Spelunking the Universe
Posts tagged Science and Mathematics
Microwaves
03 weeks ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Have you ever sat there and wondered how something works? I think most of us do, sitting at a stoplight wondering how it knows we are there. Pressure plates? Magnetism? Vibrations? Sitting there in momentary wonder before going on with the rest of our day.
I don’t function this way, usually when something is a curiosity to me I end up looking it up as soon as I can. Lately I’ve been thinking about just how cool Microwave Ovens are, an innocuous little device that is in basically every home in the US (I imagine).
Bill Maher is someone I enjoy listening to, as with any two people we don’t agree on everything but he has a presentation style and outlook on life that I find very entertaining and he’s often spot on with data points. One thing he said many episodes ago caught me by the brain and hurt a little. He said “I don’t like Microwaves, the idea of them making food jiggle and then it jiggling inside me, just unsettling.” This I found was odd.
Microwaves do jiggle food, they are warming the food through friction. But that’s not inherently unique, all heat is caused by friction. Molecules rub up against one another when they are excited and release energy that we call heat. So if he finds microwaves unsettling, he would be mortified by a conventional oven, a fireplace, or even the sun (which I’ll admit I find unsettling, I burn easy).
These are incredibly neat inventions that in modern day get an unfair wrap because of the standard food cooked in them. A hodgepodge of highly preserved quazi-food that usually has to use buzz words just to get around being sued into oblivion. This wonderful little heating device gets slapped hard by frozen burritos and Pizza pockets.
I don’t think it is fair, these are so freaking cool. How the hell do I have something so awesome in my house? It fires freaking microwaves at things. I put something in there and I get to act like a super villain from DC comics.
I actually went and read the Wikipedia entry for a Microwave, that’s a bit inaccurate, I’m reading it as I write this very post. How many times have you wiki’d a household appliance? I suggest you do it more often, your house is full of the craziest crap. How the heck can we not be overwhelmed by the amazing world surrounding us on any given day.
Good heavens the devices connecting me to you right now are something utterly unbelievable. Trying to explain them to someone a hundred or two hundred years ago would have been a complete disaster. We are the Science Fiction novel of a century ago, and I am sure that there will be a generation to come that says the same about their world compared to ours.
But I am digressing in my food powered hyperrant about Microwaves (which ironically were not used for my dinner, I used another delightfully neat invention, the Toaster).
So it turns out that Microwaves work by heating through a system known as “Dielectric Heating.” Now this was another page I ended up on, and I’ll admit I’ve skimmed this one a little less deeply (but will be reading it fully later). High-Frequency waves excite the molecules of whatever is in their path and cause them to move at high speeds which causes friction and then heat to be generated, in the case of a Microwave this is done to cook food (or occasionally melt stove top pot handles for kids who didn’t know the rules of Microwaves).
The depth that the microwave travels into the material is determined by the density, the more dense the object the quicker the microwaves are absorbed and the more shallow the heat is distributed. In these situations you get a food item with a warm outside but a frigid inside. It’s interesting to note that according to Wikipedia if you stand close to a high-power microwave antenna that it can cause severe burns and actually start cooking you.
Now back to Microwaves themselves. A Microwave is most efficient on Water and fat. I believe Sugar is also included in this world. It has been in my experience that the better something microwaves, generally, the worse for you it is. Now I doubt this is a hard fast rule, I am sure it is full of more holes than Swiss cheese. But if you slap a Cinnabon in there it’ll be molten hot in 15 seconds, put some carrot slices in there for 15 seconds and they’ll be warm at best. (This probably also has to do with densities, but there is a metric ton of fat and sugar in a Cinnabon).
So the next time you cook up a hot pocket and the inside of it burns through your lower jaw and goes into critical meltdown on the carpet, you’ll have good knowledge as to why 
.
These are truly incredible devices with a fascinating history. The next time you see something in your house, or in your life, that you think is interesting or are curious about I implore you to read up on it. Even a rudimentary understanding of everything you meet will certainly enrich your life, if not yours it will enrich the potential children in your future.
I sure hope someday when I have Kids one of them asks me “Daddy, how does a Microwave work?” I’m going to look at them, clap my hands and say “Oh you just opened Pandora’s Box! Do I have a story for you! There was this guy after WWII who…”
Special Extra: Did you know that the reason your Microwave has a grate on the front door is to stop the Microwaves from cooking your face as you impatiently gawk at your cooking meal 
. The circles are just the right size to not allow the waves of light to pass through the door! A secondary cool note is that visible light is a shorter wavelength and >can< pass through the holes, which is why you can see inside in the first place.
To Believe what One Sees
1 month ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
A simple example for discussions sake.
This video has been seen 362,057 times. If we are to assume that only 1/3 of those are unique hits (to be conservative, I’m sure most are) we are left with 120,000 people and some change.
