Archive for April, 2009

 

Dinosaurs and Their Environment – Exam #1

2 years ago
by Rico Penguin in

  Now quite honestly I had forgotten this is Wednesday. I really wish that was not the case. However over the next two days I’ll be covering the 6 chapters of info that will be in the exam. Hopefully it’ll all come to a better end than the one Dinosaurs succumbed.

  With 6 chapters to look over we split it cleanly down the middle. Today we’ll be discussing the Skeleton (hardest part), Classification and Relationships of Vertebrates (Step down in Hardness), and the Origin of Dinosaurs.

  Tomorrow you will (as well as I) be dealing with Size and Volume (Not too bad), Theropods-Carnosaurs (T-Rex And Friends), and Theropods-Coelosaurs (Raptors and Friends). Any errors in these headings will be corrected tomorrow as I go over the topics.

  The questions are from the study guide and I’ll be trying to answer them to the best of my abilities with the notes.

  What are the various Modes of fossilization? What are the best conditions for preservation?

  While I’d like to be creative and start from the least efficient and work up to the best we’ll do a downward spiral instead. The first method of fossilization is the best, known as unaltered, it is called such because as best as one can hope the organism has come from the past to the present with the absolute least amount of damage (mostly genetic). Insects that are trapped in Amber (or other small animals) is a great example of unaltered fossilization. The next of these unaltered situations is freezing, which also retains much of an organisms parts (not so much and not so long as the amber would), and finally bog mummies. What all these things have in common is that they are extremely low oxygen environments (perhaps extreme is a strong word), in the case of the bog people the environment is also acidic, and in the case of bog and ice it is a cool environment. All these things reduce the speed of degradation, bacteria is not very happy in any of these environments.

  A fun, if not disturbing, bit of info is that in an oxygen free environment a condition known as saponification happens, essentially the fatty tissues of a body turn into a soap like matter. So perhaps the name eludes to the end result ;) . Likewise desocate refers to mummification which is another efficient way to preserve bodies (as Egyptians have shown).

  Moving onto a replacement like preservation (the one more people are actually familiar with). When organic material like leaves are buried, they’ll eventually be pressed and degrade until all that is left is a carbon film, it ends up looking like a photograph.

  Per mineralization is a similar (to me) system where the pores in organic matter is filled with minerals, usually silicon, when you think about dinosaurs that are well preserved this is likely the cause. If it isn’t you have a case of molds and casts, the bones and other matter just completely decay (as they should, bone is very organic) leaving a hole in the ground that tends to be filled with a different concentration of minerals. As far as I know, there is no actual dinosaur bone found anymore, just very well preserved casts. That may indeed be wrong but its what I’ve taken away thus far from the class.

  Another fun note is that skin, feathers, eggs, nests and turds can still be recovered from very very old animals in the right environment.

What are the Characteristics of bones, tendons, and ligaments? What are the names of all the major bones in a Dinosaurs body (and consequently most animals)?

  When thinking about bones in the general sense you tend to have a very thick and good-for-clubbing outer layer that surrounds a spongy inner layer (that any lion will tell you is delicious). There are variances in both of these factors when talking about birds (which are much lighter all around), or elephants (which are much thicker in general). When I see a cross sectioned bird bone it reminds me of those cupcakes that were a little ‘too airy’ that you bit into and find nothing but an empty chasm inside. Which in terms of cupcakes is tragic.

  Tendons are the wonderful little ties that connect muscles to bones, these are one of the reasons you have bones in the first place. If your muscles could retain shape without the framework of bones you’d have no need for tendons either…which may sound a bit stupid in retrospect but its just a bit of info out of the ole brain here. Next you have Ligaments which connects bones to bones, which together with tendons and bones helps fulfill all the basic requirements for building an organism (structurally speaking…not functionally).

  The part I was dreading comes next. There are 30 major bones in a dinosaurs body. Lets see if I can find an easy way to name them all.

  We’ll separate it into 5 parts, you have the head region, the torso, arms+hands, legs+feet, and tail. Vertebrae is actually split into 4 pieces. With this in mind it would go as follows.

Head:
  Maxilla is the top half of a skull more specifically the upper jaw.
  Mandible is the bottom half (otherwise known as the lower Jaw).
  Cranium is the…well it is the Cranium, what we commonly call our skulls.

Torso:
  Cervical Vertebrae is the first of 4 sections of the spine+tail, it consists of the spine between the base of the cranium and the shoulder region.
  Dorsal (Trunk) Vertabrae is the second of 4 sections of the spine+tail, it consists of the space between the shoulders and the top of the hips (well right up util that point).
  Ribs are the ribs and if you are curious what they look like check out a snake skeleton, those guys are made of basically nothing but ribs.

