For those of you who need your content on-the-go, we've mobilised Mr Science. You can now see the Mr Science Show in a mobile phone compatible format at m.mrscienceshow.com. And for those of you with an iphone, we have made a site especially for you here. To create these sites, we used MoFuse.

Mobile sites deliberately cut back on data rich content, so pictures are smaller and many of the other widgets, which are easy to download on your desktop but add up on expensive mobile data plans, are disabled. At the moment, as mp3s are disabled, if you wish to download the podcast, you need to do it through the normal desktop version of this site (which you can see on your mobile, but contains all the data-rich stuff). I would like to make it such that if you visit Mr Science on your mobile, your phone immediately redirects you to the mobile site, but alas there is no way yet to do that (well not in blogger, there is for wordpress blogs).


QR Codes

QR Codes (Quick Response Codes) are two-dimensional bar codes (like the one on the left) originally developed by Japanese company Denso-Wave. Having just been to Japan, I can assure you they are very popular there. They are similar to normal bar codes, but are more easily customised and allow you to access internet sites and download content to your mobile without having to type in a URL or go searching through Google.

We created a QR code for the Mr Science mobile site - it's that black and white bar-code looking thing on the left.

To use a QR code, you need a camera in your phone - they all do these days - and you need QR software - grab it from i-nigma if you don't already have it. Open up the i-nigma application and hold your camera near the code. Your mobile then reads and analyses the code and takes you to the page it is encoding. Try it on our QR code - it works on a computer screen.

In Japan, everything from restaurant menus to competitions on train station walls have associated QR codes so you can enter the competition or order from the menu on-the-go. You could use a QR code as a business card if you liked. Various places around the world are starting to use QR codes. The Brooklyn Public Library uses the codes to identity each of their branches, which they then add to flyers and posters. The Powerhouse Museum used QR codes for Sydney Design 08.

For more information, see bibliothekia and ReadWriteWeb.

This week on the podcast, we take a look at the latest climate change news, and start reflecting on the science year that was, as we close in on 100 podcast episodes (this is episode 92).

The news items we discuss this week are:

1. CO₂ build-up in the atmosphere may prevent a coming ice-age. Ice-ages occur roughly every 100,000 years and are possibly due to small shifts in Earth's orbit which change the amount of solar energy hitting the surface. A build-up of CO₂ and its associated heating may warm the Earth so much that the next ice-age is skipped. Humanity has burnt about 300 gigatonnes of carbon from fossil fuels during its existence, and even if only 1000 gigatonnes are eventually burnt (from total reserves of about 4000) then it is likely that the next ice age will be skipped, whilst the next five could be skipped if all recoverable fossil fuels were burnt. For more information, see the story at ABC Science;
2. The bouquet of wine reflects the amount of fossil-fuel derived CO₂ in the air at the time and place of the growing of the grapes. Carbon-14, an isotope of carbon, is made when Nitrogen atoms high in the atmosphere absorb neutrons from space (cosmic rays) . Over time, Carbon-14 decays to Nitrogen-14 , and so fossil fuels, made millions of years ago from decaying organic matter, contain almost no Carbon-14. Therefore, when fossil fuels are burned, the resultant CO₂ is almost Carbon-14 free. As CO₂ is used by plants to grow, the amount of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere at the time of growing is reflected, in this case, in the wine's bouquet. A low level of Carbon-14 means there was a lot of fossil fuel generated CO₂ in the atmosphere at the time of growing. More information on Discovery Science;
3. Wind farms could steer storms. Future mega-wind farms for renewable energy generation could have a massive effect on the weather because the large wind speeds they generate could cause disrupted air-ripples that spread out like waves over massive areas. The waves could even steer storms on the other side of the globe. More information on Discovery Science;
4. Tibetan glaciers are melting faster than ever seen before. The Himalayan glaciers are melting so fast that the usual techniques for dating glaciers can't be used. Glaciers can be dated by looking for traces of leftover radioactivity from US and Soviet atomic bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s. In the Tibetan samples, there are no signs at all of these tests, and the exposed surface of the glacier dates to 1944. More information at ABC Science;

If you are gazing at the sky this weekend (Thanksgiving to our American friends), then look to the sky to see Jupiter, Mars and the moon all gathered together.