Imagine a situation where a 120,000 people all say something is true. These people then support their statement by saying they all saw the thing they state is true.
This is not entirely a hypothetical, in human history we have had dozens of nearly timeless stories that are entirely supported by eye witness testimony. Stories told by people in a position of respect (I’m looking for a different word by I’m quite tired). It’s said that obviously these things must have happened because people saw them happen.
But of all the different forms of evidence in court, eye witness testimony is the weakest. Each time we recall a memory we reconstruct it to the best of our abilities. Every influence we’ve had prior and after that event ends up molding how we perceive and event to have gone down. In the court of law if you are asked what person you saw kill someone you may point at the accused merely because seeing them in the high stress environment has replaced the original killer with their image in your mind.
This isn’t a pleasant thought to people, to think that our memories are not as true as we feel them to be. It is another example of the ever dangerous cognitive dissonance. Instead of accepting this to be the case we will, more often than not, alter our actions upon the new data as if it were entirely true. It’s completely understandable as well, if you can’t trust your memories then what can you trust (Hint: Video tape)?
I won’t beat around the bush anymore, I’m obviously talking about magicians, prophets, and all the other “mythical” events of human history. The most powerful of these events all occurred during a period when we had no infallible data collection devices. No video, no photo, and no DNA (ok this one can be bunk). These also are the most powerful moments in human history, because for some odd reason people are willing to put the most importance on information gathered from the least accurate tools in front of them (well technically in them).
I would hazard that people should be skeptical of any information built solely upon the foundation of eye witness testimony. I base it off a structure of living I call the “What Is versus What If.” It’s a rabbit hole I’d prefer to save for a day that I’m not drunk with exhaustion. (It was barely summarized in the previous post, maybe sometime this weekend)
Our brains demand patterns, patterns make things easier to process, I can see a dozen different faces in the rotary sanded steel bathroom stall door at work. I kid you not, if I took an image I could outline face after face, in some cases entire busts of a human torso and head. When people looked to the stars they saw outlines of animals, items, or even gods. When people look to the clouds they see shapes, figures, etc. A collection of cut hair falling on the floor could end up reminding you of Arizona.
Streamlined mental systems is what kept your ancestors from taking too long to process that a Tiger was trying to rip their ass off. It’s a vital part of our early survival and something we should look at with a bit of humor. However humans need to overcome these fragments of our ancestry. If we are truly higher beings, cognitive powerhouses, we need to identify the biases of our senses and use tools and systems to overcome them.
Otherwise the con becomes far too easy. Once someone knows they can show you a square convince you to think it is a cube they’ll keep doing so. Eventually your world is built on a house of cards and the slightest vibration from reality can bring it all crashing down.
Note: I love illusions, having my own biases tricked to convince me the impossible is impossible is a beautiful thing in the right context. But when the world is at the whim of fantasy it is in for a harsh surprise when reality slaps it upside the head.
Wymi–Further Fishy Figuring
8 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Wymi, otherwise known as, “What you Make it.” Is a easy to remember two syllable word that represents the second and possibly final piece to “The Fish and the Faith”. It’s something I was told ages ago during the short stint of time I spent in Church. The answer came when I asked why no two people had the same response to what heaven was.
The man told me “Heaven is What you Make it.” Well that was interesting I thought. Because I am a bit of a completionist, another fake word that I’m sure nobody needs explained. I need to see things to fruition, whenever a problem is unsolved, a story unfinished, or a debate unresolved, I am left brooding over it.
What if? What would be the ultimate end to this problem? I need to know this, I need to have all the data. It’s part of the beauty of our relative size. You could live the same span of time a hundred thousand times and never experience the same life twice unless you actively tried. Millions of different locations, billions of people, seemingly endless variations, every generation is riddled with infinite possibilities.
So with this in mind, I had told the man, nowhere nearly as eloquently as I’m about to tell you, “I would want this.” If Heaven is Wymi, then I would choose to make it where I am now. We have Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and the outlying Kuiper belt objects. This is centuries of exploration in a single solar system. Then we have 200 billion solar systems in our galaxy alone. That’s 200 billion times hundreds of centuries (lets cut the difference and say 500 centuries or 50,000 years per solar system). 200 billion times 50,000 is 2,000,000,000,000,000 years of content to explore in our galaxy alone (forgive discrepancies in math I’m doing this on the fly with only a few sips of coffee in me thus far).
There are 7 trillion dwarf galaxies, I’ll count these as a quarter of ours just to not exaggerate too much (it’s arbitrary I might be counting them for less than what they are). Then there are 350 billion large galaxies, I’ll count these as 1:1 even though again it is arbitrary. That means there are 2.1 trillion galaxies or 2,100,000,000 galaxies out there, at 2,000,000,000,000,000 years a piece that’s 4,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years worth of content. A tale of the most epic proportions, a game of the most unbelievable size, a journey of utterly unfathomable variety.
