A Fool’s Thoughts

No i’m not talking about some pervert kind of incest, but about the love for my newborn daughter.In july 2007 my wife gave birth to a lovely girl, our first child. Being a father and a wannabe scientist this gave me the opportunity to analyse my feelings for both my wife and my daughter. My wife and i are together for almost eight years now. This means that the first feelings of being in love have is replaced by real love. Just after the birth of my daughter my feelings of being in love for my wife grew again. Seeing her so happily playing with our child. This was to be expected ofcourse. But a very strange (to me) fenonemon happened alongside with it. I found myself really in love with my daughter. Even now, four months after she was born, i still feel butterflies in my stomach when she wakes up in the morning and gives me a big smile.

I always thought that the feeling of being in love has something to do with finding a partner. When you first meet someone you are attracked to, you start to feel the well-known butterflies. Some people confuse lust with being in love. In my opinion lust is just a short physical and chemical reaction that triggers arousal while being in love is a more lasting feeling. Things may start off as lust and grow into being in love or you might feel attracked (not physically per se) to someone from the start. The feeling of being in love is a real feeling.

When we meet someone, a range of chemicals build up in our bodies. Phenylethylamine (PEA) is believed to be a neuromodulator. That is chemical that resides in the fluid in the brain that surrounds the neurons. It plays a role in transmitting information between neurons. This is the famous chemical found in chocolate that many people believe to stimulate sexual arousal. Other chemicals are dopamine and norepinephrine. Dopamine makes us feel good while norepinephrine stimulates another well-known chemical called adrealine. The combination of these chemicals makes that we feel very happy all the time. In evolutionary terms this means that we are happy when we spend time with our partner (to be). This makes the chances of mating higher and thus producing offspring. After a while the spark diminishes and other chemicals kick in (called endorphins). Endorphine are natural pain-killers and makes us feel calm. It is these that make us stay with the same partner for a longer time thus increasing the odds of raising a child more succesfully.

So why am i feeling in love with my daughter? Wouldn’t it be better if i would feel love (as in endorphines) instead of being in love (dopamines). Both have to do with wanting to be with the child and being protective. As a father i know that i wanted to show my daughter to everyone and i could not talk about anything else (boring lots of friends with it). Why would this behaviour be evolutionairy beneficial? Being a social species it is good to let others of the society know that a new child is born. This makes others look after the child to giving the parents more freedom to fourage for food. But this still doesn’t explain why we feel butterflies instead of love.

When i try to find information about this i only find studies that recognize the presence of the endorphins but not the presence of PEA. Maybe there is a difference between maternal and paternal love, but i recall my wife having told about butterflies too. If there is anyone that can shed a light on this i would like to here from it. Please comment this article if you like

sources:
http://www.cyberparent.com/love/love-being-in-love-1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenethylamine
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,977754,00.html

We man (as in mankind) have the arrogance to think we are the only species who talk. But are we?
we are probably the only species who can talk about anything we like but if we widen our definition of talking, we will find that more animals use complicated forms of comminication.

First we must define talking. If we go back to the reason why we started talking, we know that communication is very important for species who live in close groups. The bigger the group the more important it is to be able to communicate.
Take Penguins for instance. If you are a mother or a father jumping up from the icy waters of Antartica, you must be able to find your ofspring amongst the thousands of brethren. This can be done by sight. Every penguin has it’s own color pattern which can easily be used for recognition.

Recent studies by the Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse (France) on King Penguins shows that the parents use a complicated pattern of sounds to find their chicks. They use a two-voice generation with strong frequency modulations and different loudness beats to call their chicks. The child recognises the call and responds by calling back and running in the direction of the originating call.Is this talking? It is a form of communication but as far as we know the communication contains little information more than “Here am i”. An important feat of talking is the richness of information contained in the communication. A language has well-defined structures. By changing the order of the language-elements (the words, sounds etc) the meaning (information) of the sentence changes.
If we redefine talking as communicating different types of information through the same system (sounds, scents, images) from one individual to one or a group of other individuals, we might find that we are not the only species who talks.

So which animals use these intricated patterns to communicate information?

