Bottles on a plane

[Editorial: The title just doesn't have the ring to it that Snakes on a Plane does... Maybe if I wrote it as m*therf*cking bottles on a m*otherf*cking plane...]

14 months ago, I went to Poland with friends of mine for a birthday. On the way over, I decided to do something nerdy...

I wanted to measure the pressure difference between the cabin at flight altitude and ground level.^1,2 On the way back, I bought two bottles of water; one I drank on the plane and closed it. The other one, I kept as a reference. As the plane descended, the air pressure gradually increased (my ears popped, yo!)... and the closed bottle got squashed. So... if I have the volume of something at a known pressure and the volume at another one, I can estimate the pressure at the second one... Thank you, Ideal Gas Law :)

Choosing the method
So I have my bottle of air and I have the other bottle... how to get my answer?

1. Fill the reference bottle (weigh it); Squeeze it out until it looks similar to crumpled bottle (weigh it again).
2. Submerge the bottles in water and compare the two volumes.
3. Put the bottle in a vacuum oven³; adjust the pressure in the oven until the bottle is back to its original shape. (One of the guys suggested that) 

I decided to go with 2 because it's better than eyeballing bottles to make them look the same and 3 was a bit of a beroepsmisvorming.⁴ What is nice about the vacuum oven, is that it's a direct measurement of the pressure. I'm sure there are other options - I'd like to hear them.

Procedure

I filled the reference bottle with water so that it would sink, although I was still stuck holding the crumpled bottle down. Also, for the crumpled bottle, I held it under the cold tap for a couple of minutes to chill the air, plus I took the temperature of the water. Then, if needs be, I can adjust the volume for temperature effects as well.⁵

I marked the water levels off on the lunch box (with - c - and without - a - the reference bottle and the crumpled reference bottle - b). Then I weighed how much water I had to add to go from a to b and to c:

a-b = 472g

a-c = 547g

Weight and volume are interchangeable here, so the ratio between the crumpled and reference bottles is the volume ratio, which in turn should tell me the pressure of the cabin: 0.86 atm. The height equivalent for my calculated pressure is: ~1250m.

For switching between altitudes and pressure, I used this handy correlation that I found on engineeringtoolbox.com for air pressure as a function of altitude:

p = (1 - 2.25577 10^-5 h)^5.25588

Where p is pressure in atmospheres (101,325 Pa) and h is height in m.

Sanity check

According to wikipedia,⁶ cabin pressures vary between an equivalent of sea level (0 m) and 2.4 km, which is a range of 1 atm to 0.75 atm. It also mentions that the actual cabin pressure depends on the type of plane; I flew with Wizzair and according to their Wikipedia page, they use Airbus A320. A quick google turned up this document that cites design specifications for the A320 as:

The cabin pressurisation system of the Airbus A320 is designed to maintain a maximum cabin altitude of 8,000ft (approximately 11.03psi) when the aircraft is cruising at high altitude by controlling the opening and closing of an outflow valve. Further, it is designed to limit the differential pressure between the cabin pressure and the ambient pressure to a maximum of 8.06psi. 

[Note: 8,000 feet = 2.4 km, 11.03 psi = .75 atm and a maximum differential of 0.55 atm. But no mention of what the pressure usually is...]

The cruising altitude for the A320 is about 11.7 km according to the first result on Google, which means that the calculated pressure differential is: 0.66 atm. This is within the safety criteria for the Airbus (it is about 88% of the max. pressure differential cited above).

Coming from a position of ignorance, that 12% lee-way makes me feel somewhat squeemish, but there are valve systems in place to balance out that the differential when it gets dangerous (it's mentioned in the above link from which I quoted). Thus in terms of safety, my numbers check out.

However harkening back to that wiki page on cabin pressurisation, this altitude is rather low for most airplanes - which doesn't assuage my doubts.

Errors

• My gut tells me that the biggest source for error is the plastic bottle; It's likely that the rigidity of the bottle means the deformation is less than it should be - hence the pressure is overestimated.
• I think my next biggest source of error is: using a wide lunch box instead of something narrow where changes in height are clearer.

Other its-bitsy sources of possible errors (in order of ascending unlikelihood/insignificance/scraping-the-barrel):

• My fat fingers holding the bottle under the surface
• The temperature difference between the water and room temperature is less than 20°C - on the Kelvin scale that's up to a 7% reduction, which corresponds to a 7% error in the pressure. Plus, it's an error in the other direction - if the the air contracts in the bottle the estimated pressure difference climbs.
• Diffusion of air back into the bottle from outside - since the difference is max. 0.25 atm, I don't see it have a big impact... I found a paper that gives the diffusivity values, but there was a server problem. :(

Next experiment:
I think the simplest thing to do is bring a balloon with me the next time:

• Inflate it in a bottle and fill the bottle
• Tie it off
• Fill the gap between the bottle and the balloon when I get down on the ground

*******

Reference bottle

Bottle in lunchbox

Difference in marks is the volume of the reference bottle

Holding the crumpled bottle under

Water temperature

This time in focus...

******

1. I like being able to measure and calculate things - I get quite a kick out of it.
2. I couldn't calculate the absolute pressure difference - not independently at least
3. We've got them at work.
4. I think it means to use the expertise/equipment/techniques of one's profession unnecessarily or excessively. There isn't a single word or idiomatic translation that I can think of that catches this well in English. The direct translation (professional deformation) doesn't sound quite right.
5. To be honest this is overkill This method has bigger issues.
6. I don't like the fact that the wikipedia page has the metric units in parentheses after the Imperial units.

