Tenth Dimensional Drifter

I was in Utah

It’s a great story.. if you want to commit suicide. My flight left at 6am on Sunday. That means that I was in a car traveling to the airport at 4am. I can see your jealous eyes. I flew to Denver. Nice city, mostly. I like Boulder a lot more, but that’s mostly because of the memories I have of there and that it’s smack up against the mountains. In Denver I wandered several hundred feet to another terminal. I got on another plane and flew to Salt Lake City, Utah. I then got into a car and drove myself and two coworkers up to Logan. It’s about 1.5-2 hours. We checked in to the EconoLodge (better than it sounds) and met up with a couple professors we knew at Olive Garden.

Monday rolled around without much event. I gathered my coworkers and we sped to the University (up a hill and around a couple corners). We presented and were presented with presentations associated with our satellite and with the work of others. At the first break I took our CSci guy back to the hotel so he could work on some code for our demo. (Which was pretty pointless, actually. No one really cared about that.) He took longer than estimated so I went back to the conference to help our Project Manager (henceforth PM). She was doing well enough, but there were a lot of people interested in my GPS reflectometry research, and rightly so! It’s fascinating and you should be impressed, too. Decided to leave the CSci guy working on the demo until the next day and we’d set it up then. This transpired.

Tuesday was a very long day. Over nine hours of standing on my feet repeating the same thing over and over again. It was tiring and annoying. I started to wish I’d just given a presentation on it and been done with it. It was around 2pm that I suddenly realized I was at a science fair: students presenting their volcanoes (thanks, Kat) and the teachers judging them. Only, it wasn’t volcanoes, it was satellites and it wasn’t science, it was engineering. So, it was an engineering fair. Once I was in that mindset I laughed a little and was able to do just fine with all these big scary industry people. Who really aren’t that big or that scary. I was able to impress and be impressed by several individuals from the USA and England. I got into my groove and things went much better.

Wednesday was similar, but ended earlier. Thankfully. I went from wearing dress shoes on Monday to tennis shoes on Tuesday and Wednesday. That helped my fatigue a lot more. We wrapped things up and drove the 2 hours to Salt Lake City, stayed in a hotel near the airport and  were on a flight at 10am for Denver. In Denver I sat around. And sat. And sat some more. I got up at one point to charge my computer. I finished several hundred pages of the book I was reading. Then I sat around some more. Five hours after arriving, I got my new boarding pass and wandered over to the correct terminal (I’d been sitting in a vacant one). An hour after my flight was supposed to leave we were shifted over to another terminal for a different plane because the previous one had mechanical problems (it was probably just that an exit sign was broken, but when I asked they said “uh, I don’t know…” in an ambiguous way that makes me think the plane I was getting on might not be any better).

I flew. Home.

The PM’s boyfriend picked us up at the airport. And promptly got lost trying to get us home. We took Penn to Lake Harriet… Yeah, that lost. It was around 10:30 or 11 that I finally walked into my apartment, plopped my (still packed) suitcase into my bedroom and collapsed into bed.

Moral of the story is this: never let someone else make your travel arrangements as you’ll most likely end up traveling 12 hours just to reach your destination.

Contrary to some people’s (NikLovin’s) belief, I did not convert to LDS or marry several women. That would be big-of-me. Get it? Ah, Fletch.

Oh, you noticed that I only talked about the daytime activities? Well, let me tell you: what happens in Logan, UT stays in Logan, UT. Because, there’s nothing fucking there. I talked to several locals about what there is to do and this is the reply: drink, go bowling, drink, go cruising, drink while bowling, hike. I and the PM did do a short hike, but it was late and we only made it 2/3rds of the way up. We ran into a very eccentric gentleman on the way down who was from the same conference and he was nice enough to keep us company on the way down.

Other than that, it was uneventful and boring. I attempted several times to generate some excitement, but was shut down. There were parties, but the PM wasn’t interested and the CSci guy and I felt bad abandoning her. Of course, the next day she said she’d have been fine with being dropped off.

Sitting here, thinking about the trip, I realize that I don’t remember shit from the conference except the people I met. In that regard it was cool. I don’t know for sure if I’ll ever see them again, but I do think it was enlightening to get to know some people from industry and realize that I really don’t enjoy engineering. I’m more into the science of things. It might seem like a fine line to the uninitiated, but really it isn’t. Or, maybe it is and I’ve just separated the two so much in my mind that I don’t see the difference as being all that close.

Who knows. At least I’m home.

Something that did come out of the conference (well, the ride home from the airport) is that I’ve devised a new kind of blogging. Stay with me while I explain: what you do is take a picture and GPS tag it. Now you’ve got a picture of a place with a specific (and later locatable by you or anyone else) place/situation/event. You post it with some comment on your blog and VOILA! You’ve got a photo blog.

