How an engineer loses weight

We’re constantly bombarded with ads offering the latest scientific way to lose weight – usually when you add the word ’science’ in your claim then you know there’s going to be money involved. Wired.com has a fantastic article on how to lose weight mathematically . . .

Want to drop 10 pounds in two months? All you have to do is the math, says Autodesk founder and Hacker’s Diet author John Walker. Here’s the skinny:

1. Multiply the pounds you want to lose by the number of calories in a pound of fat: 10 x 3,500 = 35,000.
2. Divide the total by the days you’ll diet: 35,000 ÷ 60 = 583.
3. Calculate your Basal Metabolic Rate 100 calories per ten pounds of body weight
4. Calculate your calories expenditure from exercize
5. Then use the formula (BMR+Exercise)-diet=total allowed calories

Or stated more simply: if you can eliminate 100 calories per day, that can add up to about 11 pounds a year, says Dr. Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating. 100 calories – that’s less than the calories in a can of Coke! Substitute one glass of water for one can of soda a day, and you’re well on your way to permanent weight loss.

Obviously exercise can help but eating less also makes sense. And how do you know if you’re over-eating?

One night, eat only half the amount of food on your plate. Wait 30 minutes, assess your feelings of satiation, and then wait 90. If you’re still not hungry, you’ve probably been overeating. Most people grossly overestimate the amount of food they need to feel full, says Dr. David Kessler, author of The End of Overeating

You can read more of this article at wired.com

What if scientists could sing?

What you’re about to see is amazingly poetic and beautiful – thanks to the wonders of Autotune (the technology that most popstars use to shift their voice when they sing out of key) you’re about to see boring physics lectures turned into something amazingly poetic.

John Boswell of Symphony of Science made this song featuring Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye.

Popstars should be banned from using autotune leaving autotune to the people who really do have something to say:

What if the earth had rings like Saturn

I know you’re thinking the same thing too – what would it look like from earth if we had Saturn-style rings? Well your curiosity has been answered with this cool video:

Don’t you just love the interweb? So many people with way too much talent and way too much time on their hands. Oh yes, make sure you hit the FULL SCREEN button and watch this thing in full screen glory.

Personally, I’m all for space junk – we should be shooting all our trash into a ring like orbit in space around the earth and then our great great great grand kids would have these amazing rings to marvel at and they would thank the wasteful ways of the past.

Sonic Pistol Shrimp

I’m still not sure I believe this, but it comes from the BBC so I guess it must be true. This species of shrimp has a unique way of catching its prey – it stuns them with a massive sound wave. I’m not even going to try to explain, see for yourself:

I wonder what they taste like?

Scales Vs Other measuring tools

Having just finished our latest cookbook I was struck by the words of wisdom from Gizmodo arguing that we should be using scales for ALL our measurements in our recipes. The argument goes something like this:

Recipes work better when you weigh ingredients. A cup of flour can weigh between 4 and 6 ounces. That means if you’ve got a bread or cake recipe that calls for 4 cups of flour, you might measure out 16 ounces or 24 ounces—a 50% difference in the main ingredient! . . . Measuring is easier and cleaner and results in fewer dirty measuring cups when you use a scale. You can measure everything right into your mixing bowl.

Makes sense to me – you can read more here:

The Kitchen Scale, Unsung Hero of Great Cooking – Kitchen scales – Gizmodo.

Honey bird talks to humans

Amazing video about the relationship honey birds have with african tribesmen that has evolved over thousands of years. The wild honey birds lead the hunters to wild bees’ nests so the hunters can get the honey – in return the hunters leave some of the honey out to reward the birds. Fascinating!

Inland sea disappears

Thanks to NASA you can see the effect that man has on the environment. Below is a photo of the Aral sea – the word’s 4th largest inland sea.

Rivers were diverted, dams were added to irrigate cotton farms etc. As a result, towns that lined the shores of the sea and derived their economy from fishing are now abandoned. Sometimes it takes a view from space to see just how fragile our planet is and what impact we are having on this planet.

Luminescent Mushrooms

Wandering around the restaurant last night I noticed some glowing dots coming from a log in the garden. Upon closer examination they were coming from tiny mushrooms. The light is bright enough to catch your eye but still took nearly 20 seconds of exposure to bring you this photo:

The largest mushroom cap is about the size of your finger nail.

They seem to spring up after heavy pro-longed rain and apparently as they grow, a chemical reaction involving luciferin (a light-emitting pigment contained within the mushrooms) occurs, causes them to glow a ghostly green.

Jupiter slipping behind the sun

There’s a reason you should never look at the sun – that’s because NASA does it for you and when they do they see cool stuff like Jupiter and its moons travelling behind the sun – if you were to do it you’d see your retinas fried:

That mild green glow on the left side of the sun is billions of tons of plasma blasting off the surface into outerspace.

Sun melts steel

Remember Mythbusters tried to work out if Archimedes really did defeat an invading navy by setting fire to their boats with a parabolic mirror. Behold the power of the sun …