Ants: many of you might know that ants use scents to mark the paths to food. This is called ‘foraging communication’. When returning from a succesfull foraging an ant leaves a trail of a pheromone to signal other ants. The other ants smell the pheromones and will walk the trail and find the food. When returning they also leave a trial of pheromones thus strenghtening the path.
First it was thought that the ants use one type of pheromone to signal to other ants. But more recent research on Pharao’s Ants shows that multiple types of pheromones are used. Some of these pheromones react with eachother to create a longlasting scent path (thus creating long term memory). Other combinations diminish the trails (short term memory) or even create ‘forbidden’ trails (used for unrewarding sidetrails on a rewarding main path).
Some types of ants use pheromones to agitate the soldiers when a nearby nest of competing ants is found. The soldiers will raid the other nest killing the other ants for food or taking hostages (Amazon ants take larvae to use as slaves).
The question is ofcourse, is this talking? In the case of laying trails, the information is stored in the type of pheromone and the trail itself. To remove the trail is to remove the information. It is unusefull to communicate more complicated information like saying “good morning”.

Bees: In addition to using pheromones to trigger responses, bees use a complex combination of movements and tail-wiggling to indicate of source of food. In Honeybees different dances which send different signals have been discovered.
A waggle dance is used to direct workers to the food source (this includes direction and distance) and to encorage workers to get the food. A different so called virbration dance is used to direct the workers to the ‘dancefloor’ where returning bees make their waggle dance. A third trembling dance is used to call the workers to collect the returned nectar.

Elephants: After study in what is called the Dr. Dolittle project. Researchers record the sounds elephants are making and videotape their behaviour. By comparing the sounds and the corresponding behaviour conclusions about the information communicated can be drawn. They found out that the ’speech’ contains information about inidividual identification, emotion and function. They even found out that when subordinate elephants are around higher placed members of their society, their voices show signs of stress. Just as humans having trembling voices when they are talking to their bosses.

Dolphins: The wild dolphin project is an on going research program to learn about the behaviour of atlantic spotted dolphins and bottlenose dolphins. Dolphins use several different vocalizations. The well known high frequency clicks are mainly used for echolocation. They ’see’ their environment by building a mindmap of their environment using their sonar. Although it is suspected that a dolphin can hear and interpret other dolphin’s sonar it is normally not used for social interaction. Other sounds the dophins make are called whistles and burst-pulsed sounds (barks, squeaks, thunks, gulps, yelps etc). They have been associated with social behaviour. Some of these sounds have been closely studied in their social context. These studies show that these sounds can be connected to emotions like fear, aggression, sexual play, chase, alarm, distress, feeding, courtship etc. Whether dolphins can actually speak or just vocalize their emotions is unknown. The studies do show an inmense range of different sounds and sound combinations. They seem to have sounds for all kinds of social behaviour (mother/calf reunions, courtship and all kinds of affiliation). Just seeing the enormous number of sounds leads me to believe that dolphins in fact communicate in such a complex way that you could call it talking.

Apes: We know that apes (except from us) do not use vocal speech much. Apes have the abillity to produce several different sounds but they lack the complex physical structures (face, throat, larynx, lips etc) we have.
Gorillas and other great apes have their own forms of verbal communication and physical gestures, says Dawn St. George, director of conservation education at the Zoologicial Society of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
“They have facial, hand, and verbal gestures to communicate danger, or the discovery of a food source,” said St. George, an expert in the field of popular genetics in great apes. She says gorillas that interact with humans develop additional gestures, including hugs and other signs of affection.

In her book “Apes, Language, and the Human Mind” Sue Savage-Rumbaugh describes the language abillities of a bonobo called Kanzi. Kanzi has learned to use human language using a board of pictograms which describe nouns. She can understand spoken language (English) and use it in a way equal to a two year old human child. The research done by Sue has led scientists to believe that apes are capable of learning a complex language at least to some extent. In a program on National Geographic i once saw a nice example of a chimpansee using his skills to communicate. In a set-up test a keeper placed a favoured food (an apple) in a box and locked it with a key. This was all done insight the view of the chimp. The keeper than placed the key somewhere in the room. The place of the key was only known to the keeper and the chimp. The keeper left the the room. After that a second keeper came into the room. The idea was to see if the chimp would be able to direct the keeper not only to the key, but also to the box with the apple. It turned out that the chimp did indeed know how to direct the second keeper to the apple. It is unknown to me how many times this experiment had already been carried out and in what way the second keeper was really unaware of the position of the key. But let us for now assume that the chimpansee indeed grasped the general idea of the experiment and had not learned to do a trick. This has a lot of implications.

First the chimp must be able to remember the apple in the box and the way it was locked. It would have to be an understanding of the workings of a lock and a key. Then it would have to remember the place of the key. Secondly it has to know that the second keeper is a new person who did not experience the placing of the apple and the key. The ape must be aware of the fact that the second keeper has knowledge of neither the key nor the box with the apple. Then he must find a way to direct the keeper to the key and after that to the box. The order in which to do that is imported because directing to the box first does not enable the keeper to open it. This all requires a sophisticated planning and knowledge of the workings of it’s surroundings. By making it clear to the keeper he shows that the ape is capable of consious thought which in my opinion is nessecary for high level communication.