Arms+Hands:
  Scapula is the first part of what is the arm, I believe the slang term for it is “shoulder blade” but I may be wrong there.
  Coracoid is the bone that connects your shoulder blade to the arm. I think, that’s a complete guess honestly, I look on wikipedia and I’m still kind of lost. It’s there though (as you’ll see in a picture later).
  Humerus AKA the Funny Bone, is the top bone in your arm.
  Radius, one of two bones in the lower half of your arm, to identify it remember radius to Pinky.
  Ulna, the other of the two bones, to identify it remember Ulna to thumb.
  Carpals, those first bones in the hand.
  Metacarpals, the second set of bones in your hand.
  Phalanges (In the Hand), the tips of your fingers, perhaps even your whole finger. (I think it actually is the entire finger).

  Legs+Hands:
    Sacral (Sacrum) Vertebrae is the third part of the spine that consists of the hip region.
    Ilium working clockwise it is the top of the 3 pieces of the pelvic region.
    Pubis the next bone working clockwise in the pelvic region.
    Ischium the final bone in the clockwise scan of the pelvic region.
    Femur, the largest single bone in the Human body, great for clubbing.
    Tibia, the front bone in the lower portion of your leg. Break this and you are in for some serious recovery.
    Fibula, the back bone in the lower portion of your leg. Breaking it isn’t quite as bad but still sucks.
    Tarsals, the top bones in your footsies.
    Metatarsals, the bottom bones in your footies.
    Phalanges (In the Foot), the little piggies from that horrible horrible children’s song.

  Tail:
    Caudal (Tail) Vertabrae is essentially the tail. In raptors it is fused at about halfway down to the tip making it like a rod.
    Haemal Arches are what I believe to be the ‘ribs’ of the tail. For keeping it nice and sturdy.
    
    Below is an image to help clear up my terrible descriptions.
     
 

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  Because of time constraints the following will be on tomorrows lecture as well. Good thing I’m starting very early.

What are signs of a fast animal and what indicates their primary food source (carnivore, herbivore, omnivore)? Linnean classification and cladistic classification, The meaning of general and specific characters, How to construct and use a cladogram, and What are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs? What is a tetrapod? What are the characteristics of a tetrapod that set it apart from a fish? How did tetrapods evolve from fish?What are Behaviors of crocodiles that separate them from other reptiles? What is erect stance and what are its advantages? What tetrapod groups do and do not have erect stance? How do Saurischia and Ornithischia differ? What are the names of the Era, periods and dates of the periods when dinosaurs were alive?

 

A Game by Any Other Name

2 years ago
by Rico Penguin in

Recently someone brought up the question of why the US tends to be very slow to get certain games that have been released before the ESRB compared to other nations. It has to do with laws in selling the product and the rating system. I have very strong feelings about just how unnecessary the ESRB, but that would boil down into a rant that I can summarize quite quickly and succinctly “Be a better parent and stop expecting everyone else to do your job.” My parents never once looked at the ratings on the games, they weren’t fools and I’ll explain now the art of gaming names.

There is never a goal of hiding destructive content behind a friendly name, this isn’t the Tobacco industry, indeed it’s almost always (if not always) painfully simple to know whether a game can be safely given to a child that you’d rather not spend time with. I say this because anyone who is attentive with their children will not even need to go this far because they’ll be there while their child is playing “Onslaught Brigade Killer Nazi 7” or whatever else that becomes popular this year.

Lets look at a dozen children friendly games and a dozen non-children friendly games. Try and figure out the pattern for each before you go on to the reveal. When I say child friendly I simply mean that even the staunchest ignorant observer would be hard-pressed to equate playing the game to becoming a murderer (which statistically is unlikely if you were curious).

Children Friendly Games

  1. Sonic The Hedgehog
  2. Super Mario Bros
  3. DeBlob
  4. Pokemon
  5. Sim City
  6. Professor Layton and the Curious Village
  7. Dance Dance Revolution
  8. Donkey Kong
  9. Cooking Mama
  10. Lego (Anything)
  11. Club Penguin
  12. Animal Crossing

Non-Children Friendly Games

  1. God of War
  2. Grand Theft Auto
  3. Killzone 2
  4. Resident Evil
  5. Gears of War
  6. Left 4 Dead
  7. Call of Duty: World at War
  8. Resistance: Fall of Man
  9. World of Warcraft
  10. Fallout
  11. Street Fighter
  12. Assassin’s Creed

So have you figured it out? What noticeable difference there is between games your kids can play and what they can’t (well they could play any of them, but for people who actually think it’ll effect the kid). The games that are kid friendly almost always sound kid friendly, sure you could misconstrue club penguin as a verb and a noun instead of one big noun…which I’ll admit is a HUGE difference.

