Buenas Tardes mi cielo

Hi Gaby!

I have 30 minutes to get one new viewer.

OK, 29 minutes, until I can get one more customer and have the same numbers as two days ago.

OK, 28 minutes, until I can get one more after. Then I will have beaten the record I will have 17 amazing readers. That’s hero’s territory.

I’ll keep editing this starting After 7:32 PM EDT.

WordPress rolls their stories every midnight GMT.

In Toronto, Ontario, we are currently in Daylight Savings Time. We are currently GMT-4 observing EDT and EST.

Here’s our stats. Let’s see if posting 1 new article can give me one more viewer before the end of the day. You see, then I’ll have 16 posts today. that matches the one from 2 days ago.

7:33 PM. Still only 15 views. Come on world. You can do it. Give me one more click.

7:38 PM. Still. 15 hits today. Need 1 more.

Maybe I’ll go and click on some other people’s blogs and click around. If someone out there is watching their stats like me, I’ll show up on their stats-radar, and they’ll click on me. Here I go. 19 minutes to go!

7:51 There is 9 minutes left, and *someone* either clicked twice or two people just visited twice. A special Hiya to my buddy Julian, who’s blog is on the right called StarvingStudentSurvival . Hurray, I’m pretty happy over those hits.

Your odds of dying in various ways.

I just loved this illustration. Interestingly enough, you’re more likely to die in a car than on a motorcycle.  I just wonder where “working 9-5 under neon lights for 35 years” fits in..

If Earth stopped suddenly, you would fly off into space. Maybe.

It was a Thursday. I remember it clearly. A crisp fall breeze, some leaves scattered below the trees and around my feet as I walked through the park. Then I was flying in outer space.

OK. It will never happen, but on this particular day, the hand of G-d came down, and stopped the earth from rotating. He didn’t slow it down, wobble it, or let it go. He just stopped it, dead.

Would we fly off into space? Doubtful. Would we have the wildest ride into the upper atmosphere? Probably!

You see, the earth’s equator is about 40,000 km in circumference. Given a 24 hour day, this is a relative speed of about 1666.6667 km/h. While this is impressively fast, it’s just not enough to launch us into outerspace for 2 reasons.

1. Escape velocity of the earth’s gravity is 40,000km per HOUR! We’re only doing that per day.
2. We wouldn’t have enough momentum to overcome the drag of our bodies in the earth’s atmosphere.

We need to consider the launch vector. Even if we were going a zillion kilometers per hour, we wouldn’t be launched straight up. We’d be launched sideways! Most likely you would end up smacking into a tree at mach 1.357.

But, let’s say that you were standing on a pier in Nova Scotia, looking at the ocean. You would not run into anything when you get launched Eastward. Because you would start off flying at a remarkable speed, there’s a chance here that you would gain *some* altitude. We need to consider the following if we’re going to see how high off the ground you’d go:

• Initially, gravity would “appear” to have no effect on your direction of travel.
• As you moved at great speed, the earth’s horizon would appear to fall away from you. In this respect, you would gain altitude. This won’t be the case for our experiment though, we’re just not going fast enough.
• Because you have more mass and kinetic energy than the air around you, your body could potentially become an airfoil as it flies through the air, providing additional lift.

Wow, let’s just pretend for now that you’re in vacuo (no atmosphere to create drag or lift on your body). Obviously, earth’s gravity is eventually going to win. Let’s also pretend that this pier you’re standing on is 10 meters high off the ocean. How far are you going to fly until you make splashdown?

Vertical motion at 10 metres height is sqrt( (2)(10m) /(9.8m/s²) )=1.42857 seconds.

Therefore, with us moving at 462.962972 metres per second (wow), we will travel 661.375 metres before we hit the water. That sucks.

Drag effect. Oh man, don’t ask me to do that…. way too many variables. First off, we’re not just talking induced drag (from creating lift) or parasitic drag (ie. skin friction, form drag), but also, because we are flying faster than the speed of sound, we’d need to calculate Wave Drag. What a drag.

Suffice to say, you’d die. And it was such a nice day….

