Cheerful Curmudgeon

I have been writing a new program, having a ball doing it, and it has brought to consciousness something which I have not thought about for years: There is a bit of Dr. Henry Frankenstein in me. I love to create things which do stuff autonomously and, when I create these things, bigger is definitely better.

My current creation has lots of parts, including:

1. A daemon (I love that word, all the more since daemon’s are useful and not evil at all) which runs all the time and wakes up once a minute to see if anything interesting has happened and decide whether it should do something.
2. A script which watches for people to click special links in email messages. It leaves a “note” for the daemon, telling it that a human being received the email and did something. Cool; my program is making humans do things!
3. A script which watches for secret messages sent from another program on another computer. This script also leaves notes for the daemon, telling it that the other computer is set up and running and ready to do a human being’s bidding.

The daemon gets to do all sorts of fun things, including summoning new (virtual) computers into existance and turning them loose on the world. In the end, the daemon even gets to kill off the computers. The daemon spends real money (hopefully, this part does not get out of control!) with a real multi-national company.  And as the daemon works, it attracts the attention of people at four different companies, all of which are very interested in what this little beastie is doing.

Not bad for a creation which only exists in the virtual world inside a computer. If you see me walking around with a smug smile on my face, now you know why.

Science is just plain cool. Check out the Ruben’s Tube (a surefire favorite if you are into flame and music) and the Non-Newtonian Fluid (if you are worried about burning down the garage).

We all know the story of Benjamin Franklin flying a kite in an electrical storm. I always thought that it was kind of fanciful, along the same lines as the myth about George Washington cutting down a cherry tree. Guess what: I was wrong. Franklin not only flew the kite in a storm, he held onto the string, and he stuck his hand near the key so that he could fully experience the “electric fire.”

I just finished reading the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, downloaded from Project Gutenberg. At the end, I found a letter Franklin wrote to Peter Collinson in 1752 describing the electrical kite experiment in exquisite detail.

Make a small cross of two light strips of cedar, the arms so long as to reach to the four corners of a large, thin silk handkerchief when extended; tie the corners of the handkerchief to the extremities of the cross, so you have the body of a kite; which being properly accommodated with a tail, loop, and string, will rise in the air, like those made of paper; but this being of silk, is fitter to bear the wet and wind of a thunder-gust without tearing. To the top of the upright stick of the cross is to be fixed a very sharp-pointed wire, rising a foot or more above the wood. To the end of the twine, next the hand, is to be tied a silk ribbon, and where the silk and twine join, a key may be fastened. This kite is to be raised when a thunder-gust appears to be coming on, and the person who holds the string must stand within a door or window, or under some cover, so that the silk ribbon may not be wet; and care must be taken that the twine does not touch the frame of the door or window. As soon as any of the thunder clouds come over the kite, the pointed wire will draw the electric fire from them, and the kite, with all the twine will be electrified, and the loose filaments of the twine will stand out every way and be attracted by an approaching finger. And when the rain has wet the kite and twine, so that it can conduct the electric fire freely, you will find it stream out plentifully from the key on the approach of your knuckle. At this key the phial may be charged; and from electric fire thus obtained, spirits may be kindled, and all the electric experiments be performed, which are usually done by the help of a rubbed glass globe or tube, and thereby the sameness of the electric matter with that of lightning completely demonstrated.

I also love the illustration:

"You will find it stream out plentifully from the key on the approach of your knuckle"

I think it is certainly fair to say, Don’t Try This At Home.

But if you do… be sure to let me know how it works out!

Welcome to today’s world. Physics isn’t just about the things thar normal human beings can understand but you can watch YouTube to catch up on the latest. My hat’s off to Geeks Are Sexy for finding and collecting these two videos, one educational and the other fun and educational. Enjoy.

Is your head hurting? Well just kick back and relax with a bit of rap music by the same science team which build CERN:

You have probably heard me grumble about history repeating itself. The LHC is just another trivial case in point.

We now return you to your regular programming…

We all know that distractions make driving significantly more difficult and dangerous. Cell phones top the list, at least from lawmakers’ perspectives, and we now have laws in several states which limit cell phone use while driving. Sadly, lawmakers have not found a way to make children stop bugging their parents during car trips. “She’s breathing my air!” and “He’s looking out my window!” make every parent cringe and enhance family outings in immeasurable ways.

