song of today

Japanese techno

a rad meeting of math and nature

Chemistry Creates Self-Stirring Liquids

• By Laura Sanders, Science News  
• January 29, 2010  |  
• 5:09 pm  |  
• Categories: Physics

In a tail wagging the dog reversal, researchers have found that simple chemical reactions can mix a solution. Usually, chemicals are stirred to enhance a reaction, but a new study finds that the reverse is also true: Simple chemical reactions can trigger fluid flows, reports a paper in the January 29 Physical Review Letters.

The research has implications for many chemical reactions, including those inside stars or when carbon dioxide stored deep in the earth encounters water, says study coauthor Anne De Wit of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.

De Wit and her colleagues wondered what would happen to fluid flows if the reacting liquids were left alone and not stirred. The researchers watched a very simple reaction — the neutralization that occurs between hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide, a common chemical base — in the absence of stirring.

The researchers carefully injected the denser sodium hydroxide into a container and then added the hydrochloric acid. The sodium hydroxide stayed on the bottom and the hydrochloric acid sat on top. Where the two reactive chemicals met, the reaction’s products — table salt and water — began to form. As the salty solution formed, it crept upward and hit the lower-density acid, creating tendrils that started to mix the solution. But the same didn’t happen below the reaction line. This difference in how the reaction product interacted with each of its chemical parents drove the mixing the team observed.

These asymmetrical patterns, the researchers say, distinguish mixing during a chemical reaction from what happens when two nonreactive liquids meet, which may look more like diffusion or other kinds of mixing.

“These kinds of beautiful patterns can be observed with very well-known reactions,” says study coauthor Christophe Almarcha, also of the Université Libre de Bruxelles. “This is quite fascinating for someone who’s done this reaction hundreds of times.”

The researchers also describe reaction-driven mixing mathematically by creating a model that predicted a pattern that looked like the real thing. The model can be tweaked to predict patterns for other chemical reactions, which would vary widely, Almarcha says.

“Our little model system says ‘pay attention,’” De Wit says. “If there are reactions, then new things will happen.” For instance, if stored carbon leaches into an aquifer and starts reacting with water, “those reactions will trigger flows, which will enhance the mixture,” she says.

Image and Video: C. Almarcha/Université Libre de Bruxelles

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/self-stirring-liquids/#ixzz0eFgKwy1d

the previous evening

I had a good time last night.  It was pointed out to me that I always spend much of my time at concerts backstage as opposed to out on the floor.  I was asked if it was because I don't like crowds, I said no I don't mind crowds.  I had fun, but after being told that I do wish that I would have spent more time in front.  I didn't really talk to any of my enduring friends and this morning I wish I had.  I feel like I missed out, but at the same time I enjoyed myself.  No real point to this, just a bit of venting.  I really do wish I would have hung out with people more; I also wish the end of the night had gone on a little longer.  I should have taped the show, it would be interesting to see how stupid my bad timing made things look.   Who cares, I had fun, the guys played well, they sold a bunch of merch, the rest of my friends who played did it really well, and the last bit of my night was nice.  There were a lot of people I didn't talk to though, and there are a few I wish I would have talked to more.  Of course there are a whole group of people who I don't really like talking to, avoiding them is a big reason I stay out of the way.  Some say this about me, but I'll say it now about some others; some people are just fucking annoying.

song of today

Such a happy remix of a song about ODing

I am being honest when I say this is a good one

“I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.” JD Salinger r.i.p. 


click on the quote to see more

Do you remember your first?

