Down with it

I’m shutting down this blog.

To the one and a half readers who visit this page, rest assured I’m not disappearing off the web. I’m setting up shop elsewhere, with two fellow bloggers who promise to keep things flowing. Prose that is a bit more purposeful or illuminating is what I’m aiming for, I’ll see how it goes.

As for this heap, sporadic rants are one thing, but two posts an year? Ansatz was never going to work. I’ll leave this message hanging for a few weeks and then dispense with the deletion.

Besides, what kind of a handle was Squidgy anyway?

The Rubber band engine, Part I

Rubber bands possess interesting thermal behaviour. Tugging hard at one of these causes an easily discernible warming- which, inasmuch as the reader has tried this before, is likely to find reasonable. (If intuition fails you on this count, you could try it now.) What is considerably harder to swallow, though, is that the stretched band cools as it snaps back when you let go. (Try it!)

Things get stranger when you rub your palms with an extended band in between- it tightens. To make this more perceptible, you could hang a weight at the end of a band, and hold a candle flame to it- the Feynman way. Assuming you manage to prevent the band from burning away (and snapping), it would shrivel up, pulling the weight!

The Matrix and the invisible crutch

The Matrix is fundamentally flawed.

Wait! Before you throw your mouse at the screen, curse loudly and call me a dunce for doubting that gem of cyberpunk soft science fiction, let me explain what I’m talking about.

Note: ‘Matrix’ with an uppercase m(‘M’) refers to the movie; ‘matrix’ refers to the matrix itself.

If you’ve no idea what The Matrix is, you probably won’t understand the reason behind this rant – but you can try. If you despise The Matrix from the depths of your belly, the little quibble I single out below will add little to your anti-Matrix agenda.

I am referring to the movie(s). The flaw I refer to, however, is not in the matrix itself (Let’s leave that to the Existentialists and the proponents of strong AI.), but in the logic behind the events that lead up to its creation.

The trouble begins (in what has become quite a cliché) when the skies are blackened, and the sun kissed earth (and more importantly, the sun fueled earth) goes cold (in more than one sense). The earth is a system that’s powered by the sun.(The earth is, in fact, a heat engine, but I reserve this treatment for a more elaborate post, with a little more rigor and less reference to cyberpunk culture) Cutting off the earth from the sun is exactly like unplugging your computer, only… different. A basic knowledge of the food chain on earth makes evident the sun’s role in keeping us alive (over the long term).

So what’s the problem? Well, the machines take over, mess with our brains, and start growing humans – with one single motive:

Energy.

The ice heat engine

No, the title’s not an oxymoron.

Water trapped in rocks is known to split them open upon freezing – this is in fact, one of the methods through which soil forms. The intense pressure it exerts suggests that the freezing of water may be utilized to do work for us. Here’s one way to go about it:

The simplest heat engine imaginable is a bucket of water at zero degrees celsius. If done very carefully, all the water can be made to solidify (thanks to the quintessential “infinitesimal” temperature difference) at the same temperature. Water expands when it solidifies, which means that with a piston like lid, the solidification of water at zero degrees can be used to raise a weight by a small height. Now the weight is removed, (moved horizontally, so we can neglect the energy used in doing so) and the ice is melted, again at zero degrees.

We have, in effect, created a heat engine that works at a single temperature.
And Viola! there we have it- the simplest perpetuum mobile ever built.

I’ll keep the math down…

Imagine translating the following sentence to the phonetic alphabet (The NATO version):

“CGI effects are cheaper and better today than a decade ago”

” Charlie Golf India space echo foxtrot foxtrot echo charlie tango sierra space alpha romeo echo space charlie hotel echo alpha papa echo romeo space alpha november delta space bravo echo tango tango echo romeo space tango oscar delta alpha yankee space tango hotel alpha november space alpha space delta echo charlie alpha delta echo space alpha golf oscar stop”

If the 200 page paperback (containing about 900000 words) you’re reading was published in the NATO phonetic alphabet, it would now contain about five times that – that’s 1000 pages and about three times the price for a four hour read. (which now takes upto twenty hours)

Imagine now, a community (the “phonecians”) that cannot associate ‘foxtrot’ with the letter ‘f’, or ‘tango’ with ‘t’. That is to say, they recognize the sequence “foxtrot-alpha-delta” to mean ‘fad’, but can’t recognize ‘f-a-d’ to mean the same. They shun the English alphabet (the ‘normal’ version) as abstract and complicated, and fail to realize how powerful symbols can be. These long-winded-phonecians spend about five times the time we do in communicating with each other, or in assimilating information from a document. (Slightly lesser if they’re used to it. Reading the first letter of each alphabet is equivalent to reading english, and we assume they cannot do so.)

The whole world’s gone Cargo Cult

What’s Cargo Cult Science?

If R.P.F could’nt convince you, there’s no way I can, so you might as well leave this section.

That article, putting it bluntly, is awesome. That speech was composed in the 1970′s, and you’d expect that people would be a little more scientific now – more than 30 years later. Apparently, the situation is just the same now. Worse, perhaps.

The problem, I’ve noticed, is that people rely too much on “experts” to do the science – and they’re happy to reap the benefits. Understandably, people find science, with all it’s jargon and technical language , intimidating. And so they decide (with a little help from their grades at school, maybe) that science isn’t their cup of tea. The further they move away from it, the more intimidated they are, although they’re probably too egoistic to admit it. Eventually, they excel at something else, something that involves lesser rigor and reasoning, and settle down to lead their lives in a “normal” fashion.

Can’t break even

The title refers to the “layman” definitions of the two laws of thermodynamics:

1>There ain’t such a thing as a free lunch.

2>Not only can you not win, you can’t break even.

The second law of thermodynamics is confusing. So much is taken for granted when stating the law (any “version” of the law), that you’re left wondering if it’s actually any good in the real world. Without going into the statement of the law, lets get a few things cleared up.

A world full of clichés

Think about it : when was the last time you heard something and went – “Aw c’mon, tell us something we don’t know.” You’re not a very observant person if you’ve never said this to yourself. The world is stocked full with clichés.

For the record, a cliché is an event, occurence or idea that has, owing to overuse, become so generic in nature that it no longer possesses the property it is intended to convey. In common language, a cliché is an idea that’s been ‘done to death’. (Instances of what I’m talking about. I’m not going to try and state them here.)

Why is this disgruntling? The need for a cliché generally arises when innovation and creativity are lacking -a clear indication that you’re stuck in a rut. When you’re giving a speech, for instance, the first example of any phenomenon that comes to your mind is the most generic one. When I tried to explain precession, (if you don’t know what precession is, try finding out. It’s fun.) the only example that came to my mind was a spinning top. How is the precession of a spinning top different from the precession of a frisbee, a football, a pencil or even the earth? The ‘spinning top’ is quite a cliché. I’ve tried, time and again to stay away from generic symbols or examples, but it doesn’t work that way.