Bread recipe

Dry:

• 1 kg wholemeal flour (or plain flour or mixes thereof, whatever you like)
• 4 teaspoons baking soda
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 100 g raisins
• 25 g cinnamon

Wet:

• ~1/2 litre of apple juice
• 4 teaspoons of vinegar.

1. Mix the solids together.
2. Preheat oven to 200°C.
3. Add the vinegar to the apple juice.
4. Roll in juice gradually until all of the flour mix is wetted, but not slimy looking sludge. 
5. Throw a quarter of the mix onto a section of baking paper. 
6. Roll the baking paper up so that it's a crude looking cylinder.
7. Place it on the tray in a way that it wont unroll while the dough bakes.  

For me, this is enough for 4 loaves of bread.

I use a fork and bowel to mix it all together - it spares me losing the sticky dough on my hands.

Now, what is nice about the baking paper is that it helps lock in the carbon dioxide that is going to be generated while it bakes. Which is critical for maximum fluffiness. You end up with two rough looking ends because they are exposed, and a smooth curved surface, where the baking paper touches the dough.

Cooking time:
Until it is visibly steaming (when you open the oven door and steam rolls out and it smells deliciously edible). Essentially, the perfect time is when most of the water has been boiled off, that the loaf is almost dry. Something like 20-30 minutes.

You can keep the dry mix for a couple of days, but once you add the liquid and mix it up, the dough has to go into the oven quickly (<5mins). Otherwise more of the carbon dioxide will be released during baking.

Alternative options:

Instead of baking soda/vinegar: try 8 teaspoons of baking powder; 4 teaspoons of baking soda with 4 teaspoons of cream of tartar; use buttermilk instead of the vinegar and apple juice (roughly 1/2 litre until the dough is damp), any other juice, lemon juice in water (say half a lemon to 1/2 litre of water), use normal milk with the vinegar (either add immediately or let it stand for an hour [as an engineer I would prefer to stir it in this time just to have a consistent and faster souring] while to make your own buttermilk).

Add in about 80 g of finely diced fresh ginger - the raisins and the tart ginger provide a fantastic flavour where they complement each other - I haven't used powdered ginger yet.

Dry some fruits yourself. 4-5 apples cut into small chips (wet size ~1-2 x 1-2 cm) are enough for this amount of dough (150 g or so when dry). Dry in the oven at 140°C with the door open a crack and, if possible a fan blowing across it. Dry until crispy, but not burned, . The apples lose a serious amount of moisture in the drying process (about 60-66% of their wet mass). In my oven it takes about 3 hours for this, but keep going until they are crispy and don't smell burnt or taste like carbon. I generally peel them beforehand. I am partial to pink ladies for this. I haven't used cooking apples yet, and I'm not inclined to.

Add some oatmeal, nuts, shredded All Bran and/or a bit of sugar if you like (you could drop large sugar crystals on the baking paper before you throw the dough on it and roll it up.

Much like my cookie recipe, beyond the bare bones recipe (flour, source of carbon dioxide [baking soda/vinegar, etc.], and a source of water to dampen the dough), you can do what ever you like with it.

Experiment  and see what works best for you.

As a parting thought:
Is carbon dioxide generation critical, or just the simplest/most convenient one to do?

As long as the by-products aren't toxic and are tasty, any reaction that produces a gas could do the job. Although... something heavy like carbon dioxide is probably best because it has a lower diffusivity than something like nitrogen. So it is more likely to stay in the dough.

I wonder what would happen if you had an oxygen or hydrogen producing reaction in there...

You should see the other guy (Appendix)

I tried, for about 60s, to think of a funny title for this, but, as you all can see, I came up dry and my PhD training kicked in...

So here are my attempts at describing the mechanics of a gormless bogger¹ falling from his bike...

What I am looking to do is calculate my velocity on impact against the post, based on my total energy going into the impact (my Kinetic Energy from forward travel, that I am assuming smoothly segues rotation about a point and my Potential Energy from falling a bit). I can then have a go at the force on my shoulder, when I had bumped against the hitherto upstanding Mr Post.

The first picture below is an artist's [This guy... I'm pointing at myself with both thumbs] impression of the subject (me) on his bike, with the measurements of the rear wheel radius, a guess of the bike's and my centre of gravity and a guess of my shoulder height (0.2, 1.1 and 1.5m respectively)

The centre of gravity is somewhere just over the seat of the bike (arbitrarily taken as 10 cm, giving a total[-ish] height of 1.1m for the centre of gravity.

From the inset: The gears and chain are housed- to protect the poor things from the elements, doncha know- so I couldn't count the teeth on the gears, which would have been far easier.... From some surreptitious eyeballing, I have:

• Pedalling period² (T_F)=1.5s
• Front gear radius (r_F) = 0.08m
• Rear gear radius (r_R) = 0.03m

Let's say the gear ratio is represented by the ratio of the gear radii (which would be valid if they had the same number of teeth per unit of circumference), then the rear wheel's linear velocity is calculated using the steps below:

It is reasonable enough to assume that the velocity of the wheel is the velocity of the bike and me; A point of the wheel doesn't really move when it is in contact with the ground; ergo the bike and I move instead.³

A quick look back at my goals... Velocity ["check"]

Now to the change in height... Of all my ropey assumptions, here is easily the ropiest of them: I'm going to assume that the bike and I were a rigid body.⁴ Which makes things incredibly convenient, since the relative positions between my shoulder, what was a wheel and now a fulcrum, and the centre of gravity don't change.

