Science often advances when somebody comes up with a new method, but sometimes that method is a new machine. When my wife  and I were courting, as it was still called in them there days, we spent a ceryain amount of time in swamps, attaching cobalt chloride paper to the leaves of assorted Banksias, so she could see how long they took to change colour.  I was no use on the colour changes, being fairly "colour blind", but at least I could do the hack work and provide support.

Our daughter, of whom we are excessively proud, combines being a provider of grandchildren with being a post-doc who uses whizz-bang machines. In particular, she uses a laser to measure something similar to what my wife assessed with coloured bits of paper. That led us, while driving to yum cha this morning, to reflect on how things have changed.  I recalled that in 1988, the Irish PM (I think it was Bertie Ahern, but don't hold me to that) came to Australia and presented us with a file with all the convicts who left Ireland, plus their details, in it.

There was a problem: at 40 megabytes, the file was too large to load on any computer that we had, so we needed to set it aside until technology caught up. A couple of weeks ago, I went out to talk to students at Birrong Girls' High about the year 1859 from a particular viewpoint, and I took a PowerPoint file of artworks from the period that was almost 40 megabytes.  I carried it on a USB thumbstick, along with a huge range of other files that I might have needed, which used up almost none of the 2 gigabytes that it offered.  The thumbstick cost me about one millionth of what that much memory would have cost me in 1981: if you factor in
inflation, you can make that one five-millionth!

We lose track of the way things are changing. As Robyn Williams observed today, history is something we only perceive in hindsight.  All the same, we keep increasing our expectations.  Now, when somebody dies, it is a matter for fury and demands of "why the doctors did not do more?"

In the end, I suspect that we will run out of new machines, new meters, new metrics, and I wonder how society will react to that.  Just as economists never saw the possibility that the economy might stop growing, we are unprepared for science to stop growing.  I wonder if we should start to brace ourselves?

This follows on from the two previous posts.

There are certain rules-of-thumb that classifiers use when they are sorting out animals. Carl von Linné, better known to us by his own Latin name, Linnaeus, was the chap who came up with Latin names or binomials for plants and animals.

All Linnaeus wanted was a handy tag that could be used to indicate a particular plant.  There are two hemlocks, one of which gave Socrates his gentle death, and another which causes vile and painful decease, and in herbal medicine, there are quite a few other confusions possible. Quite a few of them might be disastrous.

So what old Linnaeus wanted was a straightforward method for information storage and retrieval. Linnaeus found that with plants, the reproductive bits worked best, but he got into a portic frenzy of talk about marriage beds and the like, and a chap called Johannes Siegesbeck objected. He called the Linnaean sexual emphasis "loathsome harlotry". Linnaeus repaid this compliment by selecting a small and useless weed and naming it Siegesbeckia.

Anyhow, we still use the same methods today, but with mammals, the key feature to look at is teeth, the numbers of upper and lower incisors, canines, premolars and molars, because over evolution, these patterns have remained pretty steady.  Teeth are great when you are working with remains, because teeth are tough and teeth last, almost forever.  No annoying scavengers come along and crunch the teeth.  Teeth are hard, and there's nothing inside

When botanist Robert Brown reported the first specimen of a koala in 1803, even if he called it Didelphis (possum), he saw that it resembled a wombat. Brown wrote from Sydney to Sir Joseph Banks:
A new and remarkable species of Didelphis has been lately brought in from the south of Botany Bay. It is called by the natives coloo or coola, and most nearly approaches to the wombat, from which it differs in the number of its teeth and in several other circumstances.

It is only in the past 30 or 40 years that scientists have agreed to ignore dentition, the arrangement of the teeth, which links the koala to the possum. Like Brown, we now group the koala with the wombat, not with the possum, after getting it wrong for 170 years.

