I have always assumed that the cricket thermometer was just an urban legend or wive’s tale. The story goes that the temperature can be measured by counting the rate at which crickets make their clicks. The basic principle behind it is that the rate of a cricket’s clicks will increase when the temperature rises.
I was browsing through snopes and found an article about this. The people over at snopes have found evidence of a correlation between temperature and the rate of cricket click.
The formula for this correlation is endorsed by The Farmer’s Almanac and was recently confirmed by Dr. Peggy LeMone, on her blog.
Temp in degrees F = (# clicks over 13 seconds) + 40
Pretty simple eh?
Here is the snopes article, where I started reading up on this. I am pretty anxious to try this myself, but I guess I am going to have to wait until next summer to see this for myself.
I have just calculated my carbon footprint.
Over the past 2 summers I have been a tree planter in British Columbia. I have planted about 150,000 trees; the actual total might be a bit more, but for easy calculations I am leaving the number at 150,000. This is by no means that much compared to other planters who I have planted with. I know many planters that are at the quarter million mark and some people have planted over a million trees over their career.
Here are my calculations:
An average fully grown pine tree weights about 500kg. 44% of that is carbon in the cellulose molecule.
44% x 500kg = 220kg of carbon/tree
That 220kg of carbon in each tree is produced from 1 tonne of atmospheric CO2.
The average CO2 emissions of a person living in the west is around 20 tonnes/year.
Assuming that I life until 75, I will emit 1500 tonnes of CO2 in that time. In 50 years, the pine trees that I planted will be fully grown and will have removed 150,000 tonnes of CO2 and store it as cellulose. That is enough trees to cover 100 people’s carbon footprints.
Scholarpedia is a new online encyclopedia and competitor to Wikipedia. I am a big user of Wikipedia and have wasted a lot of time clicking through articles. I have exactly the same habits as the user in this XKCD cartoon. Despite it’s addictiveness, Wikipedia does have a problem with the quality of its content as it is not accepted by any academic institution.
Scholarpedia’s author selection is a lot more strict than Wikipedia and it is peer reviewed. It can still be user edited, however new editions must be approved by the original curator. The main idea behind it is to have an online encyclopedia like wikipedia, but with higher quality articles.
So far, there are only encyclopedias in Computational Neuroscience, Dynamical Systems, Computational Intelligence and Astrophysics. I am not an expert in any of these fields, however the amount of content so far looks promising. I am a little bit skeptical as to whether this will expand quickly because of the greater amount of work required to produce an article. It is based on the same MediaWiki engine as Wikipedia, so the look and feel is completely natural.
Check out Scholarpedia soon!!!!!
A new documentary is claiming there is a strong link between evolution and Hitler. Scarily, Ann Coulter is involved. It is sad to know that people will watch and believe this.
Check out their website here
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