money and do not understand the concept of “payment” the way ordinary mortals do. How can an advanced society exist without money? The simple answer, of course, is because magic.
This Crash Course World History video provides an alternative explanation grounded in anthropology.
The Changing Face(s) of Fantasy
Adam Dalton describes the continuing relevance of the fantasy genre in this insightful article over at Fantasy Faction. He writes,
Things move on. Things evolve. It’s healthy that the fantasy genre does so too – it keeps it fresh, vibrant, progressive and alive. It keeps is strongly ‘relevant’ to new readers. There are some genres that are far less progressive (in literary terms), and that are beginning to fail. A clear example is the genre of horror. Book sales have all but died off entirely (although in TV and film horror still does well). Many Waterstones stores have entirely done away with their horror sections (hiding them in their Scifi/Fantasy sections or relabeling them as Dark Fantasy sections). Unless you’re Stephen King or James Herbert (RIP), you simply aren’t going to sell many books if your book is labelled ‘horror’. Horror is literally dead. Ironically dead. Dead. Justin Cronin’s The Passage was first launched as a horror, and it hardly sold. It was relabelled scifi and relaunched. Again no sales. Then it was launched as a literary fiction and it became a best-seller.
Because scifi in terms of book sales is also in massive trouble. Brian Aldiss…puts is down to the fact that we now ‘live in a scifi world’ and that we therefore no longer need to read scifi so much. ‘Every week there’s some new device or invention that comes out and we don’t know how it works! Strange and confusing technology is all around us.’ Mr Aldiss has put his finger on it for me – current readers just don’t see scifi literature as being as ‘relevant’ to them as past readerships did.
Yet fantasy survives and thrives! Where it was the poor cousin to scifi in the 1970s, it now utterly dwarfs (interesting verb!) scifi. How does fantasy do it? What’s the secret? Well, it’s the magic of fantasy, isn’t it? Magic is at the heart of that genre. It tricks, distracts, bewitches and bespells, where other genres merely appal or confuse. And it’s learnt to be relevant, to reflect the shifting dreams and fantasies of its readership, to reflect the current state of society. ‘The current state?’ you might frown. ‘But fantasy isn’t real. It’s precisely the opposite of that.’ Precisely. Look, you can’t get a job as a philosopher these days, so you have to become a reader or writer of fantasy. Fantasy is the fairground mirror to the real, the extension and twisted exploration of the real, the different way of seeing that enables real change.
I feel as if I owe an apology to the professors of philosophy I know for that line about not being able to get a job as a philosopher these days. But I didn’t say it, so you’re on your own.
Darrell J. Pursiful 