My shoulder goes from 1.5m to 1.1m in elevation, which is a change in height of 0.4m. However, for potential energy we have to look to the change in height of the centre of gravity. By similar triangles, drop in height of the CoG can be calculated:

The next step is the total energy calculation and the velocity of a point object in the position of my centre of gravity:

Unfortunately, calculations using centre of gravity give lumped answers; I don't know what the velocity of my shoulder was [and frankly I want to finish this post in the next ten minutes]. If I was being correct and rigourous^4.5, I'd do moment calculations with estimates of the distribution of my mass, based on that I can get an expression that will tell me the velocity at my shoulder.

Let's say that my shoulder velocity is 4m/s (more than the CoG velocity, I figured this was reasonable because it is far from the turning point and centre of gravity). That gives an applied force of 800±25%N (mass by change in velocity (4-0) divided by deceleration time [writing on my white board takes time - use your imagination]).

Now, according to the internet a broken clavicle⁵ is a common injury for falling off of your bike onto your shoulder [LINK].⁶ According to this publication peak axial compressive force (compression along the length of the clavicle) is 2.41±0.72kN (listed in abstract). However, the paper itself lists the fracture force as a much lower value: 1.91±0.84kN.

Let's say I am on the frail side, one standard deviation to be exact, then force to do me damage is 1,070N. So the odds of me doing myself damage from this were disappointingly low (unless my head happened to hit instead, but that's another story).

If my straw-house of estimates is anything to go by, I experienced about 8gs on impact and an impact velocity of about 9m/s is needed for an average clavicle to break. This works out as 32km/h, which is reasonable enough, and is inline with statistics on to severe injuries and fatalities in road accidents.

In reality, I am not a rigid body:

• There would be energy losses due to my body's plastic deformation as I fell
• My soft tissues (read: amply muscled shoulder) would have absorbed more of the energy

And also,

• The post broke, so there is no telling how much of the force I actually experienced.

Now, if you will excuse me, it is the 2nd of October and over 25°C outside. I've got some kung fu to do.

----

¹Funny side-note, I grew up on "Bog Road"ⁱ - I saw nothing wrong with that until I went to Summer camp for the first time. [Spoiler alert] They laughed at me... Bad enough my home town is Lisdoonvarna [LINK 1,ⁱⁱ LINK 2ⁱⁱⁱ]
²The time for my right pedal to go through 360°. I estimated this from my nominal pedalling rate in instances after the fact: "it ain't 1s and it's less than 2s."

³Nothing new.
⁴Ooo-er vicar.
^4.5Not that the rest of it is particularly rigorous :/
⁵Am I the only person that finds this word rather lewd?
⁶OK, I am being a sophist here, but it's a convenient bone and it has a reasonable chance of being a common injury because it is such a wuss, in the area of interest and would be put under axial compression. This ain't peer reviewed :P

****

ⁱThe Fresh Prince has got nothing on me.

ⁱⁱI did not expect a Dutch article about Lisdoonvarna :/

ⁱⁱⁱA decided advantage of not being in Ireland is that this song  (heretofore known as my nemesis) is not known where I am.^A

°°°°

^APoint of note: Youtube has a new function that I noticed with this video; It listed Christy playing in Antwerp on the 5th October. How... convenient.

Garlonime Chicken

Garlic, Lemon and Lime Chicken (GarlOnIme)

Ingredients: Garlic, lemon, lime, cashews nuts and whole chicken. [Opens mouth to say something,".... ." closes it again.]

It's been yonks since I wrote a kitchen related post.

I had guests a couple of weekends back, and they demanded, demanded I say, that I make them dinner. Were I an unreasonable man and/or not already planning out what I would do, I'd have taken offense.

The scheming

I started with a standard idea tree. I went with chicken as the meat. Then I decided it would be roasted.  Then I decided I would use cashew nuts, garlic, lemon and lime for flavour (henceforth known as GarlOnIme⁰)

Chicken was a safe bet. I picked Cashew because it is my favourite nut. Garlic is always welcome. Lemon brings an acerbic tone to things, and Lime is like her shy sister, there to rein her in a bit.

The preparing

I used the GarlOnIme in two ways.

1. I diced each of them up really fine [Except for the cashew nuts... I gave up trying to dice them eventually. I ground them with a soup spoon to make my bread instead]. I think I used one lemon, one and a half limes, 3-4 cloves of garlic and a Máirtín sized handful of cashew nuts. This I mixed it into a paste.
2. I made crude 1/8s of the limes (x2) and the lemons (x1.5) and ungainly chunks of the garlic (4-5 cloves ).

I shoved the rough bits into the carcass and I covered the chicken with the paste. To get better diffusion^{screw superscript numbering} of the paste into the meat, I made incisions/stabs into the breast and thighs and shoved the rest of the paste in. I placed it in the fridge and left it over night.

The cooking

To give it a head start on the vegetables, I first foiled the chicken¹ and put it in the oven at about 150°C.

About an hour or 90 minutes later, I put in the veg. Since Barry is Oirish, I went with potatoes as the staple food. I parboiled, sliced and rolled them in butter. Then I cut up carrots, parsnips and onions and threw them in as well.

