The Mr Science Show

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Your weekly prescription of popular science 

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  Climate Change News and closing in on 100 episodes
  Sat, 29 Nov 2008 04:25:00 -0600 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  This week on the podcast, we take a look at the latest climate change news, and start reflecting on the science year that was, as we close in on 100 podcast episodes (this is episode 92).
  
  The news items we discuss this week are:
  
  1. CO₂ build-up in the atmosphere may prevent a coming ice-age. Ice-ages occur roughly every 100,000 years and are possibly due to small shifts in Earth's orbit which change the amount of solar energy hitting the surface. A build-up of CO₂ and its associated heating may warm the Earth so much that the next ice-age is skipped. Humanity has burnt about 300 gigatonnes of carbon from fossil fuels during its existence, and even if only 1000 gigatonnes are eventually burnt (from total reserves of about 4000) then it is likely that the next ice age will be skipped, whilst the next five could be skipped if all recoverable fossil fuels were burnt. For more information, see the story at ABC Science;
  2. The bouquet of wine reflects the amount of fossil-fuel derived CO₂ in the air at the time and place of the growing of the grapes. Carbon-14, an isotope of carbon, is made when Nitrogen atoms high in the atmosphere absorb neutrons from space (cosmic rays) . Over time, Carbon-14 decays to Nitrogen-14 , and so fossil fuels, made millions of years ago from decaying organic matter, contain almost no Carbon-14. Therefore, when fossil fuels are burned, the resultant CO₂ is almost Carbon-14 free. As CO₂ is used by plants to grow, the amount of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere at the time of growing is reflected, in this case, in the wine's bouquet. A low level of Carbon-14 means there was a lot of fossil fuel generated CO₂ in the atmosphere at the time of growing. More information on Discovery Science;
  3. Wind farms could steer storms. Future mega-wind farms for renewable energy generation could have a massive effect on the weather because the large wind speeds they generate could cause disrupted air-ripples that spread out like waves over massive areas. The waves could even steer storms on the other side of the globe. More information on Discovery Science;
  4. Tibetan glaciers are melting faster than ever seen before. The Himalayan glaciers are melting so fast that the usual techniques for dating glaciers can't be used. Glaciers can be dated by looking for traces of leftover radioactivity from US and Soviet atomic bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s. In the Tibetan samples, there are no signs at all of these tests, and the exposed surface of the glacier dates to 1944. More information at ABC Science;
  If you are gazing at the sky this weekend (Thanksgiving to our American friends), then look to the sky to see Jupiter, Mars and the moon all gathered together.
  
  We also start reflecting on the year that was with my much better-half Eugenia, who had to put up with me recording this here little podcast, and then having to listen to the episodes and smile! Her highlights from the year?
  
  • The no-brainer research that said in the UK you should wear thick-clothes, especially denim, to protect yourself from skin-cancer. We never saw the sun over the 2007 summer anyway...
  • And on from this show, the Science of Sumo wrestlers - we employed the sumo diet on our recent travels.
  Listen to his podcast here:
  
  
  
  
  
• That time again - Movember
  Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:26:01 -0600 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  This year, the Mr Science Show has again entered the charity moustache growing contest, Movember. Movember supports men's-health charities, and this year in Australia, all money raised is going towards the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and beyondblue - the national depression initiative. These issues are close to my heart as people close to me have suffered, and even died, because of prostate cancer and depression. Read more about the Fundraising Outcomes.
  
  Did you know:
  • Depression affects 1 in 6 men....most don't seek help. Untreated depression is a leading risk factor for suicide.
  • Last year in Australia 18,700 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer and more than 2,900 died of prostate cancer - equivalent to the number of women who will die from breast cancer annually.
  For more sciencey stuff on moustaches and Movember, here is everything you need:
  
  • The science of moustaches;
  • Movember time-lapse from 2006;
  • My photos from the 2006 and 2007 events.
  To sponsor us, check out our Mo-space or donate directly from this link
  
  Thanks y'all!
  
  
  
  
  
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  Science on Stage
  Wed, 19 Nov 2008 06:05:50 -0600 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  Dr Christopher Pettigrew, a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Biochemistry in University College Cork, is no stranger to putting science on stage.
  
  With the 2009 AAAS Dance your PhD competition up-and-running, we decided for this week's episode of the podcast to chat to Chris about his experiences in the public performance of science.
  
  Chris has been involved in the communication of many difficult subjects through artistic means, such using interpretive dance to explain the Australian Goods and Services Tax (GST) and DNA . Chris plans on building upon his experiences in Australian theatre whilst in Cork, Ireland. As Dr Pettigrew says:
  
  "Nothing says Double Helix like a rapid twirl."
  
  Listen to his podcast here:
  
  The 2009 AAAS Dance your PhD final contestants have been selected. To read more about them and watch their videos, visit The 2009 AAAS Science Dance Contest homepage.

  Do you have any scientific ideas that you would like to see put on stage? Please let us know by leaving a comment here, or by emailing us.
  

  
  
  
  
• Football Manager Lifetimes
  Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:06:00 -0600 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  I put this story together for Plus - I'll be writing their new regular Sports Column, which will focus on maths and sport. For more maths stories on sport, see previous Plus stories tagged with sport. And for more on this particular story, see it as published in The Plus Sports Page: Power Trip
  

  Being the manager of a Premier League football club may seem like one of the most glamorous jobs in the world ? with the fame comes fortune and the opportunity to travel (well, to Hull, Wigan and Portsmouth anyway). However, as far as job security goes, football managers live on the edge. Their terms can be terminated almost on a whim by their club's owner, and they live and die by their team's results.

  It would seem that there is no way to predict how long their tenures will be. However, a collection of researchers from the UK, Singapore and the US have found that there may be a strong mathematical trend underlying how long football managers stay in their jobs.

  Toke S. Aidt, Bernard Leong, William C. Saslaw and Daniel Sgroi found that the distribution of tenure lengths for managers of sporting teams in many countries obey power laws. Power laws are fascinating because they arise in a surprisingly large number of naturally occurring phenomena, such as the size of cities, stock market returns, cook book ingredients and even how many times certain words are used in long books.

  A power law has the form

  where x and y are variables and a and b are constants. The exponent b is usually negative, so y decreases as x increases. In the case of football managers, the researchers found that

  where t is the length of a football manager's career and n is the number of managers dismissed at that time of their career. The actual values of the constants a and b vary from country to country and league to league, with the exponent b lying somewhere between -2 and -3 in all cases.