Conclusion: All of the above examples do not prove that animals can talk. And if they do talk, the level of communication differs much between species and maybe even within one species. Just as all humans are not equally capable of fluently speaking. I my opinion many animal species use some form of communication to transfer important information. One thing can be said though. The more intelligent a species is, the more sophisticated it’s ‘language’ seems to be. I think in the coming years as more research on this topic is done, we might be supprised about the findings that comes out of that research.

Sources:
http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/fulltext?uid=PIIS0960982206018343
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/09/060926-dolittle-project.html
http://speechlab.eece.mu.edu/dolittle/
http://oceanwidescience.org/docs/4ch-UDDAS.html
http://www.wilddolphinproject.com/
http://www.trustedpartner.com/docs/library/000059/Hearing%20by%20whales%20Herzing%202000.pdf
Apes, Language, and the Human Mind, E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Taylor J. Talbot, S. Shanker , ISBN 0195109864

When i had my breakfast this morning, i wanted to have a cracker with sugar. When i opened the sugar bowl i noticed that there were a lot of lumps in it. So i found myself wondering how the lumping occurs and why the lumps still exist after the sugar has dried up again.

We all know (i expect) that if you have a bowl or pot of sugar or salt and you let it get wet, that lumps of sugar/salt are going to form. If you let the bowl dry the lumps still exist until you manually break them up. This is true for sugar and salt but not for sand. If you wet sand it will stick until it dries. Then the sand will break up into little grains once more.

Being curious by nature i started looking for an answer on the internet. The problem with these things is to find the right keywords. After browsing through many recipe, bakery and cooking sites i didn’t find what i was looking for. I suspected the lumping had to do with the crystals of sugar and salt being of a different nature that sand, i tried keywords like “sugar, crystals, lumping” etc. But still no results. Then i found an article in the scholar section of Google which was titled “Sugar: a user’s guide to sucrose”. This article is an abstract of a book about sugar as you can guess. It kind of held the answer to my question.

As i expected the degree of moisture in the sugar defines the lumping or caking as it is officially called. There are three kinds of moisture that can be distinguised. The first type is called ‘included’ and is the syrup within the crystals. A syrup is a solution of water and sugar. This syrup is trapped while the crystals are formed. The second kind of moisture is called ‘bound’. This is a thin layer of syrup on the outside of the crystals. This syrup slowly crystalizes and frees the moisture contained in it. This moisture is the third kind and it is referred to as ‘free moisture’. When the sugar is in a surrounding of high humidity. The free moisture will be taken up into the bound syrup making the crystals ’sticky’. When the sugar in the bowl dries up, the moisture will be freed again thus crystalizing the syrup. When pressure is applied during this process, the crystals are pressed together when the syrup crystalizes. Causing the crystals to stick together even when the moisture itself is gone. The solution of water and sugar (the syrup) is actually the key to the lumping.

When sand is made wet, no sand is actually dissolved in the water. In fact sand is insoluble in water. This means that the molecules of the sand stick together and do not disperse among the water molecules. The is no such a thing as sand syrup. The silicon crystals (which sand is mostly made of) do not have a sticky surface that crystalizes when the sand is dried. This is the reason that sand will only stick while it is wet. Ofcourse we all know from our time as a kid that sand will stick when a lot of pressure is applied. You could make a ball of sand when pressing it hard between your hands. This stickyness comes from the different sizes of the sand grains. The grains will ‘hook’ into each other and sort of cling to each other. This is done on grain level and not on molecular level as it is with sugar and salt.

So now we know how sugar lumps come into existence and how it still sticks when the sugar has dried up. Another one of life’s mysteries solved.

source: Sugar: a user’s guide to sucrose, Neil L. Pennington, Charles W. Baker

Researchers at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have recently been able penetrate some of the mystics of the beginning of our universe. They collide the nuclei of atomic particles to simmulate the conditions of the first few microseconds of our universe. These collisions generate extremely hot, dense bursts of matter and energy. By pumping the collisions they try to discover new particles and thus verify and improve the theoretical models of the laws of physics. The values of the pressure, density, size and time of these collisions are so inmense that we cannot imagine their meanings anymore. In this article I try to make the numbers more imaginable by using analogies and metaphors.

