So, like any science oriented guy (plus a helplessly self-promoting asshole) I signed up for google analytics to see who is visiting.
It is nice to see that most people visit from gargantuana and I like my ability to track natalie's travels across asia as she visits from various internet cafes.
But the best information provided by google was the keywords that directed random people to my website. As an aside, I have been branded with the description of "ambiguously heterosexual." Anyway, the number one keyword directing people to my website is: "Homoerotic art."
number 5 is "homoerotic photography"
I love the internet.
Thursday, December 29, 2005
the uncertainty of now
I recently read up on the actual mechanism of ozone hole creation. The most important aspect is the creation, in the cold and dark winter months, of a vortex above a pole that develops a core of very cold air. In this cold air zone polar stratospheric clouds can form in the lower stratosphere. During the winter the vortex is so stable that the air in polar latitudes can essentially be sealed off from air at the lower latitudes.
The polar stratospheric clouds and the segregated cold area both act to generate (or liberate) chlorine containing molecules which have been shown to aid depletion of ozone levels.
Most of the chlorine in the stratosphere is bound up in resevoir molecule hydrogen cloride (hydrochloric acid) and chlorine nitrate. Liberation of active chlorine is usually a slow process but in the presence of the ice particles, as are present in the icy-cold polar clouds, the two resevoir molecules can react together to form a chlorine molecule which can be photodissociated into chlorine atoms.
The cold atmosphere also stabilizes a ClO dimer which apparently is readily photolysed to yield to free chlorine atoms.
Chlorine atoms destroy ozone in the following reaction:
Cl + O3 -> ClO + O2
Note that while the polar clouds are developed during the dark cold months, the ozone depletion cannot take place until the sun comes out. The sun also brings warmth which breaks up the vortex, allows ozone rich air to rush in, destroys the polar clouds and allows the ozone layer to be regenerated.
Now, temperatures are often cold enough in the antarctic to cause ozone depletion but not usually as bad in the arctic. But last year New Scientist indicated that arctic temperatures were the lowest they had been in 50 years. Fortunately, by March temperatures were rising. Still, an arctic ozone hole is feared for the near future.
That being said, CFC producing appliances have decreased (though not as quickly as hoped )
and hopefully, by 2050 both the antarctic hole and the stressed arctic ozone layer will be recovered.
I am off to Waterloo in such a short time. I have a key to a house, my bedding has been sent ahead of me and I am desperately reading the papers I was supposed to do months ago. I have been watching a lot of movies (the warriors, thirteen, rounders). Okay, maybe that is not a lot of movies. But it certainly felt like a lot.
Got bloodied up fighting with azim, rob and jon (mainly rob) while ostensibly tossing a disc. We have made plans to continue with our traditions well into adulthood. I feel that I must push for this - if I am to be a renaissance man, I need friends in multiple disciplines. So with azim, rob, godfre and jon I have psychology, biology and ecology, art and music criticism, and law and politics. I provide chemistry and economics. Together we could be unstoppable. I should remind them about this.
I have been thinking about the real reasons for man's history of subjugating women. For some reason I felt that I had ideas I believed in, but when I was forced to actually write out my feelings I discovered that I had no real ideas or that my ideas were conflicting and easily perverted. If anyone has any good ideas I would love to hear them. I will make a stab at writing my collected ideas here soon. Nothing like presenting your badly conceived contentious ideas in an easily accessible and never deleted medium.
The polar stratospheric clouds and the segregated cold area both act to generate (or liberate) chlorine containing molecules which have been shown to aid depletion of ozone levels.
Most of the chlorine in the stratosphere is bound up in resevoir molecule hydrogen cloride (hydrochloric acid) and chlorine nitrate. Liberation of active chlorine is usually a slow process but in the presence of the ice particles, as are present in the icy-cold polar clouds, the two resevoir molecules can react together to form a chlorine molecule which can be photodissociated into chlorine atoms.
The cold atmosphere also stabilizes a ClO dimer which apparently is readily photolysed to yield to free chlorine atoms.
Chlorine atoms destroy ozone in the following reaction:
Cl + O3 -> ClO + O2
Note that while the polar clouds are developed during the dark cold months, the ozone depletion cannot take place until the sun comes out. The sun also brings warmth which breaks up the vortex, allows ozone rich air to rush in, destroys the polar clouds and allows the ozone layer to be regenerated.
Now, temperatures are often cold enough in the antarctic to cause ozone depletion but not usually as bad in the arctic. But last year New Scientist indicated that arctic temperatures were the lowest they had been in 50 years. Fortunately, by March temperatures were rising. Still, an arctic ozone hole is feared for the near future.
That being said, CFC producing appliances have decreased (though not as quickly as hoped )
and hopefully, by 2050 both the antarctic hole and the stressed arctic ozone layer will be recovered.
I am off to Waterloo in such a short time. I have a key to a house, my bedding has been sent ahead of me and I am desperately reading the papers I was supposed to do months ago. I have been watching a lot of movies (the warriors, thirteen, rounders). Okay, maybe that is not a lot of movies. But it certainly felt like a lot.
Got bloodied up fighting with azim, rob and jon (mainly rob) while ostensibly tossing a disc. We have made plans to continue with our traditions well into adulthood. I feel that I must push for this - if I am to be a renaissance man, I need friends in multiple disciplines. So with azim, rob, godfre and jon I have psychology, biology and ecology, art and music criticism, and law and politics. I provide chemistry and economics. Together we could be unstoppable. I should remind them about this.
