3, 2, 1 ... 1 ... Happy New Year

Can't wait another second for 2009 to get here? Well, you'll have to. Yes, add an extra 1 to your countdown this year. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service is adding an extra second to the year due to the Earth's revolution around the Sun not being exactly a year. It's the organization that monitors the difference in the two timescales and calls for leap seconds to be inserted or removed when necessary.

Basically it's like a leap second.

Full article here:

This year will be just a second longer
'Leap second' is tacked on to clocks every so often to keep them correct

RS

The Reality of Santa Claus

Did you know that Santa Claus is a physicist? Well, a scientist at North Carolina State University has shown the science behind the seemingly impossible task of Santa delivering presents to all the children of the world in one night.

Santa does it with advanced technology such as:

- exploiting relativity (for 1 night delivery)

- nanotechnology (for actually "growing" the presents)

- genetic engineering (flying reindeer)


- high level communications antenna (knowing who's naughty or nice)

Article here:

Technology helps Santa make magic, scientist says.


And very low res interview broken up into 4 parts (quicktime format):

1) What is Dr. Silverberg's theory on Santa?

2) How does Santa get around the world in one night?

3) Time moves differently for Santa

4) Other researchers have come to different answers than you

RS

Church issues bioethical document.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has issued a bioethical document addressing many of the current problems and trends in our present times.

It addresses things like:

- Embryonic and adult stem cell research

- Contraception, especially oral contraceptives

- Receiving vaccines which were derived from aborted fetuses

- In vitro fertilization and test tube babies.

- Frozen embryos.

- Gene therapy

- Human cloning

The document can be found here:

Dignitatis Personae (The Dignity of a Person) at the USCCB website. (document in pdf format)

A VERY important document for our times. President-elect Obama needs to read this if he's as open minded as he says he is.

It's also Providential to find the document on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who is the patroness of the unborn and who helped convert a nation which practiced human sacrifice. Maybe this document can be a help in converting our own nation of the Untied States from it's human sacrifice of abortion and euthanasia.

Our Lady of Guadlupe, ora pro nobis!


RS

LHC update and other neat physics machines

I was bumping around teh internets, and got a bit of a status update of the LHC.

They've been in a cooling down process, and have gotten the ring down to 1.9 degrees above absolute zero.

On September 10th they are going to start the first proton beam to get things sync'ed up.

I also found they have a live webcast with a few "channels." It's pretty boring right now, just a bunch of scientists talking about details of this and that. But they are broadcasting the first beam at 9:00 AM CEST, which would be 2:00 AM Texas time.

The video feed is here:

CERN Webcast Service

Here's another summary of the LHC, although it's not nearly as cool as the LHC rap



From what I've heard, they plan to actually begin the main experiements of colliding particles sometime in October. I'll be in Italy in October, so if there's a black hole or strangelet problem, I'll try to let you guys know ASAP. LOL.

Just to have fun, someone made a computer simulation of what would happen if the LHC made a black hole.



But over in Japan, they have made a much cooler looking machine called a Large Helical Device (LHD) which is designed to make the same conditions as the inside of a star in order to study nuclear fusion. It makes a superhot ionized plasma which is contained by magnetic fields which squeeze the particles in the plasma together to cause nuclear fusion. If nothing else, it looks a lot better than a boring ring. LOL.


More info on the Large Helical Device can be found here:

Large Helical Device Information

RS

Large Hadron Collider Rap

Well, we're getting closer to the beginning of the big experiments at the LHC in Switzerland. They've apparently started testing beams this month. Then in September they'll start circulating beams throughout the whole LHC. But the high energy tests won't be started until sometime in late October.

In the meantime here's an amusing rap about the LHC. It's about a month old, but I haven't seen it on the Catholic blogosphere yet. It may seem cheesy, but it's actually pretty well done.




My only complaint is that their brief explaination of the Higgs Boson makes the Higgs field seem like a modern tweaked version of the aether field.

I think what would make me laugh the most with the LHC is if they find out quarks are made up of other particles. Not likely, but you never know ...

RS

Is the web affecting our brains?

I know I've felt it. In my own realization, it seems like I have been less proficient at retaining the information itself, and more focused on just knowing how to get to the information I need. Instead of remembering all the data around "fact A," I usually end up just knowing that all the information on "fact A" is over at website "fact A.com."

It opens up the question about the internet and how we use it. Because it is such a new thing, I think many (not only myself) are having to learn a certain discipline in using this new tool. The internet is certainly a great and powerful tool for information and ideas, but it is a two edged sword. For all the information and ideas it has, it also has a lot of misinformation and bad ideas. It's easy to get distracted while researching something to watch a quick video clip, read a quick sports result, or just start surfing on some unrelated tangent.

It's interesting that I found this article after making my post yesterday about buying some good old fashioned books. So, part of the veracity of an article I just found will be if you can even get through the article or not. However, it is a good article to give some thought about the internet and it's effect on our thought processes as we move deeper into the digital age.

The article is called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" over at The Atlantic

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

[snip]

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

[snip]

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Like I said, it's certainly worth reading the whole article. It touches on several things I have personally experienced.

