BEARSCARE

Snow is a phenomenon regularly experienced in the upper (and sometimes lower) latitudes. For centuries scientists have argued over exactly what snow is, but over the last few decades a vague consensus has emerged: snow is frozen air, sometimes containing trace amounts of moisture. Nils Leeuwenhoek, a Danish meteorologist was kind enough to sit down for an interview.

Bearscare (BS): Mr. Leeuwenhoek, thank you for agreeing to this controversial interview.

Nils Leeuwenhoek (NL): Of course. Anytime.

BS: I understand you’ve been studying snow for, what, 30 years or so? What have you learned?

NL: With out a doubt, I can tell you it contains frozen water.

BS: And air? Oxygen?

NL: Yes, those too. Let me elaborate. In cold conditions, moisture from the clouds combines with the air to make snow. That is why it looks different than either rain or ice. It is a hybrid substance.

BS: Interesting.

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There are many conflicting opinions on snow. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a lot of it in recent weeks. Roofs have collapsed, roads have been compromised and regular, hardworking Americans have suffered. Hopefully the scientific debate will narrow in on a comprehensive explanation. Until then, bundle up.

Prime spirals are a way to visualize the distribution of prime numbers within the set of natural numbers. Accidentally discoverd by Stanislaw Ulam in 1963, the prime spirals show that there is order in the distribution of prime numbers, where one would expect randomness.

Prime numbers are those which are not composed of other numbers. For instance, 3, 5, 7, and 41 cannot be described as the product of two or more smaller numbers. Considering the set of natural numbers, one would expect that, counting up from 1, the frequency of encountering prime numbers would decrease, since the subset being considered, the set of candidate numbers to form a larger, composite number, is increasing. Surprisingly, though, prime numbers can be shown to be prominent among large composite numbers. A program I wrote is calculating that approximately 8% of large (>1,000,000) numbers are primes.

Prime spirals show that, not only do primes appear much more frequently than we would expect, but that they have structure in their positions in the list of natural numbers. During a “boring” presentation, Ulam was doodling on paper. He began writing out natural numbers with 1 in the center of the page, and circling outward. See Figure 1 [1].

Figure 1: Natural Numbers Spiral

Removing composite numbers from the picture shows the beginning of the pattern (Figure 2 [2]):

Figure 2: Prime Spiral

Look at the following sets of numbers: {37, 17, 5}, {41, 19, 5}, {19, 7, 23, 47} and {3, 13, 31}. Each set is arranged as a diagonal line traversing the spiral space. Now consider a grid that is 200×200 numbers (Figure 3 [3]):

200x200 Prime Spiral

Figure 3 obviously shows order in the position of prime numbers (each pixel is a prime number). The image shows the space which the first 400,000 natural numbers occupy. It is clear that many of these numbers are primes and they exhibit the same behavior as those in the set of the first 50 prime numbers.

So, why does this matter? No one really knows. Intuitively, we would expect far fewer prime numbers than there are. And we certainly wouldn’t expect any pattern to their occurrence. The fact that an arbitrary visualization of a expectedly random process yields order is very profound. A simple conclusion is that the very fabric of nature is ordered, that looking even at the most primal systems, i.e., the set of natural numbers, we cannot escape order. Further, we would expect that our universe, the structure of mater, everything we know is a derivation of order from disorder, but prime spirals take us back one more level of abstraction indicating that, in nature, there is no fundamental disorder. The act of counting on your fingers, the number of fish in the seas, the number of cells in your body and the number of particles in the universe all exist in a framework which is fundamentally non-random. There is invisible order within the concept of numbers itself.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ulam_spiral_howto_all_numbers.svg

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ulam_spiral_howto_primes_only.svg

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ulam_1.png

Just in: Scientists have discovered an asteroid which nearly annihilated life as we know it on planet Earth during a close fly-by. “We knew about it roughly 2 hours prior to impact,” said Dustin Forester, a NASA dispatcher who was first alerted to the threat by an anonymous amateur astronomer. He continued, “what, we were going to call CNN? No, we got on the red phone to the White House, but that’s it. Didn’t you see ‘Armageddon’? That was just a movie. Imagine what people would actually do.”

