So I broke out the calculator and did a little math. A proton is about 10 -15meters in diameter. If we increased it’s size to be, oh, lets say one light year in diameter, we would need to multiply by 9.4605284 × 1030. Now multiply the Planck length ( 16.163 × 10 −36 m ) by the same factor and we get 1.5 × 10-5 m which is about the width of a human hair.
While reading up on the LHC I came across some info about the beam dumps. If just one of the magnet sections were to fail while protons are spinning then those protons need to be sent somewhere outside of the beam so that they don’t damage the magnets. What happens is that when a failure is anticipated the computers automatically send the protons into several solid graphite cylinders that are 8 meters long and one meter in diameter which are encased in concrete.
So just how much kinetic energy needs to be absorbed? Each beam, when full, contains 280 trillion protons. That’s about the mass of a strand of hair 12 centimeters long. Those protons are spread out around the 27 kilometer circumference of the machine. But if a magnet were to fail they would all pile up there and cause considerable damage. If one magnet were to absorb the entire beam it would be equivalent to the USS Ronald Regan aircraft carrier hitting it at a speed of 10 kilometers/hour, or a high speed train going 200 kilometers/hour. Yeah, that would make a mess.
NOVA has an excellent program on how flight originated. Plus they cover the competing theories on the matter by highlighting the scientists trying to show evidence for their personal theories.
I love the line that the scientist has near the end: There are over 10,000 living species of birds and only 4,000 species of mammals. It’s still the age of the dinosaur.
Now when I sit down to eat and have a chicken sandwich, or turkey for Thanksgiving I think to myself, This is what you get for 175 million years of oppressing mammals. Keeping us small and in the trees.
Advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception, rather than the product itself. Rory Sutherland makes the daring assertion that a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider “real” value — and his conclusion has interesting consequences for how we look at life.
Almost every photo of a hurricane is from above. Which gives us a good idea of its diameter but leaves us with no impression of its height. Fortunately there is a new satellite in orbit called CloudSat. CloudSat is remarkable because it uses radar to penetrate into clouds and provide a cut-away view of what a hurricane might look like edge-on.
Take a look at the photo below. The top portion is the view of a category 4 Typhoon Choi-Wen. The red line marks the slice that CloudSat took as its orbit passed directly over and through the eye. The bottom image is the cut away view that CloudSat is able to produce from the data it gathers. Here I’ve done my own editing by placing a triangle that represents the height of Mt. Everest. You can see that Choi-Wen is nearly double the height of the highest peak on Earth. And the record cloud height that I could find, for hurricane Wilma, was 59,000 feet.
You can now see that hurricanes are not just impressive in their diameter but also in how emmensely high they are.
I’m watching The Sum of all Fears. About 9 minutes in we see Jack for the first time as he and a few other analyists are watching video footage of a the Russion President.
One of the characters asks, “Who is that woman with the brown hair standing next to him?”
Answer: Elena Rhyzkov
In the movie Sneakers Dr. Elena Rhyzkov is the woman who is having an affair with the mathematician. I wonder if it’s one of those coincidences or do we have a Sneakers fan. Would you think that Tom Clancey would be?
Okay, I just checked and I’m not the only one who noticed. It’s also mentioned on the Sum of all Fears trivia page.
I always enjoy learning more about human behavior. So this presentation by Dan Ariely at TED was very enjoyable.
Spoilers:
What I found the most interesting was the social aspect of cheating. When someone in our group does it and gets away with it we are encouraged to cheat. But when someone we consider to be an outsider cheats we decrease the amount we cheat.
I wonder if there is a way to find out if basketball and football players are less likely to use performance enhancing drugs since so many baseball players have done it and gotten cought.
This was a well edited overview of what looks to have been a very fine presentation at SXSW. Derek Powazek gives his thoughts of what to do, and not to do, when building an interface for a community website where you want to gather intelegent data from a crowd.
