Image courtesy of zirconicusso at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Oh, no – The Dragon is Coming!!!
On Monday August 21st, a solar eclipse will be visible coast-to-coast. North Carolina will be covered from 1 pm to 4 pm with the height about 2:45
NASA has a website dedicated to Solar Eclipses – find out more about what is coming here: https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/solar.html
RECYCLING – SAY NO TO SHRED
I noticed my town asked for the shredding to not go into single-stream recycling bin. What’s up with that? They want us to take it to shred day. Really, who has time for that?
Turns out they have great reasons:
(1) Shredding breaks up the paper into very short fibers which downgrades the quality of the paper and they get less money for it. Since it is mixed in and clings with all the other paper, any bundle with shredded paper now is the lowest quality. Towns are trying to lower taxes through recycling, and so the shredding is money out of the taxpayer pocket, out of your pocket.
(2) Remember I just mention shred clings? Yeah, it clings to the machinery doing the separation of all the single-stream recycling, breaking them down more often, kicking paper dust in the air as an environmental (and fire) hazard to workers, and really screwing up everything the minute it gets wet. All this means the machinery is stopped more often for maintenance and needs replacing more often. Where does the maintenance and replacement money come from – well, hopefully the selling of the recycling materials. But it also means that less money gets put back into the tax bucket so the bucket has to be filled by other means, like property taxes. Again, money out of your pocket.
We all have learned plastic bags don’t go into recycling – for the same reasons as shred. Now I need to add shred to the list of “no-go’s” in my head and take it to the special shred day.
A really good video on recycling is below. It taught me crushing cans and plastic bottles is also undesirable.
Fast, Faster, Fastest
Unless faster-than-light travel becomes a reality, the true reality of space will be very long voyages.
Those who ply humanity’s trade routes have pulled long transients for time immemorial. Christopher Columbus took two months on his voyage and faced mutiny. The silk road from China to Rome took two long years out of a merchant’s life. The longest regularly schedule plane flight of today takes seventeen hours as of February 2017 (from Doha, Qatar to Auckland, New Zealand). Cargo ships can take nearly 30 days to go across the Pacific, and one traveling from Europe to Australia can push 40 days.
The closest exo-planet humanity has found at this time is 4.25 light years away. Traveling at half the speed of light, without speed up or slow down taking into consideration, would take eight and a half years, one way. Just reflect on how much you have accomplished in the last eight and a half years, how far you traveled, matured, learned, and changed. Now imagine doing all that with other people in the space of a space shuttle’s crew module, 2,325 cubic feet. Allowing for a 8-foot ceiling that is 291 square feet. Putting that in perspective, RVs run about 400 square feet.
Fast – 0.0037% the speed of light
Half the speed of light is generous, when one considers the fastest humans ever traveled occurred during Nasa’s Apollo 10 mission that topped out at 24,790 mph – 0.0037% the speed of light. Plans exist for developing technology capable of reaching up to 10% the speed of light. (See “How Fast Could Humans Travel Safely Through Space?” published by BBC in 2015.) At 10% the speed of light, not counting acceleration and deceleration, Proxima Centauri’s system, including one very special rocky planet in the Goldilocks zone, is just 44 short years away.
Faster – 0.0246% the speed of light
Before humanity arranges for some of its members to take The Big Trip, unmanned space craft will be sent. At this time, Juno holds the speed record for spacecraft when she rushed to see what her husband Jupiter was doing with all his moon affairs. She pushed 165,000 mph – 0.0246% the speed of light (seven times faster than humans ever moved in a sustained manner). Plans are in the making to get an unmanned spacecraft up to nearly 3 times that, within the next two years. (See “What’s the Fastest Spacecraft Ever?” published by LiveScience.) Two years feels like tomorrow when thinking about the fifty-year plan for getting humans up to 10%.
Fastest – 0.0671% the speed of light
And that two-year plans has a countdown. See more about the Parker Solar Probe here: http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/
Bibliography
“Astronomers have found the closest exoplanet to Earth” – (Last viewed 11/17/2017) – https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/24/astronomers-have-found-the-closest-exoplanet-to-earth/
“How fast could humans travel safely through space?” – (Last viewed 10/31/2022) – https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150809-how-fast-could-humans-travel-safely-through-space
“Space Shuttle Basics” – specifically for the crew module on the space shuttle – (Last viewed 11/17/2017) – https://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/basics/orbiter/index.html
“What’s the Fastest Spacecraft Ever?” – (Last viewed 11/17/2017) – https://www.livescience.com/32655-whats-the-fastest-spacecraft-ever.html
Geeking language today – how language is developed.
Language is the first tool humans learn to use – it’s necessary to control the parents. Instead of a cry for I hurt, I bored, I hungry, and I working on my lungs – suddenly you can say “nana” to get the yellow sweet thing and “down” frees you from Aunt Kissy-Duck-Face. Such power.
But how did this technological tool develop? How difficult is it? I mean a baby can learn it.
If I was creating a language for science fiction or fantasy, what limitations should I put on the color words? Is there an order to them. Dark and light is obviously. Then I would have assumed blue or green since they are so prevalent in the world. Turns out, for humans at least, the next word is Red. Blue as water and the sky is fairly far down on the list.