We also start reflecting on the year that was with my much better-half Eugenia, who had to put up with me recording this here little podcast, and then having to listen to the episodes and smile! Her highlights from the year?

• The no-brainer research that said in the UK you should wear thick-clothes, especially denim, to protect yourself from skin-cancer. We never saw the sun over the 2007 summer anyway...
• And on from this show, the Science of Sumo wrestlers - we employed the sumo diet on our recent travels.

Listen to his podcast here:

This year, the Mr Science Show has again entered the charity moustache growing contest, Movember. Movember supports men's-health charities, and this year in Australia, all money raised is going towards the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and beyondblue - the national depression initiative. These issues are close to my heart as people close to me have suffered, and even died, because of prostate cancer and depression. Read more about the Fundraising Outcomes.

Did you know:

• Depression affects 1 in 6 men....most don't seek help. Untreated depression is a leading risk factor for suicide.
• Last year in Australia 18,700 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer and more than 2,900 died of prostate cancer - equivalent to the number of women who will die from breast cancer annually.

For more sciencey stuff on moustaches and Movember, here is everything you need:

• The science of moustaches;
• Movember time-lapse from 2006;
• My photos from the 2006 and 2007 events.

To sponsor us, check out our Mo-space or donate directly from this link

Thanks y'all!

Dr Christopher Pettigrew, a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Biochemistry in University College Cork, is no stranger to putting science on stage.

With the 2009 AAAS Dance your PhD competition up-and-running, we decided for this week's episode of the podcast to chat to Chris about his experiences in the public performance of science.

Chris has been involved in the communication of many difficult subjects through artistic means, such using interpretive dance to explain the Australian Goods and Services Tax (GST) and DNA . Chris plans on building upon his experiences in Australian theatre whilst in Cork, Ireland. As Dr Pettigrew says:

"Nothing says Double Helix like a rapid twirl."

Listen to his podcast here:

The 2009 AAAS Dance your PhD final contestants have been selected. To read more about them and watch their videos, visit The 2009 AAAS Science Dance Contest homepage.

Do you have any scientific ideas that you would like to see put on stage? Please let us know by leaving a comment here, or by emailing us.

I put this story together for Plus - I'll be writing their new regular Sports Column, which will focus on maths and sport. For more maths stories on sport, see previous Plus stories tagged with sport. And for more on this particular story, see it as published in The Plus Sports Page: Power Trip

Being the manager of a Premier League football club may seem like one of the most glamorous jobs in the world ? with the fame comes fortune and the opportunity to travel (well, to Hull, Wigan and Portsmouth anyway). However, as far as job security goes, football managers live on the edge. Their terms can be terminated almost on a whim by their club's owner, and they live and die by their team's results.

It would seem that there is no way to predict how long their tenures will be. However, a collection of researchers from the UK, Singapore and the US have found that there may be a strong mathematical trend underlying how long football managers stay in their jobs.

Toke S. Aidt, Bernard Leong, William C. Saslaw and Daniel Sgroi found that the distribution of tenure lengths for managers of sporting teams in many countries obey power laws. Power laws are fascinating because they arise in a surprisingly large number of naturally occurring phenomena, such as the size of cities, stock market returns, cook book ingredients and even how many times certain words are used in long books.

A power law has the form

where x and y are variables and a and b are constants. The exponent b is usually negative, so y decreases as x increases. In the case of football managers, the researchers found that

where t is the length of a football manager's career and n is the number of managers dismissed at that time of their career. The actual values of the constants a and b vary from country to country and league to league, with the exponent b lying somewhere between -2 and -3 in all cases.