I know that even though I do feel I read much, much more now (mostly on the web though), it's often more trivial things, or just blurbs rather than focusing on the whole of the article. And I also will gravitate towards things that are more entertaining than necessarily intellectual. It sort of worried me that I recognized just about every internet celebrity in the latest Weezer video for "Pork and Beans" (yes, those are the real internet personae in the video).



See, I had to slip in that little bit o' entertainment, either to keep your (or more likely my own) attention.

See if you agree with me or not.

Oh well, off to read some more Don Quixote.

RS

Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope is online.

Just found out that Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope is now live.

Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope

Imagine something like GoogleEarth for the sky, but using the best images available from the scientific community.

I'm downloading it now ...

RS

World Wide Telescope

The TED Talks are always interesting and here's one that looks promising.

At first this is odd for several reasons:

First, I am actually excited about something coming from Microsoft.
Second, it looks like something from Microsoft will actually outdo something from Google.
Third, it's something from Microsoft that is going to be free!
(The skeptic in me thinks this will only be available for Windows Vista)

So imagine something like Google Sky, but with a seamless unification of all the best pictures of the heavens.

Here's the TED Talk introducing the World Wide Telescope:

Roy Gould & Curtis Wong: WorldWide Telescope
(Sorry, I just couldn't get the embed video code to work).

Click here for more information on:

The World Wide Telescope

Kinda reminds me of the Animaiacs Song "Yakko's Universe":



RS

I can still remember 8th grade science.

I just took this test:

Could You Pass 8th Grade Science?

When I missed the 2nd question, I was actually nervous I would end up looking like this:



Whew! Thankfully, this grizzly can still remember his cub science class. I can still pass 8th grade science. 25 out of 26 (I missed a geology question).

RS

The new rig.

Sorry to be a bit quiet this week.

Finally! After 7 years, I have a new computer. The timing was a bit difficult with the holiday coming up. It's been a bit of a distraction given how much I have had to also prepare for work and the holidays.

But first off, to answer one of the The Engineer's son's questions: Yes, J. my computer case has lights. It's glowy!

The new "rig"
Going from a Dell, Pentium III 733MHz, 512 RAM, nVidia 32MB, Windows 98SE, and generic Dell stuff.
Going to a Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz w/4MB L2 Cache 1333MHz FSB, 2 GB DDR2 RAM, nVidia 8800GT 512MB, Gigabyte motherboard, Altec 900 PC case, and other stuff.

Thanks to a friend we he pretty much got it assembled and loaded and it runs very nicely. Portal looks beautiful (and is really a fun concept):



Now that I have just about all my holiday work prep ready now maybe I can get in a bit of recreation before the Marathon from 4th Sunday of Advent through Epiphany.

I may try some open source stuff like Open Office instead of Microsoft Office and Gimp instead of Photoshop.

RS

Virtual basilica

I once bought the DVD version of UT2004 to learn how to make virtual environments to design churches and monasteries. However, lack of intuitiveness in the editor, my not willing to sit down and learn it, and intrest in the game itself caused me to quickly abandon that.

How cool is this? These guys took a video game engine and made a virtual copy of the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi.



I did notice that they are missing all the choir stalls that go along the entire back wall of the apse. Still, the project is pretty impressive. I noticed that since they labelled it "1.0" it looks like they plan on refining it in the future. I'd love to get my paws on this.

For comparison, here's the only picture I could squeeze off.


You can purchase their program which gives you the ability to move wherever you want. I couldn't get the demo to work since I don't have the right operating system.

More info here:

Institute of Digital Theology

RS

levart emiT

"What's really going to bake your noodle later on is would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?"

A BBC "special" on Time Travel.



It still begs the question, if time travel will work, can't we say it already has worked?

Kind of weird documentary, especially at the ending.

The "computing" section I find to be full of illogical assumptions. Of course I guess dealing with time travel does open up lots of illogical questions. I would still think that even though computing is increasing, you will hit a wall or plateau at which you are stuck. Maybe quantum computing will prove that wrong, although I read that it can only be used to solve certain types of problems.

Funny how scientists spend their whole lives studying "reality" but end up only looking at the physical reality. Although I enjoy science, I don't worship it. It is merely a tool.

I once heard the statement, "'no statements are true unless they can be proven scientifically' cannot be scientifically proven." Interesting.

The "best" explaination I've ever heard is here:

"One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be."

So, yes, I know, this post was odd too. I guess my phone cord was too tight around my forehead, and my electromagnet was getting hot and distracting me. Oh well, back to reality. And for some reason I crave pizza.

RS

The End of the World As We Know It?

I really enjoy nuclear physics and at one time wanted to get into particle physics. In fact, before I became a theology major, I was on the path to nuclear physics. I even helped my professor do some nuclear experiments to study the structure of the Ce-142 and Nd-144. Admittedly, I didn't understand much about the "IBM model," but it sure sounds cool to say you helped with research in the Interacting Boson Model and the shell model of the N=84 isotones.