All bets are off for aliens and fantasy creatures, but if my worldbuilding goes down this path – figuring how what they see, how they see it, and how they group it can help me understand the culture which the sentient beings will develop.
Language is the bomb!
Image courtesy of namakuki at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Have you ever considered the power of water? It’s enough to make one hydrophobic.
H2O, with its free ions, can act as an acid or a base. We live on a planet where the molecule can exist as gas, liquid, and solid – sometimes all within inches of each other. Plus it has a weird property of getting larger when changing from liquid to solid instead of condensing. Liquid water molecules glom onto neighbors with both “hands” if no one else is near creating a surface tension few substances can beat. All the while being anywhere from transparent to translucent – meaning light can pass through it in both liquid and solid forms, as well as gas. More about its properties can be found at the USGS Water Science School.
Water is amazing.
Taking all these amazing abilities and combining them is what sends a shiver down my spine.
“Water finds a way.” Sun Tzu, the Art of War
Water vapor is everywhere. Getting a little cold it become water liquid and slips deep into cracks. The water freezes as the temperature drops even more, say a desert at night, and the crack expands. Water beats rock, every single time, fragmenting those hearty souls which traveled from the center of the earth to the surface. Eventually water will take the rock out like a ninja warrior, quiet and deadly. By crack, or acid, or base. Steel rusts. Clothing rots. Stone crumbles. Water allows us to create but also erases everything we make.
Water is scary.
In humanity’s constant search to improve, we are developing techniques of hydrophobic – making our creations throw off water. You may be familiar with some early examples of this field – polytetrafluoroethylene (telfon), stainless steel, and waxed coats. Telfon’s makes a corrosive resistant surface through its molecular bonds; basically water’s friendly ions can’t break into the carbon-fluorine party and start bonding to the surface – hence the non-stick surface. Similarly the process of making stainless steel alloy keeps water ions at bay and make the steel unrustable – but the nickel and chromium costs a lot more than carbon steel so large amounts aren’t practical. And waxed coats are made from cotton dipped in wax making them practical for working near seashores and on boats.
I remember once being in a car with no floor. Seeing the road rush by under your feet at 50 miles per hour is an experience. Younger readers may not remember cars with holes rusting at the doors and around the wheel beds from the combination of salt and water during the winter. Switching to plastic-based materials not only made the cars lighter, so saving gas in trying to move mass, and safer, steel sheets no longer bend into the human compartment during a crash, but the plastic also makes the car body stay together better in northern climates.
But that is then, what am I geeking about now?
Laser technology, chemical technology, nano technology. Scientists are developing other means to keep water from bullying other materials into rust. Why are we going through all this trouble? What possible results are worth this effort?
The field of hydropobics makes incredible practical items – as we previously seen with cutlery which won’t rust, kitchen pans no longer needing to be scrubbed after every use, car staying intact through winter slush, and clothing not getting soaked when working around water. Can we change the substance property? Should it be an alloy, a coating, or maybe just modifying the shape can make something hydropobic?
You may have already seen one of the recent applications, hydrophobic paint. Some cities have started painting the outside of the first floor of buildings near the bar district. Now let the peeing person beware – draining the drink can bounce back at ya. Cool, right?
Anyone who travels by plane during the winter – when water really shows off its ability to go from liquid to solid and back again – is well familiar with the wait for the deicing preparation of wings. Nasty chemicals are sprayed on the wings.
A new technology of laser technology changes the surface of the metal wings so water surface tension is shrugged off. No liquid water on wings means no ice forming from the liquid as the temperature drops. No deicing steps are needed, ever again – saving time, chemicals, and my holiday schedule. Totally geeking about this application.
Initially they were trying the paint, but that didn’t work. (MIT 2010) Instead a complicated pattern surface was recommended, something like what the University of Rochester has been working on.
The deicing technology is important for food shipment, electrical wires, the car windshield in winter, sidewalks, as well as the previous mentioned planes.
And who wouldn’t want clothes which won’t stain. Liquid repel right off. Okay, taking water out of the equation will make washing them more difficult, but how often will you need to wash them, really? No sweat, mud, no food stains, no drinks down your back when someone bumps into you by “accident”. Sounds like Science Fiction – but it’s real. Available right now – not truly practical as clothing in price or application as yet unless you are one of those who can live in multi-million dollar homes.
I predict in a decade we will go crazy about this fabric just like we did with wrinkle free polyester in the sixties. It will last for about a year, just like the chainmetal cloth of the eighties. Why? Because one of the most important properties of clothing is wicking moisture (sweat) away from the body in a cooling action. The quote of “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” (Jurassic Park screenwriter) applies to hydrophobic clothing.
On the other hand, gloves able to shrug off concrete and tar and boots able to walk through mud are already an industrial application in use today.
Applications will continue to grow for hydrophobic technology, whether the long-imagined un-iceable plane or the unexpected application against nocturnal urination.
“Water finds a way.”
But humanity is going to make it really, really tough for water to win.