Tag Archives: science

Post-apocalyptic superheroes

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Leaping tall buildings isn’t so useful when there aren’t any. Invisible jets are cool and all, but when airports were taken out with the first strike and ‘jet fuel’ is a euphemism for home-distilled hooch that glows in the dark, jets just aren’t that practical. So what, then, are the abilities that will give the post-apocalyptic superhero the edge when fighting (or simply out-surviving) super-villians? Here is a short list of candidates.

Buzzard Man
Super-power: Born with the immune system of a buzzard, he is able to eat food that would kill anyone else. Carrion several days old, crawling with whatnot, is the mainstay of his diet.
Super-weakness: He still has the taste buds of a regular human.

Camel Woman
Super-power: Able to store large amounts of water in her impressive, uh… humps. She can make it from oasis to oasis across the shifting desert sand, and will never be driven by thirst to drink from contaminated sources.
Super-weakness: chronic back pain and constantly pestered by men offering her glasses of water.

Radiation Boy
Super-power: Not only is Radiation Boy able to withstand nuclear fallout, he thrives on it. Cesium isotopes are his favorite. He can go where no others can, and there’s no worry about finding his way in the dark.
Super-weakness: Loneliness. Since he is, himself, radioactive, he has a bad habit of giving his friends cancer.

Orbital Girl
Super-power: Actually a holographic projection generated by the AI of an orbiting weapons platform, she is quite literally untouchable. Plenty of backstory potential when it comes time to explain why an orbital weapons platform would choose the guise of a teenage girl (unless the satellite is Japanese, in which case it goes without saying).
Super-weakness: While seemingly invulnerable, she is also unable to directly influence events — except with high-power lasers and a few remaining nuclear warheads. She is hot-tempered and you wouldn’t like her when she’s angry. She can never go indoors and can only appear when the satellite is overhead, and is only bright enough to be seen at night. She’s also not that bright in the mental sense.

The Mysterious Person from a Faraway Land
Super-power: Weaves spell-binding stories of a place far away where life doesn’t suck so bad. People will follow the Mysterious Person anywhere and defend Mysterious person to the death.
Super-weakness: Mysterious Person is a complete fraud. (What part of global thermonuclear war did you not understand?) If anyone finds out the truth, Mysterious Person is toast.

Mole Man
Super-power: forget the ozone layer, forget all the troubles on the surface. Mole Man can tunnel deep into the earth — so deep that mankind has not yet found a way to screw it up.
Super-weakness: There’s no food down there. Mole Man must on occasion creep back to the surface. Even a bright moon is blinding to him.

Ozona
Super-power: I have no idea. I just like the name.
Super-weakness: See above.

In the next day or two I will mount a new poll, asking you all who you think is the most awesome of post-apocalyptic superheroes. In the meantime, you can choose a favorite and start campaigning, or you can suggest others as well.

Thanks!

Old Units

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I wonder if there is any man-made unit of measure still in use older than the hour. Months, days, and years have physical events to define them, but no aspect of nature told the Assyrians to divide the day into 24 parts (actually 12 pairs of parts).

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Thanks!

Big Numbers

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Today I was idly wondering if there was any prefix for ten thousand, the way kilo- is the prefix for one thousand. Ah, Google, I love ya. In seconds I was on a page showing the accepted SI unit prefixes. I read that back in 1991 they decided they needed bigger numbers, so the prefixes could be applied in more areas. I had known exa-, but beyond that there is zetta- and yotta-.

So that got me to thinking, and we know nothing good can come of that. I like yotta- (1024 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), but pretty soon your mobile phone is going to have a YB of RAM. (Actually, it will have a yobibyte (YiB) of RAM, but the principle applies.) Before we know it, we’ll be needing bigger prefixes. To forestall any confusion and economic disruption, I, as a public service, offer to lead the crusade to go on beyond yotta-, much as Dr. Seuss did for the alphabet in his ground-breaking work On Beyond Zebra.

You don’t have to thank me; it’s what I do.

