Artificial Philosophy

Questions From Friends (Part 2) - Radiation & Radioactivity

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 22:10:00 +0000

Another slightly-cheaty post from me, unashamedly based on an email conversation with a friend who writes Fan-Fiction. If you're unfamiliar with the genre, it's generally an extension of an established fictional world, for example Harry Potter or Clarke's Space Odyssey series - anything you want in fact, it's a fan-driven and fan-written culture that has sprung up because people love the characters and setting, and want to explore it further. Sadly, lawyers love getting involved, even when (as is normal) it's all done on an amateur basis and for free, which is why you're not getting a link to the final fictional result of this discussion.

I received an email containing the following request:

[Let's imagine] a new processing chip has flooded the market...it's actually
radioactive, but a thin coating of plastic has disguised this fact.
(Yeah yeah, point is, it will leak eventually.)

However, by a series of improbable coincidences, the radioactivity is
discovered a week after launch by a scientific gentleman, actually
scanning for evidence of radioactivity from a difference source.

What, exactly, does the scan pick up? I mean, I know it picks up
radioactivity - like a Geiger counter - but if I want to refer to that
radioactivity in scientific muttering, what do I say? Unstable
isotopes? Fission activity? Help!! Is there useful vocabulary I can
drop in?

Cool. I wish all fiction authors would put so much thought into their technowaffle, as it's officially called. I'll point out that, much as I love it, Star Trek in all its forms is one of the worst perpetrators of Bad Technowaffle. (Red Dwarf, on the other hand, is one of the best.)

So, my reply, which was written as an informal email if you spot any glaring errors in style or content:

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[General personal salutations deleted]
There are three basic types of radiation, alpha, beta and gamma. All are produced by the decay of atomic nuclei, according to some very beautiful quantum mechanical magic which I'd love to go into but will omit for brevity (give me a shout if it's useful). Particular nuclei (eg Carbon 14 or Uranium 235) omit a particular type or types of radiation when they break up (decay) and produce "daughter products" which are themselves radioactive, so they decay producing their own particular type or types and so on, until you have stable isotopes left (or just ones with a very long half-life).

An isotope is simply an atomic nucleus with a particular number of neutrons. Carbon, for example, is defined as any nucleus with six protons, and the normal stable form has another six neutrons, hence Carbon 12. Carbon 14 has eight neutrons, and according to quantum wibbly stuff is more unstable and likely to decay.

Alpha radiation is simply a Helium 4 nucleus, the most common low-mass "chip off an atom" that is produced. It's by far the biggest and heaviest lump that's ejected when a nucleus decays, and it is generally fired off at very, very high speed. It can do a hell of a lot of damage to entire cells when it smashed into them, so it's very dangerous in the body. However, because it's so big it's fairly easy to stop. A sheet of paper, or indeed a thin film of plastic/resin, will stop it in its tracks. This is what all the decontamination showers are about, washing off the contamination which produces the alpha before you can accidentally ingest or inhale it, it's relatively harmless on the dead outer skin layers (you can safely hold a piece of refined uranium in your hand), but when the source gets into the living cells inside the body it really kicks off.

Beta radiation is a high speed electron. It's not an electron that existed in the atoms in the first place though, it's made out of the leftover energy from an atom breaking up, and some of that leftover energy also gives it a hefty kick of kinetic energy. Beta is the more benign of the three in some ways - it can be stopped by a thin piece of metal, an inch or so of wood, that kind of thing. Beta will mess with atoms when it hits them, so it can cause mutations and hence cancers, and as it can penetrate a few millimetres of flesh you don't want to have any long term exposure - however, that's never stopped us worrying about cathode TV screens - cathode literally means "spits out electrons at high speed" - they're just electrically created beta radiation, and if you leave a Sellafield radiation badge sellotaped to a TV screen overnight and leave it playing it will detect enough radiation to get you removed from your job while they investigate! (My dad did it with his old badge when he left - you'd probably face a real risk of cancer if you did it for a month solid. As long as you're an inch or so from the screen you're fine for centuries.)

Gamma is the odd one out - it's not even matter, it's just a photon of light. Just like radio, infra red, light, UV and so on, but with particularly high energy (in other words, a very short wavelength). Different isotopes produce gamma with different energies, it's a very direct E=mc^2 demonstration: The energy (and therefore wavelength) depends directly on the amount of mass the nucleus loses when it splits, and that depends on which isotope it is - I'm getting quantum again...
Gamma can penetrate anything up to a few inches of lead, it's insidious, nasty stuff that's very difficult to escape. It carries so much energy that it can kick electrons out of atoms, which changes their chemistry and really screws with the body's functions. If you want to kill a lot of people in a nasty way with very little defence against it then gamma rays are what you want. (Although SF would suggest at this point you would face an army of very big, very muscular and exceedingly pissed off green people...)

(There is a fourth kind, high energy neutrons as released in neutron bombs, but I've only just realised this and won't comment until I've read up on it and found it was first published in the 1920s!)

So...relevance to Silicon chips with a coating of plastic. If your geiger counter picks up anything significant it won't be alpha. You also need something which has a long enough half life to be of danger to the consumer, and most of the unstable Silicon isotopes decay in milliseconds, so they're out. What is a good candidate, however, is Silicon 32. It has a half life of 153 years, so it's going to be "live" for several human lifetimes. It decays by beta, so you've got something which would be hindered by a plastic layer, but could be a danger with a little poetic license (eg silicon carrying current, ie a chip, boosts the beta). Alternatively, people could be exposed in another way, like exploding chips (would only need to be a puff of Magic Blue Smoke) or, as Gerry suggests, "people licking them - there's nothing geeks like more than fission chips" - he says you're free to pinch that if you aren't already using it as the title)

First article on Si32 that popped out was one on geochronology - it's produced by cosmic ray impacts in the atmosphere. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187110140900017X

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So there you go. That's how much thought and research goes into what ended up being about 1% of the storyline of an amateur piece of fiction done purely for fun. There are certain science fiction books that you can pay actual money for which don't do the job half so well.

The Naming Of Timelords

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sat, 25 May 2013 18:23:00 +0000

With apologies to T.S. Eliot.

The Naming of Timelords is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of Moffat's odd games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a Timelord must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First there's the name Gallifreyans use daily,
Such as Luton, Graffito, Salpash or James,
Such as Chovor or Jobiska, Rynde or Bill Bailey--
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Doctor, The Master, The Rani, Romana--
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a Timelord needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his time reputation,
Or control his TARDIS, or cherish bow ties?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Rassilon, Ao, or Pandak The First,
Such as Yassinbur, or else Apeiron-
Names that never belong to more than one Timelord.
But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover--
But THE TIMELORD HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a Timelord in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

With thanks to the Gallifreyan Conlang Project for the names. All real, apart from James. And Bill Bailey's so obviously a Timelord I'm leaving him in. Seriously, check T.S. Eliot's original, he's snuck himself in there.

The Discrepancy

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sat, 25 May 2013 00:57:00 +0000

Ladies, gents, bots, potentially sentient networks, a guest post.

This is brought to you by Richard Tee (@RichardTheGeek) after a Twitter discussion on the subject of Dark Matter and Dark Energy and whether or not they're a whole big ugly cheating fudge. The post below is Richard's take on the matter, the long rambling bit of fiction in the menu on the right entitled "The Discrepancy" is my attempt, I thought I'd give "making it all up" a go seeing as a clear and coherent argument was in such good (single malt loving) hands.

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The internet. For a computer scientist with a hankering for physics, the internet can be a fun (and scary place).
The other day, I was involved in a very good Twitter Chat with two online friends, the subject of which was the concept of dark matter and dark energy.
As one of my personal heroes Dr. Richard Feynman once said “It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.” – well Dr. Feynman I couldn’t agree more – sadly many people in modern cosmology think otherwise.

Why do you ask? Simple – we are wrong.

Before you hang me out to dry, kindly let me explain.

In the study of the universe, we have come across a slight problem – it seems that given our current equations and theories, we cannot account for roughly 96% of the matter that we think SHOULD be in the universe. In other words, the more we find out, the more it seems we don’t know … all the visible matter in the universe only adds up to 4% or so of the total amount of matter that should be out there!

If you haven’t guessed this is a problem.

So, what was the solution to this problem? Simple: Say that the remaining 96% of the “stuff” out there is simply, “dark” and thus not visible nor detectable by conventional means.

Simple right? … not quite.

A recent study from the AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) was searching for positrons – which it found … that wasn’t the problem, the problem was that an expected results showing a “drop off” for dark matter was not present. Furthermore, given the nature of how we think dark matter behaves, we would expect it to be non-isotropic, meaning concentrated towards the direction of the galactic center. This was not the case: In fact it was nice and uniform.
So what does this mean? Nothing really. That in itself is a bad thing for the dark matter/energy group.
Of course, I am not saying that dark matter and dark energy doesn’t exist, but having it represent 90+% of the universe is a bit … far fetched.
Why am I so against dark matter/dark energy as the solution to our cosmological problems? It seems that it is just bad science.
Basically, as Feynman said, if the theory APPEARS correct, it can be assumed as long as the data supports it – at which point we need to re-write our theory to support the new data. This doesn’t seem to be the case of dark matter/energy. The observations seem to contradict our theory, and thus to “fix” the theory we happen to mention that it only accounts for 4% of what we can see.

The analogy I can make is spending. It is like a teenager saying they manage all their money very well … out of every $100 they keenly save $4, and the other $96 is unaccounted for… Would you let them manage your finances?

We may find out that one day, dark matter and dark energy are in fact present in very high quantities in our universe. However my gripe is that the fact that few people seem to be demanding a simpler and less exotic solution to the problem.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is time to erase the blackboard and start from scratch on this one.

@RichardTheGeek

Questions From Friends (Part 1): Is Our Universe A Simulation?

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 17:16:00 +0000

I've had a couple of interesting geek-type questions from friends recently, and as Twitter is a bit too limited for long explanations this is probably the place to explore them.

