It was the first absurd sounding long word that popped into my head, okay?

Plus, we owe a lot to the now fairly antique seeming electroencephalograph. Sure, in this era of realtime brain activity mapping via the fMRI, all the attention paid in the past to squiggly lines on paper that merely represent the total electrical activity of the brain seems downright quaint.

But you have to remember that, until quite recently, that EEG reading was the only scientific measure of what the hell was going on in there.

In fact, the EEG is still used widely today (not everyone gets an fMRI machine for Xmas) and a surprisingly amount of information can be gleaned from those silly looking squiggly lines.

First up in science type stuff, we once more visit the question of temperatures below absolute zero.

And it is herein that I reveal that, despite how much I love and admire science and how much I like to think of myself as a very minor participant in it, purely on the theoretical side of things of course, I have to confess that my instincts as a writer and philosopher are more powerful than my desire for complete and total scientific accuracy.

Because no matter the well reasoned scientific argument for why these German scientists have somehow managed to make something achieve a temperature lower than zero degrees Kelvin, I am just plain not buying it. I refuse to acknowledge the possibility.

Nope. Not going there. Go sell crazy someplace else.

Because as far as I know, absolute zero means zero molecular motion, and there is no such thing as negative motion, ergo, there can be no temperature below absolute zero.

Hence the word “absolute”. If you can go lower than absolute zero, then it’s not absolute zero any more, and the whole thing dissolves in a cloud of logic and absurdity.

Maybe it would help if I understood the argument for why they have achieved this silly thing, but ful disclosure, I do not.

Here they are, for what it’s worth.

The researchers describe their system in terms of hills and valleys (picture this). At absolute zero, a group of atoms has no energy and is motionless, and thus all atoms are at the bottom of the valley. As the temperature rises above absolute zero that changes, but not all at once–some particles gain a lot of energy, and some gain just a little, so now the atoms have different energies and are spread along the slope of the hill, stretching from valley to hilltop. Physics says the most disordered state of this system occurs when there are an equal number of particles at every point along the slope, and that’s the top of the positive temperature scale–increase the energy any further and the particles would no longer be evenly spread, lowering the system’s entropy.

Ayep. I do not grok. I am but an egg.

Next up, we have a rather fascinating theory as to why crime has gone down so much in the last 20 years.

As far as I knew, the basic consensus was that crime went down because the demographics shifted. Crime was at its highest when you had a huge population of young men between the ages of 18 to 25 roaming the streets and looking for trouble.

When that stopped being true, crime went down. Simple, right? Maybe too simple.

Kevin Drum, a writer for Mother Jones, says the primary factor might well be unleaded gasoline.

On the surface, it sounds downright silly, a crankpot theory from some bored professor somewhere, who noticed that crime started going down at the same time as they banned leaded gas, and thought “Hey, this might get me published!”

But the link between lead exposure and both low IQ and irrational, violent behaviour is well known. There are some who say that what brought down the Roman Empire was not decadence or barbarians, but their fondness for lead based eating utensils.

Yeah, I know. Eww.

And there is definitely some science to support this interesting theory :

Dr Herbert Needleman, a University of Pittsburgh researcher, conducted a 1996 study that showed that children with high lead levels were much more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior than those with normal levels.

A 2002 study showed that youths had been arrested had far higher levels of lead in their bones, on average, than their non-delinquent peers.

I am intrigued by this unusual theory, but that is as far as I will go. I am very interested. But not convinced. This is just the sort of theory that can seem plausible when presented, but which does not stand up to real scrutiny by someone with broad knowledge of the field.

Finally, check out this cool little demo for the highways of the future.

That is some very slick, very now tech up there. The road lights that only light up when there is a car nearby totally make sense in Scandinavia, where I imagine they have thousands of kilometers of roads that are very low use, yet of course, extremely necessary.

I bet it would look really cool from a distance, too. Or from above.

The ones that generate their energy from the draft of the cars seem like a bit of a pipe dream. I can’t imagine that working. I could be wrong.

But my fave thing is the big shiny road decals that only show up when the temperature is below freezing. That would make a fantastic warning system for distracted drivers, especially on those iffy days where it is above freezing while the sun is high in the sky, but the minute it starts going down, the temperature drops below freezing to stay, and you get two of the scariest words in the English language : black ice.

I am not kidding around when I say those words scare me. I have been in vehicles that suddenly experienced a total lack of friction due to black ice. It is definitely not fun.

And last, for absolutely no good reason, here is Yakkity Sax on Moog.