Deep-Space Data Transmission = Free Storage!

Delays. Delays. Delays. Not all bad, but some better than others.

Ordinarily, in the data world, a delay is a loathsome thing. It makes your conversations on the cell phone sound strange and impersonal, it turns your favourite video first-person shoot-em-up video game skills look like a n00b, and it’s why the people across the street from you with Cable TV are jumping with joy a few seconds before you with your Satellite TV when the Blue Jays win another World Series.

What about extra-terrestrial data communications?

The satellite used for Bell ExpressVu or other TV providers is a very small distance away from earth, but even so, this adds a small delay to the digital signal you receive. A satellite in Geostationary orbit must be at an altitude of 35,786 km (22,240 statute miles).

Light travels 1,079,252,848.8 km/h, or, 17 987 547.5 km/second.

Therefore, the delay is 0.00198948745 seconds, or, about 4 milliseconds 2-way, plus processing delay. This might seem small , but keep in mind that a delay of 200 milliseconds renders 2-way conversation unusable in full duplex (ie. it’s time to talk in half-duplex like walkie-talkies). Human perception can recognise 50 milliseconds of delay.

So back to my claim of free storage. What happens to that data for the 2 seconds it is en-route from the earth to the sattelite? It’s neither at the transmitter, nor is it at the receiver. This data is in transit as an electromagnetic wave. It’s intact, coherent, but isn’t anywhere to be found!

Exactly how much data is in the “ether” between the earth and a satellite at any given point in time? Lets build some numbers to work with:

Speed of electromagnetic propogation: 17 987 547.5 km/second
Frequency of Ku Band transmission: ~ 12.7GHz (12 700 000 000 oscilations per second).

One oscillation of a frequency is equivalent to 1 bit. For our purposes, I’m going to ignore things like headers, preamble, checksums, and the “good morning vietnam” that surrounds, encompases, and trails deep-space transmission of data.

Dividing the time required to reach the Satellite by the frequency of the transmission, we can see that there are 25,266,490 bits suspended in the ether between the satellite and the ground station. Equating that to a file, we can safely say that we have”stored” a 3MB file without the use of a wire, a hard drive, a flash memory drive, or any physical device.

This is all well and good, but our “storage” seems to expire pretty quickly. In 2 ms, our data is removed from this storage medium until the next time it is spit out there. Useless, right? Not quite. What if we could position 2 satellites to constantly rebound this data off of eachother, and when we need the data, we issue a command to the satellite to copy the data over to us the next time it comes around?

—->
<—-
—->
<—-

The further we move the satellites apart from each other, the more data we can fit into this constant cyclical stream, thanks to delay.

So how far apart do we have to move the satellites in order to store, say, a DVD movie, or the entire user database of Facebook? Here’s a few examples with a relay that begins at earth. I’m going to only include the data going in one direction.

Earth to …	Distance	Delay (seconds)	Data (Mbits)	Equivalent Amount of Data
Satellite in GeoStationary Orbit	35,786 km	0.00198948745	25.2	MP3 song
Moon	384,400km	0.0213703397	256	Quicktime Program Installer
Mars	228,000,000 km	12.6754356	152105	5 DVD Movies
Voyager 1	15,500,000,000 km	861.707245	1.03404869 × 1013	Entire Wikipedia Database

So I guess that the entire contents of all the hard drives of the world (the Internet) can be transmitted before it arrives at our nearest star, which is 40,000,000,000,000 km’s away (give or take a few).

Humans continue to lower the height of the atmosphere… but by how much? PART 1

That’s right. It’s all our fault, and I’m not even joking.

Millions of cars, trucks, airplanes, trailers, bicycles, welding shops, and wheelbarrows. What do they all have in common? Compressed air and a bath-tub. Well, not really, but wait… I’m going somewhere with this.