Just as you can make a panda into either a bear or a raccoon, depending on the emphasis you make, so you could make the koala into either a fat possum or an arboreal wombat, but people used the patterns of the teeth, the dentition or dental formula, because it was tradition.  Besides, teeth worked in all sorts of places. In Africa, you can date the beds where pre-human fossils are found by identifying the suid (pig family) teeth that are scattered around.

On teeth, the standard all-purpose diagnostic, koalas go with the possums, but scientists are always willing to question things, so the old classification was used, but people rumbled about the contradictions. There was something not right about the koala.

The wombat digs burrows, and female wombats avoid getting a pouch full of dirt by having a pouch that opens at the back, furthest from the head.  This plan makes sense in a horizontal burrowing mammal, but not in an animal that climbs trees. One famous old lady of the koala genus at Taronga Zoo is said to have had a pouch so loose that her babies fell out, so she had to be fitted with a clip to keep the pouch safe when she had a new young'un.

It was only in the late 1960s, when scientists learned ways of typing blood sera that they could show that the koala was really a wombat-up-a-tree. The new method of sorting out pandas is a great deal easier!

And where is this leading? Well, a book of mine, just about to come out in the US, has what is now a galling error, I think.  I seem to recall suggesting that we would never  be able to take pictures of planets around other stars, but the clever-clogses at NASA have done just that!

It all depends on either having new equipment, or using old equipment in clever new ways, and that is a theme I want to return to later. But just imagine taking the first photos of not one, but three planets!

Note that this is a sequel to the entry below.

Edward Tyson (1651 - 1708) is one of the unsung heroes of science, partly because he persuaded Robert Hooke to expend seven shillings and sixpence for a small (43 kg, 95 pounds) porpoise from a London fishmonger, for dissection. At a time when John Ray still classified the porpoise as a fish, Tyson's 'Anatomy of a Porpess', published in 1680, showed people the danger of judging something by its outside appearance.

Said Tyson:
"If we view a Porpess on the outside, there is nothing more than a Fish, but if we look within, there is nothing less."

Tyson's major contribution to science came when he dissected an infant chimpanzee which had died after being brought to London from Angola. While he referred to it as both a 'pygmie' and an 'Orang-Outang', the animal was without any doubt a chimpanzee, but Tyson's book, filled with illustrations of the animal, showed for the first time just how close humans were to the other animals.

This is the sort of awareness that turns fact-fossicking and nature-dabbling into science.

If Copernicus had removed the earth from the centre of the universe, now Tyson and his assistant, William Cowper, helped to remove Homo sapiens from a central position in creation. This was the 'missing link' between humans and the whole of 'lower' creation. One of the crucial steps towards a discovery of evolution had just happened.

There was one more step needed, though, and that was getting an appropriate system up and running that would do the accounts for biologists, an  information storage and retrieval system. At the time, they called it classification, but these days, we call it taxonomy. In the book of Genesis, Adam just called it the naming of things, but it was haphazard. Science con't work on haphazard: science needs order and planning. And systems.

A good system takes in all of the available data and places them in pigeon-holes from which you can retrieve them. It also allows the pigeon-holes to be reallocated or relocated where necessary, and it has a supply of spare pigeon-holes, or the facility to add them when new pigeons (or buzzards, budgerigars or rocs) turn up. The koala is a case in point, and that will bring us to floppy pouches, which will take me in turn to machines that go ping!

Taxonomy is the art of classifying living things so we can store and retrieve information. That was how it began, but these days, it also serves as a handy account of how things hang together in an evolutionary sense. Sometimes, though, what you believe depends on the data you use.

For example, pandas are sometimes assumed to be bears, but some people regard them as closer to the raccoons. Now comes the news that a quick gene map of the panda reveals the truth: pandas are funny bears, not weird raccoons.

There can be no arguing with the underlying chemistry: porpoises and ichthyosaurs may look rather like fish, but that is because evolution shaped the. If you look at genes and blood proteins and such like, the answers stand out.