To begin the discussion, I offer the following suggestions for the next prefixes:

  • lotta- 1027 – (abbreviation: L) this number is especially significant when you are ordering at lottaburger
  • holotta- 1030 – (abbreviation: HL)
  • messa- 1033 – (abbreviation: Me) as in “I want one messapotato.” (abbreviated 1 MeTater)
  • homessa- 1036 – (abbreviation: HMe)
  • yottayottayotta- 1072 – (abbreviation: YYY)

I invite the scientific community to participate as well, and include suggestions in the comments for this episode.

Is there any hope of defining a prefix that is as big as we will ever need? For instance, is there any point in defining number prefixes beyond the number of particles in the universe? (Last I heard, the estimate was somewhere around 1084.) For that number, I propose alla-, so you could say, the universe contains one allaparticle. (Later, if more particles turn up in some dusty backwater of the universe, we would have to decide whether to change the definition of alla- or just say, “The universe contains two allaparticles.”

Finally, the reason I was looking up any of this stuff: visitor 40009 will be the myennial office holder. It’s not officially sanctioned by the SI, but neither am I.

Thanks!

An architecture question

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I’m sitting at the Little Café Near Home, planing my November, which is looking bright, and somewhere along the way I started thinking of triangles — not sure what set it off — and a missed opportunity by my math teachers in seventh grade.

My memory being notoriously bad, I’m amazed I remember any of this stuff, but we spent a lot of time in geometry class messing with triangles. One thing that was pounded into our heads was that once you define the lengths of the sides of a triangle, you’re done. That triangle is fixed. I think we called it the side-side-side theorem, or SSS for short. It was just another fact. Just another checkbox in the curriculum.

It might have caught my interest more, and perhaps the interest of others who didn’t take to math so well, it someone had mentioned that it could be the single most important fact in mechanical engineering and architecture. Triangles are rigid.

Now I remember how I started thinking this way — most of the chairs in this place, sturdily made of steel, are distorted. Over the months and years of use people have leaned back in them until now they are all somewhat out of shape. They are sturdy, but they are all about rectangles, not triangles. It would not take much to redesign these chairs to be much sturdier.

So you put a chair like this in front of a high school math class and say, “Behold, the power of the triangle in your everyday life.”

But then I did some more thinking. Thoughts often lead to thinking, and thinking to thoughts, in a vicious cycle interrupted only by head trauma or the presence of a member of the opposite sex. I thought of Notre Dame Cathedral. No triangles. Apparently stone is not a material for triangles. It’s good with compression, but tensile strength is laughable. It can only be flexed one direction.

But wood is certainly a good triangle material. I remember as a kid staring up at the rafters in church, seeing the triangles there, admiring the way they were made with parallel planks bolted together like a giant tinkertoy. I remember those rafters better than any sermon.

But older examples of triangles in architecture, I’m having a hard time with. There’s the old footage of the great New York skyscrapers racing each other into the sky, giant rectangular steel frames with steeplejacks racing about with hot rivets. There must have been triangles in there or the whole mess would have twisted and fallen, but they’re not apparent in those old movies.

So, architecture guys: Sacre Coeur, no triangles; then there was that skyscraper where exotriangles were added when they realized after they built the thing that the wind tunnel tests on the models were flawed. If you were given half an hour in front of a semi-comatose group of young math students who don’t give a rat’s ass about SSS, what would you tell them? How do you pass on that this seemingly esoteric fact is a cornerstone of our civilization? In your absence, how do you advise teachers to do the same?

The scope of this ramble is rapidly expanding, to where I now want to create a framework that allows professionals to pass on their passion to students who don’t have any way to recognize when they are confronted by a potentially life-changing fact. I want a footnote in the book that links to a video of an architect getting really gung-ho about triangles, or a chemist going batshit over – uh – whatever chemists go batshit over. I want to challenge leaders in every field to think back to the most basic fact their profession is based upon, the thing they take most for granted, and explain it to people who have never heard it before. They would be giving meaning to the really important bits, things that would otherwise be lost in the noise, but simple facts that could decide a career. There’s some kid in that geometry class, not so good at proofs and theorems, but when given an important tool for buildin’ stuff, might just perk up a bit, might see the connection between all these numbers and building a hotel on the moon.

