Chile tsunami

Twenty-four hours after the Chilean earthquake, the resulting tsunami has rolled across the Pacific Ocean to wash up on the shores of Japan and Alaska. It was easily managed nearly everywhere it hit, almost always less than a meter in amplitude. (Note: amplitude means height above normal sea level, not crest-to-trough wave height.)

The news services are no doubt disappointed to have so little to report on, after all the hype and on-the-scene cameras. But the truth is, tsunamis happen on a regular basis, all over the world, just like earthquakes. And just like earthquakes, the vast majority of these tsunamis are only detectable by scientific measuring equipment. But the public perception is always of the gigantic wave, because small is not memorable.

Small is memorable to people who have seen the power of even a 2-meter tsunami. Yesterday’s tsunami showed its greatest amplitude in the port city of Talcahuano, Chile, where it reached 2.34 meters (7.7 feet) above normal sea level. Here is what 2.34 meters can do:

The Big Picture at Boston.com has a set of 35 photographs of the earthquake damage in Chile. The last three were taken in Talcahuano, and are an excellent lesson in why the governments around the Pacific Rim were wise to evacuate their low-lying areas. Even a small tsunami is not to be taken lightly.

Waiting for the tsunami

This morning I woke up to a tsunami warning in my email inbox. The automatic email, generated by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC), informed me that there had been a massive 8.8 earthquake off the coast of Chile less than two hours earlier.

The quake that devastated Haiti was 7.0 on the Richter Scale. The difference between a 7.0 quake and an 8.8 quake is akin to the difference between having your car hit by another car, and having your car hit by a train.

But Chile is prone to these huge quakes. It sits on one of the worst locations on the surface of the planet: the very edge of a tectonic plate, right where another tectonic plate is submerging beneath it. When one plate is sliding beneath another, earthquakes happen. Big ones. And where big earthquakes of this type occur, tsunamis are a real danger.

The fact that my email was titled “Expanding Regional Warning” meant this was serious. A warning is the highest alert level (watch, advisory, and bulletin are the other three, in descending order of urgency), and it means a near-certainty of a tsunami. It means governments need to evacuate all low-lying areas within the regions specified in the warning.

Today, those regions include the entire Pacific basin.

In quakes like this one, where a large segment of a tectonic plate snaps upward, vast amounts of water are displaced. If a big part of the ocean floor suddenly rises, where will the water sitting directly above it go? It will slide off, in all directions. Water will always find its own level. That’s true in a measuring cup, and it’s true in the ocean. The only difference is volume.

So, you’ve got a huge volume of water sliding off. That creates a wave. And waves are amazing things in that they can travel very efficiently for very long distances. They barely lose any energy while moving, which is why a wave generated off the coast of Chile will race all the way across the entire Pacific Ocean and wash up on the shores of Australia, Japan, Russia, Alaska…and downward to Antarctica. Once they arrive at a coastline, two things will dictate their final size: the energy remaining in the wave, and local geography. A wave with exactly the same energy can fizzle out on one coast, and cause considerable damage on another.

At the moment, every government of the regions in the above image are either preparing, or have already seen the waves go past them. The coastlines of Chile saw small tsunamis that did little to no damage. French Polynesia reported a wave of 36 centimeters. Right now it’s Hawaii in the cross hairs, and the tsunami sirens have been wailing, warning people to get to higher ground. Because of its coastal geography, Hawaii tends to get hammered by tsunamis. If it’s big anywhere, it will probably be there.

And so we all wait.

The old and the new

While taking my daily walk today, I came upon an older Portuguese man standing at the end of a right-of-way, holding an umbrella in one hand and a cane in the other. The right-of-way cuts through an orchard, and is walled on both sides, but spills out into a road at the end.

As I approached him, we traded greetings and then he turned toward his right. “Anda! Anda!” he called. This is the standard call for a dog — “Come on! Come!” I heard rustling through the grass, and a bell…a bell? And then around the corner of the wall came bounding a…

…sheep. Followed by the rest of the flock.

“Anda, anda!” called the shepherd, and as I crossed the road to the right-of-way on the other side, I looked back to see him and his flock heading toward the local sports center, which has a nice grassy field behind it. He looked for all the world like he was taking his sheep out for a walk.

A kilometer later, I was huffing up a hill when I saw a familiar sight: a couple who live in the neighborhood, out walking their large dog. They do this by getting in their car and driving slowly up and down the steep streets of the area, while the dog runs happily behind them.

And there you have, in the space of one kilometer, both the old and the new of Portugal.