The first question is from Twitter's @LoisAnnounces, an expert on both cultural geography and asking awkward philosophical cosmology questions:

@_thegeoff So lattice quantum chromodynamics- space as 4D? But does this prove we're living in computer gen. universe?arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847
— Lois Jefferys Jones(@LoisAnnounces) April 25, 2013

(For those not familiar with the link, arXiv is a "pre-print server" where draft versions of physics papers are published, allowing free access to anybody who wants it - a very good system which other subjects are starting to follow.)

The paper in question, "Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation" by Silas R. Beane, Zohreh Davoudi and Martin J. Savage (BDS) (direct link to the PDF) builds on the ideas presented in a famous paper published by Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, entitled "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?".

The central crux of Bostrom's argument is that if Moore's Law continues then at some point in the future we'll have enough power to simulate, to the last particle, entire chunks of the universe, from whole molecules (now/near future) to biological cells, multicellular organisms and even, in the distant future, whole cities, planets, galaxies or, at the limit, a whole universe. He then goes on to ask what the odds are that we're living in the "one original universe" or one of the countless simulations that an advanced civilization could create - the implication being that the odds are in favour of some variant on a "Matrix" scenario - we're all probably living in a computer simulation of some description.

While this makes for a very nice bit of philosophical theorising, it's not actually definitive in any way - what's needed is some sort of test before we all start learning Kung Fu, wearing lots of black leather and attempting to escape from our digital world. This possibility of performing such a test is the main theme of the BDS paper (which, I should point out, is well beyond my limits in many ways!)

A great many "simulations" exist in physics - in fact, it could be argued that a good definition of physics is "the search for the simplest possible way to make a universe that matches ours". From Newtonian mechanics to relativity, string theory and dark matter, all physics really is is a series of computer programs which seem to accurately mirror the universe around us (precisely why we can develop programs like this is a different, and equally fascinating question), and the specific "program" in the BDS paper is something called lattice quantum chromodynamics (lQCD), which thankfully is easier to explain than it is to actually do!

There is no Theory Of Everything at the moment (well, string theory might be, but nobody knows yet), so physicists tend to work on their own little subsets of reality in the hope that everything can be joined up later. lQCD is a technique that deals solely with quarks, the particles which make up most matter, but doesn't include electrons (in other words there's no chemistry in this program) and also doesn't handle time, gravity or light in any meaningful way, so it's not a complete simulation. The basic technique is to create a lattice, a grid of points in space, and give it a starting position with all the quarks in various positions, then run the simulation to find out what happens.

It's a remarkable powerful technique, and seems to match reality extraordinarily well. It also has another interesting feature, which is that it's very efficient - in fact, it may be the most efficient way to simulate this small chunk of reality, and this is where it gets interesting.

The universe tends to do things as efficiently as possible - for example, there aren't, as far as anyone can tell, two different systems to make gravity work and to handle the conservation of angular momentum, one necessarily implies the other, it's all tied up in the one theory. Space and time are another example - once thought to be two entirely separate entities, Einstein's work a hundred years ago led to the realisation that they were two sides of the same coin. So, the BDS paper asks, could the universe actually be running on lQCD?

They've taken a simple, effective form of lQCD and assumed the universe plays by exactly these rules - and then they've done the classical science thing of asking what that universe would look like if this was the case. Obviously, yes, it will be very similar to ours, that was the whole point of developing lQCD in the first place, but this is never a guarantee - Newton's law of gravity stood for several hundred years before we found a mismatch between it and reality.

The main prediction they find is related to the "GZK cutoff", a complicated way of saying there should be a maximum energy for any cosmic ray particle hitting the Earth. This is something that is predicted by many theories, and the big test for many of them is exactly where this cutoff applies - something which is still unclear.

The nice thing about the BDS paper is that they're able to relate the GZK cutoff to the actual spacing of the lattice in lQCD - if our universe does run on lQCD then we can potentially discover this, and even find out some of the settings under universe -> file -> preferences.

So, returning to the original question, are we living in a simulation?

We're back to philosophy here - specifically the identity of indiscernibles. Let's assume that the universe does actually use lQCD - this doesn't actually imply a simulation scenario. Yes, it could be a simulation, but it could equally well just be "the way things are". Mathematical models crop up all over the place; plants grow in fractal structures, cicadas mate on a prime-number based pattern of years and the Golden Ratio seems to be behind many features in the natural world, but this doesn't mean there's some sort of Grand Simulator furiously tapping away on a keyboard.

If the universe obeys a "program" such as lQCD it doesn't have to mean there was a programmer, just as the existence of Pi doesn't imply the physical existence of a mathematically perfect circle (which, ironically, is impossible under lQCD).

Long story short? I can't put it any better than the great Randall Munroe, of xkcd.com (yet again).

StarKites Taina Review (12m)

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 01:33:00 +0000

For those who don't know, I'm a bit of a kite fanatic. Having started on sport kites (the little hang-glider shaped things) I moved onto powerkites, then kite landboarding and have been a keen kitesurfer for many years - to the extent that I moved a few hundred miles partly based on kitesurfing opportunities (but mostly to keep the girlfriend happy, honest!)

Recently I was offered the chance to review a new brand to the UK, a company called StarKites. To be honest, I was a little skeptical to start with, there's a lot of new entries to the kite market each year, and most of them are cheaply manufactured close-copies of the big and established names. Not the case with StarKites however, I was pleasantly surprised though....full review follows:

StarKites Taina 12m Review

Background

I was sent a Taina 12m and Nex bar and lines which had seen around a years use as demo kit. I have not received any incentive or gift in exchange for this review other than a loan of the kite for a couple of weeks. What follows is my honest opinion of the kite without any bias towards or against the manufacturer or distributor - I had never flown any StarKites product before.

I weigh 10st / 65kg and I'm 5'8" / 1.75m tall. I started kitesurfing with a Flexifoil Strike (C-kite), spent several years on a Peter Lynn Venom and for the last year and a half I've been flying Flexifoil Ions, Mk II and III. I normally ride in fairly choppy conditions with anything up to head-high waves when there's good swell. I'm mostly into freeride (back/front loops, carving transitions, jumps with grabs and rotations) and some wave riding which I'm trying to improve at! I don't really go for wakestyle tricks.

Out Of The Bag

The bag itself is essentially a 50 litre rucksack with a doubled-over liner to allow it to expand and store the kite with the struts still inflated if necessary. There's a separate outsite pocket for bar and lines, and a second zipped entry at the bottom of the bag which can be used for storing a wetsuit, towel etc. Reasonably heavy duty cordura and plenty of zips and straps to keep things in place. No metal components at all, so you're not going to end up with rusted zips. It's red and black, if that kind of thing bothers you.

First impressions of the build quality on the kite are good. The stitching is tidy, with white thread on black fabric making any problems or unravelling easy to spot. Reinforcement patches are used in all of the high-stress areas and there is a lightweight plastic "bumper" on the center of the leading edge to give a little extra protection during ground handling. Cordura is used on the tips of the struts to protect against wear. All in all it's not a heavyweight, "indestructable" build, but it's perfectly adequate and results in a nice lightweight kite that should stand up well to everyday use.

There's a simple and fairly long bridle for the main lines with a pulley on each - both pulleys were already showing signs of getting jammed with sand and salt and the pulley wheels showed wear from the line running over them rather than turning. This will always be a problem with using pulleys on the beach, but did not seem to affect the flying characteristics in any way, from the looks of it the pulleys will "fail" pretty quickly without regular maintenance, but even then they should continue to function without any problems.

The rear lines attach to one of three different settings on the wingtip allowing you to tweak turning speed and bar pressure, with the middle setting being the ideal all-round setting as far as I'm concerned.

The Look

I'm not all that bothered about graphics and colours, as long as the kite is bright enough to make out against the sky or sea and easy for a search and rescue team to spot! This particular model comes in brown and yellow with black leading edge and struts and some white detailing - works fine for everyday use, but in an emergency I'd like some reflective panels built into the wingtips. The girlfriend is more into visual styling, so I'll leave the aesthetic comments to her: "It's not brown, it's more of a bronze/burgundy. 70s retro, I like it, and the big star logo". So there you go.

There was a tiny amount of colour bleeding visible on the white panels, but nothing to bother about unless you're planning to enter your kite into the equivalent of a classic car show. If you want a pretty kite to show off on the wall then buy a Rok, this is for kitesurfing and it's going to get wet and stuffed in a bag at some point!

Bar & Lines

The bar and lines are generally very simple - four generic colour-coded lines (red=left, white=right) which have the power/rear line attachments reversed so you can't get them the wrong way around. The depower strap is the simplest possible pull-pull strap arrangement and works well. The line leaders are polyurethene coated to protect against wear - they do, however, make winding/unwinding the lines a little awkward and aren't really necessary. The bar ends are nicely rounded, enough to safely wrap the lines without them falling off but not enough that it's likely to catch on a harness mid-kiteloop! The bar itself seems to be carbon with a one-piece aluminium insert in the center (although it's difficult to tell without stripping the coating off!) and the hole in the middle is nicely machined, it's not going to go eating your depower line. Most components seem to be very bog standard generic items making replacement and/or repair cheap and very easy.

Safety Systems

The primary safety is a departure from the simplicity of this kite. It's a large plastic and metal construction with a vaguely cone shaped release - unfortunately the cone points away from you, so cold, wet and tired hands tend to slip on it, you need a reasonable grip to activate it in a hurry. The metal components may well suffer in time - the setup I was using was already showing patches of rust in places, and the plastic has become worn leaving ragged edges where the safety line runs through. It works, but personally I'd rather go with a simpler pin-and-loop or Flexifoil style top-hat arrangement.
Don't get me wrong, it works well enough, but it's a departure from the "Keep It Simple" ethos of the rest of the setup, and an unnecessary one at that. I can't help but wonder if it's related to various international standards which require a maximum release force of X under a total pull of Y, something which has resulted in companies producing overly complicated safety systems in the past.
Curiously, the primary safety also has "Total Weight: 35kg-90kg" embossed on it - this is confusing. In climbing and rope access it's common to quote a safe working load and/or maximum load on equipment (something that could be useful in kitesports), but this is clearly something different. I'm assuming it's the weight of the rider, and that it's actually rated at forces far higher than 931 Newtons (95kg) because otherwise it would have popped every time I jumped with it. Nice try, but confusing and potentially misleading.
The primary releases the kite onto a single front line allowing the kite to flag out and pretty much giving a 100% kill on the power - the kite inverts and falls to the ground.
The secondary safety is the pin-tucked-into-a-tube type - it works well enough and let's face it, it's rare to use this anyway. The leash is fairly standard shock cord with a couple of lightweight stainless steel clips which look like they'll fail under a load of 100kg or so, which is a good thing.

