Faces and fingers: dogs vs chimps!

01 October 2011

Do dogs or chimps read the expressions on our faces better? Do dogs or chimps better interpret a human pointing with a finger? Two current documentaries address these kinds of issues, amongst other issues:

"The Secret Life of the Dog" shown on SBS September 2011

"Project Nim" is a movie currently in cinemas

The 'Secret Life of the Dog' examines the adaptation of dogs through domestication. Unlike chimps they have the unique ability to look at human faces and understand our facial expressions. They also uniquely comprehend what humans mean when they point with their finger. Despite our 94% DNA commonality with chimps (which was previously thought to be 98.5% or 99%), dogs can read our faces and finger better than chimps!

"Project Nim" is about scientific study of a chimp that was raised as a human for its first few years, including breast feeding from a human woman. How unique are humans? Do other creatures besides humans communicate by "language"? These questions were addressed by the study but the documentary focuses on the ethical issues of the study and the impact on the people involved and also the impact on chimp involved.

Do you feel the world as it really is? 107,000km/hr!

13 September 2011

The sun slowly sets and the seasons change even more slowly. Yet these things happen by us traveling mind-bogglingly fast in space and we don't even notice.

Most of us know that the earth rotates on its axis and that the earth also oribits the sun. You know – those slow old elephants of the solar system plodding away in space. Really? Have you stopped to think how fast we must be ripping along in space to get right around the whoppingly huge sun at a significant orbit distance (even though its takes a year)? Let's do the maths.

Circumference = 2 x π x radius (approximating our orbit from an ellipse to a circle)
Speed = distance ÷ time

Therefore, the speed of earth around the sun:
= (2 x π x orbital radius in km) ÷ (365.26 days)
= (2 x π x 149600000 km) ÷ (365.26 x 24 hours) 
= 107,225 km/hr
= 30km/sec

So let's get a feel for just how fast we're moving through space. The speed of sound is 0.343 kilometres per second. That means we are travelling at 87 times the speed of sound (30km/s ÷ 0.343km/s). That is fast! Of course there is no air in space and so you can't have sound since there is no medium for the compression waves to travel through. But you get the idea! We are absolutely ripping along all the time through our solar system just to get around the sun every year. The seasons seem to go very slowly but we are moving very very very very quickly!!! We don't feel it because there is no acceleration. Like moving in a train on a perfectly smooth track, we can walk back and forth without even feeling the journey at all.

It is hard to grasp that we are travelling 87 times faster than the FA18 Hornet in the picture below!! Mind you, since the plane is on earth, it's also traveling that fast. As it breaks the sound barrier relative to the ground, water droplets form from the drop in pressure behind the sonic boom shock wave and the result is the cloud that is shown (source). We are going 87 times faster than the FA18's already very fast speed. We would pass the FA18 so quickly that you could barely see it at all.

If you do the maths on how fast you move at the equator by the earth's rotation then it works out to be:

Speed at equator from rotation of earth
= (2 x π x radius in km) ÷ (24 hours)
= (2 x 3.14159 x 6378.1) ÷ (24) km/hr
= 1669.8 km/hr
= 464 m/sec

So if you are on the equator, you move faster than the speed of sound, just by the rotation of the earth on its axis!

The anti-speeding campaign in Australia used to ask the question "How fast are you going now?" Well the answer is 107,000km/hr! But don't tell that to the policeman – he might not appreciate the science at that time!

Do you see the world as it really is?

24 August 2011

Do you really see the world as it is, or as you have been conditioned to see it?

The painting is a massive one hanging in the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. The simple principle of perspective means that you can make it look quite small when close to the camera (or viewer).

Just in case you are curious as to the reason for the painting. It depicts a great victory of Napoleon against the Russian army in 1807. It was painted in 1891. Purchased in 1893. It would have been quite a job to paint and to transport anywhere!

When I was younger, I remember my mother explaining some things about painting and art. When Europeans first came to Australia and started painting the trees, they often painted them not as they appeared but as they were used to painting trees back in England. Australian trees can be more twisted, irregular and sparse.

