Mike Soja just wired up his barn based on “a decade old How-To wiring book, and with a few websites…(electricity is pretty easy to understand with just a little study)”.
He has pictures of the sub-panels he wired up.
He did a neater job than most “professionally” wired boxes I’ve looked in to over the past twenty years or so. Some of those were outright horror shows.
Do-it-yourself doesn’t mean incompetent. State licensing doesn’t mean competent.
Oh, this is going up on blogs, bulletin boards, office doors, and hospital bed stands all over the world, damn betcha. This is one of the great classics.
Transcript, because this is important:
Hat Guy: So, has this sickness opened you up to looking for answers beyond science?
Other Guy: …No, not really.
We’ve groped for comfort before the slings and arrows of fortune for millenia, and I begrudge nobody their sources of solace.
But science provides tools.
$100 Billion a year in scientific studies and medical R&D has bought us some pretty damn powerful slings and arrows of our own.
This world is amazing, and I’m going to live to experience more of it thanks to people who refused to gracefully accept the ineffability of reality.
I find my courage where I can, but I take my weapons from science.
Because they work, bitches.
May the Powers bless and keep you, Randall Munroe. That is something that desperately needs to be said and remembered.
Here’s my mini-review of The Last Airbender:
At the end of the movie, everyone bows down to the Airbender, the kid who is the Avatar, the latest incarnation of the one person who can “Bend” all four elements.
And I killed the movie, right there. That’s all I needed to see. I understand he bows back, but I do not care.
We’re Americans, and in America, we do not bow down. We do not prostrate ourselves. We do not kow-tow.
Fuck you very much, Airbender. We don’t need your help.
I give you instead, Juuni Kokki, a.k.a. 12 Kingdoms. You have to struggle through 39 episodes of bitter angst and prideful cruelty, but finally you get to this moment:
I have many quarrels with this show, it’s interminable length not the least, but it’s worth watching to get to this moment and appreciate it fully.
And it’s got a wonderful end theme, “Getsumei-Fuuei”, sung by Mika Arisaka.
I just love the way Arisaka drops her voice to her lowest registers. So many Japanese singers have high-pitched, even childish voices. Not hers, though; I love its robustness.
So, on 15 Nov 2007, a seven man flight crew shows up from Abu Dhabi to make the initial flight tests on Etihad Airways’ brand spanking new Airbus A340-600, the largest passenger aircraft in the world. This particular specimen was equipped way beyond first class, with large, padded computer workstations instead of seats, and double beds for the sleepy, and was so new it had not a single hour of air time.
Problem is, the crew neglected to read the manual or to account for the fact that the plane was empty, and defeated several of the very sophisticated safety systems.
Result? They ran the plane into a concrete blast barrier, demolishing the barrier and destroying the $200 million aircraft.
“The extent of injuries to the crew is unknown, due to the news blackout in the major media in France and elsewhere.”
[Actually, there were five crew members injured severely enough to require hospitalization. No one was killed. Hm. Maybe Allah really was looking out for them.]
Scuse me? This was a national security issue or something?
“Coverage of the story was deemed insulting to Muslim Arabs.”
Oh. Well. National security it is.
“That’s why Allah gave them camels.”
Photos at the link, but the whole article is posted as a single image, including the text, and I don’t want to bother taking it apart.
[update]
Also see the Snopes write up on this incident, which disputes that there was a news blackout to protect Arab or Muslim sensibilities. Although Snopes is generally reliable, they do have a reputation for a politically correct bias. Still, I must conceded I cannot confirm that there was a blackout, although playing it down would be consistent with French attitudes at the time.
Here is a more technical account of the incident. It should be noted that there was an Airbus officer in the right hand (co-pilot’s) seat, which is where the commands resulting in the crash came from.
No sooner do I disavow P.Z. Meyers than he turns up saying something important. He’s commenting on Priya Ganapati’s Gizmodo article about Ray Kurzweil’s assertion that
The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.
About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.
Meyers responds
See that sentence I put in red up there? That’s his fundamental premise, and it is utterly false. Kurzweil knows nothing about how the brain works. It’s design is not encoded in the genome: what’s in the genome is a collection of molecular tools wrapped up in bits of conditional logic, the regulatory part of the genome, that makes cells responsive to interactions with a complex environment. The brain unfolds during development, by means of essential cell:cell interactions, of which we understand only a tiny fraction. The end result is a brain that is much, much more than simply the sum of the nucleotides that encode a few thousand proteins. He has to simulate all of development from his codebase in order to generate a brain simulator, and he isn’t even aware of the magnitude of that problem.
We cannot derive the brain from the protein sequences underlying it; the sequences are insufficient, as well, because the nature of their expression is dependent on the environment and the history of a few hundred billion cells, each plugging along interdependently. We haven’t even solved the sequence-to-protein-folding problem, which is an essential first step to executing Kurzweil’s clueless algorithm. And we have absolutely no way to calculate in principle all the possible interactions and functions of a single protein with the tens of thousands of other proteins in the cell!
