Sealab 2021

Hey All,

 

Been a long time, I finally stopped resisting the facebook assimiliation and joined up.  It's pretty cool, somewhere in between a blog and an instant messaging program and twitter.

 

I've managed to reconnect with people from just about all eras of my life, and that alone is just awesome, but beyond that I'm able to get a picture of their day to day, which is something you don't get through IM nor Blog.

 

Of course, I continue to maintain my anonymity, I tried to type in the name "Online Lobster" but facebook wouldn't allow it (it knows it's not a real name) so I had to mangle the spelling to get it accepted:  Onyline Lawbstre

 

Take THAT name probability detection algorithm! 

It's nice to know people reading my profile find me so attractive they feel moved to send me private messages!  :D

 

Even though the only image in my profile is that of a Lobster, and I list my career as "Tap dancing for nickels on the pier" apparently there are girls out there who are hot for me, which just warms my crustacean heart!

 

Here's a sincere love note I got from one such admirer, I can't wait to hit up her site and see her videos as she clearly shows genuine interest in crustaceans such as myself.

 

This is apparently a really old video that has been making the rounds for almost a year, but I'm just learning about it...  I found a version with deliberately crazy subtitles which actually make it funnier than what she's really saying.  Enjoy!

 

 

Long story short, a long time ago I went to #mensa (group of smart people) with an idea I had to harness heat energy through the use of a nickel titanium alloy with the peculiar property of returning to it's original shape when heat is applied.  I suggested one could theoretically create a heat powered AC unit for example, and they laughed at me and spat out a number of equations that proved what I had in mind would never work.

 

Today, I ran across a youtube video showing a working version of the very concept I proposed:

 

 

So there you have it, society for brilliant people got it wrong.  After seeing this today I once again considered the possibility of returning to school for a degree in physics, it simply doesn't make ANY financial sense though.  Physics doesn't pay hardly anything at all.  Besides, I do some pretty creative stuff at my current job, and plus I can spend my off hours thinking about physics problems and trying to figure these things out.

 

Today I spent a long time thinking about where the energy is coming from *exactly* in this nitinol motor, because either it's violating the first law of thermodynamics or the process of returning to its original shape is an endothermic one and this is a thermo-dynamic energy converter (which either way is incredibly awesome).

 

As I thought about whether it's simply storing kinetic energy and releasing it I came to realize the movement is coming from the atomic level, from the crystaline structure of the metal which it snaps back to past a certain heat threshold.

 

And son of a gun, I seem to have solved a mystery of physics called the Mpemba effect.  I was trying to think of other examples where atomic or molecular action can result in kinetic energy, the first example that sprang to mind was freezing water.  As the molecules of water slow down, their dipole nature causes them to assume a crystaline structure that is less dense than the liquid form.  So when it freezes, ice expands, that expansion is capable of exerting force, and therefore doing work (ripping the metal of a pop can for example of you've ever forgotten one in the freezer you know what I mean).

 

So the thought occurs, this energy has to come from somewhere (again, our friend the first law of thermodynamics) perhaps freezing is actually an endothermic process itself.  That would mean that the process of freezing actually absorbes heat energy and translates it into kinetic energy in the form of water molecules expanding into a less dense crystaline structure.

 

Then I remembered the Mpemba effect, an unexplained phenomenon where hot water freezes faster than cold water, and if freezing is indeed an endothermic process then hot water would have more heat energy readily available to fuel this process than cold water would.  It seems like such a simple observation but that's two thermo-dynamic energy conversion methods thought up in one lifetime!  :D  I'm pretty excited about this and plan to talk to a few physicists about it.

 

Dare to dream!  And don't let others discourage you!

 

 

I saw an article recently that claimed businesses and gamers were "warming up to Vista" and the author goes on to state that this is evidenced by the Vista adoption rate approaching 10%.  Excuse me?  Single digit usage is warming up?  Dang, they've set some pretty low standards.

 

In the meantime, yesterday after almost a month of not logging into WoW because I had to rebuild my gaming laptop that runs Vista due to increasingly frequent driver errors for the video card... I wasn't 30 seconds into the game when Vista completely locked up.  On a fresh install!

