Geeks and humour

I saw a great comic/thingy on xkcd.com; it's so great because I'm a scientist (or that's how I like to see myself), and I base decisions and theories on some sort of logic. That's why I fail so often in love... it doesn't make any sense. Therefore, it perfectly expresses my feelings (also, as a geek, expressing feelings is not one of my sellingpoints ... ;) ).


(This is the t-shirt version)

Abstract pictures

It has been a long week, without much time to post. But I made a few pictures, and to be honest I like them. Click on them to get the large version.

Why is ice slippery?

There's an article in the December 2005 episode of Physics Today written by Robert Rosenberg, titled 'Why is ice slippery?'
A simple question, but the answer is however not so simple. The first part of the solution is the following: for example, when you're on ice skates the pressure (force per unit area) is very high (the blades of the skates occupy a small area, whereas the weight on them is large). This increase in pressure results in a lower melting temperature of the ice below the skates: -3.5 degrees Celsius. Thus, the ice melts, and you skate over the water. Simple. Or not?
However, what happens when the outside temperature is below -3.5 degrees? Can't you skate below that temperature? Nonsense. Also, the pressure on the snow exerted by a skier is not enough to make it melt (larger area). What happens when you slide over the snow or ice, is frictional heating. The author then mentions an experiment, with the following brilliant remark:

"The increase in temperature with velocity, they observed, was consistent with frictional, localized heating of the ice underfoot to create a thin water layer. Were pressure melting -an endothermic process- the dominant contribution, the researchers would have expected a decrease in temperature."

The heat created due to friction causes the temperature to rise, so a waterlayer is created, and you can skate over the ice.
There, problem solved. Not quite.
But why can ice be slippery when you're standing still on it? This question is analyzed in the remaining pages, where he shows what evidence there is for the existence of a liquid-like film at the surface, even at temperatures below zero. He concludes with a discussion of experiments about the thickness of the film and temperature-range of the effect.

New name

We changed the address of this blag; now it's zerofication.blogspot.com, as you're probably aware of. The new name is more original, and stands for everything in life that is diminished into nothing. Nullified. Zerofied. Zerofication: the process of zerofying. Or something like that. Like television news reporting on 'human interest'-stories, instead of the really important news.
By the way, a good news source is The New Standard, in their own words "independent. non-profit. commercial-free. uncompromised".

The joy of a forum

A lot of people reside behind their comps to relax and socialize. Some enjoy the company of other people in an instant message conversation, while others play games like World of Warcraft. Personally, I love to visit sites where you can post comments, make threads, play some games or just read random amusing nonsense.

A good example of such a site is Gaia online. It is a site based around anime. Yes, anime. Do not be discouraged if you are not into anime. There are a lot of topics and subjects and for everyone at least something they like. You can discuss serious subjects on the debate forums. Have a go at roleplaying as a vampire or make a puzzle. A reward is given for every action or post you make. This is in the form of a currency. It is virtual currency of course. This ‘money’ can be used to gain items by buying them on the marketplace or trading in one of the many threads.

Another good waste of time is Zantarni. This is a site much similar to Gaia online. The biggest difference with the first is that it does not have a lot of spammers and random posters. Zantarni has less visitors. It does not have the nice graphics like Gaia, but it has it’s positive traits. The site gives a more familiar feeling to it all. The thing is that Gaia, because of it’s immense userbase, makes you feel lost and alone in a big new virtual world. Making new friends would be difficult for a newbie, because of the acquired status of the older users. Zantarni is new and does not have such an upper clash yet. I must add that there are still problems on the Zantarni site. One of those problems has been a glitch. It produced a lot of virtual money and caused the economy of Zantarni to crash (Yes, like in the real world.). That combined with the sudden ‘missing in action’ of the administrator made some users quite angry. A lot of people have left the site because of all this. Even I have not been on it for a while. But it seems that the site is steadily rebuilding itself with some new members in the staff.

