13 thoughts on “Tell Us Your Story”

1. Regarding the “sea salt” example, Jeff’s comment was not entirely correct. If you take sea water and evaporate it to dryness, you will indeed concentrate all of the non-volatile constituents. But this is not the way salt is made from seawater commercially, and not the way you would need to do it at home. Instead of going all the way from sea water to completely dry crystals, you evaporate only until salt begins to precipitate. NaCl will be the first crystals to form, then other inorganic salts, and trace constituents (like mercury compounds) would be the last to drop out. By stopping when there is still some liquid, and discarding the liquid, you can recover pure NaCl, NaCl plus other salts, etc. Purity can be improved by “washing” the crystals with a bit of pure water, then discarding the resulting liquid. You will lose some of the salt this way, but you will further reduce the content of things like mercuty compounds.

2. Has anyone else noticed that nobody in Paris – or anywhere else that I know of – is actually discussing halting global warming?
   Global warming was already measurable by 1980. When entities (people, governments, Science Friday) talk about rolling CO2 emissions back to 2000, or 1990, or pick your year, it is a game. It makes us feel better. It will not have any significant effect.
   Take a look at this timeline: https://www.aip.org/history/climate/timeline.htm
   The meaningful number is not greenhouse gas emissions. The meaningful number is the ratio of emissions to consumption. As long as we continue to emit more greenhouse gasses than the global ecosystem can absorb or consume, the climate will continue to warm.
   It’s time to get serious or shut up and live with the consequences.

3. Appropriate name for Planet 9 = Redemption

   1. I suggested that, until it is actually located, it be referred to as Planet Nein.

4. Thank you for recommending “On the Move” yesterday.
   Downloaded it last night and love reading it.

5. At the top of the 29 Jan SciFri, Maggie Koerth-Baker said that we don’t really know why zebras have stripes. As she said, of course simple camouflage doesn’t make sense- black and white contrasting stripes in a green or brown savanna would stand out. I’d heard years ago that: Cat’s eyes have a high number of edge-detecting neurons to detect motion. At close range, a thundering heard of zebras become a confusing mass of vertical edges moving horizontally. It overloads the big cat’s visual system and they can’t judge position and velocity. Has that hypothesis been disproved?

6. I really enjoyed listening to the Ninth Planet episode! A few questions: might New Horizons be able to detect it? And if so, how long til it got near the new planet or has it passed it? Also, if Pluto is no longer an official planet because of a) it’s too small to clear objects from its path and b) cuz it’s too far out, wouldn’t the distance of the new planet disqualify it from being an official planet and qualify it as a plutoid like Pluto, Eris and Makemake, or is there an exception cuz it’s supposedly almost as big as Neptune and can clear objects from its path?

7. Dear folks at Sci Fri,
   I would like to comment on the use of the term “zero-g” to describe the phenomenon of weightlessness. I posted the following on the story about OK Go’s video because I believe the distinction (between simulating weightlessness and actual zero-g) is interesting and helpful. Even NASA uses the shorthand “zero-g” in stories of orbiting satellites, even though the force of gravity at orbit is a very large fraction of that at Earth’s surface.

   My post on the Facebook link to the OK Go video:
   Jeroboam Bramblejam
   What fun!…
   But
   it isn’t “zero-g”; they are still experiencing ~1 g of gravitational
   acceleration – the same as if they had jumped off a cliff.
   The illusion
   is that they are falling at the same speed as the aircraft they are in
   is descending, and at the same rate of acceleration they would be if
   they were falling in a vacuum (because the air in the cabin is moving
   with them and so offers no wind resistance).

   Fond regards, and “thanks for all the fish”
   aka David Birch, Fairfax Virginia

8. I wanted to comment on the El Nino segment of last Friday. Having lived in Southern California for over 30 years and owning sports fishing boats, El Nino was a fact of life for all those years. Where would the tuna be? How far up the coast would they come? And of course being a resident (from Ohio originally) I would look forward to RAIN! My comments: 1. El Nino and La Nina are natural phenomenon. As such, they are part and parcel of a balanced Earth. Connecting climate change with El Nino is not an accurate way to present a natural phenomenon. 2. What I heard in the show was through the lens of ‘what’s wrong’ or ‘what can go wrong’; yet no one seems to be looking for what is the enlivening, positive, purpose of such events. Everything in Nature has a purpose. i.e. things go dormant in winter, bloom again in spring, etc. There are no mistakes or errors. So why don’t scientists investigate the POSITIVE reasons for such NATURAL EVENTS. 3. What I heard was that science (the health community) is looking at everything as horrific, bad, or disasterous. What if science investigated through the lens of ‘how is this beneficial’? It always is. One final comment. On Earth there is a system of growth and expansion followed by decline, decay and death. It is Life. If this were not so, there would be no topsoil, the earth would be so crowded with people and dinosaurs, etc. Why not accept that this is the NATURAL CYCLE of Life on earth and nothing is wrong or out of place. Even man has to die, eventually. We are a species like all the others; we either adapt and become more in alignment with the Natural Cycles of Life or we too will go extinct as a species. Disease is a part of keeping things in balance. If left to its own devices, the human body will adapt to any virus, build antigens for it. There is an Elegant System; and it always works perfectly.