I call it “phlogging”. I’ve passed the idea to D (who is a genius internet guy) to see what he thinks.

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Don’t read this if…

… you are a human being that has compassion and sympathy. It will break your heart. But it might be some of the best journalism writing I’ve ever read and this story deserves to be treated this well.

The Girl in the Window

I have too many emotions cavorting around to make coherent comments: anger, sadness, hope… They’re all a jumble and I’ll need time to sort them out.

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Green Power

WARNING: Science content.

That’s how I’ll preface all my science stuff. Because, you know what? This is my blog and I want to vomit my thoughts on it in hopes I stumble on a brilliant idea in my ramblings. Since I’m not a sociologist, my brilliant ideas will come in the form of physics and engineering. Even the name holds deep meaning when considering a GUT (Grand Unified Theory- AKA: Theory of Everything). Just how many dimensions are needed? 4 (x,y,z,t)? 10? 11? 26?! (I have no fucking idea how to relate 26 dimensions- it would fold into itself so many times…) It really depends which  theory you subscribe to. Really, 10 and 11 are the same. It just depends where you start counting. I start at zero, I guess. Zero dimensionality is nothingness, I suppose. 1 dimension is a point. 2: a line. 3: an object. Etc. (Later I’ll write up something concerning this, but not right now as I’m on about something else.) One thought is that 3-4 dimensions expanded, the other 6ish collapsed. It’s.. Yeah, this is something for another post.

So there’s been a lot of hoopla and hype about “green energy sources”. Green meaning not a color, but eco-friendly. There’s great potential with hydrogen since, well, the Earth has around 326 million trillion gallons. That’s more than a little, less than infinity, you know. Well, a full 2/3rds of that 326×10^18 gallons is H (hydrogen). Since, if you ever took chemistry in any part of your education in, oh I don’t know, grade school! water is H20: two H for every 1 O (O is oxygen- stick with me here!).

So, the problem becomes: how do we get at that H? Electrolysis seems to be the best way. Put enough current into water and you’ll break the bonds holding H20 as.. well, H20. You’ll end up with 2H2 + O2. The down side is that it isn’t efficient because… Ok, so there’s this thing in the universe we call “entropy”. Basically, it’s a measure of how chaotic the universe (or a system) is (sort of). It’s goofy as that one Disney dog when you first learn about it, but after a while it starts making sense. You start with a system in a certain state and as that system equilibrializes with its surroundings there is a waste of energy (energy that can’t be used to do anything except equilibriate the system with its surroundings) and that, my friends, is entropy. Sort of. Confused? Yeah. How about this: entropy is magic.

So in any system where work is being done you’ll have to consider some of that work goes into things like heating due to friction, sound due to clicking parts, raising electron orbits in H and O, and so on. This is why you can never build a perpetual motion machine: you lose energy. You’d have to develop a machine that’s capable of creating more energy than it uses to overcome the losses due to friction of moving parts, gravity, sound, heat, etc.

This applies to any process, including electrolysis.

So, we push some current into this beaker of water, H goes to the cathode (+) and O will meader towards the anode (-). Why? Well, because of their charges. You can use various metals for the cathodes and anodes: copper, platinum, steel, a potato (no not really). Typical efficiency is pretty low at about 60ish% at the minimum. Theoretically, you could push this upwards of 90% using a variety of special catalysts (mixtures added to the water to help the electrolysis process), solutions, and electrode materials. But, you’re still losing energy to H and O because you’re pushing the electrons into higher orbits (maybe I’ll explain what this means some day), increasing the temperature of the water, etc. These are all things associated with entropy. Something you can never get away from. In any process. I don’t care how fucking slick your lubricant is (and I know some of you are familiar with KY), or how balanced your gears are, or that you’ve put your machine in a vacuum or anti-gravity chamber.. You’re still increasing entropy. (You have to suck all the air out of the vacuum chamber, you have to power the anti-gravity thingermajig, your lubricant is made up of molecules that are bouncing and colliding increasing the temperature… you see? You can’t get away from it. Ever.)

Finally, the fucking point of all this setup: When someone tells you that their process has 100% efficiency or close to it, you can say “bullshit”. No system or process outside in the real world will ever approach this imaginary limit.

Sure, Jim, what about power plants? They generate power! Lots of it! So much that we can power everything we use in our daily lives.

