Mathematica Augusta

On Incentives

2011-07-04T10:08:00.000-04:00

This shouldn't be news, but your boss makes more money than you. The boss' boss, even more. The top boss, it's just absurd; the average CEO makes 364 times what the average worker does. If you work at Walmart, the CEO probably tops your annual salary every hour. Why so high? While we're at it, why do bankers get million-dollar bonuses, even after driving their banks into the ground?

Well, if you asked one of the top dogs, they'd tell you that they need to pay that much to attract the best and the brightest, that talent follows financial incentive. On the face of it, it almost makes sense-- that the best and brightest minds in the economy will go where they can make the most money for the least effort. This assumes that the best and brightest are somewhat lazy and only motivated by cash; sociologists are still arguing over that, but I'm not qualified to dive into their debates. What I want to ask is whether they really believe that the world really works that way, these men at the levers of power.

It's a simple question to answer. If we really believe that talent follows the money, we should logically structure our society a certain way; if not, we won't. So, if we really bought into this, how would the world look?

Well, if you asked most people, I suspect they'd say that a cure for cancer would be a good thing to have. Vital, for many of them. Curing cancer, as it turns out, is harder than running a profitable business. Much harder. Thousands of corporations turn a profit each year, after all, and we've yet to definitively cure a single type of cancer. So to attract the top talent, the best brains, the men and women researching a cure should be paid appropriately, right? Hundreds of times the average CEO pay?
If you want the talent, you've got to pay for it, or so goes CEO-logic. So why do postdocs only make 30-50 thousand dollars? At Stanford , for example. Which I should tell you is not a terribly cash-strapped institution, and have quite competitive pay scales.

Competitive for research, that is. Not competitive for anything else you have to spend 10 years in school to do. I submit, then, that either North American society cares more about public transit than it does about curing cancer, or we don't really believe in financial incentive.

Personally, I imagine it's the later, but who knows? Maybe I just care too much about tumorous growths. If you don't think curing cancer is a high priority, replace it with heart disease, or any other medical problem. Or if you're more concerned with energy than medicine, try that. Whatever your priorities, the paragraphs above stay the same: the research that advances our civilisation doesn't pay like it would if we really needed money to incentivise.

Of course that's the difference: double my pay, you won't get one iota more work out of me. Pay me like a CEO, and you'll still get the same output: all I can do.* There are other, better motivators than money: there's simple craftsmanship, pride in doing a good job for it's own sake; there's the altruistic drive to do good for your fellow man; there's the selfish desire to go down in history; et cetera.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

That, I think, is my answer. The world simply does not look like it should if we were only motivated by larges sacks with dollar signs on the side. Nor do I have any experience with individuals who are-- and while anecdotes do not make evidence, a counterexample destroys the rule. And my counter example is this: the best minds I've ever known all work for love, not money.

*In all honesty, if you paid me like a CEO, I'd treat almost all of that salary as a research grant and build some dedicated instruments-- so you might actually see more results from me, but not because I'm any more motivated or working any harder. This isn't how it works with most bankers and CEOs; except for small business owners (who don't make the millions anyway) their immense salaries are never rolled back into the business, even when it is going bankrupt.

Lunar vs. NEO Resources

2011-01-30T22:47:00.000-05:00

   Last time we saw that there are Near Earth Asteroids which are quite alot easier to get to than the Moon. Today, I'll discuss why, even if the accessibilities were reversed, there's little worth going to the Moon for-- and plenty in the asteroids.
   So what's the Moon made of, anyway? Well, rock, obviously. Just rock, in fact. No ore. "Ore" is what we call rock concentrated enough in useful minerals to be worth mining-- and we've never found any on the Moon. Moonrocks, like the rocks on Earth, are mostly silicon, aluminum and titanium oxides: SiO2, Al2O3, and TiO2. Yes, oxygen, wonderful! Except that those are some of the strongest chemical bonds nature makes. To get something useful out of the lunar rock, you first have to collect it and crush it, and somehow separate grains of SiO2 from Al2O3 and TiO2. Then you have to melt the rock. Melting rock is not trivial, but you can do it; 1600C is possible with a solar a mirror on the airless moon, except during the 2 weeks of lunar night. Then you have to electrolyze the molten rock (and no, you won't be getting those electrodes back)-- run a current through it to get metal ions plated to one electrode, and oxygen bubbling off at the other. This takes a terrific amount of power--13 600W*h/kg per pound, for Aluminum. This is how that's done on Earth, and it doesn't get much better for the other metals. Now imagine moving all the equipment and reaction mass to run that process up on existing rockets. And you're still not done! You still need to cast/mill/machine/finish whatever you're making out of the aluminum, if you can avoid the omnipresent dust. If it didn't break your big, heavy open pit mining equipment.
   Now, it's not that it's not doable. There's even water, some, for your moon miners down at the poles (in cryogenic cold deeper than anything our equipment has been tested at, where ice is just another rock) -- but the ice comes from comets, so why not just cut out the middle-man and go to the source?
   And if you want metals, M-type asteroids are the richest ore bodies anyone could imagine--just hunks of stainless steel, floating in space. Mostly Iron (92%), but ~10% Nickel and upto 20ppm platinum group metals; which isn't much but it's better than the output of most terrestrial mines. Most of the transition group metals are represented--including gallium and arsenic, if you want to make solar cells.
   How do you get that purified, then? Isn't it as hard as refining on the moon? In a word, no. Here's a video:

Okay, yes, melting. Bring a mirror
   Giant mirrors are easy when there's no gravity; tinfoil will do. Tinfoil is massively overbuilt, in fact. We can thin it out to a few atoms thick and be fine. Such mirrors aren't too hard to manufacture in space--it's far easier there than on Earth, in fact. For a suboptimal, tinfoil-type mirror, just spin your molten asteroid fast enough and it'll flatten to a disk, like tossing god's own pizza dough. Or do this: add ice, or a puff of air, and your molten asteroid *foops* out into a spherical shell. Just add gas and instant-- what? Fuel tank? Space station? Split it in half and you have two spherical mirrors you can use to focus in on another asteroid.
   Making a space station from a NEO is three steps: 1) Melt, 2) *foop*, 3)fill it with your stuff.
On the moon, we
1) Harvest rock; 2) crush ; 3)sort ; 4) refine ; 5) actually machine the metal-- which is, of course, a complicated multi-step process even here on Earth. Being on the moon doesn't make it any easier. Being on the moon doesn't make much of anything easier. Free space, in zero-g? Glass blowing huge structures from molten asteroids; growing better crystals-- any number of industrial applications. That's industry, though. What about the stuff of life?
   The Moon may have a little water at the poles, but it has nothing else we need: carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. How many rockets are you willing to devote to bags of fertilizer to feed your moonbase before you give up? C-type asteroids are expected to be rich in all these things-- including being heavily hydrated, some up to 20% water by mass. Just heat (solar mirrors again) to drive off the water and other volatiles. Some of the clay minerals in these things (which you can get by centrifuge, again) might make half-decent fertilizers on their own; others may need some chemical processing. The carbon is in long-chain, coal-like hydrocarbons which, while good feedstock for plastic-making, might need some work as plant food. Regardless, though, it's a heck of alot easier than bringing it up from Earth, which you'd have to do for your moonbase-- unless you're supplying a moonbase from the Asteroids? At which point I have to ask why you even bother. If you really want the aluminum, silicon, and titanium oxides found in moon rocks, we can get those for you too.

.

Lunar vs. NEO Accessibility

2011-01-16T11:45:00.000-05:00

The Moon is big, beautiful, and often visible; in sight, and in mind. That's the only way I can explain my fellow Planetary Scientists' and Space Enthusiasts' obsession with the place.
Yes, it's close as the crow flies--but the geography of the solar system is not one of straight line distance, but of speed. On Earth, distance and energy expenditure correlate; you have to work harder to go further because you're fighting friction. In space, that's not a problem. You can coast clear across the solar system, once you get going. (the Pioneers, Voyagers, and New Horizons all did.) The constraint is that you have to match speeds to get into the same orbit as the object you want to visit. The bigger the change in velocity (delta-v) the harder your rocket has to work--you need more fuel, and more fuel to carry that fuel, and so on, and so on. Delta-v measures the energy needed to make the trip, and that's what matters.
When you consider the geography of speed, the solar system looks somewhat different. Most notably, the moon is dethroned.

Object.........................delta-v from LEO(km/s)

```
Theoretical Earth Trojans.....3.27
```

Asteroid 2006 RH120...........3.820

```
1152 known asteroids    <5.93
```

```
Lunar Surface.................5.93
```
```
Mars..........................6.3 
```

      The "closest" objects, the ones easiest to get to via rocket are actually Near-Earth-Asteroids. (NEAs) If the Moon is no longer the easiest, most accessible target, then what advantage does it have left?
Well, the Moon does still win on trip time--it only takes 3 days, vs. months on the low-energy trajectories to NEAs. When you're launching people who need to eat and breathe over the round trip, that does simplify things. Unfortunately, that's all the moon's got.
To land safely and return from the surface of the moon, you'll always need powerful, heavy rockets-- and that adds expense. Otherwise, you're helpless against lunar gravity and go splat. (Lithobreaking is normally ill-advised.) To get to NEAs, you don't need, or even want rockets; you can sail -- and using solar, electric or magnetic sails, you free yourself from carrying all the rocket fuel to get from A-to-B. In a manned mission, that should more than make up for the extra consumables needed for the trip. Sailing also cuts transit times dramatically, eking into the Moon's one advantage.
         And then, the importance of that advantage is often overstated. Much ado is made of long voyages: the gravity, the radiation, the psychology. Gravity is easy: spin the ship. Radiation's risks are overstated, and can be shielded against. As for the psychology, those who argue there must have a short sense of history. Long voyages were the norm for most of human history, not the exception. In the age if sail, it took months to cross oceans. Before railways, it took just as long to cross continents. Yes, we're used to jetting hitther and thither and never being more than a day or two away from anything in this modern world, but I don't believe it requires a superhuman constitution to abandon that luxury. Even now, mariners in the world's navies face multi-month deployments on duty; modern nuclear subs are expected to remain submerged for 3 months in peacetime, and indefinitely during time of war. There was a time, before radio and road and rail, when every hamlet in the north became an isolated outpost for winter; these conditions still prevail (excepting radio) in Antarctica, and it seems to do little harm.
        The long trip is irrelevant. Asteroids are easier to get to.

         And when we do get there, we'll find the resources available far more welcoming and useful than we would on the Moon.
But I've bashed the poor lunatics enough for one day; the resource rant can wait for next week.

