Magnetism and Dark Matter

So here is the idea I have been thinking of lately which will no doubt revolutionize the thinking in the field of physics. By which I mean this is a crakpot idea that I can't even begin to prove or back up.

So Dynamo theory says that a magnetic field is generated by circulating electric charges. Now to my knowledge the specifics of dynamo theory are still being worked out but less us assume that it is true. That brings us to the question of planetary magnetics.

There are three possibilities I will then consider here. The first being that various atoms within the earth's mantle have a charge and flow in circulating patterns of some sort and thus create earth's magnetic field. This circulation could be caused by earth's rotation or by convection, I don't know but it isn't important here.

The other possibility I will consider is to view even the mantle as essentially unmoving, a stationary object though still full of atoms with charges. In this view it is earth's rotation that makes the charges act as if they were circulating to generate a magnetic field.

This raises an important question in my mind. So a charge circulates and generates a field. Relative to what does it have to circulate? I know if you run a current through a coil of wire it generates a field, but what if you take something with a charge, tie it to the end of a rope and spin it around really quickly? Will this also generate a field? As essentially this is what I am proposing it does in the second scenario I contemplated.

I am going to skip to the end because I am rather tired now.

So here is the revolutionary bit. What if magnetic fields were generated by the circulation of charges yes. But what if the actual mechanism producing the field is the charges interaction with dark matter? I know I called it antimatter in a recent and rather lengthy post but I meant dark matter. I still mean to go back and correct that.

What if magnetism is the interaction between matter and dark matter? I'll tell you what if: it means that I am a genius. A sleepy, sleepy genius.

Spaghetti

I was listening to this one astronomer type guy, I think it was just a clip on youtube so I don't remember who it was or what the video was called, but he was talking about what would happen if the world fell into a blackhole. He was expounding on his opinion that it would be a fantastically painful experience.

According to him as you near the center of the blackhole you would move progressively faster and faster. That is all well and good, but a black hole being the massive gravitational object that it is, he argued that as you fall closer and closer to the center even tiny differences in distance make a huge difference. Thus it would be that if you were falling feet first your feet would begin traveling faster than your head. Obviously that is not a good thing.

He then theorized that eventually your body would be ripped apart into segments as they were strained to the breaking point by the gravity of the blackhole. He goes further to say that even after your body has begun falling in pieces you still have the moment were the gravity is so strong it begins to snap the bonds holding the atoms of your body together. Literally eating you on the atomic level.

Here is my issue with this: in this talk the speaker seems to assume that you are conscious throughout this entire experience, or at least until the point were you have been atomically disassembled. Let us examine this.

So you're falling feet first. Your body begins to be ripped into segments. Eventually all you are is a falling head as it would be fairly tough to rip a head apart, it being a pretty solid mass. The blood will be sucked down and out, which is assuming the soft brain tissue isn't collapsing under either the force of the super acceleration or the pressure of the every increasing atmosphere, or incinerated by its passage through said atmosphere, or that your brain is sucked out of your skull along with the blood.

No, let us assume the brain stays in the skull and that even with the blood getting sucked out not all of it manages to get out. With some leftovers of blood I suppose thought would still be technically possible, even without a body. And while you wouldn't last long, you really wouldn't need to, at such a rate of fall and with such gravity time would distort and an instant would take a good long while. The thing is, with everything slowed down because of your speed would you be able to perceive it as an instant? Even if it took a lifetime would it pass it you as a mere flicker of time?

My thinking here is that it all comes down to biology. The brain will not function without blood, or at least not for long. So without the blood supplying the brain there is no thought and therefore no pain. The counter point being that in a black hole you don't have to live very long, things are going to be moving along rather briskly. In the end I suppose it comes down to how long it takes for a neuron to fire and transmit the message of pain.

Also in arguing for one not being conscious of their own demise in a black hole, while only one factor need go wrong for the victim to be rendered unconscious, every factor need go right to sustain it, which puts the odds heavily in favor of unconsciousness.