If you go to club penguin for a fun night of dancing is quite different than going to club penguins. But I digress, even the ambiguous titles up there are pretty obvious upon gazing for about a quarter of a second at the covers. Have you ever looked at a cover for a game and thought “Hmm I wonder if there will be death and destruction.” No. While you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover you will always get a pretty accurate view of the ‘danger’ involved with a game by a look at the cover. Lets have a few visual examples.

image
Alright this guy has a gun. Probably involves shooting.

image
Now if the title wasn’t a give away you might notice the pissed off alien with a weapon.

image
Again if the title isn’t a giveaway (Ultimate Fighting Championship) the picture is.

image
Now I’ll admit he eats ‘pills’ and ugh…”kills” ghosts…if you can do that. But obviously friendly.

image
Sure there are lightsabers and ‘violence’ but anyone who knows what Lego’s are knows that they are ALWAYS kid friendly (choking aside).

image
It’s golf. While I realize this could lead your kid to making millions and incidentally losing their ability to feel compassion (joking joking) it is family friendly.

Now I realize I chose all 360 games (a system notorious for adult games) but that was mostly the point. There is really little to no gray area in gaming. If there is going to be death, murder, drug selling, it’s all painfully obvious on the cover if not by the name but by the visual content. Then again on second thought.

image
I can see the ambiguity.

 

The Möbius Code (Part 5)

2 years ago
by Rico Penguin in

[ Index ]
Part 1 – The Introduction
Part 2 – From Universe to Solar System
Part 3 – From Solar System to Earth
Part 4 – From Solar System to Earth

  So time has passed and we have reached what we would now call Humans, Homo Sapiens, or any other clever naming agent you can grow to love. There is little to talk about here, not because much hasn’t happened, but because it is all easily accessible in the plethora of required history courses you will take in school.

  One can hope we’ll survive ourselves. Assuming we do we have many millions of years to go before the current theorized end comes (the scientific one not all the religious ones that pop up annually). We are 1google years away from what is the predicted end. That’s a much less clean way of saying 1 Googol years from now, or (arguably) even cleaner would be 1 with 1 hundred zeroes following it. It’s a fantastically long time that even I didn’t quite grasp till I saw it written out in this post.

  Over this time we’ll have stars born and stars die. Black holes will grow and shrink (via a process championed by Stephen Hawking). Galaxies will soar away from one another with each passing day, planets will be consumed in the expansion of stars, the Earth will be scorched by the sun (all things left as they are). Eventually all matter will be stretched to an extreme and ever widening point where heat is no longer generated. This will leave an entire universe with absolutely no action which technically would also mean that time has ‘ended’.

  I’m skeptical as I’ve stated before. We have not accounted for the excess gravity all over (the idea behind the possible existence of dark matter) and frankly there tends to be new information found with each passing year and certainly with each passing decade. It’s not to say we don’t have ages, 1 Google years is an amazing amount of time. So many wonderful (and unfortunately terrible) things can transpire between now and the purposed end.

  My theory? While I’m hardly a better source than any astrophysicist I think that there is some currently unknown rubber band response to the expansion. At a certain point the stretch will get so extreme that everything will then rocket inwards. It seems quite reasonable to assume that this is what has happened the X amount of times in the past and will happen the X amount of times in the future. Of course there is also the possibility that the recoiling inwards is exponentially proportional to the expulsion outwards with each ‘bang’ and perhaps we are experiencing what will end up being the final shot. Who knows, it would be quite unfortunate but we still have far more time than needed for just about anything.

  It is currently the state of all things mortal or otherwise to reach a state of inaction, it would be nice if we put more energy into prolonging and enhancing the time of action we each have. With each dollar we spend on death instead of life we are creating a large imbalance that could indeed snowball one day. I just hope it hasn’t already begun.

  I’ve left out unimaginably large amounts of time, but that’s because who knows what will happen down to the number. The chaos effect makes estimating things highly difficult if not impossible. Neat stuff.

Educational Aggravation Overly Exaggerated?

2 years ago
by Rico Penguin in

This is one of those things that may indeed make me look a little insensitive. Indeed perhaps that is the case. However I am at a loss when I read articles like this. When I was younger I got called basically anything you can imagine. Fag, Queer, Gay, and Homo, indeed I was called basically everything there is to call someone (without being positive). Did it hit me and bounce off because of my rubbery exterior and stick to all those sticky glue ridden baddies? Well no indeed it hurt me deeply for a good while. However, never at even the worst point, did I ever even think about killing myself. Frankly people just aren’t worth that much investment.

I don’t quite get the generation that is a sneeze after mine. I remember Columbine when I was in Junior High and how a group of 5 (or was it more?) kids were all emotional because they didn’t have any friends. I looked and realized that I only had at best 2 to 3 people I could really truly call friends, the rest were friends by circumstance. However, while I might have written about the doom and gloom, I hardly felt it. It was more like a responsibility, it always just seemed right to articulate the macabre world I felt growing around me. That’s what I do, I try and convert what I feel or think into text because while I may be fragile and mortal the words that leave me are far less so.

