Eight Glasses of Water a Day? Who says?

According to Dr. Heinz Valtin, a physiologist who has studied water regulatory systems in humans for over 40 years, the answer is No.

Evidentially this is just another urban myth that most of us have accepted as true because we have heard it so many times. Be warned, that is true about more than just water. It pays to be a skeptic.

Dr. Valtin states that unless you have a physical condition that requires you to consume large quantities of water, like kidney stones, there is no reason a healthy adult needs so much water.

The myth is thought to come from a misunderstanding dating back to a 1945 study that suggested 1cc of water be consumed for every calorie eaten. Not only is that study very outdated, but the amount of water in the food was to be taken into account, which drastically cut down the liquid water to be drunk.

Nevertheless, in hot weather it is better to be safe than sorry, so here’s to you.

Where did that Moon of ours come from?

Reading time about 60 seconds

An early theory explained the moon by saying it formed from the same gas cloud from which the Earth and other planets formed. This explanation doesn’t fly because the moon contains very little iron. The Earth has a lot, mostly at its molten core. If the moon formed out of the same stuff as the Earth, the moon ought to have more iron.

A second theory explained away the Moon’s small amount of iron by suggesting the Moon formed somewhere else, where there wasn’t much of that pesky iron, and was captured by the Earth’s gravitation as it swung by. This one didn’t work out either. When samples of the moon were brought back by Apollo astronauts and analyzed, it was found that they had a chemical composition almost identical to Earth’s making it unlikely that it came from somewhere else.

A third idea tried to explain away the Moon’s ‘iron deficiency anemia’ by suggesting the early Earth spun so fast that some of its surface was flung off and went into orbit. The hole it left was the Pacific Ocean basin. Since most of the Earth’s iron is at its center, the flung off material would not have a lot of iron in it. But when they crunched the numbers relating to the Moon’s orbit, they found the math didn’t work out.

The latest theory is that a chunk of debris, leftover from the formation of the Solar System, slammed into the Earth and knocked a large amount of the iron poor crust loose. Scientists estimate that the piece that hit us was a third to half the size of the Earth. The material blasted loose formed a ring around the Earth which clumped together to form the moon. This is the currently accepted theory.

It’s interesting that even after decades of head-scratching, scientists are still not really sure how the moon came to be.

Redo of Older Blog On UFO's

Reading time about 80 seconds

Just read an interesting piece on-line, which is no longer available to link to, about UFO's. You may remember that I wrote about the percentage of people who believe in space aliens having visited Earth is 20% higher than those who believe in evolution.This article states that the UFO scare started in 1947 when a man named Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen nine UFO's flying over Mount Rainer in Washington. As I recall, in the TV documentary made of this incident, he was flying a small plane at the time and perhaps his being a pilot added some credulity to the story. Soon after a number of similar reports were made as the sighting took hold on the public’s imagination. Bad reporting is given, by the author, as the reason they were called ‘flying saucers’. In reality, Mr. Arnold is said to have reported them as crescent shaped. He went on to say that they “flew erratic, like a saucer if you skip it across water." He evidently didn't mean they looked like saucers.

What caught my attention was that the authors of the book, The Saucer Fleet" (Apogee Books, 2008), claim that the entertainment media picked up on this story and promoted the flying saucer story hoping to cash in on books, movies, etc., from all the interest they themselves created. Eventually that one 'sighting' became a culture myth that many people came to believe as true, or so say the authors.

Me? As I said before, I would be surprised if we were alone in the universe, but am not ready to say they have visited Earth, but I am open minded about it. I have read a few books on the subject both for and against. Both points of view are persuasive.

What troubles me about all this has to do with the age of the universe, which is at least 13 billion years old. In all that time there had to be civilizations older and more advanced than ours. Why haven't they stopped by to introduce themselves?

Not Rootin for Newton

Reading time about 40 seconds

This blog's been a bit sparse lately, but I have a good excuse. I've been helping a daughter with physics who's decided to get her college degree at a point in life that it can be considered a career change.