I went for a slow roast, so everything was ready to eat 2 to 2.5 hours after I put the chicken into the oven (although, that is a rough estimate, because I didn't keep track of the time and just tested the meat every now and again).^1.5

As dessert, I sliced up some fruit (nectarines, strawberries, apple and grapes) with some raisins and threw them into a bowl. I melted some honey and poured that in on top of them. After I poured in the honey, I left it to one side² for about half an hour. All the juices pooled with it to make a surprisingly light, just-sweet-enough syrup.

The post-game analysing

- On the upside, the chicken was very juicy and tasty. [I think it was safe to say that the GarlOnIme was well-diffused through the meat.]

- On the downside, I used too much lemon for my tastes. In future, I'd use another lime or two to get it more balanced.

- The dessert was tasty.

- And of course, the guests were happy with the food. :)

_______________

⁰I thought that GarlOnImeEw gave the wrong kind of message - anything that ends with "eew" does.
^{screw superscript numbering}I wanted to use "penetration", but googling that with any item of food leads to TMI.

¹It crowed quite coarsely, which is like saying "curses" for a chicken.
^1.5I'm a real firebrand, I am. Or it is my occupation with Process Analytical Technologies barging its way into my private life...

²A self respecting chef chronicling his/her forays into the culinarial wilderness feels naked without this phrase. I challenge you to find a TV chef that hasn't used it at least once an episode.

Dutch is a lot like-

It has been a while.

I did mean to put some things [stuff, ponderances, musings, philosophizings, thoughts, ponderances] here, months back.

Months back, I went to Delft to visit friends. There and back, I wrote extensively⁰ about learning Dutch; The similarities between learning a language and learning a martial art;^{0.5, 0.75} How listening and conversing are like sparring... This in turn led me to bemoaning the two most under-appreciated skills in the world today: Listening and Teaching.¹

It takes an awful lot of focus to actually listen to a person; not hearing what you want to hear; not just waiting to say your bit.

And teaching? Teaching?! Richard Feymnan, a the celebrated teacher and physicist, in the foreword to his lecture series,² worried at his own inadequacies as a teacher. How there was no room for feedback during the course, so that he could improve.

If this guy wasn't happy with his teaching, then I don't think there are many of us that should be.

I suppose it is open to debate. But if it is, I am firmly on the side that if they aren't getting it, you are doing it wrong.³

That is the bones of the writings from back then. Better for the brevity, I think.

--

⁰In longhand no less, with a p-e-n. It was actually very calming, not that I'd ever keep a journal or anything. Heavens no. Keeping track of day-to-day thoughts and anecdotes... No, no. Never.
^0.5Or learning one skill is like learning another skill, when you get abstracted/fudgy enough.
^0.75More recently I have been thinking about it like going from on1 salsa to on2 salsa, or cha cha cha, since they [English/German and Dutch] are in the same language/dance group: There's a fundamental change- in the dance it is the rhythm or how you follow the rhythm- that is hard to get over. But when you get comfortable with that, a lot of the things you knew previously are easily transferred.ⁱ

¹ My advertizers demand that I use sensationalist tag-lines. I tried to fight them on it; I wanted to go with: "[...] two skills that are harder than a number of people I know probably think they are [...]." It [sensationalism] is what gets people in the door. This is a numbers game. Not quality.ⁱⁱ

²My work place is so awesome that it has them in their reference library, I only had time to read the foreword on a lunchbreak, but it was worth it.

³Practically, there are limits to this stance. Of course. But. But, there is no telling when you actually reach the limit of your abilities to explain and enlighten and hit the corresponding limits of the pupil. So just keep going, trying to come up with a point of view that clicks.

***

ⁱComing from English and German, a lot of the syntax is similar, and some words sound the same, just "Dutchified." The easiest thing is combining prepositions with verbs for things, it similar for the three languages, and gives a huge jump in amount of things you can say.
ⁱⁱOK, I don't have any advertisers, but I just wanted to feel like someone that would have them. FYI: I am up to 1000+ views all told, not that I care or anything...

Doctor, doctor, please

When I finished my PhD, I had intended on writing a quick note on my hard learned lessons.

A mate of mine is beginning his own shortly and he asked me for some advice... so here I am...

Nothing new...

1. Every month or so remind yourself what your "end game" is - or what shape you want it to be at least.
2. When you find yourself getting nowhere, go talk to someone else about their research problems - a change is as good as a rest.
3. When doing a presentation, write a paper for it, not just throw together a few slides. What I want for myself, is, if I give a presentation or write something, that it fits comfortably within what I know. This generally requires knowing more each time. That means thinking about the literature, which I found best done by writing at length about the context of my research. As "3.5" I don't like showing "frayed edges" to people unless it is to actually talk about the frayed edges. 
4. Also - I found I did my best thinking when I was writing down what I had done in the past. Since i was writing about something that was over and done with - I had some distance on it and could see better what to do next.

So nothing new there, but one must give the ego what it wants - in this case it is being redundant :/

I have a couple of ideas for some more posts, I will probably not get time during the week to do them though, being all busy in work and interacting with people. Socially. I started tango two weeks ago. It is a lot harder than salsa. Seriously subtle stuff - I am rapt.

Quantum buschanics

Our quantum physics teacher in college, was a gent who made the stuff pretty accessible.¹ I remember he made this nerdy [i.e. I laughed] simile.