  To derive this formula, the authors plotted tenure lengths of real managers against their time of dismissal and then set out to find the curve that best describes the data. In fact, to make things easier, they looked at logarithms, which turn a curve of this form into the straight line

  For tenures greater than one year, they found that in the English Premier League, football leagues across Europe, and American football and baseball competitions, there is a straight line of this form that fits the data. Moreover, the fit is statistically significant, that is, it?s not just due to chance.

  The following graph is for English Premier League managers between 1874 and 2005.

  

  The logarithm of the length of managers' career plotted against the logarithm of the number of managers dismissed at that time of their career. The data can be approximated by a straight line and the fit is statistically significant. The data come from the English Premier League between 1874 and 2005.

  But what does all this mean?

  As we mentioned earlier, power laws are compelling as they can emerge from simple mathematical rules ? the power law is often a macroscopic outcome of microscopic interactions between the players in the system (in this case football managers, the team, club owners and fans, etc). In fact, power laws are often seen as the signature of complexity. In the 1980s scientists found that there are dynamical systems based on simple rules which, through self-organisation, bring themselves into extremely sensitive states, where even the smallest change can cause wide-ranging and unpredictable chain reactions.

  An often quoted example of this phenomenon involves a pile of sand. When you sprinkle sand on a table, a pile will build up and after a while reach a maximal slope: any additional grain of sand will cause avalanches whose number and size are impossible to predict. Such a sensitive state is called a critical state and this behaviour is called self-organised criticality. It is an interesting phenomenon, because it may explain "spontaneous" emergence of complexity in nature, which is not a result of someone forcing the system.

  When a system has reached a critical state through self-organisation, it can often be described by power laws. In our sand example, the size distribution of the avalanches follows a power law. Power laws reflect complexity because they are similar on all scales. Suppose that the number n of avalanches of size s is described by the power law

  for some constants a and b. Now multiply s by a large number c, so you're now looking at large avalanches. These then follow the power law

  which, apart from the constants involved, is essentially the same as that for smaller avalanches - the same type of behaviour occurs on all scales.

  Given that the power law highlights the fact that there is something interesting going on, the researchers set out to find out what it was. What are the simple rules of football management that govern this system, and is there self-organised criticality?

  The model

  The authors constructed a model which includes a manager's reputation ? this is either enhanced or diminished, depending on the result of each match. The core of the model is a round-robin tournament with 20 teams playing each other once at home and once away ? just like in the Premier League. The probabilities of win, lose and draw were modelled as 37%, 26%, 37%, respectively ? these probabilities are those observed in the English football league between the years 1881 and 1991 and are assumed to be independent of the managers involved.

  The model starts with 20 randomly selected managers, each with a given reputation and tenure. (With a nod to realism, we will henceforth assume that all managers are male.) The initial reputation of each manager is described by a positive whole number, which is chosen at random from the numbers between the firing threshold and the poaching threshold (more on these in a moment). Each manager also starts with a random tenure length between 1 and 40 years. The managers gain reputation (+ 2 points in the model) every time their teams win, and lose reputation (-2 points) when their teams lose. There are no points for draws. Each game has equal importance and so each result is equally important for a manager's reputation.

  The length of a manager's tenure depends on how his reputation evolves. Termination of tenure can occur for four reasons:

  • The manager loses his job when his reputation falls below the firing threshold ? that is, he is sacked;
  • The manager is poached by another club when his reputation reaches the poaching threshold ? that is, he gets a better deal;
  • The manager retires if he gets too old (another parameter that can be varied);
  • The manager's team is relegated to a lower league because it has the lowest reputation at the end of the season ? the team is demoted out of the league.

  When a manager leaves the system ? that is, he is either fired or poached, relegated or retired ? his place in the league is taken by another manager with tenure length of zero and a random starting reputation.

  With these rules in place, the researchers ran many simulations, varying the random parameters in each run. Such a process is known as a Monte-Carlo simulation. They recorded the distribution of tenure lengths corresponding to one hundred years of competition. They found that for a very broad range of starting parameters, the model produced a tenure length distribution statistically indistinguishable from a power-law distribution. Similar results were obtained for different probability distributions of win, loss or draw. However, the researchers also found that power laws only emerge when a win enhances reputation by the same amount as it is decreased by a loss, and when each match has equal importance. The latter makes sense if you think that the aim of a Premier League team is to maximise its profit: you need to fill the stadiums and make as much advertising revenue as you can at each game. And as the Premier League is a first-past-the-post competition, each win has equal worth on the league table, with position on the table more than anything guaranteeing further advertising and merchandising returns.

  Coming back to self-organised criticality, the researchers admit that their model does not prove the existence of this phenomenon in the world of sport. In fact, the model is not quite as self-organising as it could be, since certain parameters need to be artificially fixed at the outset. They do believe, however, that certain other factors point in the direction of self-organised criticality. The Premier League, they postulate, follows the Red Queen principle: it is an arms race where constant development is needed simply to compete. This explains why once a league has reached a self-organised critical state, it might stay there for a prolonged period of time. It is simply too difficult for a team to shake up the system, given that they are already in a process of continual change in order to stay with the pack. The term Red Queen comes from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass in which the Red Queen says: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place".

  What the results surprisingly show is that ability and talent, although obviously playing some role, do not play a major role in a manager's success. His survival is far more determined by the sacking and poaching thresholds and simple randomness in his team's results. 2007 Chelsea manager Avram Grant is a good example of this: as he started his tenure with a low reputation, despite his team's good results, probabilities took their toll and he was sacked at the end of the season.

  In any case, it's hard to feel sorry for prematurely sacked Premier League managers when their average salaries are over £2 million.

  For more info, see the following:
  

  • The paper A power-law distribution for tenure lengths of sports managers has appeared in the journal Physica A;
  • The Plus article Understanding uncertainty: The Premier League finds more randomness in the Premiere League;
  • There is more about sand pile models in the Plus article Like sand through the hour glass;
  • And about power laws in the Plus articles The mystery of Zipf, Network news, and Beating bird flu with bills.
  
  
  
  
• Here's why we need science communicators
  Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:11:02 -0600 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  From the Border Mail, Letters 01/10/2008
  
  When I was a kid, we never had drought after drought.
  
  Then we started with daylight saving. We started with a little bit, but now we have six months of the year daylight saving. It has just become too much for the environment to cope with.
  
  It is so logical, for six months of the year we have an extra hour each day of that hot afternoon sun.
  
  I read somewhere that scientific studies had shown there is a lot less moisture in the atmosphere which means we get less rain.
  