I have been thinking about the real reasons for man's history of subjugating women. For some reason I felt that I had ideas I believed in, but when I was forced to actually write out my feelings I discovered that I had no real ideas or that my ideas were conflicting and easily perverted. If anyone has any good ideas I would love to hear them. I will make a stab at writing my collected ideas here soon. Nothing like presenting your badly conceived contentious ideas in an easily accessible and never deleted medium.
Monday, December 19, 2005
the wholehearted effect of kinder eggs
Party at Azim's this weekend was excellent. I enjoy interesting people.
Met an organizer of the Spirit Bear Youth Coalition, who is doing some interesting things working towards an economically feasible model for conservation. Also caught up with lots of Vancouver folk, all of whom are doing great. I like my friends.
I have decided to communicate for 30 minutes per day. It will be hard but should ultimately be worth it.
Godfrey (rmutt.diaryland.com), azim (he doesn't yet know) and I will be using these blogs to teach each other things about our respective fields. If you want to join in just comment and you will be read by our little collective.
I am going to start with something I read in The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene.
Determinism is a philosphy which is not easily adopted since it removes one's free will. Initially found to be a problem (at least in the west) come the onset of Newtonian mechanics, it was thought that perhaps atoms moved in a manner akin to billiard balls. While difficult to calculate exact trajectories and interactions, such calculations should not be impossible, even if humans are never able to do it. The fact that such calculation are, in theory, possible removes free will.
The discovery of quantum mechanics seemed to make determinism impossible, since an important aspect of QM was the inherent uncertainties in that QM described probabilities. This was found to be a thought based on falsehoods. It is actually the description of QM in terms of classical (Newtonian) mechanics that seems to indicate uncertainty. Schroedinger's equation (time dependent) fully describes a wave function as it evolves in time and so, if you accept the wave function as being real in itself and not as a descriptor of probability in classical mechanics, then you find that QM can be deterministic as well.
This has been discussed for a while. The interesting discovery outlined in The Elegant Universe (and admittedly somewhat refuted in the same book) revolves around black holes. It was initially though that black holes did not radiate. It turns out that they do, but I want to save that for the next update. Black holes do, though, remove wavefunctions when they attract matter into their belly. This is a loss of information from the Universe. In analogy, if you strike a ball on a billiards table with a certain velocity in a certain direction, you could theoretically calculate the final positions of all the balls. But if a ball was removed suddenly and unexpectedly from the table your calculations would not hold. If black holes did not radiate, then one may have been able to assume that the information contained in the wavefunction passed to a locked area of the universe (the black hole) and this would not affect determinism because the information still existed although it was not easily accessible. The problem, then, is that black holes do radiate and this radiation results in evaporation of the black hole. Hawkins argues that when the black hole fully evaporates the information is not recovered.
With disappearing information, determinism is impossible.
The refutation is, of course, that black holes do return the information they stole.
Still, it is interesting to see how physicists are looking at this issue.
Met an organizer of the Spirit Bear Youth Coalition, who is doing some interesting things working towards an economically feasible model for conservation. Also caught up with lots of Vancouver folk, all of whom are doing great. I like my friends.
I have decided to communicate for 30 minutes per day. It will be hard but should ultimately be worth it.
Godfrey (rmutt.diaryland.com), azim (he doesn't yet know) and I will be using these blogs to teach each other things about our respective fields. If you want to join in just comment and you will be read by our little collective.
I am going to start with something I read in The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene.
Determinism is a philosphy which is not easily adopted since it removes one's free will. Initially found to be a problem (at least in the west) come the onset of Newtonian mechanics, it was thought that perhaps atoms moved in a manner akin to billiard balls. While difficult to calculate exact trajectories and interactions, such calculations should not be impossible, even if humans are never able to do it. The fact that such calculation are, in theory, possible removes free will.
The discovery of quantum mechanics seemed to make determinism impossible, since an important aspect of QM was the inherent uncertainties in that QM described probabilities. This was found to be a thought based on falsehoods. It is actually the description of QM in terms of classical (Newtonian) mechanics that seems to indicate uncertainty. Schroedinger's equation (time dependent) fully describes a wave function as it evolves in time and so, if you accept the wave function as being real in itself and not as a descriptor of probability in classical mechanics, then you find that QM can be deterministic as well.
This has been discussed for a while. The interesting discovery outlined in The Elegant Universe (and admittedly somewhat refuted in the same book) revolves around black holes. It was initially though that black holes did not radiate. It turns out that they do, but I want to save that for the next update. Black holes do, though, remove wavefunctions when they attract matter into their belly. This is a loss of information from the Universe. In analogy, if you strike a ball on a billiards table with a certain velocity in a certain direction, you could theoretically calculate the final positions of all the balls. But if a ball was removed suddenly and unexpectedly from the table your calculations would not hold. If black holes did not radiate, then one may have been able to assume that the information contained in the wavefunction passed to a locked area of the universe (the black hole) and this would not affect determinism because the information still existed although it was not easily accessible. The problem, then, is that black holes do radiate and this radiation results in evaporation of the black hole. Hawkins argues that when the black hole fully evaporates the information is not recovered.
With disappearing information, determinism is impossible.
The refutation is, of course, that black holes do return the information they stole.
Still, it is interesting to see how physicists are looking at this issue.
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