We were learning about the particulars of the incestuous mess that is Hund's Rule of Maximum Multiplicity and the Aufbau Principle [and peripherally, the Pauli Exclusion Principle]. In a nut shell, in a given electron shell there are a number of orbitals and 2 electrons ultimately go into each orbital. The energy of the system needs to be a minimum for a given number of electrons in a shell (Aufbau), the energy is lowest when the orbitals are balanced - filled to the same amount, so 1 or 2 electrons (Hund's Rule). So the result is that the electrons fill each orbital first in a shell before doubling up.

He likened it to the way bus seats fill in Dublin: all the seats are filled singly before strangers start sitting side-by-side. It's practically a law of Nature.²

Of course that is not the case in Belgium. Every morning, I see the cosmic commuter ballet unfold. Firstly, the seat filling is quite different. There are some seats that are never filled, regardless of how many people there are, other seats are filled regardless of who is in the adjacent seat. For example we have the face-to-face seats. Here, they are all about facing the direction of motion; they'll preferentially sit side-by-side instead of taking a free opposing seat. To complicate matters further when a seat is vacated someone will usually trade up from their seat to the free one. Much like everything else in Belgium it is a complex dance, and I still don't understand the running order for the best seat - I've seen people going the length of the bus for a change.

Two other things that I have noticed:
Some take their commuter naps seriously; I've seen two bring inflatable neck pillows, and conk out for their trip. One of them even sports a really long lagging-jacket-like coat that she reverses as an ad hoc blanket.

There is a turn off a highway - it takes about 10 seconds to complete. It's fantastic, it's the longest turning circle I've ever been in! Once I figure out when it happens - I am going to eyeball the g's I'm pulling on this bad boy³... when I am starting to doze the shift reminds me of the falling van scene in Inception.

While we are talking about buses and commuting - there was another blooming vakbondsactie last Friday. To add some levity a chap sporting a knitted cap in the Jamaican colours came into the waiting room. He began with a boisterous "Goede morgen, Everybody!" He then spent 15-20 minutes bemoaning the fact that Belgium has been without a government (regering) for 6 months - he's wrong it is actually over 8 months, but he didn't sound like he was interested in accuracy. To add that Belgian flair to it he was soapboxing in a patchwork of English, German, French, Dutch and Italian.

For a finish, all the men except me had decided to brave the frost outside, instead of staying inside with the man of the moment, me and the women. After we, the audience, exchanged a few glances and smirks at his histrionics, our man declared that he had to work, pulled down his cap, put a rolled up cigarette in his mouth, swung open the door and left without so much as a by-your-leave.

------

¹He told us about his own difficulties with the subject as a student, and what he found helpful. Unlike our physics teacher in first year who could tell you how many students were in the class and recalled how many were at the last class; told us we shouldn't eat coming into his post-lunch lecture because it would make us sleepy. I couldn't never followed his lectures on Gaussian surfaces, it took a lot of thinking on my own part... I suspect this guy never had any trouble learning new things.
²Obviously the quantum mechanics is practically a law of nature, but I meant, as a figure of speech, that the system for seat-filling is such a thing.
³I can estimate how many degrees off vertical it is with a piece of string, or how far I moved away from the side of the bus - I have an idea of my centre of gravity - the law of the lever on from c.o.g. what ever datum I chose for moving away from the side of the bus - a bit of vector magic... then from Googlemaps I can estimate the radius of the curve - and then the speed of the bus. ⁱ

****

ⁱAlternatively, I could look over the driver's shoulder. :/

I'm walking on eggshells [wooah, it don't feel good]

SWMNBN is going nuts.¹

15 minutes from home...

She asked motherdearest to put down her window. It wasn't down far enough so she communicated this to us with pepperings of "f*cking hell", "you are all f*ckers", and kicking her inactive window switch. From here, She smoothly segued into how she hates us all, especially me.

7 minutes from home...

She began talking about how her and I can have the house to ourselves, sit on the couch, cuddle and watch a scary movie ["but only a ittle bit scary"], while Deirdre collects her sowing kit.

3 minutes from home...

She is asleep.


Mythbusters had a look at Chinese Water Torture and the found that it was not the dripping water in-and-of-itself, but the regularity of the dripping  that made the experience torture.² It reminds me of and is possibly related to this interesting little ditty from Cornell U. The idea being we look for patterns to make things simpler for ourselves, so we reduce the amount of information we have to handle. Generally speaking it has made us pretty awesome, but accidentally or intentionally complicated/irregular/non-sensical information makes us its bitch.³

****

¹Well, she is growing more apparently nuts...


²I know I paint her in a pretty bad light at times, but she is hilarious, shockingly adroit, and generally
very niceⁱ. I don't think we much cared for each other at the beginning of my time in the country, but we've gradually won each other over, like some kind of mutual Stockholm Syndrome.



³In Neal Stephenson's book Anathem, the punishment within the Maths was to copy from and memorize "the Book." It is rife with errors, which grow more insidious chapter-by-chapter, the feared result being a corruption of the mind.

++++

ⁱI'm hardly going to relate the dull bits; it's kind of like war- lots of waiting around interspersed with moments of terror.