So when did people become so dependent on the recognition of obnoxious pricks? When did we prioritize people that frankly don’t matter? Those cool kids you met in junior high and/or high school are probably working at a McDonalds now. Their personalities are toxic and frankly the only reason they worked in school was because they were butt to butt with a ton of people. When you have that kind of concentration of folks in a region you are bound to find someone who enjoys your dry comedy and ability to notice imperfections in people. Which really isn’t that hard seeing as likely less than a percent of the world population has anywhere near symmetry in their bodies. The rest of us have discrepancies ranging from a few millimeters to perhaps an entire inch or more.

For me in school the revelation, that change came the moment I personally realized that people don’t really matter. More often than not, unless they are filthy stinking rich (which is rarely the case), the people who annoy you the most will likely go off to be nothings that fester and vanish into obscurity. Sure there are exceptions, you have your Bill O’ Reilly’s and your Rush Limbaugh’s, but when you realize that they are maybe a few hundred out of the literal hundreds of millions in the US alone it starts to come into perspective.

I’m just curious as to what happened. Is it a side effect of our drive to make people sensitive? I didn’t really start seeing an increase in suicide until schools started picking up their punishment for harassing kids. When I was in Elementary kids could basically do anything short of punching you in the butthole and get away with it, nobody died, sure you had your emotional kids (myself included) but it was hardly a suicide worthy experience.

Perhaps we should take a step back. Stop trying to protect kids from an experience that really shouldn’t be all that much of an experience. It’s not unlike sexuality, we tell people that it is some taboo monstrosity and indeed it is treated like such. Anything you hand over to people stuck in huge concentrations will be compounded as such, so a small reminder that being accepting is important will boom into a ridiculous fear of being judged. The very day I realized how unnecessary it was to be accepted was the very day that my stress levels plummeted straight through the floor. While it was still a bumpy road it was an ever inclining one to the point where I am now.

You may exit school with a few less friends than you were hoping, but you’ll also leave school alive, healthy, and more than likely happy. Plus you’ll find most of your friends have become alcoholics anyways so it really isn’t that big of a loss, or maybe I’m pushing my own experiences on a bit too much there ;) . To summarize, if you are a kid who isn’t feeling quite popular enough, calm the hell down. I played Pokémon from the day it was cool, through the days when it was ‘gay’, and straight on into today. Why? Because I like it, you should do that with anything you enjoy as well. 9 times out of 10 that thing someone is badgering you at school for doing is something they do at their house (this again is something I caught from personal experience).

PS. For those curious, yes I will be finishing up the Mobius code tonight. Just wanted to post this while I was waiting for my next class.

The Möbius Code (Part 4)

2 years ago
by Rico Penguin in

[ Index ]
Part 1 – The Introduction
Part 2 – From Universe to Solar System
Part 3 – From Solar System to Earth

  So when last we met (if memory serves) we were discussing the first life on Earth. Tiny tiny little organisms that one cannot see with their naked eye (unless you squint really really hard…ok you still can’t). Slowly the organisms become more complex, initially it was a matter of symbiosis for at least some. Small organisms began fusing to one another (see mitochondria) to create more complex and indeed more efficient systems. With the noticeably copious amounts of space in the sea and the development of an Atmosphere there was not much to worry about but taking in energy, via eating or sunlight, and reproducing like you had nothing left to do.

  Some organisms split like a particularly tasty banana in your ice cream, others mated. As time passed and the bigger is better mentality started to pick up we begin to see visible formations in the sea. Eventually plants will dominate the sea and spread out onto land. With the introduction of a nice firm atmosphere (firm my way of saying effective) to protect their cells from the ultraviolet sunlight there was little reason to stay bound to the sea. The first’ ‘animals’ would be completely secluded to the sea and would spread quite well. Considering the absolutely massive nature of the ocean and its ability to reduce gravity’s effect on organisms it makes surviving and growing much easier than on land (at least initially, these days you get eaten by many crazy animals in the sea).

  Once the surface land is absolutely covered in plants (maybe sooner) there is a revelation, as always, a copious amount of food leads to the introduction of something that’ll eat it. Indeed someday there will be a bacteria that absolutely engorges itself on our plastic waste, it is just a matter of waiting. As the first animals move to land they bring a second source of food to the land, that being them. Carnivores would soon fill that gap as well. I often wonder if the copious levels of land carnivores are what lead some animals to return to the sea. Indeed all sea mammals are incidents of animals that were initially land mammals and moved to the sea. The motion of a dolphin is hauntingly similar to the motion of a gazelle, and in some cases you can find the remains of what once were legs in whale corpses and other sea mammals as they move ever closer to lose all evidence of their previous adventures on land.