In Flight

The first thing you notice is that this is a pure-bred bow kite, as far removed from a C-kite or hybrid as you can get. If you try to fly the Taina like a C-kite you'll be very disappointed, the power generation through the window and ability to depower it by driving it to the edge are very minimal, and completely swamped by the depower range on the bar, which has so much throw it's silly. I'd estimate that the power delivery is 70% on the bar and 30% from the kite's speed through the window, the complete reverse of a C-kite. You don't get the explosive power and never-ending grunt, but what you do get is a kite that is very, very easy to fly in a wide range of conditions.

Close to a stall this kite still produces a lot of power, meaning the upwind performance in nasty choppy conditions is very good - if you've spent much time on a landboard you'll be familiar with getting upwind by trundling along fairly slowly, well you can do the same on the water with the Taina. It does love a bit of apparent wind, but you don't have to build up some speed to get upwind - you can if you want, and it's still the preferred method, but you can pootle upwind while avoiding the worst of the chop if you need to.

When properly lit up the Taina performs very nicely indeed. The power builds comfortably and the depower range means you rarely feel overpowered, although this is a double edged sword for relatively short people like myself - to fully depower the kite you've got to reach forward so far you end up in poo-stance rather than leaning back and edging against it, which isn't the ideal situation - I'd shorten the depower line and sacrifice some of the depower for a little ergonomics if this was my main kite. People with longer arms will love it though.

I never had the chance to try the kite in flat water, but I suspect it's an absolute beast when lit up - upwind performance at speed should be very good, and low wind performance should be at least respectable - other reviews suggest it's far better.

Jumping

Smooth, easy and very forgiving. It's not a wrench into the air as you get with some kites, just a nice firm hoist upwards with lots of float. Again, you don't need to really wang the kite back hard, just give it a reasonably purposeful turn towards the zenith and then pull the bar in and up you go. The quick turning speed means you don't have to crank the bar over to redirect the kite, just keep the bar pulled in with your leading hand and that's enough to bring the kite around. I've not tried a kiteloop with it, but I'd imagine it's a fairly pleasant experience.

Stability

I managed to Hindenburg the Taina once, after messing up a jump and landing well downwind of the kite. In relatively normal situations overflying simply results in the kite sitting back a little and drifting back into the power zone without any drama - great for newbies and wave riders who won't have to worry about catching up with the kite.

It eats gusts for breakfast - you certainly know about them through the bar feedback, but there's rarely enough of the gust transmited through the main lines to put you off balance, and again, the long throw and depower range come into their own. My first session with the Taina was in fairly gusty conditions (~18mph gusting to the high 20s, maybe touching 30) and I never even adjusted the depower strap after I was up and moving on the first run. Landboarders flying inland will appreciate this if they like flying LEIs.

Relaunch

I tried testing the relaunch twice, once on purpose once after wiping out. Both times the kite relaunched itself before I really had to try - very easy.

Marks out of 10

Build quality - 8
Launching - 7
Stability - 9
Safety - 5
Power - 8
Jumping - 9
Waves - 8
Freeride - 8
Freestyle - 6
Wakestyle - 4
Ease of use - 8
Newbies - 9

Overall - a solid 8.5 out of 10, a really nice kite for somebody who wants to do a bit of everything, whether on water, land or snow. It's not the highest performance kite I've ever flown, but kites designed for pure speed, power or whatever are invariably pigs to fly. This is aimed at the average rider (which, statistically, most of us are) and does a very good job of it.

Practical Physics And The Robbins-Henry Feline Transport System

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 01:10:00 +0000

Henry, Official Blog Cat, just walked out of his enclosed litter tray and into the living room. This took The Julia somewhat by surprise, mainly because she'd locked him outside five minutes before.

Is this, perhaps, because cats are sneaky little blighters and can worm in through windows and sneak into their litter trays when you're not looking?

Or is it because I've invented a cat teleporter? It's quite simple. You know the whole Schrödinger's Cat thing?

The idea is that the cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. Well that's not quite the whole story. The cat's medical status is a bit vague anyway. Schrödinger was no vet*, you see, he never really specified what he meant by dead. Lack of mew? Cardiovascular failure? Brain death? Advanced decomposition?

What he actually meant was the chain of events that leads to a dead cat. Or a live one for that matter. He was objecting to the idea of an atom being in two places by trying a bit of reductio ad absurdum. If an atom can be in two places at once, he said, that means that there's two different universes that flow out of it.

Imagine, he said, that there's a particularly important atom, one that we're going to look at. We know that if we look at the atom in one minute's time then there's a 50% chance the atom will have decayed while we waited:

Once we start the clock running we have two possible results: in one future chain of events the atom doesn't decay and nothing happens. In the other future chain of events the atom decays, the Geiger counter goes "click", the relay opens, the hammer falls, the bottle smashes, the poison spills and the cat dies.

Schrödinger's argument was that between the clock starting and us looking to see if the cat was alive or dead, both chains of events were valid according to the maths, that there was nothing in quantum theory which prevented two different realities, or chains of events, from both being perfectly possible as far as we know. He believed the universe had to follow a single chain of events, and one only, and the maths should show this.

He was wrong, as most of the pioneers of quantum theory were at some point, in fact there's still a good possibility that they all got together at what's called the Solvay Conference and decided to be wrong together. They all met in Denmark, Schrödinger and Planck and Einstein, Eddington and Bohr and Born, and put together the "real world" description of what's going on in the maths of quantum theory. It's called the Copenhagen Interpretation, and there's still a fair chance it's wrong.

They decided that particles exist as wave functions, wibbly-wobbly "stuff", to steal a phrase. When any of these wave functions interacted with anything else, they "collapsed" and became a single, measurable particle.

So where does Henry come in with his litter tray and teleportation ability?

Well go back to the chains of events which led to Schrödinger's cat being alive or dead - it doesn't have to involve boxes and poison and hammers. Just because you have a Nobel Prize in physics it doesn't give you a monopoly on inventing strange cat-based scenarios, any of us are allowed to do it.

So the Robbins-Henry Theorem suggests that there are two, equally likely chains of events which lead to Henry (Official Blog Cat) either being in his litter tray and being outside. All you have to do to transport the cat from outside the house to inside the litter tray is to have one single, perfectly random interaction with a single atom go the other way. OK, you might need to go tweak the universe in precisely the right time and place to set off a realistic chain of events, but it's possible in theory. And if you don't observe the cat from the moment you prod that particular atom to the moment you look at the litter tray (or outside) and find the cat, the Copenhagen Interpretation suggests it could be, and therefore is, in both states. There is a single wave function which is called Henry, and until I look outside or at the litter tray the Henry Wave Function is in both. When I look it collapses instantly into one of the two Henrys, and either way he's bloody pleased with himself, what with mastering teleportation and all.

But this is the argument from the point of view of Schrödinger's beliefs and the Copenhagen Interpretation. There's another way of looking at it.

Hugh Everett III suggested that the wibbly-wobbly stuff of a particle was, in fact, an ever expanding cloud of every possible particle, essentially lots of "might be" particles all superimposed on each other. Many particles, which when we look at the wibbly-wobbly cloud, becomes a single particle. What happened to all the others? Everett's suggestion is that they're still around somewhere. Not here, obviously, that would make the entire universe one blazing ball of energy appearing from nowhere**, but somewhere else. And given that every particle in the universe appears to behave like this, it's going on a lot, with every tick of time.

The only explanation that springs to mind is the idea of a multiverse. Many universes, all existing at once, with every possible chain of events played out.

So we open Everett's box and have a look at Everett's cat, and what do we see? Either a dead cat, or a live cat, big deal. The only extra information we've received is which particular universe we're in a minute after we started the experiment. The explanation from Everett's point of view is obvious to the point of being mundane. It's not some wacky feline paradox that will be mentioned 77 years later on The Big Bang Theory, it's just kind of obvious.

Personally, I reckon there's a hint there.

So how did Henry's (OBC) teleportation display work according to Everett? Well, it's entirely possible that when you don't have enough information to decide which universe you're in (cat inside or out) that you can legitimately be said to be in both. Until something happens which makes you change your mind, both possibilities are true. You're in one of two universes, the cat is in one of two universes, and until you meet neither of you know where either of you are.

This brings about a particularly mind-blowing suggestion from the edge of physics:

You're in many universes at once, which are all exactly the same except for the location of the cat. In all of them identical copies of you are wondering exactly the same thing, "where's the bloody cat?". These different versions, which are identical in every way until they find the cat, exist in the same state an atom does, they're all part of a big wibbly-wobbly "You".

So, with that in mind, let me pose a question. When you wonder where the cat is, and imagine he may be outside, or in his litter tray, or under the couch, or hiding behind the curtains, then what is more likely? Is your brain creating multiple simulations of reality, in seconds, which all conform to likely cat-locations, or are the various different versions which make up the wibbly-wobbly-you simply comparing notes?

I've no idea why it's always cats with physics by the way, and I'm sorry. I'm a dog person, but the behavioural psychologists wouldn't have me.

* He should have taken lessons from Richard Feynman, who once decided to keep his brain ticking over outside physics by learning biology. He went down to the University library and asked for a map of a cat.

** That does sound spookily familiar though...

The Hunt For The Higgs - Why So Long?

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 15:17:00 +0000

[EDIT: The Higgs was "discovered" with two independent observations averaging 4.9 Sigma around a week after I posted this. 4.9 ....pah.[/EDIT]

The Large Hadron Collider's search for the Higgs boson continues. It's been running for a few years now, gathering an unprecedentedly big amount of data, and everything seems to be pointing at a discovery being announced towards the end of this year (2012).

