“You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves.”
Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (Stalin)
But you may start a revolution by studying the science of silk.
A transcript of the video available on the TED page HERE if you do not have the bandwidth to view it. Below the squiggle, if you‘re interested, a potpourri of videos. We learn a little about candy corn in space, coupled oscillators, dice and nebula, something old and something new. We hope you all enjoy.
There are a lot of videos posted from various sources here on dKos, music videos to nourish our souls, comedy and political satire that tickle and tackle the irony of our lives, and video news to keep the fire of change burning in our psyche. A few videos, too few in my humble opinion, are about science. I thought our community might appreciate a series presenting interesting science videos from Ted, YouTube, wherever.
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One of the goals of Sunday Videos is to make science a little more accessible to the folks here on dKos. I know that most of us have little time to devote to reading long tomes on subjects of little interest, so I believe short videos on various subjects might be more palatable. An article by James Grimes, a mathematician, in the Guardian makes the point nicely. One of Dr. Grimes favorite YouTube videos explains Non-Transitive Dice.
A dice game that you can always win at, I‘m surprised they haven‘t shown up in Vegas yet.
Talk about being surprised, it‘s fascinating how something very simple can astound and, well, surprise. For example, here is a set of 15 simple pendulums...
In the case above all the pendulums are acting independently. Allen started them at the same time and at the same amplitude. There are other types of pendulums that exhibit coupled oscillations. A Wilberforce pendulum. Stretching the spring begins a periodic oscillation up and down, but, eventually the spring begins to torque the bob and it starts to spin.
The device's intriguing behavior is caused by a slight coupling between the two motions or normal modes, due to the geometry of the spring. When the weight is moving up and down, each downward excursion of the spring causes it to unwind slightly, giving the weight a slight twist. When the weight moves up, it causes the spring to wind slightly tighter, giving the weight a slight twist in the other direction. So when the weight is moving up and down, each oscillation gives a slight back and forth rotational impulse to the weight. In other words, each oscillation some of the energy in the translational mode leaks into the rotational mode. Slowly the up and down movement gets less, and the rotational movement gets greater, until the weight is just rotating and not bobbing.
Similarly, when the weight is rotating back and forth, each twist of the weight in the direction that unwinds the spring also reduces the spring tension slightly, causing the weight to sag a little lower. Conversely, each twist of the weight in the direction of winding the spring tighter causes the tension to increase, pulling the weight up slightly. So each oscillation of the weight back and forth causes it to bob up and down more, until all the energy is transferred back from the rotational mode into the translational mode and it is just bobbing up and down, not rotating.Wiki
A tip o‘ the hat to jim in IA for finding that interesting video and for the following video that shows that even the most mundane things can be used to demonstrate principals of science. Here we learn a little about candy corn soap...
The Very Old
I‘ve generally kept myself fairly well informed about archeology even though my preferred intellectual avocation are math and physics. But this archeological site stunned me as I‘d never heard of before a few weeks ago. Gobekli Tepe is the oldest place of worship known, so far :) There may be extended diary on Gobekli Tepe one of these Sundays.
Göbekli Tepe is the oldest human-made place of worship yet discovered. Until excavations began, a complex on this scale was not thought possible for a community so ancient. The massive sequence of stratification layers suggests several millennia of activity, perhaps reaching back to the Mesolithic. The oldest occupation layer (stratum III) contains monolithic pillars linked by coarsely built walls to form circular or oval structures. So far, four such buildings, with diameters between 10 and 30m have been uncovered. Geophysical surveys indicate the existence of 16 additional structures.Wiki
The Very New
Nanotechnology is is going to play an important role in our future. I‘m thinking that this might also make for a good Sunday Science Video diary.
In The News
I take it that the rapture didn‘t happen yesterday, but I have no empirical evidence of that. Everyone I knew yesterday is still walkin‘ about today, but I wasn‘t worried at all. Mystics have, so far, had a 100% failure rate predicting the end of time, while Schroedinger has a pretty good record predicting the likely position of an electron. I‘ll continue to depend on those whose theories have been validated by empirical evidence.
Recently my favorite astronomical phenomena, the Crab Nebula, made the news. Unusually energetic gamma-ray flares have erupted in the nebula‘s neighborhood.
Thank you for taking the time to view and read tonight&slquo;s diary.