To derive this formula, the authors plotted tenure lengths of real managers against their time of dismissal and then set out to find the curve that best describes the data. In fact, to make things easier, they looked at logarithms, which turn a curve of this form into the straight line

For tenures greater than one year, they found that in the English Premier League, football leagues across Europe, and American football and baseball competitions, there is a straight line of this form that fits the data. Moreover, the fit is statistically significant, that is, it?s not just due to chance.

The following graph is for English Premier League managers between 1874 and 2005.

But what does all this mean?

As we mentioned earlier, power laws are compelling as they can emerge from simple mathematical rules ? the power law is often a macroscopic outcome of microscopic interactions between the players in the system (in this case football managers, the team, club owners and fans, etc). In fact, power laws are often seen as the signature of complexity. In the 1980s scientists found that there are dynamical systems based on simple rules which, through self-organisation, bring themselves into extremely sensitive states, where even the smallest change can cause wide-ranging and unpredictable chain reactions.

An often quoted example of this phenomenon involves a pile of sand. When you sprinkle sand on a table, a pile will build up and after a while reach a maximal slope: any additional grain of sand will cause avalanches whose number and size are impossible to predict. Such a sensitive state is called a critical state and this behaviour is called self-organised criticality. It is an interesting phenomenon, because it may explain "spontaneous" emergence of complexity in nature, which is not a result of someone forcing the system.

When a system has reached a critical state through self-organisation, it can often be described by power laws. In our sand example, the size distribution of the avalanches follows a power law. Power laws reflect complexity because they are similar on all scales. Suppose that the number n of avalanches of size s is described by the power law

for some constants a and b. Now multiply s by a large number c, so you're now looking at large avalanches. These then follow the power law

which, apart from the constants involved, is essentially the same as that for smaller avalanches - the same type of behaviour occurs on all scales.

Given that the power law highlights the fact that there is something interesting going on, the researchers set out to find out what it was. What are the simple rules of football management that govern this system, and is there self-organised criticality?

The model

The authors constructed a model which includes a manager's reputation ? this is either enhanced or diminished, depending on the result of each match. The core of the model is a round-robin tournament with 20 teams playing each other once at home and once away ? just like in the Premier League. The probabilities of win, lose and draw were modelled as 37%, 26%, 37%, respectively ? these probabilities are those observed in the English football league between the years 1881 and 1991 and are assumed to be independent of the managers involved.

The model starts with 20 randomly selected managers, each with a given reputation and tenure. (With a nod to realism, we will henceforth assume that all managers are male.) The initial reputation of each manager is described by a positive whole number, which is chosen at random from the numbers between the firing threshold and the poaching threshold (more on these in a moment). Each manager also starts with a random tenure length between 1 and 40 years. The managers gain reputation (+ 2 points in the model) every time their teams win, and lose reputation (-2 points) when their teams lose. There are no points for draws. Each game has equal importance and so each result is equally important for a manager's reputation.

The length of a manager's tenure depends on how his reputation evolves. Termination of tenure can occur for four reasons:

• The manager loses his job when his reputation falls below the firing threshold ? that is, he is sacked;
• The manager is poached by another club when his reputation reaches the poaching threshold ? that is, he gets a better deal;
• The manager retires if he gets too old (another parameter that can be varied);
• The manager's team is relegated to a lower league because it has the lowest reputation at the end of the season ? the team is demoted out of the league.

When a manager leaves the system ? that is, he is either fired or poached, relegated or retired ? his place in the league is taken by another manager with tenure length of zero and a random starting reputation.

With these rules in place, the researchers ran many simulations, varying the random parameters in each run. Such a process is known as a Monte-Carlo simulation. They recorded the distribution of tenure lengths corresponding to one hundred years of competition. They found that for a very broad range of starting parameters, the model produced a tenure length distribution statistically indistinguishable from a power-law distribution. Similar results were obtained for different probability distributions of win, loss or draw. However, the researchers also found that power laws only emerge when a win enhances reputation by the same amount as it is decreased by a loss, and when each match has equal importance. The latter makes sense if you think that the aim of a Premier League team is to maximise its profit: you need to fill the stadiums and make as much advertising revenue as you can at each game. And as the Premier League is a first-past-the-post competition, each win has equal worth on the league table, with position on the table more than anything guaranteeing further advertising and merchandising returns.