This is curiosity porn at its most ridiculous, this is a mass of content that dwarfs every single action by ever single living thing that has ever breathed on the surface of the Earth. Yet we are so quickly to discount it all and say “It can’t be just this can it? This can’t be all there is?”
We stand, miniscule and nondescript on the surface of a nearly invisible pebble, that pebble spins around an orb of flam that is itself nearly invisible as it floats around a galaxy that is nearly invisible amidst a sea of a trillion other galaxies, all of which likely is but a spec in the vast darkness that spans for infinitum in all directions.
It’s so astoundingly beautiful that thinking about it makes me warm from head to toe. This is what I want, heaven could not interest me in the slightest until this entire journey is complete. Until ever rock is overturned, to be taken away early is a maddening thought, and the possibility that an afterlife could result in knowing it all instantly is incredibly unsettling.
So why? Why would I even need to die in the first place, if Wymi is correct then I’m already here. Death is a superfluous and redundant feature. I find it almost impossible to believe anything with the mental capacity to create so much content (even procedurally) is so near sighted that they’d have such poor variety in ultimate outcomes.
100 Years? Really? When there are 4,200 trillion trillion years of content for me to explore? What monster would do such a thing?
That, I believe, is the conclusion to the two major reasons I am not a man of faith. I cannot be so greedy that I would look at so much and ask myself “Is this it?” I instead ponder just what can come along that would grant me the power to see it all, one gorgeous discovery at a time.
Again apologies for any bad math above, the gist is still the same. If you enjoyed the few minutes you spent here on this please vote for this article on reddit (link provided above) I would be infinitely appreciative, views help me both figuratively and literally.
Of Mars, Molars, and Missed Opportunities
10 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Of Mars…
It’s been quite some time since I last updated. More wild still is that people are now paying to advertise here. What a wild state our world lives in when my thoughts are valued enough over 0 cents (nearly 3 now the last I looked, hooray for me). I’m 50% beyond the proverbial “2 cents”. We’ll continue on and see just how much cognitive cents I can provide. (It occasionally plummets back to 2 cents. Turns out folks like updates.)
I suppose I’ll begin with some commentary on the first episode of this Season of “Nova Science Now” which asked the question of if we can make it to Mars. What the episode did not cover was why that is such an important endeavor to be shooting for. The majority of arguments against it ring of the same basic flaws in thought. “Why try to go there when we have problems here.”, “Why waste money on going somewhere we cannot live?”, or anything similar.
What these arguments tend to forget is that the advancements of medical science or truly wonderful advances that we’ve largely taken for granted are almost entirely not created for their inevitable use. The MRI was not designed from the ground up to do what it did, that was a secondary function. Many military advances such as the jet engine were not originally designed to shorten our travel around the world. Financial gain, military prowess, and dumb luck are what lead most science projects and the seemingly altruistic outcomes are merely a likely and pleasant result.
Supporting science is vital to gaining the very dreams that many people hold dear. Living longer healthier lives, doing less damage to the environment, and even removing the harm of animals from our daily diets. Some of these things are much harder than others, and some will take longer than others, but the support of things will lead us to a much more productive and comfortable future.
People fear nuclear power, pesticides, heavy metals in water, these things may have come from a stage of science but they’ve only remained because of the stagnation of science in their respective fields. Nuclear power could be lost to the history books with more investment and interest in more potent and safer (and renewable) alternatives, pesticides could be a thing of the past with advancements in hydroponics and light based weaponry (such as the mosquito laser), and with advances in energy we could create amazing water filtration systems that are not bound by the limitations of modern day energy. Reverse osmosis on a massive scale, or perhaps an even more efficient advancement in the future.
Funding the imagination is the key to surviving happily in our reality. The people who push straw men horrors of science (events of the most grand of minorities) are seemingly always the ones who profit most from stagnation. They have invested in Coal, Nuclear Power, Natural Gas, Modern Industrial Farms, or Patented Medications. Their lives are relatively short and the benefits of innovation are not in their best interest financially.
It’s not necessarily an evil way to live ones life, just a very sad one (in my person opinion).
If anyone ever tries to convince you that cutting funding to your local sciences will save you money, do not fall for it. This will likely never be true.
I may come back to this in the not-to-distant future to explain how even ones faith could very likely support this view of life (that is the embracing of curiosity and advancement).
Molars…
I have what is known as a Mesioangular impaction of my bottom left Molar in my mouth. It’s the most common kind of impaction. I have for quite some time been avoiding having it removed. As a child my dentist routinely told my parents it should be removed, I won’t go into details why it was never removed, but I would like to give a word of caution to current and future parents.
