Thursday, September 27, 2007

Get to know your friend, The Sun!

Whoa! We're up to 19 days with NO sunspots on the sun! WTF? You can thank the stupid solar minimum.

Now, because we don't have fancy-pants sunspot activity to distract us, we can focus on other cool stuff about our friend, The Sun. You may have heard that it takes light approximately 8 minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth, yes? Well, light is generated by fusion deep inside the sun's core. How long does it take light to escape from the sun's core?

How does 10,000-100,000 years sound to ya? It's true!

Check out this nifty NASA article about it. From http://sunearthday.nasa.gov

Sunlight is produced through nuclear reactions in the sun's core. Originally born as energetic gamma rays, after billions of collisions with matter, this radiation reaches the surface and escapes into space. How old is sunlight by the time it reaches the surface?
Most textbooks say that it takes light between 100,000 years and 50 million years to escape. You would be surprised to know that this simple, and very popular, question seems to be without a firm answer! The reason has a lot to do with the assumptions that textbook authors use in making the calculation. Most astronomers are also not particularly interested in a high-accuracy answer, so they tend not to bother doing the tedious calculation exactly. It is actually a very complex problem in physics!

Once a photon of light is born, it travels at a speed of 300,000 km/sec until it collides with a charged particle and is diverted in another direction. Because the density of the sun decreases by tens of thousands of times from its lead-dense core to its tenuous photosphere, the typical distance a photon can travel between charged particles changes from 0.01 cm at the core to 0.3 cm near the surface. As a comparison, most back-of-the-envelope estimates assume that the sun's interior has a constant density and that the 'free path' distance for the photon is about one centimeter. It is these estimates that find their way into many popular astronomy textbooks.

Once you know, or assume, a typical distance between collisions, you also have to figure out how many steps the photon has to take to travel from the core to the surface. This is called the Random Walk Problem. The answer is that, if you take a sequence of N random steps, each for example of one meter length, the distance you travel from the starting point will be the square-root of N. After 100 random steps you will travel about 10 meters, but it will take 10,000 steps to travel 100 meters, and one million steps to travel about one kilometer, and so on. Because the density of the sun changes from the core to the surface, it is common to represent the interior of the sun as a collection of nested shells of matter, each with a typical average density. You then calculate how many steps it takes for a photon to travel through each shell. During each step, the photon travels at the speed of light so you can calculate the time required for each step. By multiplying this by the number of steps taken, you can calculate how long it takes the photon to traverse each shell, and then add up all the times for the other shells.


When this random walk process is applied to the interior of the sun, and an accurate model of the solar interior is used, most answers for the age of sunlight come out to be between 10,000 and 170,000 years. Rarely do you get answers greater than a million years unless you have made a serious error! Why do you still see these erroneous estimates of '10 million years' still being used? Because textbook authors and editors do not bother to actually make the correct calculation themselves, and rely on older published answers from similar textbooks.

Cool shit, eh?
Katy... out!

Friday, September 21, 2007

Baby On Board

Quick anticdote from Burning Man...

I was doing my usual late-afternnon activity on day, hanging out on the couches on our Esplanade-frontage front porch watching the world go by.

A guy rode by on a bicycle with a "Baby On Board" sign attached to it. There was a rope attached to the back of the bike, and he was dragging along a wood board with a doll baby lying on it.
Baby on board. Brilliant!

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

WTF, CNN.com?

I'm sorry, but if I remember correctly, CNN.com used to have actual relevant news! If you've been a frequent visitor to CNN.com over the years, you must have noticed that the headlines have become quite sensational lately.

Sure sure... they're no Onion. They still report on the major headlines, but take a look on the right side of the screen under "Latest Headlines". When I see some of those headlines, I say to myself, "WTF, CNN?" What is happening? Is America becoming that dumb? No wonder we have stupid, evil assholes in Washington! No one is paying attention to ANYTHING that matters anymore!!! Don't even get me started on local news broadcasts.

