August 2004 Archives

The new iMac, complete with a G5 processor (1.6 GHz or 1.8 GHz) was released recently. It's pretty cool, and although the design is more convenient, it isn't as neat as the former model. Essentially, the computer was smushed onto the back of an LCD flatscreen, and put on an aluminum stand. The bottom border to the monitor is a bit thick, but the size is pretty impressive. I wonder if there are problems with heat. All and all, it's ain't bad.

The most beautiful aspect of math is that the more about it you learn, the rate at which it becomes more interesting grows exponentially (that is quite nearly a pun); and, I've just scratched the surface. I was reading about Simpson's rule the other day, and it's pretty cool. You can approximate the area under the curve using a simple series, which is derived from fitting parabola approximations to the curve. What's even more amazing is that approximations from Simpson's rule just happen to be the weighted average of those from the midpoint and trapezoidal rules (Sn = (2/3)Mn + (1/3)Tn). ALWAYS. I haven't a clue why, but it's pretty amazing.

Even more amazing are improper integrals. Essentially, if you have a function with an asymptote, the area under the graph from a fixed point to the asymptote (among other cases) sometimes is a finite number. So, even though the line approaches infinity, the area under it can be finite (if the function is convergent). It's so bizarre.

Many of you are probably already aware of both of these principlesand think I'm silly, but the coincidence and counterintuitiveness (?) of math is constantly fascinating to me.

I was a little confused in my previous entry. I realized that I'm actually referring to electron capture when I say "reverse beta decay." Like all radioactive decay, it generally happens in unstable atoms. An electron from the K-shell is "sucked" into the nucleus where it combines with a proton to form a neutron and emits an electron neutrino. So now my question is, could this effect be replicated by colliding two particles in a particle accelerator?

I've been thinking about the scenario of reverse beta decay for some time now. Normal beta decay follows: n -> p + e + v. Under most circumstances, that happens spontaneously because it is a lower energy configuration. From what I've read, in dying stars that are about to become neutron stars, the reverse reaction is energetically favored. So the question is, can beta decay be reversed under experimental conditions at moderate energies? I have no idea what the energy requirements are, so I'm a little in the dark. I read somewhere that theoretically you don't even need the neutrino in the reverse reaction. This is because colliding a proton and electron could produce both a neutron and an electron neutrino by way of the conservation of the lepton number. It would end up being p + e -> n + ev.

I found an interesting plugin for MovableType called MT-Blacklist. It does content-based blocking, but that only works so well. For now, I've turned off HTML in comments. More to come later.

Is the absurdity of the spamming situation nowadays apparent to anyone? It's horrible! Not only are email spams the bane of the net, but spammers now target blogs as well. I just finished deleting about 15 spam-comments for what I think might be a German internet "pharmaceutical" company and those damn idiotic penis enlargement pills. Luckily I check the comments regularly and delete nearly all of these rogue annoyances. I'm thinking about looking into blacklisting domains because I don't want to have to enforce some kind of user login for comments. But other than that I'm not really sure what to do. This may require a Google search. But whatever it takes, I'll get these ingrates for profaning by blog with their infernal "mystery" medications and penis enlargement pills!!

I was reading a little and writing a little the other day, and something came to me rather abruptly. Has it every occurred to you how despicable and lamentable this so-called phenomenon of "popular culture" is? I mean, it would be presumptuous of me to make a blanket generalization denying all worth of popular culture, but for the most part it is an idiotic machine that idolizes the worship of stupidity. Yes, that's my opinion of the matter, as vehemently as you may disagree. There are finer aspects, such as cyclist Lance Armstrong or "pop" physicist Brian Greene, but the more despicable elements like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (yes, this seems diplomatic, but it's truly honest) gain all of the attention, precisely because the essence of the culture is to idolize the bone-headed. Duh! It is also worthwhile to note that popular culture is now the dominant culture of America. Now you know why Muslims hate us (not that stoning women for coming out of burning buildings without wearing veils is any better). Well, okay, so that's not really a new thought; that's been jiggling around in my skull for a while now, and it's probably not very interesting to you either. So here's the good part.

How exactly does a society come to this stretch of the journey? Have we become so weary of the pointless burden of spiritual/religious social existence that we now give up all decency to collapse into unproductive nihilistic society? Maybe, but that's a matter of interpretation. The importance lies not in where we are, but how we got here.