   Somewhere in here you have dinosaurs rise. They have a pretty long and successful run (I believe there was a mass extinction or two) until the drop of a meteor that I’ve read was large enough to fill the rose bowl (or some football stadium). It impacted somewhere in the gulf of Mexico and utterly dominated the planet. Basically all life on Earth died. Before this point there were tiny little mice like animals, which might not be accurate, so just imagine a cute little mammal of your choice. Essentially before Dinosaurs were extinguished this was the pinnacle of our particular class in the animal kingdom. After dinosaurs mammals popped out and started to show their talents. It would be some many millions of years but eventually a particularly successful class of apes came to be the most dominant of all animal species (relative to land mass covered…and I suppose not counting insects).

  People often wonder why Humans made that jump mentally. As I’ve stated before I think it was a case of substantial amounts of food. Evolutionarily there is no real advantage to being exceedingly smarter than your prey, it doesn’t take much to catch a Gazelle, strength and big teeth will do it more often than not. However with a single mutation of the brain taking it just far enough above the average level of ape intelligence it would become, much like the original organisms spreading across the planet, a snowball effect. With every evolutionary generation the human brain would grow larger, at one time even there was more than one type of human. However, for reasons I don’t know personally, one particular answer I’ve heard was the mistake by the now extinct humanoids to let their opponents spread into Europe and across to Asia, this essentially locked them into a small area and they died off. But again take that with a grain of salt.

  So slowly but surely, this ever increasing effect, like the pull of a black hole growing with each uncontrollable growth we move on to modern day. Which is where we will stop for now. Tomorrow may indeed be the final episode of this little collection. It’ll be about what is to come (in the most general of senses) and the ‘end’…as well as a bit of philosophy that I hope someday to get clarified.

The Möbius Code (Part 3)

2 years ago
by Rico Penguin in

[ Index ]
Part 1 – The Introduction
Part 2 – From Universe to Solar System

  So where were we? Well science is not my strong point, I’m more about the philosophy of things using science as backup. That being said if you catch any scientific inaccuracies in here don’t be all too surprised. The general idea should be close enough for Jazz however.

  Generally speaking the further away from a star you are the larger you are. I’m not entirely sure why but I’ve read a few times that it has to do with the lower temperatures. As planets are forming there was probably an issue with certain matter being burned away from inner planets (like say Ice) which didn’t burn off on the outer planets. This would give them much more mass to pull in even more matter until they hit whatever limit (that is before they’d start hitting those uncomfortably large star sizes).

  While there are other planets in our Solar System and I’m sure with a good drink and a weekend you could get to know any of them and find them to be quite friendly folks. However there is one that is substantially more important at the moment. That would be Earth, which in the beginning like all other matter was in a fairly hot state. This molten sphere was spinning quite merrily, getting belted by frozen comets and meteor rocks and probably a unicorn or two (okay likely not the latter).

  According to a report I read (and subsequently watched on FORA.tv, again you all should check it out), the Moon was formed from a rather large impact during the early days of the Earth. A massive object smashed into the Earth launching a fairly large, dare I say moon sized, chunk of rock into the atmosphere. Interestingly as the video notes the composition of the moon fits quite nicely with this theory and frankly I see little reason not to believe it, I imagine otherwise it would be quite hard for something the size of the moon to be flying by and get stuck in our orbit.

  About 4 billion years ago, which frankly isn’t all that long when thinking about non-living things, the first life sprouted up. The presence of water on Earth is not exactly all that surprising. I’d be willing to bet that any planet in the relative range that we are from our star (that is further if their star is larger or closer if their star is smaller) would find quite a lot of water on them. Comets which were, amongst other things, pretty icy were pummeling anything they could get attracted to. Those planets too close to stars would have it subsequently evaporate and those further would have it freeze (special exceptions aside). However for your average planet in this area like that of ours found themselves covered in water. This is helpful because, generally speaking, you are going to be hard pressed to find water and not find life in it. Even extremely toxic, extremely hot, or extremely cold (see ice) water can have life either living merrily or at least being in stasis within them.

  I personally wonder if Virus’s were not the first ‘life’ on the Earth. An in-between stage moving from the many non-living (see incapable or acting on own) things to the living. They have very simple processes and a very simple goal. Simply to sustain their existence through whatever means possible. There is and likely never will be any evidence of this and it is merely a thought. However what I can say is that once the acidity of the Oceans (volcanic activity is hell on a PH balance) were friendly enough the bacteria that sprung forth was quite happy to do so.

  It seems almost silly to imagine hundreds of millions of years, in which every fraction of a second there is a reaction of chemicals and elements across an almost unfathomably large space would not return some sort of unusual side effect. It’s a very good side effect because without it we wouldn’t have chicken…oh or us. I keep forgetting you need to exist before you eat chicken.