The Profit Motive

2010-10-29T15:30:00.000-04:00

As Dr. Brin would say, "the political lamp is lit."
I'm inspired to write this in part by the continued discussions at Contrary Brin, and by an essay/open letter from legendary game developer and rocket builder John Carmack.
Now, Carmack is an intelligent man, and far more accomplished than I am, let's just get that out of the way. On the whole, I don't disagree with him, except for one line:
"Without the goal and scorecard of profit, it is hard to even make value judgments between people and programs, so there are few checks against mounting inefficiency and abject failure, let alone evolution towards improvement."

There, I could not disagree more, for various reasons. The first, and most obvious, is that the government is in the business of providing services that aren't, in general, profitable. You think the transcontinental highway system could ever pull a profit, if run as a business? One can argue that the economic activity generated thereby has more than paid for their construction (depending how you factor the externalities of it), but... that's not how a business works. John Carmack's rockets have to make money for John Carmack, not society as a whole, and that makes a big difference. It's cliched, but how do you calculate the "profit" in saving a life?

Listen, I have no problems with the free market. The freer the better, I say! Ideally, we'd have as many transactions as possible in a market free of oligarchy and monopoly, as well as unfair or unnecessary government meddling. What regulations count as fair and necessary is a debate for another day. Right now, I want to take on the gold standard of the capitalist economy: the profit motive. There is something seriously wrong with the profit motive.

People have tried to calculate the profit in saving lives. The Ford Motor Company did, once. In the 1970s, they produced a small car whose name lives in infamy: the Pinto. The Pinto was a nice little car, with one small flaw: in a rear-end collision, the fuel system tended to explode. Ford knew. They knew! They deliberately put a death trap onto the market, because they'd calculated that actually fixing the problem would cost more than paying damages to burn victims and bereaved families. They sold an exploding car, because that was more profitable than making it safe.

That's what's wrong with the profit motive.

Ford's is hardly the only example. There are companies which willfully break the law and dump toxic chemicals, because the fees and lawsuits they'd pay if caught don't cost enough to offset the profit of polluting. Chinese companies making baby formula found a novel cost-reducing measure: in the name of profit, they poisoned thousands of children.

That's where profit takes us.

If you're following the profit motive, you're doing as shabby a job as possible for as much money as you can. That's not reductio-ad-absurdum, either. That is what happens in the real world.

Why do we base our entire economy on ripping people off?

Yes, we can combat the shaddiness of profit-driven product development with government regulation-- that's why you can drink milk in Canada, the US, and Europe without worrying about melamine. But isn't there another way?

Imagine a different sort of market. Today, Ford might build automobiles, but their real business is producing profit for the shareholders. Instead, imagine a company whose business really is building automobiles. Imagine a company that isn't run by MBAs, that doesn't calculate how many bereavement suits balances the cost of fixing a fuel tank. Instead, imagine a company run by workers and engineers who just want to build the best damn car they can.
Just imagine.
Instead of chasing the almighty dollar, someone tries to build for quality instead. Instead of building a car designed to fall apart after the warranty term, they would build a car that lasts. A car that's safe, not because they might sell a few more that way, but because it's the right thing to do.
Imagine a free market that rewards craftsmanship over cost-cutting. That rewards integrity over dishonesty. A market makes that corporate persons act like decent human beings, rather than sociopaths. That rewards good over evil.
Is it possible?
Why the hell not?

It's up to us, after all. We are the actors in the free market. We could form a Car Construction Co-operative, a non-profit to build the automobile I described. We could make it open source. We could make it lean, green, mean, and make it last a lifetime. We could apply that principle to every poison-coated piece of crap coming out of China. We could revive manufacturing in North America.

Well, we could try. Say what you will, it's a free country; you cannot say we couldn't try. The argument is: could we compete?

I'd like to think so, even given the immense advantages held by our competition. I'd like to think, that given the choice, people will chose good over evil. I'd like to think that We The People, we the working people, the people of Main St., "the builders, the doers, the makers of things," can stand tall and wrest control of our destiny from the stuffed suits and the bean counters on Wall St.
I'd really like to think so, or else I might have to grow a beard.

... the funny thing is, John Carmack isn't one of those suits. The man clearly isn't driven by profit: he makes rockets and videogames. He makes ROCKETS, and VIDEOGAMES. Those aren't the career choices of a man trying to maximize monetary profits. What I don't know is, if John isn't driven by profit in his personal life, he feels our society as a whole should be. I know that it is, and I know it would be hard to change, but can anyone tell me why it should be?

Thanksgiving Week Reviews 3

2010-10-14T21:02:00.000-04:00

What media am I thankful for tonight?
1632.
The whole damn thing -- every single novel, every single story.
If you have any time on your hands, the sheer size of this shared universe is one of the wonderful things about it. If you don't, then there's something saved to read for vacation.
Like any good pusher, author/editor Eric Flint offers the first hit free. Now, I don't like to stare at glowing rectangles for extended periods; I find LCDs hard on the eyes for reading. Given this, I still read all 597 pages of 1632 in one sitting. As much as my bleary eyes ached, I couldn't put it down! As soon as I found it in paperback, I read it again. And again-- the first novel in the series is Eric Flint's magnum opus, and something I still regularly reread. The premise seems ridiculous, at first, but like HP:MOR the book does not just rise above the premise: soars beyond it at escape velocity.
In 1632, a West Virginia coal town is mysteriously transported back in time to Germany in the Year of Our Lord 1631. The 3000 hillbillies find themselves dropped into the middle of the 30 Year's War-- the worst Europe would face, before the 20th Century.
Hillbillies. Time travel. An American flag billowing across the cover. That sounds like it could be as much of a disaster as "Ender Wiggins goes to Hogwarts," couldn't it? In the right hands, there are no bad ideas. This book is nothing short of brilliant. The series continues that tradition with a retinue of authors who, while perhaps not quite the virtuosoes in language (or storytelling, in the case of Virginia de Marce, but she's learning too) that Eric Flint proved himself to be in the first novel, with stories that span Europe.
Like HP:MOR, these are stories that teach. That fanfic teaches rationalism; this teaches history and political science. History is not viewed through the tunnel vision you normally get in such works, however-- the Great Man theory of history is either completely ignored or vastly expanded. Every character is the Great Man; every person from a mercenary camp whore and the geeks at the high school to the Holy Roman Emperor has a role in building the new Europe. This breathes a much greater realism than you see in much historical fiction, or indeed, much fiction and even many history texts, where the action only follows the main characters.
Oh, yes, it gets hard to keep track sometimes. The same is true of Tolstoy. With the 1632 series, however, the number of characters in any one story or novel is kept to a fairly manageable level for an epic; there are simply a great many stories. The same is certainly not true for Tolstoy.
War and Peace? Not today.
Today, I'm thankful for 1632.

Thanksgiving Week Reviews 2

2010-10-13T21:54:00.001-04:00

Today, I am thankful for Low-tech Magazine, and its little brother, No Tech Magazine. In our gadget-happy society, where a man's worth is measured by the age of his iPhone, these skeptical publications come as a breath of fresh air. Not that they are written by Luddites, by any means; simply put :
"Low-tech Magazine refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution. A simple, sensible, but nevertheless controversial message; high-tech has become the idol of our society."
The author, Kris De Decker, recognizes that the development of modern technology has been based on a series of choices; each new idea represents a fork in the road. De Decker casts his eyes backwards, and examines the road not taken. From sailing ships to turn-of-the-century electric cars and propeller planes of the 1950s, the case is strongly made that if we could have chosen differently and built a cleaner, greener, more efficient future--and we still can! Why not a subway for cargo? Why flush thousands of gallons of water when you could have a 19th century vacuum flush toilet bring your manure straight to the farm? While, in general, Low-tech Magazine offers well-considered essays painting pictures of the tech that never was or should be again, No Tech Magazine is a compendium of links and blurbs on the topic at hand. Want a 19th century book on bicycle design and construction? (and who doesn't?) Exploded views of the new 1909 model autos? All this and more to fascinate the mind and titillate the senses at No Tech Magazine.
For which I am thankful, because where else could I learn that carrier pidgons are faster than the Internet?

Thanksgiving Week Reviews 1

2010-10-12T12:24:00.000-04:00

Last weekend was the Canadian thanksgiving festival, and to celebrate, I'll be posting reviews of books, websites and other media that I am truly thankful exist.
My first item is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

Yes, it's fan fiction.
Yes, it's fan fiction for a children's book.
So what? As the old saw says, don't judge a book by its cover. It might be fan fiction, but this is one of the most original and entertaining stories I have read, period. Now, I have to admit, I'm not normally a fan of the fantasy genre--HP:MOR supplanted Larry Niven's "The Magic Goes Away" as my favourite work of fantasy, and one thing they have in common that most works in the genre do not is a burning desire to make sense. Nuts-and-bolts fantasy. Fantasy-as-sci-fi. Not to riff too hard on fantasy, but in most stories "A wizard did it" is speckle troweled hastily over plot holes. In Methods of Rationality, "A wizard did it" is only the beginning; the next logical question "Okay, how?" and a science-nerd version of Harry Potter's attempts to answer it form a good part of the plot.
I'm not going to be the first one to call this "Ender Wiggin Goes to Hogwarts"-- but that's a pithy label that doesn't really do the fic justice. Because while HP:MOR contains everything awesome that implies, it has none of the downsides, and in spite of the borrowed/reworked setting (like anybody has ever done that before) this is an original work. The characters borrow from cannon originals, but only as archtypes--those that get screen time are deep and fully fleshed, probably more than Rowling's versions simply because this work is not for children.
I have to admit, I never actually read the original novels. Like the Harry of this reboot*, I was too busy reading science and classic sci-fi to "stoop" to a novel aimed at my actual age group when the first Harry Potter hit the shelves. Even then, I was probably too old to enjoy them. Now, I can, in deliciously rationalist flavour.
Rationalist? Yes. The author, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, is a student of rational thinking, and is using this work to advance his ideas. The fic is not only entertaining, it is educational! No, this is not a thinly disguised treatise on how to think. It is a very rich work in which you might also pick up some pointers on how to control your brain and its natural tendencies to err. There are declamations, there are lectures, and there are lessons about human rationality in this work, yes, but they don't detract from it. Yudkowsky handles his sermons at least as well (and often better) than Heinlein ever did--and these sermons are useful lessons in science, not inconsistent politicking.
So thank you, Universe, for producing Eliezer Yudkowsky and putting enough raw imagination in his rationalist brain to produce the stellar Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

*Except for Harry being way smarter than me, I identify with this character better than anyone in any fiction I've read in years.

I am thankful for my work.