President Obama learning of imminent threat

After the brief phone interview, we asked the White House for comment. Will Bridges, the Obama Administration’s Press Secretary for Astronomical Anomalies (WHPSAA), gave the following statement: “The President was advised of the danger and was deeply troubled. He did open the vault protecting The Button, but he erred on the side of caution. Yes, we could have done something, but at what cost? The probability of the foreign body hitting our planet was less than 1 in 1,000,000, but the probability of causing mass hysteria from using The Button was 100%. What would you have done?”

2009 VA, the planet killer

The asteroid has been named by astronomers “2009 VA”. It is approximately 100 miles across and is thought to weigh about 1/100,000 the mass of Earth. “It’s a planet killer,” remarked Ron Bingham, an astronomy major at Virginia Commonwealth University, “if it had impacted, we’d all be doomed. Have you ever heard of ‘nuclear winter’? Yeah, it’s like that. This is worse than the rock that took out the dinosaurs over 60 million years ago.”

Astronomers aren’t sure yet whether our planet’s gravity will slingshot* the rock back around to impact us in the future. They’ve estimated that there’s only a 12% chance that this may occur, which isn’t satisfying AT ALL to me. So, keep checking back for end of the world updates.

*Referenced from the film “Apollo 13″

You may have seen headlines about a mysterious “blob” floating in the Arctic Ocean around the Berring Straight in Alaska. What you may not know, however, is that there is no mystery to this blob. First, though, here’s a picture of the blob.

Scientists are no strangers to strange “blobs” and references to such organisms go back past Aristotle. Currently, “we know more than you might think about these things,” explains Werner Lindenberg, a professor at Radford University. “We know the great blob is made up of billions of smaller organisms; worms, actually.” Lindenberg went on to describe an intricate system in which millions of round worms (see below) involuntarily swarm together. “They don’t do it on purpose. Well, they can’t; they just aren’t smart enough. But they induce the behavior in each other and, as a group, have been shown to possess intelligence rivaling that of a medium sized mammal, such as a rabbit or fox.”

Presently, the blob is floating through the Berring Straight and both scientists and government officials are concerned it may stay close to the coast and enter the Puget Sound. “Oh yeah, FEMA knows. We alerted them to this thing a week ago,” replied Amos McMillan, a Washington State Coast Guard spokesman. He went on to explain that, apparently, President Oabama has assigned Vice President Biden to run a taskforce within FEMA to make sure that the “Katrina fiasco” isn’t repeated. “That was just a hurricane,” a figure claimed to be Biden says on a videotape provided by McMillan, “these are worms. They are alive and there’s more of them than us. We will use whatever force is necessary to acheive a satisfactory conclusion to this threat. No worms will set foot on American soil under my watch; you can be damn sure about that.”

"No worms will set foot on American soil under my watch; you can be damn sure about that." -Joe Biden

That’s all we know right now, so keep checking back for more updates.

The Mexican Pig Virus, colloquially known as “Swine Flu”, is a strain of Influenza called H1N1. This designation was assigned by American President Barack Obama on 4/29/2009. The Mexican Pig Virus is currently a class 5 pandemic and is expected to wipe out an appreciable portion of the world’s pig population. The Mexican Pig Flu can be caught by humans and is sometimes fatal. Here is a list of facts to dispell some common myths people email me about:

1. Pig flu is not just for pigs. People can catch it too. Try not to get too close to pigs for a couple weeks until this thing passes over.
2. Pig flu is deadly. A bunch of people have already died of it and countless pigs too.
3. Mexican Pig flu isn’t only in Mexico. Pig flu has been found in America, Israel, Spain and New Zealand. It is unstoppable and it is everywhere
4. Pig flu is nearly 100% fatal under certain conditions.

My recommendation is that everybody avoid close contact with pigs and close contact with people who have regular contact with pigs. If you know that a loved one has pig flu, send a card or something but KEEP AWAY. Your loved one is extremely contagious and probably dellusional. There have been reports of pig flu victims biting others that get too close to them and then making unusual grunting sounds.

It is estimated that over 18 million humans worldwide are currently suffering from pig flu. There are no know cures. Keep checking back here for updates. Good luck and Godspeed.

A big pig with a smaller pig