For me.

Thanks!

Reusable Space Vehicle, part 2

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After watching SpaceShipOne on TV this morning, I was thinking again about my electromagnetic double-barreled space gun which captures the energy of a returning craft to launch the next one. Obviously, since a hotel on the moon is my ultimate goal, the gun needs to be able to fire its projectile at what is for all intents and purposes escape velocity, plus extra for the loss due to drag the first few miles of flight. Since the acceleration would have to be moderate in deference to my squishy guests, I knew that to get up to that kind of speed would take a launcher several kilometers long.

But how long? Well, this morning I did the math. Escape velocity is about 11100 m/s. We’ll shoot for 12000 m/s to give us a little cushion. Plus, it makes the math easier. OK, the first warning bells started to go off when I realized that in the last second of the launch the capsule would need almost 12 Km of launcher. Uh, oh.

Get out your shovels, boys and girls, because to get the capsule up to target velocity at the only moderately-stressful acceleration of 40m/s/s would take 300 seconds, or five minutes. In that time the capsule would travel 1800 Km, almost 1/4 of the diameter of the Earth.

The electrogun could still be used for an initial boost for a ship which also carried its own rockets to allow it to claw up out of the gravity well, and indeed several people have already thought of that. (I have not seen any design that recaptures the energy on return, however.) A gun with much greater acceleration and a shorter barrel could also be used to launch non-squishy payloads.

It’s also worth noting that it would take only a tiny fraction of the energy to needed achieve escape velocity to match the feat of SpaceShipOne, so I’ll still happily accept any large donations to make my dream a reality. In the meantime, I’m back to rooting for the Space Elevator boys to deliver my hotel guests.

Thanks!

Eggs Over Easy

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Note to visitors: I am passionate about my eggs. It’s funny how many people wind up here from searches in Google and Yahoo, looking for the Answer. Read on; the key to the perfect over-easy egg is only paragraphs away. This episode was written to entertain, but clearly there is a pent-up need in the world for advice on getting those eggs just right, and by gum I’m happy to give my opinion about anything. For that reason I have now written another episode: Eggs Over Easy – The Definitive Step-By-Step Guide. I would recommend you read here first, then go over to the step-by-step page. If you find this information helpful or entertaining, please leave a comment; I’d love to hear from you. Then you can invite me over for breakfast. Mmmmmm… breakfast.

I’m not a gourmet by any stretch of the imagination, nor does Iron Chef have to worry about being unseated by me. But I do like my eggs. Thus it is not an unusual morning when I venture out to find someone to cook some for me. Now that I no longer have a kitchen, this happens with even greater regularity. Alas, my fried chicken ova* are almost never cooked right. Oh, I eat them, and I still enjoy them, but there’s that little part of me that says, “doesn’t anyone know how to cook an egg anymore?”

I’m here to put things right. You don’t have to thank me; it’s what I do.

There are four generally recognized ways to fry an egg:
Sunny-Side Up: The egg is never flipped. The yolk is a bright yellow hemisphere sitting in the middle of the pristine white. The yolk is liquid, and some of the white around the yolk may have a jelly-like consistency.
Over Easy: The egg is flipped briefly. The yolk does not stand out as strikingly, but is still liquid. The white is no longer liquid.
Over Meduim: The white is cooked to a firmer texture, and the yolk is solid around the edges, and oozy in the middle.
Over Hard: The white is firm, the yolk is a lighter color and flakey.

Then there are those who intentionally break the yolk before the flip. We won’t talk about those people here.

