The Million Word Year

One man. One blog. One year. One million words.

Archive for July 8th, 2010

Mood Ring : Melted pink wax floating in brine

Jul 8

Posted by MegaWordMan in Journal | No Comments

It’s too fucking hot.

Fat guys hate heat. The reason is simple : every cell in your body produces heat as part of cellular metabolism. That’s the flory of being a mammal. We’re self-heating, and can keep out bodies at peak temperature via our cooling and heating systems. Homeostasis.

At least, that’s the theory. But fat people like me mess with that, because while our larger number of cells means we produce more heat by volume, our skin only radiates heat via surface area. It’s a classic cube-root problem. And while it looks like we have lots of extra skin, in reality we don’t have that much more surface area than a normal-weight person.

So our cooling systems are already overtaxed even at a neutral temperature. Hence, the Sweaty Fat Guy Syndrome. Our bodies have to work harder to maintain anything like a proper temp even in good conditions.

So when it gets hot out…. often, our bodies just can’t keep up. We sweat profusely (and the more surface area, the more sweat!), we get heatstroke and heat sickness easily, we dehydrate very rapidly from all that sweating unless we hydrate continuously, and in general, we’re bloody miserable.

On days like that, I feel very much like The Fat Man in Casablanca, furiously mopping his forehead with a handkerchief and complaining bitterly about the heat.

World : Can Mir fix oil leak?

Jul 8

Posted by MegaWordMan in World | No Comments

Not the space station Mir. The pair of incredibly tough and powerful Russian submersibles named Mir-1 and Mir-2. The captain of one of these vessels is claiming that these two submersibles have what it takes to go down there and fix this thing.

It’s a hell of a claim, to put it mildly.

And it’s a hard claim to evaluate, due to the large quantity of technichalia involved in trying to understand how to fix the oil leak in the first place.

And, to be honest, Russians have been know to get in over their heads with the bragging from time to time.

But if the claim is true, and I think it might well be, then we as a planet need to drop everything and get their plan working ASAP.

The subs are definitely unique. They have spent three seasons exploring Baikal, the world’s deepest lake, located in Siberia. So it’s probably a pretty COLD lake too.

According to the Wikipedia article on the Mir subs :

The units are designed for pressure at 6,000 metre depth, and have been tested to 125% of that pressure. In field testing, Mir-1 descended to 6,170 m and Mir-2 descended to 6,120 m.

And also according to Wikipedia, the oil leak is at a depth of around 5,000 metres. SO by the numbers, the subs can work at that depth no problem. And these are no robots. They are manned vehicles with extremely experienced crews who are used to dealing with these sorts of depths.

So who know, they could be right. It could be that the Russians have the only subs in the world capable of dealing with this problem, and that honestly, we should give them whatever cooperation will be required in order to help them go in and do their thing.

It’s not just a case of transporting the crafts and their crews, though :

But Mr Chernyaev added that such an operation would have a chance of succeeding only if BP or the US government asked the Russian government to join efforts to stop the leak.
Yevgenii Chernyaev Mr Chernyaev said the problem had to be addressed at the highest level

“It should all be decided on the government level. Asking [Anatoly] Sagalevich [of Russia's Shirshov Insttute of Oceanology, which owns the subs] to simply bring the Mirs over is nonsense. Even though we’re able to go to much greater depths than where the damaged well is located, we wouldn’t be able to do much on our own.

“We need a team of international specialists and we have to know all the details and probably even build a special device to attach to the subs, and all this needs time,” said Mr Chernyaev.

In other words, the international community should stop fucking around and put together a team with the right equipment, the right expertise, and the right support and stop expecting BP to suddenly become competent overnight and fix the damn thing. Obviously, they are incapable. This has to be taken out of the hands of incompetents and treated like a military operation, not some obscure corporate problem fit only for gossip and head-shaking.

Obama. You say you are taking personal responsibility for the problem. Yet you do nothing. This suggests that the notion of personal responsibility does not mean a whole lot to you.

That’s not good.

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LOL : Canceled TV Love Song

Jul 8

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Video | No Comments

More goodness from College Humour, this time a charming bubble-pop love song to all the awesome television shows that were canceled before their time.

I didn’t watch a lot of these shows, but they had me at Arrested Development. That show was simply the best thing on television ever. Everything about it was incredibly high quality, from the writing to the performances to the editing to… just everything. It was hilarious to the point of pain, and honestly made me feel better about the world because the world now had something this good in it.