2010-10-11T20:29:00.000-04:00

When I started this blog, I was doing my undergraduate degree in physics at Laurentian University. I'm pleased to say that that's done.
My new home is the Center for Planetary Science and Exploration at the University of Western Ontario; I'm perusing a Master's degree here under the Astronomy Dept. umbrella.
Planetary science? Astronomy? Not exactly my undergrad background, no. But if you've read the blog before, you may have noticed I think this is a terribly important field. The research for which I hope to be awarded an MSc is going to be on the asteroids--those leftover lumps of rock and metal which cluster between Mars and Jupiter, but also occasionally and terrifyingly cross the orbit of the Earth. The project has to do with the sizes of the asteroids, specifically those which are less than 1km across. Asteroids vary in size from minor worlds like Ceres down to the pebbles we sometimes see as shooting stars. Those different sizes are because of collisions: Their sizes are determined by collisions: if two bodies collide slowly enough, they may stick together, as happened to form the planets; too quickly, and both bodies might fracture into smaller pieces. What counts as “too quickly” depends on the strength of the objects. At large scales, the strength of an asteroid is governed by gravity, and results in a simple power law distribution of diameters. For objects less than 1km across, composition begins to dominate: it is bulk strength keeps it from breaking apart. The size distribution for small asteroids has not yet been studied in-depth with relation to composition, so that's just what we're going to do. The hows I'll leave for my research proposal (or ask, and ye shall receive) but an important question is why?
Why am I interested in the size distribution of asteroids? Well, it can tell us a few things. Firstly, because at these sizes the sizes are determined by the bulk strength of whatever the rocks are made of, we can get some ideas about that strength. Of course, we know metallic asteroids, being made of stainless steel, are stronger than silicate asteroids,which made of rock, and carbonaceous chrondroids, which are mostly made of crumbly organic materials. We know this from meteorites that have made it to Earth--but for large objects, out in space? No data. Yet. We need to know that, too, to properly plan to deflect asteroids which pose an impact hazard to the Earth-- like 99942 Apophis, which stands a 1:250 000 chance of impact in 2038. Of course, to deflect Apophis we'll want the specifics of its exact properties-- but general data and statistical means can be useful for contingency planning while we prepare to make those measurements. (Note: No one is actually planning to make those measurements. Your chance of death in a terrorist attack is 1:93 million; Western governments have spent trillions in combating terrorism. Suffice to say that wee are very poor at risk assessment.)
These sorts of measurements can also help us nail down the overall composition of the asteroid belt-- which is useful, from scientific terms, because the asteroids can tell us a lot about the formation of the solar system--and in less academic terms, because it is prospecting the greatest source of resources in the solar system. Resources that will allow us to move off this planet, and scatter far enough that we need never fear a single extinction event; that will allow us to take stress of the Earth's ecosystem and rebuild the Garden lost so many, many years ago.
Veteran readers may notice that I am very concerned with building such a future; now I'm in a position to actually do something about it.
And given the date, I think that is definitely something to be Thankful for.

The Blog is Back!

2010-10-02T21:11:00.000-04:00

The past few months, I've been a consumer of content, not a producer. (Excepting my contributions to a cosmology paper.) Which, while good for the wrists, is somehow less satisfying. At first, I did not miss the sound of my own voice: there are so many others with whom I agree, and I thought, perhaps that that was enough. Yet in spite of their eloquence and astronomically greater readership, none of those people say quite what I'd say; none of them have my way of saying it. Out of six billion people, actually have something unique to add.
That's not a trivial statement. We're at a unique point in history, one where everyone has a voice and everyone's voice matters. The stuff of standard human experience may be limited, however, in which case the wellspring will eventually run dry--once everything has been said, anyone who speaks will be quoting by necessity. Karl Schroeder deals with this in one of his books: a young woman is sculpting, while a young man makes fun of her for it. He calls up a display of all the young women sculpting at that moment, and they're uncountable in number. He narrows it down: all the young women sculpting the same form as hers; still a multitude. He then displays the young women sculpting the same thing while being made fun of by young men for daring to think they could be original, and they are legion.
As much time as I spend looking to the future, you know, the present is kind of awesome too.

Wither the blog?

2010-01-08T14:46:00.003-05:00

If anyone still actually checks here, I feel I owe you an explanation for the steady drop off (and then cessation) of posting. I actually have one, and it's really quite simple : carpal tunnel syndrome. Rather than type my wrists into oblivion, I'm cutting back on computer use as much as my responsibilities (and internet addiction) will allow, and so the blog has been put on hiatus as part of that process. I probably should have mentioned this sooner.
If my internal ergonomics improve through exercise therapy or belated Christmas miracle, I may someday return to the blogosphere. When I'm a rich asteroid tychoon, I'll dictate to all of you how it happened.
In the meantime, I will leave the archives of this page open for as long as Google and the Internet Archive allow, in case of a return. Stone tablets it ain't, but it is what it is. We are what we are.
Audios, amigos.

Climategate is really starting to annoy me.

2009-12-06T11:55:00.003-05:00

I have just one thing to say about "the climategate scandal" :

Just because you stick "gate" on the end of a word, it doesn't make it a scandal.
Also, the Watergate Scandal wasn't actually about water.
I imagine the modern media must assume Watergate went something like this:

Deepthroat : "Oh noes Nixon be stealin' all the waters~! Its watergate!"

Nixon: "Srry bout waters. I can has pardon? kthxbye."

Ford: "I can has Presidency! Nixon can has pardon."

Here is the thing-- CO2 is a greenhouse gas; it is partially opaque to IR. Traps heat, very well. This has been known since the 19th Century, and, in fact, our oh-so-sophisticated climate models don't give results oh-so-very different from calculations performed in the Victorian Era.
It is really quite simple; there's no need for a complicated computer model or even a bleeding calculator. CO2 traps heat. When you trap heat, it gets warmer. This is not rocket science. It is not controversial, and it is not a communist plot.

It's just the way the world works.

It might be inconvenient to your investments in Exxon-Mobil, and it might not jive well with your vision of free market politics, but guess what?

The universe doesn't care.

You can't change the science by wanting it not to be true.

It's quite simple. CO2=heat, and we're crapping out insane amounts of CO2 from our use of fossil fuels. That fossil fuel use (mostly the coal) is also crapping megatonnes of toxic mercury, cadmium, sulphuric and nitric acids and lead into the atmosphere, along with more radioactive waste than Chernobyl, every single year.
Even if we wanted increase CO2 levels in the atmosphere, if we wanted to fuck with the climate and raise sea levels and disposess millions of people for some demented reason-- we'd still be better off not burning coal. It just isn't very nice stuff.
Oil isn't quite as dirty--but it's running out anyway. We might as well learn to do without now, before the supply runs dry, or we have to strip mine half of Alberta.

This is what I really don't understand about "climategate" -- reacting to global warming is a win-win scenario. If we get off fossil fuels, and it happens through some incredibly unlikely fluke that this IS a communist plot sprung fully-formed from the loins of Karl Marx himself, then all we have done is cleaned up our act, increased national security by averting conflicts over dwindling oil resources and having to care about the Middle East, and left some beautiful Boreal forest intact for our descendants to enjoy. It really doesn't seem like such a bad scam.
And in the overwhelmingly likely case that man-made global warming is actually happening, we may just save civilisation.
How is either outcome really a bad thing?

"So what would you do with a physics degree?"

2009-11-25T18:59:00.003-05:00

This question gets asked a lot. Usually they have the idea to add "besides research, I mean" -- that is generally acknowledged as the goal for anyone even in undergraduate physics.
But say you get your BSc., have had enough schoolin', and want out? What then?
I recently joked that I was applying to grad school because I didn't want to go to Afghanistan : the only two positions actively advertised seeking holders of a physics BSc in this country were graduate schools and the Canadian Forces. The key word, however, is "actively."

The other physical sciences--especially engineering and geology, but also chemistry and biology to an increasing degree--have this luxury. There are job postings for field geologists that anyone with a pulse and a BSc. have a good shot at getting, especially in a good economic climate. A B.Eng knows that he or she is tailor-made for jobs with the quasi-legal title "engineer," so there's no worry and no mystery there.

With physics, it is different. Very few employers say "We need to hire a physicist!" -- it happens, but the jobs are few and far between. Because there are few competitors and few jobs, the ironic situation arises that whenever someone is looking for employment, there are no openings, and when there are, nobody is looking. It is a job market that moves in fits and starts and relies very much on personal contacts. Outside of that? The limit is your imagination.

A bachelors degree in physics has more in common on the job market with one in history than it does the other physical sciences. A history major has no illusions: there are a few jobs for historians, but in industry very few corporations ever utter the phrase "we need to hire an historian!"

What you hear from industry is "We need someone to do X" -- and then it's up to you, worthy job seeker, to prove to them that your Bachelor in physics/history/underwater basket weaving and previous experiences gives you the skills and attitude needed to be the perfect fit for that particular job in that particular company. There are few limits here. Before the financial crisis, down-and-out theoretical physicists had wheedled their way so far into Wall Street that the term 'financial physicist' became briefly in vogue. The idea was to use the mathematical tools that model the behaviour of atoms to model the markets instead. Needless to say, that didn't work out too well, but once things start rolling again it will doubtless become a viable career option.

Other options include down and out scab work: turn your experience in crafting computer models to take a job from a CS major. A businessman reportedly declared at a recent undergraduate physics conference "I love physics majors. You can do everything an engineer can, but I don't have to pay you as much." Sometimes, being under-qualified can be a qualification; it's all about what you can bring to the table. If you have a degree in physics--any degree, honours or no--you can get recognition as an intelligent, hard-working individual. Then it's just a matter of spinning the skills you've earned inside and outside of the classroom into what a specific employer wants, and building a career from there.

Would I suggest anyone do this, as a career path? Probably not. You don't go into physics if you want to do engineering, or computer science--there are degrees for that. You go into physics because you want to do physics, but, unfortunately, the economics of the university system is causing it to overproduce physics majors at all levels. All of this advice applies to freshly-minted and unemployed MSc or PhD holders -- and with 4 times as many PhDs as faculty positions at any given time, you can bet there are quite a few of those. Not everyone can be a professor, work at a national lab, or even do corporate R&D. Not everyone can endure the hard, long, long, long slog through more than one degree.
It doesn't mean a ticket to Afganistan; it just means you need to use your creativity, which, in the end, is what physics and science is all about.

Bring on the Atomic Amish

2009-11-23T10:27:00.002-05:00

In another two decades, there will be virtually no skilled machinists in the Western World. To most, this doesn't seem like a terribly big deal. After all, a computer-controlled CNC mill can shape metal faster, more accurately, and cheaper--more profit all 'round! Productivity goes up, capitalism prospers, management gets a huge fourth quarter bonus--except for the machinist, everybody wins. Don't we?
Well, there's a few drawbacks here. One comes from lefty economics: you just took away a highly paid, highly skilled professional, and replaced him with a less skilled, less paid computer operator. Now that highly skilled professional won't be buying nice things with his wages--things like what the company makes. It was Henry Ford who first figured that his company would do best if his workers could afford to buy his cars, so we'll call if Fordism. From a fordist perspective, the rich getting richer and the middle class being driven down to into McDonald's style wage-slavery is not good for anyone--even, long term, the factory owners reaping all the profits of the shiny new CNC mill. Ronald Regan would disagree, but Regan's dead so I'm not going to argue. The problem goes deeper than that.
As usual, I am not concerned about the economy: I am concerned about survival.