I was reading an article about particle physics in the Scientific American. The article really was about the behaviour of quarks and gluons in very high collision energies. Physicists try to define which particle are created when colliding gold nuclei with almost the speed of light. I will not bother you with the exact details of the physics involved. Mainly because I don’t understand them myself.

When reading the article I came across lots of numbers of temperatures, pressures, speeds etc. These numbers really dazzled me. When I see a very large number I always try to find an analogy to understand the number. I mean, how big really is 1012? I know it’s a trillion, but what does that mean? In this article I will try find analogies for the numbers in the SA article.

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) on Long Island is used to smash heavy atoms into each other (or their nuclei to be exact). When doing this two large rings which are 3.8 km wide packed with magnetic coils are pushing the nuclei to ever higher speeds. When the nuclei have reached a speed of 99.99% of the speed of light (300.000 km/s) they will cross the two beams and let the nuclei crash into each other. This collision creates very high energies and with that all kinds of exotic particles are created. The temperature of the particle cloud is around 5 trillion degrees Celsius. The pressure reached during the collision is 1030 times the atmospheric pressure. The time that the particles exist is around 5×10-23 sec. The distance between the particles (quarks) needs to be smaller than 10-13 centimeter to make the strong nuclear force small enough to let the quarks break free.

So let’s see if we can understand these numbers. First the speed. 99.99% of the lightspeed (299.792.458 m/s) means that it will travel around the world 7.49 times each second. Within the 3.8 km ring it will pass through it’s starting point 78.885 times per second.

The temperature reached is 5 trillion (5×1012) degrees. Water melts at 0 degrees and boils at 100 degrees. Iron melts at 1510 degrees. Lead will boil at 1740 degrees, 5500 degrees is the surface of our sun. The surface of Sirius alpha (a very hot star) 32000 degrees. 300.000 degrees is the estimated temperature of the detonation of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The sun’s core is around 13.6 million degrees. So 5 trillion degrees is almost 400.000 times hotter than the core of our sun. That would make a nice suntan. “How would you like you flesh? Well done sir.”

A pressure of 1030 is hard to understand. We know that at the surface of the earth the pressure is around 1 kilogram per square centimeter or 1 Bar. When we dive into the water, the column of water above us will add extra pressure due to it’s weight. For every 10 meter we dive deeper 1 Bar of pressure will be added. So when we are at a depth of 20 meter, the pressure will be 3 bar (20 meter water + 1 for the air) The best manned military nuclear submarines can dive to a depth of around 600 meter. This means a pressure of 61 bar. Research submarines, also manned, have been known to dive to depths around 6500m. (The japanese Shinkai 6500). Unmanned submarines can dive to the bottom of some of earth’s deepests oceans (Here the Kaiko holds the record of 10.000m). This means they can withstand a pressure of 1000 (103) Bar. Let’s stick to this analogy and see how deep an ocean we would have to dive to create a pressure of 1030. The ocean has to be 1029 meter or 1026 kilometer deep. This is quite deep as the distance from the Sun to our earth is around 149.6 million kilometer (1 Astronomical Unit). The distance from the Sun to pluto, the farthest planet in our solar system, is 39.5 AU. So we would need an ocean that would reach far past pluto. It would even be billions of times deeper than that. That is dazzling indeed.

The next dazzling number is the distance between the particles that are created, 10-13 centimeter. So what is a very thin object that we can still imagine. The human hair. A human hair in average is 100 µm (one hundredth of a centimeter) wide. If we cut an average human hair in half, it would be 50 µm thick. Would we do this again it would be 25 µm and so on. So how many times would we have to slice the hair to get a thickness of 10-13 cm? If we take the hair and slice it in two exact halves every time, we have to slice the slices 37 times to create a hair of around 10-13 centimeter. Ofcourse at that time we are at subatom sizes which makes slicing a bit difficult.

Hopefully you can better imagine the impact of these numbers by now. Or at least understand that the research on quarks, muons, gluons, bosons and other exotic particles combines extremities of all areas of physics.