Return your mind to 1800 or so. In America, let's say. Individual towns were largely self-contained because of geographic isolation, giving way to more varied cultures. A frontier town was dramatically different than a southern plantation, which was dramatically different than a Northern city. Compare that with today, where you can go from suburbs in the Northeast, to suburbs in the Southeast, to suburbs in the Southwest, to suburbs in the Northwest, to suburbs anywhere, to virtually any civilization anywhere, and there are very few differences. Or at least there are fewer differences than there used to be; America is becoming increasingly homogenized. That's not very interesting either, probably

My argument is that the source of this increasing homogenization is due to improved communications technology. Think of the radio, which was one of the first devices that could deliver the same radio shows to people anywhere (well, not quite). In this fashion, the essence of communication is the capacity to deliver a single product or idea to as many people at once. That means that the diversity in the human experience between individuals is diminished by improved communication.

This explains how American culture has been homogenized, but it doesn't explain why pop-culture is just so darn bad. To do that involves a little bit of economics and a lot of psychology. The influence of the profit motive has meant that communications have become consolidated. A smaller array of individuals control a larger amount of our time and experience in life. This is somewhat of an inevitable effect, whether or not communications had been controlled by private or public enterprise. Heck, at least this way politicians aren't using the media for political benefit... right? Oops. In any case, media corporations are going to deliver what people want to consume. Since the arm of communication's reach effectively encompasses all people in this nation, the consumers' appetite is the lowest common denominator and can be explained by basic human instinct; that is, violence, sex, gore, and gruesome "feats" (i.e. feats of idiocy) are highly intriguing. I could go down this whole other route of Freudian mishmash on instinctual suppression, but I won't. Essentially, they're going to be intriguing as long as human remain anything else that primal hunter-gatherers. I sound so pretentious saying this, but it's true that all people find sex, violence, etc. in intriguing. However, if you had enough intellectual experience, then you realize that there are other things more interesting in life. Now you know why Nietzsche hated democracy: he hated the masses, the "rabble." Well, now you probably think that I'm a hypocritical ingrate, but the point that I'm trying to make is that all humans have basic psychological instincts (when outside their native existence) to like things that make for barbaric culture.

So why haven't other countries fallen into this same disgusting trap? I think they have actually. Look at Europe for instance. Have you ever realized just how bad British television is? Have you ever watched a British sit-com? Whew! It's too much to handle. Apparently the French public just gobble up news of all of their government's juicy scandals. They may seem like they have a vestige of worthwhile culture, but that's only because their societies are too old to be entirely transplanted by this modern insanity. America is a totally modern nation: we think that a building is old when many people even older are still alive. When there are relics lying around from ancient times, and a society has preserved many aspects of its culture through many centuries, things may seem less degenerate. That's somewhat of an illusion. It's a good illusion, but still fake.

So set down your airport novel or switch the box off "Fear Factor" and pick up... I don't know. Pick up something else. At the very least, doing so is kind of quaint.

I'm done now.

Oh, also, the title doesn't really have anything to do with this post, I just thought it sounded rather dramatic. It's the kind of thing that attracts attention.

Well... well? Well! Well, I'm at our house Utah where I arrived yesterday evening. I've spent the bulk of today configuring this old iMac (a real classic; it's the original Bondi Blue model), and it is now working fine. I've got OS 10.2.3, meaning that I can't install Safari, and I don't think that I can get the latest version of iTunes. Since this computer is going to function as a music server of sorts, that will be a problem. So I need to get a copy of 10.3 sometime. That means that I will have to rebuild the OS again, but it shouldn't be bad because I've got the wireless bridge installed now. That was the hardest part. In any case, it's kind of nice to use a Mac for a change.

I must eat; therefore, I must go.

Linear particle accelerators may be a little too complicated, but what about a cyclotron? I found someone's thesis on "The Design of a Small Cyclotron." It seems relatively straightforward. Plus, Milton Stanley Livingston built a successful 4 inch cyclotron in 1931 that he used for experiments for his doctoral thesis. That's almost pocket sized, and that was in the '30s.

But here's my theory. It turns out that there are a fair number of useful applications of neutron generators, but all of the neutron generators I know of use nuclear fusion (the Farnsworth reactor, for instance). It's relatively easy to isolate protons to be accelerated in this cyclotron, so if you could accelerate a proton into an electron beam, I think you might be able to create sort of a reverse beta decay process. This would create neutrons. It's what happens in neutron stars, but I'm guessing that the energy requirements are too high to be practical. There's also this crazy physicist who is probably full of misshapen bologna, and he theorizes that absorpsion of thermal neutrons is essential to the production of excess power in electrolytic cells by the P-F effect. So I was talking about this with Dr. Dash one day, and I brought up the idea of bombarding our cathodes with neutrons. I think he chuckled a little bit. In any case, that's why I've been thinking about neutrons a lot lately. I've got to think about this cyclotron some more.