Let me give you a few specific examples of just how wrong Kurzweil’s calculations are. Here are a few proteins that I plucked at random from the NIH database; all play a role in the human brain.
First up is RHEB (Ras Homolog Enriched in Brain). It’s a small protein, only 184 amino acids, which Kurzweil pretends can be reduced to about 12 bytes of code in his simulation. Here’s the short description.
MTOR (FRAP1; 601231) integrates protein translation with cellular nutrient status and growth signals through its participation in 2 biochemically and functionally distinct protein complexes, MTORC1 and MTORC2. MTORC1 is sensitive to rapamycin and signals downstream to activate protein translation, whereas MTORC2 is resistant to rapamycin and signals upstream to activate AKT (see 164730). The GTPase RHEB is a proximal activator of MTORC1 and translation initiation. It has the opposite effect on MTORC2, producing inhibition of the upstream AKT pathway (Mavrakis et al., 2008).
Got that? You can’t understand RHEB until you understand how it interacts with three other proteins, and how it fits into a complex regulatory pathway. Is that trivially deducible from the structure of the protein? No. It had to be worked out operationally, by doing experiments to modulate one protein and measure what happened to others. If you read deeper into the description, you discover that the overall effect of RHEB is to modulate cell proliferation in a tightly controlled quantitative way. You aren’t going to be able to simulate a whole brain until you know precisely and in complete detail exactly how this one protein works.
Dammit, and I thought Kurzweil was a schmot guy.
But let me poke a bit on Meyers, too: Simulating the brain down to the protein interactions isn’t going to work, either. The trick is going to be setting up a network of logic gates that can self-organize into a brain under the appropriate stimuli. And, no, we’re not going to understand how it works, either. [Yeah, that link goes to Meyers, too. He knows better.]
Then there’s this from the comments:
[Kurzweil thinks] he’ll be able to resurrect his dead father using DNA recovered from the latter’s grave plus records of his life. IOW, he believes in magic.
Even Jesus can't believe your idiocy.
via SF critic James Nicoll.
“The Impending Doom of the Human Species”
Acceleration of perversions
Initially, all FACA[Female Anatomically Correct Androids] had been designed as young adult versions of their human counterparts. However, emboldened by their sweeping victories in the courts, FACA were soon designed as young girls and boys, and even animals, to meet every possible sexual perversion of their intended markets. Even those men who bought the adult FACA versions found their attitudes changing, since there were no consequences to anything they did with their FACA. After all, it didn’t matter if you swore at your FACA or spoke harshly to it, since it always did exactly what you wanted. Over time, men who owned FACA became more and more rude to their human counterparts as the degradation of society accelerated. Men who owned a FACA disdained the company of real women, with all their incessant demands and mood swings. The sexual revolution was complete and we were all the victims.
Actually, an argument against pornography.
Frink is a calculator/programming language that keeps track of units. It also has a huge library of custom defined units to cover common calculations. For instance, the unit “water” stands for the density of water.
Here’s one of the example calculations from the documentation:
Fart Jokes
I received one of those endlessly-forwarded e-mails of dubious but “interesting facts” which said “if you fart continuously for 6 years and 9 months, you’ll have enough gas to create the equivalent of an atomic bomb.” Hee hee. Cute. (Thanks to Heather May Howard… being unable to easily calculate the veracity of this statement was one of the primary influences that showed how existing programs were too limited and inspired the creation of Frink.) But I didn’t believe it and wanted to check it. The Hiroshima bomb had a yield of 12.5 kilotons of TNT, which is a very small bomb by today’s standards. How many horsepower would that be?
12.5 kilotons TNT / (6 years + 9 months) -> horsepower
329.26013859711395Can you produce a 329-horsepower blowtorch of a fart? I doubt it. That’s the power produced by a Corvette engine running just at its melting point. A one-second fart with that much power could blow me 1000 feet straight up. To produce that kind of energy, how much food would you have to eat a day?
12.5 kilotons TNT / (6 years + 9 months) -> Calories/day
5066811.55086559Ummm… can you eat over 5 million Calories a day? (Again, note that these are food Calories with a capital ‘c’ which are equal to 1000 calories with a small ‘c’.) If you were a perfect fart factory, converting food energy into farts with 100% efficiency, and ate a normal 2000 Calories/day, how many years would it really take?
12.5 kilotons TNT / (2000 Calories/day) -> years
17100.48898417136717,000 years is still a huge underestimate; I don’t know how much of your energy actually goes into fart production. Oh well. To continue the calculations, let’s guess your butthole has a diameter of 1 inch (no, you go measure it.) Let’s also guess that the gas you actually produce in a fart is only 1/10 as combustible as pure natural gas. What would be the velocity of the gas coming out?
12.5 kilotons TNT / natural_gas / (6 years + 9 months) / (pi (.5 in)^2) 10 -> mph
280.1590446203110Nobody likes sitting next to a 280-mile-per-hour fart-machine. Lesson: Even the smallest atomic bombs are really unbelievably powerful and whoever originally calculated this isn’t any fun to be around if they really fart that much.