Yes, that’s right. Nuclear power has no waste and no heat escapes (sarcasm!). And dams only use a small fraction of the energy of the water’s mass being pulled down by gravity (KE = (mv^2)/2) to get those turbines spin spin spinning. Wind power? Those windmillshave moving parts which means energy is lost to friction-heat. Plus, they look like shit. Fields of giant white windmills are ugly. Really really ugly. I’m not advocating anything here, or saying wind power is stupid. The more natural energy sources we can harness the better, in my opinion. Nuclear power is really just steam power. You didn’t know? This is how a nuclear power plant works: You stick a bunch of highly radioactive material in water. As the material decays the energy transfers to the water molecules. Well, then the water heats up. It heats up so much that it creates steam. Then you force this steam into pipes, monkey with the pressure, then force the steam into turbines that rotate the magnets inside the coils of wire and because Maxwell was a genius we get electricity. That’s because electricity and magnetism are the same thing, relatively speaking! (Get it? Relatively speaking! HAHA!) Yeah, not so neat anymore, hm? Well, it is neat when you realize it’s a controlled nuclear bomb they’re using.

Anyway. Back to the point. Don’t trust people that tell you their experiment or doodad or googaw is 100% efficient. Nothing is. Even “close to” 100% efficient should make you question their process, their statistics, and their sanity. For instance, I found this article about MIT researches that claim a near 100% efficiency using electrolysis to separate H from H20. Not only that, but they claim a green process. Your red flags should be flying, my friends. It sounds too good to be true, honestly, even though I hope it’s not. Because this would be an incredible step to easing our dependency on fossil fuels. I’m 100% (+/- some entropy) behind new sources of fuel. The neat thing about H-fuel is that the byproduct is water. Think about how awesome that would be. Instead of forcing the Earth’s ecosystem to support us, we’d be able to just be a step in the eco-cycle! H20 -> 2H2 + 02 -> usable energy -> H2O!

The implications are staggering and wonderful. :)

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Jesus?!

I don’t know why, but my blog has taken a religious slant lately.

Well, I do know why..

If I blog about ANYTHING ELSE NO ONE FUCKING POSTS COMMENTS. (If I could make that blink annoyingly, I would.) I’d love to babble all sciency about the structure of the cosmos (I did a pretty damn good job (with a friend of mine) of presenting this to a grad class a couple semesters ago- Michele was there!) or about the research Michele and I did as undergrads in our experimental physics class (which was on in-flight annihilating positrons (a positron is an anti-electron… see, electrons have a negative charge so the anti-particle would be of the same mass (9.109e-31 kg), spin (1/2) but opposite electric charge (+1))); here’s the abstract:

We proposed to test the relativistic to semi-classical mass difference of positrons by measuring the in-flight annihilation energy of positrons produced by the β-decay of Na²² into Ne²². To do this we used two NaI scintillation detectors connected to a computer by an ADC. By doing so we hoped see a definite discrepancy between the semi-classical method and the relativistic method and thus demonstrate the more correct nature of the latter. Unfortunately, we were unable to determine this due to the low energy level and decay rate of our Na²² source and the sensitivity of our apparatus.

Fucking cool, huh?! We were colliding matter and anti-matter (anyone makes a fucking Star Trek joke gets a swift kick in the ass). And then there’s all the stuff I think about: relativity, dynamics, mechanics, quantum physics, light, electromagnetism (you see what I did there? No? figures), nuclear physics, finite velocity of light and the ramifications of it, information paradoxes (can information travel faster than the speed of light?), time paradoxes arising from time travel (which is fantastical sci-fi shit), uncertainty principle, exclusion, spinors, radioactive decay, gravity… On July 4th this year I was sitting on a dock for 30 minutes kicking water into the air watching how the water’s structure reformed in mid air into spheres similar to how they do in space (which makes perfect sense if you think about it). The interesting thing is that there’s a surface tension that’s breaking due to external (gravity) forces, but the spheres of water are not uniform (introducing chaos into the dynamics) as they tumble back to the lake. Indeed, they are of vairous volumes so the question becomes: why do they not form equal volume spheres when they break? Well, because of internal forces (molecular structure of H2O is very strong) and that the force required to launch the water into the air is not spread uniformly over the mass.

Yeah. So I don’t remember what I was babbling about because it’s a day later since I was writing this. But I liked where I was going so I’m going to try picking it up again.

I think it was that if you people would comment on things I’d like to blog about, I could blog about that stuff. But you all tell me when you read that “science shit” it’s like a deer in headlights.

Anyway. Some moran found Jesus in her Cheetos:

 Hotlinked because I hate “news” sites.

Fox “news” thought it was appropriate in their non-biased view to run this as a “news” story. I hate Fox “news”. It doesn’t stop there, though. Today I found that these people claim Jesus is in the fucking cat’s fur. I can’t see it:

Cute cat that’s holier than thou!

The best is this line from the “article”: We’ve had a lot of things happen in our lives. This was a good sign that uh..
everything’s ok and got somebody looking after us. YEEHAW! Gyuk gyuk!(I added that last bit, but you can hear it, too, right?)

Since this is two-thirds of a Jesus trifecta, I thought I’d post my dog’s butt for your genuflecting pleasure:

I FOUND JESUS!

Do Hindus see Ganesh in their everyday items? I wonder.