I am vaguely conscious here that I may be injecting myself into a conversation that has been underway for some time and may have already arrived at a consensus. Nevertheless I persist.

The Marathon

And now a few thoughts on the marathon I ran.

I am mystified having run the thing, why anyone in their right mind would do it again. And yet, having said that I may have to do it again.

I had two goals running the marathon. Aim for a 3:40 finishing time and never walk.

I finished with 3:39:34. But was forced to a walk when with two miles left to go there was a particularly cantankerous bridge with an inhumanly steep incline - practically vertical, should be illegal - proved greater. The tragedy of it was that I was so keenly aware in the moment of how much I'd regret it later but I just couldn't make it go.

And now, reflecting on it my own words come back to smack me in the face. "Champions are greater than the sum of all excuses." . I may run some other races between now and then because already as the stiffness goes out of me and all the soreness eases I am hungry for another run. However, other races aside, I still feel the deep bite of losing face to this bridge before my fellow runners, and my city. I was wearing my pink jersey, along with pink bandanna, and pink shorts, I was flying the colors and put my name to it. Every runner I passed knew that I was Cruton and I was defeated. I must regain my honor before Baltimore.

A quick breakdown of the miles:
1-12: all fun and games, everyone has plenty of energy and is in high spirits.
12-20: work, your moving but it isn't as fun anymore now it is just doing it to get it done.
20-26: this sucks, muscles are burning and it is a struggle to keep putting one foot in front of the other, a lapse in willpower will lead to walking (and I should know)

I was walking along the park on Monday and I put on the super bright neon long sleeved under armor shirt they gave the marathon runners because at the time I was just puttering around the house when I decided to go to the bank. So I had this shirt on and I am walking by the park and I see joggers and I was amused because I found myself thinking "Bow before me joggers for I am your God!" and I am not going to lie, I was serious.

Finishing the race my butt hurt like it hasn't since maybe the infamous 400m run back in my track days.

I saw the gummy bear guy and even took some gummies. The problem was it was so late in the race that I put the first one in my mouth and quickly decided that it was far too much energy to chew the damn thing. I ended up spitting it out and dumping the rest of them I had in my hand on the street.

I enjoyed the parts of the course with bands.

I think I made a major mistake in this race not taking any of those calorie gel things. In my post run analysis I think my walking breakdown was due to a utter lack of available calories. Also, I find in amusing in retrospect how at the start of the race and well through it at the water stops I was able to keep going while holding the water fairly steady and drinking it but towards the end of the race I somehow completely lost the ability to hold the cup still and had to just kind of throw the liquid in the direction of my face and hope for the best.

I talked to Mike and Blue at work. Mike who was aiming for under 4 hours came in hot on my heels with a 3:47 if I recall correctly. Blue apparently ran a marathon in New York when he was younger and got a 3:15.

Quite pleased with the medal, it has some serious heft to it. The crab logo thing is still retarded but the medal is awesome.

That is all I can think of to say about the marathon - Wait!

Taking the turn up I don't know what after running through Patterson on Linwood, and along the course they had at various points Under Armour logos and slogans on the pavement, and we were all running along when there was this guy. And for whatever reason this guy was super pumped. Like there is rooting for people and then there is rooting for people like it is the super bowl and you need this drive to work to win it all. Not crazy ecstatic but genuinely, masculinely into it. And he just really got to me, got me really hyped, and I belted out as loudly and in as deep a voice as I could muster "WHO WILL PROTECT THIS HOUSE?!" I even heard a few people call out the answer "I Will!" Anyway that had me feeling awesome for a while. A feeling I sorely missed a little later on.

When I got to the inner harbor, the halfway mark and a spot for some of the bigger crowds one girl came streaking past me and I thought to myself, yeah, you run like a hero, I'ma see you in a little bit. And sure enough, a mile or two later, when she wasn't high on the crowd I passed her.