  I believe this one hour extra sun is slowly evaporating all the moisture out of everything. Why can't the government get the CSIRO to do studies on this, of better still, get rid of daylight savings.
  
  They have to do something before it is too late.
  
  CHRIS HILL, Albury
  
  ... And that's why we need science communicators!
  This has also been reported in Failblog and somewhere in the smh.
  
  
  
  
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  Halloween Science Special
  Sun, 02 Nov 2008 04:24:15 -0600 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  As it's Halloween, here is the Halloween news that I presented on Diffusion Science Radio this week. Diffusion can be heard on Monday nights at 6.30pm on 2SER 107.3 in Sydney, at various times across Australia on stations affiliated with the Community Radio Network, and on the Diffusion podcast.
  
  1) Halloween, Candy and Science
  
  What's worse: eating all the lollies collected on Halloween night at once, or spreading this out over the coming days and months?
  
  When it comes to your teeth at least, it is far worse to ration your lollies all through the day, day after day than it is to gorge it all at once. Mark Helpin, a pediatric dentist at Temple University, says that snacking on candy keeps your teeth bathed in enamel-corroding acid, which is produced by bacteria feeding on the sugar in your mouth.
  
  When you cover your teeth with sugar, oral bacteria cause a rise in acidity levels. This is neutralised when you brush your teeth. Even if you don't brush, saliva will eventually wash away the sugar and starve the bacteria. If you continually snake on chocolate and other lollies, the level of acidity stays constantly high, and this can lead to tooth decay.
  
  Helpin also thinks that potato chips are just as bad, or worse, than lollies. Acid-producing bacteria feed on carbohydrates in potatoes, which are far more sticky than lollies and so hang around longer on your teeth. This poses an even greater risk for tooth-decay.
  
  More information on ABC
  
  2) Bigfoot revealed to be Halloween Costume
  
  There's been a recent downturn in the fortunes of those hunting for Bigfoot, which a supposed frozen corpse of the animal turning out to be a Halloween costume.
  

  SearchingforBigfoot.com owner Tom Biscardi had paid an estimate $50,000 to Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer for their frozen Bigfoot "corpse". Biscardi also hired Sasquatch detective Steve Kulls to check out the specimen.
  

  Kulls was not a happy man, and neither, it turns out was Biscardi, especially after Whitton and Dyer ran off with his money.
  

  "I extracted some [hair] from the alleged corpse and examined it and had some concerns," Kulls writes. "We burned said sample and said hair sample melted into a ball uncharacteristic of hair. Within one hour we were able to see the partially exposed head. I was able to feel that it seemed mostly firm, but unusually hollow in one small section. This was yet another ominous sign."

  "Within the next hour of thaw, a break appeared up near the feet area. ... I observed the foot which looked unnatural, reached in and confirmed it was a rubber foot."

  When Biscardi found out, he called Whitton and Dyer at their California hotel, who confirmed the hoax. However, when Biscardi went to look for them, they had disappeared with his money, and plenty of his dignity.
  

  More information on FoxNews.com
  
  3) Vampire Moth
  
  A population of vampire moths has been found in Siberia that entomologists suggest may have evolved from a purely fruit-eating species as there are only slight differences in their wing patterns from the herbivorous cousins, Calyptra thalictri.
  
  When the Russian moths were experimentally offered human hands , the insects drilled their hook-and-barb-lined tongues under the skin and sucked blood.
  
  Entomologist Jennifer Zaspel from the University of Florida said the discovery could shed light on how indeed caught a fruit-eating moth evolving blood-feeding behavior, it could provide clues as to how some moths develop a taste for blood.
  
  It may be that blood-feeding in insects evolved from feeding on tears, dung, and pus-filled wounds.
  
  "We see a progression from nectar feeding and licking or lapping at fruit juices to different kinds of piercing behaviours of fruits and then finally culminating in this skin piercing and blood-feeding," she said.
  
  In addition, only male moths exhibit blood-feeding, which means that maybe its so the males can pass on salt to females during sex. This could provide a nutritional boost to young larvae that have sodium-poor diets.
  
  More information on National Geographic
  
  4) Trick-or-treat safety tips
  
  Children are twice as likely to be hit by a car and killed on Halloween than on any other day of the year - so take care! More information at AJC
  
  Listen to his podcast here:
  
  
  
  
  
• We're now on Twitter
  Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:21:40 -0500 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  For those of you who use Twitter, we are now there and embracing it, so come along and become a follower.
  
  We've blogged quite a bit about Web 2.0 applications (most recently on data-mining and Last.fm). Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are posts up to 140 characters. When you 'follow' someone, you can see their updates, and it has become quite popular. Even politicians are getting on board, with Australian Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull opening an account (whether he has time to continually update his Twitter status, or it's one of his staffers, is another question).
  
  Twitter has become a surprisingly powerful platform, breaking the news of the Sichuan earthquake in China with SMS messages well before the conventional media arrived. This was also the case in the Virginia Tech shootings.
  
  So if you would like to follow me on Twitter, I am marcwestius (westius was taken). You can use this site's email address to find me. See you there.
  
  
  
  
• So, you think you can dance...
  Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:26:59 -0500 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  We've explored the overlap between music and science before, but what's dance got to do with science?
  
  The 2009 AAAS Science Dance Contest is just around the corner, so if you're a scientist with a deep longing to express your innermost scientific thoughts through dance, then this is for you. The contest is open to anyone who has (or is pursuing) a PhD in any scientific field.
  
  What you need to do is:
  
  1. Make a video of your own PhD dance;
  2. Post the video on YouTube;
  3. Email your name, the title of your thesis, and the video link to gonzo@aaas.org by 16 November 2008.
  On 17 November 2008, a total of four winners will be chosen from the following categories:
  
  1. Graduate Student
  2. Postdoc
  3. Professor
  4. Popular Choice
  If you are lucky enough to win one of these categories, you will need to provide a single peer-reviewed research article on which you are a co-author. You will be paired with a professional choreographer and over the following weeks you will help your choreographer understand the article (via e-mail and telephone). Then the four choreographers will collaborate to create a single four-part dance based on the winning research articles.
  
  You will then be an honoured guest at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois, where on 13 February 2009, you will have front-row seats to the world debut of "THIS IS SCIENCE" - your dance creation. Accommodation in Chicago will be provided, and grants are available for travel expenses.
  
  To read more about last year's competition, see sciencemag and gonzolabs.
  
  Stay tuned to this website as we are going to follow this contest, and I have already roped in a couple of my PhD friends to enter - or at least, they're thinking about it...
  
