illuminating science

If you didn’t read the comments to that post about a guy selling Angelina Jolie’s air, then I highly recommend it - BrettW gave a very thorough derivation (though I haven’t checked his maths…We’ll assume he’s right though!) which suggested at least a few billion of Angelina Jolie’s air molecules would be in a litre bottle, and indeed in my lungs right now, while Luke Lea said this agreed with an earlier calculation they’d seen. Les, a meteorology friend of mine, also suggested that a more thorough answer would need to account for global air movements - how long would it take for air from America to reach us in Australia? Local diffusion is, I expect, quite rapid (think how quickly you can smell an open bottle of perfume or dried herbs) but I’m not sure how that translates to global distances.

I was also reminded of a similar, and scary, question - take a barrel of oil/polutant/contaminant/other-nasty-stuff and dump it into the sea [NB: This is a thought experiment only, thankyou!]. Mix it evenly across the whole planet’s oceans, then take one teaspoon of water out. How many molecules of polutant are in that water? The answer depends on what assumptions you make, but it’s in the 100’s or 1000’s of molecules. From just one barrel! Whoa! Of course, it’s easy to make impressive statements like this because “1000’s of molecules” sounds like a lot, whereas it really weighs next to nothing. But a fact is a fact…

In other good news, the final vote on commercial whaling, proposed by Denmark, was vetoed today, with only two countries supporting it. Further talks are planned over the next year to discuss the issue, but I’m not really clear what they hope to achieve. The IWC is anti-whaling at the moment, and unless more pro-whaling countries join, that doesn’t seem likely to change any time soon. However, with Japan threatening to quit the IWC, might the pro-whaling countries be tempted to support limited commercial whaling, rather than risk losing control altogether? That sounds perilously close to blackmail to me…but maybe that’s just politics! Time will tell, I guess.