9. I would like to comment on the Diversity in Tech section from yesterday.

   I am a full stack developer. I have worked creating database driven web applications for over 15 years. I can’t find a job. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have been unemployed for over a year. I get interviews. But at some point while I was actually working on legacy applications, the newer companies out there were using whatever the program du jour was. Now that it is built, they need people who program in that language. If you start college this year getting a CIS degree, they will teach you either Java, Python or C#. By the time you get out of college, all three of those languages would have likely been replaced. So that addresses part of why it is hard for me to find a job.

   If I am lucky to find a job that needs my skills, I get an interview. If it is a phone interview first, then I likely will not get an in person interview. I interview well, I am upbeat, friendly, know how to answer all the example questions, but it is hard to hide my feminine voice.

   OK, say they do ask me in for a face to face interview. That’s when they find out that the very young sounding voice, I sound like my daughter, belongs to an older woman. No one wants to work with their Mom. It can be a little awkward to be interviewed by men who are younger than my children. Sometimes they use acronyms that I don’t know. I’ve done what they are asking, it’s just not what we called it. Then they start with the white boarding. They ask me questions and want me to code the answer on the white board. Mind you these are the types of things I learned in Data Structures and Algorithms over 15 years ago and have never actually had to use in a real application. I program mostly in Perl. We have modules to do those things, like sorting, for us.

   I can actually tell when they are just going through the motions of an interview or when they are actually engaged in finding out who I am. I can learn any language given time and someone to ask questions of from time to time. I can’t learn to be one of the “Bros”. I play video games. I am just like them just older and a refrigerator full of beer is not a job perk that excites me.

   Most women who start out in programming tend to move on into management or being project directors. It is only recently that women have been encouraged to learn the STEM skills. So I am up against gender and age discrimination and my inability to be a code monkey. That whole white boarding to prove I can program is a killer and all it proves is that I get nervous having people stand behind me and watch me code some inane problem, like sorting a matrix. “Here’s your pen, now perform for us”. The timed programming tests are almost as bad. So you can tell what kind of an employee I will be for you based on my ability to solve 4 programming puzzles in 75 minutes when the platform you chose to have me use doesn’t understand the very basic command “floor” and doesn’t have any of the basic modules installed?

   If Silicon Valley wanted more diversity in the work place, they would have it. I’m here. I have skill and experience. Hire me. That’s what probation periods are for. Use them.

10. Good show today about starfish generalized to human population. Why can the starfish teach us everything?
    Yet there’s no comment section which NPR usually provides.

11. 8 April 2016 Ciimate Fiction stories were very fun.

    In 1970’s I was writing a novella based on Milankovitch cycles and the coming ice age. I threw in a tipping point based on “the Gulf stream stops scenario” and voila! 6′ of snow in Iowa in July. You don’t need a mile of ice to make it hard to plant corn.

    Now, as a Republican, I start with that background to explain how dogma makes science conservative. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and once accepted, as Milankovitch cycles were becoming, claims against them need that extraordinary evidence. I then sketch out a quick three factor model (solar heat, CO2 from warming and CO2 from anthropocene) to show the new model that replaces the old dogmatic ice-age model.

    After all that, I push for a free-market solution (carbon fee and dividend) as espoused by the @citizensclimate Citizens Climate Lobby.

12. I’ve listened from Tokyo for many years now (before hitting the sack each night). So, firstly, thanks for that. This week I hear news of ideas for a laser-powered sail to head into the heavens to Alpha Centauri. I’ve always wondered what would happen to the micron-thin sails if punctured by dust, but I think that could be history now given a mechanism that simply repairs itself (graphene nano-spiders).

    However, it seems smarter to me that we simply send laser pulses out asking, “Hey, how do we make this easier?”: a sufficiently intelligent receiving intelligence would let us know.