Hickey versus the fractals

A friend of mine, who shall remain Hickey, sent a group of us this email:

http://kottke.org/10/02/insanely-deep-fractal-zoom

This is probably one for you, Mairtin, but can anyone explain to me why I'm supposed to be impressed by this. I'm seeing these Mandelbrot set's everywhere on the tinterweb [sic] lately and I don't get it. Why isn't it just an animation that goes on for a long time (in theory can't it go on infinitely)? What exactly is it supposed to convey, mean, represent?

It has been a while since I deigned to put up a blog post and while writing my first [lengthy, oft-times kitsch and pontificating] response to Hickey's challenge, I decided that this fit the bill.

Mairtin McNamara for the defence, your Hickey.

The Mandelbrot set is the flagship for a group of mathematical oddities known as fractals.

Fractals look the same at any scale of magnification.(But, as you said, theoretically.)

This is their key characteristic. Well, that and the fact that they arise from a few simple steps or the solution to a few equations; You get something of potentially infinite vastness, but contiguous enough to shift smoothly from coarse to fine scales, all from a tiny package of information.

Evidence A for the defence:

This is bread and butter in biology. The construction of nerve fibers, the lungs, the folds in the brain, fingerprint patterns, blood vessels, etc. are all examples of the application of fractal behaviour by human genome/body. With a fractal expression it is tantamount to having a button called "create vein system."

It is a few years since I read it, but in Max Gleick's book, Chaos, he as an example of how flexible fractals can be, he writes about a guy who created a set of expressions that yielded the face of a dog, and more easily the leaf of a fern.

Fractal geometries also depict the behaviour of dynamic systems.* I say depict, since it is useless as a predictive tool- as evidenced [I haven't used that as a verb in a while...] by the lack ironclad predictions in the stock market, or the bloody weather.

Simply, it shows you the quality of things, what kind of thing to expect.

Evidence B for the defence:

A weather forecast is the most likely outcome based on numerous simulations performed on current available data. It is an educated guess, not a prophesy [particularly since Met Eireann uses arcane code from the 1960s that is to modern forecasting what an ass-and-cart is to a Ferrari Enzo...]

Fractals come into this because they form in the visualisations/plots of the data- you could probably interpret it as a piece of music, if you were so inclined, but I wouldn't recommend it though.

I digress... the fractals show as almost repeating and never overlapping phase trajectories. In the context of weather the shape of the fractals show in broad-stroke terms how many different types of day could unfold and whether the weather of one of these days is a strange attractor of sorts.

Evidence C for the defence:

Fractals hold an interest in game graphics and special effects, since both want simple little packages that use little energy to provide complex results: clouds of smoke, water splashes, explosions, river deltas, branches of trees, the way wind bends the blades of grass in a lawn, hair on the head of a back-flipping cheerleader, etc. can be represented by some kind of fractal and simulating contextually , or phenomenologically can hugely simplify things, when compared to modelling individual elements in painstaking detail.

Closing statement:

In summary, it is unlikely we could exist today without fractal phenomena, since our bloated DNA would be rife with lethal errors in their convoluted algorithm "how to construct vein system" ["error at vein-889-9-3-1, address not found"]

The defence rests, your Hickey.

I haven't read it in about 6 years, but there is a book called the Collapse of Chaos that does an amazing job of addressing the flaws of the deterministic view of the world adopted by most scientists since year dot, and how it compares with the contextual (i.e. qualitative view) that fractals, Poincaré plots, horseshoe plots, etc. represent. A caution though: it is densely written, I could only go through 10-20 pages at a time before needing a break to think about what they were saying. Max Gleick's book I mentioned earlier is a better one to cut your teeth on, or even to wet your toes with.

You'll notice the sparsity of references in this, it is more a personal essay, than a formal response. Nonetheless, it will be this week's blog post, for no other reason than my canookie uncle demanded one of me..

*Dynamic systems is a catchall phrase: populations and food supplies, the rate change of data failures in a transmission with respect to time, weather- as I note at length-, and almost anything else you can think of. Hell even how a day in your life progresses can be considered as a fractal... if you lived it over and over again like Mr Murray in Groundhog Day and assigned numerical values to the things you did in your day and the outcome thereof... You get the idea.

In writing this little essay on "what the Mandelbrot set means to me" I am reminded of a comment my seconday school English teacher made at the end of one of my essays:

Somewhat overwhelmed by its own verbosity

I imagine that it will be my epithet...¹

Feeling guilty for inundating my friends with a wall of text, left in their inboxes waiting to be sprung on a Sunday morn, I wrote a more brief one:

If that wall of text was too much to consider reading on a Sunday morning:

The set is the iconic representation of infinite recursion, something rich, complex and almost the same arising from a simple set of rules.

Poetically speaking it represents life.

It is seen all over nature- from trees to blood vessels.

By corollary, fractal shapes that we make can follow the spirit of the law of the world around us as opposed to the letter of it.

If I get the chance, I'll comb through the, currently, baseless, but generally reasonable, claims I made above and insert citations. I make no promises though.

*****

¹I could write another post on how much I enjoyed my teacher's sense of humour, but then it wouldn't be very funny, would it?

Super Science Slide-Show Special

Some research images, stuff that is so hydrophobic it kicks itself out of solution as quickly as possible. So fast it doesn't have any structure- an amorphous phase. Nothing happens to it, so it builds up, but eventually some of it develops a structure- some crystals- and it breaks up. The whole thing took about 5 minutes to happen.

"Just a little meta-stable amorphous phase, nothing to worry about..."

"Ah! He's brought a friend, or grown..."