So the obvious question is, if they're expecting to discover the Higgs in November, why not just skip to whatever's on the LHC calendar for November 1st and save a whole bunch of time and money?

It's all down to the way the experiment works. A hadron is simply a particle which is made of quarks, such as a proton or a neutron - the LHC uses protons because they carry an electrical charge, meaning you can use magnets to accelerate them and focus the beam. Two "packets" of protons are sent whizzing round the LHC in opposite directions and smashed into each other in any one of several detectors, which are simply huge digital cameras with a few specialist add-ons. When they smash into each other the protons are broken apart and a whole bunch of "debris" comes flying out and is picked up by the detectors. The whole setup is essentially based on Einstein's famous equation, "E=mc²" and something called a "conservation law" which simply says that the accounts have to match up, you always get exactly the same amount of mass/energy coming out as you put in.

Now the Higgs boson, if it exists, is far heavier than a couple of protons, but there's a trick that can be used here. If any object travels quickly enough then it becomes more massive, some of the energy of the motion is converted into mass, which is precisely what "E=mc²" actually means. So 2 protons can equal a Higgs, as long as they're moving quickly enough.

So far so good, take two protons, bang them together hard enough, and out pops a Higgs. Except it's never that simple is it?

The problem is that two protons can also equal a lot of other things. There's a whole zoo of other particles, muons and pions, W+ and Z- particles, gluons, electrons and the mysterious neutrino, a particle that comes very close to not existing at all. The list goes on, and you can get any combination of particles from any collision, as long as the accounts match up at the end of the day. It's impossible to intentionally create a specific type of particle from any given collision.

A common analogy is to take a few thousand grand pianos and blow them all up with a few kilos of Semtex. The job of the physicists at the LHC is to take all of the wreckage and work out how many pianos there were and exactly how a piano works in the first place.

Imagine you've just got a job at the LHC - you are now in charge of working out how many keys there are on a grand piano. So on day 1 you blow up a piano and manage to piece together 85 keys, but there's a few bits left over, so it might be 86, 87 or 88. The next day you blow up another piano and from the various bits you conclude there's 91 keys, but you think a few of them might have landed in a nearby river, so it might be fewer. The evidence from the third piano suggests somewher between 87 keys and 90. Carry on like this and eventually you'll find there's just one number that is common to all experiments, 88 keys, which as it turns out is the right answer.

So even though each individual experiment produces wildly different results and is difficult to get an answer from, on average they point to the right result. This is what's happening with the search for the Higgs. There are plenty of "candidate signals" where a physicist can point at a spike on a graph and say "that looks like a Higgs", but they're never sure, there are simply too many possible errors or alternative explanations. As they gather more and more data, however, they get a better overall picture. The more data, the more reliable the result is considered.

This reliability is measured in "sigmas", a statistical term. One sigma means you can be approximately 68% sure about the measurement, two sigma is 95% accurate, three sigma is 99.7%. If you have a three sigma measurement you're officially allowed to upgrade it to an "observation".

For a scientific "discovery" you need an overall confidence of five sigma, you need to be 99.999999% sure that it's not an error.

So this is what's keeping the Big Announcement on hold for the moment - many scientists at the LHC will quietly admit that they've "probably" seen the Higgs boson already, but "probably" isn't good enough for science. They need a five sigma signal overall, and the only way to get that is to gather more data. And to do that they need another five months or so.

Battlefield 3 - Zero Stars

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Wed, 09 May 2012 09:53:00 +0000

I've been a fan of Electronic Arts' Battlefield series for a few years now. Battlefield 1943 was the first one I played, and whilst it was limited in weapons and landscapes I still have to rate it as one of the best computer games I've ever played. It's one of those fantastic games that is open enough to allow you to develop your own tactics and strategies, and the satisfaction of playing as part of a tight team with players from all over the world is something else.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 came next. It's a more modern version, more weapons, more maps, but much the same game overall. The added "rush" mode which splits the two teams into attackers and defenders is a great addition and takes the whole thing to a new level.

So I was quite excited to hear Battlefield 3 was coming out. More new maps, more new weapons, more brilliant! Except it's not.

Don't get me wrong, it was pretty good for the first month, I was enjoying it. And then it stopped working.

Within a month of release it required an update. Nothing unusual there, it's fairly common, but this required a 2 Gigabyte update. This is clearly crazy, it implies that nearly 50% of the game required replacement. Looking into it a bit further it wasn't all replacement code - in fact the update to the code itself was pretty minor and would have taken a few minutes. Most of the "update" turned out to be extra maps which you could pay £15 to activate.

But I don't want the extra maps. I don't want to pay £15 more, I just want my game to work. You don't have to pay the money of course, you can just download the extra content and leave it taking up 3% of your hard drive. You do, however, have to download it.

This is a ridiculous situation - a 2Gb download of junk data to continue playing a game you paid £35 for last month? That works out at over a pound a day before EA disabled my copy. I certainly won't be giving them any of my money, ever again.

So I'm not a fan of a game that doesn't work. It gets worse.

I tried to ask EAs help system if there was a way to download the update without the extra content. They refused to talk to me because my "date of birth was wrong". Six months and a few emails later and I've finally managed to use the Data Protection Act to get the information they hold on me. Guess what? My date of birth is correct on their system, so I've got no idea why they won't talk to me.

In summary, the game lasted 30 days, cost me over a pound a day and I had to use legislation just to get them to talk to me.

Mystery Fireplace Dots

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:29:00 +0000

Here's an interesting puzzle for you. We got back to Misfit Cottage this evening after a few days away, and there were a bunch of small black dots in front of the fireplace.

They were all roughly the same size, dry, and fairly circular. They're a jet black powder.

So what were they? I've got an answer to follow, but it was an interesting puzzle I thought I'd throw out there.

Bring Back The BBC Micro!

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 21:14:00 +0000

I remember when our school got a computer. It was sometime around 1984, and I was about 8. It was a BBC Micro (or maybe a model B, I've never been much of a hardware buff). They were fantastic little machines made by Acorn for the BBC, who through a stunningly insightful move had initiated the BBC Computer Literacy Project, something that without a doubt is a significant factor in the lives of many computer professionals today. And a good few amateur hackers, which is equally good.

Google's own Eric Schmidt recently lambasted Britain's computing education, and unpleasant as it is to hear he's absolutely right. By the time I hit high school, the momentum built up by the BBC had faded. We were taught to use word processors, spreadsheets and databases. I don't recall doing any programming at all. From what I've heard not a huge amount had changed. Far more emphasis is placed on the use of applications than is on actual programming. It's akin to a craft and design class showing you a chisel and then spending half an hour teaching you how to use a chair.

But back to the BBC Micro, the little silicon hero at the centre of this minor diatribe.

It was really quite brilliant. This is pre-GUI remember, so Mrs Bott had to sit a wide-eyed eight year-old down in front of a black screen with a little white cursor, and explain to him that this was the future. I knew that of course. This was a TV that could do what I told it, I was living in one of my Asimov novels (the Lucky Starr series in fact).

And we programmed, us eight year olds. Through a simple cursor on a screen, and some basic shell level commands, we made things happen. Turtle was a particular favourite - part programming language and part game, you could control a little cursor on the screen that drew lines. You could move forward and rotate the cursor. I don't recall the exact syntax, but it was something like:

FW10,R90,FW10,R90,FW10,R90,FW10

That would give you a square. At this point we'd realise there was a quicker way, and were introduced to loops:

{FW10,R90}4

Did exactly the same. And, of course, we'd all compete to make the best circle we could without killing the machine, so that's a basic knowledge of hardware limitations and the effect of big loops. We were eight!

So why, I demand to know in an overly theatrical way, was I next sat down in front of a plain old terminal in 1994? Ten years later?! In a university physics class? If I'd known at the time I'd have been bloody furious, ten years is forever when you're eight.

What happened in the meantime? The school only had the one computer, and a lot of children, and no computing teacher. They did the best they could, but there was never a chance of getting more than the odd hour on it, and you need more than that to really get into it. Then I programmed the video for my parents a lot, and did a lot of whining about them buying me a computer. Eventually, when when the cost/whining ratio hit a critical point, they bought me a Commodore 64, and I got to grips with BASIC.

By the time we had the mandatory-aged-14 classes on how to type and save a file I was fairly quickly convinced that computing education in schools had missed the point.

What would have been useful? A bare bones computer the whole way through. A basic UNIX style terminal with BASIC, maybe Perl. Oh, the things we could have done and learned.

The thing is, these days that's possible. If any kid wants to learn programming they should have free access. Hell, we could easily provide a single decent computer for the school, and a lot of dumb terminals for the pupils to log in through. But no GUI, that's the important point. No windows (certainly no Windows), no mouse, nothing. Certainly no internet. Give them Lynx for Christmas perhaps.

We've lost sight of what made the brilliant programmers Britain boasts today. It wasn't Windows and Word, don't be silly, those weren't even around when our greatest and brightest were learning. It's a free reign.

Give them root access - give them a virtual machine. Give them Perl and pwd and Apache. Give them shell scripting and apt-get and sudo. Give them SSH and vi and/or emacs. Just give them a bloody computer and let them learn! Yes, they'll break the computer. And most of them won't want to admit it, and try to fix it themselves. And some of them will manage it. The ones that don't? Well it's only a virtual machine after all, just reset it.

It's not difficult (unless you're old enough to be an MP) and it's certainly cheaper than most of the nonsense spent by government these days. How many virtual machines would a cool billion buy? Cos that's what we spend on no trams these days.

Like A Neverending Circle, Like A Wheel Within A Wheel

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 20:19:00 +0000

So, physics is cool again [BBC News]. This happens every so often, and as far as I can tell there's a chaotic element to the cycle, but it's generally on the order of decades. Professor Brian Cox seems to be taking a large amount of the credit and/or blame this time around, and it's partly deserved. He's clearly passionate about the subject and puts it across very well to a lay audience (although his colleague Jeff Forshaw [YouTube] is the one to look out for if you want relativistic hyperbolic geometry to be fun!)