Say we lob a few nukes into the upper atmosphere. Terrorists might do it, or a nuclear border war, since everyone seems to be getting the Bomb these days. The resultant EMPs (electromagnetic pulses) fry every integrated circuit-- every computer-- within a couple thousand miles beneath; its not hard to get even global coverage
But then, everything has computers in it now.
Nobody knows how to rebuild.
Chaos, famine, death.

All entirely avoidable.
Nukes aren't the only danger; a large enough spike in solar activity could have the same silicone-frying effects. And without the computer resources that run and build nearly everything we come into contact with in our daily lives...? Well, like I said. Chaos, famine, death. Only the Amish escape.
The Amish, of course, won't be much good at helping us rebuild civilization. For one, they're too few. For another, it would send us back to the 19th Century, or worse. At the same time being backed up to the 19thC is way better than the Neolithic.
Jesus saves, but God makes backups. The Amish, then, are obviously God's people.
What we need is a more recent backup.
An Amish-like culture that will not shun modern technology, but embrace it-- or embrace it as much as possible, to provide us with the best possible backup. I would give them only one commandment, stolen from Frank Herbert's Butlerian Jihad : "Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of a man's mind."
That's it.
Give us a high-tech culture that builds things for themselves, designs things for themselves, and does it's own dirty work, and we can weather any but an extinction event.
Give them souped-up and modernized 20th Century technology: make them the Atomic Amish. You don't need automated systems to run a pebble-bed reactor.
At least, not so automated that you need ICs.

Oh, yes, this backup culture would miss out on the Singularity, if it comes-- they would find it heretical, abhorrent, the very thing against which they stand. Would that stop it? The real Amish haven't stopped consumerism and high-tech culture from spreading the globe. Of course, our Amish don't have atomic weapons, but consider that it's a pacifist culture regardless.
You couldn't hold back technology with anything more aggressive, whether you base it on Christianity or not. So the Atomic Amish would no more stop the Singularity than the existing Anabaptists.
And if the Singularity goes wrong and our creations love us not-- well.
Then the Amish have our back. And they have nukes.
I can't see this as anything but a good thing.

You are a wave.

2009-09-07T19:24:00.003-04:00

A while back, I discussed some of the wonderful repercussions of the fact that you are made of atoms. The problem with atomic theory is that atoms never touch (baring a nuclear reaction) -- if I hold you, our atoms do not touch. If I kiss you, no mater how fiercely, our atoms do not touch. Even when two people make love--unless they do it inside a running particle accelerator (not advised)--their atoms never touch. Never. It's a lonely existence, being a man made of atoms.

The other problem with the atomic view of the world is the that question I discussed "Which atoms?"-- or, turned around "What collection of atoms can I refer to as my cat?"--is a nonsense question, because the atomic components of a being are always in flux. Your cat exhales, you inhale; you swap atoms. Yet your cat remains a cat, despite the change in atoms. Is there, perhaps, another way of looking at the world: one less lonely, one where our identity is more distinct?

Actually, there is. In Quantum Mechanics, there is a principle called wave-particle duality : a thing is not a particle, and it is not a wave--it's both, depending on how you choose to look at it. Consider the electron, a fairly normal particle. Bounce it off an atom, and it acts like a particle; shoot it through a crystal, or a pair of slits, on the other hand, it behaves exactly like a wave. This behaviour scales up: to atoms, to anything. You aren't a particle. You are a wave.

More specifically, you are an interference wave. Imagine a summer's day, a light breeze, and a pond. The light breeze will set up small waves on the surface of the pond. Now, drop a rock into the pond: it sets up ripples of its own, does it not? And the waves before? They don't go away: the ripples from the rock simply add to the wider pattern. Toss in more pebbles, and this pattern can become really quite intricate--this is what is called the superposition principle: waves add, be they on water or the matter waves of atoms. You are, then, a specific wave-pattern, if we look at it from that perspective.

This restores individual identity: you may gain or loose the waves of atoms, but the overall pattern remains constant, just as a symphony remains the same piece of music as different instruments drop in and out. There is a waveform I can call my cat, and a waveform I can call myself--and if they exchange constituent atoms, well, I can play Beethoven and Bach with the same orchestra, so there is no need to get confused. And if they touch? If I pet my cat, or if I hold my lover, what then?

Waves add. When your lover takes you in his (or her) arms, your atoms may never touch, but they do interact. In interacting, their waveforms do too, and waves add: your waveform and his waveform join as one, into part of a larger and more complicated pattern. You are one, in a very real and beautiful sense. And if sometimes, in the heat of passion, you forget yourself and it seems as though you move as one--now you know the metaphor. It's just the poetry of quantum mechanics at work.

The best part is, this is not limited to lovers: my feet touch the soil, same as yours do. Just as the atoms in a pair of lips can interact with another's, so too do my feet interact with the soil--only because they do do I keep from falling to the center of the Earth. My lungs and skin interact with the wave-particles of the atmosphere; so do yours, so does everyone's. And by this interaction? Our wave-forms become part of a larger whole: the waveform of the very world, a vast, complex, almost unimaginable symphony. We are all one, be we atoms or waves. We are the world--not just the world, but the Universe itself: one great, maddening waveform, the product of all our beings. Individual, unique, but part of the greater whole. We are all connected in ways that poets never dreamed.
Sometimes, truth isn't just stranger than fiction: it's more beautiful, too.

Full-speed Rail

2009-08-14T22:11:00.004-04:00

There is a lot of talk these days about proposals for bringing High Speed Rail (trains going 200km/h faster) here to North America. Most of the plans and the policy debate focus on the United States, with only the Edmonton-Calgary and Windsor-Toronto-Montreal corridor under any consideration here in Canada. I am very much in favour of high-speed rail as an alternative to distance car or air travel, but--if a lucky few are zipping between Toronto and Montreal in 2 and a half hours, or Calgary and Edmonton in 1 hour 15 minutes, what of the rest of the country? There is, sadly, no chance of raising funds for a transcontinental high speed railway. Personally, I'd settle for a full speed railway.

To travel from Greater Sudbury to Union Station in Toronto, Ontario upon Via Rail's Canadian is a journey of 444km, and it takes the better part of a day: 7 hours and 40 minutes, to schedule--rather longer then I want to spend riding to Toronto. A quick bit of arithmatic shows the problem here : the train's average speed along this route is only 58km/h.
For reference, the granddaddy of all locomotives, Stephenson's Rocket, clocked 47km/h at the Rainhill Trials in 1830. 179 years have only given us 11km/h of progress in this country? By the time Confederation rolled around and the Dominion of Canada came to be, shaped by its railroads, trains were capable of making bursts of 60km/h; the record at the time, set in 1850 on the UK's Great Western Railway, was 125.6km/h.
When you factor in that Via Rail does but rarely keep to schedule, our trains run slower now than when the country was led by Sir John A. in the service of Queen Victoria.
So while the big cities can have their fancy high-speed rail, my vision for the rest of the country is the much more modest proposal of 'full speed rail'.
Locomotive technology, even here in Canada, hasn't sat still since the year of our lord 1867--not quite, at any rate. The General Electric EMD-F40PH Locomotive that pulls Via's Canadian is capable of a sustained top speed of 166km/h. Clearly, technology is not the problem. Oh, yes, the 1930s-era refurbished Pullman cars used by the Canadian would fly off the rails the first corner they hit at that speed; I'm not proposing we open the throttle the whole way down (even if it were safe, we still have stops along the route) -- still, the excess capacity of the GE Locomotive should be able to get us average speeds of 90km/h without difficulty. A railway engineer can correct me if I'm wrong, but they go that fast in Southern Ontario without exposing passengers to undo danger.
That extra 30km/h may seem like little, but it shaves the elapsed time down to just 5 hours. Now we are actually saving time, versus driving. That is a big deal, when it comes to getting people off roads and onto rail--saving lives, and sparing the climate*.

It's a simple proposal : if we cannot blanket the country with High-Speed Rail, then at least can't we have Full Speed Rail? Can't we use what we have to its full potential?
Unfortunately, it isn't as easy as it might sound. The tracks are owned by CN and Canadian Pacific; Via just leases time on them, and so passenger trains in this country not only share track with slow-moving freight, but they also don't have priority. CN and the CPR make more money from freight, so they let that go first. While this is very inconvenient for Via Rail's customers, CN and CPR are independent corporate entities operating on their own property. They neither care, nor are under any obligation to. In the current business-friendly political environment, it seems highly unlikely that we could induce Parliament to legislate a Full-Speed Rail initiative by telling CN/CPR what to do on their own tracks. To get the needed priority, Via Rail would have to pay a hefty premium. Would the extra speed draw in enough passengers to balance the bottom line? I don't know. I think so, but I'm not sure it matters.
Even with priority, CPR's tracks are crowded. They're carrying quite alot of freight up and down through our example corridor of Sudbury-Toronto. To actually get full speed out of our passenger rail safely, it might be necessary to build a parallel right of way, at least in sections.
That would be expensive, but it frees up the track currently used for passenger rail for additional freight, and also opens up the way for more than just Full Speed Rail in the future-- with tilt-train technology (pioneered by Bombardier, perfected in Europe) our regular rail infrastructure can support average speeds of up to 125km/h.
That's halfway to TVG-speeds, at a for far less than half the cost. It's the modest, unassuming, downright polite way to get people ba ck on the rails. Perfect for Canada!

*The efficiency of rail gets brief mention in my last post. In terms of passengers and CO2, standard diesel rail produces 0.13kg/km each, whereas cars clock in at 0.22kg/km/person. From Sudbury to Toronto, that's 40kg CO2 saved per passenger, with the dirty diesels in Via's railyards. New locomotives about to go into production can cut emissions in half, for the train.

The safety of rail might deserve a post of it's own, but look at it this way: every time a train crashes or derails anywhere in the world, it makes CNN and the 6 o'clock news. That doesn't happen with fatal car accidents, does it? They're not rare, so not newsworthy. In terms of deaths per passenger per kilometer, driving is 3.2 times more likely to kill you.

I'm alive!

2009-08-04T20:05:00.002-04:00

I had planned on a brief blog hiatus for exams in April, but when those segued directly into a full time job plus commute and a couple of classes, well... the hiatus came along for the ride. Now that I'm not facing 60 hour weeks, I hope to get back to something resembling a regular update schedule.
Blog-Metamucil, perhaps?

