Continuing with my fascination for altered time and space perception (through mechanical means), I had not heard about Schlieren Photography until I saw this video on Slashdot Review over the weekend.
The balloon (what is it about balloons?) was one of my favorites, but the towel was cute. The shockwaves emanating from piston shots was instructive. In some cases you can actually see the bullet overtaking the shockwave from the initial firing of the weapon.
I was listening to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe episode #128 where they discussed the realities of near relativistic speed travel. One thing I was not clear on was, what happens if you need to have a fleet of ships exploring all of them traveling to the same destination from the same destination?
2 scenarios:
1) You travel some tiny percentage of light faster than your companion ships. Do you arrive, and now that you’re not traveling at the same speed as the other ships, have to wait potentially thousands of years for your fellow ships?
2) You’re all accelerating at exactly the same rate and traveling at exactly the same speed. But because of relativity, all other ships experience thousands or even millions of years for your journey and you, likewise experience such for their journeys? So, in effect, you’d all vanish relative to each other and you’d never see each other again?
I’ve sent them an email with this question but I’m sure they get so many that they won’t be able to respond (ah, the problems of popularity…).
Mich and I just finished watching Nova’s “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” on PBS.
I was very pleased to see that the ID proponents got their butts handed to them in their outrageous attempt to further dilute what is already considered to be a shaky science curriculum. We very much need to grow up, put away the fairy tales and begin to accept what life has to offer us without hiding behind our mother’s skirts.
What was very clear to me from the statements of the ID proponents was that the point of the judgment against their actions was completely lost on them. I too believe, as George W. Bush was stated to have said, that ID needs to be discussed and presented to students so that they understand these issues. But the proper forum for ID is NOT a science class. *Social Science* perhaps, for it’s relevance in society today, or mythology, for it’s quaint point of view for folks unable to grasp epochal aeons of time (check out my opinion in the 7th paragraph of this blog entry) .
I have to say that the scariest part of the show was the discussion about “The Wedge” strategy whose primary instigator seeks nothing less than a complete regression of folks’ literacy and life outlook to a more religious perspective. Let’s see… can we think of a time when that was the case? Hmmm.. Yes, indeed, it was called “the dark ages”.
Again with the slow motion. As I’ve mentioned before I’m a sucker for time lapse and accelerated photography.
The world is such a product of our perception and, as amazing and full as the world as we know it is, step yourself down or up in time rate and it becomes a completely new realm.
There is so much that we don’t understand until we can look at it from a different time perspective. The growth of plants, the movement of animals, the explosion of a balloon. All of these are revealed to us as exciting dynamics so completely different from our initial conception when explored in an alternate time sense…
Wow! Pretty succinct… well as succinct as 14 1/2 minutes can be. But a very good description of Homeopathy nonetheless.
When I was younger I explored a lot of alternative practices and was very seriously considering entering the field as well. Fortunately, my grades in university in computer science were so much better than my grades in my pre-med subjects that they convinced me that my forte really lay in programming and analytical pursuits.
There is so much to know in this world that you often have to pick your authorities for the things you don’t have the time or inclination to pursue yourself. You end up trusting folks’ word and believe that they know what they are talking about. Of course, implicit in this is the assumption that they have either done the research themselves, reviewed the research first-hand or that their choice of a trusted authority has a good handle on the subject.
Homeopathy, was something that I was never able to reconcile with reality. The testing modality assumed “energies” that could not be measured and treatments that relied on “vibrations” or “energies” that could not be detected or explained.
The premise of “like cures like” was a wild stab in the dark from a pre-science era and was pretty cool reasoning for its time. But with the advent of the scientific method, understanding that perhaps 60% of anything you’d see a doctor about will fix itself ultimately anyway, and knowledge that the placebo effect is quite a powerful one, it seems clear that folks need to weigh the efficacy of such a questionable and unproven modality. Especially one that can be so expensive.
Sent to me by a friend, the World Clock is a sober reminder of the immensity of the reality of our existence on this tiny little planet. Go ahead and click the “Now” button to see these figures zero themselves out and begin counting from the current moment. If you’re like me you will be simply gobsmacked by the rate of births. Even realizing that these are merely statistical expressions (in real life you’d see periodic pauses and the occcasional great leap in the numbers) .