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My head hurts

This one is mostly for Jason, but I think everyone that reads this blog can appreciate it.

I gave up on TV, mostly, because the infrequency of anything thought provoking and intelligent finally got to me. Even my much beloved History and Discovery channels have “jumped the shark” (an expression which, itself, has “jumped the shark”) and are showing reality series: Ice Road Truckers, Deadliest Catch, Mythbusters, Dirty Jobs, to name a few. Sure, I get my glee on with some of these, but in the end it’s just filler material with no real value. Worse, though, are the shitcoms sitcoms and reality shows on other channels like American Gladiators, The Bachelorett, Life According to Jim (heh), Reba, Two and a Half Men, The Simpsons. It’s all garbage. People fixate on these shows like they extensions of their own lives instead of living their own lives. What’s worse is the humor and plots are spoon fed to an audience with a steadily decreasing intelligence.

That’s not to say there aren’t good shows: Weeds, The Office, Family Guy. But they’re rare and get canceled because the writers were writing for more intelligent people (Futurama).

Anyway, so I stopped watching TV. My cable hasn’t been working for about two weeks so I decided to entertain myself with the internet. There’s a much much wider variety of stupidity and occassionally there is intelligence. But, really, it’s mostly just stupid people thinking they’re smart and that they matter.

For instance, this guy. In one foul swoop of his keystrokes he’s single-handedly pointed out every flaw I’d pointed out in my previous controversial post about stupid people arguing about things. I’ll spare you having to read the article (if it can be called that, which I don’t think it can.. more of a work of fiction) and point out some juicy bits.

Mathematical probability alone has shown that it is not rational, logical, or scientific to believe that life could originate by chance.

He misses the meaning of what scientific is and who ever said math was rational? Pi and square root of 2 are prime examples of incredibly important irrational numbers! Also, I can show with mathematical probability (as opposed to social probability or faith probability) that the odds are actually in favor of life originating by chance: the larger the universe the more likely the probability of weird things happening. In all of existence over all time.. life would have eventually evolved. It’s just statistically probable. Actually, if space and time are infinite then the probability is exactly 100%.

He goes on to babble a bit about the improbability that a life form must wait millions of years to evolve sexual organs to reproduce, but that that idea is preposterous. Because, you know, amoebas do the dirty like humans do. Well, maybe not fundamental Christians. I’m actually not sure how they get it on.

So, he postulates that aliens are actually demons sent by Satan to debunk Christianity. (No really!) But quickly goes on to say that God can create aliens. It’s just that he didn’t. They’re demons. Which makes sense. If you’re fucking insane.

The golden nugget, though, is something I was going to let Jason find on his own. A little bit of logical flim flam that made me giddy to read it. But, I decided I’d just share it. It’s much better in context, by the way:

 The Christian Gospel is unique, unlike any other religious teaching.

Wait! He’s not done. The next sentence is priceless.

That in itself is powerful evidence of its true and divine origin.

GLEE! You can’t argue that logic! I mean, he’s a graduate of BJU (Bob Jones University). They learn you faith there, my friend. Their science department teaches the young-Earth creation… I hate to call it a theory… YAY!

Anyway, from here the “article” disintegrates into a bunch of religious mumbo jumbo and I lost the point of it all.

Read it for yourself.

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It’s been a while, so I thought I’d remind you…

That is all.

KHAAAAAAAAAAN!!

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The capitol of Nebraska is Lincoln

Bester scene ever? Who remember the Kentucky Fried Movie?

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Best Scene Ever?

Swingers was a great movie for a variety of reasons. Reasons I’d like to tell you, but I won’t. If you’ve seen the movie you’ll agree: it was a great movie. If you haven’t seen the movie, you’ll be clueless when I give my reasons. So, it’s pointless to list my reasons because a) I’d be repeating common knowledge or b) it would make no sense.

Instead, I give you this scene.

You, my friend, are money.

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This is good pudding.

If you’ve ever played an online game you can probably relate to this 10 episode comedy.. thinger. Whatever the fuck they’re called. I laughed my ass off. Good stuff.

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Couch surfing

First, the website: www.couchsurfing.com

This is a brilliant idea. A social network of people willing to let you crash on their couch/floor. Not just the 85,000 in the USA, but ALL OVER THE WORLD! How amazing would your vacation be? You fly in to Spain (let’s say), get picked up by a local, crash at a local’s place, hang out with locals.. That’s REAL. Not the tourist shit. I love this idea. Plus, it cuts on costs. Hotel for $300 a night? Shya! NOT! Local’s place for $50 to cover some expensive they’ll incur. WIN!

It also seems they have checks and balances to keep the potential freaks/killers away, too. Check here. Read it, I don’t feel like retyping it.

Not much else to say. Nik thinks it’s crazy stupid. But she also lives in a shell. :P

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