If your dentist tells you to remove your children’s wisdom teeth, ask them what likely complication is foreseen. If they tell you that your child will be having a Mesioangular impaction (the most common kind), put aside your planned purchase of that new widescreen TV and actually get it done. As the tooth first starts to pierce your gums it will elicit a pain that is, perhaps because of the age it arises, quite a bit more painful than the crowning of your other teeth.
It won’t come out even either, so the pain of emerging teeth will be prolonged for weeks, months, or in my case quite a bit longer. It will be at an angle, more than likely, that you cannot reasonably brush. Immediately I imagine you see your next problem. Tooth decay and tooth discomfort. My tooth in particular has created a pit that is so phenomenally complicated to clean that I’ve fantasized about ripping it out myself far more than once.
If you get exceptionally lucky, and I say that with a bit of bile, the tooth will begin to rub against the side of your cheek. If you grind or move your mouth at all while you sleep you’ll awake with a remarkable level of pain in your mouth. This pain in my case lasts for a good few hours.
I hope for you, whoever you be, that your tooth be like mine and be in the lower mandible. That’s the way to go, I’ve read that it is easier to repair and hopefully that’ll be the case. Unfortunately once the tooth has breached you will likely need much more work and have longer healing times than other folks. There is not one part about the healing progress that is anything above shitty.
Your mouth is a dirty dirty place, having a wound in it is not ever a fun experience. So I suspect within the next 2 weeks I’m going to be a very pissed off individual.
So I suppose I should reiterate. If you have children and your dentist warns their wisdom teeth will have impactions, get them removed. Your kids will thank you, and if they don’t tell them about this story. It’s not exactly riveting, but discomfort that requires surgery of any kind is not something that adults like to think about, at least for a child they’ll be over it and forget it. Treat it like circumcision, if it’s necessary, get it done before they are old enough to be upset with you when they need to get it. It’s expensive but it’s hardly expensive enough to screw expenses for longer than a month or two.
Missed Opportunities…
Unfortunately it appears that my personal brain has failed and cleared all the data that I had been storing under the many tabs that are strewn across it (roughly 100 nodes). I was at first confused, then I was upset, and now I find myself shrugging it off.
Sure I have lost all the past ideas I had about my story universe, but I’ve also been thinking about it constantly since the last time the files were open. I’ve decided to take this missed opportunity of storing the data in some more secure way and will use it as a chance to breath anew my thoughts about the world of Scion.
I’ve decided I’m going to start documenting all my story via the wonderful world of paper and transcribe it from there to notepad files and occasionally personal brain. Ironically I have found the least reliable software I’ve ever used is also the most expensive, perhaps there is a lesson in there to examine for the future.
I have faith that I can publish a book of at least 100 pages, perhaps multiple short stories, within this year and hopefully by summer. I would love to live a life of reading and writing, as with all journeys it is a matter of taking my first step.
The “Ordered” Universe–Because it is.
1 year ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
There is often a point made about the universe, about everything that is around us. The gist of the point is that “There is obviously a designer, a watch requires a watchmaker, and a universe run by laws must have a lawmaker.” This is very pleasing to the ear and to the mind as long as you don’t take longer than two seconds to think about it. The moment you do it falls apart and it falls apart hard.
The observation that the universe is governed by strict laws is ultimately a redundant observation, the universe must be as it is if we are to be as we are. If the universe were different in any way then we would be different (if we existed at all), to clarify “we” are merely the things observing the universe. If there is nothing conscious in another universe then the “we” is a null value. But regardless of what universe you examine and the species within it, the reasoning behind their being there is entirely redundant.
Because no matter what the case were, the questions would be exactly the same and the reasoning would be exactly the same. While I used to give my parents a bit of a grimace when I got the “Because I said so.” line from them I must admit that in this case a similar response must be made. The universe is ordered because it is ordered. You are sitting or standing where you are because you are sitting or standing where you are. We see visible light because whatever light we would have sensed would have been called Visible light, that range of light is only special because it is special to us, if we were different in any way we would be making the exact same observation about a different range of visible light.
We are on Earth not because Earth is special but because whatever planet we would have been on anywhere in the entire universe would have been judged with equal curiosity. It would have been the “special one” for no other reason than it happened to be the one we spawned on. There is no necessary designer behind the universe because the universe must exist in some fashion or another, if that fashion were a null fashion then more power to it. There could have been a trillion trillion universes before this specific one, each one with beings that too tried to explain why their own unique composition was the one. What made it special was not that it was special but that it was what the outcome was.
Just like rolling a die, there must be an outcome to the roll (at least in the philosophical sense) there are 6 choices, and the one you are left with is not chosen because it is divine, or because it is pre-thought or unique, but because it was the choice. Essentially the universe is ordered because, as humans, the only way humans would have examined the universe would be if it was ordered. If it wasn’t ordered we wouldn’t exist as we are but whatever that did exist would be asking the exact same questions (for a short while at least), they would be no more unique than us, and the universe they’d be in would be no more unique than ours. These things must be the way they are for us to wonder why they are as they are because no matter how they were we’d be wondering. There is always an outcome to the dice roll and if you knew nothing of the other 5 possibilities you would assume that there was something special about that dice roll, wherein fact there was nothing unique about it at all.