When the US poisoned its citizens

Deborah Blum has written a fascinating article on a bit of American history that I certainly never learned in school. Did you know that the US government used poison as an enforcement tool during Prohibition?

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Full story here.

Saturn V: an oldie but a goodie

Back in the glory days of NASA, when the budget was vast and the race was on to beat the USSR to the moon, US engineers developed the most powerful rocket engine in human history. Fifty years later it is still the most powerful rocket engine in human history.

It was called the F-1. Here are some blow-your-mind factoids, courtesy of Wikipedia:

The F-1 burned 3,945 pounds (1,789 kg) of liquid oxygen and 1,738 pounds (788 kg) of RP-1 each second, generating 1,500,000 pounds-force (6.7 MN) of thrust. This equated to a flow rate of 413.5 US gallons (1,565 l) of LOX and 257.9 US gallons (976 l) RP-1 per second.

Let’s break that down. A combustion engine needs both fuel and an oxidant to run. In your car, the fuel is either gasoline or diesel, and the oxidant is simply the air drawn into the engine from outside. In the F-1, the fuel was kerosene (called RP-1, because engineers can never call anything by a common name) and the oxidant was liquid oxygen (LOX). Those two ingredients burned together, generating 1.5 million pounds of thrust every single second.

The Saturn V was the rocket that powered the Apollo missions into space, and put the first humans on the moon. The “V” in the name is a Roman numeral, referring to the fact that this rocket used five F-1 engines. So take all of those factoids above and multiply them by five, and you’ll get the true power of the Saturn V rocket.

During their two and a half minutes of operation, the five F-1s propelled the Saturn V vehicle to a height of 42 miles (68 km) and a speed of 6,164 miles per hour (9,920 km/h). The combined propellant flow rate of the five F-1s in the Saturn V was 3,357 US gallons (12,710 l) per second, which would empty a 30,000 US gallons (110,000 l) swimming pool in 8.9 seconds.

One of my favorite videos of all time shows a launch of this rocket, in super slow motion that allows us to see the things we would otherwise miss. Set to the haunting music “Baltar’s Dream” from Battlestar Galactica, this video inspires awe at the very least. For me, it inspires pride in the achievements of our species. We screw a lot up, but we have also accomplished some amazing things.

For sheer power, the first 2:38 minutes of this video are the best. The rest is imagery of the rocket in flight, set to a quieter piece of music (“Roslin and Adama,” also from Battlestar Galactica.) It’s definitely worth watching at least until the sonic shockwave, which begins to form a vapor cone at 3:12 as the rocket passes through the sound barrier. At the 7:00 mark there’s an extra treat: a replay of the launch, this time recorded from above, and in real time.

A couple of notes about what you’re seeing in this video. At the moment of ignition, before the engines really get going, the fiery exhaust billows out from below the rocket, obscuring half the image. Once the engines kick in, they create a downdraft that instantly sucks all that exhaust back into the well beneath the rocket. (In real time, it takes a fraction of a second.) From that moment on, the engines burn much more efficiently, and the cloud of black exhaust does not reappear.

As the rocket rises out of the well, one of the F-1 engines becomes perfectly visible. Slowly the nozzle extension is exposed, and then you see something highly cool: a dark curtain shooting out of the extension, below which is the unbearably bright flame. That curtain is a clever bit of engineering. It’s the exhaust from the engine’s turbopump, the component that injects the fuel and oxygen into the combustion chamber. Since the turbopump’s exhaust is much cooler than the exhaust from the actual combustion, the designers fed it right into the nozzle extension, where it forms a film that protects the extension from the much hotter exhaust gas (which reaches 5,800º F or 3,200º C). So they used one exhaust to protect the hardware from another exhaust.

The part that really awes me is just before that, at the 1:27 mark. That’s when the clamps release the rocket and snap back to their upright position, and you realize that they have been holding this beast down. They’re designed to make sure the rocket does not launch until the engines have reached full thrust. Which means that for the moments leading up to their release, those clamps are holding down a thrust force that approaches, and then reaches, 7.5 million pounds.

One final note: every one of these five F-1 engines generated more thrust than all three of the space shuttle’s main engines combined.

And that was fifty years ago.