"Space..."

"Now that is just psychedelic"

"It's OK, looks like it is breaking up into crystals, fine ordered members of society"

Collected the images with a microscope submerged in a beaker of my¹ solution and I² dumped in some acid to get the thing to come out of solution.

☆ ☆ ☆

¹It is a chemical I used in my PhD research

²By "I," I mean Barbara did the experiments

Roads? Where we are going don't...

Last week, Brian left his car lights on all day, while he was in college. It goes without saying.¹ Shortly after he left the office, he was on the phone begging for a push start. Feeling magnanimous, I recruited a cohort (a silent man of many names) and rushed to our hirsute damsel's aid; Damian remained behind to make sure his pants were so tight it felt like he was wearing nothing at all.

We got Brian's Fiesta out of its spot and lined it up for the exit.

Once did we push it, with such a mighty effort that the car moved, and once did it not start. Twice did we move it, with such a mighty burst of effort that the 3 score birds took flight from the shaking trees and twice did it stay silent. Thrice did we throw ourselves at the sleeping beast, with a such mighty effort that our very feet left a blazing trail in our wake and thrice did it roar to life with much coughing.² And lo' did the Warring Son of the Seahound³ and the Silent Man of Many Names walk back to the engineering building as the Rice-man goeth in his chariot of steel.

Joking aside, the incident reminded me of Back to The Future. Except of course Brian is only a pinch of salt grey, not yet a doctor, his surname is a food and not a colour; it was just pushing a damn-bucket-of-bolts quickly enough to make a spark; ⁴ Finally, instead of 1.21 Giga Watts it was more like, 4 Kilo Watts!⁵

*****

¹The phrase is used far too often and always in-correctly. If it really "went without saying", or if "it was needless to say," then why would one continue? - It casts aspersions of ineptitude on the listener: "What I am about to tell you is fundamental to the matter-at-hand, anyone with a modicum of sense realises or knows this; I do not think you have one."
²I am aware that once, twice and thrice are used in egregious error, but I wanted a Celtic legend feel to it and decided,"F*ck it."
³A chocolate bar to the person that first explains my reasoning here!
⁴ It also kinda reminds me of the time Han couldn't the Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive to start and they had to go through the asteroid field to get to Bespin.
⁵Some back of the envelope bill calculations:

Power is work per unit time; Work is force by distance; The force is the car's friction coefficient by its weight; The friction coefficient is the sine of the angle of the incline that the unbraked car begins to move (link). We pushed for about 30-45m and over 15-30 seconds. The Fiesta weighs about 940kg, ±85kg of Rice. I figure the Fiesta would start to roll somewhere between 7 and 15 degree incline.
Not exactly what I wrote down, but it is in the spirit of it. The actual wattage is most likely of that order of magnitude (i.e. 1-10kW); 4kW is a mid-point of sorts.

*****

I apologise for the manifold instances of the semi-colon; I came across a link about its use earlier in the week; I am in the habit of showing-off that I know something even when at best it is tangentially relavent.

I see the light

What is he on?

I was waiting for my bus to bring me to salsa last week.¹ It was drizzling at the time, with some driving gusts. I'm wont to stretch my neck, tilting an ear to a shoulder² and pointing my nose upwards. Due to my off-kilter gaze my attention was caught by raindrops, falling.³ They were back-lit by a street lamp. Against the night sky, it looked like a swath of comets, like something in the opening of TNG. I had a moment of vertigo, like I was inside an optical illusion. It was amazing.

There's the rub.

Yet another reason why humans make terrible scientists. Our thoughts colour our perceptions; Giving us preconceptions, if you like.

We are convinced the next time it will come up heads, since it came up tails so many times already. We are shocked when famous people turn out to be other than virtuous paragons... surely all the money, good-looks and social influence correlate to a good nature.^4,5 If we are feeling all happy, we are more likely to get the wool pulled over our eyes.⁶ If a person annoys me, he/she can't be right.⁷

And, at the end of the day: do what I say, not as I do.

I can't wait for the robots to take cover, everything will move smoothly.

*****

¹In the main, I am better at at keeping the beat now, thanks to the... clave!

²The more possible one.

³Sure, it sounds poetic, but since the water spheres and I were standing near a bus-stop, as opposed to a volume of space removed from objects of a significant mass, poised at the apogee of a parabolic flight in a gravity well, or a high magnitude magnetic field, the water obviously falls.ⁱ

4

⁵It seems rather recursive if you ask me.

⁶Forgas & East, 2008

⁷Heck, I probably didn't bother listening in the first place, since he's obviously going to be wrong.

*****

ⁱOther exceptions are welcome.

2009: The Director's Cut: Scroll the Finalth

And now for Máirtín's nod to materialism.

My favourite possessions of the year are:

My head scarf: I got it in Morocco back in February. We were forced to buy them on the way to the Sahara, €10, as far as I recall. It kept my porcelain face safe from the abrasive sand and scouring sun all the way to the tallest dunes in the country.
The hitherto snubbed¹ shroud rose to favour when I tired of trying to turtle into the wide brim of my fleece. I wrap it round my neck and jaw-line. Since it is 2.62 m long it goes around a few times.² Now my neck and chest are safely tucked in.

My gyroscope: I got it as a gift from Cillian and the Mrs. I look forward to coming to grips with the mathematics/physics behind it.³

My netbook: I've had some [self-inflicted] problems the past few months with my desktop, so I spend most of my time with the VGA cable to my 20 inch monitor connected to the little one. That and its mobility got it on the list.

