Category Archives: Science

Obsolete Technology – yesterday – today – tomorrow

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I ran into this video teaching us how to use a dial telephone…

… and that got me to think.

From today’s point of view, this is obviously funny, but I tried to imagine what things that we consider high-tech today will look really funny to my son when he is my age.

Speaking of my son, I have noticed one piece of technology I grew up with that he already has no personal experience with: the tick-tock of a clock. He might still know that a clock in the distant past did make such a sound, but he has never heard it himself.

Or the first super-high-tech wrist watch I had – with red LED segmented numbers. These LEDs used so much power that I had to switch them on – and off right away – to see the time. Very inconvenient at a party where you were fondling a glass of whiskey on the rocks, trying to look as cool as your watch. Very uncool to put the glass down just to push the little button on your other wrist and realize that, after two hours of looking cool, you still didn’t have the nerve to talk to the cute brunette.

So, what’s the item with the biggest cool factor today? Maybe tablets like the iPad. I believe this is a good candidate to look ridiculous in 20 or 30 years. Imagine you’re lugging around a book-sized slate – just like Moses did when he came down the mountain – only to access some information, or look up an address. Tomorrow you simply say your search term into the ether and the information materializes right in front of your eyes, or even better, you just pose the question in your mind and the answer is directly delivered to your own synapses via a synaptic interface – – – who needs eyes – – – maybe we have them closed at all times as all the experiences we have are virtual anyway. While we experience a rich virtual world, our bodies are securely stored and fed through some tubes while at the same time acting as a power source for the computer system that runs the whole virtual world, and ….  hold on, doesn’t that sound somehow familiar?

Making yourself a slave

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I went to college in Germany (they call it Universität) and the semester fees were about 23 Marks – maybe 10 Dollars. I lived with my parents but was registered at a friend’s house so that I could draw state-funded study support, part of which was a loan. (I still owe some of that today, by the way.)

So, I have to say, my college education was pretty – – – inexpensive. At least for me personally, maybe not so for the rest of the population. But my justification was always that later in my professional life, I would earn well and pay lots of taxes.

OK, the latter did not really happen. First, I was self-employed most of the time, and I first saw all of my money in my account and only then had to write a check (instead of it being collected before the wage earner even sees it). That created a rather intense resistance, so I did everything possible to avoid writing big numbers on those checks.

And second, I left Germany after just about six or seven years.

At one point, it becomes acute to think about those things for my son. He is still a few years away from any college thoughts, but eventually it will be something to consider.

Now I ran into this video that paints a bleak picture of the current college situation here in the old US of A… (when I revisited this article, my original video was not available any longer, so I found another one)

There is not that much to add in terms of the facts, that it really does not seem to be worth going to college anymore, but what I do want to add is the following from my very own experiences.

I studied physics and got up to the equivalent of a master’s degree – 6 years. It was fun to a greater degree, especially my little stints down at CERN, to mingle with world-class scientists – for example, the internet was born down there (no, it was not Al Gore!)

But I did not pursue a career in science; instead moved into the computer field, which was just then starting to be something to be reckoned with. What later became computer science was, in the beginning, manned by physicists and mathematicians.

So, after college, I never did anything much in physics. I did practice forcing my will onto computers during my college days, but this was more or less a side effect because the experiments I conducted produced lots of data, and we happened to have PDP 11 at the physics chair where I did my work. My first contacts with computers, a little bit before that, were in my spare time when I taught myself to program a big IBM mainframe (I think it was an IBM 360) through the use of punch cards. I did this just because I was fascinated by these machines, not because of any career goal.

All this happened during a time when, in most cases, you could still do the job you trained for for the rest of your life. With the accelerated development in technology and science, that is definitely not true anymore. Sure, programming the PDP 11 in assembler gave me some basis, but certainly did not prepare me for optimizing websites and writing that occasional PHP application. All that I do now is self-taught and did not require me to sit in some auditorium and listen to a professor who has given the same lecture for the last 20 years, who can not be replaced by something younger and more up-to-date because he has tenure.

This is why I have to wholeheartedly agree with the implied conclusions in the above video that going to college at this time is a waste of time and money, and at these costs would just make you a slave for the rest of your life. It was scary for me to learn that not even a bankruptcy can get you out of these student loans – do I see debtor’s prisons on the horizon?