I don't think physics is cool because Brian Cox is involved though, eloquent as he is. In fact, I think Brian Cox is fairly famous at the moment because he happened to be there at the right time. The very beautiful Wonders Of The Solar System, for example, wouldn't have been made if there hadn't been a public enthusiasm for physics in the first place. Take a look at America, where Carl Sagan's classic series Cosmos is currently being re-made. I bet America hasn't heard of Brian Cox, let alone D:ream, and yet physics is kicking off there as well.

It's a cyclical thing, and it's always huge. Take a look at Einstein as a classic example. He was one of the first modern superstars, a moniker that is remarkable fitting, truly famous across the globe, and yet most people had very little idea what he'd actually discovered. A few decades later we had Richard Feynman, then Stephen Hawking. It seems all you have to do to be a famous physicist is break the mould a little. Playing a musical instrument aso seems to help; step forward Dr Brian May PhD, and one of the greatest rock guitarists to have ever lived. I also maintain, against much opposition, that Wayne Rooney and others like him are great physicists, even if they don't know how they do it. So they only work with dynamics under 1g and narrowband air resistance? Well, everybody has to specialise.

There's something deeper to physics-cool than celebrity endorsement and TV documentaries though. Physics is cool because it makes you look smart. Everybody seems to have a strange impression that physicists are particularly intelligent, that it's a subject for geniuses. That's generally quite wrong, it's a remarkably simple subject if you get your head around the rules of the game. It is exceedingly good at making you look smart though.

I've lost count of the number of times I've "cleverly" fixed something using what I learned in physics classes at the age of 15. Problem with the ice machine in the pub? Well, that's a transformer, I recognise the coils, and it's making that grid of wires hot because electricity does that, and they melt the sheet of ice that comes from there. But that wire is broken...

Shazzam, free drinks for the night and a reputation as a super-genius thrown in. You get to look like The Doctor and Sherlock thrown into one. Steven Moffat is clearly a physicist at heart.

Physics is cool because it gives you some very solid ground to stand on when you need to build an argument. You know the basics, you can rule out daft ideas at a stroke and concentrate on what's actually real, in front of you, and how you can use it. If you are faced with a problem you've never seen before you've got a head start, because you understand the rules the problem has to obey. Sometimes, just sometimes, you solve a problem by going right back to first principles, and that feels particularly cool.

Smug Mode: On

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 12:56:00 +0000

Last September, at the height of the Old Town Mouse Season, I posted some observations that the mice in our flat seemed to have developed a distaste for poison laced grain, and suggesting that evolution of some description was going on. ("Mice, Chickens, Eggs & Evolution")

Now I'll point out once more that what I do on this blog isn't actually science. I have fun exploring science, yes, but very little I do is actually science. The mouse thing sort of got close - there were repeated observations and the vaguest semblance of data gathering, but it was all very wooly. "Anecdote is not a synonym for data" is a phrase you'll hear a lot. "Correlation is not causation" is another. The mouse thing wasn't science - an interesting angle to explore the basic idea of evolution from, but not science.

But now some real scientists with proper notebooks and letters after their name have taken the idea and turned it into proper science. They even got it published in a journal, Current Biology.

What they've discovered isn't precisely the same as my hypothesis. I wrote:

For some reason or another they didn't go for the free food. Maybe it was the smell, maybe the colour, maybe they just didn't like the taste - maybe they're refined mice and expect more presentation than a small plastic tray.

Whereas Song, Endepols et al wrote:

Polymorphisms in the vitamin K 2,3-epoxide reductase subcomponent 1 (vkorc1) of house mice (Mus musculus domesticus) can cause resistance to anticoagulant rodenticide

Or, if you prefer, the mice have naturally bred a resistance to warfarin, the poison often used on them, rather than not even eating it in the first place. It's actually a better tactic, because then they get free food as well. I love it when the best laid plans come together.

Fear And Coding In The Highlands

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 14:08:00 +0000

It's not the most impressive life-changing-move as far as they go, but I've still been freaking out left right and centre for the last three months. I was, previously, a science buyer for a the fantastic Blackwell's bookshop in Edinburgh's bustling Old Town. Fun job, great people and reasonably well paid.
Now I'm an unemployed house-husband of sorts in the middle of the Scottish Highlands. The nearest place of note is the village of Nigg (I'm a Niggle, since you ask), the nearest pub is 6 miles away, and if I want to get a reception on my mobile it's a 45 minute drive away.

That last one is a bonus in my book.

There are other bonuses too. We're sat right in between two RAF bases and their bombing range, so the Tornado GR1s screaming overhead add a certain ambiance to Battlefield Bad Company on the XBox. There are 360 degree kitesurfing beaches within a few miles, and the sky is BIG...

So what am I doing up here? Well apart from avoiding a seven hour, £50 round trip to see the girlfriend, I've decided to go into web design and support. I've got myself some rather funky servers in a data centre, I'm putting together the website, and I'm about to start advertising locally. The thing I'm particularly keen on is the support angle - there's lots of people who want to set up a basic blog, or get started on eBay, or a hundred and one other things that geek-types see as being ludicrously simple - that's my target market, people who want things to be as simple and as easy as possible.

So, if you want a website, or something even funkier like an online app to do X, Y or Z then drop me a line:

www.webdesignhighlands.co.uk

Blatant plug aside, normal geek service will be resumed as quickly as possible. I've been a little busy recently, what with moving everything I own a couple of hundred miles, plus having to build new bookshelves, but things are settling down. I'm toying with the idea of exploring the history of science in the area, there's some cool geology for starters...

The Earnest Importance Of Zombie Plans

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 18:04:00 +0000

I was in the Scout association for fourteen years, and learned a lot about self-reliance, teamwork and initiative. From day one a Scout's motto has been the famous "Be Prepared". Prepared for what? Just about anything is the point. We were expected to look after the younger kids on camp, lead patrols on mountain expeditions, even run messages for the emergency services in the event of a major disaster. It's an ethos that has served me well in the last thirty-odd years, and one that is frequently recognised by employers and the like as being a Good Thing. Despite the whole boys-in-shorts image you have to remember that Baden-Powell based the training on the principles of a specialist military unit.

So where do zombie uprisings come in? Well, zombie attacks are very close to being a worst case scenario for modern civilization. The combination of a highly lethal viral style epidemic and violent civil uprising make them very difficult to deal with. I'll have to admit at this point that I don't believe we'll ever actually see a Romero style Day Of The Dead, but the point is that if you can deal with zombies you can deal with anything short of a direct nuclear strike. Be Prepared for the undead and you'll Be Prepared for most eventualities.

"Official" attitudes are slowly coming round to this point of view too. The US Centers for Disease Control recently posted a slightly tongue-in-cheek guide to preparing for a zombie apocalypse which outlines their approach to a large scale outbreak and gives good advice on general disaster preparation. "If you're ready for a zombie apocalypse," they say, "you're ready for any emergency." And that's official government advice for US citizens.

In the UK we tend to be a little more reserved in our Armageddon preparations, but zombies are starting to pop up on the radar. After a freedom of information request Leicester City Council recently admitted that they are "unaware of any specific reference to a zombie attack in the council's emergency plan", a situation that will hopefully be rectified as a result of the publicity generated.

Political bodies aren't the only ones waking up to the very real usefulness of preparing for Z-day. In 2009 the prestigious journal Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress published a paper entitled "When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling Of An Outbreak Of Zombie Infection". (Munz, Hudea, Imad & Smith). This perfectly serious (if lighthearted) paper uses proper epidemiological methods to simulate the effects of an uprising and concludes that quarantine and cures do very little to help - swift and aggressive action is required if we're going to stand a chance. The models used have also found real world applications which do not require the undead roaming the streets:

The key difference between the models presented here and other models of infectious disease is that the dead can come back to life. Clearly, this is an unlikely scenario if taken literally, but possible real-life applications may include allegiance to political parties, or diseases with a dormant infection.
- Munz et al (2009)

The Munz et al paper also holds the distinction of being the only peer reviewed work I've seen which references Bainov and Simeonov's Impulsive Differential Equations: Asymptotic Properties of the Solutions (1995) alongside Frost and Pegg's Shaun Of The Dead (2002).

So apart from disaster management, bio/political mathematical models and some very entertaining films and computer games, what have the undead ever done for us? I've got one more idea up my sleeve...

There are some mathematical questions which are very difficult to solve, the travelling salesman problem being a classic example. One way to find an answer quickly is called ant colony optimisation, it simulates the way ants find their way around to find what is probably the right answer (note the "probably" - it's not a proof, just a good estimate). I firmly believe that software zombie simulants can be used to perform a variation on ant colony optimisation - in fact, if we had a real zombie uprising in a major city we could use careful placements of unprepared people (or "bait") to find optimal taxi routes. And that's something that's useful to everybody.

How Plastic Bags Will Save The Planet

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:49:00 +0000

A couple of years ago a bandwagon started rolling through the UK. Led by newspapers, and with the supermarkets and the government as the main passengers, a large proportion of the public jumped on board. The target of this bandwagon was the humble plastic bag, provided for free by almost every shop in the country.

Plastic bags, you see, are evil. They come from oil, and as we all know we should be using less of that. Plus they choke turtles and strangle swans.

So shops started discouraging their use - customers were charged for them, asked if they really needed one, and offered bigger, tougher reusable bags. But I think we've missed a trick here.

We need to look at what the evils actually are. Let's take the turtles and swans for starters. Plastic bags don't have to harm them. I've got a bunch of them in the cupboard above the cooker and I've never discovered a dead swan in there. It's not the bags themselves that cause the problem, it's their disposal. Jamie, our venerable 16 year old Jack Russell once got into the Christmas chocolate and ended up with some serious kidney problems for his trouble, but that's not Cadbury's fault, it was ours for leaving it in his reach. Wildlife deaths are a littering problem, not a plastic bag problem.