The actual experiment was kind of cool. Getting to play with one of those van de graaff generators. You know the one where you put you hand on the ball and it makes your hair stand on end:


Well, imagine having a van de graaff generater that was two stories tall! We used it to shoot protons into a block of something I can't remember. But the protons would collide with the substance and shoot neutrons of a specific energy at the sample (either Ce-142 or Nd-144). The neutron would hit the nucleus of the atom and transfer some of it's energy to the nucleus of the sample, making it go to a higher energy level. It would then decay, releasing a photon. We would measure this photon's energy and be able to use that data to see various energy levels. My job was to help babysit the experiement, then crunch numbers and do computer analysis to find the energy levels as accurately as possible. It was pretty cool how you could predict some things just by the data. Anyway, science has always interested me.

So why the title to this post?

I came across a documentary on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

I love the "frightful" opening squence of the video. Will it destroy the world?

I guess there has been concern. In looking at the LHC web page, if you look at the public web pages of CERN and it's description of the LHC, tucked at the end of the pages is a page that deals with the "safety concerns."

Are LHC collisions safe?

Microscopic black holes will not eat you...
Massive black holes are created in the Universe by the collapse of massive stars, which contain enormous amounts of gravitational energy that pulls in surrounding matter. The gravitational pull of a black hole is related to the amount of matter or energy it contains – the less there is, the weaker the pull. Some physicists suggest that microscopic black holes could be produced in the collisions at the LHC. However, these would only be created with the energies of the colliding particles (equivalent to the energies of mosquitoes), so no microscopic black holes produced inside the LHC could generate a strong enough gravitational force to pull in surrounding matter.

If the LHC can produce microscopic black holes, cosmic rays of much higher energies would already have produced many more. Since the Earth is still here, there is no reason to believe that collisions inside the LHC are harmful.

They even point out other articles that deal with this from other experiments:

Review of Speculative "Disaster Scenarios" at RHIC (pdf file)

The video is a pretty good video about the purpose of the LHC at CERN and the physics behind it. It also gives a very good overview of the relationship between cosmology and particle physics; two seemingly opposite areas of physics: study of the whole universe and study of the basic building blocks that make it up.



There's also some interesting video of just one of the detectors on the LHC the Atlas detector (sort of a crash course in particle physics ... pun intended ... "crash" course ... super collider ... nevermind)

I can't embed these particular videos, but you can see the videos on youtube:

The ATLAS Experiment - Mapping the Secrets of the Universe 1

The ATLAS Experiment - Mapping the Secrets of the Universe 2

It looks like the November 2007 date has been pushed back, so I think the LHC won't go online until 2008. Still, interesting stuff.

RS

Of Blenders and Shredders

For some reason the Blendtech videos have been pretty popular on youtube. I admit that the blenders are pretty amazing in their power to blend things up. I keep wondering what the heck people are eating or drinking that they would need a blender that can liquify golf balls or cell phones! Impressive, yet I was disappoined when they didn't do the crobar. The only really cool one was the lightsticks IMHO:

(you homeschool friends don't try these things at home:
YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!)



I was more impressed with the SSI corporation's machines. They can tear up engine blocks:



and even a VW bug:



Wouldn't that be a cool job. "Yeah, I test industrial shredders by coming up with things to tear up inside them.

Thanks to Fr. Erik Richsteig at the Orthometer for the Hippie link.

RS

Shifting gears

I've blogged about the highly fascinating informational video "Shift Happens" before (it's certainly worth watching again):

Information the new weapon of mass destruction?

Well, Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod have produced a second video to get you thinking about the internet and the power of the information highway:

Shift Happens 2.0



RS

Cool World Background Map

click to embiggen
Just found a very cool site that gives a satellite image of the world's current weather and sunlight. The picture it gives is perfect for setting as a background on your desktop.

World Sunlight Map

What would totally geek this out is to have some type of program that would update your background regularly so that your desktop background would be up to the minute (or however often they update the pic).

EDIT: There's also a moon phase page as well.
The waxing gibbous, 12.0 day old moon, 91.9% lit:
Moon Phase

RS

Why engines are tested

You might remember the airplane engine tests I had a while back. Here's a real life reason why they test engines by shooting birds into them. Two herons got sucked into a jet engine right at take-off.

(watch the whole thing, the detail is at the end)


Here's the news report:



RS

Photo and Internet Technology

Wow, this is so geeky and so cool. It's pretty interesting what computer processing has become. It's kind of strange that we have used computers to create fantasy worlds or different environments in which we can change reality. Now we are coming full circle and using computers to make an exact copy of the real world. All at your fingertips on your computer.

I've never played with google streets, but it seems a bit like what they are doing, although with much more detail.

This Photosynth thing looks pretty cool.





I was just thinking you could also "recreate" historical environments. For instance, you could take pre 2001 photos of New York City and put together a virtual environment of the World Trade Centers.

Although I also thought of one problem with this type of thing. Can we say "security issues?" All it would take is a few pictures of things that are not public to get onto the web and ...

Still, it looks like it could be a lot of fun to play with.

Hmm, I wonder if you could use it to see what churches used to look like before they were "wreckovated" so they could be restored to their original glory. Technology can have uses. LOL.

RS