Maybe my son is really smart, because at his young age, he is really embracing the digital world, which might be the area that we will be living in in 10 – 15 years. You’d better learn how to become an entrepreneur in Second Life.

Inner Versus Outer Motivation

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Many, many – – – many – years ago, I had a little friend, three actually. When I met the three nephews/nieces of my best buddy, they were three/four/five years old. Harald, the middle one, came out to the garden where my buddy and I were drinking beer to check out that new dude. One of the first tests he conducted was “how does he react to pinching?” My reaction – “pinching back” – must have been the correct one because we became really good friends and grew up together until I finally had to leave the country (but that is a whole different story).

One of the stories with Harald I remember was that he came up with the idea of washing my car. It was another beer-drinking session in the garden, a few grown-ups doing all the work, and several kids playing in the garden as well, not drinking beer!

This is when Harald had the idea, “Can I wash your car?” Generous as I was – and knowing that the car could really use that treatment – I said “Sure!” There was quite some commotion about finding a hose, sponges, and other things I did not know you needed to wash a car. An hour later, my car was clean(er), and Harald was very proud of his job well done.

Several of the beer-drinking, session-attending adults now suggested that I should pay Harald something for his work. But even at that young age, I was too smart for my own good and realized that this would not be a good thing. So, I politely declined to follow those recommendations and instead demonstrated to Harald how much I appreciated his deed by becoming an even better friend.

Sometimes it takes the universe a long time to acknowledge the correctness of one’s actions, and for this event, I finally found the acknowledgment after so many years in the form of a TED talk that I just have to share here.

Here we go – enjoy!

ISS – View out of the Cupola

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There are always two sides to a coin, and today I had to reflect on these two side in regards my my anarchistic conviction.

It is easy and righteous to be an anarchist, and to help as little as possible for all those things most of us abhor. War, extortion, corruption, etc. But there are a few things that I like that these guys are doing, like helping to get pictures like this…

view out of the cupola
Tracy’s View out of the Cupola on the ISS

This is just one sample of the pictures taken by astronaut Douglas H. Wheelock during his stay at the International Space Station, just about 200 miles straight up. I can’t help but consider other people who do not appreciate this venture into space, just as I personally don’t appreciate beating up the Iraqis or toppling a South American Dictator.

One of the most frequent arguments against anarchy (in the sense of a society without a ruling government – not the definition of ‘chaos in the streets’) is “but somebody will have to build and maintain the roads!” At first glance, that seems like a valid argument, but thinking a bit further, there are possibilities that don’t make it look so good. For one, a private builder who builds an area with houses he wants to sell will make sure that there is a road that lets people access these houses. Would make the houses probably a bit more expensive, but considering that the buyer does not pay any taxes to a usually very inefficient government, the house with the street factored in would probably come cheaper than the house plus the taxes.

But what about highways and freeways? In parts of the US, we already have toll roads, and they seem to be working just fine. Again, the savings in taxes factored in, traveling might actually become cheaper. But let’s assume that it would actually be more expensive to travel longer distances along toll roads – maybe other means of transportation would have been invented if they were now more competitive without any government strong-arming the use of the road and car system. Maybe there would already be flying cars that don’t require expensive road building – or we would actually have the rolling roads of the early Heinlein – would THAT be cool!

Back to the space pictures. It might have taken us a bit longer to reach the moon, but there is a good chance that we would now have a flourishing space industry if there had been no monopolistic government involved. A good chance that I might be able to afford a trip to Bigelow’s Space Hotel in one of Burt Rutan’s SpaceShip version 4 (edit: Now Virgin Galactic).

There would have been fewer people contributing to the cost of developing these space technologies, because right now, every tax-paying citizen is a contributor. But if only the people who wanted it would be contributing, which is far less, it still could be more, as – first – an inefficient middle man is cut out of the loop, and – second – the people who do contribute really want it, and how much energy does real intention add to the equation?

But despite all these ifs and whens, I can still enjoy the great images from the ISS that were created with all our contributions – willing or unwilling – even forced. Here again, the link to astronaut Wheelock’s images.

A Natural Cure for the Swine Flu

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I learned the following when I studied the Kabbalah, and many other philosophies promote similar ideas, namely that we are not presented with a problem if there is not also a (possibly hidden) solution available. I know this logic has a bit of a hole, as nobody who was presented with a problem for which there was no remedy is around anymore to tell about it, but I like the first point of view better, so I take that.