And for the record, I've heard of two high school students who have built nuclear reactors now. Someone from OES had some connections with Reed and got a bunch of parts from their reactor. Another person from southern Utah scrounged up parts in junk yards for a year (he just "happened" to find a neutron detector in Idaho junk yard) and built a reactor with the same design.

Well, ASE is finally over, and I'm a little sad, but glad for a break. It was immensely fun. Now I just need to think of the next project. I want to enter in a regional ISEF-affiliated science fair, but I'm not going to get anywhere with cold fusion. That would be like preaching the continental drift to the American Geological Society (if there even is such a thing) in the 1920s, if you get my point. I've certainly got ideas, but they're all way too complicated and expensive to be practical. Since I know some people at PSU, I probably could scrounge some things from there, but I need a definitive plan first... More to come later. For now, I'm investigating a hunch about solar radiation. Oh and good job to everyone I know who did ASE (Andy, David, Hendrik, Jodi, Anna, Bjorkquist, those three people from the top floor of SBII who always play hacky-sack, and anyone else I forgot), and everyone who didn't apply should apply next year.

I've got about 1 hour and 10 minutes left of my internship, so I thought I'd blog a little. It's not that I don't have stuff to do, or that I'm not doing the stuff I need to do; I performed a bunch of maintenance on the cells and wrote a 9 page report of data from this week. But it's time to just take a break. Unfortunately, tomorrow I have to give a presentation and have my poster ready, which will be, erm, interesting. We're also doing a demonstration, which will also be, erm, interesting. This has been the worst week yet for excess power: 0.02 W, 0.10 W, and 0.32 W, in that order. Maybe the cosmic rays are coming back to town. I'm a little worried that the demonstration is going to be really bad, which especially is unfortunate because I think that this was my idea. Oh well, and so long.

Wolfram.com is one of my favorite websites simply because of the huge amount of free science and math resources they have. Wolfram's Mathworld and Scienceworld are particularly neat, but here's a cool demo of Mathematica's technology: http://integrals.wolfram.com It will integrate even the most complex functions. You have to be careful to get the right syntax (typing in cos[x] will do do nothing, it's Cos[x]), but it's pretty neat.

Although my blog has been inactive and somewhat dead for some time now, things are working again. The appmagic server was hacked into and some of the settings for the server passwords needed to be updated. All is well again.

I just got an email from someone at Mozilla. It seems someone there noticed my recommendation of Mozilla Firefox and asked me to add a button to their site. While I already have a link, I figured that I'd add one of their buttons as well. It's rather small because I picked the unobtrusive one, but I felt it couldn't hurt. It's located at the bottom of the sidebar.

Work is going well, although it's winding down. I'm finished with my calculus class, which means that I can get on to the proper work of finishing integrals (I'm on integration by parts) and doing some more physics (I've skimmed through about half of the AP mechanics topics, and I'm approaching rotational dynamics, the first topic that is mostly new to me). In other words, now that my class is over, I'll have the time and energy to do meaningful things. Calculus is meaningful, but not when I'm wasting such a ridiculous amount of time in such a ridiculous class.

I found an interesting little tidbit of etymological trivia today that I found rather interesting. The word meaning money in Latin is pecūnia, which originates from the Latin word for cattle, pecus. According to Wheelock's Latin, the English word fee is related to the German word Vieh via the Old English feoh and the Old High German fehu, all meaning cattle. Although the Oxford English dictionary disagrees by claiming that fee orginates from the medieval Latin feudum (I don't know the meaning), the Indo-European connection of money to cattle is remarkable. It seems to suggest that the ancestors of Europeans and Middle Easterners, the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, had a great value for cattle. Well, in fact, this prompted me to look into the matter a little. The speakers of Proto-Indo-European were a society known as the Kurgan that had some agriculture, but engaged in both herding and domestication of livestock approximately 6000 years ago near the Black Sea. From what I can tell, they engaged in a great deal of animal husbandry. Excavations of Kurgan rubbish heaps yield a large quantity of cattle bones.

Linguists have reconstructed much of the Proto-Indo-European language. It reveals much about they way this particular culture lived. It's pretty interesting what can be deduced about people from their diction.