Around 1870, a tiny Chinese insect turned up in farm fields around the city of San Jose, California. The creature would inject a syringe-like mouthpart into a plant and suck up the juices. It grew a plate-like shield that covered its entire body, out from which new insects would eventually emerge. The San Jose scale, as the insect came to be known, spread quickly through the United States and Canada, leaving ravaged orchards in its path. “There is perhaps no insect capable of causing greater damage to fruit interests in the United States, or perhaps the world, than the San Jose scale,” one entomologist declared.
In 1991, a 21-year-old Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds got annoyed. He had bought a personal computer to use at home, but he couldn’t find an operating system for it that was as robust as Unix, the system he used on the computers at the University of Helsinki. So he wrote one. He posted it online, free for anyone to download. But he required that anyone who figured out a way to make it better would have share the improvement with everyone else who used the system. Torvalds would later tell Wired that his motives were not noble. “I didn’t want the headache of trying to deal with parts of the operating system that I saw as the crap work,” he said. “I wanted help.”
Ivanka writes,
I got this last week and as I’m sure you know, it’s the second law of thermodynamics (the original equation, by Clausius) before -N even represented entropy. This is a strange story, because I’m not a physics or math major, I’m a female philosophy person.
I really do love physics though, and I’m about to leave my home country and all my undergrad friends behind and go and do my MSc at LSE. So the sentiment behind this is that now, after undergrad, we begin to disseminate. Entropy.
It’s also a great boyfriend filtration system:
‘Can I have your number?’
‘Wait, what’s this mean?’
‘Um… I don’t know?’
‘Too bad, you were cute’ (walk off)
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published May 2, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Scicurious, a blogger at Neurotopia with a PhD in physiology, writes,
The molecule is caffeine, and the tattoo itself was designed by artist Glendon Mellow of The Flying Trilobite. I got it to celebrate my PhD.
Why caffeine, you ask?
1) I had a friend once tell me that my friendship was like a hot cup of coffee. Warm, vivacious, stimulating, and comforting. It was one of the best compliments I ever received.
2) I have spent the last six years of my life studying drugs in various forms. Caffeine always spoke to me as a stimulant, because it is so different from other traditional drugs classified as stimulants. I’ve always been a little different myself.
3) I also spent the past six years studying various neurotransmitters. I will spend more years studying different neurotransmitters. Which ones I study and why will change over time, but caffeine will be with me through all of it. 🙂
Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.
Originally published May 2, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
What will the world be like when your genome sequence costs less than a cell phone? A couple days ago I went to Cambridge, Mass. to find out.