Welcome and thank you for being here. This week I have links about the history of refrigerators. Oddly enough, refrigerators have a massive impact on human culture in only a century. I also have links about citizen science projects. Might be interesting to look into for the new year. And links about the odd coincidences around the number 42. It’s supposed to be the answer to the meaning of life itself, according to Douglas Adams in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe. Plus two videos explaining how day and night actually happen.
Science Near Me
At the start of a new year, and school semester, now might be a good time to think about plans for the year. Exploring citizen science projects is a fun, educational, and helpful option. You get to help real scientists with part of their work. And it exposes kids and adults to the scientific process.
Three websites — Science Near Me, Connected Girls, and SciStarter — are a great place to start exploring. There’s also other sites that you can find online. You can find projects that accept volunteers. Most of the projects need people to help collect data. Scientists then use the data for their research. For example, one NASA project asked people to take photos of trees from ground level. NASA scientists used this data to optimize their satellite calculations of tree heights.
I covered this topic in the 1.21.1 email but it’s useful to mention citizen science again this time of year. See what projects are available. And maybe plan something fun and interesting for the next few months.
Link-wise, my 1.21.1 email and magazine stories have a lot of links. Here I’ve focused on a few US links but also UK, Europe, and Australian links. The easiest way to find things online is to search with the phrase “country/region citizen science projects” and then try again by adding the word āfinderā to the search phrase. That worked for me. Replace country/region with your country or region. Also see SciStarter has a UK projects section.
1.21.1 Citizen Science, Great Games Explained, Data Types, Sign Language Gloves
https://kidscodecs.com/citizen-science-projects-games-explained-data-types/
Citizen Science Projects
https://kidscodecs.com/citizen-science-projects/
Science Near Me
Connected Girls
https://ngcproject.org/about/initiatives/connected-girls
SciStarter
https://scistarter.org/
https://scistarter.org/citizen-science
Citizen science apps and projects – UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
https://www.ceh.ac.uk/our-science/citizen-science/citizen-science-apps
Do Something Great: Citizen Science – BBC
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4BZZdHm64S051q2lnZ1Nr7p/citizen-science
EU Citizen Science
Citizen Science – EarthWatch Europe
https://earthwatch.org.uk/science/citizen-science/
Australian Citizen Science Association Project Finder
https://citizenscience.org.au/ala-project-finder/
Citizen Science Projects – Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)
https://www.csiro.au/en/work-with-us/citizen-science/Projects
Everybody should learn to program a computer because it teaches you how to think. ā Steve Jobs
Don’t Panic, It’s only 42
A lot of STEM work involves numbers. And attracts people attracted by numbers. If you’re lucky enough to have read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, then you know 42. And probably you’re smiling or laughing. In the novel by Douglas Adams, there’s a supercomputer called Deep Thought. It’s built by hyper intelligent aliens. These aliens want to know what is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. After 7.5 million years, Deep Thought answers in the only way a computer can answer: 42. The meaning of life? 42.
Here’s the crazy part. Adams claimed that he randomly picked 42. But there’s actually meaning in that number. And you don’t have to look too hard either.
For example, Deep Thought is a computer. And computers respond with numbers and use numbers to generate responses. 42 happens to be an asterisk in ASCII. It’s called a wildcard. Itās whatever you want it to be. Computers use ASCII to map numbers to characters like the letter a. Then they display these characters on computer screens. An asterisk represents everything and anything in computing. If you search *house, computers look for everything that includes the phrase house. Search without the asterisk and the computer narrows its search. It only looks for things with the exact phrase house.
So lots of people believe 42 means life is whatever you make of it. That Deep Thought actually gave a deep answer.
But it gets stranger. In Egyptian mythology, when you die your soul faces 42 judges. And you have to prove that in your life you didn’t commit any of 42 sins. And before Europeans defined a kilometer, the original marathon ran 42.195 kilometers. That’s the distance Pheidippides ran between Marathon and Athens in 490 BC. Or take ancient Tibetans. They had 42 rulers and the last one ended their reign in 842 AD. The Gutenberg Bible also has 42 lines of text per column. It’s called the 42-line bible. And oil barrels? Naturally they hold 42 gallons.