The problem I am thinking of now is the swine flu. Today, Ed (thanks Ed!) sent an e-mail presenting the solution for that problem. I know there is, or shortly will be, a pharmaceutical, and expensive, solution, but I always want to look at natural remedies first, in order not to get from the fire into the frying pan – fire being a deadly threat to the world and the frying pan standing for the dependency on the pharma industry.

Science Daily has the following article:

Scientists in China have discovered that roots of a plant used a century ago during the great Spanish influenza pandemic contains substances with powerful effects in laboratory experiments in killing the H1N1 swine flu virus that now threatens the world. The plant has a pleasant onion-like taste when cooked, but when raw it has sap so foul-smelling that some call it the “Dung of the Devil” plant.

Kindly, Ed also supplied some more info about this plant in a Wikipedia article about ‘Dung of the Devil’ and he even passed on a source to buy Asafetida (Edit 2026: appears, no ordering possible anymore, but now you get it on Amazon and even Walmart).

Now you have a solution for the time when the friendly government agent comes and wants to give you the mandatory swine flu vaccination – if you have a sample of asafetida in your pocket and let him smell it, he will run and look for more gullible victims to thrust his benevolence upon.

With that sample of asafetida, you might not have any friends, but let’s make that the subject of another article.

Save a Hundred Bucks on a New Car

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If you heard somebody announcing very excitedly, “You can save a full hundred bucks on your new Ford F150 truck!” The only thing to do is drive to the other end of town to the dealer Joe Cheapcars and pick it up, you would probably not share much of this enthusiasm.

Hundred bucks on a car – that’s not much.

There is this miter saw you always wanted for your weekend projects. At $150, the cost wasn’t quite justifiable, given the number of weekend projects you actually do. But now James Toolshack over in Othertown, just 30 miles across the river, has it for only 50 bucks!

So as soon as the weekend is here, it’s off to the Toolshack to finally get that miter saw. We saved a full hundred bucks!

So, what’s the difference between the hundred bucks saved on the car and on the miter saw? Nothing as far as the money in the wallet is concerned.

Let’s listen to Dan Gilbert, who gives us some really good insight into this subject…

How the Martians see us

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There have been plenty of rumors, opinions, ideas, and conspiracy theories that our government is not quite as honest with us as it could be. There is even the theory that the whole moon landing coverage was shot on a sound stage somewhere on good old Earth.

But all this aside, let’s assume all our ventures out into space and to other planets are actually true; then this fascinating image of our Earth-Moon system as seen from Mars (actually from one of our spacecrafts up there) is in fact authentic.

214811main earthmoon 516

But unfortunately it is totally misleading. It tries to create this feeling of being this small twin system out there in the void – alone but still the moon so close that we can identify with it.

Still, let’s assume that this image is not photoshopped; then it uses the treacheries of three dimensions to mislead us. The moon must be either much closer to the observer – the little green Martian – or much further away.

How come?

Let’s do some simple math. The Earth diameter is about 12000 km (OK, I think in metric – so what?) and the distance of Earth and Moon is about 360000 km; that would put the Moon at the distance of about 30 Earth diameters. In the NASA image, the distance seems to be 6 Earth diameters – pretty big difference, don’t you think?

If we – or the Martians – would look at our system at a time when the real distance of the two heavenly bodies in one image would be shown, we would see two specs of light without any awe-inspiring effect.

Why do you think they do this manipulation?

The Big Bang in your Backyard

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What is the image you get when you think of a scientist?

I bet it’s usually a middle-aged guy, most likely wearing a lab coat, probably glasses, and definitely not cool.

But we all know by now that TED does not promote the ‘normal,’ so when they have somebody on to talk about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, we do not necessarily expect a guy in a lab coat.

I was still positively surprised by Brian Cox’s talk. There is a cool guy who not only makes it interesting to show what the LHC does but who also represents a new breed of scientists who seem to be in awe of creation and taken by its extent.

When I turned my back on physics after I was all done with my degree, the scientific scene was immensely more arrogant. So, listening to Brian Cox made me happy because I think that science will succeed when it develops the right amount of humility and recognizes that it itself is part of that creation and is searching for itself.