Coming back to self-organised criticality, the researchers admit that their model does not prove the existence of this phenomenon in the world of sport. In fact, the model is not quite as self-organising as it could be, since certain parameters need to be artificially fixed at the outset. They do believe, however, that certain other factors point in the direction of self-organised criticality. The Premier League, they postulate, follows the Red Queen principle: it is an arms race where constant development is needed simply to compete. This explains why once a league has reached a self-organised critical state, it might stay there for a prolonged period of time. It is simply too difficult for a team to shake up the system, given that they are already in a process of continual change in order to stay with the pack. The term Red Queen comes from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass in which the Red Queen says: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place".

What the results surprisingly show is that ability and talent, although obviously playing some role, do not play a major role in a manager's success. His survival is far more determined by the sacking and poaching thresholds and simple randomness in his team's results. 2007 Chelsea manager Avram Grant is a good example of this: as he started his tenure with a low reputation, despite his team's good results, probabilities took their toll and he was sacked at the end of the season.

In any case, it's hard to feel sorry for prematurely sacked Premier League managers when their average salaries are over £2 million.

For more info, see the following:

• The paper A power-law distribution for tenure lengths of sports managers has appeared in the journal Physica A;
• The Plus article Understanding uncertainty: The Premier League finds more randomness in the Premiere League;
• There is more about sand pile models in the Plus article Like sand through the hour glass;
• And about power laws in the Plus articles The mystery of Zipf, Network news, and Beating bird flu with bills.

From the Border Mail, Letters 01/10/2008

When I was a kid, we never had drought after drought.

Then we started with daylight saving. We started with a little bit, but now we have six months of the year daylight saving. It has just become too much for the environment to cope with.

It is so logical, for six months of the year we have an extra hour each day of that hot afternoon sun.

I read somewhere that scientific studies had shown there is a lot less moisture in the atmosphere which means we get less rain.

I believe this one hour extra sun is slowly evaporating all the moisture out of everything. Why can't the government get the CSIRO to do studies on this, of better still, get rid of daylight savings.

They have to do something before it is too late.

CHRIS HILL, Albury

... And that's why we need science communicators!
This has also been reported in Failblog and somewhere in the smh.

As it's Halloween, here is the Halloween news that I presented on Diffusion Science Radio this week. Diffusion can be heard on Monday nights at 6.30pm on 2SER 107.3 in Sydney, at various times across Australia on stations affiliated with the Community Radio Network, and on the Diffusion podcast.

1) Halloween, Candy and Science

What's worse: eating all the lollies collected on Halloween night at once, or spreading this out over the coming days and months?

When it comes to your teeth at least, it is far worse to ration your lollies all through the day, day after day than it is to gorge it all at once. Mark Helpin, a pediatric dentist at Temple University, says that snacking on candy keeps your teeth bathed in enamel-corroding acid, which is produced by bacteria feeding on the sugar in your mouth.

When you cover your teeth with sugar, oral bacteria cause a rise in acidity levels. This is neutralised when you brush your teeth. Even if you don't brush, saliva will eventually wash away the sugar and starve the bacteria. If you continually snake on chocolate and other lollies, the level of acidity stays constantly high, and this can lead to tooth decay.

Helpin also thinks that potato chips are just as bad, or worse, than lollies. Acid-producing bacteria feed on carbohydrates in potatoes, which are far more sticky than lollies and so hang around longer on your teeth. This poses an even greater risk for tooth-decay.

More information on ABC

2) Bigfoot revealed to be Halloween Costume

There's been a recent downturn in the fortunes of those hunting for Bigfoot, which a supposed frozen corpse of the animal turning out to be a Halloween costume.

SearchingforBigfoot.com owner Tom Biscardi had paid an estimate $50,000 to Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer for their frozen Bigfoot "corpse". Biscardi also hired Sasquatch detective Steve Kulls to check out the specimen.