____________________________________________________________________
¹I've been waiting 12 years to use that phrase appropriately! Another highlight to the year. It is from Nobel Laureate Séamus Heaney's An Advancement of Learning.
² It goes around 5 and 3.5 times.^i
3Pardon the pun, or not. Hell, if you complain about it, I'll just delete your comment!

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________
i}If I tie it really tight around my head it is the former, if I take care to keep it loose, it is the latter. I took out the measuring tape and found that the circumference (C) of my neck is 39cm, a tight wrap is 53cm and loose wrap is 69cm.
I went nuts and assumed that my neck and scarf were cylindrical, so I could calculate the volume ( V=HC/4π) of each of the cylinders, taking 15cm as the neck height. There is about 4 times more air in the loose wrapping. w00t!

ⁱⁱIts density is 0.01% of liquid water and it follows that eventhough its heat capacity per unit mass is about 25% of that of water, its heat capacity per unit volume is about 0.0015% that of water. If its temperature has the potential to change so easily, why can I barely feel my radiator‽ <sup>iii

iii</sup> "Thanks for asking, Máirtín..." When objects are heated their density changes. In the simplest case, the heat source is on the ground, i.e. the lowest position in the accerating reference frame.^iv The fluid heats, gets less dense compared to the fluid overhead and experiences a buoyancy force, and convection ensues. A critical Rayleigh Number marks the transition from conductive to convection dominant heat transfer. Bluntly, compared to water, Air does not have much going on.<sup>v

iv</sup>Without an applied force objects, don't do much. Kinda like drunk people and cattle prods.

^vI got the air expansion coefficient and kinematic viscosity here. For water I got them here. The diffusivities took some tracking down. I decided that the diffusivity of oxygen in air would suffice for air and water's turned up after some googling. As far as the temperatures go... I picked what my radiator felt like and what my room feels like, respectively.
____________________________________________________________________

Some interesting links that cropped up while I was sifting through the calculations to put in the post:

Rood, E.S. "Thermal Conductivity of Some Wearing Materials", Physics Review Letters, pp 356-361 Vol. 18, 1921. Damn her units. In the abstract she has a mismatch of SI units and neglects to list the pertinent units of the conductivity.

These guys had lots of indepth stuff on the properties of cotton, Air permeability, Weight per unit area, and Thermal conductivity. ^α

This guy did a great job on calculating the condesnation temperature for one's breath.

This lady composed a Matlab program for calculating the Schmidt Number of binary gas mixtures
____________________________________________________________________
^αThey had it as: 53 W/m/K. I was rather sceptical of that. I suppose my scepticism is rooted in associating cloths with insulators. They are probably good insulators because of all the air in them... Nonethless I stand doubtful.

Oh Obee Doo, I wanna Be like you-oooo

This morning, I reminiscing about childhood games. And how mammals and birds at the least if not all animals have their own forms of childhood games. Before I go any farther, I'm going to send some references your way [swings both hands with point index fingers in your direction].

A quick googling of "animal play"⁰ indicates that it is very difficult to defineⁱ, however there is agreement that it gets you ready for the big bad world in almost all ways.ⁱⁱ

So, then. What is the purpose of games like:

red-light/green-light ["i'm going to get really good at sneaking up behind people before they turn to face me and then scaringⁱⁱⁱ/killing them"]

Lion's Cub ["Watch how I stealthily take the one thing you care about"]

blindman's bluff

I'll tell you what the purpose is. Ninjas. No wait. Even better. Liam Neeson in Taken (54s in)

I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

_____________________________________________________________________________

⁰ Be careful what links you click on when you put that into Google.

ⁱ"No behavior has proved more ill-defined, elusive, controversial and even unfashionable than play" Wilson, E. O. (1975) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis Cambridge, M.A. Harvard University Press. By way of the Wikipidea article

ⁱⁱ"When individuals play they typically use action patterns that are also used in other contexts, such as predatory behaviour, antipredatory behaviour, and mating." pp83- It is an interesting review. A sub-species of wallaby have been shown to take it easy on younger partners (bottom of pp 84) There is another interesting anecodote in it about coyote cubs and no one wanting to play with the cheaters (top of pp85). And [the last one. I promise] - cranial electrodes measured that primates have an area in their brain that lights up when they do something or when they watch someone do the same thing. It has the titular name: "mirror neurons".*

ⁱⁱⁱI'm all for the idea of scaring people... in fact it is that time of year again. This year, I'm going all out nerd. I'm even going as far as to do up before and after sketches of the thing I am going as and giving it a back story. That will appear... here exclusively!**

_____________________________________________________________________________

*The observations regarding "mirror neurons" reminded me that babies learn to smile from watching us smiling, which prompted some googling... Eric Jaffe quotes that some consider their discovery on a level with "DNA in the realm of scientific discovery". It is an accessible review of the subject... as he says: "technical enough to impress at dinner parties; simple enough to explain to Grandma; sweeter sounding than, say, the Bose-Einstein condensate"***

**I was the first person I went to and I could not refuse my offer. I really got screw/came out on top with this deal.

***FYI- if you see me at a dinner party, you better not use mirror neurons or so help me, you'll learn to wince at others' pain if you don't already :)****

****That one is wheels within wheels, baby