Also, I am not sure I could run a distance other than the marathon at an event where a marathon was being held. As running the marathon I looked down at all the other, lesser, distances. Way down.

Lastly, other marathons totally have it figured out. Half marathoners should not finish with the full. You are just starting to dig into your trenches, the pack has thinned out and you know the people in front and behind you fairly well when this mass sea of people is dumped on you. They of course are all jazzed up with energy to burn setting paces much too fast. And I wanted them to die. Spontaneously burst into flames.

Ok, this time I am done. For reals.

To the Stars

Today's run I intentionally dedicated to thinking about getting off this planet. Shuttles and rocket fuel are nice and pretty but they are hardly efficient. Consuming massive quantities of fuel and releasing huge quantities of exhaust, each launch it's own trial to say that achieving earth orbit could be stream lined a bit is something of an understatement. So I have taken it upon myself to devise a better way, or at least consider alternate ways it might be done.

So first I started off with the idea as it was presented to me in science fiction. An impossibly long metal cable of indeterminate width that stretched from planet surface to orbit. Along this cable I understood there to be a car shaped like a donut wrapped around the cable riding up it by some sort of magnetic propulsion.

With this start I promptly dismissed the cable idea as not feasible. The weight of the cable of structure at that height/length I felt wouldn't have the tensile strength to keep itself together. Like a mooring line stretched between two oil tankers the line snaps before it becomes perfectly taut because its own weight causes sag.

From there I started thinking in the direction of Ender's Game. What if there were a way to reflect gravity? Well, this makes no real sense whatsoever, but lets play with the idea for a bit.

Saying we could reflect gravity would mean we took the gravity from one place and applied it to another area. So this would mean we could maybe make an area of earth have zero gravity while some other part of it experienced double gravity or something.

In this fanciful universe then achieving orbit would be pretty simple. You'd just have to push off the ground with a fair amount of force and before you know it you'd be in orbit. But let us discard this gravity reflection to pursue gravity to its roots.

For a while I was thinking along the lines of a gravitational tractor to get something into orbit. This will quite clearly not work at all, but it is an avenue I pursued briefly. The root of the problem it lead me to was gravity. Now, perhaps discoveries have been made about gravity since my astronomy text book was written but from what I understand gravity isn't all that well understood.

Gravity simply is the force that all matter exerts attracting other matter. Being fundamental the how and why of gravity is unknown or at least unknown to me. Thus the more matter the greater gravity, which means I can figure out how to increase gravity at a certain launch spot, a mascon, but not decrease it.

However at the heart of all this is one basic material. Matter. What if there was something which didn't abide by these laws of matter and gravity? Something like antimatter.

Now my understanding of antimatter is that I do not understand it at all. Whispers and rumors of something I yet to grasp in any meaningful way. Yet, for the purposes of this discussion let us say it is out there. In my understanding of the stuff antimatter and matter have absolutely no interaction. As in interaction is exactly equal to zero. The leap of faith that I made was to consider the possiblity that this understanding was flawed. What if the interaction between matter and antimatter wasn't zero, just really, really, really small? If the interaction were small then we are in business, just gotta figure out a way to harness the antimatter to our ends and whisto presto we have not only orbit but we have a limitless free energy source.

When I say a small interaction above I do not mean small as in the chances of antimatter and matter interacting is 1/10^X, where X is just shy of infinity. That is no good. What I mean by small interaction is that the two interact all the time but exert an incredibly weak, here-to-for undetected amount of force on one another.

At this point, having decided antimatter was the key, I returned to scoff at the idea I started with of using a very large , very long cable. Then I paused and thought, what the hell, I've got a couple more miles left to go in this run so why not see if I can make it work.

So, we start with a long cable, which likely isn't a cable so much as a tower of some sort. Assuming it can keep it's integrity, how do you keep the damn thing up? Well, the earth is spinning right, so centrifugal motion should rule the day here, all you need to do is attach a weight to the end of it, that'll keep it taut. Alright, tether an asteroid to the end of it.