Do you want to know where the LHC actually is? Glad you asked, because here are some fascinating facts about its location. CERN, which, by the way, is also the mother of the World Wide Web, is located in two countries, Switzerland and France. The Conseil européen pour la Recherche nucléaire (CERN) is located close to Geneva, Switzerland, and stretches across the Swiss-French border. So, you might cross the border between the two countries many times during the day while remaining in the CERN complex. Nowadays, that has not much significance, but when I was there it was a fascinating fact that you could go across the border without showing your papers.

So, here it is…

Brian Greene explains Superstring Theory at TED

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In 2005, Brian Greene explained superstring theory to the TED audience in layman’s terms in a very engaging presentation.

Three years ago, the Hadron collider at CERN, which has one of its goals to confirm string theory, was still a few years away from completion. But now we are nearly there. Interestingly, the public is taking notice now as voices have been raised that this machine might be dangerous. Loud voices actually, so the CERN website for the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) has to address these concerns and dispel them…

TGVs and mosquitoes

The total energy in each beam of protons in the LHC is equivalent to a 400 tonne train (like the French TGV) travelling at 150 km/h. However, only an infinitesimal part of this energy is released in each particle collision – roughly equivalent to the energy of a dozen flying mosquitoes. In fact, whenever you try to swat a mosquito by clapping your hands together, you create a collision energy much higher than the protons inside the LHC. The LHC’s speciality is its impressive ability to concentrate this collision energy into a minuscule area on a subatomic scale. But even this capability is just a pale shadow of what Nature achieves routinely in cosmic-ray collisions.

During part of its operation, the LHC will collide beams of lead nuclei, which have a greater collision energy, equivalent to just over a thousand mosquitoes. However, this will be much more spread out than the energy produced in the proton collisions, and also presents no risk.

Microscopic black holes will not eat you…

Massive black holes are created in the Universe by the collapse of massive stars, which contain enormous amounts of gravitational energy that pulls in surrounding matter. The gravitational pull of a black hole is related to the amount of matter or energy it contains — the less there is, the weaker the pull. Some physicists suggest that microscopic black holes could be produced in the collisions at the LHC. However, these would only be created with the energies of the colliding particles (equivalent to the energies of mosquitoes), so no microscopic black holes produced inside the LHC could generate a strong enough gravitational force to pull in surrounding matter.

If the LHC can produce microscopic black holes, cosmic rays of much higher energies would already have produced many more. Since the Earth is still here, there is no reason to believe that collisions inside the LHC are harmful.

By all probability, these concerns are in the same category as the fears that people would die when going more than 50 miles an hour on this devil’s machine called a train. But there have been experiments in the past that seemed rather harmless and turned out to be deadly. I am thinking of Pierre and Marie Curie, who discovered radioactivity. They did not know that this new phenomenon they had discovered was poisoning them during their work. I remember the anecdote of demonstrating their discovery to friends at a party by circulating a vial with this new substance, which you could see with your eyes closed.

So, there is a chance that this microscopic black hole that might be created by the LHC does indeed attract matter and energy from its surroundings, grows and swallows the universe as we know it.

I am actually sure that this will happen, at least in a number of parallel worlds. These parallel worlds are, as far as I know, also postulated by string theory, so we are really approaching the unified theory of life, the universe and everything, a theory that contains its own annihilation – cool!

I have worked at CERN for a little bit, being involved with the old muon-neutrino experiments, and I have to admit that it would be a fascinating experience to be at CERN for the first activation of the LHC. I imagine a scene similar to the setting in Douglas Adams’ ‘Restaurant at the End of the Universeir?t=bbnjinternati 20&l=ur2&o=1‘ – everybody is seated in an exquisite restaurant expecting a great show watching the universe to end.

And, you know what – in one of the parallel worlds according to string theory to be tested – that will be so!

Space – the Final Frontier – – Today

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I subscribe to some of NASA’s podcasts on iTunes, and today I watched a video called “A Postcard from Opportunity.” For all of you who are not quite up-to-date, Opportunity and Spirit are the two rovers that NASA landed on Mars a while ago with the idea that these two vehicles could roam the Martian surface for some 90 days, giving us some photography and other scientific data.

Against all odds and expectations, these rovers have now lasted a multitude of their life expectancy. If you are interested in the details, you can find them at the NASA JPL website.

I am a space buff and science fiction fan for pretty much all of my life, but only today, when I watched this postcard from one of the rovers, it suddenly really sank in that these are pictures from a different planet. It might not sound very impressive, but for me it made a shift – and I really wanna go now!