Now I remember taking physics in high school and college and I know most of it hasn't changed all that much, but it seems like a vague memory and somehow much harder. What has struck me is that I somehow managed a career in science without ever having to calculate the force required to move a 50 kg trunk up a four meter ramp inclined 25 degrees to the horizontal. For this I also needed to remember something called trigonometry and wrestle with sines, cosigns, etc. In all these years the only kind of signs I've used are the kind that directed me to the nearest McDonald's.

I'm sure this stuff must be important,but looking back I'm not sure why it has to be so hard. In forty years I,ve never fired a 10 kg cannon ball at an angle of 45 degrees with an initial velocity of 600 meters per second discounting air resistance. Not at any angle actually and no one's ever fired one at me.

Census of Marine Life

Reading time about 60 seconds

Important in the history of life on Earth are the several extinction events that killed millions of species. The most famous of these resulted in the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. What is little recognized is that Earth is now in the midst of an extinction event of colossal magnitude and Homo sapiens is the cause. Since the Industrial Revolution we have turned up the Earth’s thermostat, fouled its waters, its air and are in the process of overcrowding her with huge numbers of hungry mouths to feed.

Among biologists greatest fears are that millions of species will go extinct before we even know they were here. Most folks have the idea that all the creatures of the Earth have been neatly tagged and identified. Not so. Based on the rate new species are discovered, vast numbers of undiscovered species exist.

A partial remedy for this is the Census of Marine Life begun in 2000. The goal is to discover and catalog as many of the sea’s inhabitants as possible as well as understand their distribution, diversity and abundance. The census ends in 2010.

Why bother? Well some estimates foretell an end to all commercial fisheries by 2050. We already find supermarket freezers filled with fish once considered ‘trash fish’. Not so long ago no one dreamt of eating them. This census will help identify where stocks of fish are and how best to manage them in order to maintain a commercial fishery. Not only that, but it's impossible to rebuild an environment (should we become so wise) if we don’t know what is here.

This is scary stuff to someone looking at this from the perspective of a time when 2-3 billion people populated this planet not 6-7 billion and growing fast, needing electricity, fuel, food, products of manufacture and medical care.

Beyond Understanding?

Reading time about 60 seconds

We’ve all heard of the Big Bang Theory of the creation of the Universe. It is the currently accepted theory as to where everything came from, an infinitesimally small point smaller than an atom, which in a fraction of a fraction of a second expanded to give birth to time and space as we understand it.

Physicists have been able to explain mathematically and with conventional physics what happened after the expansion occurred, but do not know what happened in the instant of the expansion or before it, because conventional mathematics and physics is insufficient to explain it. We do not at this time have the tools to understand what happened.

Is this because we don’t have the tools or because we don’t have the minds to understand? The human mind is the result of billions of years of evolution. All living things on Earth are. Our minds evolved to survive in environments to which it was exposed. One reason we cannot imagine infinity, although we can conceive of it, is because our minds evolved in a finite space. There are always limits to distance, quantities, etc. We evolved in a finite space not an infinite space so there would be no reason to be able to deal with infinity.

By the same token perhaps we do not have the ability to understand the physics of the big bang anymore than we can imagine infinity because we did not evolve with such physics.

To understand these unimaginable events we may have to develop an Artificial Intelligence that can interpret this strange physics in a manner our minds can understand and explain it to us in terms we can understand.

Remember When

Reading time about 35 seconds

I have finally reached the age of retirement. Frankly I never thought I’d make it.

It is interesting to look back at what my grandparents thought of as amazing. The airplane, telephones and TV for instance. They were from French Canada, Quebec to the rest of us and spoke no English when they arrived. They attended night school to learn English and did their best to fit in. Their heavy Quebecoise accent made that hard.

My grandmother was among the first to buy on the installment plan and had one of the first TV sets on her street. I was 10 before I saw it. We lived in Key West, Florida where there was no TV reception yet. I have to admit it was love at first sight. I sat mesmerized before the fuzzy black and white image of Crusader Rabbit and his faithful sidekick Rags the Tiger. Love of television or anything with a screen must be instinctive for kids.

My grandparents knew nothing of computers, color TV, cell phones, iPods or spaceflight. These all came about during my lifetime. I like them told an unimpressed grandchild about all the things we did not have as children.

I can’t even imagine what she in turn will tell her grandchildren about the technologies that did not exist when she was young.

They, like you, will probably be unimpressed.