On nice mornings, I find myself compelled to walk the last leg of my commute to work--I have to transfer buses at the depot downtown, and sometimes the connection just isn't worth waiting for, 15 minutes for a 15 minute bus ride. So, impatient sot that I am, I walk. It's a pleasant walk: the university is directly across Ramsey Lake from the majority of the city, so I get to semi-circumnavigate the waters. Surprisingly, that is not always my favourite part of the walk.

Sudbury is cut in twain by a once-essential rail yard; on these walks, I cross it by bridge; there is both a great 4-lane commuter span and a smaller structure some yards up the tracks for pedestrian and bicycle traffic. Now, there's something almost magical about sunrise over the railyard. The first thing that strikes one as you cross onto the bridge is the smells: no longer city smells, but the clean, sweet smell of dew on the greenery that boarders CP's right-of-way. As you walk further, the smell of dew begins to mix with the complex, smoky aroma of the tarred timber sleepers, and years of accumulated soot. At just the right angle, your eyes are hit by the sun glinting off the rails like a river of molten steel stretching to the horizon. Then 10,000 tons of cargo go rumbling by beneath you, and you can almost capture some of the sense of wonder those Victorians felt, when the Iron Horse was new.

Seeing the first train pass through the Rugby countryside, Thomas Arnold remarked in his journal that "feudality is gone for ever." It was a new age, an Age of Steam--an age that had no tuck with the crusty leftover oppressions of the Middle Ages. Those who saw it happen credited the railways with ending the last vestiges of feudalism and spreading democracy in Europe. Those on the receiving end of the new order blamed the rails, too--Pope Gregory XIV coined the pithy phrase chemin de fer, chemin d'enfer." It is perhaps telling that the French experience with democracy only met with lasting success after the railways were built; the national network was slow to develop and only came out of infancy after Napoleon III was in power, and at the dawn of the Third Republic (the latter spurned by the humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussians, thanks in good part to their superior railway logistics.)

The railways ended feudalism, they were nursemaid to Democracy in Europe, and may save us from global warming*.
Plus, a moment of satorai on a morning walk.
Just what has your car ever done for you, anyway?

*(A train can move a tonne of cargo more than 400 miles on a gallon of fuel--or use no fuel at all, if driven by overhead wires.)

Baby Steps: Powering the Future.

2009-04-18T17:20:00.005-04:00

Something caught my eye in the news this week, something I feel I really have to share here.
Pacific Gas and Energy, the largest utility company in the State of California, has cut a deal to buy solar power from space. The contract calls for the Solaren corporation to deliver 200MW of baseline electrical power to the Californian grid, starting in 2016.
Now, normally, solar can't provide basline power: baseline is the always-on, dependable part of the grid, which can't turn off at night or drop out when it's cloudy. In space, we don't have this problem; space is where they keep the sun. No clouds, no night, no worries.
Yes, since the power satellite orbits the earth, it must occasionally end up in shadow, but we can play with the orbital mechanics to keep that time to a minimum. Also, using a network of satellites, one can make sure that only one out of commission at a given time, keeping the power load steady. That seems to be what Solaren is planning: the article mentions 5 launches of 25 tonnes each. Given the general lack of experience in on-orbit assembly, (with Mir and ISS the only objects ever so constructed) it seems likely that that would mean 5 independent satellites.
This is, needless to say, excellent news. It is electrical power with virtually no associated ecological footprint: it won't release carbon into the atmosphere or leave nuclear waste like traditional thermal plants, and nor will it disrupt desert ecosystems like most of the conventional solar power installations planned worldwide.
So how is all that clean energy going to make it from orbit down to California? The electrical power generated by solar cells on the satellites will be converted to radio waves, and beamed down to antenna farms on the ground. You may worry about what happens if the beam misses its target: don't. The radio waves in question can be made to spread out, so they reach the ground no more powerful than the emissions from your cell phone--it just means the antennae have to be similarly spread out to collect the beam. Even at cell phone strength, an antenna farm for 200MW is going to be far smaller than a 200MW solar array--and is compatible with on site wind turbines, or even farming under the antennae (or both!)
Perhaps the best part of this news is that this is not a "best effort" contract: there are serious penalties for Solaren Corporation if they fail to pony up the power. What this represents is nothing less than the first serious exploitation of space resources (aside from telecommunications and earth monitoring) in the history of mankind.
It's a big deal.
This is could turn into a long-awaited paradigm shift for the on-orbit economy. These first 5 power satellites will be launched all up, like satellites always have been, but the economics are far more favourable to build in space, from materials mined from the moon or the asteroids. This deal has the potential to be the first step in a very long and prosperous journey into the final frontier.
And we get to see it all unfold.
It's a great time to be alive.

Science, Scientism, and Descartes' Ghost.

2009-04-08T18:29:00.003-04:00

Some people just don't like Science. They talk about "scientism," this idea that Science is somehow just another variety of religion; they warn you that trying to make political or life decisions based solely on scientific opinion is to invite oppression and disaster-- because what do those eggheads know, anyway?
The reason there is no such thing as 'scientism' is that those eggheads will tell you exactly what they don't know: they are forthright and honest because they're trying to get funding to fill in those blanks.
The reason that there is no such thing as 'scientism' is because science is not an ideology: it is a way of figuring things out. It is, in fact, the only way we have of getting answers from the world. It's short and simple, the Scientific Meathod.
1) Get an idea.
2) Test the idea: do an experiment, make observations about the world.
3) Compare results to idea-- if it holds up, keep the idea. If it doesn't, back to step one with a modified idea.
In science, in the broadest possible terms, we call an idea we keep a theory, one we're testing a hypothesis--but that's just jargon distracting from the issue. Those three steps of idea, test, compare, are science.
And there is no other way to find things out.
Say you're out shopping, looking for a new outfit. You see a pair of pants on the rack, and think they'd make your ass look positively smokin'-- this is your idea, your hypothesis. Before you buy the pants, you want to know if it is correct: the only way to do that is to go to step two. You test the hypothesis, you run an experiment. In this experiment, you change into the pants, and admire yourself in a full-length mirror. Sometimes, the pants don't fit: you can't test your hypothesis, because an underlying assumption you'd never thought to question was wrong. How else could you have found that out, but to try on the pants? So you return them to the wrack, and try on a different size (politely, we shan't ask which. One is discreet about a lady's wasteline.) You examine these new pants in the full legth mirror; you twist about to get a look at your derriere: you can now judge your hypothesis. Your ass, indeed, looks smokin' in those pants-- or so you think.
Your hypothesis is now a theory, but that doesn't make it god's own truth, but at this point you're probably feeling good enough about the smokin'-ass theory (or SAT, since science loves acronyms) to put down some scratch and buy the pants. Then what? You need corroberation, of course. You wear the pants in front of your boyfriend: you waggle; he drools. The pants come off.
Your theory is confirmed and a good time is had by all.
That is science.
That's it, that's all there is to it. Nothing high fallutin' and edumacated-- just finding out about the world by looking at it. You do it every single day, every time you want to know something, because it is the only way to know something. Buying pants without trying them on, unless you know the cuts and sizing very, very well can lead to fasion disaster. Holding stronger opinions without testing them can lead to much, much worse.
Sure, a lot of the time you let other people do the observing for you: I never went down the mineshaft to SNO, but I believe my collegues when they tell me what they saw about neutrinos. You might run out of baking powder, and it is alot easier to let the internet tell you that you can substitute Cream of Tartar and Baking Soda rather than having to combine all the powders in your kitchen looking for the match yourself (but in baking the recipy, you still put their theory to the test).
If idea>>test, observe>>compare is the scientific meathod, idea>>lookup>>compare is the next best thing: it just isn't practical for anyone to do every experiment devised by man themselves, so often you're left relying on the word of others. The only trouble with this is knowing whose observations can be trusted, and whose cannot, which is a whole other bag of worms. Fortunately, there is a scientific community which tasks itself with regulating these things, in the form of peer-review: if it's in a reviewed journal, it is probably good. (though every so often, something slips through)
If all else fails, you can always do Science, and try to find some way to test a questionable statement out for youself.
Because in the end, it's the only way you'll ever really know.

...unless the ghost of Descartes is making you hallucinate everything, and good luck testing that one.
Some things, yes, are beyond the power of science to know. They're also usually pretty banal: if Descartes puts you in the Matrix, you might not be able to use science (or anything else) to learn about the "real world", but you're still learning the rules of the world being fed to your senses, and that, really is what is really to you. The quibbling is Philosophy, and as fun as that might be, it can't really tell you anything about the world: only yourself. Sometimes, though, that can be even more worthwhile.

You _are_ a precious snowflake

2009-03-17T18:37:00.006-04:00

Please, O gods of the interwebs, forgive the lateness of mine offerings, for I have been Unclean in health and unfit for your temple.
...or something like that. Regular service resumes now~ish. Be warned: author is still ill, may not make sense.
You are unique, wondrously and amazingly so. A pretty perfect snowflake, unique in all the world-- no matter what bitterness Fight Club might try and telly. We can prove it, with math.
Start with your parents: I have no idea who they are. What are the odds they might hook up to make a baby? Say you were born in the late 80s-- in 1987, there were 5 billion people on this planet, most of them of a baby-making age. For a safe estimate, say 2 billion men, and 2 billion women, with the extra billion either too young or old to have been able to get it on with sufficient vigor to result in a child.
So one of those 2 billion men is your father. I don't know who, so that's already 2 billion to one odds against your existence, right there. Now, your mother? Each of those 2 billion men (ignoring geography-- love conquers all!) has at least some chance of getting jiggy with each of those 2 billion women, one of whom must be your mother. So that is 2 billion men, times 2 billion women-- naively, we can say the odds of your parents becoming entangled to produce you are (2 billion)*(2 billion) -- that's 4*10¹⁸ , or 4 followed by 18 zeros-- to one. This is, admittedly naive: much more likely your parents lived in the same region of the same country, perhaps shared the same hometown. On the other hand, it fits perfectly accurately for Barack Obama.
Now, if 1:4*10¹⁸ isn't rare enough, it gets better: those are only the chances of 2 random people having kids (again, very naively; there are millions of factors that could affect that probability.) and does not differentiate between you and any potential siblings. Anyone who has had siblings can tell you, that small change in genetic material can make a huge difference in personalty, temperament, and even body type. Now, a woman is born with ~1 million eggs. This number is constantly being diminished over time, but we don't know which-- and we don't know which gave rise to you, either. So each of those 4*10¹⁸ have the random choice of 1 million eggs to make a baby with, so we have to multiply again. The combinations are up to 4*10²⁴ and we haven't even added daddy's contribution.
Now, how many sperm does a father have? Unlike mom, he isn't born with a set amount: constantly making more, not necessarily with the exact same combinations of genes. To the tune of 4 million sperm per hour. (They die, and are re-absorbed, in case you are wondering. The male propensity for wankin' it has other roots than building pressure from an unquenchable fountain of spunk) 4 million sperm per hour, over an active lifetime, means somewhere around a trillion. So, to sum up, 3 billion possible men, times 3 billion possible women, times a million possible eggs per woman, and a trillion possible sperm per men... that is a huge number. A really, really huge number. In scientific notation, we're up to 4*10³⁶ ("four undecillion," and yes, after a certain point mathematicians do basically just make numbers up) possibilities, of which you are the result.
So, the next time someone calls you 1 in a million, slap the mo'fo up the head for selling you short. You aren't one in a million: you're one in four undecillion.
Which, when you think about it, is pretty much im-friggin'-possible odds. Up there with spontaneously burning bushes and lead just up and deciding to become gold.
Congratulations, O reader.
You are a miracle.
We all are.