Don’t get me wrong, I am infinitely fascinated by the entire universe and of the possibilities of things unknown. But the desire to know “Why Earth?” or “Why this Universe?” or “Why is it ordered?” are all fruitless questions, beyond knowing how to best sustain our own physiology they will not bring us unique information because if you changed the variables to some other variant the questions would still exist, they are entirely malleable and don’t hold educational value in that respect. These questions are no more productive than pondering if we are in a Matrix or a Brain in a Vat. All they tend to do is waste time in the case of furthering advance in science, which is a shame because the further Science travels the more wonders we will discover.
Just don’t get caught up in explaining why the universe is, because at the end of the day it is and all the explanations in the universe will not make it change (for if they did the best you’ve done is get yourself killed, the living thing is not fond of extreme sudden change). I realize it’s fun to think about but it does not provide any useful information because the questions all apply to every possible variation of existence wherein anything capable of asking the questions would exist.
Note: That was very difficult to write since I’m trying to explain the circular logic of this profoundly wasteful question and it seems to drag you into circular answers. Which I think helps explain my point better than my attempts to explain it did.
Rico Examines “Evolution and Economics”
1 year ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
So I’ve been reading Richard Dawkin’s “The Greatest Show on Earth”, interestingly for a guy who is constantly described as condescending and downright mean his book thus far has been really well thought out and pleasant. He’s barely mentioned faith at all and seemed to make an effort to separate faithful from “those people” (Creationists/Young Earthers). He seems genuinely concerned with people trying to discount Physics and about a half dozen other sciences as being “other forms of faith”. But I digress, that is not what this post is about 
.
In the book Dawkin’s mentions something about rats, how through selective breeding in a matter of 30 or so generations (or even quite a bit less) you can generate rats who have far better dental than those not selected specifically to enhance those traits. Likewise you can make rats who get really crappy teeth fairly quickly. He mentions in this chapter, “Why if man can make a rat with awesome teeth can nature not? One would assume that long surviving healthy teeth would do nothing but enhance the survival rates of the hose animal.” Which was interestingly timed because I was thinking the same thing.
I had been wondering about all the monsters that folks create for movies, these apex predators with amazing senses, huge muscular structures, good bones, and many cases wings because obviously flying is badass. One would assume that these creatures should be inevitable in life, likewise the question arises even on a smaller scale, why if Human’s have gotten these fairly awesome brains have other animals not jumped on the bandwagon? They are sexy organic computers that have helped us to create super cool things. One would think that any animal would benefit, much like the rats from the fancy teeth.
To this question, that he assumed (rightly) would form from the discussion of that rat experiment, he responded with an Economics quote that I’ll paraphrase “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” The Calcium necessary for those teeth must come from somewhere, in lab rats it is simply supplemented with a seemingly endless supply of nutrient rich food. But in the wild the Rat would have to get that calcium from somewhere. It would be taking it away from the rest of it’s bone structure, or in females from the milk production, or any other process in the body that needs that Calcium. In the end, having slightly worse teeth for the wild rats might be beneficial because the calcium they’d have used in those teeth can then be used for other operations in the body that may actually extend their life even further.
Which brings me back to the human brain thing. I’ve read, long before this book, about the reason why humans are so gung-ho on fat and high calorie diets. Obviously being warm blooded is a big part of it, but beyond being walking waste machines (we do burn through energy really fast), we also have incredibly nutrient hungry brains. These big grey batches of yogurt are very big on the high fat high calorie diets that we take in, it makes them happier than a clam (both of which I don’t think actually feel happy, but you get my point). At a point in the history of our particular branch of the animal Kingdom there was a period of very high fertility in the land where our ancestors lived. This provided them with the resources they needed for a mutation of the brain to actually work, before that point HAD the event occurred the animal carrying that new brain would have not had the food supply to support the new infrastructure and would have likely died off.
It’s hardly a give-in, by stuffing animals full of vitamins and minerals for centuries we have no certainty that they’d suddenly get awesome brains and be able to help us fight the inevitable ape uprising. However it makes me wonder how many times in the past a really neat strain of an animal has arisen and died off because it couldn’t support the new workings of its body. Requiring perhaps more vitamin C than was available, or Vitamin D, or Calcium, or Iron. The only thing killing off it’s otherwise (subjectively) superior body was the environment not supplying it with the funds (so to speak) it needed to succeed.