Of special note I’d like to highlight the deaths due to war and how disproportionately small this number is relative to a great many of the other, less popularly reported causes of death. Firearms aren’t listed but are subsumed by other categories and are far less common than the glaring media reports would lead one to believe, they are merely spectacular due to their infrequency and violence.
Traffic accidents, meanwhile, one of the most preventable causes of death (proper education, proper testing and then proper review every few years) gets a pass with a death rate (ignoring what must surely be a spectacular toll in injuries) that eclipses war, suicides, drownings, poisoning, falls or any non-disease.
This emphasizes what is surely one of the greatest ills of the American or any other government today, ignoring the practical, logical and mundane for the popular and the exciting. We can’t get our politicians to sponser and produce legislation that will simply be practical, they must forever be trying to woo us with our emotions and with whatever is simplest in order to keep their incumbencies secure.
The CO2 emmisions are interesting, but lack the global context of consumption (by plants) and destruction of CO2 by natural processes to help give a perspective – it’s a big planet relative to our conception. More relevant might be the % increase in CO2. The numbers may not be as exciting, but it would be consistent with the Earth’s temperature displayed which gives a much more useful value.
Wow, I was put onto this by Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog. It’s a cogent and pithy description of what the word “Theory” really means in the context of science.
Someday I hope we’ll all get on board and move out of this “mini dark age” that we’ve saddled ourselves with.
Evolution is Not Just a Theory: home
I record Jay Leno’s “The Tonight Show” mostly for the “Headlines” feature on Monday nights which I find amusing. Sometimes, however I’ll stop and inflict “Jaywalking” on myself. It’s too gruesome, like a terrible car wreck you are drawn toward it. I realize this segment is edited to be more amusing. For some reason folks being intelligent isn’t entertaining, so we see a stream of functionally illiterate morons come across the screen. Folks absolutely ignorant of basic science, history or even current events. But they all seem to know about Nascar and wrestling…
I didn’t know that ants were quite this ambitious. I rather thought that, when confronted with something this big, they would work to chop it up or otherwise make it more manageable. It’s a pity that we don’t get to see what finally happens.
You might not want to view this if the sight of lots of ants makes you squeamish…
I don’t know where this is but it looks pretty amazing to me.
I wonder how big they really are? Isn’t it astonishing the things you can share in without having to actually be there? Our breadth of experience versus folks who lived even a generation ago has increased incalculably.
The day after any significant rain here in Cobb County, Georgia, the tap water acquires a taste that I can only describe using a product from my Canadian past – Ozonol. It has a medicine-y taste that really doesn’t complement my morning oatmeal breakfast.
Our fridge came with a filter for the water dispenser that effectively gets rid of that taste and so I use it whenever I’m cooking.
The side-effect of such a filter seems to be that the water has a lot fewer particles or nucleation sites and can lead to superheating of the water as I boil it.
I always boil my half cup of water in a measuring cup for 2 minutes (the microwave isn’t that powerful only about 550 Watts) and this normally works fine. Sometimes, when I haven’t observed the water actually boiling while in the microwave, when I pour it over my oatmeal it will fizz up and release a bunch of steam which tells me that it had managed to get to a temperature above boiling yet wasn’t triggered to change state until it was introduced to the oatmeal. It’s kind of cool and not dangerous to me as the measuring cup is between my hand and the scalding steam that’s coming out of my bowl.
I believe this phenomenon tends to scald tea drinkers who would be holding a tea bag on a short string right over a superheated cup of water. That would be a most unpleasant shock.
Anyway, about a week ago I was preoccupied with a problem from work. I’d been up into the wee hours working with my team on an issue that we thought had been resolved and I woke to find that there were still more issues. So I put my water in the microwave and set it for two minutes. When the microwave let me know it was done, I peered inside, didn’t see it boiling so hit the “Minute Plus” button and went back to work. The microwave chimed again, I pulled myself away from my work task to see that the water still was not boiling – I absently hit the “minute plus” button once again turned to Mich and commented that I thought the microwave must be having issues ’cause it’s not boiling my water.
Then I heard a definite “Whump” come out of the microwave. Mich said “There’s something oozing out of it” and I turned to see water dripping out from around the microwave door.
Opened it up to see that nearly all of the water was out of the measuring cup. And the entire inside of the microwave was wet.
Not a big deal but a cautionary tale. If you use filtered water, you can’t necessarily trust the the water to bubble to indicate that it’s hot enough. Trust that, if you’ve heated it long enough, it’s warm enough.