(And that is why Dr. Manhattan allows us to live.)

Sailing Through the Solar System

2009-03-02T07:58:00.004-05:00

Say you want to get around, but there is no ground to push off of, and no fluid to swim through. What's a weary traveler to do? Well, you could always bring some stuff with you to throw away-- conservation of momentum says that if you throw mass in one direction with a given speed, you gain speed in the opposite direction. This is the very key and core of the so-called Rocket Principle. Rockets are, right now, the only game--but you might have noticed that there aren't many PetroCan stations on Mars or the moon with which to refuel our rockets, and to drag all that fuel along, you're going to need a bigger rocket. Which is going to need more fuel, and to drag all that fuel along, you're going to need a bigger rocket, which is... well, you get the idea. This has lead to a number of schemes being proposed for in situ (on site) propellant production, using local materials and possibly some ingredients you dragged along-- the trouble is that you usually have better things to do with any of these resources to throw them into the inky blackness of space. Hydrogen and oxygen are the best rocket propellents, and it is convenient enough to make them out of water-- but at the same time, you could also drink that water, and oxygen is pretty nice stuff if you happen to be the kind of space traveler who enjoys breathing. Another minus is that chemical rockets are never going to get you going around the solar system very fast, anyway. Six months to Mars, a couple years out to Jupiter. This is because you cannot possibly carry enough rocket fuel to cover your whole way under power: you fire your rockets at the beginning, to get up to speed, again at the end to slow down (no friction in space: nothing to rub against, so you do not slow down) and the rest is up to god and Sir Issac.
If you want to get around the solar system faster than the scale of years you get with rockets, and with more control over your trajectory, you need to find someway to give yourself a constant push-- even a feather-light touch will add up to enormous speeds, if you keep it up over time. To do this without expending mass, you have to go sailing.
Yes, sailing. Clipper ships in the sky, and all that.
There are three types of sails: the most commonly known, and the oldest (dating way, way back to Johannes Keplar himself) is the photon sail, A.K.A the 'solar sail,' which relies on the pressure of sunlight pushing against a (very) large, (very) thin and light area of very shiny sail. Once again, the sail relies on conservation of momentum: light can be imagined to consist of a great many tiny particles, called photons, and each of these posesses a tiny momentum related to its colour (not velocity*mass like normal particles, since light always travels at the same speed, ~300 000km/s). When the photon hits the very shiny sail, it either bounces off, or it is absorbed. If it bounces off, a tiny amount of its momentum is aquired by the sail (and the light bouncing off the sail is thus shifted ever so slightly towards the red end of the rainbow)-- it isn't much, since the sail and attatched spacecraft is infinately more massive, but there are billions of photons in the average sunbeam. This adds up to a small but measurable pressure along the entire area of the sail, enough to make things move. Of course, the more massive an object the harder it is to make it move, so there is a maximum weight/area ratio for a workable sail, and it is very, very small. This necessitates the use of exotic materials: thin films of alumanized plastics, like a space blanket only a few atoms thick. And they have to be big: acres or kilometers in area, depending on how big of a payload you want to move. Solar sails see limited use in Earth Orbit to help orient satellites, but have not been tested for large scale propulsion due to the problem of assembling or unfolding such a large, thin and delicate structure in orbit. (Perhaps more importantly, when a prototype was launched, the rocket blew up.)
Solar sails, ironically, have absolutely nothing to do with the solar wind, which is a stream of charged particles (mostly protons, electrons, helium and other light nuclii)--these particles penetrate the thin sail without depositing any momentum that might aid in propulsion (but fortunately without damaging the sail: the particles in the solar wind are small enough to fit between the atoms). There are two forces that can interact with a charged particle: the electric force and magnetism, and there are designs for sails which rely on each.
Both are quite simple, and work in the same general way: instead of a big, expensive and delicate sail stretching out to catch the sun's light, we can create an even larger electric or magnetic field to interact with the solar wind, instead. The magnetic sail would see a hoop of superconducting wire cast out around the craft, supported by its own magnetic field. The main downsides are that the superconductors that would work are nearly as expensive as exotic solar sail materials, and it requires an investment of power to set current running through the superconducting loop (but nonethereafter: that is why we picked a superconductor). The upshots tend to outweigh the downsides: a magnetic sail will tend to weigh less and thus be much more efficient than a solar sail for the same area and trust, and also will tend to deflect the particles in the solar wind that it interacts with. This is a good thing, as another word for "charged particles" is "radiation," and we all know that too much radiation is never a good thing. For crewed ships (that don't want to end up crewed by the X-men), that benefit alone justifies the cost of dragging along superconductors; when the superconductors drag you along, and faster than a rocket could, well. That's an orgasm made of fair-trade chocolate, is what it is.
After that stunning endorsement, you might not be suprized to guess that the electric sail does not quite measure up, at least not when people are involved. The sail works like this: start your spaceship spinning, and play out a bunch of fine wires like spokes on a bicycle wheel: the centrifugal force from the spinning will keep them straight. Using an electron gun, give the works a strong positive charge: this tends to deflect protons and alpha rays (helium nuclii), which gives the sail momentum. It also attracts negatively charged electrons, which are captured and contribute even more to thrust--but high energy electrons are radiation, too. While the bonus is that electron guns can be made quite light and power-thrifty, and that the wires in the electric sail can be made of cheap, lightweight aluminum, the downside is that you've become a beta-ray magnet. Unless someone wants to start a Reed Richards Experience Tour, the electric sail will have to be relegated to use in transporting cargo and automated probes. That said, for cargo and probes the electric sail is the best bet: it is cheaper and possibly lighter than either electric or magnetic sails, per swept area, though the higher power requirements may dwarf that advantage.
That power source can easily be solar as well, at least in the inner solar system, but once you get out past the orbit of Mars, you hit double jeprody from the inverse square law. You see, both the strength of the solar wind pushing you along, and the solar sails you want power from fall off as the square of the distance to the sun: (intensity ~ 1/r^2) and soon you have neither enough power or enough wind to get anywhere. Using a solar sail, or a power source not reliant on the sun, will allow you to get out further (perhaps as far as the orbit of Saturn)-- but in the outer dark, sailing definately loses its appeal.
Of course, since mankind has yet to leave the kiddy pool of the Earth-Moon system, worrying about what happens once you get past Saturn is a bit accademic. There's plenty of room to grow in the Astroid Belt and Jovian Space before anyone except scientists and the most intrepid of explorers have to worry about the limitations of sails, and for those applications they can be conqured: a photon sail works on any light, not just the sun, and will work just as happily under the influence of a laser beam shone out from more sunward environs. Without having to carry fuel, this means you can fly your probes as far out as you want, for missions as long as you want: even to the stars, if patient enough you be.
Those who love the romance of creaking ropes and whistiling rigging can take heart: the Age of Sail has not even yet begun. Arthur C. Clarke once said that if the human race is to survive, for all but a tiny period in its history the word 'ship' is going to have to mean 'space ship'-- those ships may very well have sails and masts, and those words are going to change as well.

I am a boundary condition

2009-02-21T20:00:00.004-05:00

We are boundary conditions more often than we are anything else: touching on the edges of someone's life, without actually being a part of it. Sitting on the edges, barely there. For every friend who's life you are enmeshed in, there are likely dozens of lives of which you are on the boundary. That transient contact can't mean much, right? The nod hello in the morning, a smile on the subway--but as anyone who has received that smile on a lonely day could have told you, physics shows that sometimes boundary conditions can be the most important thing of all.

Often in physics we find ourselves dealing with what are called differential equations-- a special kind of equation which talks about the rate of change of a quantity, instead of that number itself. The classic example is exponential growth, when the rate of change with respect to time of a quantity (like the number of bacteria in a petri dish) is proportional to that quantity itself. The differential equation for this case reads: dN/dt = a*N
dN/dt is the derivative of N with respect to t, which is just the rate of change in time. a is some constant related to the system you're talking about: the growth rate. The solution of this differential equation, in all cases, is N=C*e^(at)
Where e is a special number known as the "Natural Logarithm," approximately equal to 2.7; it is a special number which is to calculus as pi is to geometry. e^(a*t) reads "e to the power of a*t" -- e times itself a*t times. And the C? That is some constant. The constant must be determined by the boundary condition: right now, this equation works for any system with a given a. If a is positive, you have exponential growth, like bacteria; if a is negative it is exponential decay, like radioactivity. What you don't have is what's happening to a specific population; that is where the boundary condition comes in. Note that e^0=1-- why? 1 times any number is that number, so you always have that 1 sitting there when you multiply e times itself however many times you'd like. When you do it zero times, all you have is the one. So e^0=1. Now that means that when t=0, N=C. So C is just the starting population-- the boundary condition at zero time.
Of course, that the number of bacteria starting on your petri dish should define how their population grows later should be obvious; not terribly profound. But the technique of boundary conditions applies whenever you have a differential equation, in time or space.
Another example comes from electrostatics: if you have a space with no charges in it, you can define the voltage anywhere by a differential equation on the rate of change of said voltage with respect to the directions in space. (Go to the left or right, and the voltage changes how? Go up or down, how? Go backwards or forwards, how?) This is the famous Laplace Equation; if there is a charge present we call it the Poisson equation, but the principle is the same. We solve the differential equation using the boundary conditions, and that gives us the voltage. From the voltage, you can get the electric field, and from the field you can find the force on any charges that you might have or bring into the area under consideration-- and once you know the forces on an object you can tell everything about how it is going to move. All that you can know about the electric environment of that area, you can determine just by knowing what hovers at the edges: what the boundary conditions are.
Who smiled at that particle, who opened a door for it?
In physics as with people, sometimes the little things can make all the world of difference.