We, long ago, hit a point where we begin a cyclical system of altering our environment to meet the ever (however slowly) changing needs of our bodies. We’ve reached the point now that any mutation we have can likely be met with environmental changes to help support it, providing us with an infinitely many versions of humans that can survive…at least hypothetically.
It’s an amazing moment personally, wondering just what has been lost or what could be gained in the animal kingdom given a sustained period of fruitfulness, however I find that the odds of this happening with humans around is quite a bit lower than it once was (we’ll utterly consume any place that begins to thrive). At any rate, it’s a neat bit of info. If anyone was ever wondering why animals don’t get X, the above is the basic reasoning. Every mutation requires resources and if those resources are taken away from even (for the moment) more important bodily functions that mutation will fail. It is only the mutations that result in a slightly longer lifespan (and thusly more chances to breed) that lead onto new strains of the animal, and those strains will only survive for as long as their needs are met by the environment. They could still vanish if the environment suddenly changes and their “inferior” cousins could end up returning to power.
Bah…I’ll end up bantering on about how neat this is to me. So I’ll just leave it at that. More to come I’m sure.
Rico Examines “BP Oil Spill”
1 year ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
So the estimate I’ve heard is that it will take 90 days to repair the BP Oil Spill, that is to say, it will take them 90 full days to drill a relief valve and stop the spill from pouring an unfathomable amount of oil (you honestly can’t fathom it legitimately) into the Gulf of Mexico.
I have to raise the flag on what appears to be BS from BP. I’m not here to strike a flint in hopes of lighting the company aflame but there is no way it actually takes 90 days. It takes 15 hours to fly from the US to Japan and drop a warhead that wipes an entire city off the face of the map, and the bomb itself would only take 4 times as long as the estimate for this drilling to be made (assuming you have the fissile material which is a fair exception considering BP already has the materials necessary to repair the problem). Now those might seem like loose comparisons, and quite frankly they are, but I’m just trying to give a judgment of time here. BP is saying that it will take one fourth the time it takes to wipe an entire city off the face of the map, from the entire distance of the Pacific Ocean, as it would to locate and repair a situation using far less elaborate materials in a location you can sail to (with nice winds) in 1 to 2 hours. That’s just assuming that nobody in this year has a boat with an engine…
I wouldn’t be so quick to judge, as I rarely critique the work of a surgeon, but their fixes are what lay the groundwork for my judgment. They attempt first to cap it off like a gushing fire hydrant, then they decide to try a smaller cap, next they’ll try to just re-route the flow with a tap system (from what I understand), and finally…they’ll try just stuffing a bunch of random stuff into it and hope it clogs. This last one is what got me. If it is that easy why don’t they just take a thick fabric like emergency raft material, coat it in something that is very resistant to moisture and oil and stuff it into the pipe then inflate it? If golf balls and tire shreds are enough to clog it then surely a tough hide inflatable material can do it.
That should take all of a weekend to pull off. It might sound like a lot of work but when you have the kind of money oil companies have you could pull of something like this for a party in a day easy. Secondly I move on to the idea that it will take them 90 days to produce a new functional hole to stop the problem. There is absolutely no way this can possibly be true-90 days is a really long time. You know what you can do in 90 days? You could fly from the Earth to the Moon and back nearly 18 times, with 2-3 people you could build a 2,800 square foot home, you could get 18 E60 BMW’s custom ordered and shipped to you.
Want 18 of these? Not my thing but you’d have them in custom order before BP finishes repairing the oil spill. Course then you’d have to fill them all up with gas…oh dear.
BP has over 80 thousand employees, or enough people to build between 26,000 and 40,000 houses in the time it is quoted to take them to repair a single blown pipe. It isn’t fair of me to assume all those people are skilled in this kind of repair work but I’m more trying to stress the fact they have an enormous staff and lest we forget the 239 billion dollars they brought in according to their website in 2009, they aren’t exactly hurting for cash to invest in a quick repair.
Had they been honest about the situation or even cared in the slightest this would have been taken care of at most two weeks after the situation occurred. It would have taken that long only because they’d have invested dubious amounts of time to assure that they won’t screw up and cause a bigger problem. The actual work would have taken 3 days of straight work with revolving crews and we’d be looking back on this as a really bad but at least expertly resolved incident.
The biggest humor in this sluggish and unenthusiastic repair is the this is the company who has one of the most “nature friendly” looking logos of any company in existence today.
“Look at our earthy green, sunny yellow, and life white all meshed into a hybrid flower-sun. We love nature that’s why we drill for Oil <3”
I don’t necessarily begrudge them for drilling for oil, but their logo annoys me. They are quite intentionally trying to grasp the shapes and colors that make the brain view them as a nature conscious company whose main goal is to circumvent natural catastrophes. But instead a multi-billion dollar mega company is just dragging its feet with merry disregard as a completely manageable situation unfolds without halt.