Fart jokes. Sheesh. If Frink isn’t a huge success, it’s not because I didn’t pander to the Lowest Common Denominator.
Frink is the 280-mile-per-hour fart-machine of calculators.
Frink makes it easy to think precisely.
Best, clearest explanation I’ve found for how the classic bipolar transistor works. No math.
When I went into engineering school, I found it extremely odd that there were still no good explanations of bipolar transistors. Sure, there were detailed mathematical treatments. Just multiply the Base current by “hfe” to obtain the Collector current. Or, treat the transistor as a two-port network with a system of equations inside. Ebers-Moll and all that. But these were similar to black-box circuits, and none of them said HOW a transistor works, how can a small current have any effect on a larger one???? And nobody else seemed curious. Everyone else in the class seemed to think that to memorize the equations was the same as learning concepts and gaining understanding of the device. (R. Feynman calls this the Euclidean or “Greek viewpoint;” the love of mathematics, as opposed to the physicists’ ” Babylonian viewpoint” where concepts are far more important than equations.) I’m a total Babylonian. For me, math is useless at the start, equations are like those black box Spice programs which might work great, but they don’t tell you any details of what’s happening inside a device in the real world.
Right On! And Oh Goody!
First of all, you must abandon the idea that current travels in transistors or flows inside of wires. Yes, you heard me right. Current does not flow. Electric current never flows, since an electric current is not a stuff. Electric current is a flow of something else. (Ask yourself this: what’s the stuff that flows in a river, is it called “current?” Or is it called “water?”)
Since a current is a flow of charge, the common expression “flow of current” should be avoided, since literally it means “flow of flow of charge.” – MODERN COLLEGE PHYSICS, Richards, Sears, Wehr, Zemanski
So what flows inside of wires?
The stuff that moves within wires is not named Electric Current. Intead it is called Electric Charge. It’s the charge that flows, never the current. And in rivers or in plumbing, it’s the water that flows, not the “current.” We cannot understand plumbing until we stop believing in a magical stuff called “current.” We must learn that “water” flows inside of pipes. The same is true with circuits. Wires are not full of current, they are full of charges that can move. Electric charge is real stuff; it can move around with a real velocity and a real direction. But electric current is not stuff. If we decide to ignore “current,” and then examine the behavior of moving charges in great detail, we can burn off the clouds of fog that block our understanding of electronics.
Second: the charges found within conductors do not push themselves along, but instead they’re pushed by potential difference; they’re pushed by the voltage-fields within the conductive material. Charges are not squirted out of the power supply as if the power supply was some sort of water tank. If you imagine that the charges leave through the positive or negative terminal of the power supply; and if you think that the charges then spread throughout the hollow pipes of the circuit, then you’ve made a fundamental mistake. Wires do not act like “empty electron-pipes.” A power supply does not supply any electrons. Power supplies certainly create currents, or they cause currents, but remember, we’re removing that word “current.” To create a flow of charges, a power supply does not inject any charges into the wires. The power supply is only a pump. A pump can supply a pumping pressure. Pumps never supply the water being pumped.
Third: have you discovered the big ‘secret’ of visualizing electric circuits?
ALL CONDUCTORS ARE ALREADY FULL OF CHARGE
Wires and silicon …both behave like pre-filled water pipes or water tanks. Electric circuits are based on full pipes. This simple idea is usually obscured by the phrase “power supplies create current,” or “current flows in wires.” We end up thinking that wires are like hollow pipes. We end up thinking that a mysterious substance called Current is flowing through them. Nope. (Once we get rid of that word “current,” we can discover fairly stunning insights into simple circuits, eh?)
If circuits are like plumbing, then none of the “pipes” of a circuit are ever empty.
I was taught to visualize a wire as a tube full of ping-pong balls. You push a ball in at one end, and another ball pops out at the other end. The actual speed at which individual balls (or in the case of electric current, electrons) move through the pipe is very much slower than how fast the impulse moves. (For electrons, this is called the drift rate, and is usually a few inches per second. The impulse is the speed of light. For ping pong balls, the impulse speed is the speed of sound.)
This is not empty nit-picking. This absolutely correct, and I’m pleased to finally grasp the distinction between “current” and “what flows”.
Now, get thee hence, and learn how one of the fundamental miracles of the age works.
My mom’s book club watched this today, and she loved it. I saw it when it first came out, and am surprised to find I don’t have it here on the blog. It’s a wonderful piece, well worth watching. In any event, I wanted to save references to it so we could find it again.
Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture website is here. There’s a book, and you get the lecture on DVD. There are class and book group study guides.
I just watched the whole thing again, and folks, this is something everybody needs to watch, and hear.
There’s a lot of gloom and doom on this site — in my heart and mind, to tell the truth. Things are about to get really, really, bad.
“The best gold,” says Pausch, “is at the bottom of a barrel of crap.”
We’re about to be swimming in oceans of crap.
The gold at the bottom is going to be just fabulous.
BP’s running live video of the Deep Water Horizon oil leak.
[not embeddable from this source]
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What, did you people think living in the future was all jet packs and food pills?
Blowups happen. Deal.
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