Remember the first generation of ipod? a big chunky brick with small drive and not super awesome sound?  Thoughts like that make me wonder about the people who buy the first generation of ipad.  I'm not a tech geek, but it seems like there are a bunch of things that the apple people are holding out on so they can put them on the future gen versions and give people a reason to buy another one, like a flash on an iphone.  I've been one of those people who were excited for something like this to exist now that I've seen some of the detail I have a few problems; no full HD playback, no usb port, no flash video player, no camera (or flash), it can only run one app at a time, and no phone capabilities (hook up a bluetooth ear piece and talk while you're using it; if people are going to call it a big iphone might as well give it that option), it could have had a stylus option with handwriting recognition for using it like a paper notepad.  The lamest thing about it is of course the fucking name; there was an internet rumor that it was going to be called the iSlate (way better), but instead they went for a pansy play off the iPod.  Come on apple, this could have been some serious Star Trek TNG style shit; instead you put out Voyager.

If this were on any other show somebody at apple probably would have spoken up at the product naming meeting; but it was madtv so I nobody watched.

dammit

damn, I can be a fucking tard.

sign of the times

Isn't it great the the whole conan thing went from being on everybody's tongue to the back of everyone's mind?  In a week Haiti will be forgotten.  Popular songs used to also average at around 4 minutes, these days it's closer to 3.  I'm old and even I get bored with the longer stuff, and now between posts on here and text messages my writing has just become a series of short thoughts instead of eloquent prose.  I'm even bored now and I'm not sure if it is because I've drifted off of a stupid topic, or if it just sucked in the first place and now I'm just bored.  If you're reading this I can imagine that you are pretty bored.

I can type without looking at the keyboard; in fact I was just watching the end of a tennis match as I am writing this part.

"Bluuuughh, Bluuuuuuuighhhhh, Bizazzumm!, Blllluuuuuighhh"- Chuck at a Wendy's

more cyber hotness

damn

I hope after the barbarella clip this isn't too much. This isn't the coolest or most appropriate, but I don't think anyone can deny that her moves are impressive.

Cosmic Dreams

I love you Barbarella.

cosmic rampage. drag down and highlight the post and the text will appear. Nasa is trying to be all infrared and shit

Cosmic Explosion Among the Brightest in Recorded History

02.18.05

Scientists have detected a flash of light from across the Galaxy so powerful that it bounced off the Moon and lit up the Earth's upper atmosphere. The flash was brighter than anything ever detected from beyond our Solar System and lasted over a tenth of a second. NASA and European satellites and many radio telescopes detected the flash and its aftermath on December 27, 2004. Two science teams report about this event at a special press event today at NASA headquarters. A multitude of papers are planned for publication.

Image/animation above: Image 1: Artist conception of the December 27, 2004 gamma ray flare expanding from SGR 1806-20 and impacting Earth’s atmosphere. Click on image to view animation (no audio). Credit: NASA 

The scientists said the light came from a "giant flare" on the surface of an exotic neutron star, called a magnetar. The apparent magnitude was brighter than a full moon and all historical star explosions. The light was brightest in the gamma-ray energy range, far more energetic than visible light or X-rays and invisible to our eyes.

Such a close and powerful eruption raises the question of whether an even larger influx of gamma rays, disturbing the atmosphere, was responsible for one of the mass extinctions known to have occurred on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago. Also, if giant flares can be this powerful, then some gamma-ray bursts (thought to be very distant black-hole-forming star explosions) could actually be from neutron star eruptions in nearby galaxies.

Image/animation above: Image 2: An artist conception of the SGR 1806-20 magnetar including magnetic field lines. After the initial flash, smaller pulsations in the data suggest hot spots on the rotating magnetar’s surface. The data also shows no change in the magentar’s rotation after the initial flash. Click on image to view animation (no audio). Credit: NASA 

NASA's newly launched Swift satellite and the NSF-funded Very Large Array (VLA) were two of many observatories that observed the event, arising from neutron star SGR 1806-20, about 50,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius.

"This might be a once-in-a-lifetime event for astronomers, as well as for the neutron star," said Dr. David Palmer of Los Alamos National Laboratory, lead author on a paper describing the Swift observation. "We know of only two other giant flares in the past 35 years, and this December event was one hundred times more powerful."