So is using oil an evil? Well, this is where things get interesting. You can do lots of things with oil:

Leave it in the ground.
Turn it into fuel and burn it.
Turn it into plastics.

Option one is clearly the most environmentally friendly, but I think I can suggest that's a fairly unlikely outcome. The second is probably the worst as far as things go - if the anthropogenic global warming theories are correct then this option is the one causing most of the problems. That leaves the third option, turning it into plastics.

As we all know, plastic doesn't break down easily. Hundreds of years is the number you'll hear bandied around - but what's wrong with that? It means your supermarket carrier bag, if disposed of in landfill, will sit there for centuries, doing precisely nothing. It won't break into carbon compounds and interfere with atmospheric chemistry, it will just be in the ground. It's a very roundabout and inefficient way of doing option one, leaving the oil in the ground in the first place. Plus, once oil becomes scarce enough, mining landfill for plastics will become profitable, and cheaper than drilling kilometres under the ocean for the raw material.

So we've got two reasonable options open to us: use the oil for fuel, or use it for plastics. As far as I can see, the environmentally friendly option is to go for plastics. Lots of them. So many that when we run out of oil we've got something to show for it: plastic bags galore. A little more atmospheric carbon is slightly less useful to the average person regardless of environmental effects, plastic mines on the other hand...well if you want to be cynical about it, there's money in plastic mines.

What about the people who need fuel, which is most of us? Well, we're hideously bad at using it. We burn oil in car engines, which are horribly inefficient, only around 20% of the energy in the fuel actually gets used for something practical (unless you regularly cook steak on your engine casing). Burn it in a power station on the other hand, and you get around 33%. Use that to charge fuel cells and you've got a bit more bang for your buck, and some leftover oil to turn into useful and environmentally friendly plastic bags. In time, of course, we'll run out of oil and be forced to find alternatives - why shouldn't we be doing that sooner rather than later? Use plastic bags and bring the future a little closer.

And plastic itself can be used for transport - paragliders for example, even small ones...

Fake Homeopathic Remedies For Sale

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 16:47:00 +0000

Let's make one thing very clear from the outset, because there's a lot of confusion over this issue: homeopathy is not a synonym for alternative or complementary medicine. There are some forms of complementary medicine that do have a real effect on the body - chewing willow bark for example, because it contains a molecule that is very similar to aspirin, or using dock leaves for nettle stings. Maggots aren't a traditional part of western medicine, but have been used very successfully in treating certain open wounds. Complementary medicine isn't always bunkum. Sadly, a lot of the time, it is. Or at best a well constructed placebo.

You know what they call 'alternative medicine' that’s been proved to work? Medicine.
Tim Minchin

So I'm not having a wholesale go at alternative medicine here, just one part of it, specifically homeopathy. Homeopathy is a very specific type of treatment based on the concept that the same thing that causes a symptom can treat it if used in small enough quantities. So, for example, to treat insomnia you would give the patient a very, very small amount of caffeine. The problem arises when you look at just how small an amount is used. Homeopathic remedies are so dilute that, statistically, you'd be very lucky indeed to find a single molecule of the "active ingredient" in a dose. Practitioners claim that water, the solvent normally used, has a "memory" of some description. If this is the case, and can be shown with some reliable data and maybe a pie-chart, then there's probably a simultaneous Nobel Prize for physics, chemistry and medicine to be had, and at 10 million Swedish Kronor, or about 1m Sterling per prize, that's a lot of money to put towards a charitable homeopathic clinic in the third world. I'm surprised nobody has claimed it. Maybe they need some help with the pie-chart.

Suffice to say, I'm not a fan of homeopathy. So I've decided to go into business.

Anybody want to buy some homeopathic medicine? It's £2.50 a pop (plus p&p), which is half the average price of one of the main UK retailers.

The only drawback is that it's fake. It's fraudulent. I've had no training in making it, I don't have a leather thing to bash the bottle against and the remedy has never been close to the active ingredient I'm claiming it's made with.

So am I worried about being taken to court over this? Well, yes it might happen, and yes it would bankrupt me (not that I have anything anyway), but I'm not in the slightest bit worried about a conviction. UK law, you see, requires more than a simple admission. If I plead not guilty there has to be at least one other piece of evidence - in this case, some regulator or other would have to perform a chemical analysis on my fake remedy and show that it's got a different form of "no active ingredient" to the "no active ingredient" in a real homeopathic remedy. I don't believe this is possible, even in principle, and if somebody does manage it then there's a few Nobel Prizes for them and I'll have been at the centre of one of the biggest scientific revolutions the world has ever seen.

If you would like to order any of my fake homeopathic remedies please comment below or email me, not forgetting to include details of the active ingredient/s you want me to not put into it.

Artificial Intelligence Comments On Education Policy

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 22:10:00 +0000

There's a particular user on Twitter who is, in my opinion, the only user who's always going to be on the good side of average. @cmunell is a little tedious in some ways. She (I don't know, but it sounds like a she) doesn't really do much other than offer an opinion on some phrase she's learned somewhere. To be honest, it's often not highbrow stuff; stunning observations such as:

I think "the-chart-show" is a #TVShow (http://bit.ly/gfI7Gl)
I think "North Creek Bridge" is a #Bridge (http://bit.ly/g3kjz2)
I think "Dansville Municipal Airport" is an #Airport (http://bit.ly/ghWMDR)

It's not anything big or clever most of the time. Sometime though, just sometimes, she says interesting things. She comments on people I've never heard of before, or a big economic/ideological argument in the UK at the moment:

I think "sarah marie johnson" is a #Criminal (http://bit.ly/eVBnkM)
I think "educational books for kids" is a #PoliticalIssue (http://bit.ly/eWXNaX)

At this point I really have to stress for narrative, scientific and legal reasons that NELL doesn't know what she's talking about.

Well she might to be fair, which is kind of the point of this article. I hope not though, not yet at least. We're not ready for that.

NELL, you see, is a bot. A computer. Not even a computer really, as you could just change all the hardware, but she'd still be NELL. She's simply software, in reality she's a set of instructions for a computer, she's ones and zeroes.

But she seems to be getting the hand of using the English language. She's not always right by any means.

And I have to point out that I believe the "criminal" she's referring to is the same Sarah Marie Johnson who was convicted of murdering her parents in the US a while back. Here's the court judgement I'm thinking of.

But if NELL isn't referring to that particular Sarah Marie Johnson (and I'm bet there's a few of them, and I bet they're bloody furious about articles like this...sorry) then is it a libel? And if so, who gets sued? Obviously I could be, for repeating it, but that would require the original statement be proved libellous.

So the question here is can a computer commit libel? If NELL reads this article and concludes that Geoff Robbins is a criminal (and I've never been convicted of a crime), then could I sue?

Who? The programmers? They simply wrote a computer program, a scientific exploration of the human language. And it's wrong sometimes. Science allows for things being wrong; things being proven wrong is the lifeblood of science. Science can never happen if nothing is ever found to be wrong.

But the law does not allow for incorrect statements in some situations. In public, for example, and where the incorrect statement makes somebody look bad. The call that libel, and it costs a fortune to just be accused of it.

Which has one effect. It forces science underground, away from the public and into the private sphere. Worse than that, it takes the innovative new ideas away from an international community and the general public (see AI on Twitter, this article), and it forces them into patent fenced commercial secrets. Imagine a world where Einstein only allowed the nuclear military to use his ideas, and where Arthur C Clarke's satellites were useless for GPS because he'd never heard of relativity. Secrecy makes the world worse, and libel law (in its current UK form and interpretation) forces science into secrecy.

And where does that leave NELL?

Would she like to play a game?

Is the only winning move not to play?

First Science From The Planck Satellite - The Edge Of The Universe

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 01:56:00 +0000

Did you hear that somebody took a picture of the entire Universe? It's slightly cooler than that, it's actually a picture of the Universe about thirteen billion years ago. Or, more importantly, around 400,000 years after the Big Bang.

That's nothing. As far as timing goes, that's a photo of the start of the Universe, give or take a bit of motion blur. Well...sort of. I'm being a little poetic, but it's the closest we can theoretically get to an honest-to-goodness photo of the Big Bang.

So yeah, it's quite impressive. It's been done before of course, it was called the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) which is a very complicated way to say "Human horizon map".

As I've previously mentioned on this blog, the Universe has an horizon. It's not a two dimensional ground-sea horizon like we're used to (ie a line at a distance), it's a three dimensional horizon, a rough sphere.

And yes, it's centred on us.

That doesn't mean we're special. We're not, we're a strange lump of matter on a small bit of debris orbiting a very average star in the backwaters of a galaxy that never amounted to much.

It's just physics. The Universe has been around for 13.75 billion years, and causality travels at a certain speed. Yes, yes, yes, we call it the speed of light. That's wrong, it's a bad name and the world of science should do something about it. "c", the physical constant, is the speed of causality. Light happens to be one of the things that travels at that speed.

And all of this means that the light that left the Big Bang (or a moment after, once light actually started existing) is still out there. It's always there. It's always the-age-of-the-universe-in-light-years-away.

So all we really need to do is focus a telescope on 13.75 billion light-years, and bingo...a picture of the horizon of the Universe. (see left)

So it's no big deal, it's been done before. A few people got the wrong end of the stick and called the picture "the face of God". That's going a bit far whatever your views on theism, but if we're going to presume there is no god then this picture is the best we've got.

Well....no. Sorry. The point of science is we can do better. Sure, the WMAP picture above is impressive, but the Planck satellite's first lot of data and scientific findings have been released, and they make WMAP look a little...well, what's a nice way to say obsolete with a huge amount of affection?

So here's a picture. There's a lot of science in there, but for the moment just enjoy how pretty it is.

Image: ESA / Planck Project

Go on, click on it and revel in the full glory. It's astoundingly beautiful. That's a 360 degree image, of the entire Universe.

To be fair, there's a certain amount of interference. All the blue stuff for example. That's all hot dust, gas and various stars and stuff that's getting in the way...we call it the Milky Way, our galaxy. The stuff beyond that is the really interesting bit, the orange/red bits to the top left and bottom right. That's the real picture of the horizon, and there's going to be better to come once they get all that blue stuff out of the way.