It took the US less than a year to invade a country on the other side of the planet and locate a single human being who was hiding in a hole. A hole that was amidst an area of land that measured a full 169,234 square miles. The average person is something like 3 feet across, and something like 5 square feet total space taken, which means (with my shoddy math) there were 178,711,104 unique spaces in Iraq that Saddamn could have been standing (assuming a flat landmass and people standing one by one beside one another…there are far more places in actuality). We found him…we found that 1 in 178 million in less than a year.
How on Earth can that happen so quickly and yet this repair work is going to take 90 days? I don’t see it, both the US and BP have a stake in this incident, how neither could at least stop the leak on a weekend is beyond me. Just a matter of spending too much time pointing fingers and not long enough time putting a finger in the leak.
Rico Examines “The Beauty of Mathematics.”
1 year ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
I am a huge fan of numbers. I love statistics dearly and enjoy any sort of comparative diagram. Especially when dealing on the astronomical scale, the reality of how small I truly am is very exciting and opens doors in the mind that are difficult to get ajar. They never seem to open wide but just trying is such a treat.
Mathematics, is at its heart, the only subjective truth in the universe. At least that I know of so far, it is this subjectivity that gives it beauty to me. It is difficult to tarnish math, one of my favorite quotes about this says “Statistics don’t lie, People do.” Math is a sanctuary, a land one can travel that is not tainted by morality, or belief, it is something of solid true objective meaning. Math will never betray you and as long as you are willing to learn it will open a seemingly infinite number of doors. Man…back to that door metaphor.
Admittedly this is not really an examination as much as it is a love letter to math. Which I believe is a bit ironic because I am not a stellar mathematician. I love a good excel sheet, I enjoy calculating things in my head, and I am all aflutter when I see a new time to make a complex formula. But I am, perhaps hypocritically so, not good at the highest levels of mathematics. This creates a deeper wonder and desire to learn it however, to see numbers in their full beauty.
Astrophysics and Fractals are two of my favorite examples of mathematics. The first because as I had mentioned before astronomically large numbers excite me. Visually let me grab a picture:
This image is of an “Earth Sized Hole” that was left on Jupiter after a Meteor Impact. The entire Earth, this massive swath of rock that we call home. The surface that more than 6 billion people all live upon. Millenia of documented human history have transpired on. All of this is but a mere spec on a slice of Jupiter. The staggering difference in sizes, those massive differences in numbers. That, I believe, is true beauty.
To continue on this Earth Jupiter topic, let me grab a few other numbers. I weight about 135 lbs on Earth. If I was on Jupiter I would weigh 319.5 lbs! Gravity itself requires an intense amount of matter for you to feel the results (just think with the entire size of the Earth it is merely holding you against the surface, not even crushing you to a pulp). That said, Jupiter has enough extra mass to more than double my weight! 2.3x heavier if you were curious (roughly). Speaking of mass, Jupiter contains 300 times the mass of Earth. If that doesn’t metaphorically crap your pants I honestly don’t know what will. Just try to grasp that, all the mass of earth replicated 300 times! I can’t even properly visualize the full surface area of my city, let alone my state, or my continent, or the Moon or Earth, and here is an object that dwarfs us to a point of obscurity. The diameter of Jupiter is insane as well being over ten times that of Earth. I would have a 30 foot wide waist if that were the case, which would make it very difficult to fit through…doors. Unless I stood sideways, however our hallway is only about 10 feet across. Which raises more issues.
I’ve shown before the pale blue dot, an image of the Earth where we are a single pixel on a massive picture of space. A single spec of light emitting from a vast unknown. When thinking about Jupter, and how it dwarfs our size. Even Jupiter is but a child in a room of adults. Our sun could swallow Jupiter hundreds of times over (an understatement).
So here we are. Examining a marble, that marble an object 300 times the size of Earth. That Earth ~1,260,000,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than the average person. These numbers all becoming awash in our minds. Or at the very least mine. These things are astounding, nearly unimaginable (I try to stray from impossibilities), yet numbers can swallow up these things and produce manageable data. This is the ultimate power of subjectivity, the ultimate beauty of mathematics, and one of the reasons I get a cognitive ‘boner’ every time I’m presented with data. It also gives me another reason to remind people why they are so inconsequential in size and why that is not a bad thing .
Update: I would be remiss if I didn’t plug a few of my Fractal Artworks while discussing the beauty of Math:
Coming this Week on TheIOS:
ADIOS: The King of Spes: Votum.
IIWP (If I was President): Taxation
Thought Experiment: Life and Intelligence
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
The following is not necessarily fact, indeed this is just a thought experiment on why I’m not too amazed that there is life or that life can manifest itself from a universe that is seemingly non-living.
I am unsure of the exact mechanics of DNA and RNA. Nor do I know if these are the most basic of building blocks for life. However I am going to assume, for the sake of argument, that they are. If they are not you can quite easily, without breaking the point, replace their names with the actual names of the basic building blocks of life.