And then there’s math. It appears that the number 42 is the result of several calculations. The Scientific American article link below gets into all that.
Of course, these are all coincidences. But it’s an added layer of humor on top of a smart aleck answer from Deep Thought and Douglas Adams. If you want more fun, search online in many languages, “what is the meaning of life?” and you already know the answer: 42.
And the Donāt Panic image up top of this email? Itās also in the Hitchhikerās Guide to the Galaxy. Itās what you should not do when confronted with an insanely complicated computer. One that takes millions of years to respond to a simple question.
For Math Fans: A Hitchhikerās Guide to the Number 42
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/for-math-fans-a-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-number-42/
Forty-two facts about the number 42
https://number42.nl/en/company/the-number-42/
ASCII Chart: Asterisk
https://theasciicode.com.ar/ascii-printable-characters/asterisk-ascii-code-42.html
Using Wildcard Characters
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-xp/bb490639(v=technet.10)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy
Douglas Adams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams
How Refrigerators Changed Flavors and Humans
In my first job, I worked as clerk in a hardware store. We teased the owner that he could sell refrigerators to Eskimos. If you have snow, in other words, you don’t need one. Of course, he schooled us clerks. If you put eggs in the snow, they freeze. If you put eggs in a refrigerator, they last longer than leaving them out indoors.
We take refrigerators for granted and assume everyone has one in their kitchen. But the invention of refrigerators changed how people used and prepared food. It also changed the taste of food. In a way, refrigerators are a critical dividing line in human culture. Their appearance is recent, appearing only a hundred years ago in commercial form.
There’s at least two huge impacts caused by refrigerators: taste and food shopping. Human taste buds respond differently based on food temperature. Having a refrigerator also means you don’t have to food shop every few days. There’s a reason many Europeans buy food daily or every other day. That was common practice in the US too before refrigerators. It’s also true that not having to be near fresh food makes it easier to live spread out in suburbs. You can drive to the grocery store once or twice a week instead of having to be near a farm or town shops.
What’s also interesting is that keeping food cold is not a modern invention. In ancient Iran, the YakhchÄl mixed architecture and wind to keep food cool. But there were other food storage inventions created by people in the past.
How the Fridge Changed Flavor
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/how-the-fridge-changed-flavor
The Birth of Cool: How Refrigeration Changed Everything
https://gastropod.com/the-birth-of-cool-how-refrigeration-changed-everything/
How the humble household refrigerator changed the world ā for better and for worse
Refrigeration Changedā¦ Everything
https://web.colby.edu/humanslashnature/2015/10/06/refrigeration-changed-everything/
From Farm To Fridge: The Science And History Of Refrigeration
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/frostbite-book-refrigeration-changes-food/
Stepping Inside The Global Cold Chain – Book Excerpt
https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/frostbite-book-excerpt/
Refrigerator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator
How did people keep food cold before refrigerators?
https://www.whirlpool.com/blog/kitchen/history-of-the-refrigerator.html
Ancient Ice-Making Machines Found In Persian Desert, The YakhchÄl
https://www.youtube.com/embed/tnJms_3Gbuk?si=b_TrKT98nyTLrMaK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YakhchÄl
Why do we have day and night?
As adults, itās easy to take day and night for granted. All our lives the sun has arrived during the day and disappeared at night. Kids are new to the world, however. They might wonder how the sun appears and disappears.
Here’s two videos. The first explains the sun’s behavior from a kid point of view. The second is more humorous and strange in spots. It’s Neil deGrasse Tyson explaining how the earth rotates with lots of odd facts tossed in. For example, people who live at the equator travel 25,000 miles a day in one earth rotation. Meanwhile, Santa in the North Pole hardly travels at all every day.
What Causes Day and Night? – Science All Around Me for Kids!
Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains the Earth’s Rotation
This Week
Our Sunday email this week will have fun often offbeat links about 3d printing concrete, Beni the Llama at the Portland, Oregon airport (to help calm your fear of flying), kids and social media, phone tracking, Japan launches their wooden satellite, and more. Plus the New York Metropolitan Museum has put 490,000 images online for you to use for free. Look for the email this Sunday.
