iMiscellany: April 2009

Some of the trivia I picked up in my travels around the web. Sorry, no citations, since there were too many sources.

Imagine a PET bottle filled a quarter of the way up with oil. That's about how much oil was needed to produce the bottle.
The net cooling effect of a young, healthy tree is equivalent to ten room-size air conditioners operating 20 hours a day.
Conventionally grown cotton uses approximately 25% of the world's insecticides and more than 10% of the pesticides.
Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1500 miles. (Closer home, think of seafood and kiwi fruit that we want to enjoy in Delhi!) If you start your own garden the vegetables only have to travel to the kitchen table.

GeoEye looks at our planet

So many people mail out 'stunning pictures' of the Earth, endlessly forwarded, that my mailbox creaks with the load. So here's a link to the site of GeoEye, the new kid on the block when it comes to high-resolution images of the earth. The images are a big improvement over Google Earth, though they don't offer anything but the picture.

Enjoy your planet.

Dim Sun?

Apparently, the sun has been rather quiet, with solar activity at a record low. Read.

Shifting focus

I've just been thinking why I have been drawing the line at 'science' posts, and concluded that there is no real reason, apart from the convenience of classification. So I've decided to drop that wall, and post on whatever seems interesting and appropriate. Would welcome any feedback. I will still keep this as more of a 'clippings service', a digest, rather than a personal forum.

Showpiece for Indian democracy

One polling station, 5 EC officials, 2 policemen... one voter. Read this story about India's loneliest voter.

Simulating the brain

Many years ago, I bought my first PC emulator (for my Macintosh computer). I was astonished to learn that it consisted of a complete software simulation of the Pentium processor hardware. So every flip or flop that the processor would perform was being simulated, leading to the higher-level functions being performed. That was 1997.

Today, I read a similarly mind-boggling story about a software simulation of a section of the human brain. What the researchers have done is to build a molecule-by-molecule simulation of the neocortex, and then put it through its paces. I have no idea where this leads, but it is an astonishing achievement.

Here's the story.