We're probably going to have to have rocket engines at strategic points on the asteroid so that you can keep a constant orbit that is just right. You are also going to have to keep it well outside its roche limit as you don't want the thing falling apart on you.

The problems with the concept are several but interesting to contemplate and listed here in no particular order.

First while we have assumed the tower will be able to keep it's structural integrity against it's own weight and gravity what about meteorological forces like a strong breeze?

Second essentially adding a long string with a weight on the end to a spinning ball is going to do rather interesting things to that balls rotation and orbit. A possible solution to this problem is build two launch sites at exactly opposite sides of the planet. This will negate or mostly negate the orbit altering effects of the weight, etc.

Third, it occured to me that this tower, which I assume to be metal or metalic would almost certainly have a faint but constant stream of electricity going through it from ground to sky for the same reason lightning occurs. Which posses fascinating images of a land surrounding the launch site which became suddenly devoid of ever having lightning, because the energy simply rode up the man made tower.

Alright, that does it for this installment.

Cyber Amputee Syndrome

As you may have noticed when I get to running I tend to be hit with these awesome world transforming ideas. Today's Awesome Running Idea #2 ( the first one was the terraforming idea) is: Cyber Amputee Syndrome

In the future people are going to be commanding their computers with their mind. Already there are examples of our playing around with this technology of controlling computers with their thought, which I am too lazy to find and link to right now, but take my word for it, it's out there. I'm pretty sure they even demoed it at some big tech gathering for bigwigs like Steve Jobs.

Just think of it, in the future you'll never have to reach for the mouse because mouses will be hopelessly outdated. You'll simply think left and your cursor will move left.

Now I am no techy so I can't tell you exactly how this is going to work or when it is going to come about or anything like that. What I am able to tell you is what it is going to lead to.

In the future children will learn to control the computer with their mind much like today's children learn to ride bikes, something they learn young, master, and never have to really think about again. The noticeable difference here however is that tomorrow's children will likely learn this computer interaction much earlier than modern children learn to ride bikes, ingraining this behavior far deeper in them than bike riding today.

I am going to distinguish this post from those that will follow it and suspend judgment of this eventuality. Good or bad is irrelevant here. However, as a consequence of learning to use computers at a young age much like one moves one's arm, if these children come to be stranded on a desert island they will suffer from Cyber Amputee Syndrome.

Used to constantly controlling machines with their thoughts the absence of machines will have the same effect on these children as losing an arm or a leg.

As an offshoot of this thought I began to contemplate the effect of computers being so pervasive in our lives. I started thinking that mankind, will become increasingly like an ant colony or a beehive or some other colony organism. Individuals will increasingly diminish in importance and give rise to a hive mind or collective.

It is only a small step from controlling computers with our mind to putting computers into our mind, and with technological advances I can only imagine what we now know as internet will only become more widespread to the level that there is virtually nowhere you can't be in constant wireless connection with everyone else.

With these advances how can one really say what one person knows? It would be pointless to ask a student to give a presentation of Oppenheimer because the student will have instant access to the best papers written on Oppenheimer by the best and brightest minds in the world. Indeed they will even have access to the papers Oppenheimer himself wrote (I assume they should be declassified by then). Super smart search programs, Google 5,000, will be able to give the student a summary of the relevant information as it will have been digested and culled by so many others before that it will have been broken down in manageable bits even a grade schooler could understand.

Teraforming

Everybody knows that the first person to discover extraterrestrial life is going to go down in the history books forever. Maybe it is shaking hands with ET or maybe it is simply taking a meteorite fragment and putting it under a microscope and exclaiming "BY JOVE! This bit of something isn't from around here and it's alive!"

This is all well and good and as it should be. But while it is a certainty there is other life forms in the infinite vastness of space none of them seem to be anywhere near here. Thus for the present we've only got ourselves to play with.

