Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2024 i Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children

Our world is all about information. People are constantly measuring and observing. We measure the height of snow or the size of sunspots. We track giraffe herds or subway riders. We count customers or concert tickets or veggie burgers. Then we collect those facts into groups called data. It’s a lot of data. Every day about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created. How much is that? Let’s take a not-so-new but concrete example. Say, you get the movie Inside Out 2 on a Blu-ray disc when it comes out. When the movie’s picture and sound files are stored on that disc, they become 25 gigabytes of data. So, one Blu-ray movie equals 25,000,000,000 bytes. That already sounds like a lot of data. But you’d need 10 million discs to…

Scroll through social media, glance at an ad, watch the news, or pay attention to politics. You’ll see them: Graphs. Charts. Data visualizations. They’re everywhere. Data visualizations, graphs, and charts are pictures representing data or numbers. On the one hand, graphs can inform, explain, and enlighten. That’s especially true when they’re well designed. On the other hand, they can misinform or mislead you. Fortunately, you can learn to spot tricks by becoming a data decoder. ››The Case of the Cut-Off Axis When Stephanie Evergreen sorted through her junk mail one day, something caught her eye. It was a postcard from an energy company. “I’ll never forget it,” says Evergreen, a data visualization expert and author. “They had included this bar graph of how much money a person would save by…

Did you think you’d find math in an unruly quilt or crinkly bead creature? No? Think again. Geometry offers all sorts of mind-bending constructions to inspire artists. Mathematician and sculptor Helaman Ferguson (1940– ) created a wrinkly hyperbolic quilt with four pentagons meeting at each corner. What does that mean exactly? To better understand, start by thinking of triangles. If you draw any triangle on a sheet of paper and add up its three interior angles, the result is always 180 degrees. When you draw a triangle on a saddle-shaped surface, however, the angles add up to fewer than 180 degrees. Just as a flat surface is a piece of the infinite mathematical object known as the Euclidean plane, so a saddle-shaped surface is a tiny piece of what mathematicians…

Al Dente Greetings, people from planet Earth. I am the Über General and Head Designer of the country Togalini. Togalini is the country of pasta. We have many states: Angel Hair, Ravioli, Spaghetti, Ramen, The Province of Ramen, The Republic of “Mmm, Dino Nuggies,” Alfredo, Macaroni, Noodle, Romano, and Pasgetti. It’s a lot, but we are the second biggest country on our planet. The capital of our country is Meatball. Do you want to hear the origin story of Pasgetti?... I’ll take that as a yes! Spaghetti and Pasgetti used to be one state, but all the little kids who were born there started calling it “Pasgetti.” AND THE REST IS HISTORY! OK, that was a little dramatic… ANYWAY, a lot of our subjects have been requesting you to write…

A hurricane slams a coastal city with wind, rain, and waves. People are trapped on rooftops or cut off from food and water. But roads are blocked. Cell phone calls can’t get through. Those responding to an emergency need to know where the worst damage is. This helps them quickly repair the services that help keep people safe. Have three hospitals lost power, or only two? Are the fire stations operating? Which assisted living facility, or sewage treatment plant, is under water? And which roads and bridges are still open for delivering precious electric generators, water, and other supplies? TIME AND PLACE These questions are all related to geography: where things are on the Earth, what shape they’re in, and how to reach them. Maps usually help us with this,…

YOU MAY have heard the saying “numbers never lie.” It seems reasonable enough. Generally, gathering data or statistics leads to the truth. If a baseball team manager needs to choose between two different players, they may compare numbers. Stats like batting average or on-base percentage measure players’ performance in games. So, the manager can pick the player who consistently performs the best. In all sorts of sports, numbers help build the best teams possible. And in business, numbers and statistics typically guide major decisions. Numbers usually represent reality in a way that instinct, emotions, and hunches cannot. But not always. Numbers may not lie, but people have been known to. And people are still those usually responsible for gathering and analyzing numbers. During this process, people may lie on purpose.…

>> GEOMAGNETIC STORMS Auroras Put on a Global Show Auroras are a natural electrical phenomenon that produce reddish and green light in the skies. They can usually be seen near Earth’s northern and southern poles. In the north, they’re known as the aurora borealis or Northern Lights, while in the south they’re called aurora australis or Southern Lights. In the north, they’re usually seen in the northern parts of Alaska, Canada, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, as well as all of Iceland. But in May, auroras were seen in all 50 states as well as Puerto Rico and the Bahamas. They also appeared in Mexico, Italy, Austria, and India. In the Southern Hemisphere, they could be seen in Argentina and Chile, and Australia and New Zealand. This light show was a…

“Artists can help us look at data differently and find alternative ways of thinking about it.” With these words, Nathalie Miebach explains why she creates art that symbolizes weather data. Her three-dimensional woven sculptures are not only beautiful; they are also scientifically accurate. Miebach’s works of art can help viewers better understand weather patterns. Miebach trained as a sculptor at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. A lifelong learner, she has also taken several science courses. Miebach teaches art classes across the country, and her work has appeared in more than 100 museum and gallery exhibitions. She likes to play around with the categories of art and science. By using artistic processes and materials, she makes us rethink the traditional ways scientists present information. At the same time, she…

Science@Work Carrie C. Wall has one of the best jobs ever. She’s a marine scientist who has studied sea lions in Alaska, tracked dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, and dived deep underwater around the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Today, Wall works at the University of Colorado Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science (CIRES). Since 2013, she has led the development of an archive for water column sonar data at the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. What does all that mean? I have no idea, but since she also happens to be my little sister, I thought I’d give her a call and find out exactly what she’s doing, and why it’s so important. HEY SIS. SO AN ARCHIVE FOR WATER COLUMN SONAR DATA. BREAK THAT DOWN…

Science@Work Daniel Young is good at making connections between seemingly unconnected things. He’s studied many different subjects, such as music, dance, psychology, graphic design, information technology, and languages. He’s worked in mostly design-related positions for Google on various teams in New York, Switzerland, and most recently Northern California. But he’s also an artist whose creations connect art and data. That may sound complicated, but Young says his work is about making things simpler. HOW DO YOU SEE YOUR JOB? I see myself working in a kind of subfield within both visual design and interactive design. It’s somewhere between a real digital product design and science fiction. WHAT LED TO YOUR INTEREST IN THIS TYPE OF DESIGN? I am fascinated with the idea of technology being a part of the creative…