 

The website for my laptop lists no new drivers for Vista.  I went out and bought a bluetooth adapter for my laptop only to have the installation fail.  I contacted the manufacturer and they said they have no plans to make a driver for Vista.

 

Wonderful.

 

So I'm left wondering, what color is the sky in that author's world?  Is he a shill?  Was he paid in some way by MS to write a favorable article on Vista?

 

I guess I'm just angry that I have two machines that I can't install XP on and am getting nowhere with Vista.  I wish there was a version of WoW that worked on Linux, in the meantime I'm just going to have to not play WoW, or swap some computers around and build an XP box to play it on.

 

I can't believe how dependant the world is on Microsoft products, given the huge vacuum created by Vista for a stable operating system, you'd think in our capitalist society someone would step in and offer a proper operating system.  Anyone?  Intel?  IBM?  Google?

 

Edit:  In case it's not obvious from my increasing grumpiness, my shoulder pain is back with a vengence... ranting takes my mind off the pain a little  :P

I was just watching 11th Hour, it's a show about bleeding edge technology and an FBI task force set up to investigate its misuse.

 

I like the issues they deal with but I hate how they villify technology.  Today's episode was a little better in that regard, they showed stem cells saving lives as the good application, and then they showed stem cells keeping people young as the bad application.

 

I disagree vehemently on this issue.  There is nothing wrong about wanting to stay young forever.  But in the show they mused about how terrible it would be to be forever young, how foolish these people who wish to live beyond their years were.

 

So I'm quite ambivalent about the show, it brings issues near and dear to my heart to public awareness, but villifies them.  :P

 

I have to bite my tongue and keep reminding myself humans are still infants when it comes to understanding their potential.  Many are still plagued by superstition, delusion and most are unable to think deeply about issues themselves so have to settle for parroting the opinions they've heard others express.

 

All the more reason to hate this show, it's giving people opinions that are not conducive to growth and progress.  Fortunately there are those of us who don't take our cues from TV shows and will push forward with these technologies.  Too bad we will have to push through all the less clever people holding opinions given them by the writers of this show.

 

So, here, for a short time, the secrets of the universe that you may or may not be aware of:

 

There is no god

There are no souls

There is no afterlife

There are no ghosts

The bible is a boring work of bad fiction

Jesus never even existed

There are no demons

There are no dragons

There are no vampires

There are no werewolves

 

The life we have is all the life we get, when we die we cease to exist, so extending that life indefinitely is a GOOD thing.  Just because everyone who came before us died doesn't mean we have to do it too!  What are we, lemmings?  The guy ahead of you jumped off the cliff to his death so you have no choice in the matter and must follow him to your own death?

 

Snap out of it people, wake up. 

I was watching Fringe this week and it's kinda funny how they have actors and graphics guys who know nothing about computers putting together words and screens that look incredibly high tech.

 

In one particular scene some alleged tech guru is tracking a download from a certain IP address... they trace it to the following IP address:

 

 

Which of course resolves to a name and physical address, guess I missed the RFC for the DNS server extensions that allow you to pass invalid IP addresses and resolve them to physical locations.

 

Still, it's just a show, heck maybe it's an inside joke for us tech savvy people?

I saw my doc for a follow up appointment, and we're aggressively treating the medical issues I have.  She seemed upbeat and optimistic and I felt good about the sense she gave me that she's got a good handle on the issues.

 

I'm going to back off on the immunosuppresants for a bit till I run the course of hardcore anti-biotics to make sure I don't get an infection after this surgery, and she's doubled my diabetes medication to reign in the blood sugar and improve my chances of healing.  Also dropped the prednisone dosage since it can raise blood sugar as well.

 

This will afford me the best chance possible to fight off this infection and after two weeks of throwing everything we have at it we're going to go back to dialing down my immune system to keep my body from attacking itself.

 

I feel a lot more optimistic now, I was worried my health was crumbling out of control but this is just a minor setback in a course of treatment that was otherwise working.  The only drawback to pulling back on the immunosuppresants is I'm going to be in a lot more pain for the next two weeks.

 

But the pain will pass...