Random science articles with funny stuff

Entropy and physics for idiots

2014-09-12T00:14:00.002+03:00

There's a big online industry on explaining scientific concepts. Most of them fail. The award for the most misunderstood and poorly explained concept is ... *drum roll* ENTROPY!!!.

But thanks to a bunch of rowdy guys and girls we have physics for idiots dot com. Let me link you to their thermodynamics and entropy article and be amazed:

IDIOTS FOR THERMODYNAMICS

A very weak analogy would the configurations of Rubik's cube when you're solving it. From one configuration to the final desired configuration you have a certain amount of configurations you have to go through. With each and every new state you know more about the past and future configurations.

How a computer language compiler works

2014-09-12T00:01:00.002+03:00

The programs that are written in languages like C++ or C are just text. Computers don't understand that text as it is. The program (the text) has to be compiled (translated into another language) into machine language which is the actual language that the CPU understands.

Why ? you ask. Well it's because development in pure machine language is slow and prone to errors. And machine language doesn't look like our spoken language which makes it hard to learn and understand.And because it takes a long time to learn machine language. And because people after a long time programming in machine language have observed some patterns emerging and they gave those patterns names like : for loops, do while loops, while loops, if decisional blocks, functions etc.

Like spoken languages, computer programming languages have an alphabet(lexicum) of words that mean(do) something. So the first thing that a compiler does is to analyze the words of a program, that's lexical analysis.

After the compiler checks using lexical analysis that the words used are the ones from the language it does does a syntax analysis. Syntax analysis checks if the combination of words used follow a predetermined grammar.

After syntax analysis comes semantical analysis in which the compiler checks if the meaning of the expressions made from the language's words make sense.

After that the compiler starts replacing expressions in the high programming language with expressions in assembly language. Before this step there can be a step of intermediate representation and intermediate optimization.

Here's a picture from a book called the "Dragon Book", a book about compilers.
This picture gives a good example how an expression in a high language is transformed(translated) into an expression in machine language :

The memory layout of a computer program and how a computer works.

2014-09-07T12:51:00.000+03:00

A computer program that is loaded into a computer's RAM has a distinct layout. Before we dive into how a computer program looks in memory we need to understand what is the computer offering us when it comes to memory management.

A computer's RAM memory is a long array of bits. Instead of reading and writing 1 bit at a time we read and write in chunks of 8 bits called bytes. If we want to read or write a location we need to know it's address. If our computer supports 32 bit addresses than we can work with:

2^32 = 4294967296 bytes which is 4294967296/1024=4194304 Kilo Bytes, which is 4194304/1024= 4096 Mega Bytes which is 4 Giga Bytes.

Adresses start at 0 and go all the way to 2^32-1.

You can think of a RAM memory as a long string of beads, each bead containing 8 bits.

A computer program is composed out of data and instructions.
Instructions tell the CPU what to do with data from memory. The only operations that a CPU does to data are mathematical/logical operations and moving data around memory operations.
Instructions and data are loaded into memory in segments. There are different segments for data and instructions. Segments as the name tells are just pieces of continuous memory that the central processing unit keeps tracks of. The CPU can discern between data segments and code segments.

When a program is loaded into memory, its data segment and code segment are loaded. Also there are other segments initialized. One is the stack data segment and the other is the heap data segment.

We have stack segment because programs are organized into functions that generate intermediate data when executed. That intermediate data lives from function execution beginning to function end, when the function finishes executing the intermediate data is deleted/erased. So we need a place to store that intermediate function data, the stack segment. The heap segment is for data that we compute when the program runs and we want to keep in between function calls. That data is erased when the program finishes executing.

What I've described above is a short description of how a CPU interacts with memory and how a program looks when it's loaded in memory. There a lot more details the most important being CPU registers. A picture is worth a million words, so look at this one:

Linux "-f" or linux "-z" or linux "-eq" or linux "-gt" ... ?

2014-09-06T15:47:00.000+03:00

Often friends and people that I know that start to have an interest in Linux end up doing shell scripting and they get their ears caught. I usually get e-mails with questions like this:

What is linux "-f" or linux "-z" or linux "-eq" or linux "-gt" or linux "-rf" or linux "-le" ?