It was okay.

And of course, Mister Show was kickass too. And also featured David Cross…. hmmm. Anyhow, best skit comedy produced in the last 30 years, no argument, no hesitation. Not every skit is a gem, of course, but enough of them are pure brilliance that it made me realize what modern skit com could be.

Let’s see… oh right, Firefly! And Angel! Loved both of those shows, and liked the Firefly movie up until the last part when it suddenly become a typical American action film with a big noble goal and a big noble action scene and whatnot. What I always like about Firefly was that the scale was kept low. They were just a ship full of people trying to get by. No galaxy-saving, no cosmic evil thwarting, just a family of friends, thrown together by fate, trying to make it through life.

It’s the same with Angel, actually. I find I liked the show most in the first two seasons, when there was no big over-arching plot, and Angel was just one fangy guy trying to help regular people out of supernatually bad situations.

I got thoroughly burned out on high-scale drama by being a Marvel reader for many years as a teen. Every other minute, it seems like someone was saving New York, no, the Earth, no, the galaxy, no the WHOLE DAMN UNIVERSE, or even the MULTIVERSE. (Yes. There’s a level about “Universe”. I know that makes no sense. ) You get really, really tired of it. It becomes like a magician who keeps pulling increasingly larger rabbits from his hat. Yeah, great, the rabbit thing… do you do ANYTHING ELSE?

And yes, these shows are always with us due to DVD, which is AWESOME. But what I find irritating is when it’s a show that REALLY got killed early, like Greg the Bunny, and the DVD box brags about how it contains the ENTIRE SERIES!

Yeah, of course the whole series fits in one DVD box, that’s cause you bastards canceled it! You don’t get to cancel a brilliant and awesome show and then turn around and try to make that a selling point. Assholes.

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Cool : LEGO on LEGO violence!

Jul 8

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Video | No Comments

A rather impressively executed bit of hardcore action film goodness brought you to by LEGO stop-motion animation and a lot of time and effort.

I’m particularly impressed with the camera work. They really captured the modern hand-held look, with the point of view tight and not always exactly centred on the action. And of course, swinging around with cartoon “woosh” sounds, as though you were right there, watching, provided you a) had just got a short buzz haircut after having grown your hair down past your knees and B) snap your head around like it’s you’re first day with a new and more powerful neck.

Also, good frame count. A lot of the LEGO animation you see online is hindered by the creator’s desire to get this done in as few key frames as possible, resulting in a jerky and unconvincing animation from, basically, sheer laziness. But these animators took their time and did all the key frames (and supporting frames) they needed to do in order to make everything look good.

One thing I noticed : in a scene like this, we automatically sympathize with the first guy we see, and want him to win. Technically, that makes no sense. For all we know, our crazed bearded friend could be the worst criminal the world has ever known, and his glory death in a hail of bullets could be the sort of thing that causes worldwide celebration like the “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” scene from the Wizard of Oz raised to the power of the Jub Jub song from the end of Return of the Jedi.

But no, when we have nobody else to latch onto, we automatically identify with the first person we see on screen, and we want them to win and not get hurt.

I’m sure there is some kind of lesson in regards to politics and democracy in that.

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LOL : Video Game Super Easy Modes

Jul 8

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Video | No Comments

More classic video game fun from the folks at College Humour.

I wasn’t keen on the premise at first, as it seemed pretty obvious, but some of these vignettes are funny and creative despite that. The Duck Hunt one needs the dog to pop up and look terrified. No Duck Hunt comedy is complete without that damn dog.

But the one that really sold me on the clip was the Battletoads one. I, like presumably millions of others, really loved Battletoads, it was an awesome game, EXCEPT FOR THAT GOD DAMNED BIKE PART. It was WAY too hard and too unforgiving. The first time I rented Battletoads, I just plain gave up on the game at that point. I said “Fuck it. It’s not worth this amount of pain to play a game. ”

And over and over again, I pictured doing EXACTLY what is depicted in the clip. Just pick up the bike and walk to the end, nice and slow, no fiery instant deaths required. Only travel at speed for the jumps.

I’m sure the makers of the game thought it would be a fun, exciting, action-movie type experience. But it just didn’t work out that way. It was too damned hard.

And the Contra section was funny just for the final boss sitting there humming to himself. It was cheap humour, especially the “aw crap”, but it still works. LOL.

