A Tax on the Innumerate

Couple of days ago I was sitting in the lounge deleting old recordings from the hard drive of our PVR when The Mint was on. There was a word find puzzle on there, from which you were meant to find words beginning with A. I found aegis and I was sure that that would be one of their six special words that allowed you to win money, so I called them up. Call cost: 55c. Didn't get in. Tried again. Again, didn't get in. Tried again. Can you guess what happened? That's right, I didn't get in. I watched some more, not intending to make any more phone calls. A lady got in a guessed one of the six words. I thought, great, she'll get a thousand dollars! Nope. She was introduced to "The Vault" which needs a three digit combination to open. Ah.

With this information, I turned the TV off. Even if you got through every single time and guessed right, that still only means an expected earning of 45c per call.
Let's work this out. I tried calling three times, and didn't get in. Let's say very generously then that the probability of getting on to win some money is 1/4. Now let's further say that since there were about 12 words and only half were the ones they wanted, the probability of guessing right is 1/2. Now let us say that the vault has been reached by two previous people and you know that those numbers are invalid. So the probability of getting into the vault is 1/998.
Finally the expected value of earning for each call is given by the product of all the probabilities multiplied by the prize money, minus the cost.

Expected earnings:
1/4 * 1/2 * 1/998 * 1000
= $0.0000313

Subtract the cost:
Expected balance per call = -$0.5499687

Yeah.

Little Annoyances

t

That's right, people, here in Australia we keep left.
Speaking of which, here are a few common courtesy rules that help everyone:

1. Keep left on footpaths.

2. Allow passengers to disembark from a train before you get on.

3. Leave a bus from the rear entrance and enter through the front entrance.

4. Keep train doorways clear.

5. Old ladies and pregnant women first!

6. Allow people space to pass on on the escalator/travelator.

7. Lower the volume on your music player so other people don't have to hear your thrash metal.

8. Avoid shouting across carriages, laughing loudly and continuously, etc, anything that disturbs other passengers.

Darkness, be my friend ...

Darkness, be my friend

When light goes out, all friends long gone,
Darkness cloaks where no light is shone.
But when light is there in your heart,
Of it darkness can have not part.

Do not fear the gloom, embrace it,
For when alone in the dark you sit,
No friend there is but gloom within,
Then shadow itself will be your kin.

Say only, "Darkness, be my friend."
And darkness will not be your end.
For shadow cannot pierce the light.
Does not the day strike out the night?

If shadow shunned is shadow feared,
So surely loved is shadow neared.
Presently light may darkness rend.
'Till that time, Darkness, be my friend.

First Poem

No, this isn't my first poem ever, just the first poem on this blog. Also it's not mine - it was written by a friend of mine.

I wish I could live it again
But this time without the pain
I wish I could make a new beginning
This time a life worth living

I'm stuck in this life
One I didn’t want
Theres no way out
I wish I knew what it was all about

I wanna crawl into my bed
And forget the thoughts running through my head
Forget about this life I’ve led..

I sit alone
And I wonder why its gotta be this way
I was born to try
But I wonder why when all I find is pain
Is there more or did I lose it all before?

Remember when I said I'd had enough?
And I couldn’t go on?
But you made a promise
One you didn’t break
You said you'd be here
When I thought the end was near

The Worst Show in the Entire World

No, I'm not referring to Big Brother. I'm not referring to Home and Away. I'm not even talking about Pokémon. I am, of course, talking about Family Guy. Now I want to make it clear that I never watch American cartoon comedy, apart from the Simpsons. So I had never seen Family guy until long after it became seriously popular. The first episode I watched had me gagging after just a few minutes. I was at my friend's place with a bunch of other people and we were going to go to my house, so I implored them all to get going. But anyway, I sat through that one show. The only two things I can remember are little "imagined" snippets that the show is well-known for. The first one approached the German persecution of the Jews in a humorous way, with a group of hiding Jews being revealed to the SA because of the dad's unwillingness to stop eating potato crisps. The second involved a humorous depiction of incest. Anyway, after seeing that, and deciding that never again in my entire life did I want to see another second of it, many months passed and recently I was on a Christian camp, with the boys. One night we watched it, and it wasn't that bad, until it got about two thirds of the way finished. There was a little sketch involving Jesus Christ which was most irreverent, defaming, ridiculing. I almost couldn't believe my eyes.
I'm telling you now that show is the work of Satan and no conscientious Christian should watch it for a moment. I have rarely seen the like of it in terms of making the most grievous of sins the subject of humour. If you have any regard for God, I implore you DON'T WATCH IT.

