On display
Museum experts are exploring how to bring the science dioramas of yore into the 21st century, while ensuring scientific accuracy and acknowledging past biases, freelance writer Amber Dance reported in “The diorama dilemma.”
Reader Gary Hoyle reminisced about his time working as an exhibits artist and curator of natural history at the Maine State Museum. Hoyle recounted working with esteemed diorama painter Fred Scherer and learning about another renowned diorama artist, James Perry Wilson.
“Wilson was a trained architect draftsman who had worked to develop a grid pattern that minimized the distortion of viewing a curved background against the three-dimensional foreground of dioramas. His and Fred’s sensitivity to light and the colors of nature astound me still,” Hoyle wrote. “When painting backgrounds, they consciously modified colors to reduce the green tint from the plate glass in the viewing window.”
Hoyle noted that the many scientific and artistic challenges that went into developing wildlife dioramas are now being ignored or lost to history. “What is needed is a museum devoted solely to … these complicated, mesmerizing exhibits.”
Tsunami risk?
A Pacific submarine volcano called Axial Seamount is likely to erupt in 2025, freelance writer Rachel Berkowitz reported in “An undersea volcano may soon erupt near Oregon.”
Reader Ginger Johnson asked if the eruption could cause a tsunami.
Axial’s eruptions are benign to us humans, says geophysicist William Chadwick of Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center. “The volcano is too deep, [about 1,500 meters underwater], and the kind of activity anticipated is too mild” to trigger a tsunami, he says.
What’s more, tsunamis are typically caused by sudden, large movements of the seafloor, especially around subduction zones, where one tectonic plate slides beneath another. “An eruption at Axial Seamount would have no effect on the Cascadia subduction zone along the coast of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia” because the volcano is too far away, Chadwick says.
It’s not nothing
The math puzzle “Imagine there’s no zero” challenges readers to use mathematician James Foster’s number system, which uses T to avoid a zero symbol.
Reader Bill Torcaso found the number system valid but bizarre. “What about arithmetic operations?” he wrote. “ ‘Nothing’ is still important.”
In general, arithmetic operations can be accommodated without a zero symbol, says puzzle maker Ben Orlin. “Negatives, for example, still work fine. Decimals are trickier but can be handled with an adapted version of scientific notation, using negative powers of T.” For instance, the decimal 0.03, which is 3 x 10−2 in scientific notation, would become 3 x T−2.
But ‘nothing’ is still important. “Foster has eliminated zero as a placeholder, but not as a number concept,” Orlin says. “We can eradicate the zeros from every number in existence, with one very notable exception: zero itself.”
Correction
Due to an editing error, February’s math puzzle incorrectly equated 2T with two boxed-up tens. Indeed, 2T equals 30.