Kulls was not a happy man, and neither, it turns out was Biscardi, especially after Whitton and Dyer ran off with his money.

"I extracted some [hair] from the alleged corpse and examined it and had some concerns," Kulls writes. "We burned said sample and said hair sample melted into a ball uncharacteristic of hair. Within one hour we were able to see the partially exposed head. I was able to feel that it seemed mostly firm, but unusually hollow in one small section. This was yet another ominous sign."

"Within the next hour of thaw, a break appeared up near the feet area. ... I observed the foot which looked unnatural, reached in and confirmed it was a rubber foot."

When Biscardi found out, he called Whitton and Dyer at their California hotel, who confirmed the hoax. However, when Biscardi went to look for them, they had disappeared with his money, and plenty of his dignity.

More information on FoxNews.com

3) Vampire Moth

A population of vampire moths has been found in Siberia that entomologists suggest may have evolved from a purely fruit-eating species as there are only slight differences in their wing patterns from the herbivorous cousins, Calyptra thalictri.

When the Russian moths were experimentally offered human hands , the insects drilled their hook-and-barb-lined tongues under the skin and sucked blood.

Entomologist Jennifer Zaspel from the University of Florida said the discovery could shed light on how indeed caught a fruit-eating moth evolving blood-feeding behavior, it could provide clues as to how some moths develop a taste for blood.

It may be that blood-feeding in insects evolved from feeding on tears, dung, and pus-filled wounds.

"We see a progression from nectar feeding and licking or lapping at fruit juices to different kinds of piercing behaviours of fruits and then finally culminating in this skin piercing and blood-feeding," she said.

In addition, only male moths exhibit blood-feeding, which means that maybe its so the males can pass on salt to females during sex. This could provide a nutritional boost to young larvae that have sodium-poor diets.

More information on National Geographic

4) Trick-or-treat safety tips

Children are twice as likely to be hit by a car and killed on Halloween than on any other day of the year - so take care! More information at AJC

Listen to his podcast here:

For those of you who use Twitter, we are now there and embracing it, so come along and become a follower.

We've blogged quite a bit about Web 2.0 applications (most recently on data-mining and Last.fm). Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are posts up to 140 characters. When you 'follow' someone, you can see their updates, and it has become quite popular. Even politicians are getting on board, with Australian Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull opening an account (whether he has time to continually update his Twitter status, or it's one of his staffers, is another question).

Twitter has become a surprisingly powerful platform, breaking the news of the Sichuan earthquake in China with SMS messages well before the conventional media arrived. This was also the case in the Virginia Tech shootings.

So if you would like to follow me on Twitter, I am marcwestius (westius was taken). You can use this site's email address to find me. See you there.

We've explored the overlap between music and science before, but what's dance got to do with science?

The 2009 AAAS Science Dance Contest is just around the corner, so if you're a scientist with a deep longing to express your innermost scientific thoughts through dance, then this is for you. The contest is open to anyone who has (or is pursuing) a PhD in any scientific field.

What you need to do is:

1. Make a video of your own PhD dance;
2. Post the video on YouTube;
3. Email your name, the title of your thesis, and the video link to gonzo@aaas.org by 16 November 2008.

On 17 November 2008, a total of four winners will be chosen from the following categories:

1. Graduate Student
2. Postdoc
3. Professor
4. Popular Choice

If you are lucky enough to win one of these categories, you will need to provide a single peer-reviewed research article on which you are a co-author. You will be paired with a professional choreographer and over the following weeks you will help your choreographer understand the article (via e-mail and telephone). Then the four choreographers will collaborate to create a single four-part dance based on the winning research articles.

You will then be an honoured guest at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois, where on 13 February 2009, you will have front-row seats to the world debut of "THIS IS SCIENCE" - your dance creation. Accommodation in Chicago will be provided, and grants are available for travel expenses.

To read more about last year's competition, see sciencemag and gonzolabs.