That in mind, when we think of space what should we be thinking of?

Funny you should ask because I was contemplating this while jogging the other day (don't ask me how this popped into my head, as I have utterly no idea) and happen to now have the perfect answer.

Terra-forming.

Those familiar with science fiction may be familiar with this term but for those that aren't terraforming is the process of taking an uninhabitable environment, think Venus or Mercury or Mars here, and turning it into a place people and other Earth life can live freely in.

Normally this process is depicted by using huge machines. Picture an air-conditioner the size of a large city, except instead of cooling the air, it would take in available resources from the planet and turn it into air and perhaps water.

Now first of all we must here limit out discussion to planets that are first terrestrial, setting foot on a gas giant just isn't a happening thing, and second of sufficient mass hold an atmosphere of breathable air to it's surface and not simply vent it off into space.

Past these two initial requirements all other considerations are secondary and can be thought through and conquered with human ingenuity. However, back to the original premise of using ultra massive machinery to turn a planet habitable to humanity, I find this idea to have crippling and ultimately insurmountable problems.

The idea is fine for science fiction, but in reality not only do you have to keep all of these machines repaired and in working order but you also have to power them in some way shape of form. In either case this would be not only hugely expensive, but more importantly, on the scale that would be required completley unfeasible.

Honestly, I love to believe that we as people could do it but the fact is it isn't possible, or if we ignore this objection and assume that it could be done it would require such resources of man power, energy, and materials as to beggar the imagination.

Yet behold! The dream of terraforming can still be accomplished. It can even be accomplished by man, we're just going to need a bit of help. From what immensely powerful ally can mankind hope to draw aid you ask?

Bacteria.

Yes, bacteria, those wee little things that make you sick that you can't even see without the help of a microscope. Those things which live in the most severe, the most varied habitats in the world.

In the beginning the planet earth did not have an atmosphere of oxygen. Oxygen is thought to have come as the byproduct of certain elementary life forms which gave rise to progressively more complex life forms until we get to where we are now. The point being that we need to recreat this process on the planets we hope to live on one day, and if we were smart we'd start today.

I don't know how long it took to convert earth's atmosphere to having a significant portion of oxygen and all those other gases which make air but regardless, by human standards it took a very long time. Thus, if we want to take over a planet we need to begin the terraforming today. We need to round us up some hardy bacteria and shove them on a space pod and launch them into space. The pod should be shot at some planet we hope to inhabit one day and upon arrival disperse the bacteria in as wide an area as possible. The hardy bacteria would flourish converting toxic gases into breathable ones and replicating to make more bacteria to do the same without humanity having to lift a finger. Eventually an uninhabitable world becomes a human paradise and all would live happily ever after frolicking in a man/bacteria made Eden.

A sublimely simple solution if I do say so myself, and I do.

Musing on Vampires

Burger King has come out with a series of ads of late that has two hosts of crazed pre-pubescent girls descending on one of their stores, battling for the allegiance of hapless Burger King customers. Both sides fanatically devoted to Stephanie Meyer's Twilight Series, but one side are ardent supporters of Edward, the other, zealous proponents of Jacob. Edward being the vampire and Jacob being the werewolf.

Now, I love this ad. I love this ad because these girls are so clearly out of their minds. Their passion for their side sweeping through any trace of reason in their not yet fully developed brains in a holocaust of unfamiliar hormones. Add to that the general confusion of the customers who have no idea what the hell these squeaky voiced idiots are talking about or why they seem so desperate to make their case and you have commercial gold. Honestly the commercial should win some sort of award for awesomeness.

Anyway, I was watching this commercial and it got me thinking (who knew a commercial could make you think?) What is it about Edward and Jacob that has these girls so out of their heads?