The short answer for the above is that those are number and file tests/comparisons of korn/bash shells. Linux shells are the primary ways the users interact with Linux operating systems. With shells you can interact with the file system and execute programs. You can chain shell commands in scripts in a programmatic way.

Number and file tests/comparisons occur in shell scripting constructs such as :

if [ true ]
then
  # do something here
fi

You can replace the "true" between the [] with expressions that evaluate to true or false, for example:

if [ 5 -eq 5 ]
then
  echo "5 equals 5"
fi

The above decisional block in plain english is " if 5 equals 5 print the string "5 equals 5" ".

File tests/comparisons are:

"-d" file Test if file is a directory
"-e" file Test if file exists
"-f" file Test if file is an ordinary file
"-r" file Test if file is readable
"-w" file Test if file is writable
"-x" file Test if file is executable

Numeric comparison operators are:

"-eq"    Checks if two operands are equal or not
"-ne"    Checks if two operands are equal or not, if values are not equal then condition becomes true.
"-gt"    Checks if left operand is greater than    right operand
"-lt"    Checks if left operand is less than    right operand
"-ge"    Checks if left operand is greater than or equal to    right operand
"-le"    Checks if left operand is less than or equal to    right operand

I usually give people that want to learn shell scripting the finger/
This was another linux stuff article that nobody proably gives a damn about it.

Why we need to conquer space and how rockets work?

2014-09-03T01:00:00.000+03:00

   Space, the final frontier.
   Just why do we need to make space travel a common thing?
   Well there a lot of reasons but the main reasons are:

Energy
Technological advancement
Human species survival

    1. We owe our current civilization to the fact that we always want to travel faster and further. We always want to ease our work by means of machines. Travelling and machines require energy.

    Our everyday appliances and devices run on electrical energy, which is obtained from fossil fuels or other types of fuels. Our cars run on fossil fuel energy. Our bodies rely on chemical energy and so on. Everything in our world that we have today is based on energy. With the invention of agriculture we were able to achieve more food which is more energy for our bodies and minds. That gave us more free time to think about ways to better ourselves.

    To travel into space efficiently we have to have to great amounts of easy to produce energy. Traveling efficiently means to travel fast, because distances in space are of the order of billions of kilometers. You don't want to travel from point A to point in B in space in years because you will die of boredom, so you'll have to move faster. To make an object move faster you need energy.
    Currently we are not very efficient at producing and storing energy. Reaching space means that our millennial fight with finding a way of cheaply producing and storing massive amounts of energy will probably come to an end. Rockets are actually a pretty inefficient way of traveling because for a useful payload you need huge amounts of propellant.

    2. Interplanetary space is very inhospitable. There's no air. It's cold. It's full of radiation. And the distances are abyssal. To survive in the harsh environment of space we need technology. If somebody gets sick on a space ship that is light years away from the nearest hospital you need technology that can diagnose and cure diseases fast with very few resources. You need a way to efficiently grow or produce food. You need novel and efficient ways to repair or construct needed devices.

    3. It's nice and warm on planet Earth. The problem is that some stay stray comet, asteroid, planeton or runaway neutron star can hit the earth and wipe us out. Chances are quite high because it happened in the past. When sh*t hits the fan we need a way to abandon ship and the only way is by going into space.

    If you ever wondered what are the principles behing rockets just remember that it's all about Newton's 3rd principle, action and reaction.

I have written a nice post on the principles of Newtonian Mechanics:

newton's principles of motion

please check out these 2 sources :

Why modern art is bad, stinks and sucks in general ?

2014-09-03T00:30:00.000+03:00

This 5 minute video covers the reasons why the modern art sucks. Compared to days past art, modern art is just ugly. I don't understand why people enjoy modern art. It's soulless and made just to shock you. The so called modern art has been pushed because some people want to make money.

OBJECT ORIENTED PROGRAMMING IN A NUT SHELL... ALMOST

2014-09-02T22:06:00.000+03:00

So you want to learn object oriented programming?!

Good choice .But before you start learning with the style of an enraged spanish bull you should understand its premises.

Object oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm,that means a style of coding(google for paradigm).
Its purpose is to solve problems faced by coders and to make efficient the time spent coding.