Mark Twain reviews a romance

In 1908, Mark Twain wrote a letter describing a torrid romance he had just read by a young English author named Elinor Glyn. The idea of women writing such things was practically unheard of then, and Twain was most impressed with Ms. Glyn’s efforts:

“The queenlet and the Englishman flit away privately to the mountains and take up sumptuous quarters in a remote and lonely house there — and then business begins. They recognize that they were highly and holily created for each other and that their passion is a sacred thing, that it is their master by divine right and that its commands must be obeyed. They get to obeying them at once and they keep on obeying them and obeying them, to the reader’s intense delight and disapproval, and the process of obeying them is described, several times, almost exhaustively, but not quite — some little rag of it being left to the reader’s imagination, just at the end of each infraction, the place where his imagination is to take up and do the finish being indicated by stars.”

Twain was intrigued specifically because of the author’s gender, which made all that “obeying” much more deliciously sinful than normal. I can’t help but wonder what he would think of the mountains of trashy novels now available, many written by women who have no need for euphemisms and in fact would probably have to look the word up. Once he got over the shock of it, how would he review the books where not even a rag is left to the reader’s imagination, and the plot is merely a thin thread linking the sex scenes together?

I’d pay good money to read those reviews.

All in the kiss

Is there a point to the classic liplock other than romance or foreplay? According to a 2007 study in Evolutionary Psychology, kissing is actually a sharing of biological data. (Warning: this is more than you may ever want to know about a kiss.)

Our facial skin contains glands that, when prompted by sex hormones, produce chemicals. These chemicals mix with our saliva, and are thus exchanged in the course of a kiss. (A wet kiss, that is — dry ones aren’t useful for swapping data.)

Chemical cues also help people, particularly women, size up potential mates. [Susan] Hughes and her colleagues found that women tend to base a man’s kissing ability on the smell and taste of his mouth.

Those scents and tastes can provide clues to overall health, which is of paramount importance when choosing a mate.

The study also found that men’s tastes run to French kisses.

Dr. Helen Fisher, a professor of biological anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, theorizes this is because the sloppier the smooch, the more saliva—and hence, hormonal information—is exchanged. [She] explained that our cheek cells absorb the hormones estrogen and testosterone that are exchanged during a wet kiss. Men, suggests Fisher, may use this hormonal input to subconsciously gauge their partner’s fertility and reproductive potential. A man’s preference for extra-wet kisses may have to do with the fact that men are less sensitive than women to chemosenses like taste and smell.

Now, I can buy into this if we’re talking about courtship smooching. But what about post-marital smooching? What about couples who are already committed and have no need to determine each other’s health and reproductive fitness?

Turns out that men in those relationships still prefer French kissing. According to William Cane, author of The Art of Kissing, “Men often respond most to the French kiss, whereas women often respond to a romantic kiss. Guys will say they’re not really getting excited unless there is some tongue contact, while girls will often say if you’re passionate and loving, a lip kiss is good enough. You don’t have to rush in and, you know, trigger the gag reflex with the tongue.”

A “romantic” kiss, in this instance, is a pretty all-encompassing definition. It can be on the lips, but also anywhere on the face, as well as the ears. (Women enjoy ear kisses much more than men do, says Cane.) And the most romantic place of all for a woman? Cane’s surveys revealed that 96% of women adore being kissed on the neck. It’s their favorite place to be kissed, other than the mouth. But the neck barely even rates an honorable mention among men: only 10% of them get a buzz out of being kissed there.

“A guy will not even believe that a girl likes being kissed on the neck because it doesn’t really do anything for him,” says Cane. In his lectures (yes, he makes a living giving talks and presentations on how to kiss), he advises men to “move or slide off the lips occasionally down to the neck, and that will produce big results.”

Women’s responses to the surveys apparently included some fairly strong comments regarding men and French kissing. “When I turn blue, doesn’t he realize that means I can’t breathe?” asks one. Another says men shouldn’t use their tongues like darts, but should put some finesse into it. Men, on the other hand, say that the number one mistake women make is not opening their mouths wide enough.

Based on Cane’s survey results, it would appear that we don’t just have a gender gap between preferences in kissing. It’s more like a gender chasm. Guys want tongue, women want romance…actually, it sounds pretty similar to another gender chasm.

As an aside, the Portuguese do not use the term “French kiss.” In fact, they think that’s a hilarious name, since it credits the French for coming up with the whole concept. Unfortunately, the Portuguese term is not any better: they call it linguado, based on the word for tongue (língua). This is a seriously squicky word, and besides that, it also means a halibut or sole. I’ll stick to calling it French.

(X-ray kiss photo via Geekologie.)

The Mariana Trench to scale

The Mariana Trench is the deepest point in the oceans (that we know of). It’s so deep that the true dimensions of it are hard to grasp, but this visual illustration does a great job of clarifying things, even as it blows your mind.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an adult blue whale look tiny before.