  The fact that life is so happy in water makes much sense. Ultraviolet light and other radiations that do well to destroy the genetic makeup that comprises life have relative difficulty permeating water as easily as other substances (exceptions like Lead aside). Unlike Lead and rock, Water is also easy to move through which is a very helpful addition. Though even without water I’m sure that some sort of extreme bacteria would live quite happily in a mercury rich cave dining on the walls.

  At some point it became apparent that there was a massive orb blasting endless levels of ultraviolet light onto the planet. Organisms began converting this matter for energy creating a seemingly endless supply of food. They began to convert the CO2 flowing through the air (and wherever else it could squeeze its deadly butt into) into Oxygen. This process would help bolster the atmosphere and probably for a bit was actually quite extreme. Anything that wasn’t prepared to process Oxygen would have found the result quite fatal.

   But whenever a massive supply of new food arises something arises to consume it. At some point in here there was surely something that noticed everything around it could produce energy if consumed. Carnivores likely arose at this point. Indeed on thinking back carnivores probably popped up before even the photosynthesis, I just get ahead of myself.

  We now had carnivores, herbivores, water, and copious levels of oxygen. However all things included in this conversation are still so small that unless there is an absolutely grotesquely large collection of them we couldn’t see them with the naked eye. Stuff that would make plankton squint…well maybe not but it would sure as hell be hard for us to see.

  Tomorrow we’ll move onto the first plants and hope that I don’t butcher too much while trying to make my various points. Who knows in a few decades I might have a nice solid little lecture out of this thing (I redo it yearly).

The Möbius Code (Part 2)

2 years ago
by Rico Penguin in

[ Index ]
Part 1 – The Introduction

  In the beginning of this particular Universe as likely each before it there was a point when all matter was crushed to a near 0 point. Think of it like exponential decay, you can keep going and going but you will never hit 0. Indeed that’s what happens with all the matter, it is crushed till it is absolutely as close to 0 as anything can possibly reach. This runaway series of events builds up likely the highest level of energy to ever be experienced by the universe at any given time.

  Going back to yesterdays discussion on time I imagine that there is a vast amount of compression that is done. Indeed if time moved at the same speed during this point as it does in modern time it would probably take incredibly long periods of time long outweighing a human life and easily dwarfing the entirety of human (and perhaps biological) history. However with the warping of space (again reaching a near 0 point) could quite possibly be causing this otherwise unfathomably long period of crushing to happen in a relative instant. Although to be fair either way it doesn’t matter, it’s not how quickly that it happens but that it happens.

  When the explosion first happens there is a point currently that I don’t believe is (or may ever be) understood. Now the following is how I understand it and again I may be wrong. This is the part that you should probably ask your local Astrophysicist about :) . Likewise I’ll be using the word explosion because it is easy to visualize, technically it was not an explosion. Disclaimers aside let us continue. The explosion created a massive amount of energy. This fantastic level of heat meant that essentially the entire Universe was plasma. As time passed a long the temperature cooled. Matter goes from a point that we can’t really simulate yet to materials that are exhibit able. You start off with very small matter and move up till you get to the familiar protons and electrons. There was during this time as well anti matter particles which is a topic that is a bit over my head. The best I could tell you for now is that when matter and anti matter connect they have some fairly explosive results. However as you’ll find in “Death by Black Hole” that Mr. Tyson feels that a universe entirely made of Anti matter would look indistinguishable of our own universe. The exception being that on contact with you it would kill you. But assuming you were anti matter it would all look and feel the same :) .

  Over a good chunk of time (hundreds of thousands of years or something along those lines) protons and neutrons started to act quit friendly to one another and formed the first nuclei in the universe. Electrons stroll along and we finally have the required ingredients to make quite a large collection of different elements. Essentially the cooler things are (to a point) the easier it is for molecules to combine, it makes sense when taken into context. When holding some magnetic beads you will have less trouble getting them to connect when they lightly bump one another than when they are slammed into one another. The kinetic energy can be so great that it ejects attracted items apart from on another.

  Initially the Universe was primarily Hydrogen which makes sense. It is easily the simplest element on the periodic table. Slowly as temperatures cool you will start to see other elements popping up. Gravity starts to become a noticeably dominant force collecting matter into…well for lack of a better term Colonies. These colonies began to form gas clouds, which consequently would make stars. Likewise this wonderful duo helped form Galaxies and the other stuff that anyone with a telescope and a bottle of fine wine (or cider for those of us who don’t drink) can find.

  Essentially for stars they build up tons and tons of matter. As matter builds up you start to get heat (as one would probably figure). Over time you have a very very hot and very very large object, neatly enough it produces an equilibrium of energy where the force outwards is equal to the gravitational tugging inwards. That’s why it looks like a big ball, generally speaking when you are being pressed in and pushed out in all directions with equal force you will end up with a ball for most non-stubborn matter.