Stay tuned to this website as we are going to follow this contest, and I have already roped in a couple of my PhD friends to enter - or at least, they're thinking about it...

Travelling Japan and Korea was a wonderful experience - magnificent sights, great food, interesting people and of course, of interest to this blog, science.

I have finally put together the Japan / Korea podcast, which you can listen to here. It was recorded whilst we travelled from Tokyo to Fukuoka on the shinkansen (bullet train), Fukuoka to Busan in Korea on the JR Beetle (ferry), and Busan to Seoul on the KTX (high-speed train) - all fantastic methods of transport that put Aussie transport links (and for that matter UK ones) to shame.

The first topic we tackled was the Sumo Diet - how do Sumo Wrestlers get so big? And why? We were lucky to catch the September Grand Sumo Tournament in Tokyo and I was astounded by how big and strong these guys are. What's their secret to rapid weight gain? Well, here's what you need to do:

1. Skip breakfast. Often people who try to loose weight skip breakfast, but it's actually the worst thing you can. After 8 hours of sleep, your body craves food. By depriving your body of food, you keep your metabolic rate low;
2. Exercise on an empty stomach. If you exercise with no food to burn off, your metabolic rate lowers even more in order to conserve the energy you have. This helps increase your muscle but not burn off too many calories. This point is rather open to debate as to whether it works;
   
3. Sleep after eating. After a massive lunch or dinner, have a sleep. This means you wont burn off all those calories you just ate. This is a major factor;
   
4. Eat big in the afternoon and evening. Going to bed with a full stomach makes your body release a rush of insulin, storing some of your previous intake as fat instead of in muscles and organs;
5. Eat in a social atmosphere. An unreferenced report says that when you eat with others, you eat more than 44% more than when alone. I'd believe that.
   

You can find more info on this diet here.

At the heart of the diet is a hearty stew called chankonabe. It is a communal one-pot simmering stock-based casserole, into which you dip chicken, pork, mushrooms, carrots, potatoes, radish, lotus root and onions as if it were a massive meaty fondue (which I guess it is). You can drink the left over stock. Now this doesn't actually sound unhealthy - indeed it actually sounds pretty nutricious, but if you eat a lot of it, and then have a sleep, you can get very big. And they do eat a lot. A wrestler named Takamisugi was revered for eating 65 bowls in a single sitting.

We tackled a number of other topics in the podcast, so tune in. And feel free to leave any comments you like - I would love to hear from you, especially if you have tried the Sumo Diet...

Listen to his podcast here:

I've recently been putting together a Guide to Web 2.0 for The Helix Magazine and one of the most interesting aspects has been exploring the various mashups and applications of Last.fm.

Last.fm is a brilliant online music service and currently my favourite "web 2.0" application. By downloading a plugin for itunes (or whatever music player you have) that "scrobbles" each song you play (that is, tells Last.fm what you are listening to), a picture of your music taste builds up, and people with similar listening tastes are found. Artists are recommended to you according to your tastes, charts of your songs built up and "radio stations" perfectly tailored to you can be streamed online. But it is better than radio as there are no ads and you like every song.

By the way, I am westius on Last.fm.

Millions of songs are scrobbled every day by Last.fm users. This data helps Last.fm develop a massive database of user music preferences, and because of it's API, it is possible to access Last.fm information and develop interesting tools.

As users can tag their music with genres that they think aptly describe their songs and artists, it is possible to determine your own tag cloud of musical preferences. Using an excellent script at anthony.liekens.net, I came up with my own tag cloud, as you can see here.

It is possible from such tag clouds to examine how listeners fall into different categories through a process known as Data Mining. Data mining is essentially the process of sorting through enormous amounts of data and picking out the relevant stuff. Using principal components analysis - a mathematical technique which reduces multidimensional data sets to lower dimensions for analysis - and k-means clustering - an algorithm to cluster n objects into k groups - Liekens came up with 5 broad groups of Last.fm listeners:

1. Electronic/pop
2. Rock
3. Indie
4. Metal
5. Hip-hop
   

Clearly this list does not reflect everyone on Last.fm (where are the classical music listeners?), but it does reflect the majority. I was surprised that Indie is a group in itself and am intrigued by the bundling of electronic and pop together - there are some tweaks to the maths you can make that could come up with different groups, and better results might be possible with a bigger data set . Hip-Hop listeners were the most clearly defined group. You can read more about the maths and how these groups are separated in the original article.