Let's understand a computer programming language. Computer programming languages are cataloged in to 4 generations. The first generation is the machine code,pure CPU instructions.The 2nd generation are the assembly languages . The third generation are languages like C/C++,C#,Java,Delphi.
The 4th generation doesn't matter right now.

The generations appeared because when you do complex stuff using tiny,finite and simple bricks(machine instructions) you observe patterns. And if you give those code patterns a simple human readable name, you can make another program ( a compiler) to replace that name with the code it represents.

At one point people figured this:

With computer programs you are trying to solve problems from the real world. By programming you are actually describing OBJECTS from the real world in the solution world(the computer). You are making a functional/mathematical description of OBJECTS from the real world.
OBJECTS of one kind (species) have a mold(CLASS).

Now coming back to 3rd generation languages. In those languages you toy around with variables and functions. What if you can give a common name to a number of functions and variables that describe an OBJECT(rallied under one name,symbol)? To make an object out of different variables and functions we need to ENCAPSULATE those functions(methods) and variables(attributes). What if we want to INHERIT from another mold(CLASS) functions and variables or add functions and variables to an existing mold(CLASS) and give it a new name: we need to INHERIT.

The basics concepts of OOP:
-ENCAPSULATION
-INHERITANCE
-POLYMORPHISM (one name,different implementations|concept applied to functions a.k.a methods)
GOOGLE FOR MORE.

Nature's hardcore mating problems or the weird way nature reproduces.

2014-09-02T20:51:00.001+03:00

When you think about reproduction (or mating, or the act of copulation that spawns new individuals of a species) you think about two constituents of the same species of different sexes coming close for some time . One individual is a male and the other is a female, both are equiped with specialized reproduction organs.

Well... there are some species that lack external reproduction organs in one of the sexes. Also there are species that really don't like touching each other...

Our first case of weird mating habits comes from the ocean, the deep ocean. The deep sea squid is cannibalistic, that means they eat each other. That's one impediment, the other impediment is that the male is quite small compared to the female.
So how does a species that practices cannibalism that has small males compared to females reproduce ?

The male has dart like spermatophores that it shoots at the females. Exactly, the male comes close enough and shoots sperm filled darts at the female. The female is receptive to sperm all over her body. The species is called "Moroteuthis ingens".

Other species of squids just have the male wound the female with its beak.

The next weird are bed bugs. The female has no external sexual organs, so the male has to cut an opening into the female to delivers his genetic cargo.
The male has a penis that can cut into the females exoskeleton. The funny thing is that both males and females in some species of Cimicidae have the bladed phallus. So bloody fights ensue between horny males and not so horny females.
That's traumatic sex ...

Calculus vs. Algebra, a story

2014-08-31T14:18:00.000+03:00

   Calculus and algebra are two fields of study in mathematics.
   Calculus deals with the study of change in relations a.k.a equations. Calculus is split in to two parts, one studies the rates of change and slopes of curves and the other studies the area underneath curves and the accumulation of quantities. Hence differential and integral calculus.
   Algebra on the other hand is the study of operations and what you can do with them to solve equations a.k.a "dubious relations".

   The word calculus comes from the latin word "calculus" which means little stone. Outside the english speaking world, in the majority of countries, calculus is called analysis. Calculus was invented (or discovered) at the same time and independently by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz had a very good opinion about Newton and wanted to collaborate but Newton got all "super star" and obnoxious. No wonder Newton died a virgin. Leibniz's mathematical notation for calculus is used today.

The word algebra comes from arabic. Algebra is the latin version of the arab word Al-Jabr. This came from the title of a book, Hidab al-jabr wal-muqubala, written in Iraq roughly in 840 A.D. by the arab math man Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khowarizmi. Al-jabr in the book named the basic operation of subtracting terms from one side of an equation to the other. For example: x - 30 = 12 becomes x = 42.

For a more complete history of mathematics starting from ancient time go here:
http://www.storyofmathematics.com/story.html

World of Tanks... sort of

2014-08-29T23:07:00.001+03:00

I've been playing this little online tank game for a while. It's an open source game. You play against other players online by connecting to a server. And the size of the game is small. It's 14 megabytes, yes 14, not 140, just 14 megabytes.
But don't let the size fool you, this game has an isometric view that means it's in the style of Red Alert.

