3/12/10 On Your Marks, and... Action!
How the universe is 4-D and movies are 3-D.
One might imagine space as a cube made of height, width, and depth. Or altitude, latitude and longitude. In this space we plot something's location along these three co-ordinates. Take a fly in a box. At point A the fly is at 1' altitude, 1' latitude, and 1' longitude.
Say the the fly flies to point B at 9' altitude, 9' latitude, and 9' longitude. The fly flying from A to B takes time. Without time it would have to be in both spots at once, and at every spot along the path from A to B. To really know the fly's location you must know not only where it is, but when it is.
Without time things would be many places at once. Not only that, everything would happen at once. I mean, you'd be born and die at the same time, which is always right now. That's a pretty mean trick and highly unlikely. Motion takes time, without it the universe is frozen in place and nothing happens. Ask yourself, what's use of a three-dimensional universe where nothing can happen.
On the other hand, can you have time but no space? What would an object be if it had no height, width or depth? Again you'd have a case where nothing can happen because there's no space for it to happen in. And nothing in the non-space anyway. If nothing happens how do you measure the passage of time? Is there even such a thing as time in that case?
Can there be space without time or time without space? I don't know, my brain isn't big enough to get around that. But having one without the other just wouldn't work. Nothing could happen so what would be the point. That's how the universe is 4-dimensional, why they call it the space-time continuum.
This is how movies are 3-D. They have height, width and time. With the exception of movies in 3-D which are 4-D.
2/17/10 Magnificent Merlin
The German Me109, the British Spitfire, the American Mustang, and the Japanese Zero are perhaps the most famous fighter planes of WWII. Three of the four used essentially the same powerplant, the merlin engine developed by Rolls Royce. The exception being the Zero, or "Zeke" as it was called by US navel air forces, which employed a Mitsubishi radial engine.
One might easily imagine how the Mustang got an English engine as the US and the British were allies. The Mustang, or P51, had rather unexceptional performance until the Brits put in the merlin turning it into a great plane. The English also gave the P51 its Mustang moniker.
On the other hand, on the other side actually, the Me109 didn't use a merlin built by Rolls Royce, but a variation of it. This was originally licensed to Messerschmitt before the war and developed into the engine that powered the Me109 in all its many incarnations.
Using basically the same engine is one reason the Spitfire and Me109 had very similar performance characteristics. On paper, anyway. In the field the Spitfire bettered the 109 because the British burned higher octane aviation fuel from the US while the Germans, constantly strapped for petroleum, used a lower grade. Of course, the skill of the pilot made a difference, but that's another story.
The Rolls Royce building aircraft engines was not the same Rolls Royce making cars, but was a seperate company. They started together but split up only both kept the name. BMW also built aircraft engines. In fact that's where thier logo comes from, it represents a spinning propeller. Which explains the opening pic.
In case you ever wondered, the "P" in P51 stood for "pursuit" which is what they called fighters back then.
2/2/10 Bloody Barbers!
Old time symbolic signs made it possible for illiterates to know where to shop. For instance, the three balls on a pawn shop told the great unwashed where to get a loan. Still, how does a red and white striped pole mean "get your hair cut here"?
Back in the day, way back, a barber was the go-to guy to have your hair cut off, your beard cut off, or your pinky toe cut off. Ye olde barbers treated wounds and performed simple surgery. The red and white stripes of a barber pole represent blood and bandaging, or a bloody bandage. You might say early barbers were proto-surgeons.
Before the 19th century surgeons weren't doctors and vice-versa. In simple terms, doctors treated diseases while surgeons treated injuries. Doctors employed potions and bleeding and whatnot to restore a patient's balance of humors which they thought was unique to each patient. Surgeons were more tradesman-like with a hands-on understanding of flesh and bone which they treated with tools. Surgeons thought a wound was a wound whoever was wounded.
The stock of surgeons rose during wartime where treating wounds was just what the doctor ordered, even though surgeons did it. Wounded soldiers needed surgeons using tools rather than doctors using elixirs and bleeding. Especially since the wounded were already bleeding. Eventually doctors began to appreciate and learn what surgeons knew and did, so the two disciplines merged.
Fast-forward to today and surgeons are doctors, and barbers no longer cut off anything but hair. Had the symbolic red and white pole gone over to doctoring with the surgeons perhaps hospitals would be adorned with barber poles instead of snakes on a winged staff. Where that symbol comes from is another story for another day. As is why a pawn shop sports a trio of balls.
1/14/10 Doesn't Taste Like Chicken
They tell me salt is the only rock we eat. At least the only rock we eat on purpose with a purpose. And the only one that tastes good. Other rocks in our food is grit, which is almost always unpleasant.
But then we eat little bits of many unsavory things besides grit that get in food. Like animal hair, insect parts, worm castings and so on. Kept to a minimum we can survive all that. Of course finding an entire rat in your food is an unwelcome prospect. Finding one in your KFC is possibly a lawsuit or an urban myth.