If you were to take the chemicals that naturally occur upon Earth that are responsible for these basic building blocks and you placed them in a large vat. Lets say a vat the size of a stadium, something far smaller than the size of the Earth (almost ridiculously so) and you left them to constantly react to one another every moment of every day, for years and years, I am certain that you would in return find yourself with extremely simple life.
This life would have an intelligence, however it would be absolutely basic. The operations of generating energy and replicating would be all that it does. Why? Well even non-living elements on the periodic table are (misnomer alert) instinctively searching to complete their outer electron shell. There is an inherent motivation to have a full ring and it is an ever present reality in our Universe. This basic need moves right on into life, the ever present desire to consume energy in order to complete operations that sustain a stable life pattern that gives the longest period of time to replicate and repeat this action.
This function is so fantastically simple that it requires little in the way of blind faith to accept. It essentially is the spawning of a billion light switches that have binary modes. They have two extremely basic functions and they repeat these functions over and over.
It is through this process of repetition and the ever present reality that nothing can (to our or at least my knowledge) perfectly replicate itself that we received change. These simple creatures began to have errors in their coding that resulted in extra operations becoming present. These extra operations, just like newer mechanical gadgets, presented even more gears to break. The more complicated anything gets the more there is to worry about after all.
These compounding functions, of replication, error, and growth result over a period of time to what we see today. It is not difficult to believe either, when watching bacteria replicating at nearly breakneck speed I find myself wondering just how many sneezes are going on in the process. How unrelated the bacteria a few days later are from their great ancestors of the days prior (assuming the bacteria has a short lifespan of course).
The shorter the lifespan of an organism the more present are these mechanisms I believe, because the shorter the lifespan of an organism, the more quickly it consumes and reproduces thus providing far more chances for replication and error. I’m sure this is not breaking science news for anyone but it is something I was thinking about recently. The point however is that at the most basic level of life. You really just have the same operations that are committed (at least in concept) at the electron level of elements. They are attempting to complete a simple circuit to establish a level of stability. It is this simple action that is present even in the non-living that drives all of life. Not necessarily the only thing, but I’m quite sure that the primary need of any organism is to maintain a stable energy level since every other operation after that requires it. You can’t exactly mate if you are dead…usually…ok there was that one time…wait…nevermind I’ve said too much.
I hope you enjoyed this thought experiment. Tonight I will also be publishing my final version of the Alabaster Bonobo: Tides of Chaos. If you ever needed a reason to dislike Microsoft here it is: They have Wal-Mart in their dictionary but not Bonobo.
“…how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go”
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
I’m sure I’ve quoted this enough times that it looks like I’d sleep with Galileo or at the very least take him to dinner (which I surely would…dinner that is). This phrase is, to me, one of the most powerful statements in the history of civilized man. The full line is "The Bible was written to show us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."
While I am known for my rather callous feelings towards religion. This is not the goal of this post and indeed 99% of my posts are not trying to butcher the faithful upon a pedestal. What I’m here to discuss today especially is what religion cannot do and will never be able to do.
There has never and will never be a scientific use for faith. All of the benefits that people get medically from being religious have been seen with equal success in merely positive people. It provides absolutely no aid to any real world field of science. This is no a negative to faith, because it was never meant to do such a thing (or at least I don’t believe it ever outwardly advertised such), however in modern day it is a huge flaw that is overlooked by many who have vendettas against certain scientific beliefs.
Obviously to many this is a post in response to intelligent design, formerly known as creationism, and even before that known by 4-5 names. As was stated in a very good book I’ve been reading (“only a theory”) it would appear that more often than not religion is not trying to explain how something works but instead is trying to merely get credit for the something.
You cannot discover how malaria spreads, why the suns light gives people skin cancer, nor can it even explain why people cannot breath underwater. We didn’t decode the human genome with a single bit of guidance by any book of faith nor did we make it to the moon through the discoveries found in any scripture.
There will never be a time when faith can properly function as a scientific tool and likewise there will never be a time when science can function properly as a tool of faith. Each is by its very roots incompatible with the other. This is not to say you cannot be a faithful scientist, that is a scientists who for whatever reason has religious convictions, but neither will benefit the other. They exist in solitude from one another and that is by no means a bad thing.
The danger is when we make the mistake of assuming that faith can save our biological selves. We do not need another era of trephinations to remind us of what happens when we fight that truth. So as many have, much more eloquently than I, this is a modest request to cease and desist with the incessant attempts to use faith as a tool of science. In the end it helps no one and creates various problematic and violent situations.
Well that’s it for today, I will likely discuss the book linked above once I finish it. It is fantastic though and roughly 50% of the way through it I suggest anyone read it who has the ability to do so.