A Heart to Heart talk with the Human Race

2009-02-06T22:10:00.015-05:00

Hey, humanity, we have to talk. It's about your living arrangements. Look, I'm going to put this bluntly: you're 200 000 years old (or so) and still living at your mother's house. And frankly, you're trashing the place: leaving your superfund sites, your Zones of Alienation , your islands of indestructible plastic waste, leftover minefields and unexploded weapons all over the place. There are whispers around the Solar System that say mother Earth would be better off without you entirely.
You know something? It goes both ways. Let Terra rest. Let her be a parkland, a paradise once more.
You're a little old for all this now. Don't you think might be time to move out? I know, it's hard. It's all you've ever known, and you do love mommy so, but you can still come back and visit whenever you'd like. It won't be so bad! The solar system might seem scary and empty and dark at first, but hey, it's always that way. Remember the first time we tried to get you to go into the pool, humanity? You were kicking and screaming, terrified you'd fall off the edge of the world, or be eaten by sea monsters. You didn't, though, did you? Of course not. So let's just take a look around at what's out there, shall we?
There is the moon, of course, but whatever water supplies might exist are going to be rather limited, so we can't just put the whole civilization there--and does it really count as moving out when it's right across the street from mommy? Common, humanity, we can do better than that.
Mars? Mars, yeah, okay, Mars is nice, but it might be taken by native life, and you just trashed one ecosphere, remember? That's why we had to move out; you're not just going to crash on Uncle Mars's couch and trash his place next. Not cool, humanity. Between the acid and the searing heat, Aunt Venus has already made it pretty clear that we're not welcome knocking on her doorstep, and she might even have an ecosystem of her own. To be honest, nobody with kids is going to want you anywhere near them, humanity, not with how badly you beat up on your siblings back home. Forget the planets, though. There's plenty of real-estate in smaller markets--you don't jump right out and buy a mansion, right? Check out the asteroids. Looks like carbanous chondroids are the most common type on the market right now, and they'll suit you just fine. Some 20-50% water by weight, 10 or 20 metals, then silicon and carbon/nitrogen/phosphorous and other nice life-giving elements making up the rest. It's perfect!
Oh, no atmosphere? Humanity, it is time you learned to look after yourself. Your mother has been providing you with free atmosphere, drinking water, organic waste recycling--you're a spoiled brat, and have to get over it. You can handle that stuff, Humanity.You learned to grow your own food instead of what your Mom left out for you in the forests and on the planes; you're better of for that, aren't you? It'll be the same way with atmospheres, trust me.
Oh, you don't think one dinky asteroid is enough room for all your stuff? You're probably right. Here's what we do. Try and count the asteroids, humanity. Ignore everything whizzing around further out (you'll never get done) and just look at the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter. Go ahead and count them. It's okay, I'll wait.
...yeah, it's alot.
How much room? Room to grow, humanity. Room to grow. You could let your population hit a couple Trillion living out in the Belt, no problems. Sustainable, if you learn to do your own recycling. Not looking to gain that much weight? Then each of your current 6.8 Billion souls can be a billionaire. No, seriously. You like bling, right? About 10% of the main belt is M-type (metal): lumps of gold, stainless steel and platinum the size of Mount Everest, or larger still. Plenty of bling for everyone.
So what are you waiting for, Humanity?
It's about time you move out; you and Mother Earth will both be better off for it, so long as you clean up your messes on your way out.
And who knows? If you're not still living with your mom, maybe that cute Little Red-Haired Girl from Alpha Centauri will finally talk to you.

For more on this vein, if less irreverent, I heartily recommend Mining the Sky by John S. Lewis.

Diamonds: not forever

2009-02-03T15:58:00.006-05:00

Not even romantic; the entire concept of a diamond engagement ring, now so entrenched in our culture, was devised as a marketing ploy by De Beers in the 1920s. (Of course rings have been exchanged since the middle ages in the West, and the first diamond one in the 15th C., it only became an essential component to a marriage thanks to De Beers.) At least since the end of WWII, key to that marketing was the phrase "Diamonds are forever," an attempt to encourage people to hold on to their rings as heirlooms or be buried with them to avoid creating a secondary market, but also proof that the people at De Beers didn't know much about the product they were pushing.
Diamonds are not forever. Not by any stretch of the word.
Diamonds are made of Carbon-- that's exact same stuff that is the graphite in your pencil and the black soot belched from diesel trucks. The only difference is the orientation. In soot, the carbon atoms link together willy-nilly however they might like; in graphite, the form hexagons, flat sheets of hexagons. This is why your pencil can write: the bonds between carbon atoms in graphite are strong, but nearly non-existent between layers. Without chemical bonds to hold them together, he flat sheets of carbon-hexagons come apart easily and make their way onto the paper.
Diamond, on the other hand, is like graphite in 3D. It is the same strong carbon-carbon bond, but instead of the atoms linking up in flat sheets of hexagons, they form what's called an Isometric-Hexoctahedral crystal, or just Diamond Cubic. From one, over simplified perspective, you can look at it as though those hexagonal sheets of carbon atoms now being locked together with octagons. This binding fixes every carbon atom to every other carbon atom, producing one of the hardest materials known to man. In fixing all the atoms together, it also 'cleans up' the lattice enough to let light through, giving the quite spectacular sparkle to your gems. A perfect diamond is colourless, and perfectly clear: any colour or cloudiness is a sign that there are some other atoms in there, disrupting the crystal lattice.
Now it may be hard and it may be pretty, but this isometric-hexoctahedral crystal lattice is not stable. There is more energy caught up in the higher-angle carbon-carbon bonds you find in diamond than in graphite, and the single guiding principle in nature is to find the lowest energy state. Sooner or later, those bonds get 'tired,' and relax--and the diamond breaks down into simple graphite. Sooner-or-later depends on temperature, and pressure: in mantle, with all the pressure of the Earth's crust pressing down upon them, diamonds are a stable state of carbon. Take away that pressure, like by bringing them to the surface and mounting them in rings?
All bets are off: it's a one-way train to graphite town. A slow train, by human standards, which won't arrive for several million years (so you needn't rush off to bury Grandma's heirlooms just yet.)
In human terms, you might as well call that "forever." The average marriage only lasts about 8 years, anyway.
Still, not much of a symbol, is it? "My love for you is so permanent, so transcendent, I will give you a perfect shining crystal that is going to eventually decay into a bland, grey lump of despair, resembling nothing so much but a ball and chain."
... on the other hand, maybe that IS the perfect symbol.
Good work, De Beers!

Look up. There are wonders.

2009-01-26T07:46:00.008-05:00

For North Americans, in the western sky this month, the setting sun has revealed each night a great, gaudy diamond hovering in the sky, outshining everything but the moon. It's not a star, though it looks like one. It is our nearest celestial neighbour, the planet Venus. Before they knew it as anything more than a light in the sky, the ancient Romans called it Venus, after their goddess of beauty. If you need to ask why, just to outside tonight and look.
Of course, appearances can be deceiving; what seems beautiful from a distance might not be quite so nice, closer up. Venus is so bright from Earth in part due to its nearness, and its shining white clouds. Still looks heavenly, right? Except the clouds are sulphuric acid strong enough to dissolve the pearly gates in seconds. If we venture beneath those clouds, the temperature at the surface averages around 465 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt lead, thanks to the greenhouse effect provided by a super thick atmosphere composed mostly of Carbon Dioxide. How thick? The weight of the atmosphere enough to exert a force of 1350 pounds on every square inch on the surface. That's ten times the pressure used in steam engines, over a hundred times what you pump your tires to. Exposed on the surface of Venus, you wouldn't have time to be cooked alive; you'd be crushed too quickly to even notice the heat, or even think of suffocating.
It is not a nice place. You'd be forgiven for assuming that this is a planet that wants to be left very much alone. As I said, though, appearances can be deceiving.
When scientists started peering into those thick clouds and that super-thick blanket of CO2 that Venus swaddles itself with, they began noticing something odd.
A few things, in fact. For one, you can find the gases sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide side by side in the atmosphere of Venus, which you should not be able to do. Hydrogen sulphide (H2S) and sulphur dioxide (SO2) react and destroy each other on contact; something must be replenishing the supplies to keep the those gases present in Venus's atmosphere. That something could, perhaps, be life. On Earth, these gasses are produced by anaerobic bacteria (microbes which do not need oxygen).
Or that something could be Venusian volcanoes; on Earth, eruptions are known to produce both H2S and SO2, and Venus is not believed to be any different in this regard. Although one would expect to find the highest concentrations of volcanic gas down near the volcanoes, while what we see on Venus is that the chemicals are only out of equilibrium up in the aforementioned clouds. Even if the volcanoes were spewing gases directly into the upper atmosphere, or they were reacting too quickly to be detected down in the hotter layers, it would still require more continuous and sustained volcanism than anyone really expects to see on Venus.
Also not explained by the volcano theory is the carbon monoxide--or rather, the lack of it. When the carbon dioxide that makes up most of Venus's thick atmosphere is exposed to UV, it is split into carbon monoxide and oxygen, just as on Earth, oxygen is reformed into ozone. We have an ozone layer; Venus should have a carbon monoxide layer.
But it doesn't.
Something is happening to Venus's carbon monoxide, just as something is happening to her sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide.
There's something rotten in the state of Venus.
And that something just might be life.
What sort of life? Not little green men, almost surely; light airy bacteria living in the clouds, however, seem to fit the bill exactly. Some of the first life on Earth made its meals of sulphur dioxide, hydrogen, and carbon monoxide, outputting hydrogen sulphide or carbonyl sulphide (another gas inexplicably present on Venus) as a waste product. Sound familiar? Of course there is not much free hydrogen to be found in the atmosphere of Venus, but the sulphuric acid in those clouds has the formula H2SO4; it's possible hydrogen could be coming from there.
Or life on Venus could have found an entirely novel way of making it's living, performing photosynthesis with UV and doing biochemistry never imagined here on Earth.
Why not? The cloud-tops absorb UV, and something has to be causing that.
It is a strange, wonderful universe; it seems there is plenty of room in it for life.
So if you get a chance tonight, go out, look up. You won't be able to see any evidence of life on Venus with your naked eye, but you can surely see that it is there, and maybe feel somewhat less alone.

*As a caveat, most astronomers prefer the volcanism theory. To conlusively prove that We Are Not Alone is going to take much harder evidence than a few erroneous wisps of gas.

You are made of atoms.