And I got a kick out of Completely Unfair Pong.

So, good job, College Humour, as usual!

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Update : Solar Impulse makes historic flight

Jul 8

Posted by MegaWordMan in Science, Technology | 2 Comments

Yesterday, I told you about the Swiss plan Solar Impulse, which was going to try to fly all through the night on its solar batteries and “stored” altitude.

Good news, everybody! It made it through the grueling 26 hour flight without a problem.

Also, it turns out I was quite wrong in my assumption that this was a small pilotless test vehicle. There was a pilot, a brave soul named André Borschberg, and the plane is actually a huge beast with a 200-foot wingspan and 10,000 solar panels.

Obviously, this shreds all my speculation about slowly increasing payloads over time. If it can carry a person, it could certainly carry packages and other things normally left to a courier.

There’s still the question of whether the fuel savings justify the expense of the vehicle or any losses in speed or flexibility. But that’s something to worry about much later. This is the all-important prototype/proof of concept stage. The idea is to prove that a completely solar plane that can fly virtually indefinitely is possible. Actual practical applications can wait until much later in the design cycle.

After all, when the Wright Brothers took their history flight at Kitty Hawk, they didn’t do it in a modern commercial jet plane. They did it in a jury-rigged contraption that could easily have killed them.

Still, it’s fun to speculate. I know that the cost of the fuel is a large percentage of the operating costs of an airline. So it’s possible that if this technology scales up to at least passenger prop plan size, it could offer a cheaper and more eco-friendly form of travel for certain people under certain circumstances.

And of course, this is all based on the energy capacity of the current level of solar cell technology. No doubt all those solar cells are quite heavy, and tax the power to weight ratio of the vehicle considerably, and when you are talking ten THOUSAND of the things, a comparatively small improvement in either the weight or the power efficiency of the cells could make an enormous difference in the performance of the vehicle.

I’m still holding out hope for some sort of quantum leap in solar technology. The efficiency of solar cells is still too low to be truly practical. If we could double it, solar would become far more viable very quickly, especially if it can also make them cheaper and easier to work with.

Imagine if they could make the solar car.

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Thoughts : Genuineness versus calculation

Jul 8

Posted by MegaWordMan in Articles | 1 Comment

This is a subject that haunts my darker thoughts and informs a lot of my self-examination.

Generally speaking, if someone is described as “calculating”, it’s considered an insult. It’s a negative attribute. If someone is calculating, the implication seems to be that they do not act out of genuine feeling, but instead choose their actions according to their own self-interest and/or to advance their personal agenda. Thus, a calculating person is considered both dishonest and fake, and worse, inhuman. Humans feel. Computers calculate. That’s just how it goes.

But what does being calculating really mean? I find it hard to find the real objection. What is wrong with letting yoru intelligence guide your reactions and your actions? Thinking about things, at least to an intellectual like me, seems like someone we want to encourage. Certainly there’s a lot of problems with simply acting out of emotion. We’re sentient beings, not hormonal automata. We have the option of choosing our actions instead of merely acting out of instinct. And isn’t that all being calculating really means?

I think part of the problem is a false dichotomy between thought and emotion. It’s either genuine feeling or cold calculating forethought, no middle ground, and certainly no chance of both at the same time. I think the real question is a lot more complex than that. At least, I hope it is.

For you see, the reason that this question haunts me is that on the one hand, I am a thinker. I try to think every decision that I make through, and pick the best choice. I’m not a person who relies on intuition or “goes with his gut” very much. If I am forced to make decisions faster than I can think them through, I tend to become panicked or depressed.

On the other hand, I also put a very high value on my own honestly and candor. I consider myself a genuine person. I have my complexities and my hidden layers, but for the most part, what you see is what you get. I don’t fake anything. I mean what I say, and I say what I mean. This is very important to me. I can’t stand falseness or insincerity. I don’t even want to lie for people if I can at all avoid it, even when I completely agree with their reasons for concealing the truth. The notion of that sort of falseness offends me.

So when, in the past, I’ve been accused of being cold and calculating, I’ve not really known how to respond. In a sense, it’s true, in that I try to calmly and rationally assess my options and choose the one with the best outcome for all concerned according to my own sense of empathy and ethics. But I do this because I care deeply about the consequences of my actions. I’m not a sociopath weighing everything by personal material gain. I am a deeply ethical person who is also a deep thinker, and when you put those two together, it can appear like I am calculating and cold from the outside, but in fact, I care so much that I am willing to suppress my initial emotional response and focus on using the best of my reasoning and judging abilities in order to make sure I don’t hurt anyone unnecessarily and choose, for lack of a better term, the most intelligent option available to me.