  
  
  
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  Japan and the Sumo Diet
  Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:49:01 -0600 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  Travelling Japan and Korea was a wonderful experience - magnificent sights, great food, interesting people and of course, of interest to this blog, science.
  
  I have finally put together the Japan / Korea podcast, which you can listen to here. It was recorded whilst we travelled from Tokyo to Fukuoka on the shinkansen (bullet train), Fukuoka to Busan in Korea on the JR Beetle (ferry), and Busan to Seoul on the KTX (high-speed train) - all fantastic methods of transport that put Aussie transport links (and for that matter UK ones) to shame.
  
  The first topic we tackled was the Sumo Diet - how do Sumo Wrestlers get so big? And why? We were lucky to catch the September Grand Sumo Tournament in Tokyo and I was astounded by how big and strong these guys are. What's their secret to rapid weight gain? Well, here's what you need to do:
  
  1. Skip breakfast. Often people who try to loose weight skip breakfast, but it's actually the worst thing you can. After 8 hours of sleep, your body craves food. By depriving your body of food, you keep your metabolic rate low;
  2. Exercise on an empty stomach. If you exercise with no food to burn off, your metabolic rate lowers even more in order to conserve the energy you have. This helps increase your muscle but not burn off too many calories. This point is rather open to debate as to whether it works;
     
  3. Sleep after eating. After a massive lunch or dinner, have a sleep. This means you wont burn off all those calories you just ate. This is a major factor;
     
  4. Eat big in the afternoon and evening. Going to bed with a full stomach makes your body release a rush of insulin, storing some of your previous intake as fat instead of in muscles and organs;
  5. Eat in a social atmosphere. An unreferenced report says that when you eat with others, you eat more than 44% more than when alone. I'd believe that.
     
  You can find more info on this diet here.
  
  At the heart of the diet is a hearty stew called chankonabe. It is a communal one-pot simmering stock-based casserole, into which you dip chicken, pork, mushrooms, carrots, potatoes, radish, lotus root and onions as if it were a massive meaty fondue (which I guess it is). You can drink the left over stock. Now this doesn't actually sound unhealthy - indeed it actually sounds pretty nutricious, but if you eat a lot of it, and then have a sleep, you can get very big. And they do eat a lot. A wrestler named Takamisugi was revered for eating 65 bowls in a single sitting.
  
  We tackled a number of other topics in the podcast, so tune in. And feel free to leave any comments you like - I would love to hear from you, especially if you have tried the Sumo Diet...
  
  Listen to his podcast here:
  
  
  
  
  
• Last.fm, data mining and mashups
  Wed, 08 Oct 2008 19:42:57 -0500 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  I've recently been putting together a Guide to Web 2.0 for The Helix Magazine and one of the most interesting aspects has been exploring the various mashups and applications of Last.fm.
  
  Last.fm is a brilliant online music service and currently my favourite "web 2.0" application. By downloading a plugin for itunes (or whatever music player you have) that "scrobbles" each song you play (that is, tells Last.fm what you are listening to), a picture of your music taste builds up, and people with similar listening tastes are found. Artists are recommended to you according to your tastes, charts of your songs built up and "radio stations" perfectly tailored to you can be streamed online. But it is better than radio as there are no ads and you like every song.
  
  By the way, I am westius on Last.fm.
  
  Millions of songs are scrobbled every day by Last.fm users. This data helps Last.fm develop a massive database of user music preferences, and because of it's API, it is possible to access Last.fm information and develop interesting tools.
  
  As users can tag their music with genres that they think aptly describe their songs and artists, it is possible to determine your own tag cloud of musical preferences. Using an excellent script at anthony.liekens.net, I came up with my own tag cloud, as you can see here.
  
  It is possible from such tag clouds to examine how listeners fall into different categories through a process known as Data Mining. Data mining is essentially the process of sorting through enormous amounts of data and picking out the relevant stuff. Using principal components analysis - a mathematical technique which reduces multidimensional data sets to lower dimensions for analysis - and k-means clustering - an algorithm to cluster n objects into k groups - Liekens came up with 5 broad groups of Last.fm listeners:
  
  1. Electronic/pop
  2. Rock
  3. Indie
  4. Metal
  5. Hip-hop
     
  Clearly this list does not reflect everyone on Last.fm (where are the classical music listeners?), but it does reflect the majority. I was surprised that Indie is a group in itself and am intrigued by the bundling of electronic and pop together - there are some tweaks to the maths you can make that could come up with different groups, and better results might be possible with a bigger data set . Hip-Hop listeners were the most clearly defined group. You can read more about the maths and how these groups are separated in the original article.
  
  Another interesting thing you can do is compare your music tastes to your friends. This pic is a difference cloud comparing my music tastes with that of my good friend intranation. We have a roughly 40% similarity in music genre tastes, with the green tags those that I have more of in my collection, and the red those genres that intranation listens to more than me. No real surprises there.
  
  Mashups are all the rage at the moment. The term refers to web applications that combine data from more than one source into a single integrated tool. For instance, domain, an Australian real-estate site, adds data from Google Maps to provide location information. My current favourite Last.fm mashup is idiomap. idiomap is a digital music magazine that personalises its content according to your interests in music, which it learns from your Last.fm profile. It gives you stories and reviews of the artists and genres you like, helps you discover new music and mashes in video and audio from youtube and other sources. idiomag aggregates music articles from over 100 different sources. You can also tweak the articles you like so if you receive something you don't like, you won't get it again. I subscribe to the RSS feed of my personalised idiomap magazine and so far its been great and has included reviews of music DVDs of artists I like and schedules of when bands will be playing and appearing on TV. Good stuff.
  
  I will probably put out a few more blogs like this as I explore this world of mashups. And for podcast listeners, yes hopefully I will get one of them out soon too!
  
  
  
  
• Why Hollywood stars should stick to acting
  Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:38:19 -0600 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  It's funny being on holiday, removing yourself from everything and deliberately avoiding the news, and then returning home to find things largely the same as they were. Sorry for the lack of posts and podcasts, I have been travelling back to Australia through Japan and Korea - stay tuned for a podcast from the trip.
  
  One of the things that has not changed is our own Russell Crowe. He may have played a maths genius in A Beautiful Mind, but his maths skills don't say much for his Aussie education.
  
  We all have our theories on what is causing the current financial meltdown - my theory is it's the Australian cricket team (see this story for why).
  
  But Crowe has an interesting solution - give America's entire population of 300 million $US1 million each.