Image/animation above: Image 3: Radio data shows a very active area around SGR1806-20. The Very Large Array radio telescope observed ejected material from this Magnetar as it flew out into interstellar space. These observations in the radio wavelength start about 7 days after the flare and continue for 20 days. They show SGR1806-20 dimming in the radio spectrum. Click on image to view animation (no audio). Credit: NRAO/CfA/Gaensler & Univ. of Hawaii.

Dr. Bryan Gaensler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., is lead author on a report describing the VLA observation, which tracked the ejected material as it flew out into interstellar space. Other key scientific teams are associated with radio telescopes in Australia, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, India and the United States, as well as with NASA's High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI).

A neutron star is the core remains of a star once several times more massive than our Sun. When such stars deplete their nuclear fuel, they explode -- an event called a supernova. The remaining core is dense, fast-spinning, highly magnetic, and only about 15 miles in diameter. Millions of neutron stars fill our Milky Way galaxy.

Image/animation above: Image 4: SGR-1806 is an ultra-magnetic neutron star, called a magnetar, located about 50,000 light years away from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. Click on image to view animation (no audio). Credit: NASA

Scientists have discovered about a dozen ultrahigh-magnetic neutron stars, called magnetars. The magnetic field around a magnetar is about 1,000 trillion gauss, strong enough to strip information from a credit card at a distance halfway to the moon. (Ordinary neutron stars measure a mere trillion gauss; the Earth's magnetic field is about 0.5 gauss.)

Four of these magnetars are also called soft gamma repeaters, or SGRs, because they flare up randomly and release gamma rays. Such episodes release about 10^30 to 10^35 watts for about a second, or up to millions of times more energy than our Sun. For a tenth of a second, the giant flare on SGR 1806-20 unleashed energy at a rate of about 10^40 watts. The total energy produced was more than the Sun emits in 150,000 years.

Image/animation above: Image 5: Swift is a first-of-its-kind multi-wavelength observatory dedicated to the study of gamma ray burst (GRB) science. Its three instruments will work together to observe GRBs and afterglows in the gamma ray, X-ray, ultraviolet, and optical wavebands. Swift is designed to solve the 35-year-old mystery of the origin of gamma-ray bursts. Scientists believe GRB are the birth cries of black holes. Click on image to view animation (no audio). Credit: NASA 

"The next biggest flare ever seen from any soft gamma repeater was peanuts compared to this incredible December 27 event," said Gaensler. "Had this happened within 10 light years of us, it would have severely damaged our atmosphere. Fortunately, all the magnetars we know of are much farther away than this."

A scientific debate raged in the 1980s over whether gamma-ray bursts were star explosions from beyond our Galaxy or eruptions on nearby neutron stars. By the late 1990s it became clear that gamma-ray bursts did indeed originate very far away and that SGRs were a different phenomenon. But the extraordinary giant flare on SGR 1806-20 reopens the debate, according to Dr. Chryssa Kouveliotou of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, who coordinated the multiwavelength observations.

Image/animation above: Image 6: NASA's Swift satellite was successfully launched Saturday, November 20, 2004 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. Click on image to view animation. Credit: NASA

A sizeable percentage of "short" gamma-ray bursts, less than two seconds, could be SGR flares, she said. These would come from galaxies within about a 100 million light years from Earth. (Long gamma-ray bursts appear to be black-hole-forming star explosions billions of light years away.)

"An answer to the 'short' gamma-ray burst mystery could come any day now that Swift is in orbit", said Swift lead scientist Neil Gehrels. "Swift saw this event after only about a month on the job."

   

Image left: High resolution, wide-field image of the area around SGR1806-20 as seen in radio wavelength, without a location arrow. Credit: University of Hawaii. Image right: A high resolution, wide-field image of the area around SGR1806-20 as seen in radio wavelength. SGR1806-20 can not be seen in this image generated from earlier radio data taken when SGR1806-20 was “radio quiet.” The arrow locates the position of SGR1806-20 within the image. Credit: University of Hawaii. 