Deep down, I know this to be true. And yet, the question of my own emotional warmth and genuineness still haunts me with doubt and reflection. I find myself questioning myself in moments of high emotional content, when I notice I am carefully picking my options in a situation where it seems like a normal person would simply be acting from their heart, and I wonder whether I really am a cold fish. Is there something wrong with me? Am I dead inside in some terrible, tragic way?

Arguably, like most things, it’s likely a matter of balance. A normal human being has a balance between calculation and emotion. And perhaps my balance is off, and I calculate a little too much sometimes.

But I swear, honest to goodness, I am just trying my hardest to do the right thing.

And deep down, I simply trust in intellect to be the best guide to finding the right thing.

Thoughts : America is crazy

Jul 8

Posted by MegaWordMan in Articles | No Comments

It really is. If countries were people and the world truly a village, America would be in and out of the psych warn of the village hospital all the time.

I say this not as a condemnation, but as the result of many years of thinking and my direct observation of Americans and how they think and work as a nation from the years I spent living there.

It took living among them for a while to really grasp it, and even then, I only really got it once I had moved back to Canada and the contrast was sharp and clear in my mind.

In the USA, I would speak to people about politics, and allude to the idea of political insanity somehow. Invariably, the people I was talking to would loudly proclaim “YEAH, THOSE OTHER GUYS ARE REALLY NUTS, AREN’T THEY?!?”, at which point I would be thinking “Jesus, calm down, you’re just as nuts as they are. ”

It really didn’t matter what political stripe these people were, on my leftish side of the fence or on the right, when you begin to talk politics and other things above the personal level, Americans go crazy.

Now I will state right here that I am judging the USA to be insane by Canadian standards, although I have a feeling a lot of the rest of the world might agree with me, or at least, my conclusion.

But I truly feel that if any Canadian citizen behaved the way America does as a nation, we’d think that person was completely insane and a raging asshole besides.

In fact, we’d probably suspect he was an American. Trust me, we can tell. It’s usually not too hard.

I also want to stress that I do not think Americans, as individuals, are uniformly insane. As individuals, they are as likely to be crazy or sane as any other nationality. I’ve got a lot of American friends online, I met lots of nice people who were quite kind to a lost Canadian when I lived in the US of A, and I sincerely believe Americans to be, by and large, nice people as individuals.

So if you are an American reading this, know that I am not saying that you, personally, are definitely insane.

I’m just saying that, as an American, you’re as much a part of the national insanity as any other American.

Like I said, I’m not offering a condemnation here. Instead, the reason I want to explain this fact on this blog is not to offend Americans but to comfort my fellow non-Americans.

For you see, there are few things more stressful and insanity-inducing in human existence than trying to deal with an insane person as though they were sane. When you do that, you have no choice but to find their cray behaviour stressful, confusing, frightening, and in the end, literally maddening.

But once you accept that this person is not rational and is, in fact, crazy, suddenly a giant burden is lifted from your mind and your soul. You say “Oh, I get it, they’re crazy!” and suddenly it all makes sense and you are no longer stuck trying to make sense out of things which make no sense.

I think that if the international community simply accepted “America is crazy” as their credo when dealing with Uncle Sam and all his nieces and nephews, it would not only release them of their burden of doubt, fear, and worry, but lead to better, smoother relations between the USA and the world in general.

And for all my American friends reading this, feel free to declare me to be American-bashing and a hater and unfair and biased, and suggest that maybe you’re the sane ones and everyone else is nuts, and so forth and so on. It is both your right to think so and your national character to go ahead and do it.

But please believe me when I say that if the world simply accepted the insanity of the USA, you would go from being the “rich pushy loud asshole” of the world village to the “wacky local character” of the world village, and you’d actually get a lot more love.

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Tech : Robot fetches beer

Jul 8

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Science, Technology, Video | No Comments

Demonstrating the true nature of engineers, a bunch of geeks who work together decided to invest their time and energy into building a robot that fetches beer.

Personally, I think they kind of cheated. If you take a look into the lower right corner of the video and keep an eye on it, you’ll see just how often they sped up the film in order to make it look like the robot acts a lot faster than it does. You’d better not want that beer any time soon. Ten minutes from now, sure. Be definitely not faster than just getting up and getting the damned thing yourself.