  So with quite a few oversights we have gotten to a more familiar Universe (Note: These oversights are not necessarily because we don’t know, but because I haven’t read it yet which isn’t really a surprise considering the copious amounts of info available). With the next chapter I’ll try and take a stab at what I (at least think I) know about our own Solar System. For anyone interested in knowing more and more accurate information about your universe you can find some fantastic books by many talented individuals. Anyone who needs suggestions can email me, I’d be glad to give you a throng of suggestions on literature.

 

The Möbius Code (Part 1)

2 years ago
by Rico Penguin in

  Anyone who has known me or read this website knows that I’m constantly attempting to decode for myself just how the universe reached the point it has currently reached. With each passing year there is new information that gets gathered into my tiny tiny brain (well I suppose compared to body size its not too shabby). So the following is, to the best of my current knowledge, how I think the universe has come to be. I’ll also discuss personal philosophies on how I feel it is best to examine the universe.

  First we need to establish my views on time. Without them it makes it somewhat difficult to grasp just where everything begins (which will soon look like the wrong term to use). To do this we introduce an item that you can replicate with a strip of paper and a strip or two of tape. It’s nice because it is easy to make a personal one for examination.

  image
  A Möbius strip is a one sided object in a three dimensional world. We could argue that it does indeed have a small almost inconsequential side on its edge however that doesn’t change the point of the example. You have an object that appears to have two definitive sides and yet in actuality it only has one. If you happen to feel creative take a strip of paper and twist one of the ends a single time. Tape that end to the other end and you should have in your hands a Möbius strip. If you take a pen and press it in the middle of either side and run it along you will find that by the time your pen reaches the point you started at that you have a line on both sides of the paper and yet never had to lift the pen. You have essentially taken something that cognitively and visually appears to have two sides and proven with the wonders of a pen (or pencil) that it is merely an illusion where instead a one sided object actually stands.

  So this is important (as I imagine you hoped it would be) because essentially this is how I view two separate real world issues. The first is that of time and the second is of the origin of the Universe. Now time is a wonderful thing, without it (or at least without the phenomena we call time) most events wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. In fact no events would be interesting named because there would be absolutely no events. It would just be a paused screen for all eternity, sort of like running Crysis on the average Jo’s PC (Nerd Joke).

  I’m willing to argue that time itself has no beginning and just may end up never having an end. While with current knowledge of the Universe it does appear that eventually the Universe will stretch to such an extreme point that absolutely nothing will be moving any longer. Technically with the absence of all movement there is no longer time. Though there is a vast majority of the Universe that hasn’t currently been examined. The two prevailing arguments I have seen is that either we have goofed our calculations of Gravitation OR there is a matter that is not reactive to light. It is known as Dark Matter for a very good reason, it is literally absent of light. As far as I know nobody knows how Dark Matter reacts with all things around it or when presented with high levels of torsion. If we assume that the vast majority of the Universe is indeed Dark Matter it may indeed have a reactive property to that of a rubber band.

  Which to me seems more likely. Why? Well it would seem extremely unlikely given the nature of everything that this process would only happen once. It is entirely possible that of the infinitely many times that this has gone on through its process that we just happen to be the ones that ended up in the ever expanding and eventually final universe. I’m skeptical but I won’t rule it out.

  Time, like the Möbius strip, are examined as if they are two sided objects. In fact however I feel that Time is indeed one sided much like the adorable paper strip shown above. Time has and always will, by necessity, exist. There is little reason to believe otherwise, while this may seem naive (and I’m willing to agree it might be) it does however clear up some larger issues such as the origin of the Universe.

  As you may have surmised the previous lecture essentially explains my understanding of the Universe as of now. Unless we get into the Quantum Level (and well outside of my realm of understanding at this time) the general rule of thumb is that matter is neither created nor destroyed at any time. Even a black hole doesn’t destroy matter, it merely crushes it to a near 0 point and flicks off fantastically small bits of itself until the black hole ceases to exist. Stephen Hawkins has some wonderful literature on this topic if you get interested.

  With this fact in place it seems illogical to think that the Universe is any different (or time for that matter). Why would there be a special exception that serves absolutely no purpose. Indeed adding the special exception seems to do nothing more but support extraneous and entirely unhelpful theories about environments that the living human can never interact with (without the aid of some strong narcotics that is).

  So I think this will do it for the first part of this series. What we’ve hopefully established is that something can give the illusion of multiple dimensions while instead being a single dimensional object. Time is one of those things, it never truly began and will likely never end. At best we could argue at the zero points (when all the matter in the Universe comes as close to 0 as it possibly can just before exploding) time temporarily ceases but that is purely speculation. Secondly somewhat necessarily of the previous statement the Universe is something that has for all intents and purposes always existed, indeed there is no reason to think that it didn’t.

  Hope to see you all here for part 2 (and beyond).