Each degree of cooking is associated with a preferred texture for the white and for the yolk. Which brings me to my point. People who order their eggs over easy don’t want runny whites. If they wanted that, they would order sunny-side up. Runny yolk but solid white is why over easy was invented in the first place. It is by far the trickiest egg-frying style – it requires touch and artistry to cook one part of the egg without cooking the other. But it seems most places I go don’t even make the effort to try.

When in egg-cooking school, students must be reminded with great clarity and consistency: Don’t flip the eggs too soon. If one waits until the egg is ready to serve sunny-side, then flips it for just a few moments to sear the last of the white, it comes out perfect every time. Alas, impatient cooks do not wait for that perfect moment. They flip the egg prematurely and there’s no way that much white is going to get cooked post-flip without adversely affecting the yolk. The time to get most of the white firmed up is while the white is acting as an insulating layer between the pan and the yolk.

I have considered explaining to my waiter exactly how I want my eggs. I thought of saying “Sunny-Side Over” to convey my meaning, but I have never tried. Even if the waiter nodded and took notes, by the time it reached the cook I would probably end up with Sunny Side Rubber, so afraid would he be to flip the eggs too soon. That or it would just piss him off. No, we can but hope that future generations will take this to heart, and look with pride at the eggs sitting on the plate, seemingly in defiance of thermodynamics, the yolks jiggling, the whites not.

So mamas, tell your children, when you first hand them the spatula and the carton of eggs, as they stare wide-eyed at the pan in front of them, butter or bacon drippings faintly sizzling in the shimmering heat, that they must be patient. They must wait for the right moment to flip.

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* this used to say “fried chicken embryos”, but I got tired of people unfamiliar with the Coneheads explaining Greek to me.

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Thanks!

Reusable Space Vehicle

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Please note: There’s a lot of engineering and physics in here, but give it a try even if you hate that stuff. I’ve tried to give the Carl Sagan version here. I thought about splitting this entry up, but it’s kind of a big-picture thing. I’ll add some drawings tomorrow (er… later this morning). If you start to glaze over, you can always see what’s happening at the Suicide Squirrel Death Cult.

I’ve got it all worked out, see. I had most of the plan worked out some time ago, but I had put it on the back burner. The other day my brother sent me an article mentioning the space launch contest and that got me to thinking again. Now it’s the wee hours of the morning, and the last piece of the puzzle has fallen into place.

Here’s how space flight works now: you make a huge bomb with a nozzle at one end. You set off the bomb and hope it burns in a controlled manner long enough for it to carry something worthwhile into space. Now you have something way up there and when you bring it back down you have to do something to slow it down, or, like a truck rolling out of control down a mountain, something bad is going to happen at the bottom. To get rid of all that potential energy, you use the air to slow you down. That generates an enormous amount of heat, so you hope the payload makes it to the ground without burning up. We have seen tragedy both on launch and landing as our frail machines proved unable to handle those enormous amounts of energy. There are several other drawbacks as well. Off the top of my head:

  • Inefficiency: Most of the fuel is used to lift…fuel. I don’t know the ratio of fuel mass to payload mass with modern propellants, but it’s still ridiculous. You’ve seen rockets taking off – they’re huge cylinders of fuel with a tiny capsule on top.
  • Cost: even with reusable spacecraft, big parts are thrown away on each launch. That fuel ain’t cheap, either.
  • Environment: The exhaust from a rocket has some nasty, nasty chemicals, and nothing gets those chemicals into the upper atmosphere like a rocket. Manufacturing the fuel has some ugly byproducts as well.

It’s time to rethink the whole proposition and take a step backward. Remember Jules Verne? He shot his space travelers out of a cannon. If I remember correctly, that’s how the martians came to Earth in War of the Worlds. There are some problems with the approach, but with a little thinking a very elegant and practical space launch system could be developed.

Here’s the skinny: rather than use a huge explosive charge as a typical cannon does, use a long electromagnetic coil to propel the capsule. I’m not going to do the calculus here (I’ll save that for a later post. I bet you can’t wait.), but for a manned capsule you are limited on the acceleration of the payload by human endurance. Since I’m eventually going to be launching wealthy patrons up to my hotel on the moon, the barrel of the gun will be very long indeed. I’m thinking you find a tall mountain and start drilling down. (This needs to be in a remote area anyway, as it will be really freakin loud – more on that later.)