Extra Terrestrial Life

So, aliens then. Lots of people are obsessed with the search for extra terrestrial life, and whenever a new molecule of water is discovered on an interstellar planet they do a press release so people think progress is being made. I for one do not see any reason why there should be extraterrestrial life, but I can think of a very good reason for finding earth-like xenoplanets. But, first things first.

The idea of life arising on other planets because it clearly has done so on this planet is a bit of a conundrum. No one really knows how life began on this planet in the first place, so no one can attest the the probability of it arriving spontaneously on other planets as well. Personally I don't think it's probable enough to expect any form of life other than earthlife in any part of the universe. However I do expect some earthlife on other planets in the solar system, and perhaps beyond.
Life on this planet has been going on for a fair few billion years, and any large meteorites hitting would result in a sort of ejecta cloud of bacteria and rock heading out of earth's gravity well. To reach Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighbour, in two billion years, a rock need only travel at about half a meter per second (on average). Which is possible. So I do expect that we might find some earthlife on moons and planets in this solar system, perhaps even others.
We will not, however, find intelligent, moral beings on other planets. There are several reasons why. The first is God. The creation account states that we are the only creatures made in God's Image, and if there are other moral beings this would be a rather glaring omission. Also, we were given the creation to "fill and subdue". If they are moral creatures too they would have the same mandate which would thus clash and would prove that the Bible was not the word of God. However it is the word of God, so we may be confident that no such first contact will ever be made.
And now we're getting to the second reason why there are no other civilised life forms. For any civilisation even slightly more advanced than us, colonising the Universe would be so easy that the fact we see no evidence of them is very strong evidence that we are the most advanced, if not only, civilisation currently in the Universe.

Now we come to the reason why it's good we're looking for planets that can sustain our kind of life: we can use them. When we learn to manipulate spacetime we will be able to travel anywhere in the Universe, so those planets are bound to come in handy some time.

Low-Level Stressors

Low level stressors are slight stresses to one or more of your body's systems or organs. These stresses can be caused by anything that would be harmful to your health in a large dose, for example X-rays, sunburn, carcinogens (cancer-causing chemicals), other toxins, high temperatures, heavy excercise and the like. Virtually everyone will tell you that these things are bad for your health, and they are right - a large dose of X-rays can kill within a few weeks, prolonged heavy excercise will dramatically shorten your lifespan and so on. But research has shown that for some of these, the exposure/risk relationship is not linear. In other words, exposure at high levels is harmful, but at low levels it may not be, or may even be beneficial.

The effect is called hormesis, and it is well known in the drug industry. Research has shown that some drugs which stimulate at low doses suppress at high doses (paracetamol, asperin), and vice versa. Some scientists now think that other stresses can act in much the same way, by stimulating your natural repair and defense systems and so increasing their effectiveness. You may have heard that people whose immune systems are not stressed are often sickly, whereas country dwellers who are exposed to a range of bacteria enjoy enviable health and freedom from allergies. It is now thought that other body systems work in the same way - a "use it or lose it" idea. A simple analogy is callousing. If your hand's skin is not stressed, it remains soft and pliable, and relatively easy for a thorn to enter. If you rub that spot on and off for a couple of weeks with a rock, the skin will thicken in response and sharp objects will have a much harder time getting through it. You may not want callouses on your hands, but people who play guitars without a pick need them to prevent their skin wearing through. Other organs and systems respond in the same way. Using your mind a lot will sharpen your perception, excercise strengthens your muscles and stimulates your heart and lungs to work more efficiently. So small doses of toxins, radiation and other stressors can build up the repair systems to be more robust and even reduce the effects of aging. Animals have shown important increases in longevity as a result of caloric restriction, which is now thought to operate as a low level stressor.