The Olympic story of Petra Majdic

Why this story is not getting more attention, I do not know. It’s got everything sports journalists usually drool over: top ranked athlete, injury, gutsy performance, medal against all odds.

But this top ranked athlete is a cross-country skier, which is not an event that gets North American spectators excited. And she is from a small central European nation, which most Americans could not find on a map. So her story — while big news in parts of Europe — got dropped through the journalistic cracks in the English language media.

Their loss.

Petra Majdic was Slovenia’s best hope for the nation’s very first gold medal, not to mention their first medal of any color in a cross-country event. She was the winner of the World Cup cross country sprint, and went into the Vancouver Olympics as the woman to beat.

But on the training run right before the qualifying races for the sprint, Petra suffered a freak accident. The course had iced over due to rain the previous night, and Petra slipped in a curve. Unable to stop herself on the ice, she went straight over an unprotected embankment, fell three meters, and landed on her back on rocks and ice. She broke both poles, one ski, and seriously injured her right side, but would not hear of being taken to the hospital. She insisted on competing.

The organizers allowed her allowed her to go last in the qualification race, rather than third as she had been originally scheduled. It gave her a tiny bit more time to recover. “I couldn’t walk, move or breathe,” she said. She could only lay down and think that it was all over. But when her time came, she stood up and raced, in absolute agony.

Her pain was obvious, and everyone — including the coaches from other teams — cheered her on. It was one of those moments that transcends national pride; every person there wanted her to make it. She crossed the finish line and collapsed into a fetal position, screaming from the pain.

But she’d managed to come in 19th, easily making the 30-place cutoff for the quarterfinals. Then she finally allowed her team to whisk her off to the hospital, where an exam showed no broken bones but deep bruising. Petra refused an analgesic injection, which would have blocked most of the pain but would also have hindered her movements. Instead she just gritted her teeth. She made it back in time for the quarterfinals, where she raced again. And again she collapsed at the finish line. Then came the semifinals, and another collapse. In the final race, she pushed herself beyond her limits, passing up the fourth-place finisher to cross the line third. This time when she collapsed, she didn’t get up again.

She was taken back to the hospital, where a second exam revealed what the first had inexplicably missed. Petra Majdic raced an Olympic qualifying trial, a quarterfinal, a semifinal, and then won a bronze medal in the final heat — all with four broken ribs and a perforated lung.

It was truly a superhuman effort, and almost beyond medical belief.

She had to be helped to the podium to accept her bronze medal. To her, it was pure gold. She said, “This is not only gold. It is gold with little diamonds in it.”

She is now hospitalized in Vancouver and will be staying there for at least another week. Her Olympics, and the rest of her season, are over. But she brought home her nation’s first cross-country medal, and there will be a hero’s welcome awaiting her when she is finally cleared to fly home.

Her countrymen had already voted her sportswoman of the year in three of the past four years — and now we know why. Respect to Petra Majdic, an inspiration to anyone who thinks about giving up. And a big, wet raspberry to the American press, which devoted hours of breathless coverage to the snowboarding and downhill events, but ignored a real hero.

(Top photo by NBC, bottom by Michael Dalder/Getty Images.)

Weightlifting ant

Dr. Thomas Endlein of the University of Cambridge scooped first prize in the BBSRC Science Photography competition with this fantastic image of an Asian weaver ant lifting 100 times its own weight — while clinging upside down to a glass surface.

According to the BBSRC web site:

Asian Weaver ants (Oecophylla smaragdina) can carry weights of more than 100 times their own body weight whilst upside down on a smooth surface. To do this, they have incredibly sticky pads on their feet. However, this does not stop them from running quickly across such surfaces. Research has revealed how they cope with the conflict of sticking to a surface but not getting stuck.

Weaver ants are known for building nests using leaves woven together with silk. They are very territorial and their tendency to defend against intruders can make them a useful tool in controlling agricultural insect pests, avoiding the need for chemical insecticides. They have traditionally been used in this way in Chinese and Southeast Asian citrus orchards for at least 1,500 years.

Dr. Endlein took advantage of the ant’s natural aggressive behavior to achieve this photo. Weaver ants will grab and bite practically anything that comes near them, in a behavior designed to take down potential threats before they can do harm. “Once they grab an object, they won’t let go for a very long time,” says Dr. Endlein. So he tied a 500 mg weight to a tiny string and pushed it toward the ant, which immediately clamped its jaws on.

The image was taken using a Canon EOS 5D with a 2.8/100 mm macro lens and twin flash guns.