And boy, is it nice and brisk!
Archive for the ‘Science Stuff’ Category
In Lloydminster, it’s just gone 10 a.m.
Monday, February 8th, 2010Various thoughts and comments
Friday, January 29th, 2010The other day I drove behind a woman driving a Mercedes Benz, and who had two small Dachshunds on her lap, sticking their heads out of the driver’s window. How is this safe?
—
I read that Terry Pratchett is a Humanist. I didn’t quite know what this meant, but it appears at first look to cover my belief system as well, so if I were forced to pick a label, I suppose I’d pick this one. I’m not religious about it, if you’ll pardon the pun.
They have a “statement of faith” which reads as follows (my own emphasis added):
Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.
—
On Monday I’m starting on a new project at work, which has a zero margin for error. I’m even getting my own Business Analyst to help me out. We have to extract data from old storage and re-inject it into new storage, so that the old storage can be freed up. Unfortunately, if we miss some data, there’s no back-out / rollback plan. There’s just too much data and not enough time.
—
I butted heads yesterday with one of South Africa’s Spammer Hall of Shame, namely Jaco Derksen. I managed to find out that he uses email addresses supplied by fxstyle.net. They claim to have over 300 million email addresses via opt-in services all over the world. I’m trying to follow up with them, but I’m keeping the Internet Service Providers Association of South Africa up to date.
—
Yesterday morning I drove to Pretoria in a follow-up trip to last week. First off, I dropped off documents at the Canadian High Commission (hopefully for the last time before we take our passports through), and then I went to the South African Police Services records division to get our Police Clearance Certificates renewed.
Traffic is getting worse. People do not understand what the speed limits are for, and I would have been able to issue several hundred fines in the hour and a half I was on the road, had I been a traffic policeman.
What happens in a black hole?
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007Popular theory says you get crushed and stay in the middle until the end of the universe, because the gravity is too strong.
Conservation of energy and mass says you can't stay inside. So, what if you come out the other side instead, into a mirror image of the universe?
Sure, you'll be in millions of little pieces (I prefer to call them atoms), but that's neither here nor there. You'll eventually form part of a star, then planets, then life. That's how the (current) universe began, after all. A massive explosion from a tiny point in space-time.
What if the big bang was only a little bang, and the universe had recently collapsed in on itself, only to release the massive amount of energy and mass stored by the collapse?
On the other side of the black hole, light would travel in the opposite direction. Electrons would spin in the opposite direction. In fact, this would explain why nothing detectable happens on the other side – because we're in a different phase shift.
I think that explains dark matter too.
Incidentally, the space-time thing is silly. Time is relative to the space in which it resides. If you split the two, black holes make sense. From the known universe to its constituent atoms, as a mirror image of itself all the way down, separating time and space is necessary. Each level is another "dimension".
For the record, I'm just as much a black hole expert as anyone else. No one has ever been able to study one close up, so it's all speculation. This is my take on it.
Plastic Power
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007Check out the related link. Now you can power your electrical devices (up to 40 watts) with a piece of thin plastic. I think that's 'ber-cool.
Applied Mathematics
Thursday, October 26th, 2006Vampires are impossible, according to a physics professor at the University of Central Florida. Costas Efthimiou's debunking logic: "On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was 536,870,911. If the first vampire came into existence that day and bit one person a month, there would have been two vampires by Feb. 1, 1600. A month later there would have been four, and so on. In just two-and-a-half years the original human population would all have become vampires with nobody left to feed on. If mortality rates were taken into consideration, the population would disappear much faster. Even an unrealistically high reproduction rate couldn't counteract this effect."
See related link.