  His thinking was that a $300 million outlay would only be a fraction of the $US700 billion bailout package that President Bush proposed (read that carefully and you will spot the mistake).

  Crowe told Jay Leno, "So, here's the thing: They're looking for $700 billion, right? Which is a good chunk of change... But I was thinking if they wanna stimulate the economy, get people spending, let people look after their ... mortgage. I think you take the first 300 million Americans, if that's the population at this point in time, give everyone a million bucks.''

  The problem is that the Crowe Plan actually only gives $1 to each American, not $1 million, and if the Crowe Plan to instantly make each American a millionaire went ahead, it would cost $300 trillion - more than the US annual gross domestic product. The Iraq War only cost $3 trillion.
  
  Crowe clearly didn't do his method acting for A Beautiful Mind.
  
  Edit:
  Funnily enough, he could be correct if he was using the Long scale where one billion is actually one million million (not one thousand million). Most of the English speaking world uses the short scale, but much of the world uses the long scale - so perhaps we can forgive him. Even NASA has mucked up unit conversions, loosing a Mars orbiter in 1999.
  
  
  
  
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  Reflections on the London Science Blogging Conference
  Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:14:32 -0500 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  With the London Science Blogging Conference finished up, it was time to reflect on the good, the bad and the ugly of science blogging.
  
  I chatted to Lisa Bailey, who blogs about science at Bridge 8, about what we learnt at the conference, how blogging can be used effectively to communicate science, the challenges laid down at the conference - including the challenge to get senior scientists to blog - and where science blogging might be going from here.
  
  For more from the conference, check out the Mr Science podcast from our evening in London science pubs.
  
  This is my last post and podcast for a couple of weeks as I travel home to Sydney after an absolutely wonderful 18 months in London. I will miss all the new friends I have made, and all the old friends I have met again. London, it's been emotional. See y'all in Sydney and if any one wants to sponsor a visa for me to come back, just get in contact!
  
  Listen in to my conversation with Lisa here:
  
  
  
  
  
• Bacon vs. Erdos - it's a numbers game
  Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:51:22 -0500 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  
  Remember movie star Kevin Bacon, who fought so bravely for our right to dance in Footloose?
  
  His dance activism aside, Bacon is probably best known for spawning the trivia game Six degrees of Kevin Bacon. The game is based upon the assumption that all actors can be linked to Bacon through their film roles in six steps. For example, Brad Pitt starred with Bacon in Sleepers, so he is connected by one film and has what is known as a "Bacon number" of one. In Top Gun, Val Kilmer starred with Tom Cruise, who starred with Bacon in A Few Good Men, so he has a Bacon number of two.
  
  This theory that every actor can be connected to Bacon within six steps concerns the mathematical field of small world phenomena. Stanley Milgram first suggested that everyone on Earth is connected by a surprisingly small number of people when working at Harvard University in 1967. He sent packages to 160 random people in Omaha, US and asked them to forward the package to a friend or acquaintance who they thought would bring the package closer to a set final individual, a Boston stockbroker. The letter stated, ?If you do not know the target person on a personal basis, do not try to contact him directly. Instead, mail this folder to a personal acquaintance who is more likely than you to know the target person.?
  
  Milgram?s theory was that everyone is connected by on average six people ? that is, even the Prime Minister is connected to rickshaw drivers in Thailand by six people. Whilst this may seem astounding, think about how many people you come across during your lifetime. Whilst I have never met the Prime Minister, I have met my local member of parliament which means I am only two steps from Rudd. Imagine that my local member has a son who travelled the world and visited Thailand ? now the rickshaw driver is connected to the PM in only three steps. You only need to meet one well-connected person to be connected to almost everyone!
  
  The concept of the Bacon number sprung from a similar idea surrounding the mathematician Paul Erdos. Erdos was an immensely prolific Hungarian mathematician who worked on a variety of problems from number theory to probability. He collaborated with so many other scientists that mathematicians invented the "Erdos number". You have an Erdos number of one if you directly collaborated with Erdos on a paper, an Erdos number of two if you worked on a paper with someone who collaborated with Erdos, etc.
  
  The amusing consequence of all this is the "Erdos?Bacon number" which is the sum of your Erdos number and Bacon number. You would think that these two numbers would be completely separate ? not many Hollywood stars have authored mathematical papers. However, thanks to a few movie and TV cameos, astronomer Carl Sagan has an Erd?s?Bacon number of nine, whilst theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking?s is seven. And most interestingly, thanks to her authorship of psychology papers during her Harvard degree, actress Natalie Portman also has an Erdos?Bacon number of seven!
  
  Thanks to the fact that I was in our high-school production of Grease with my brother James, who had a role as an extra in the Australian gritty crime show Wildside, which starred Rachael Blake, who was in Derailed with Jennifer Aniston, who was in Picture Perfect with Bacon, I have a Bacon number of 4.
  
  There are probably a few ways I could track back my Erdos number, but the easiest way is through Plus which I co-edit with Marianne Freiberger, who has an Erdos number of 4, making mine 5. There is probably another route back to Erdos through my chemistry work, but that is hard to track.
  
  Therefore, my Erdos-Bacon number is 9. See if yours is lower. Here are some links to help:
  
  • Calculate your Bacon number at the Oracle of Bacon;
  • Calculate your Erdos number the American Mathematical Society.
    
  
  
  
  
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  Crawl of London Science Pubs
  Tue, 02 Sep 2008 07:36:33 -0500 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  Last night I attended the most interestingly themed pub-crawl I have ever been on. It was a science crawl of London pubs.
  
  The pub crawl was held in association with the inaugural science blogging conference, Science Blogging 2008: London, hosted by Nature Network, in collaboration with the Royal Institution. The aim of the conference is to bring together science bloggers from around the world to discuss the pressing issues in science, science communication, publishing and education. What role does blogging play? I am going tomorrow, so come and say hi!
  
  We went to four different pubs, starting with the Jeremy Bentham, then moving to the Museum Tavern, the Ben Crouch Tavern and the John Snow.
  

  Our tour guide for the evening was Londonphile and editor of the Nature Network, Matt Brown. On this week's podcast, I chatted to Matt about the four pubs we attended. A few other science bloggers also pop up in the podcast, and they are:

  • The Questionable Authority,
  • Frank Norman,
  • Deep thoughts and sillyness,
  • Grrl Scientist.
    
  Listen here:
  
  
  
  
  
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  Your favourite fictional scientists - the podcast
  Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:12:09 -0500 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  
  
  
  
  Emmett Brown vs Dr Who
  Professor Honeydew vs Beaker
  Q vs Dr. Evil
  
  And Mr Science vs The Ordinary Guy?
  