Now, it’s going to take a lot of energy to get your cargo up into space, though not nearly as much energy as a traditional rocket needs, because we’re not burning fuel to accelerate fuel. The total energy required will be a fraction of that needed to launch a payload today. Nonetheless, chemical rockets have one big advantage – they can release a whole bunch of energy at once. It is very difficult to store that much electrical energy and release it all in a very short time. That’s what had me partially stumped until tonight.

So here’s the story so far: we have a miles-long electric cannon that in a burst of energy flings a breathtakingly beautiful streamlined capsule into the heavens. The capsule is designed to be as aerodynamic as possible, so that the pesky atmosphere hinders it as little as possible. (No amount of streamlining will diminish the enormous shock it creates as it tears the atmosphere a new one, but we’ll try to minimize that.) There are certainly some hurdles into getting the thing up there, but things really get interesting on the way back down.

As I mentioned before, spacecraft returning to earth have a lot of energy to get rid of. They need a way to apply the brakes all the way down that big gravity hill. Spacecraft today use the atmosphere to slow themselves down, turning all that potential energy into heat. Not my aerodynamic little beauty. When it points its slender nose toward the earth, it’s going to slice through the air as cleanly as possible. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there will still be lots of heat, but this baby will only have to deal with a tiny fraction of the heat that other spacecraft do. Out of the sky our capsule plunges, greedily hoarding its energy rather than using it to heat the air. Down it comes – straight down the barrel of the gun that launched it.

Now those giant coils that first hurled our spacecraft upwards become the brakes, transforming the kinetic energy of the capsule into electricity. We actually get back some of the energy we used to launch the craft in the first place!

Here’s the beauty part: it’s very difficult to store electricity, and boy, we’re going to be getting a lot of it all at once. If it doesn’t find a place to go, there will be trouble. We need to use that energy right away, as it’s generated… by launching another space craft. Sweet Saints of Symmetry, Batman! As one goes in, another comes out of another barrel of the gun, like two people on a trampoline bouncing each other. Bounce! one comes down, sending the other soaring into the air. Bounce! the other comes down and sends the first even higher. Of course, there has to be energy added on each bounce. The trampolinists use their legs to supply the energy to send each bounce higher. Our bouncing space capsules will use a large electric power plant. But since the power plant doesn’t have to supply all the energy for each launch, the problem becomes manageable.

All that’s left is getting the bouncing started. That’s the part I came up with tonight. Like the two bouncers on the trampoline, you don’t start at full height, you bounce back and forth, building up your energy over time. If you have two capsules, first you give one of them the biggest kick you can. Maybe it goes 5,000 meters up then comes back down. You get some of the energy back from that one and kick again. The next capsule goes 9,000 meters up, and so on. The biggest problem with the electrical launch, how to store enough energy, is solved. Away you go, Chumley, laughing at the very idea that it would take two whole weeks to launch a capsule twice.

That Ten Million is practically mine. Anyone have a billion to loan me? Actually, better make it five billion.

Post Script: Please read the followup article which discusses a slight hitch in this plan.

Thanks!

Hotel on the Moon

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Let’s start by thinking about the reasons anyone would want to visit the moon:

1) It’s the moon!
2) Low-gravity sex – and, uh, other activities

Number 1 means that when someone looks out the window, they expect to see pristine lunar landscape, not the tracks left behind by the construction equipment. Brian’s offer to head up the lunarscaping crew notwithstanding, any marring of the terrain (lunain?) will be permanent.

So how does one create a structure without touching the surrounding land? My thought is to learn from the mushroom – pop up from underground overnight.

Man, I wish I had a napkin scanner now.

Anyway, the idea is to start by going underground. For health and safety you want most of the complex beneath a layer of rock anyway. Way deep you bury your reactor; it’s going to take a lot of energy to build the place. Then above that you put the living areas.

Here’s where it gets good. From a shaft in the ground you extend a giant umbrella, open it. Its reach extends far past all the destruction caused while digging the shaft. Set it down gently. Beyond that plastic bubble the moon is untouched, looking exactly the way it did when dudes were spitting painting onto cave walls. Good viewing!

The actual umbrella will probably have more than one layer, and some sort of optically-neutral gel between the layers to plug micrometeor hits well enough until a better patch can be applied. But I’ll leave those details to the engineers.

There would, of course, be a location where guests arrive and depart; that will likely not be as pretty. It would be out of sight of the main city, connected by tunnel or – Ooo! – by a graceful elevated rail to give spectacular views as guests arrive. Building that without ruining the surrounding countryside would be tricky, but probably worth it. In the low gravity you could build something that really defied imagination, something that our common sense would say must fall down. Definitely worth the effort.

As far as point 2 above, Brian V. already has dibs on the astro-jump concession.

Thanks!

More on the Robot Race Vehicle

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John pointed out that one of the entries in this year’s race brazenly stole my idea for a self-stabilizing motorcycle. There’s even video of it wobbling around the campus. While it’s not a bad start, I think my design is better.

So here’s what I’ve got:

By making the gyroscope very large, it won’t have to spin as fast to get the same stability. The things steers by tilting over, controlled by the gyroscope. Raising the main gyro way up improves ground clearance. I have now dubbed my machine The Camel.

Putting the motors directly on the wheels like that implies electric, but I doubt that’s practical unless it was solar powered. Batteries would just weigh too much and be too bulky. Probably end up with little gasoline motors, but they’re harder to control. Fuel cells? Steam power? Mr. Fusion?

No napkin scanner, but this way I get color, too!

Thanks!

Robot Race Vehicle

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The race course is revealed to the teams the day before the competition. Well, there was no winner this year. In fact, the best any vehicle did was seven miles. Most of them were out after less than a mile. the prize is $1M, and it will probably cost quite a bit more than that to build a winning entry.

Which makes this excellent fodder for a get-poor-quick scheme indeed, although perhaps not on the same grand scale as a hotel on the moon.

Most, if not all, of the entries looked like dune buggies with junk attached all over them. I have a proposal for a radically different vehicle. I would build motorcycle with a big gyroscope that would stableize the vehicle and allow it to turn. it would even be able to pick itself up if if fell over. Both wheels wold be driven with independent motors, and a second gyroscope with a vertical axis would allow the motorcycle to lift its front or back wheel. With that configuration, the vehicle would be able to climb just about anything.

What few pictures of the race make the course look a lot tamer than what I had imagined, but many of the cars turned over or suffered mechanical failures, so perhaps the course was rough, just not where the cameras were. It does appear that the course was on a road the entire way. That would certainly reduce the need for climbing capabilities and perhaps give an edge to the 4-wheel vehicles which could carry more fuel and electronics.

Still, a self-stabilizing autonomous motorcycle would be pretty cool. Are there any mechanical engineers, AI guys, and remote sensing experts who want to win a million bucks with me?

This just in – John pointed out that there was an entry like that. I looked at their design and it required less custom mechanical engineering than mine would (gyroscope was a pre-packaged unit, but much smaller than the motorcycle needs if you’re going to stay upright.) I would use the gyroscope for steering as well, rather than try to steer with the front wheel. their bike suffered from a severe case of the wobblies.

Thanks!

Better Get Hoppin’

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before someone aces me out. I saw another plan for a moon hotel, designed (like all of them) to look cool FROM THE OUTSIDE. Aye, yi, yi. So far no one seems to be considering making the place the best experience possible for the guests.

I’ll try to put together a description of my plan and put a link to it here. Multi-billionaires looking for and investment may contact me directly.

By the way, the astro-jump concession has already been spoken for.

Thanks!