But there's no need to go on a near-starvation diet if you want to live longer. Just enjoy life a little closer to the edge.

Time travel?

We're all traveling through time, sort of. It's not that great though because we all travel through time at the same rate, at one second per second. The trick then is to travel at more than one second per second, or less, or even travel at negative one second per second. Fortunately, help is at hand because time travel is in fact possible, according to the laws of General Relativity anyway. Unfortunately, it doesn't involve a simple and cheap flux capacitor dissipating 1.21 GW. You need gravity, because you have to severely distort spacetime. In essence, there are two ways of making a time machine and both of them involve a singularity. A singularity is the sort of thing you get in the center of a black hole. It is a point, line or sheet of infinite density. When very massive stars die they sometimes collapse into a singularity, which is almost always obscured by the event horizon of a black hole. However there is no law that says they have to be hidden from view. But I digress.
When some matter collapses into a singularity it forms, for a very brief instant, a wormhole to another region of spacetime, in this universe or, more controversially, another universe entirely. The wormhole immediately pinches off though, but there is a way around that. What you need is some exotic matter, which is predicted to be left over from the big bang. No such matter has ever been found but in time with space exploration perhaps we might find some. What we need is cosmic string. Cosmic string possesses a peculiar property called negative pressure, which we can use to keep the wormhole open. Once we have created a wormhole, and located the other end, we must then move one mouth of the wormhole around at very high speed (I think you can see how difficult this is going to be) so that time slows down for it. Moving clocks run slow, so time slows down for moving wormhole mouths. We need to move it around fast enough for long enough to create and appreciable time difference between the two mouths. Then all we have to do is bring the two mouths together. If you travel from the mouth that moved to the mouth that remained stationary you will effectively travel into the future, whereas if you travel in the other direction, you will travel backwards in time. You can never travel backwards in time earlier than the creation of the wormhole though.
The second way to make a time machine is to take some neutron stars, ten will do, and spin them up really really fast. So fast that at the surface the instantaneous velocity is about half the speed of light. Then you need to align them all so they're pole to pole and they will collapse into a spindle singularity. At this point you may travel through time using the spinning singularity. It works because a rotating mass drags spacetime around with it, in theory. The earth does this too but you don't notice the effect because the earth is rotating very very slowly, and it is extremely light. But it's real, according to Einstein, and data is now available to confirm or refute it. The data is still being analysed, but it's assumed that it will be right. Anyway, in the region around a very quickly spinning, very heavy singularity, the effect is so strong that time and space start to interchange, so you can travel in a closed orbit around the equator of the singularity to travel forwards in time, or in the reverse direction to travel backwards in time. Again, you can only travel back to the moment is was created, but hey, it's time travel, and there's nothing that says you can't do it.

Greatness

What is greatness? Is it a quality with which one is born, or must it be earned? Is it merely the possession of great power, as in a great ruler, or is it something more? Is it mastery of your chosen path, or is it nothing to do with knowledge and power?

I think greatness is a quality of all who are truly good, who truly seek to serve and sacrifice themselves for others. Evil can never have greatness; it is a quality belonging only to those who are good and who act upon it. Evil can of course be great - some evils are worse than others, and more powerful than others, but that is largeness, not greatness. To be truly great one must serve.

At lest, that is how I see it.