Still, it’s impressive work in terms of the robot’s AI. The fetching of a beer is a remarkably sophisticated task for a robot, incorporating a lot of tricky motor functions and good video processing. The state of the art on visual recognition systems like facial recognition has advanced substantially lately, but it’s still a fair bit of design and coding to give your robot even the most rudimentary ‘vision’. They are still, compared to a human, practically blind. They have the same amount of data as us, but they can’t process it like we can.

And I love the design. That round white smooth look for robots never goes out of style, in my opinion. It looks so clean and friendly that it goes a lot way to defusing any potential scariness attached to having a human sized robot moving around. Even a beerbot can be scary if you’re not expecting it, or if t moves towards you suddenly.

We’re a long way from the domestic robot we’ve been promised since the days of electrification.

(Try to imagine how it would feel to experience electric light for the first time in your life, when before all you’d known is candles and lanterns. It would seem like a miracle from God, wouldn’t it? But I digress. )

The history of robotics, it turns out, ended up being a sort of inverse history of our understanding of just what goes into being a human being. It was easy, in the days before information theory and programming, to imagine that making a robot butler was not a whole lot different than making any of the other modern miracles like the sewing machine or the washing machine or the automobile.

But with every generation who gave it a shot, often expecting that some sort of household robot was right around the corner, we learned more and more about just how complicated and sophisticated a machine each human being truly is, and how hard it was to make something that was even as competent as a very low intelligence person, let alone smart enough to be useful to have around the house.

I’ll resist the urge to make any predictions about whether or not I’ll live to see the butler robot. We’re closer than we’ve ever been…. the Roomba and its kin prove that… but it’s impossible to predict when that key insight into human intelligence and/or AI will occur that makes it possible. It’s not the sort of problem that easily lends itself to a dedicated direct effort, because it’s really a problem of understanding, a philosophical issue. When we work it out, I have no doubt it will be the sort of synapse-leaping Einstein-level insight that seems blindingly obvious the moment you grasp it.

But until then, we can’t even build a reliable robot ant.

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Science : Diamond bullet fusion

Jul 8

Posted by MegaWordMan in Science, Technology | No Comments

No, it’s not the latest Schick razor with eleven blades, six moisturizing strips, a thermonuclear gel dispenser and a vacuum attachment that gives triple-diamond blowjobs.

It’s a theory put forward by some Chinese researchers that we could get that ever-elusive fusion sparked up if we could shoot a diamond bullet at 1000m/sec at some frozen methane.

So far, all that has happened with this theory is that the Chinese researchers have done the necessary math and run some simulations. But the simulations say that the kinetic energy of the bullet would be transferred in the form of a shockwave to the crystalline methane, which would create the heat and pressure necessary to achieve fusion ignition.

Like most fusion solutions, it ain’t cheap. It would take an enormous amount of energy to get our magic bullet up to speed. But according to their results, you will still get more energy out than you put in.

I like this solution because it suggests that fusion thinking is moving past the BFI (brute force and ignorance) stage and becoming more sophisticated. For too long, fusion thinking has been trapped in a one-dimensional “just add more stuff” mentality, which makes the fusion equation hard to fulfill. When you put so much energy into starting it, it’s hard to start a reaction that will exceed that investment. You are stacking the odds against an energy profit.

This diamond bullet idea is a step in the right direction. It shows that the researchers understand that energy comes in many forms, and while this is certainly not a backyard science type of theory, it is less energy intensive than many other fusion ideas.

Basically, I think we have to realize that we are not going to get practical, useful fusion power via any straight-ahead, linear method. If we ever succeed in sparking up a reaction and creating our own little stars, it will be because we found a cheat, a short-cut, a trick, that lets us get the effect of a huge energy investment without actually having to make one. We will discover some obscure effect, some little-known peculiarity in how things work, and by exploiting it to the fullest, we’ll find the royal road to fusion.

Pitting the most rigid substance in the world against the crystalline structure of methane at extremely high speeds is definitely a step in the right direction. Expense aside, it’s a considerably simpler solution that many of the others which are dependent on tricky things like massive magnetic fields. Taking a small object and accelerating it with a linear accelerator to very high speeds is something which is old hat, science wise.

Who knows? This might be the beginning of the first real, workable fusion system.

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