The ancient Greeks lacked that sort of subtle methodology, but they still had eyes, and they could see how some creatures strained the standard boundaries of taxonomy.

 Aesop was a legendary Greek writer of fables, or so we believe.  Most of whose tales were probably later additions to any he may have created. Clearly Aesop, or somebody who wrote one of 'his' tales for him, knew something of anatomy and classification:

The Bat and the Weasels

A Bat who fell upon the ground and was caught by a Weasel pleaded to be spared his life. The Weasel refused, saying that he was by nature the enemy of all birds. The Bat assured him that he was not a bird, but a mouse, and thus was set free. Shortly afterwards the Bat again fell to the ground and was caught by another Weasel, whom he likewise entreated not to eat him. The Weasel said that he had a special hostility to mice. The Bat assured him that he was not a mouse, but a bird, and thus a second time escaped.

It is wise to turn circumstances to good account.

As Jacques Monod reminds us, we often get the impression that the ancients knew nothing, but that leaves out Aristotle, who knew that whales were mammals, not fish, though when Edward Tyson dissected his porpoise, that particular piece of knowledge was just about buried and forgotten. Still, the German word for 'bat' is fledermaus, or 'flying mouse', while the term 'flittermouse' is known in English as far back as 1547.

But who was this Edward Tyson?  I'll get back to you on that.  He managed to get Robert Hooke to pony up 7/6, a lot of money in those days, to buy a 95 pound (43 kg) "porpess" in about 1679.

That will take us on to coolahs, possum teeth and floppy pouches.  I promise.

 Look, I can't actually finish off a blog entry with the heroine strapped to the train tracks, so this is the next best thing!

I am working in the 1850s again, and I have just chanced on the quote below in Scientific American, 30/10/1852, p. 54.  Scientific American used to have problems with 'boomerang' -- in another issue, they called it a "boomering".  Note to old salts: the usage "knots per hour" was normal in the 1850s, and blowing hard will not change that.

Bomerang Propeller. The last files of the Sydney Morning Herald contain accounts of a new propeller invented by Sir Thomas Mitchell, the Surveyor General of New South Wales, a trial of which in a small steamer at that port had just excited great interest. It is called the Bomerang Propeller, and is constructed on the principle of the weapon of that name used by the natives to kill game. Although the experiment was only on a small and imperfect scale, a speed of 12 knots an hour against a head wind is stated to have been obtained. The instrument is described to combine great strength and simplicity, while it has also the advantage that its motion in the water causes but a comparatively slight agitation, so that it is capable of being adapted to canal boats as well as to other vessels. At the conclusion of the trial Sir Thomas Mitchell expressed his conviction “that the weapon of the earliest inhabitants of Australia has now led to the determination mathematically of the true form by which alone, on the screw principle, high speed on water can be obtained.”  

Now I am curious: has anybody anything else on this?

The song that contained those lyrics was, allegedly, one of the reasons why W S Gilbert was never knighted. Oh well, bang go my chances of a K!

I learn from today's reading that you can tell, by looking at an office or a bedroom, what political leanings somebody has!  Links don't seem to be working today, sohere is the URL:

http://www.livescience.com/culture/080925-conservative-liberal.html

Basically, liberals are scruffy, colourful and untidy, conservatives are more austere, neat, tidy and grey.  Well, my colour sense isn't all that hot, but I am the king of untidy.

There are other indicators like the range of books, and at least count, I had some 2025 books listed at www.goodreads.com and those are in about 50 categories.

Oh well, I guess I'm a liberal then.

Coming right up: how to tell somebody's religious views from the way they read the newspaper.

Science is about understanding and finding out.  It is not a matter of air-heads running around flapping their hands and their mouths.

In the past few years, the CSIRO has been desperately deficient science, because staff have been furiously at work trying to make the CSIRO look good. Spin doctors with little understanding of science have been to the fore.  I am delighted to see that the architect of this fiasco has finally been replaced by a real scientist.

Long may the CSIRO prosper!