Helium

Helium. On the face of it, rather a boring element. Doesn't really react chemically with anything. Most people's only contact with helium is in the form of helium balloons. Actually, though, helium is a very valuable resource. You might think that because it's very light, and all elements apart from hydrogen are the result of nuclear reactions, that it is common. And you'd be right - it makes up about 10-20% of all mass in the universe. The rest is hydrogen - all the other elements combined are insignificant. Down here on earth things are different, though. Here we have gravity to worry about. When helium reaches the upper atmosphere, some of it escapes into space. The reason for this is that at any given temperature, a volume of gas will contain some particles that are traveling faster and some that are traveling slower. The average of all these velocities gives the temperature. In the upper atmosphere some helium particles travel so fast that they escape the earth's gravity well. Escape velocity: Ve = sqrt(2Gm/r) where G is the universal gravitational constant, m is the mass of the body and r is the distance from the center of mass. Escape velocity from the earth's surface is about 11.2 km/s, which is of course VERY fast, faster than anything. It's about three hundred times the speed of sound. In the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere, at an altitude of 10,000 km the escape velocity is only 8.9 km/s. Now, of course, heavier gases will have lower RMS velocities because RMS kinetic energy is the same for all gases at a given temperature. Radon, one of the heaviest gases, is about fifty times heavier than helium. Kinetic energy: Ek = 1/2mv^2 where m is the mass of the body and v is its velocity. So radon's RMS velocity is just 13% that of helium. Heavy gases are not buoyant enough to reach the upper atmosphere though. Helium and hydrogen are and a lot of both of these gases is lost each year. Luckily we have plenty of hydrogen, locked away in water and other compounds. But helium doesn't form any compounds, because its electrons are very tightly bound, so it just migrates to the upper atmosphere and escapes. Jupiter doesn't have this problem so severely - it has such a powerful gravitational field that not even hydrogen can escape in any great amount. The same is true of Saturn and the other gas planets.
So our helium is escaping, slowly. So what. Well, there are a few natural processes that produce more helium, chief among which is radioactive decay. When Uranium decays eventually to lead it releases a few atoms of 4He on the way there, and these get trapped underground in oil wells and natural gas, which is where we get most of our helium from. Some 3He is formed by interactions in the upper atmosphere as well - when cosmic radiation starts frying nitrogen that's up there. These are the only sources of helium on earth, so we would be wise not to be so cavalier about the way we use it - balloons for instance.
So what is helium good for? Well, if you want to go SCUBA diving really far down, you're going to have to deal with the problem of the bends, eventually. At depth, the air you're breathing has to be higher pressure, to match the pressure of the water, and at high pressure the solubility of nitrogen in your blood increases dramatically. When you return to the surface too quickly the nitrogen becomes less soluble, and can't be breathed out fast enough, so it forms bubbles in your blood, same way a carbonated drink forms bubbles when it's opened. Helium has such a high RMS velocity that it doesn't dissolve in your blood very much at all, so if you breathe oxygen mixed with helium, you can go down to much greater depths and pressures without worrying too much about decompression.
Helium is also very useful for low temperature physics. Helium has no nett dipole moment, so helium atoms don't attract one another very well at all. It's also very light which means that it's fast, and quantum mechanical juggling due to uncertainty is very big. All this means that helium has to be at a very low temperature before it will liquefy. Helium doesn't freeze at all. Ever. So you can use it as a refrigerant gas for making things very cold because it's still a gas at 5K. It also behaves very strangely at these temperatures. It becomes a superfluid at around 2K - it's a sharp changeover, much like a change from liquid to solid. This means that it stops behaving like a regular fluid and starts behaving like a quantum mechanical fluid. This means, for one thing, that it can only have integer values of turbulence and rotation. Practically, this means that you can spin a bucket of liquid helium and the fluid will stay still until you spin the bucket fast enough for the first rotational quantum value. So it has stepwise rotation. It also flows with zero friction though fine tubes because it cannot become turbulent. It can only allow eddies of a certain size and angular momentum, and below this size no eddies can form, so no energy can be dissipated. An experiment has been conducted where a hollow torus was filled with fine powder and then liquid helium. The helium was set flowing around the ring, and it never stops. Water molecules would bash into the fine powder and stop flowing very quickly, but helium can't become turbulent at that scale so it just keeps on flowing.
It's interesting stuff, helium. Think about that next time you let a balloon float up into the sky.

Here we go again

My last few attempts to create a blog were beset by difficulties, chief among which was the fact that I didn't have the determination to continue. So lets see how it turns out this time around.

I think it's probably fitting to start with an update on where things are in relation to me.

Currently I'm a student at Monash University in Clayton, and have been for the last two and a half years, roughly, which means right about now is the Monash exam period. Oh joy. I have about nine days to study for my exams, then I'm traveling to Adelaide to see my girlfriend of two months, before returning here to Melbourne with her. Then it's crunch time. After that there's a rather different kind of crunch time when I have my 21st birthday party. Sooo many things stressing me. And so much time to be stressed in. Basically the whole of June can be written off as a total loss. But at least I'll have Karina with me.