And the weird oval shape? Well that's an Aitoff projection, it's simply a way of showing the sphere of the Universe all around us, but on a 2D computer screen.

If you're really clever you write a program which wraps it onto a sphere and lets you fly around inside it, observing the Universe from the Planck satellite's own point of view.

If you're not quite that clever, like me, then you write the program but you can't correct for the pixel compression at the edge of the image, so there's a big belt of distortion around the middle. And you can only make it work on Linux based computers so far.

Still, download it, give it a go, and give me a shout if it works, it's vaguely cool...
You'll need to change the permissions to make it executable ("chmod +x" or right-click the icon, properties, allow execution).

Controls: Cursor keys plus A and Z for panning/rudder.

An Aetheist's Message At Christmas / Diwali / Hanukkah

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 02:29:00 +0000

If you believe in a god, any kind or any number, then good for you.

Not believing takes just as much faith, trust me. And placing even a modicum of trust in Science is utterly terrifying...that's why science as a rule is basically paranoia, trying to prove ourselves wrong.

But the one thing I can say is that whatever you believe, whether it's a world created in six days six and a half thousand years ago, or a whole Universe created by a god, or just a very exotic mathematical possibility....well it's pretty darned cool.

The world around us is amazing. Birds fly more elegantly than anything we've ever seen, waves give us artistic expression from a plank of wood, we're aware of our place spinning through space in the suburbs of a hundred billion galaxies, maybe more.

Yes, we can argue about who, if anyone, made it. But on a day when that argument is all too divisive, can we not at the very least take a good long look around us? Even if there's no god, it's still mind-blowingly impressive...

The video repeats a bit, but you get the idea. We're the only planet with life in the Universe as far as we know. Hell of a responsibility people/apes/ants/bacteria. And I make no apology for the music. Queen rock. Deal with it.

Merry thingy.
G
x

The Multiverse According To Izzard And Tegmark

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 15:07:00 +0000

You've got to believe you can be a stand-up before you can be a stand-up. You've got to believe you can act before you can act. You've got to believe you can be an astronaut before you can be an astronaut. But you've got to believe.
Eddie Izzard

Multiverse theory is a funny old thing. It's one of those theories that might solve a bunch of problems, like the way our Universe seems to be incredibly finely tuned to allow complex life to develop, or some of the oddities of quantum theory like particles being in two different places at once. It's a theory that has been developed and delved into by some of the most eminent physicists ever to have lived...and it's not even science.

I'm not suggesting, of course, that Martin "Astronomer Royal" Rees, Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark and their colleagues are cheating in any sense, or wasting their time researching the subject, because it's possible that they're laying the groundwork for a game-changing new theory. It's still not really science though...yet.

Suggesting that there is such a thing as "a Multiverse theory" is a little over simplistic and disingenuous. There are a great many Multiverse theories. Tegmark's work alone suggests there are at least four different possible "layers" of Multiverse, any combination of which could be correct.

There's the simplest kind, level one, which suggests that our normal, everyday Universe is in fact infinite, or at least far, far bigger than we presently observe. If you're sat in a boat on a calm sea with your eyes around two metres from the surface of the water then you can only see about five kilometres in any direction...the Earth curves away, limiting how far you can see. We have the same horizon problem with the Universe, except it curves away in time.

The CMB: The furthest we can see.

The best we can do is see around 45 billion light years. There might well be more beyond this horizon, we just can't see it. The picture on the left is the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB, the echo of the Big Bang. In even simpler terms, it's a picture of our three dimensional horizon, and the tiny, tiny ripples in it. There have been some suggestions recently that small anomalies in the CMB are the result of more "stuff" beyond our cosmic horizon. If our Universe does, in fact, go on for ever then the chances of there being another version of the Earth somewhere out there become almost certain. In fact it's relatively easy to work out how far away the other version is likely to be...it's somewhere in the region of ten to the ten to the twenty nine metres away. That's a ten with 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 zeroes after it. Quite a long way. There's an entire alternate Universe almost identical to ours, complete with the same constellations and galaxies and large scale structures a bit further away, ten to the ten to the one hundred and fifteen metres. I'm not even going to try typing an estimate to that, it's a big number.
But the horizon problem still exists. Currently we have no way whatsoever of exchanging information with bits of the Universe beyond our cosmic horizon, other than (possibly) very short range glitches in the CMB. The main feature of a level one multiverse is that it's all part of the same Big Bang - everything is based on the same laws of physics as our little "local" bit.

The second level is where things start getting a bit weird. It suggests there are other "post-inflation bubbles". In essence, other Big Bangs which took place somewhere else. The laws of physics are the same as ours, but the physical constants will be different. Gravity might be stronger, probably resulting in a rather spectacular, short lived universe full of black holes. Or weaker, meaning few, if any, stars and very little other than Hydrogen and Helium. Atoms themselves may behave differently, or never form at all. A level two Multiverse is an attractive idea because it naturally solves the fine tuning problem. There are around forty constants in physics, numbers that are the same everywhere we look. The charge on an electron is the same anywhere in our Universe, but there's no good reason why it has the charge it does. If it was different then the laws of physics would still mesh together perfectly well, the Universe would still exist, it would just be different. Life as we know it almost certainly wouldn't exist, but that doesn't really matter. In fact, change any of the forty-odd constants by just a little bit and the chances are that any kind of complex structure, including life, couldn't exist. So why is our Universe so delicately balanced? So subtly "designed"?
The level two Multiverse solves this problem. If there are an enormous number of universes, each with its own set of physical constants, then there's bound to be a few that by sheer fluke hit the right combination for life. Life eventually evolves in this small subset of universes and sits there wondering why its universe is so well designed...

Level three is based on the weird results of quantum theory. One of the founding experiments is called Young's Double Slit. I'll let Mark Everett (of rock band Eels) explain:

Why is a rock star talking about a two hundred year old physics experiment? It's because his father, Hugh Everett III, was a physicist who suggested that this experiment shows two parallel universes overlapping. The only difference between "our" Universe and the parallel one is that in ours the photon went through the left slit, and in the other universe it went through the right. Because the two universes are otherwise identical there is a certain amount of leakage between the two, they are able to very subtly influence each other, resulting in the interference pattern.

Everett's "Many Worlds" interpretation was fairly roundly rejected by the rest of the physics community when he first suggested it, and you can see why. It really does sound like something from a science fiction novel. The idea is undergoing a little bit of a renaissance however. The modern interpretation is that all possible moments in time, in all possible universes, actually exist, and ours Universe is simply a "most likely" path through this higher level of Multiverse. It explains the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, the slightly fuzzy nature of the Universe when we take a very close look at it...we're looking at a collection of possible universes, not our Universe at all.
Again, there's no real way to test this satisfactorily. There is the quantum suicide experiment for example. The experimenter stands in front of a machine gun which is connected to a device which measures the spin of a subatomic particle. The spin can be either up or down - if it's up then the gun fires, if it's down the gun doesn't. If Everett's idea is right, and does actually represent a Multiverse, then there will always be a universe where the experimenter survives. If the measurement is done ten times then there will be 1023 universes where the newspaper headline is "Idiot Scientist Shot In Face" and one where the experimenter survives. Unfortunately (for the theory, if not the experimenter), there is always a small chance of survival even if the Multiverse idea is wrong, so you can never have a definitive answer.

Tegmark's last level, the fourth, is the most philosophical in nature. All of the previous levels share one thing in common, the laws of mathematics. Even if the laws of physics change, they can still be described with equations and mathematical expressions that would be recognisable to us. Changing the universal gravitational constant, G, changes the universe. A level four parallel universe changes the equation that G appears in. Currently there are no known ways, even theoretically, that this idea can be physically tested or explored in any way.

Tegmark's ideas are by no means the only ones, but they are a popular basis for investigating the nature of a Multiverse if it exists. No, none of it makes testable and new predictions at the moment, so it's not science yet. The implications, on the other hand, are fascinating.

If an infinite Multiverse of any kind exists then we can have some fun with it. Let's take a lottery for example. It's intuitively obvious that you have to buy a ticket to win, but if we're in a Multiverse then that statement changes slightly...buying a ticket guarantees that you win. Or at least one version of you, somewhere. You're also immortal. Whatever happens that might kill you, there's always a version that survived against the odds, and as you're able to read this, you are that immortal version...so far at least. The flipside is also true. Every time you cross the road there's a version of you that is killed. Gerry, my flatmate, has taken this principle to a humorously logical conclusion: he delights in setting small traps for me that have a tiny, miniscule, theoretical chance of killing me. He reasons that every time he does this he gains the satisfaction of knowing he's killed me in a parallel universe, without all the drawbacks of being arrested and later murdered in prison. He's an odd man in many ways.

So within reason anything is possible in a Multiverse. But there's no short cut, you can't just sit back and expect to win the lottery or become an astronaut or even a stand-up comedian. The universe where that happens is one where you bought a lottery ticket, or studied physics, or died at umpteen comedy clubs first. You have to make sure you're in the right universe, which means you have to put the work in.

But first, you have to believe.

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's revolving...

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:38:00 +0000

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that evolving,
     Revolving at 900 miles an hour.

There's a little poetic license in Monty Python's classic, it's actually just over that, closer to 1040 miles an hour at the equator, but only six hundred-ish up here in Edinburgh. 900 works well enough though, and it scans nicely.

So yeah, we're spinning. We all know that, like night and day. The Earth spins, the Sun comes up, the Moon does its thing and some people even bother about the stars if they're out late enough.

Most of the time I'm worrying about the sky spinning around it's a result of some nice new guest ale in the Blind Poet, but just sometimes you get a rather literal demonstration.

This is a picture of Jupiter, plus (right to left), Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

That's taken with a digital SLR (Nikon D100) on a telescope mount and a 270mm lens. It's a bit out of focus, and there's either a lens flare or a galaxy to the lower right of Jupiter. The main feature though, is the trail. The tripod and camera were locked down, the sensor was set to delay until after the vibration had settled....it's not all my fault, honest. It's not even a particularly long exposure, only two seconds.