Scientists around the world have been following the December 27 event. RHESSI detected gamma rays and X-rays from the flare. Drs. Kevin Hurley and Steven Boggs of the University of California, Berkeley, are leading the effort to analyze these data. Dr. Robert Duncan of the University of Texas at Austin and Dr. Christopher Thompson at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (University of Toronto) are the leading experts on magnetars, and they are investigating the "short duration" gamma-ray burst relationship.

Brian Cameron, a graduate student at Caltech under the tutorage of Prof. Shri Kulkarni, leads a second scientific paper based on VLA data. Amateur astronomers detected the disturbance in the Earth's ionosphere and relayed this information through the American Association of Variable Star Observers (http://www.aavso.org).

Image above: SGR 1806-20 is a "magnetar": a rapidly spinning neutron star that not only has an incredible density, trillions of times greater than than ordinary matter, but an incredibly strong magnetic field. Tens of thousands of years ago, a "starquake" fractured the magnetar's surface. The result was an explosive release of energy, which sent a pulse of gamma rays racing across the cosmos at the speed of light. Behind them came the explosion's fireball, expanding in a lopsided fashion at roughly one-third the speed of light. The gamma rays swept past the Earth on December 27, 2004, when they were detected by NASA's Swift satellite. That initial signal faded away within minutes. But then came a steady stream of radio waves from the fireball. Astronomers rushed to ground-based radio telescopes such as NSF's Very Large Array outside Socorro, New Mexico, where they have been studying the information-rich signal ever since. Click on image to view animation (no audio). Credit: NSF

Other observatories and scientific representatives include:

Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, Netherlands -- Prof. Ralph Wijers
http://www.astron.nl/p/observing.htm

Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST), Australia -- Prof. Dick Hunstead
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/astrop/most/

Australia Telescope Compact Array -- Prof. Bryan Gaensler
http://www.narrabri.atnf.csiro.au/

Parkes radio telescope, Australia -- Dr. Maura McLaughlin
http://www.parkes.atnf.csiro.au/

Greenbank Radio Telescope, West Virginia -- Dr. Maura McLaughlin
http://www.gb.nrao.edu/

Very Long Baseline Array, USA -- Dr. Mike Garrett
http://www.vlba.nrao.edu/

Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN), UK -- Dr. Rob Fender
http://www.merlin.ac.uk/

Additional information about magentars and soft gamma ray repeaters can be found at Dr. Robert Duncan’s web site located at the University of Texas at Austin: http://solomon.as.utexas.edu/~duncan/magnetar.html 

High Resolution Images:

+ Animation 1 still - beginning of the animation
+ Animation 1 still - end of animation
+ Animation 2 -- 1st still
+ Animation 2 -- 2nd still
+ Animation 4 still
+ Swift Spacecraft
+ SGR 1806-20 (no arrow)
+ SGR 1806-20 (with arrow)

Christopher Wanjek
Goddard Space Flight Center

this kid rocks

This kid is awesome, brilliant work

It would be fun to be Justin Timberlake for a weekend.

that title has nothing to do with the content of the post; I imagine it is true though.  The whole time I was watching the haitian telethon I was on the verge of crying.  That is some sad tragic shit

kenyan sci-fi.

This is a sci-fi short film directed by a woman in kenya. takes place after water shortages have fucked up the world. Showing at sundance right now and I really wish I could go see it.  looks fucking cool

check this

Designers Unearth Apple Tablet Prototypes — From 1983

• By Priya Ganapati  
• January 22, 2010  |  
• 6:50 pm  |  
• Categories: Notebooks

Here’s a blast from the past: In the early 1980s, an industrial design firm helped create some early prototypes of tablets for a young Steve Jobs.

The tablet was called “Bashful,” in reference to the dwarf in the fairy tale Snow White. Bashful was created alongside the Apple IIe as an extension of the Snow White industrial-design language that Apple used from 1984 to 1990.