The last site that caught my eye is Menewsha. It is still under heavy testing and in Alpha phase. You can register yourself and post on the forum. They have a lot of items already, but for now not a site that is on the same level as the two previous ones. I hope that will change. It has quite the potential to grow into a big forum based game like Gaia.

The reason for me posting this bit of jibberish is because I have been asked to join the staff of a similar gamesite. It is still work in progress. I do not even know if I will stay with them, because I am always doing other things. The pixelart is quite remarkable and the people are very friendly. So for now something you definitely have to visit in the future.

For the people who are interested in joining one of these games:
I can refer you for the two first ones. The third had to take down the referral system, because some users were abusing it. You get extra gold on Gaia, if I refer you. On Zantarni it is the opposite. I will get 100 gold for referring you, but I will give it to you of course.

Do not hessitate to add me on Gaia online or Zantarni. I do not know if Menewsha has the feature to add friends. I will just add it also. Please personal message me on the sites, because I will not add you if I think you are a random person. Just tell me you visited this blog.

My usernames:
Achaia Crucifix (Gaia online)
Achaia (Zantarni)
Jade Crucifix (Menewsha)

(I made my first post! Yay! )

Lou Reed in Amsterdam

I was happy when I saw that Lou Reed is coming to town. Lou Reed. To Amsterdam. Performing Berlin. Live. Until I discovered the ticketprices: approximately between 60 and 73 euros. Fucking hell. I expected it to be around 45-50. Not sure if I still want to go; it's a lot of money. I can (or I have to) eat for a month with that money. But still haven't made up my mind.

New pictures

Here is some new experimental art I created. Maybe you'll like it.

(No, it's not some kind of love-toy ... what women think of these days ...)

Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Mood Disorders

Another interesting article from the American Journal of Psychiatry, titled

"Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Mood Disorders"

Here are the main points; below that there's a summary of the article.


Objective: This article is an overview of epidemiological and treatment studies suggesting that deficits in dietary-based omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids may make an etiological contribution to mood disorders and that supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids may provide a therapeutic strategy.

Method: Relevant published studies are detailed and considered.

Results: Several epidemiological studies suggest covariation between seafood consumption and rates of mood disorders. Biological marker studies indicate deficits in omega-3 fatty acids in people with depressive disorders, while several treatment studies indicate therapeutic benefits from omega-3 supplementation. A similar contribution of omega-3 fatty acids to coronary artery disease may explain the well-described links between coronary artery disease and depression.

Conclusions: Deficits in omega-3 fatty acids have been identified as a contributing factor to mood disorders and offer a potential rational treatment approach. This review identifies a number of hypotheses and studies for consideration. In particular, the authors argue for studies clarifying the efficacy of omega-3 supplementation for unipolar and bipolar depressive disorders, both as individual and augmentation treatment strategies, and for studies pursuing which omega-3 fatty acid, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) or docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), is likely to provide the greatest benefit.
(Am J Psychiatry 163:6, June 2006)

I learned a few things from this paper: first, the omega-3 fatty acids can be either marine-based or from plants.
The rapid growth in population has been associated with a change in diet, resulting in a decrease in omega-3 while the uptake of omega-6 (e.g. from vegetable oils) has increased. Some authors suggest that there's a connection between the depression-rate and other neurological disorders and the increase of the omega-6 fatty acids; there's a possible link between fish consumption and mood disorders. Both Iceland and Japan, which both have high consumption rates of fish, have low rates of "seasonal affective disorders". As the consumption rate of fish declines (and the consumption of 'Western' food rises), the rates of seasonal affective disorders increases, even when they receive more winter sunlight. Furthermore, the "likelihood of having depressive symptoms was significantly higher among infrequent fish consumers than among frequent consumers." Some research also opposes these findings, but there's a general tendency to support the previously mentioned claims. Other research state that this is especially so with women. But in short, 5 out of 6 researches find that there's a correlation between fish consumption (omega-3 intake) and mood disorders.
During pregnancy the fetus accumulates more DHA (primary component of omega-3) than the intake of the mother, and after the birth the depletion of the omega-3 acids continues by breast-feeding. This contributes to the risk for depression around the time of birth. So feed your wife some fish during pregnancy (finally a reason to be happy someone eats dead animals);

• it's safe
  
• it may have "additional benefits for the infant’s neurodevelopment"
  

Then there's a lot of biological mumbo-jumbo, which I don't fully understand, but which still support the previous claims. Some possible mechanisms are presented, to continue to the treatment studies. Bipolar/depressed/borderline patients which took omega-3 had in general greater symptom reduction. On the other hand, there are some experiments which don't reproduce this effect, but again, in general, the results support the previous idea.

