137 search results for: Oliver Kuhn
Presidential Column
…Oliver Kuhn and Vice President Francois Aubin we met for two sessions. The first meeting invites the 10 most recent Presidents to provide their advice on any compelling issues that confront the society. The meeting is chaired by the current Past President. While the current Executive is not compelled to…
Executive Message
…Oliver Kuhn wrote about the corporate changes we are seeing at both Veritas and Geo-X. Both have been standards in the industry since I arrived in the mid-1970’s. Over the last few years there has been a flurry if not a blizzard of changes from both Operators and Contractors. Recognizing…
Grapevine
…Oliver Kuhn) Please register now as space is limited. You can register with Colleen Sando (298-5669), at colleens@geox.com or sign up here: http://www.geoxsystems.com/geox/training/lunch_learn.asp Lunch and Learns are to be held at the Geo-X offices, located in the Ernst & Young Tower at 500, 440 – 2nd Avenue S.W. Veritas DGC…
Grapevine
…Oliver Kuhn dressed as Zeus...his long wig and beard must have outweighed him. Congratulations to this year’s Doodlebug champion Mitch Peters of GeoStrata who took home the sought after trophy. Divestco Continues to Grow: INTERNATIONAL DATASHARE CORPORATION AND DIVESTCO.COM INC. ANNOUNCE COMPLETION OF AMALGAMATION Calgary, Alberta, September 24, 2003 -…
Science Break: Desalination
…Kuhn, Ancient Chinese Drilling, 2004) I describe how between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago there was a salt industry in Szechuan, China that was drilling deep wells to coproduce brine and natural gas, with the latter being used to heat the brine to produce salt. When I wrote that I…
Science Break: Ocean Currents
…Kuhn, Practical science, 2015); additionally, any pockets of saltier liquid brine locked in the ice matrix will tend to melt downwards and escape. The cold water travelling south from the Norwegian Sea continues all the way to Antarctica, where it forms a circular, clockwise, deep water flow around that continent;…
Science Break: The Great Lakes
…Kuhn, 2008), I alluded to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, humans had witnessed this catastrophic event. Here I will cover a similar series of geological events related to glaciers and water that most definitely were witnessed by humans. The period covered here is between 14,800 and 9,500 years ago,…
Science Break: Immaculate Conception, Christmas, Etc.
…Kuhn, Parasitoids, 2008). So maybe the concept of immaculate conception isn’t that far out there after all... Let’s segue from weird sex to Paracelsus, who conducted an experiment to artificially create a small, perfect human male known as a homunculus (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 2013d); apparently back in the middle ages…
Science Break: Circadian Rhythms
…Kuhn, 2013), even plants are capable of fairly rapid response to external stimuli, and of course animals are too. But those responses are not circadian; in order to meet the criteria, the system must more or less lock in to a 24 hour clock, and only adjust gradually to external…
Science Break: Natural Gas Liquids
…Kuhn, 2009). Normal Butane This is the unbranched form of butane (n-C4H10), where the four carbon atoms are connected in a continuous chain. It has numerous uses – in lighters, camp stoves etc., as a propellant for spray cans, and as an ozone-friendly refrigerant replacing halomethanes. Interestingly, it is the…
Science Break: Natural phenomena
…Kuhn, Singing Sand Dunes, 2008), and so I don’t need to go over it again. I just think it deserves to be highlighted here, as it really is one of Earth’s most fascinating natural effects. Also, I can provide a link to a recent PBS video (PBS Terra) that covers…
Science Break: Materials science
…Kuhn, 2013). Properties Again, this is another huge field. For the sake of brevity, I will share Wikipedia’s list of main material property categories (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 2021c) – mechanical, chemical, electrical, thermal, optical, magnetic – as well as a reference to their page on this (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 2021b)…
Science Break: Mushrooms
…Kuhn, 2008) which included a description of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a fungus that grows inside a live ant and alters the ant’s behaviour, compelling it to climb to the top of a tree, and then the fungus sends its fruiting spike up and out of the top of the ant’s head!…
Science Break: Bacteriophages
…Kuhn, 2008). There I contrasted parasites, which do not kill their hosts, with parasitoids, which do. Lysogenic and lytic are analogous terms, albeit at a microscopic scale. Figure 2. Anatomy and infection cycle of phage T4, used under Creative Commons license 4.0 (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 2017) The five steps indicated…
Science Break: Savage or Slave?
…Kuhn, 2009)), but it never occurred to me that this may be a normal difference between sedentary and non-sedentary populations. In fact, archaeology repeatedly and convincingly shows that ancient humans living in urban communities tended to be unhealthy, malnourished and disease-ridden, while hunter gatherers were not. Sedentary communities tended towards…
Science Break: Fireworks
…Kuhn (1884-1961), an early translator of many classical Chinese novels, including several containing erotic content such as Jin Ping Mei. Perhaps the ancient Chinese also used fireworks as a visual euphemism for sex? Moving on… Figure 1. Ming Dynasty (1628) ink drawing of a fireworks display (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 2017)…
Science Break: Automatic Transmissions
…Kuhn, 2012) on the Antikythera device, an ancient machine that used planetary gears to predict the positions of the known (then) planets in our solar system. In Figure 3, if the carrier (green) is rotated 45° clockwise then the planet gears (blue) turn within the fixed ring gear (pink), thus…
Science Break: The Tardigrade
…Over the years I have seen intriguing references to tardigrades and the unique properties these small organisms possess. Recently there have been headlines floating around claiming researchers had been able to entangle tardigrades at the quantum level. That just seemed too interesting to pass up – I had to look…
Science Break: Opioids
…Several months ago when I was picking this topic, opioids were arguably considered the biggest current health crisis, but of course now that has been eclipsed by COVID-19. Brian Schulte (RECORDER editor) and I considered switching the topic to COVID-19, but decided against it, since the news is swamped with…
Science Break: Feral and Invasive Species
…It’s fall, and it’s election season, so there are maple leaves everywhere, real and on placards. Since moving to Toronto I’ve learned to both love and hate maple trees. My back yard is surrounded by them – two huge Norway maples (Acer platanoides) to the west, and although damaged by…