Here are some actual CNN headlines for ya...

Crocs, kids, escalators could be dangerous mix
Armless man quizzed in neighbor's death
Man puts rattlesnake in mouth, gets bitten
Bikini-clad 'Obama Girl' now hot for troops

They've obviously changed their approach to news to attract more, dumber people!!

This sucks. Now I've worked myself up into a tizzy.

If I were in charge, I would require that every person must take a basic test before voting in a general election. It would be a kind of "politically stupid" test to weed out the people who don't know anything about our country, political issues, and the candidates.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to make this "test" so hard that it eliminates too many voters. I would definitely avoid limiting the voting base to only college-educated Americans. It seems to me that people should be able to correctly answer questions like "How many states are there?", "What state was George W. Bush the governor of before becoming president?", or "How many illegal immigrants did Mitt Romney have working on his lawn?" (just kidding on that last one). If you can't answer simple questions to demonstrate your basic knowledge of what's going on, your vote should not count.... or at least... not count as much.

If we can spend millions and millions of dollars on bullshit space probes to check out Pluto, we must have some cash lying around to employ some really smart people to come up with a fair test like this. We could call it the "Voting Qualification Test" or something like that.

Pluto is cold. It's fucking far away. There's nothing there. Get over it.

Let's face it. The reason we're knee-deep in shit right now with the war, global warming, oil prices, the struggling economy, etc is because we have an "elected" fucktard in the White House. People in 2000 and 2004 heard all sorts of soundbites and talking points repeated over and over and over again... until they accepted these little nuggets of shit as the one and only truth. Hearing the term flip-flopper was starting to make my ears bleed in 2004. Unfortunately, I think it was this simplistic, dumbed-down horseshit that too many people actually believed that resulted in our situation. Some of those idiots could have been weeded out with my little system!

And I don't want to hear any shit from you guys saying I'm disenfranchising people because that's exactly what my little test intends to do! It eliminates the lazy assholes (republican, democrat, independent alike) who can't pick up a newspaper, watch a debate, or god-forbid check out CNN occasionally to become more informed about the issues.

Voting Qualification Testing for all!!!

Rant over.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Back to the Default World. Ugh.


Hey kids. I'm back. I've been back for a week, but it feels like a month or more. I think I'm finally caught up on sleep.

It was a year of many "firsts" and many spectacular sights. Here's a VERY short list of some memorable moments and events.

The Man was burned five days early by an arsonist during the lunar eclipse. (He was rebuilt and back up on Thursday! Yay!) You may have heard about this. It made the national news. Me and two friends were right by The Man when it happened. The arsonist was chased by Black Rock Rangers right past us.

We had incredible dust storms on Thursday and Friday afternoons. The one on Friday was worth it, though. We had a full double rainbow appear over the city afterwards.

The Augerid meteor shower DID happen on Saturday morning. I viewed it from the trash fence... away from the city lights and smoke. I saw about 35 meteors in 40 minutes (that's really impressive).

I witnessed my good friend Annie marry her soulmate at the Temple of Forgiveness at dusk on Friday night.
I was attacked my a mob of zombies.

The "Crude Awakening" burn/performance was the most bone-chilling, but also beautiful thing I've ever seen.

I participated in the Monkey Chant at Center Camp on Friday afternoon. Ask me about that later...

I spun fire with my great friends Jewels and Wheylan on Sunday night (the last night I was there) for a wonderful audience. Burning Man was the reason I started spinning in the place. It made my experience complete. I received some of the best compliments of my life afterwards (while fighting back tears of joy).

All week, several people told me that I possess "great energy". The cab driver taking me home in Boston Wednesday morning echoed that sentiment... "you're a very nice, friendly lady, nice to talk to". It really struck a chord with me... that so many people pointed out the exact same trait over and over again.
Life changing again.
Check out this video for starters.