In High School I enjoyed technical drawing and Engineering Science. My mother also explained that painting in perspective was not commonly done for many centuries in Europe either. People painted more like an isometric diagram, where depth is drawn with parallel lines. In perspective pictures, you have vanishing points so lines converge further away from the observer. It is the logical consequence of things appearing smaller the further away they are. For example the Sun being 400 times larger than the moon but 400 times further away so they are the same size. When drawing objects that have parts close to you and parts further away, the lines need to converge to a 'vanishing point'. An example is a railway line disappearing in the distance where the tracks appear to get closer to each other.

What fascinates me is that the objective world out there is quite a different thing to how we see it and model it in our minds. Even painters and drawers who were trying to objectively capture just what they directly saw, often didn't actually succeed. They saw what they wanted to see. They saw what they have been conditioned to observe. Fascinating and sobering – it happens for more than just visual imaging but also how we model the working of people, society, the world and the supernatural.

Source of Sydney Sandstone Solved.

24 August 2011

Every since I was a little child I wondered. What's the reason? I have lived in Sydney, Canberra and Scone. Every time we drove through the road cuttings travelling into Sydney I would look the swirls and layers in the sandstone and wonder about how all that sand was laid down. There is so much of it! I had seen it in the Blue Mountains, the South coast and up through the Hawksbury River crossing on the freeway. We enjoyed the sand at the beach when in Sydney for holidays with my cousins.

I remember a friend at Uni who was a creation scientist. He was also a geologist. He found the Sydney sandstone a real challenge to his view of a young planet only 6000 years or so old.

Recently, one of my most favourite episodes of Catalyst (Episode 15, 2011, found here) explained the mystery! Paul Willis explained that the sandstone stretches from Lithgow in the West, up to Newcastle and down to Nowra. The sandstone is all from an absolutely massive river estuary that covered that whole region.

Recent studies on the sands of Sydney and its region reveal that much of the sand and sediments started life in Antarctica, a billion years ago. A very large river came from what was the highlands of Antarctica, across Antarctica, and across from South Australia to Sydney. Antarctica and Australia were joined together as one – Gondwana. The journey along the river filtered out many things but left the cleaner, white, silica sand that we see in the sandstone.

The movement of that sand from the estuary region has produced the sand Islands of Southern Queensland. This includes Fraser Island, which is the largest sand Island in the world. We went there back in 1998 with friends.

That’s stretching it just a little!

23 August 2011

This impressive little guy (or girl - not sure how to tell!) I found outside our house making a run for it – slowly mind you. What he lacks in feet number, he makes up for in dexterity. There is more than one way to be mobile.

Dinosaur Deceptions?

23 August 2011

These pictures were taken when we went to the Australian Museum in Sydney.

I remember meeting a man in the past who didn't believe that there were ever real dinosaurs. He thought it was all a fraud and the public had been deceived by atheists. Though there was one well known fabrication of human skeletal remains called Piltdown Man (see here), it is extraordinary to imagine, without any substantial evidence, that every dinosaur specimen is a fraud.

Clearly the evidence also points away from Dinosaurs having lived at the same time as humans and only eating grass until human's sinned. T-Rex's teeth are designed for eating meat. A woodpecker's whole neck is designed for boring holes in trees for the sole purpose of getting grubs to eat. It is hard to imagine them eating leaves until human's sinned and then getting a wonderful creative reshaping of their whole neck to then start eating grubs. Psalm 104 is about the goodness of the created world. In verse 21 it explains that God provides the lions with their prey. Animal death is part of a good world – ask any Arnhem Land local about the goodness of a dead kangaroo! Human rebellion prevents human life – not animal life. Christianity is about life for humans, not woodpeckers.

What are ya made of?

23 August 2011

These are four very different minerals at the Australian Museum. They are remarkably different in colour, texture, lustre, hardness. It is quite mind blowing to consider that they are made of the same stuff: Protons, Neutrons and Electrons. What's is more incredible is that the human hand that picked them up is also made of the same stuff. The human brain that is thinking about the minerals is also composed of the same stuff. God is incredibly creative with the same material or perhaps it is all just chance and necessity that bought us into being from nothing and then arranged the diverse universe just as it is. Someone or something is quite amazing!