Source: Scientific American, issue may 2006, the first few microseconds, Micheal Riordan and William A. Zajc

Double thoughts about the palm plantations and rainforest in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Last summer my girlfriend (now my wife) and me had a 28 day vacation to the Malaysian part of the Island Borneo. We travelled with a small group of Dutch people. We had a very good time over there with lots of hikings through the jungle. We visited some local tribes, the Iban and stayed with them for a couple of days. Although these tribes have been visited by tourists a couple of years now, the life they live is still quite primitive (in our view). The first thing I noticed was that they have a very different perception about the animal life around them. While we see animal wildlife (especially in Borneo) see as things we must protect, they see them as food. They eat literally everything that has the guts to come near the village. They don’t see see the rare probiscus monkeys as endangered species but like something that is very tasty. There are nomadic tribes that stay in an area for a couple of months until all food resources are fully used up, then they move to an adjacent area. At first I thought this a bad thing but later I changed my view on this. We in the rich west have plenty of money and time to worry about things that happen in the world. So we say we must protect this or that animal or rainforest. For them the world is their village and maybe the closest bigger town. They have no real notice about the rest of the world and how it is destroyed (mainly by the industies of the west).

Something similar goes for the palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia. While the Malaysian government has decided to stop the cutting of the rainforest as much as possible, tghe Indonisian government still allows that area’s the size of small cities are cut down every day. Leaving the animals that depend on the rainforest for survival stranded on small separated pieces of forest. On my vacation we also travelled to the east of Malaysian Borneo where large area’s of rainforest have been cut to make way for huge palm plantations. One day we drove by one such a plantation for more than three hours. With palms as far as we could look in every direction. We all got a very sad feeling from this. The primary rainforest had to be replaced by the plantation for the palm oil that we in the west like to use in soaps and other products.

My first reaction to this was to blame the people who owned the land and the large palmoil companies. But rethinking this later on made me changed my mind. Can the local people really be blamed? For people who happen to own a piece of land containing primary rainforest the choice is quite simple. The rainforest itself does provide much income. Maybe some rubber from the rubber trees but mainly the land is unused. When a large company comes and offers a lot of money for land that you don’t use much anyway, the decision is quickly made. The cutting of the trees and building of the new plantation provide a lot of work for local people. Thus stimulating the local economy which helps the country. When the country becomes richer it can look for long term solutions on preserving the rainforest while at the same time having a healthy economy.

You might think by now that I totally approve of the the cutting of the rainforest in favor of the plantations. Which ofcourse is not true. I am a lover of any wildlife and vegetation everywhere in the world. But before accusing anyone I think that we should see the whole picture instead of just a part which many people do. So how can we solve this big problem. This is ofcourse not so easy but I think there are some short term and longer term solutions.

First we must start with ourselves. We are the ones that want to have cheap palmoil in our soaps. So the demand for the products is coming mainly from the west. By not buying products like this we can reduce the demands and with that the profits that is being made by the companies that sell the products. But this is not enough. We must somehow make the rainforest worth more when it is intact than when it is cut down for other purposes. In my opinion this can be done by ecotourism. If we tourists are willing to pay just to view the forests with all it’s animal and plantlife, people can make more money by preserving the forests and indirectly the animals.

I was very glad to see that are a couple of projects running in Malaysia where this is done. The WWF is sponsering a project called the ‘corridor of life. They buy small pieces of land to connect the separated area’s of rainforest left. Buy doing this they enlarge the living space of the larger and smaller animals in the forest. Another project called sepilok rehabilitaion center is using tourism to pay for the rehabilition of Urang Utangs. There are more projects like these two. I call upon you all to sponsor these projects and help the presevation of the rainforests on the long term.

My name is Wouter Tengeler.

I was born way back in 1968 in Holland. I live in the beautiful town of Breukelen (yes where Brooklyn got it’s name from) in Holland together with my wife to be. I run a small company named The Motion Studio multimedia productions. This company specializes in simple game development, (web)software development and training (of advanced programming techniques).

So why did I decide to start yet another weblog?

When I look around me in my world I wonder about things I encounter. Why are things the way they are? How do things work? How do they do that? etc. Does that sound vague to you? Well let me explain it.

The other day I read an article in the Scientific American. It described that scientists will be able to find a new quantum particle using a new hadron collider being build in Switserland. In the article the writer wrote about the energies involved in creating this new particle. This particle can only be measured indirectly by detecting the collisions with other (known) particles. The traces of these particles can be detected in huge dectectors (a couple of meters wide and high). There comes my first question: How can a particle with the size of around 10-29 meter be measured by such a large detector. Also the lifespan of this particle is measured in 10-30 seconds. To the best of my knowledge we have no computers with clocks that are of that accuracy. So how can they measure something with a lifespan shorter than anything that we can reference?

This weblog will be full of these kind of musings. Sometimes I will try to explain things the best I can but most of the time it will be just my thoughts trusted to this weblog. I think there are many of you out there that have the same thoughts. Maybe you can help me clear up some of the questions in life that I have.