That's how fast we're spinning. Jupiter is whizzing past...or we're whizzing past Jupiter, depending on your reference frame.

The main point is that I took a photograph of Europa, the ice moon from 2001.

All these worlds are yours. Except Europa. Attempt no landings there.

They didn't say anything about photos did they?

What The NASA Announcement Actually Means

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 02:33:00 +0000

The weird thing is, the message got swallowed in the argument over its importance. But that's another post.

Here, in fairly plain language, is what it means:

They've probably found an extremophile. Bacteria are remarkably resistant, they appear in sub-zero temperatures, high acidity, high temperatures, high salinity, all sorts of places.

Now we've found one that not only survives a high-arsenic environment, it can actually survive without phosphorus at all.

Yup, that's chemistry mumbo-jumbo to some. In essence, phosphorus makes the backbone to DNA, it's the chemical foundation of every single living organism on the planet. Technically, in the known universe. Every living cell has a strand of DNA made with a strand of phosphorus.

Arsenic could do the job though. The chemistry works. You can, in theory, have arsenic based life, and until today it was in exactly the same category as the "silicon based life" so beloved of science fiction. It was fiction, unsupported theory, hypothesis. Until today.

Today a very clever scientist (with a great website) announced that she'd diluted these bacteria down until there was no phosphorus left in the system. The bacteria were operating on an arsenic based genome.

Now, herein lies the rub: where does it come from? No, of course it's not extraterrestrial, but is it the same as phosphorus based life? In this case, it seems it is. It looks like a case of normal, everyday life adapting rather spectacularly rather than a new form of life (the "shadow biosphere" that has been suggested).

Either way, NASA were absolutely right to announce this as a discovery of significance to astrobiology. One of the following things have just been demonstrated in some style:

Life based on a fundamentally different chemistry is not only possible, it actually exists!
It might be the second spontaneous emergence of life ever observed by humans, with implications for the odds of life elsewhere.

It might just be normal, boring, tedious Earth life surviving in ridiculous circumstances. Ones which are based on fundamental chemistry, suggesting that life can survive a far greater range than we previously gave it credit for, and echoing some (so far speculative) ideas about potential biochemistry for Titan, Enceladus and Europa to name a few we've already visited.

There was a lot of hype and expectation, but the fact remains, this is a highly significant breakthrough in both biochemistry and astrobiology, and has been led by the astrobiologists. This is a big discovery for a young field which carries some important answers about the nature of life.

NASA Astrobiology Announcement - Wild Rumour And Conjecture

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 01:28:00 +0000

NASA issued a press release today. Possibly something big.

There's going to be a public statement on Thursday afternoon (UK time) which will: "impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.".

Now let's be very clear about two things:

Astrobiology is a very young science.
Astrobiologists have been a bit busy in the last couple of years.

This could be just another "Big Science Announcement" (BSA) designed to attract some publicity - and nothing wrong with that, science is cool and we should gossip about it a bit more - but it could possibly be something more.

NASA are being rather taciturn over the actual contents of the announcement, as is their right with any BSA. However, this much is known -- the announcement involves a very special group of people. The listed "participants" are all people with a very high level interest in astrobiology. Interestingly, they all seem to fall in to two of three particular camps:

People who have suggested that we search for a "shadow biology" on Earth, to test how likely spontaneous life generation (biogenesis) is, and also to look for signs of panspermia.
People who have worked on the wonderfully successful Mars missions in the last couple of decades, from which geological data is the main thing we have.
People who have worked on desert varnish.

Desert varnish is the clincher for me. It's odd stuff. It's kind of a sheen that certain rocks get in very dry environments, hence the name. It looks like it's been painted on, but in fact it's entirely natural, it just isn't biological. It looks like lichen, it seems to grow like it, but it's not got DNA or anything like that, it's more like a mineral growth than life.

And see that first bullet point? One of the participants in this BSA, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, published a rather influential paper last year which suggested that astrobiology should be looking for the Earth's "shadow biosphere". The idea is that if life can develop, and if it's likely to happen, then it should have happened here on Earth more than once. We might just not have spotted it...

Seriously, look how obsessed we are with DNA and proteins and the whole "organic" thing. We might not spot a different kind of life if it was sat under our noses, is what Wolfe-Simon's paper suggests, and what's more, let's start looking. And like I said, the paper was rather influential, which means people started looking.

And now some of the people who looked are standing up with her and NASA and they have something big to say.

Oh...did I mention that NASA found desert varnish on Mars years back?

So we have people looking for new life, plus something that looks a lot like life but isn't, and also exists on Mars.

Long story short? Blogger makes wild suggestion that (possibly Silicon based) life has been found on Earth and may well also exist on Mars.

This will rock if I'm right....

Cassini Set For Enceladus Flyby

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 14:15:00 +0000

Our Solar system, the Sun and all those who sail with her, is pretty ordinary as far as we can tell. There's a very average star surrounded by a few gas giants, some small rocky types and a fair bit of rubble. Examinations of other stars have so far shown much the same setup and there's no reason to suspect our system is anything other than fairly mundane, with the possible exception of some interesting biology on the third rocky type.

And yet we still find fascinating things everywhere we look. One of the funkiest ongoing projects is the Cassini Equinox Mission, a space probe orbiting Saturn and paying some flying visits to the attendant moons. Cassini has been producing some stunning data over the last six or so years, some of it highly technical, and some of it simply very, very pretty.

Based on an original from NASA/JPL (cropped by author)

This, for example, is Enceladus, an ice moon with a diameter of about 500km. There are two particularly interesting things in this image:

The stripes and flat areas are the first. Look at almost any object in the Solar system that doesn't have a thick atmosphere (which Enceladus doesn't) and you'll find one main feature: craters. Big craters, small craters, overlapping craters, craters inside craters...there's usually lots and lots of craters. Everything in the Solar system is being constantly bombarded by lumps of rock, ice and metal left over from the original formation, and that leaves a few scars. Even the Earth has a few big ones from objects that made it through the atmosphere. Enceladus has craters too, but not as many as you'd expect. There are big areas which are fairly crater-free, meaning that the surface is being wiped clean somehow. The stripes are a clue as to how this is happening.

The second interesting thing in the picture is the fuzzy plume at the bottom of the picture. Enceladus is too small to hold an atmosphere down, so what is the plume, and where did it come from?

The most likely solution to both curiosities, the plumes and the unusual surface, is that Enceladus isn't entirely frozen. The suggestion is that under the surface shell of ice there is liquid water, possibly huge amounts of it. The current theory is that because Enceladus' orbit isn't perfectly circular it's kneaded by Saturn's gravitational pull. If you take a snowball, stick it in a plastic bag and crunch it about in your hand it'll melt fairly quickly, and that appears to be what's happening with Enceladus. And a liquid ocean under the ice would produce tectonic activity very similar to what we see on Earth. The icy crust will slide about on the water, crack open, melt and refreeze, potentially explaining the lack of craters.

This is where this article becomes a bit speculative. There's no suggestion that there's life anywhere in the known universe other than on Earth, but we do have a few likely candidates: hardy microbial life on Mars perhaps, or possibly even some funky methane eating organisms on Saturn's gigantic moon Titan. One of the best bets however, is anywhere you find liquid water, which puts Enceladus firmly in the "just maybe" category. We've got life on Earth which exists in a very similar environment, under the Antarctic ice cap for example, or deep in the ocean. There might be nothing - Enceladus might just be a dead snowball hovering too far from the Sun. The potential is certainly interesting though.

Cassini will be making another close pass on Enceladus this Tuesday (30th November, 2010), skimming past at a mere 48km. Even if there's no extraordinary new game-changing data from the plucky little space probe, we should at least get some very pretty pictures back.

The PiSBN Project

noreply@blogger.com (Geoff) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:33:00 +0000

I don't normally apologise for being a bit of a geek. There's a part of my brain that's into computers and space and science and all that, it's just the way things are.

But to be honest, even I cringe a little at my latest little project. Sorry about this.

Pi is an interesting number. It goes on forever, doesn't repeat itself, and appears to be entirely random. And in an infinite, random sequence, you get every possible combination of numbers eventually. Your phone number is in there somewhere. And every book written, if you convert the numbers into ASCII.

Searching Pi for books like that would be stupid though, you'll burn up the best computers on the planet before you get anything worthwhile. There is, however, a quicker alternative.

Almost every single book published since 1966 has an ISBN number. These days they all start 978, then there's another ten digits. The last one's a check digit made by multiplying the others up in a certain way.

So I wrote a program that searches Pi for ISBN numbers. Then it checks them to see if the check digit is a valid one. Then it looks the ISBN up on Google Books.

I got three hits in the first fifty million digits of Pi. It took about ten minutes. Actually, it took about three hours to write the thing properly, another hour debugging it, and a frustrated lie in the bath half way through. And about six cups of tea. Once it actually worked it was fairly quick though.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, I present for you edification and entertainment, the first three books in Pi. (Cue fireworks.)

At the four hundred and nine thousand, seven hundred and eighty third decimal place, we have:

Licentiate seminar on environmental engineering and biotechnology
by the Tampereen teknillinen korkeakoulu. Bio- ja ympäristötekniikka.
(Tampere University of Technology. Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering.)

I have to admit that I haven't read this one, but I'm quite chuffed that the first book (well, journal) is something a bit geeky.

In second place, at the two million, one hundred and twenty thousand, two hundred and fourth place, is:

Sneeuwwitje en Rozerood
by Jacob Grimm

Or as it's known in English, Snow White and Rose Red. And because the original is not covered by copyright you can get a copy from the excellent Project Gutenberg. Not hugely geeky, but there is something wonderfully gothic and conspiratorial about one of Grimm's turning up.

And taking the bronze, at the three million, six hundred and thirty thousand and thirty third decimal place:

The healing knife
by George Sava

A curious sounding book written under a nom de plume by a "noted Harley Street Surgeon".

I'll bet you feel better now that you know what the first three ISBN numbers are in Pi? I know I certainly do.

Sorry again.