Now Frog Design, the firm that created those mock-ups, has unearthed some photos from its archives that show what the tablet might have looked like more than 25 years ago. With Apple expected to unveil its long-awaited tablet device on Wednesday, it seems like a good time to bring these photos out of the archives, Frog Design’s people thought.

There are none of the sleek contours that characterize Apple’s products today. But you can still see the emphasis on ease-of-use and a slim profile (relatively speaking, anyway). And it shows how long Jobs has been mulling the idea of bringing a tablet to market.

Variations of the Bashful tablet included one with an attached keyboard and one with a floppy-disk drive and a handle for portability. Some of the tablet prototypes included a stylus. And one concept even had an attached phone.

Frog Design also helped create the Apple IIc, the fourth in the wildly popular Apple II line of personal computers.

The Bashfuls never made it to market, and the prototypes are probably still in the hidden, underground storage vaults of Apple or Frog Design.

Take a look at more photos of the prototype tablets below.

Photos: Frog Design

Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/apple-tablet-1983#ixzz0dVxtBsQg

stupid me

fortress of el solitudo

song of today

this is a strange one. The Knife got asked to do the music for a danish theatrical interpretation of Charled Darwin's Origin of Species.  I want to find more of this.

Which is better?

Is it better to sit and watch tv, sometimes news or documentaries; or is it better to sit and play a video game?

   I had an argument a number of years ago with a room mate about how watching boxing is technically the same as watching two cartoon characters fight.   He was saying that the difference between the two is that one is fake and the other is real; therefore the real one is better, partially due to the spontaneous and unpredictability of it.  I was saying that those perceptions are just relative.
  My point was that all we as individuals sitting in the room together were particles of light shot onto our retina by way of the tv.  Therefore, no matter what we are watching it is technically the same as any other thing we will or have watched.  Be it animated or recorded the subject matter was combat between two humanoid shapes.  The unpredictability was proved moot when it was shown that neither of us knew what was going to happen next on either show.  As far as the act being created by the interaction between two humans, that is also proved moot as a manner of differentiation; flesh coming into contact with a material creating the excitement (gloves punching on face, pencil pushed on paper).   I even went so far as to say that the central figures in both programs wore costumes to make the difference between them more obvious and to help the viewer tell the difference between them; I also said that the environment in which the contest was being held was illuminated by bright and occasionally colored and flashing lights.  Shit is all relative; people like to deny that fact and are comforted by the unproven idea that perception is constant between all of us.
     Needless to say, nobody bought it.

Until we have the weird crab/mini-disc things from the movie "Strange Days" (mid 90's; Raph Fiennes, Julliete Lewis) there is no way we will ever be able to perceive the world another person sees it.  

We don't see objects, our retina translates the particles of light it pics up.  Who's to say that my eyes translate those particles the same way as yours.  To switch over to the ears, check out how the sound a rooster makes is vastly different between languages over the world. i.e. Spanish=Ki-Kiri-Ki; English=Cock-e-doodle-do.  Now a rooster doesn't really sound like either of those, it's just that our ears heard it differently and translated it from sound perception to a phoenitic(sic) translation.

Some might find this interesting, while others might find this inane and boring.  All I can say is, same words read in the same manner off the same source, from the same mind; just translated and perceived differently.  It's all relative



 

Back to the stars

So yeah, it's sad, but I'm watching revenge of the sith for the second time today.  It's been on and I've been cleaning, if I played music right now I'd want to go out do something more exciting.  Who cares though, the thing I wanted to share and laugh about is how Padme and Anakin say they can't tell anyone they're married; in reality what they would be saying is "we can't tell anyone we're fucking".  The next funny thing is that when the two of them were fucking he either forgot to wrap up/ had a leak, or she missed a dose; because they are both pretty surprised that she is knocked up.  For two people trying to keep their relationship secret you'd think they'd be on top of the ball when it came to birth control.

Time to go clean a sink

song of today

I didn't know that a new massive attack record was coming out,