There will likely never be a WWIII.

2 years ago
by Rico Penguin in

  While I’m sure there is at least one snooty historian reading this. Not to say all historians are snooty indeed I like basically all of the historians I’ve ever met but I know at least one that is kind of a jackass. Anyways that bit a tangent out of the way lets get down to the meat of this prediction.

  World War I likely had some events that happened before it that lead up to it. I’ve never really studied the first world war but that isn’t the topic of discussion today. People sometimes act like World War II was totally unseen and completely surprising to all parties involved. Indeed whereas World War I was terrible the second World War was absolutely atrocious. Events transpired during it that are the epitome of unbelievable. However it required extremely precise and special events to transpire for it to build to such a level.

  You required a nation with industrial strength to hit a point of absolute desolation financially. This financial destitution really needs the extra bonus of being caused by a series of outside nations who are intentionally destroying you. Germany was essentially a wounded animal that was getting the crap poked out of it by a few other nations with sticks. Basically the world wasn’t ignoring it passively but actively. Making sure that Germans knew that nobody outside of Germany cared either. This set them up to trust anyone who promised to get them out of the situation. Now there are tons and tons of other things that happened as well and I’m sure I’m missing some. However it was a matter of taking a powerful nation and treating it like utter crap until it was nothing but tattered remains. The current economic ‘crisis’ really isn’t that impressive compared to the financial doom of the past.

  Well most people know the gist of what happened during the second world war. Ending with the introduction of arguably the most feared weaponry the modern world has ever and may ever know. This added a new paradigm to future wars. It is now relatively certain that a new world war would end with something far more dramatic than the second world war. Anyone with the power to destroy cities doesn’t want to risk losing their cities and anyone willing to lose their cities doesn’t have the power.

  The introduction of biological weaponry (the lab produced kind) we have another paradigm of possibly creating a weapon that has a global mortality rate in the upper 90’s. This sort of extreme event is a very strong deterrent. Indeed there is little reason anymore to have a world war. While the first world war marked the last great land grab attempt in Europe the second world war was an event brought on by extreme (for a lack of a better term) dickery. If everyone wouldn’t have treated Germany like trash after the first World War there is basically a 100% likelihood that there would have never been a second world war.

  The sequence of needs offset by the costs of execution make any future World War extremely unlikely. Indeed everything commonly used now to support the idea of a future world war is merely a more active observation of events that have been happening for a long long time. The rise in terrorism has been the case for centuries, the rise in dissention and international conflict ahs been the case for centuries, and most other ‘notes’ are really more a case of efficient international communication than a sudden dangerous shift in global paradigms.

  It is more likely that space will send us a global decimator than man will. At least in the next century or so. The old extremists are dying and the youth are less and less intent on following the suicidal nature of their parents. Which you can’t really blame them for, when all you had to play when you were a kid was beat the rock with a stick or paper cut-out GI Joes of course you’ll grow up to be bitter.

  We have I-Phones and Video Games now, even nations that are labeled as ‘haters’ of modernization have high percentages of young citizens who are more or less infatuated with the cultures of other nations. It’s just a matter of surviving the current generation of leaders, once that is done it’ll be quite a long time before another great atrocity happens.

At what point is it Murder?

2 years ago
by Rico Penguin in

  Now I’m not trying to start an agenda to end smoking. As anyone who regulars here they know that I am pretty lax on my feelings towards drugs. If you want to do them and keep me apart from it I’m completely cool with it. Indeed there is a strong correlation between the legality of a substance and the crime related to it…which I suppose could go without saying.

  But my question today is to what point does ingesting a dangerous substance go from being legal to illegal? Surely if I were to start dropping as much arsenic as there is in one cigarette into strangers drinks I would be arrested quite quickly and charged with multiple crimes. Perhaps even attempted murder.

  How much of the chemicals in airborne drugs make it into the exhale? The vast majority of oxygen we inhale is exhaled without being processed. It goes along to think that the chemicals taken in through drug use also have a pretty copious outtake. So if it is perfectly legal to introduce this material in the air to strangers without their acceptance would it likewise be legal to take the same substances and pour them unknowingly into people’s drinks?

   This carries over into religious beliefs as well. Suicide is illegal. However the question is how fast does the degeneration of your health have to be before it is considered suicide? Surely few people would argue that cigarettes shorten a persons lifespan, isn’t that what suicide is? Similarly alcohol is a poison, wouldn’t one figure that poisoning yourself is a sin?

   It is often treated as a black and white situation. However I’m finding issue with locating that switch. It may seem a bit ridiculous but take a minute and see if you can separate the point when dangerous substances go from being illegal to legal (or vice versa).

  PS. What you may find far more enlightening than this little romp into the subjective universe is probably the most fascinating article from cracked.com: The Monkey Sphere. If you read only one other thing for the rest of today make it this.

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