Science News, in Shifting Priorities at the Wheel, reports on a new study which demonstrates that simply listening to conversation severely reduces a driver’s ability to safely maneuver a car.

Even a simple form of multitasking — driving while listening to someone else talk — disrupts the ability to navigate a car safely, a new study finds.

An intriguing neural response underlies vehicular mishaps associated with such distractions, say neuroscientist Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and his colleagues. Attending to what someone says galvanizes language-related brain areas while simultaneously reducing activity in spatial regions that coordinate driving behavior.

This finding suggests that people who combine relatively automatic tasks, such as speech comprehension and car driving, exceed a biological limit on the amount of systematic brain activity they can accommodate at one time, the researchers propose. As a result, the less-ingrained skill — in this case, driving, which is learned long after a person grasps a native language — takes a neural hit.

Pilots know how distracting simple chit-chat can be. When I am taking off and landing my plane, I ask everybody else on board to stop talking, even to each other; I need to concentrate. If I am flying with several children and they won’t keep quiet, I use the “isolate” switch on my audio panel so that I don’t have to listen to them.

This is a significant enough issue that the FAA formalized it into the Sterile Cockpit Rule in 1981. Wikipedia summarizes it nicely,

The Sterile Cockpit Rule is an FAA regulation requiring pilots to refrain from non-essential activities during critical phases of flight, normally below 10,000 feet. The FAA imposed the rule in 1981 after reviewing a series of accidents that were caused by flight crews who were distracted from their flying duties by engaging in non-essential conversations and activities during critical parts of the flight. One such notable accident was Eastern Air Lines Flight 212, which crashed just short of the runway at Charlotte/Douglas International Airport in 1974 while conducting an instrument approach in dense fog. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that one probable cause of the accident was distraction due to idle chatter among the flight crew during the approach phase of the flight.

It is worth being aware of the biological limits to what our brains can do. When hurtling down the road in a two ton missile, with innocent bystanders on foot nearby, and women and children blithely motoring along in their own cars next to yours, pay attention to the most important task at hand: arriving alive.

This morning the Gee Whiz department brings us photographs of the planet Mercury, taken by the MESSENGER probe on its first fly-by.

I don’t know about you but I grew up in the stone ages, when seeing a planet meant looking at a bright spot in the sky. As a child, I never imagined being able to see such detailed photographs.

You’ve got to see this to believe it. And even then, you might not believe it.

I was dubious until another member of a forum where this video appeared wrote,

My neighbor works for Santee Electric in the transmission line area and he does this. He is 60 year old and still rides up in the heli and walks the lines. He says he would much rather walk the line than ride on the copter. He gets motion sick while riding.

I am also a certified tower climber and I had to put an antenna on a billboard off I95 once and Steve helped me, well I needed to run back to the shop and get a different mount, he was already up the 300 + feet on the billboard. When I got back I could not find him, I ended up climbing up to the top and found him sound asleep on a 4in I-beam. I guess it is all what you get used to.

Sheesh!

Were you looking forward to another boring day on this run-of-the-mill planet Earth?

Researchers from Indiana University Bloomington and eight collaborating institutions report in this week’s Science a self-sustaining community of bacteria that live in rocks 2.8 kilometers below Earth’s surface. Think that’s weird? The bacteria rely on radioactive uranium to convert water molecules to useable energy.

Go read These bacteria use radiated water as food at IU’s web site. Once again, truth is stranger than fiction.

What happens when lightening strikes an airplane?

According to Edward J Rupke, senior engineer at Lighting Technologies, Inc., not much. (Image courtesy of Edward J. Rupke and borrowed from Scientific American.com.)

Although passengers and crew may see a flash and hear a loud noise if lightning strikes their plane, nothing serious should happen because of the careful lightning protection engineered into the aircraft and its sensitive components.

I have been asked that question many times and, though I have never heard anything to make me worry much about it, I did not know the details of the answer. You can read the full article at Scientific American. Ask the Experts: Physics: What happens when lightning strikes an airplane?

I’m a space junkie so I was thrilled to read in Slashdot

Jivecat writes: “All those extra cameras NASA has added to the Space Shuttle to watch for debris impacts have yielded what may be the coolest Shuttle launch footage ever. The forward-facing view from the right-hand SRB shows, at about the 2:58 mark, booster separation and Discovery zooming away. Other views are available at the main mission site.”