Perhaps it is just clever marketing with untold millions of dollars behind it that has pushed these characters onto the phsyche of every girl between the ages of 10-15, I am not sure that is true. At one point, before it was a movie Twilight was just a book. Albeit not a very well written book, but a book nonetheless. A book of words and no pictures. And at some point previous to this it wasn't even a book. It was just a manuscript looking to be published.

As I am unaware of any publishing company that lets 12 year old girls give the green light for publication (I have yet to see "Why Betsy Thomas who sits in the Third Row of Mrs. Applebuam's 4th period history Doesn't Deserve the Bead Necklace She Got For Christmas" hit the shelves of my local chain bookstore) I am forced to presume that there was a day where some adult read the story and liked it. If events followed the standard chain this adult then passed it on to the next adult in the chain and next thing you know people all over America are reading this damn thing.

Thus, it seems one cannot wholly attribute this phenomenon to a savvy marketing scheme. Nor, more surprisingly to me, can one chalk it up to girls alone, because as previously mentioned adults read this thing and took it to publishing.

Clearly Stephanie Meyers has tapped into something here. Which brings me back around to the part where the commercial got me thinking, what the hell is it about these vampire and werewolf characters that has girls will to descend on unsuspecting Burger King patrons to sway them in the favor of their choosen good looking monster character?

Now, I have only read the first one, which predates Jacobs entrance onto the scene so I really can not speak to that, and I don't actually own the thing so I'm going to do this analysis completely from memory. This excuse I find sufficiently large as to encompass any faults which may be found with my subsequent argument.

Let us start by stripping Edward of his good looks. Honestly, I would think the movie version would be enough to drive women fleeing from vampires like their was set aflame as the whole emaciated hollow cheeked combined with a paleness that is downright painful to look upon image of the on screen Edward comes off to me as sickly. If I saw a guy looking like that on the street I'd think they were doing some seriously hardcore drugs and were maybe three steps away from hospitalization.



But again, let us set all that aside as I think it accounts for relatively little of Edwards appeal. This is not to say that his looks are irrelevant, it helps to be easy on the eyes even if I can't see what they see, but rather that it is not Edward's looks that inspire his fans loyalty but something about him.

When Bella looks on Edwards her thoughts explode into hot shards of chaste puppy love. It is this that women love about Edward, not his appearance per se. His fans make this mistake of conflating his appearance with the effect of looking upon him has on them. They long for the man who will treat them as the focal point of the world, the sole point upon which the universe turns.

Not only that but Meyer's constructs Edward in such a way as to assure her audience that Edward cannot manifest his devotion to Bella in the traditional physical forms most of us are familiar with. This move has two desire intensifying principles to it.

The first of these is that it assures the audience that Edward is not simply captivated by Bella's appearance. Bella is the center of Edward's universe regardless of her looks. She could get acid thrown in her face and it wouldn't matter a bit to Edward. Bella feels truly seen by Edward for what she is, and what she wishes to be, for every facet of her personality. Honestly, who wouldn't be swayed by that kind of attention?

Secondly the chastity of Edward coupled with his metaphorical need and desire to suck the blood out of Bella's veins sets up that sweet tension of lovers parted. Romeo and Juliet wouldn't really be a story were it not for the fact that they were kept separated. The lust to be together present, Meyer's erects seemingly un-scalable walls to keep them apart. After that all Meyer's has to do is sit back and watch the tension and frustration build. Like sealing a lid to the top of a pot of water and then putting it on the stove and cranking up the heat, eventually there is an explosion. In essence it all boils down to we want what we can't have. Edward repeatedly telling Bella how much they can't be together only serves to make Bella want him all the more.

Of course Bella is described by Meyer's so vaguely that she could be anyone and is, in the minds of her readers. Where Meyer's has written Bella, Meyer's readers insert their own name, confused by how the story could be written any other way.

And now the world cup game is about to start so I am going to have to bring this musing to a close for now. Who knows, maybe someday I'll read the other books and be able to contrast Jacob and Edward and their relative merits. Though I wouldn't count on it.