It has a fast gameplay. The game has been around since 1999 and it has conquered my heart. You can download it from here : (just google the image below)

Physics for idiots by an idiot, Newtonian mechanics

2014-08-29T12:46:00.002+03:00

    The media today is full of documentaries on the wonderful world of physics, the universe, quantum mechanics and a lot of physics subjects.
     The problem is that all of them teach nothing worth of value. The documentaries are there just to make you "WOW!", "OMFG!", "AYYY LMAO".
     To get into the wonderful world of physics you have to start with the basics, which is Newtonian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics is that wonderful subject that you study in your first year at university, it's simple but the professors stress that you should learn it like it's the word of God and they flunk a hell lot of students for not learning it.
   For good reason they flunk legions of students. In learning Newtonian mechanics you learn the principles on which every other subject of physics is built upon.
     Newtonian mechanics is composed of 3 parts:

Cinematics - how objects move

Dynamics - why objects move

Statics - why objects don't move, are at equilibrium

So let's begin with dynamics. Dynamics is concerned with the reason why objects move or grind to a halt.
If you ever took a moment to reflect about the physical world you would have come to these conclusions:

Objects are in 2 states:

physical objects (cars, people, etc) are stationary

physical objects move with constant speed or increasing/decreasing speed

2. The most important 3 properties of the physical world you can perceive are:

time
distance
mass

Examples:
"A physical object with a certain mass moved some distance in a period of time. If we split the distance that the object moved in equal consecutive lengths, the object moved through those equal consecutive lengths in equal amounts of time or in different amounts of time for each equal and consecutive length."

The example above gives you an intuitive feeling of what speed and acceleration is:

speed is distance that an object moved in an amount of time : Speed = distance / time.
acceleration is the variation of speed in time, meaning that the speed of an object increased or decreased with time: Acceleration = (Speed at time t1 - Speed at time t2)/ time.

The reason why objects start moving with constant speed or variating speed is force. If an object is moving at constant speed that means that initially the object was stationary and a force acted on it for a distance and the start moving. The reason why an object is moving with increasing speed or decreasing speed is that a force is still apllied on it.

    Let's recapitulate: physical objects move and the reason why they move is that a force acted or is applied to them.

    Let's say you find a spring around the house, you play with it and you come to the conclusion that the spring generates a force when compressed. You fix it to a vertical wall and take 3 objects of same size and shape but different masses. You make a little experiment where you compress the spring with those 3 objects and you observe how the objects start moving:
1. You measure the acceleration that the objects achieve when the spring acts on them,
2. You measure the acceleration that the objects have after losing contact with the spring.

    At point 1 you measure that the objects have a non zero acceleration, at point 2 you observe that objects have zero (0) acceleration but a constant speed.
Fooling around with the measured accelerations on a piece of a paper you observe that the acceleration of object 1 times the mass of object 1 is equal to the acceleration of object 2 times the mass of object two equals the mass of object 3 times the acceleration of object 3:

m1*a1=m2*a2=m3*a3

Congratulations you have found the formula that describes the quantity of force:

FORCE = MASS * ACCELERATION

F= M * A;

Isaac Newton understood this and he put all of the above obersvations into three simple laws, "Newton law's of motion":

Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.
The relationship between an object's mass m, its acceleration a, and the applied force F is F = ma. Acceleration and force are vectors (as indicated by their symbols being displayed in slant bold font); in this law the direction of the force vector is the same as the direction of the acceleration vector.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Example: You are on a boat near the shore. You take a paddle and you push against the shore. What you are doing is applying a force on the shore, a force for example F = 20 Newtons. The object you apply force against is the planet earth itself, the earth won't move because its mass is huge and if you calculate earths acceleration for the force you applied using a=F/earth's mass you will see that the acceleration is really really small 0,0.......................01. Earth than applies the same force on you and the boat , you start moving in the opposite direction. The forces that you apply and the reaction force of earth are equal, they don't cancel each other out because the force you apply has it's application point on the earth(shore) and the reaction ( the force earth is applying back) has its application point on you.

Paper microscope

2014-08-28T01:09:00.001+03:00

The paper microscope is for those that don't have money to buy a real microscope. Fun part is that it works. It really works. A microscope for 50 cents.

It has 2,000X magnification with sub-micron resolution (800nm). It's made for citizen science. It's called the foldscope and can be found here :foldscope.com

Doctor Who!? Not a hate post.