  This week the podcast has joined forces with the Brains Matter podcast to discuss the topic of our favourite fictional scientists. We looked at the poll and at your suggestions, then chatted at length over Skype about what turned out to be quite an interesting topic. There is certainly scope for more of these joint podcasts - especially if I get my recording gear together, unfortunately my computer overloaded a bit so some of my bits are a bit clipped.
  
  I will leave the poll open (see right) for a while so please continue to vote (if you can't see it, follow this link). Also see our original story on fictional scientists, and if we have left someone off that you like, please leave a comment.
  
  This podcast also exists in a slightly different form on the Brains Matter website, and you can never have too many Australian science podcasts (although The Ordinary Guy is from Melbourne, but we wont hold that against him...), so check it out.
  
  

  Listen here:
  

  
  
  
  
• Modelling Olympic Gold
  Mon, 11 Aug 2008 06:51:56 -0500 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  After every Olympics, there is speculation about which country performed best. Should we really be surprised when China, with its huge population, and the US, with its combination of high GDP and population, top the medal table? Can we take a look at the medal tables and see which countries did indeed perform better than expected?
  
  This is a shorter version of an article I wrote up over at Plus, so to read more, especially about some of the maths involved, see the article Harder, better, faster, stronger.
  
  In terms of total medals won, the same five countries topped both the 2000 Sydney Olympics table and the 2004 Athens Olympics table:
  
  

  Position	Country	2000 Medal Count		Country	2004 Medal Count
  1	United States	92		United States	103
  2	Russia	88		Russia	92
  3	China	59		China	63
  4	Australia	58		Australia	49
  5	Germany	56		Germany	49

  
  By-and-large the same countries rise to the top each Olympics, but a quick look at the medal tables seems to suggest two obvious variables that may play a part in a country's Olympic success ? population and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). A high population gives a country more athletes to draw from, while GDP could be assumed to represent a country's prosperity, with a prosperous country more likely to spend money on frivolous activities such as sport. Adjusting for population, we see that the top 5 countries have changed, except for Australia, who has over-performed for its population:
  
  

  Position	Country	2000 Medal Count	Population ('000s) per medal		Country	2004 Medal Count	Population ('000s) per medal
  1	Bahamas	2	142		Bahamas	2	150
  2	Barbados	1	259		Australia	49	406
  3	Iceland	1	273		Cuba	27	419
  4	Australia	58	324		Estonia	3	447
  5	Jamaica	7	379		Slovenia	4	503

  
  India, with its huge population, under-performed in 2004, with one medal per one billion people, however we may expect with its rising GDP that it could come near the top of future lists. Looking at GDP, we find a new top 5, with Australia dropping out, but Cuba, Jamaica and the Bahamas again performing well:
  
  

  Position	Country	2000 Medal Count	GDP ($ '000,000s) per medal		Country	2004 Medal Count	GDP ($ '000,000s) per medal
  1	Cuba	29	597		Cuba	27	1170
  2	Jamaica	7	1257		Jamaica	5	2042
  3	Georgia	6	1867		Bahamas	2	2550
  4	Macedonia	1	2100		Georgia	4	3045
  5	Bulgaria	13	2585		Eritrea	1	3300

  
  Looking at simple plots of medal tally against population and GDP for the 2004 games, it can quickly be seen that linear models of these variables will be unsatisfactory:
  
  The extreme values of GDP and population suggest that logarithms should be used. This makes practical sense ? a country with a high population does not get to enter more athletes in the Olympics than lowly populated countries, and whilst a high population gives a strong base from which to draw quality athletes, as population increases, this effect will diminish. With regards to GDP, countries occasionally produce athletes with so much natural ability that no amount of money spent on training the opposition could defeat them. Findings in the report Do elite sports systems mean more Olympic medals? by Simon Geoffrey, Martina Kerim, Peren Arinb, Nitha Palakshappac and Sylvie Chettyd from the Department of Commerce at Massey University back this up, with the authors suggesting that "the extraordinary talent required in winning a gold medal cannot be surpassed by the employment of an elite sports system."
  
  Looking at the countries that received more than 15 medals in 2004, plots of the logarithm of medal count against the logarithms of population and GDP show a linear relationship. Using linear regression ? a form of analysis that fits a straight line to the data by minimising the distances between the data points and the fitted curve ? we can find a straight line that fits well. We found that the R² values of this fit (R² is a statistical measure of correlation between 0 and 1) are above 0.5, suggesting that, while not quite high enough to prove a correlation, we may be on to something:
  
  Using a linear combination of the logarithms of GDP and population, we can come up with a fitted line:
  
  We can see that Cuba, Australia and Russia all fall above the line of best fit and so compared to the other countries who received more than 15 medals, achieved well. This could be explained by Cuba's famous tradition of boxers and the spending of Australia and Russia on sport.
  
  The danger with any such fitted model is that you can fit anything to anything after the event ? the challenge is to come up with a worthwhile representative model that can not only let teams know how they are doing now, but can predict how they may do in the future.
  
  In the paper Who wins the Olympic games: Economic development and medal totals, Andrew B. Bernard and Meghan R. Busse from The National Bureau of Economic Research developed a model that includes population, GDP, whether the country was the Olympic host and whether the country was formerly part of the Soviet Union or eastern block. They found that countries win 1.8% more medals when host than otherwise, and similarly, found that former Soviet Union or eastern block countries, because of their forced mobilisation of resources towards sport, and countries with planned economies, won more than 3% more medals than equivalent western countries. Their model is formulated as:
  
  where M is a country's medal count, N is the population, Y is the GDP, C, alpha and beta are constants, and Host, Soviet and Planned are constants equal to zero or some value depending on whether the country was the host, part of the Soviet block, or had a planned economy.
  
  In their more developed models, the authors included terms to represent how countries performed at previous Olympic games ? perhaps to represent the experience gained by athletes competing at multiple games. Their overall conclusion is that whilst GDP is the best single variable for predicting medal tallies, other factors such as being the host country need to be included. Indeed, their model predicted that Australia would win 17 more medals than otherwise when it hosted the Sydney Olympics ? the model was only one short of the actual 18 extra medals Australia did win.
  
  With this in mind, it is hard to look past China, as host country and with vast amounts of money pouring into Olympic sports for just this occasion, topping the medal tally.
  
  
• Data from the World Bank and the International Olympic Committee was used in the analysis. Due to doping scandals, the medal tables may change but are accurate at the time of writing.