Another interesting thing you can do is compare your music tastes to your friends. This pic is a difference cloud comparing my music tastes with that of my good friend intranation. We have a roughly 40% similarity in music genre tastes, with the green tags those that I have more of in my collection, and the red those genres that intranation listens to more than me. No real surprises there.

Mashups are all the rage at the moment. The term refers to web applications that combine data from more than one source into a single integrated tool. For instance, domain, an Australian real-estate site, adds data from Google Maps to provide location information. My current favourite Last.fm mashup is idiomap. idiomap is a digital music magazine that personalises its content according to your interests in music, which it learns from your Last.fm profile. It gives you stories and reviews of the artists and genres you like, helps you discover new music and mashes in video and audio from youtube and other sources. idiomag aggregates music articles from over 100 different sources. You can also tweak the articles you like so if you receive something you don't like, you won't get it again. I subscribe to the RSS feed of my personalised idiomap magazine and so far its been great and has included reviews of music DVDs of artists I like and schedules of when bands will be playing and appearing on TV. Good stuff.

I will probably put out a few more blogs like this as I explore this world of mashups. And for podcast listeners, yes hopefully I will get one of them out soon too!

It's funny being on holiday, removing yourself from everything and deliberately avoiding the news, and then returning home to find things largely the same as they were. Sorry for the lack of posts and podcasts, I have been travelling back to Australia through Japan and Korea - stay tuned for a podcast from the trip.

One of the things that has not changed is our own Russell Crowe. He may have played a maths genius in A Beautiful Mind, but his maths skills don't say much for his Aussie education.

We all have our theories on what is causing the current financial meltdown - my theory is it's the Australian cricket team (see this story for why).

But Crowe has an interesting solution - give America's entire population of 300 million $US1 million each.

His thinking was that a $300 million outlay would only be a fraction of the $US700 billion bailout package that President Bush proposed (read that carefully and you will spot the mistake).

Crowe told Jay Leno, "So, here's the thing: They're looking for $700 billion, right? Which is a good chunk of change... But I was thinking if they wanna stimulate the economy, get people spending, let people look after their ... mortgage. I think you take the first 300 million Americans, if that's the population at this point in time, give everyone a million bucks.''

The problem is that the Crowe Plan actually only gives $1 to each American, not $1 million, and if the Crowe Plan to instantly make each American a millionaire went ahead, it would cost $300 trillion - more than the US annual gross domestic product. The Iraq War only cost $3 trillion.

Crowe clearly didn't do his method acting for A Beautiful Mind.

Edit:
Funnily enough, he could be correct if he was using the Long scale where one billion is actually one million million (not one thousand million). Most of the English speaking world uses the short scale, but much of the world uses the long scale - so perhaps we can forgive him. Even NASA has mucked up unit conversions, loosing a Mars orbiter in 1999.

With the London Science Blogging Conference finished up, it was time to reflect on the good, the bad and the ugly of science blogging.

I chatted to Lisa Bailey, who blogs about science at Bridge 8, about what we learnt at the conference, how blogging can be used effectively to communicate science, the challenges laid down at the conference - including the challenge to get senior scientists to blog - and where science blogging might be going from here.

For more from the conference, check out the Mr Science podcast from our evening in London science pubs.

This is my last post and podcast for a couple of weeks as I travel home to Sydney after an absolutely wonderful 18 months in London. I will miss all the new friends I have made, and all the old friends I have met again. London, it's been emotional. See y'all in Sydney and if any one wants to sponsor a visa for me to come back, just get in contact!

Listen in to my conversation with Lisa here: