Inertia In Action

A few months ago while I was unemployed and seeking cheap ways to entertain and educate myself from home I discovered a bunch of interesting YouTube channels with a science slant to them. One such channel turned out to be by a guy from West Vancouver, Derek, and he had a video from his home area. The video was about the Earth and why it rotates, and used a very cool looking object located at Dundarave Pier to illustrate the reason.

As soon as I saw it I wanted to visit it, so last weekend, while Claire was playing DnD, I ventured north and west across the bridge. It was as cool as I had hoped, but I had no-one to share it with. So today I dragged Claire and two friends back to see it again, and we all marveled at the two and a half tonne granite wonder. I even did a quick video blog, my first in over a year!


Here is Derek's video featuring the globe, from his channel Veritasium. Check out his stuff, it fun and informative, and I've learned lots from watching everything he's done so far!

Discussions Of An Abstract Nature

Short one today, but here goes.

Yesterday I worked in the after school age program. It's a nice change of pace moving from the little ones up to a group consisting of six to eleven year olds. They are much more independent and capable, such that most of my day is really about just being there for ration and insurance purposes, but they rarely need me for anything specific.

The other major difference is the topics of conversation. Over the course of the day I discussed endangered species, hunting, conservation, Santa Claus, and eating bugs with one group, and later the formation and physics of black holes with a different child.

I love my job.

Publicity Stunt, Or Real Deal?

This is just a bit too close to fiction to be fact, but you never know:

Warp Drive Engine Would Travel Faster Than Light

It is possible to travel faster than light. You just wouldn't travel faster than light.

Seems strange, but by manipulating extra dimensions with astronomical amounts of energy, two Baylor University physicists have outlined how a faster-than-light engine, or warp drive, could be created that would bend but not break the laws of physics.

"We think we can create an effective warp drive, based on general relatively and string theory," said Gerald Cleaver, coauthor of the paper that recently appeared on the preprint server ArXiv.org

The warp engine is based on a design first proposed in1994 by Michael Alcubierre. The Alcubierre drive, as it's known, involves expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would rest in between the expanding and shrinking space-time, essentially surfing down the side of the bubble.

The tricky part is that the ship wouldn't actually move; space itself would move underneath the stationary spacecraft. A beam of light next to the ship would still zoom away, same as it always does, but a beam of light far from the ship would be left behind.

That means that the ship would arrive at its destination faster than a beam of light traveling the same distance, but without violating Einstein's relativity, which says that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object with mass to the speed of light, since the ship itself isn't actually moving.

Read more at the Discovery Channel new site:
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/07/28/warp-speed-engine.html

Dibs On Optic Blasts!

A few posts back I told you about my "5 Questions" I was doing as part of Flickr. Well, I ended up with an unexpected 30 questions, all of which I answered. Some were funny, some serious but all of them were interesting, and I enjoyed thinking about the questions and how to answer them truthfully.

One of the questions asked was "If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?" After thinking long and hard on it, I decided on my answer.

Wow. Um... Is it terrible if I say that I'd love if super-powers existed? Does that count? Seriously. I have always dreamed about it, and still do. I wake up in the morning, and if I'm feeling particularly silly, I'll lie in bed wondering what it would be like to open my curtains and see people flying outside, or turn on the TV and hear about the newest crisis averted by the premier super-team. Yeah, I admit I'm only thinking of the cool stuff, and not the "Rogue mutants nuke elementary school" stuff, but it's just a nice dream, right! Sure, it's not "end world hunger" or "stop war", but it's my change! And a cheat. With super-powers in existance, anything is possible!

Now it seems I might not have as long to wait for that to happen after all! This last year or so has turned up some very interesting occurances that alone are odd, but together are just far to coincidental to ignore!

In the last few months two amazingly comic relate discoveries have been uncovered, both relate to the Superman mythos. In Mexico, a huge cavern with gypsum columns up to 36 feet long was discovered 1,000 feet below ground! It looks incredibly like Kal-El's Fortress of Solitude, and is a stunning example of nature at her most impressive. The second event relates to the discovery of Kryptonite! An unknown mineral composed of the chemicals sodium, lithium, boron, silicate, hydroxide was discovered to match the description of Kryptonite, only missing fluorine. Unfortunately, this material has been named jadarite, much to the dismay to millions of comics readers around the world!

So, Mother Nature, now we have a Fortess of Solitude and Kryptonite. When are you going to give Marvel a shout-out? I want my damned optic blasts! I want human flight, steel skin, phase-shifting, and all the other wonderful things those wacky mutants get up to! Not all for myself, of course. I'll just be happy with optic blasts. And if Claire could get telekinesis I'd be greatful too.

Thanks.

Denis.