• Making the top 100 cutting edge science blogs
  Mon, 11 Aug 2008 06:16:31 -0500 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  Sometimes people are very nice.
  
  We recently found out that our humble little blog has made a list of the Top 100 Cutting-Edge Science Blogs in their Everyday Application category. I'm not sure we're cutting edge but it does look to be a pretty good list to me!
  
  Thanks guys!
  
  
  
  
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  Tanneries and water - meandering through Morocco
  Wed, 30 Jul 2008 07:58:35 -0500 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  Morocco is a hot, dry place. We were lucky enough to visit the town of Marrakech last week, and apart from being stunning to look at, it was 40 degrees and chaotic! This latest post is not meant to be a travel blog - there are plenty of them out there - but instead we are going to take a look at some of the science from this most recent trip abroad.
  
  Tanneries
  
  To work in a tannery in Marrakech is to work under some of the harshest working conditions there are. Not only are you exposed to the blazing sun, but you are are soaked in blood, animal bodily fluids and parts, pigeon poo, and get paid appallingly.
  
  But there is some science to the ancient Moroccan tannery tradition.
  
  Legend has it that the tanners are descended from demons who lived under a black king. As they didn't obey his rules, they were condemned to work in the tanneries. They use hundreds of concrete vats to process animal skins which are bought locally in the souks. The skins (mainly sheep and goat although cow and camel are sometimes used - lions are no longer used as they were hunted to extinction in the region around 1900) are treated far differently to the way leather is treated in other parts of the world as the process clings to its ancient traditions. Hair and flesh are removed by soaking the skins in quicklime (Calcium Oxide formed when limestone - calcium carbonate - decomposes) and water. After this, the skins are placed in a vat of water and blood, then separated and rung out, before being coloured using a few natural products:
  
  • Pomegranate for yellow;
  • Olive oil for shininess;
  • Bark for various colours, presumably brown;
    
  • Saffron for golden yellow;
    
  • Henna for red/orange;
    
  • Poppy for many other colours including white, pink, yellow, orange, red and blue.
  The skins are stretched out and left to dry for over 20 days in little piles that look rancid. Pigeon poo is used to soften the leather, and if anyone knows why, I would love to know. Presumably the poo is slightly acidic. Pigeon poo has actually been reported to be quite dangerous, with people almost dying after ingesting it. The poo adds to the smell of the place, with there being large pigeon coups near the top in which you could wade knee deep in the brown-smelly stuff.
  
  Our guide, apart from ripping us off ridiculously, did give us some mint to hold under our noses to mask the smell.
  
  If you want to be a tanner, you need to be born into it, and only men are allowed. Many suffer from arthritis and are forced into an early retirement. And it has been reported that in Bangladesh, half a million people are at risk of serious health issues due to their tanneries emitting toxic chemicals such as sulphuric acid. Not a place I would like to work.
  
  Water
  
  Morocco has a massive water problem. It rains about a third of that in Canberra, Australia, which is considered in severe drought. The average rainfall in a summer month is 3 mm, and there are increasing demands on the scare water-supply by a massive push to increase tourism and reduced rain-fall, presumably due to global warming. The period in which crops woudl grow in the 1960s was about 180 days per year. Now it is 110, and most of the country still live off the land. Add to this food shortages and there will be a problem in the years to come.
  
  It has not always been this way. When Marrakesh was originally settled by the Almoravids, who had lived in the desert all their history, water management was done well. The Almoravids built massive underground piping systems called khettaras which brought water from melted snow from the Atlas Mountains, a few hundred kilometers from Marrakech. It was quite an engineering project, but unfortunately western irrigation techniques, developed in places where there is lots of water, are now being used and water is running out. There are still magnificent oases in Marrakech, such as the Palmeraie and the Majorelle Gardens, but these are irrigated using modern methods.
  
  I took my recording gear to Marrakech, so listen up to the podcast here. You will also here some commentary from the local lads on Australia, east and west coast America, and north and south England, and some of the sounds of Marrakech.
  
  

  Listen here:
  

  
  
  More of my Marrakech photos can be found on my flickr site.
  
  
  
  
• Cocoa Condoms
  Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:23:49 -0500 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  Not too long ago we sort to find out whether or not you can recycle condoms, and didn't reach a conclusion. However, there has been one recent development in this area, with the condom manufacturer Condomi releasing condoms that are slightly higher up the ethical stakes.
  
  Condoms are made from latex, which comes from the tropical rubber tree Hevea brasiliensis. Liquid latex, a dispersion of rubber particles (30%) in water (70%), lies between the bark and wood and is collected by slashing through the bark and allowing the latex to flow out. Ammonia is added to counter the acid production of waste products from the bacteria that naturally feed on the latex and cause it to curdle.
  

  The liquid latex is centrifuged to concentrate the rubber particles so that it is 60% solid rubber. Other chemicals including an antioxidant, a sulfur-based vulcanizing agent, and a vulcanizing accelerator, are added to increase both the rate and extent of cross-linking in the latex compound during vulcanization - a process in which polymer molecules are cross-linked by sulfur atoms or carbon-carbon bonds under high heat. This makes the latex harder and more durable.
  

  This is where there is some ethical debate. The manufacture of condoms usually involves casein, a phosphoprotein that occurs in milk and cheese and so is from cows and not vegan friendly. Casein is added at this stage to toughen up the latex. Condomi have replaced casein with cocoa powder. It is thought that these condoms might be a tiny bit weaker.

  I'm not sure which option is the best for the planet as the latex produced is still largely not biodegradable, but it's good to see that the best brains on the planet have made life a bit easier for a couple of vegans. I always figured there was some connection between sex and chocolate...
  

  
  
  
  
• Who is your favourite fictional scientist?
  Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:58:00 -0500 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Who is your favourite fictional scientist? I've come up with my top 14 covering my favourites from my formative years, including Doc Emmette Brown and his flux capacitor, the parapsychology-studying ghostbusters and the crazy muppet scientists Beaker and Honeydew.
  
  Have a vote in the poll and once we get enough responses, we'll close it off and write detailed profiles of those scientists who top the list.
  
  If you can't see the poll (perhaps you are viewing in a feed reader that doesn't like flash), then follow this link: View Poll. Or check out the poll in the right sidebar of our homepage.
  
  To get you in the mood, have a look at Forbes Magazine's Top 15 richest fictional characters, topped by Scrooge McDuck. This list features two characters who are arguably scientists - Tony Stark (from Iron Man) and Monty Burns (from The Simpsons). But I prefer to classify them as businessmen who work in scientific industry.
  