2009-01-19T10:01:00.004-05:00

How many atoms? In science, when we want to look at something but not spend much time worrying about precision, we make what we call an order of magnitude calculation. Orders of magnitude are also known as powers of ten: 10² is a 1 with two zeros following, or 100. 10⁶ has six zeros, so 1 000 000, or one million. These are orders of magnitude, and for some purposes it is good enough to know a value to only that much precision, rounding not to the nearest ten, but the nearest power of ten. Using this technique, we can answer the question "How many atoms?"
To an order of magnitude, we can say the average human mass is around 100kg. The phrase "to an order of magnitude" allows us to encompass everything from 50 to 500kg, and that indeed seems reasonable. Excluding a few supermodels on the lower end, few enough adults weigh less than 110lbs, and hopefully very few weigh more than 1100lbs. 100kg, then. 100kg of what? We know that the human body is ~80% water, so to an order of magnitude, you are 100kg of water. Certainly there are traces of other things, some which are heavier and some lighter, but the average human has a density very close to that of water (you only just float in a pool) so we can get away with saying "just water" and call it close enough. The chemical formula for water is H2O; two hydrogen molecules, and one oxygen. We find on a periodic table values of "Atomic Mass" listed in grams per mole: ~1 for Hydrogen and ~16 for Oxygen. 1 mole is 6.022*10²³ particles (this is known as Avogadro's Number, and it is a very large number indeed). The atomic weight of water is simply the average : 2*1g/mole + 16g/mol = 18g/mol.
That's 18g for an Avogadro's number of molecules. 100kg, then, is 100 000g, or about 5556 times 18g. There are therefore ~5556 moles of water in the human body, or ~3.35*10²⁷ water molecules. Since each water molecule is composed of three atoms, multiply this number by three and we have the number of atoms in a human being. To an order of magnitude that is 10²⁸.
That is a huge number. A one, followed by twenty-eight zeros. In words, we call it one octillion atoms. For comparison, there are only believed to be around 4*10¹¹ stars in our galaxy-- a billion billion times fewer. You are made of atoms, a great, great many atoms.
Which atoms, though? I cannot simply gather together a large ball of atoms and call them a reader (and thus actually have one) because blog readers, like any living beings, are constantly metabolising. You breathe in, taking oxygen molecules for the air, and breathe out, losing carbon and oxygen in the form of CO2. Constantly, the atoms that make up your body are changing. You add atoms by eating, drinking; lose them by excrement, sweating, simply touching things and losing a few dead skin cells and that's a billion atoms gone. Though this, you replace all the matter in your body every few years. You go through, then, a great many atoms in a lifetime. So many, that we can make some statistical guarantees about it. For instance: there are more atoms in a glass of water (or wine) than glasses of water on earth... so each and every glass will contain at least one atom that was once a part of Jesus Christ, had such a man existed. ("This is my blood" -- but also my sweat, urine, semen and tears). The same goes for a biscuit. A bit of carbon in it may have spent some time as part of Christ, exhaled by Him, wandered in the atmosphere 2000 years and taken up by the grain that became the flour for your biscuit. More likely it went through many many other beings in between, but still. Is this not amazing?
Everything you eat, every time you take a drink-- you are taking holy communion.
We're all Catholics, and everything is holy.
Despite my lack of religiosity, somehow I find that beautiful.
The bigger picture, which is perhaps even more wonderful, is that there is nothing special about Jesus when it comes to atoms. My dinner will be equally connected to you-- and everyone else on the planet. We really are one, in some sense. One big atom swapping party. Doesn't it make you want to reach out and hug someone?

Preparing for Apocolypse

2009-01-11T18:17:00.000-05:00

The Yellowstone Caldera was acting a bit off this holiday season. A few hundred extra earthquakes today, off. Earthquakes can indicate movement of magma, which can presage an eruption. Since the caldera is a volcano the size the entire national park, capable of covering the majority of the continental USA with ash if it erupts, extra earthquakes have made people worry. Of course reading through the Scientific American article linked, it turns out that these aren't those sorts of earthquakes. We'd need much more by way of upheaval and would see abnormal amounts of out-gassing. provided the usual signs hold as with the caldera's smaller cousins.
The whole hullabaloo got me thinking, though.
If this thing went, it would be an extinction event; comparable to a decent-sized asteroid strike. The dust plume would blot out the sun for months, leading to, if not a fullblown photosynthetic collapse, at least a few good years of winter. And we are not ready. As a society, we just aren't equipped to feed any large percentage of the population, should harvests fail worldwide for even one year, never mind three or four. In general, we are woefully unadapted for anything outside the status quo. How many warehouses full of grain does your city store?
So much for society, then.
Myself?
I'm 125lbs and 6'0. I've never fired a rifle, have no food storage past what just happens to be in the pantry, and nowhere else to flee. If this were the 1950s, I'd be the bad example in a civil defense film, I'm sure. And yet I am better off than most; I have actually read "Nuclear War Survival Skills" (1980s version, available here ).
Even they only suggest a few months provisions laid in for your household, never mind trying to go two or three years without a harvest. It is assumed by the authors that the US government will be able to sustain agriculture in regions untainted by fallout as would be required to provide a staple diet for the populace. Given a even a mid-sized asteroid strike or a super-volcano eruption, however, the harvest will be 0%. Corn, wheat, and soybeans may not be difficult to grow, but they will not grow in snow. That leaves you on your own. Can you store everything you need to eat for three years, possibly supplemented by hunting and trapping the semi-starved wildlife?
There are people who could, I'm sure; maybe someone already has, stashed in some mountain retreat, enough dry goods to hold them through an asteroidal winter. I am equally sure, however, that no semblance of Civilization is going to make it through such conditions; one can only hope the tropic zones remain more fertile, and rebuilding can spread out from there.
Unfortunately a quick look at a map tells us that those areas most likely to survive tend to be the least industrialized, as a rule. And nature might not be so kind as to provide a disaster survivable by anyone, be it by asteroid, volcano, or something else entirely.
What, then, can be done?
A cynic might say "nothing"-- our civilization is geared towards instant gratification. Fast food and easy credit; don't save for tomorrow what you buy with today! Governments, especially in the United States, are already sandbagged by their existing expenditures, and can't afford to start stockpiling food and fuel oil. In general, the outlook is a bit bleak.
Others have noticed this, and agitated for protection. Currently, the most notable group is the eponymous Lifeboat Foundation, who are attacking every extinction event ("existential threat," by their jargon) they can think of in parallel. One might argue that this is, perhaps, not the most efficient technique in terms of allocation of resources. On the other hand, who can tell what will strike first? If we spend all of our time perfecting a system to deflect asteroids, we may be caught with our pants down by a plague of out of control nanomachines that coats the planet in 'Grey Goo'. Naturally, if Humanity possessed a self-sustaining space colony than the human race will continue in case of any extinction event barring a Gamma Ray Burst--and perhaps even then, if it is a free-flying orbital or asteroid-belt colony which can be maneuvered such that the burst is occulted by a large solar system body. (This supposes some early warning of a GRB, however, which cannot currently be provided.)
Space colonies, are, however, not on the immediate horizon. However, there is a slightly more affordable alternative:
To throw my hat into the mix, I would propose that we build in addition to (and before) space colonies, self-sustaining arcologies on Earth. Think Biosphere II, but, you know, actually functional. Some research is still needed to allow for that part, but let us assume it has been done and we are ready to construct these lifeboats. Contained within would be libraries with all human knowledge, along with manufacturing and terraforming facilities to rebuild following any number of conceivable disasters. Scatter them across the globe so only one could be destroyed by an asteroid stirke, and at least some will be able to escape nuclear war or be shielded by the Earth in the event of a gamma ray burst. The shelters could be used in peacetime perhaps as schools, universities, to allow some recoup on the investment and make sure the life support systems will work when needed. Students could enter and exit via airlocks to preserve the closed ecology, though we would want to limit contamination to but a few times per year--make it a boarding school. We thus provide ourselves then with not only a talent pool trained on and familiar with all of the aforementioned equipment with which we have provided the facilities, as well as a large population heavily skewed towards fertile and soon-to-be fertile ages, already on the premises with the hatches naturally battened down. Since such a facility would be hideously expensive, it would have to be a *very* good school to try and recoup that investment as much as possible--so we thus afford ourselves not only the population required, but find ourselves saving the brightest minds of the antediluvian generation. These Lifeboat Academies remain vulnerable, however, to threats like "gray goo" nanobots which could overwhelm the entire surface of the planet. It will be far too difficult, at least for decades yet, to implement such a scheme offworld--and if they were sited in orbit or otherwise away from Earth, it would make rebuilding this planet more difficult; you'd have to ship down all that terraforming equipment and et cetera already mentioned. But if Earth goes, what then? What about gray goo? Haven't I put all our eggs in one basket with this proposal?
In short, no. I never specified that these archeologies had to remain ON the planet, did I? Only that they be situated there originally. This is where things get interesting, because we are talking about something the size--and more importantly, mass--of a small city. Perhaps even a large one. That we could build an arcology ready to be sealed off from the rest of the planet on a moment's notice, indeed naturally operating that way, seems feasible. That we could then launch it into space in response to a crisis? Listen. The world is ending, right? Nobody is going to notice if it leaves a crater when it takes off. This is the perfect application for Orion. Project Orion was proposed in the 1960s as a quick and dirty way to get out to the Planets. Simply put, you build a spaceship as large and heavy as you'd like. Mount it on shock absorbers, atop a large hemispherical plate. Beneath the plate, detonate a hydrogen bomb; guaranteed things are going to move. Then, you do it again. And again, and again. Treaties on the use of nuclear explosives (and possibly common sense) ruled out anyone ever building anything but a small proof-of-concept vehicle launched with conventional explosives, but that was enough to prove the concept. The only reason to move a city-sized object off the planet is that the planet is a writeoff, anyway, so we needn't care about fallout or blast damage. If these things are taking off, it is because incinerating everyone nearby with the liftoff would be a mercy.
Including Orion capability is still cheaper than building space colonies, but functionally equivalent, allowing survivability of all but the extreme-long-range existential threats created by the end-of-the-universe. Before we can worry about that, however, we have to live that long. Orion-Arcologies might be the answer to let us do that, at least in the short term.

Je suis un Bloggeur.

2008-12-30T22:47:00.000-05:00

Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast a man could make was civis Romanus sum. Fifty years ago, Ich bin ein Berliner. In the 21st century, it is no longer places or nations of which we are most proud. It is said in not one but in every language, in a myriad different ways.
"Je suis un bloggeur."
"We are Anonymous, and we are Legion."
“I'm in this great group on Facebook...”
We are the body politic, ladies and gentlemen. It is a sense of belonging to something greater--an interconnectedness unknown in any previous age. We are the future, and yes, yes we can.

... oh, rather puffed, up, isn't it? Blogs must number in the millions; I may only be adding to the abysmal signal-to-noise ratio present on the Internet. That has held me back, but somehow I no longer care. This is my voice. This is signal; this is noise. The difference is only one of perspective-- and if you don't want to listen to my noise, the beauty of the era is that you can easily tune it out.
So if I want to wax dramatic about the wonders of the medium, this is the soapbox on which I can.
My name is Tyler August. I am an undergraduate Physics Student at Canada's Laurentian University. I read, I write, and sometimes even I do physics when I can keep my mind on it.
Anonymity can be wonderful but I refuse to cower. I will not regret broadcasting my views or who I am, even if it does come back to kick me in the teeth.
We'll see where this soapbox goes. I'll start with science, leaven with politics and spice with social engineering. If any of that sounds interesting, welcome to the blog. If not, I guess this is just one small helping in your daily dose of noise.