2014-08-28T01:01:00.000+03:00

Am I the only one that finds the so called sci-fi show "Doctor Who" a boring waste of time?

In a nutshell it's just some nerdy time traveling nerd-ball and his wench in my opinion and nothing more. The Doctor is a narcissistic character followed around by a blonde that claps at his successes.
The show paints an universe that nobody would want to live in and nobody would dare to imagine it because just boring. It's just like warm beer, from England. Doctor Who is the sour pill in the world of sci-fi shows that has managed to brainwash a legion of clappers.
Compared to other sci-fi shows it looks like the crack baby of the industry that is successful because it's the only crack baby around. People look at it like at some exotic freak.
I know I haven't brought in serious arguments for my opinions expressed above but Doctor Who is just an "180 and scoot". Different from the bunch.

Phone booth... eh. Tardis... eh. Daleks... eh. Bleah

Robert Finale paintings

2014-08-24T15:11:00.002+03:00

Robert Finale is the artist take captures your dreams. His warm style that catches glimpses of the human soul in landscapes is amazing:

You want to change your personality ? Seriously ! There is an answer

2011-10-12T15:09:00.000+03:00

Single dose of hallucinogen may create lasting personality change... It's a genious discovery, I don't have to drop rocks on my head to get the attitude I want. I just have to drop aome mushrooms

Here's the link:

SHROOOOMS!!!

Linux kernel noobies!

2011-05-17T12:26:00.000+03:00

Hello people. If you are in to the developing thing and want to do something on Linux I have a nice link:

Kernel/seeds

What do we have here ? Cool unix cheat sheets. Get them. They are good deal

2011-04-29T17:02:00.000+03:00

You should throw your vision on these cheat sheets for *nix. Trust me they are good.

Cheat sh..eet! One

The one Page Linux Manual

I love rocks,especially geology !

2011-04-16T21:10:00.000+03:00

Rocks are all the stuff. I have rocks everywhere my house,even in my head. Geology ! Hell yeah ! *looks at noose*

Do you know geologists are actually payed pretty damn good. In the resource extraction industry you really have to know where to dig or drill, geologists know that.

Hello! Here are some video lectures on electricity and magnetism !Enjoy !

2011-04-07T17:19:00.000+03:00

The link to what is written in the title:

ELECTRICITY !!! MAGNETS ... HOW DO THEY..?

HA! Brigs back memories. I need a napkin.

2011-04-04T21:17:00.000+03:00

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen!

2011-04-04T00:47:00.000+03:00

               I was thinking today... Do you know what's the secret of life ? I don't know. But looking around, measuring other folks life and mine of course I came to a sinister conclusion. Success in life is achieved when you have found your place, in every aspect of this world.

             To find your place you need a path to that place, that path becomes more clear and clear as you gather details about your finality. Remember ,detail. The second thing is adaptability. If the wall is not moving blast a hole. What I am trying to say is that you need to think,always ask yourselves if the path is the correct one. Always ask yourselves if the map is ok. Like images , the more pixels you have and the larger the number that describes the level of colors the CLEARER the image is. Strive to have a clear "vision". You don't have to think like a winner,you don't have to think like a loser. You have to think like a human that likes to see things working.

            The mistake that you should avoid , one of the most abominable sins is laziness. You know ,you're not missing anything interesting if 2 hours a day you study a subject of interest for your path.

The vi editor and emacs in Linux.They are text editors people. Not snails.

2011-04-03T00:46:00.000+03:00

Here's a survival guide using the vi editor and emacs under Linux. Straight to the point.
I use vi.

Le survival :

Oh le FUUU!

Wow! A nice introductory video course on programming!

2011-04-02T17:58:00.000+03:00

This video and the videos that follow really share concrete knowledge when it comes to programming

and the abstrascts behind it.You can learn how to develop software,or if you want a new perspective here it is:

Watch it on Academic Earth

Linux security how to

2011-04-01T14:17:00.000+03:00

A great link to an article that covers linux security. A bit old but but still works:

Security-HOWTO

Asterisk passowrds to reveal ... no problem

2011-03-30T18:41:00.001+03:00

Hello, having trouble with finding browser asterisk passwords?

Please have a look at this:

Le asterisk!