On the other hand salt is required eating as we need it for a little biological process we call "being alive." They also tell me this is because land animals evolved from sea creatures that migrated out of the oceans. To survive out of water, land animals had to take the sea with them. So we are in large part water, or rather salt water if you will.
All of which reminds me of what might be the first joke I ever heard. A riddle actually. What's big and red and eats rocks? A big red rock eater. Yes, it's a silly joke, but it didn't take much to amuse me at five years of age. Still, though I am not five years old, big and red, I do eat rocks. So do you.
12/16/09 Pair of Hearts
True or false? In the U.S. most people who get married don't divorce, yet most marriages end in divorce. Is it even possible?
Let's examine this proposition with a hypothetical small town of Wedville which has only 14 people, 7 men and 7 women. Let's say they all get married, that's 7 marriages. (We assume conventional marriage, no Mormons or the like.) The next year three couples divorce, and then remarry different partners. Now there's been 10 marriages.
The following year the three remarried couples get divorced while the 4 couples that didn't divorce before stay married. Now there have been 6 divorces out of 10 marriages. Yet 8 of the 14 people of Wedville that got married stayed married. Meaning most people who get married don't divorce (8 of 14) while most marriages end in divorce (6 of 10).
So we know it's possible, is it true? It is true. In the U.S. most people who get married don't divorce, while most marriages end in divorce. Which means both anti-marriage folks and pro-marriage folks have bullet points in their favor. It's the miracle of statistics. Or rather the wonder of spin. Then again, maybe it's good old everyday...
Card stacking and the fallacy of exclusion (suppressed quantification): using selected evidence to make one's side look favorable, or omitting evidence that would undermine an argument.
This is card stacking as in stacking the deck, not building a house of cards. Though if the "evidence" you've stacked is a laundry list of other fallacies your solidly stacked deck might well be as flimsy as a house of cards.
11/4/09 Galileo Was Wrong?
The Earth doesn't orbit around the sun. At least not strictly speaking. They orbit each other. It's just that the gravity of the Earth has close to no effect on the motion of the sun.
Imagine it this way, say you have a star and a planet the same size. In this case the equal mass of each will effect the motion of each other equally. The orbital center of this system will be a point midway between the two so they orbit each other. Now then, shrink the planet down and the center point gets closer to the star. Shrink it way down and the point of mutual orbit is somewhere inside the star.
Now, the Earth isn't very big compared to the sun. Big old Jupiter is a different story. Its gravity not only effects the movement of the sun, but the movement of every other planet in the solar system. In fact, all the planets effect each other so the center of the solar system changes depending on the position of all the planets and the sun.
This is called the barycenter of the solar system, the average center of mass of all the bits. In the end, everything sort-of orbits everything else in what's called barycentric orbits. Sometimes the barycenter is inside the sun, and at other times away from the sun. So, the sun is at the center of the solar system, but it isn't the center of the solar system.
10/6/09 Watt is Moving
Even though we use electricity, rarely do we use it directly as electricity. By which I mean electricity is converted to some other type of energy to be usefull to us. Such as coverting it to light energy with a lightbulb. Or to mechanical energy with a motor as in a fan, pump or compressor. Or to sound waves with a speaker. Or to heat energy with a stovetop or oven.
There are very few uses for electricity as electicity outside of stun guns, electrified fences and crash cart paddles. Even though the work done with your computer is all electrical, you can't much use it unless it is converted to light energy on your monitor or mechanical energy with your printer or sound waves with a speaker.
Consider the other end of electricity, the source. Thing is, there are no direct sources of electricity, no vast electrical fields or reserviors that can simply be tapped into. Electricity must be generated. Other than photovoltaics this is done mechanically with dynamos. Turning a dynamo can be done with falling water or moving air. Though usually it's done with a source of heat powering a steam turbine. Most often the heat comes from combustion of fuel, usually coal or gas. Even a nuclear reactor generates heat for steam turbines turning dynamos.
You could say electricity isn't a source of energy, but a way to transport energy. It starts out as heat or mechanical energy, flows to your home as electricity and is converted to mechanical, light, heat, or whatever energy that you can actually use. Without it we'd be back to fireplaces, candles, hand cranks and wind-up springs. Or maybe lots of little steam engines on every appliance.
9/9/09 Asdfghjkl?
Ever wonder about the peculiar arrangement of letters on a standard computer keyboard? You know, what they call qwerty. How did each letter wind up in that particular location rather than arranged alphabetically or maybe something less awkward?
It all goes back to when typewriters were invented. These first writing gadgets were not electric, but mechanical and prone to key jamming if used too quickly. To prevent this the keys were arranged to deliberately make it awkward to slow users down.
This layout eventually became standard so now we're stuck with this anti-sticking arrangement. A case of the early bird gets the worm, first in and all that. Just like a lot of things, the standard stays standard because everyone is used to it. There is an alternative, more efficient Dvorak keyboard if you're interested.
Now for a trivia add-on. Mark Twain was the first writer to have a book published in which the manuscript was typewritten. I'm too lazy to research which one, but if you really need to know, try Google or Yahoo! or AskJeeves or whatever.