  If we have missed anyone off this list, then please leave a comment.
  
  
  
  
• Run away and join the circus - the science circus that is
  Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:48:35 -0500 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  
  
  Interested in science communication? Love travelling? Then the Science Circus might be for you.
  
  If you are a recent science or technology graduate and enjoy science communication, then you can earn a prestigious Graduate Diploma from ANU and travel Australia communicating science in cities, towns, outback stations, indigenous communities, schools, nursing homes, just about everywhere around Australia. Your HECS is paid for, and you get a living allowance.
  
  I did the course in 2001 and it was fantastic, although judging from the picture above, and with all due respect to my year, it looks like the students have got better looking...
  
  Not only have I now seen places in Australia that barely anyone gets to see, but I had a ball and made contacts in science communication fields. Plus, you are on tour much of the year and believe it or not, when you aren't, Canberra is a pretty good place to live.
  
  Applications are due Friday 29 August 2008 - see the circus website, or this flyer, for more information.
  
  For my reflections on my 2001 year, see my Science Circus flickr photo set and this rather silly Mr Science story - if you're game, listen to the podcast of that episode to hear me sing...
  
  
  
  
• Tackling Climate Change with words?
  Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:25:57 -0500 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  I will remember the recent G8 conference on tackling climate change because of two statements, one written and one spoken:
  
  • We seek to ... consider and adopt ... the goal of achieving at least 50% reduction of global emissions by 2050, recognising that this global challenge can only be met by a global response, in particular, by the contributions from all major economies, consistent with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. (Full text here).
  What an amazing statement. International committees such as these, especially the self-proclaimed 8 most powerful countries in the world, are notoriously wishy-washy in the words they choose to express their results. Rarely are hard and fast objectives written down, the Kyoto Protocol being one that did (although, of course, not meeting its objectives doesn't really have any punishment), and despite the fantastic number of 50% being quoted here, it really is a nothing statement. They don't commit to a 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050. They don't even commit to considering it. They say they will seek to consider it. So really, they don't even have to think about it, they can say they had a go about thinking about it, but it just didn't work out. The second part of the statement says that the responses to this seeking to consider depend on a country's capabilities - here is another way to opt out - "we just didn't have the capability to do it!" At least the usual statements for opting out of these things - "its bad for jobs" and "well China and India aren't doing it" - have an element of truth to them, even if they're narrow and naive viewpoints. This new statement allows for laziness, which is surely worse.
  
  The next statement I will remember from the conference was by George Bush as he left:
  
  • "Good bye from the world's biggest polluter." (More here)
    
  Bush is famous for his charisma, but as a joke, this wasn't particularly funny given his record on climate change. Oh well, Bush is on his way out now, and we will all miss his humour.
  
  Hopefully one day the world's leaders will strongly commit to the task of tackling climate change. If so, then I have no doubt that we can solve it. There are many scientists in this world just waiting for the chance to take on these problems.
  
  
  
  
• Science Podcasters
  Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:14:50 -0500 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  I am happy to announce that The Mr Science Show has joined up with sciencepodcasters.org, a fledgling organisation for supporting and promoting science podcasts. It was started by Ginger Campbell, MD host of the Brain Science Podcast. The purpose of this website is to create a site where people can find high quality science podcasts about a wide variety of fields. It offers science podcasters a place to post announcements, show notes and links back to their websites and content. This is not a directory or hosting site. Our main motivation is a spirit of mutual support. We all believe in the importance of using podcasting as a tool to communicate science to a broader audience. We have chosen the blog format in recognition of the fact that sites with content that is constantly updated is also more attractive to search engines. The more content we post on this site, the more we will help all the shows on the site to get the recognition they deserve.
  
  So get over and check out sciencepodcasters.org
  
  
  
  
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  The 118118 Challenge
  Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:19:59 -0500 Author: mrscienceshow@gmail.com (Marc West)
  118118 is a directory enquiries phone number in the UK that has recently expanded to "answer any question you put to us, no matter how big or small."
  
  So we thought we might test them out with some of the unsolved questions from our show, and then some maths.
  
  

  Listen here, with the voice of 118118 played by the AT&T Text-to-Speech synthesiser.
  
  
  
  Marc: Can you recycle condoms?
  118118: In general, condoms are made of latex and are not recyclable. It is probably better to dispose of your used condoms in the rubbish. Thank you!
  Verdict: Pretty much what we came up with too. To read more about recycling condoms, see the Mr Science article Recycling Condoms.
  
  Marc: How many colours to do you need to colour a political map of the world such that no two bordering countries are the same colour?
  118118: Four colour theorem: any plan separated into regions, the regions may be coloured using 4 colours in such a way that no 2 adjacent regions receive the same.
  Verdict: Pretty good. The four colour theorem is correct, although it is just a theorem and so no one has conclusively proven that you only need 4 colours to colour the map. See the Plus article The origins of proof IV: The philosophy of proof.
  
  Marc: Is there a formula for solving quintic equations, like there is for quadratic equations?
  118118: There is no formula for general quintic equations over the rationals in terms of radicals. Some can be solved by factorising into radicals. Thank you!
  Verdict: Correct. For more on the quintic, see the Plus article The equation that couldn't be solved.
  
  Marc: Is the Mandelbrot set locally connected?
  118118: The Mandelbrot set is a set of points in the complex plane. It is a compact set, contained in the closed disk of radius 2 around the origin. Thanks!
  Verdict: Well, that's correct but not an answer. That the Mandelbrot set is locally connected is an outstanding conjecture. To read more about the Mandelbrot set, see the Plus article Unveiling the Mandelbrot set.
  
  Then I got my Plus co-editor Marianne involved, and she was less forgiving...
  
  Marianne: Can any even number bigger than two be written as the sum of two primes?
  118118: Every even number bigger than 2 can be written as a sum of two
  primes. Thank you.
  Marianne: But that's wrong!
  118118: 2 is the only even prime.
  Marianne: But that's got nothing to do with the question.
  118118: Every even number bigger than 2 can be written as a sum of two primes.
  Marianne: Still wrong.
  118118: No charge. Please direct any questions to our customer service
  department.
  Verdict: It was a bit harsh asking 118118 an unproven conjecture. The Goldbach conjecture postulates that all even number greater than 4 can be written as the sum of two odd primes. To read more about the Goldbach conjecture, see the Plus article Mathematical mysteries: the Goldbach conjecture.
  
  Finally, a couple of big questions.
  
  Marc: Can science disprove God?
  118118