Helium

Helium. Who needs it anyway?  Well, as it turns out, helium isn’t just about party balloons and doctors around the world are worried about a global helium shortage.  Helium is used in MRI machines - each MRI needs about 2,000 litres of ultra-cold liquid helium to keep the MRI magnets cool enough to work.  Helium, a nonrenewable element found deep within the Earth’s crust - is running low. Part of the global helium shortage is due to a failure in a crude helium enrichment plant in Texas and declining or unreliable production from existing sources, and the delay in Russia’s helium facility coming on-line.  This is the fourth time the world has suffered a helium shortage since 2006. As well as balloons and MRI, helium is also used in high-speed internet, computer hard drives, airbags in cars, and as a coolant in nuclear reactors.  It’s also used in weather balloons - which are released from 900 locations worldwide a couple of times a day. Hopefully the helium supply will improve soon, and that there are plans in place for dealing with Helium Shortage 5.0 should it happen.

Up front training

How much training should you have before you can run “front of house” at a cafe?  We went to our usual Sunday morning venue today - and, admittedly it has had a change of management and it would also seem a change of staff, but you would think they would still be able to run a cafe properly … like knowing how old the croissants are, and when the jam is out of date … and to deliver the take-away coffee order (for multiple cups) to the table, the same way the previous management did.  I was not impressed.  But then, when collecting the coffees from the barista, that the server (who managed the get our coffee order wrong) was just “filling in” - I would suggest not very well but then again it might have just been that he had no specific training or maybe he was feeling put upon because he had been called in to work on the till. It looked as though there wasn’t much help for him either, so that might have been affecting his performance a little as well.

In a word

Is it possible to tell a story in six words? I think you can convey an idea but I’m not sure about the telling a story. If you type “six word story” into a search bar, you will get many results including http://www.sixwordstories.net where there are numerous six word stories. I guess in a world where we have phone text messages as a way of conveying information, it’s feasible to think that people are used to truncating their communications ... and that six words could convey a lot. I remember reading a joke once about a woman and her sisters who ran a farm and she went off to see if she could buy a bull. She did managed to find one and it took just about all of the money she had to be able to secure it. It was the “old days” so ... she went to the Post Office to send them a telegram to let them know she had the bull and that they would need to come and collect her and it. She had enough money for only one word in the telegram so she sent: comfortable. And they did.

Up in the air

Who knew? And what are the requirements? Reading a story today about a woman who had been tricked into paying money to a “cosmonaut” who couldn’t afford to pay for his “return ticket to Earth” from the ISS, it said that space travel didn’t work like that … you don’t have to buy your own ticket. The amazing thing, though, it seems like private astronauts (and cosmonauts?) can pay for their own tickets to board the station. The price does include a return trip to Earth. I knew you could buy tickets to travel to "space" with Space X and other companies, I just had no idea you could buy a ticket to the International Space Station. So how much does it cost? What are the requirements/restrictions? And how much would it cost to take a Fisher Space Pen on board and see if it really does write in space.

Intelligent AI?

Plagiarism is a dirty word when it comes to study and research but it may be harder to detect now that some students are using advanced language generators to write papers for them - and this can’t be detected by plagiarism software. The issue is that AI-generated text is not copied from somewhere else - and that’s what plagiarism software checks for. In the article “Sneaky Students Using AI to Write Their Papers For Them”, one student suggests they still do their homework on things they need to learn to pass, but they use AI to handle the things they don’t want to do, or they find “meaningless”. I guess it’s fair to say that we all learn in different ways, and that this might be a part of this. It also may just be a way to make “busywork” less time consuming so you don’t have to fill in the details - but rather are doing the equivalent of “dot points” to answer. Hopefully, though, the AI being used is better than the voice recognition software in my car - you would think it would be easy for it to make a call to someone it has called many times before, rather than suggesting something like “email” which really doesn’t have a phone number attached to it.

The long and short of it

Why did the T-Rex have such short arms? A study published in the journal Acta Paleontologica Polica suggested that the T-Rex evolved short arms because they fed in packs - and by having short arms it meant they wouldn’t bite off each other’s arms. Or was it a matter of the arms didn’t get shorter but that the legs got longer - that’s a suggestion put forward by John Hutchinson at London’s Royal Veterinary College who is an expert in the biomechanics of movement in large terrestrial animals - both living and extinct - who also noted that there was no way we could really know what was involved or the triggering factors. It is interesting to think about this piece of evolution differently though - because we do tend to think of T-Rex anatomy and the short arms that way. 

Sounds of music

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious - I think that’s how you spell it; I once read that you spell it exactly as it sounds - and it sounds like that! I must watch the movie (“Mary Poppins”) one day … although I remember it from when the child actors in “The Sound of Music” talked about how Julie Andrews would entertain them on set with songs from her previous movie … “Mary Poppins”. Although, me for mine, I’ve always been a fan of “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” and that famous line after she returns from the Von Trapp family house and the Mother Superior says to her “Maria, what is it you can’t face?”. I wonder how long it will be until they decide to remake “The Sound of Music” - they seem to have remade a whole lot of other movies which were perfectly good enough the first time around!