Interesting stuff.

Spatial memory and depression

In my first post I already mentioned that this blag is mostly for myself, and that I'd add notes for myself about things I like or want to remember. This is such a piece.
In the American Journal of Psychiatry I found an interesting article titled:

Performance on a Virtual Reality Spatial Memory Navigation Task in Depressed Patients

The title doesn't leave much for the imagination on what it's about, but the findings are interesting nonetheless:

Method: Performance on a novel virtual reality navigation task and a traditional measure of spatial memory was assessed in 30 depressed patients (unipolar and bipolar) and 19 normal comparison subjects.

Results: Depressed patients performed significantly worse than comparison subjects on the virtual reality task, as assessed by the number of locations found in the virtual town. Betweengroup differences were not detected on the traditional measure. The navigation task showed high test-retest reliability.

Conclusions: Depressed patients performed worse than healthy subjects on a novel spatial memory task. Virtual reality navigation may provide a consistent, sensitive measure of cognitive deficits in patients with affective disorders, representing a mechanism to study a putative endophenotype for hippocampal function.
(Am J Psychiatry 2007; 164:516–519, link )

Well, there you go. I think this was interesting, and I want to remember it.
(The only question I have that the article didn't answer is, if there existed a correlation between the familiarity with the game and the people who were depressed. I.e. whether the depressed people could be more familiar with the game)

Another author

Another person to reinforce our already strong team on this blag! Welcome Nartheling!

Common sense?

Scientific American: Fact or Fiction?: Living People Outnumber the Dead
Booming population growth among the living, according to one rumor, outpaces the dead.

I read in the above article about the question whether the living people outnumber the dead. From the article:
"The human population has swelled so much that people alive today outnumber all those who have ever lived, says a factoid whose roots stretch back to the 1970s. Some versions of this widely circulating rumor claim that 75 percent of all people ever born are currently alive."

Unless you believe the world started populating around the time Jesus supposedly died on the cross, this can't be true.
A highly simplified model could be the following:
If we start with 1 couple (2 people), which produce slightly more than 2 children who (when their time comes) produces more than 2 children ... and so on, we can ask the following:

When is the sum of all the people produced equal to 6 billion (current population)?
If we take as an exponent 1.025 (so that 1000 couples produce 1025 new couples), it takes less than 800 generations. Of course, we didn't take anything in account (plagues, food shortage, wars, infertile men/women, gay couples, abortions, women who are never in the mood, ugly/stupid people who couldn't get a date, etc), but the exponent is very low.
Even if we take as an exponent 1.002 (1000 couples produce 1002 new couples), we need less than 8200 generations to accomplish the total amount of 6 billion people who are dead. The first homo sapiens originated from about 200.000 years ago from Africa (Wiki).

Estimations for the year 2050 range between 7.3 and 10.7 billion people, giving a much larger exponent than we took.
I think we can safely say it's bullshit to say that more people are alive now than that ever lived.
(The article comes to the same conclusion; it just surprises me that people could ever believe such a statement)

Experimental art

Experimental art using two forks.

 

New author

Not even 1 day has passed, and there's already a second author: Jade.
She's probably your best bet for the regular postings, so this blag becomes less useless.

Enjoy your stay.

First posting and disclaimer

This is going to be another blag (yes, blag!)... more useless information to be added to the blagosphere. Don't check back regularly, as it probably won't be updated a lot.
It's mostly a personal blag for myself; things I want to remember, pictures I took ... in short: not a lot of interesting things for other people.

You can't say I didn't warn you.