Consider the bathtub effect. Run a bath and watch it fill up with water. Note the level of the water. Take one thimble-full of water out of the tub. By how much did the water level drop? You can’t tell me it didn’t, but trust me when I say, “It did drop”. You might not be able to see it, but it certainly did drop. I’ll prove it:

Bath tub = 80cm long x 150cm wide x 30cm deep = 360,000 cm³ of water.
Thimble = 1cm x 1cm x 1cm = 1 cm³.
New bath tub depth = (359,999 cm³ / 80 cm long / 150cm wide) = 29.999916666666666666666666666667 cm deep.

This represents a 0.00084 mm drop in water. That’s completely indescernable to the naked eye, but you can’t deny that it happened.

Now imagine this bathtub represents the volume of air in our atmosphere. Imagine that the thimble full of water represents the volume of air that humans remove from the atmosphere. How? Simple. We compress air. We humans LOVE compressing air. We take gobs of it and scrunch it down and squeeze it into a space that occupies a fraction of the space that it did before. We take a gymnasium’s volume of air, and put it into a tire.

To figure the mystery of the shrinking height of the atmosphere, we’re going to have to figure out a few things.

1. What’s the current volume of atmosphere
   • Spherical volume of Earth – Spherical volume of stated atmospheric limits
   • How altitude affects atmospheric densities
2. What’s the amount of compressed air we have used I think we’ll use a few huge examples:
   
   • Automobile Tires (cars/trucks/buses)
   • Bicycle Tires
   • Other Tires (wheelbarrows, dolleys, etc. we’ll approx this one to, say, 5%)
   • Compressed air industry (welders/scuba)

I won’t be calculating things that put height into the atmosphere, ie. heat expansion, geo-venting, or vacuum cylinders, cause then these numbers won’t shock and awe… but I wonder how much we “add” to the atmosphere. Oh well, another day perhaps.

I think I’ve just bitten off almost as much as I can chew. The earth will be an easy one. The others, not so much.

Let’s get started! Click More.

How much water does a leaky faucet REALLY waste?

Yesterday was one of those fix-up-the-house days in my basement. It started with the kitty litter, and ended up with the hot-water-heater. I live in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada, and here we get our water from a well. Well water is very hard (full of sediments, especially iron), so I decided to purge the hot water tank, as recommended annually by the sticker.

I turned off the gas, and opened up the hot water tap in the laundry sink beside, for 15 minutes. WOW! So much sediment. I actually left it running and went to do some other things. When I was done, I also used the built in purge valve at the side of the tank, and got the last remaining “brown-water” out. Finally, done!

I shut off the hot water tap in the laundry sink, and that’s when I noticed it. A drip. A slow, seemingly innocuos drip. This had actually stained my laundry sink. I guess the tap needs fixing. I never noticed it before, probably rationailising it by my use of the sink. I mean, who passes by and notices that kind of a thing in an unfinished basement?

This got me thinking… how many drips? I watched it. I watched it for 1 minute. 50 drips in 1 minute. Ordinarily, not concerned, but because it’s hot water, I’m probably wasting energy to heat it. Obviously, a case for real world numbers.

According to various sites, a leaky faucet can waste anywhere from 38 gallons per year to a volume greater than the Pacific Ocean. Here’s what various sites say about it:

http://www.chnep.org/MoreInfo/water_conservation_facts.htm

Leaky faucet (fast drip): 20–30 gallons per day
Leaky faucet (slow drip): 5–10 gallons per day

What? 75 – 115 litres per day for a fast drip, and 20 – 40 litres per day for a slow one? This I’ve gotta check out.

The US Government has a website with a built in calculator.

http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/sc4.html

It estimates that 86,400 drops is 28 litres. This means, 1 drop is equal to 0.32407 mL. Problem is, I also found these web sites:

http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070830165114AAEDkwC

http://forum.onlineconversion.com/showthread.php?t=618

Apparently, one drop of water is called a “minum”. Never mind viscosity, pressure, temperature, it turns out that 20 “minums” equals 1 mL.

So, for my situation we are left with
50 drops/minute
= 72,000 drops/day
= 3600 mL/day
= 3.6L/day
= 108 L / month

My current rate for water at home is $5.027 per 100 cubic feet. In workable terms this is $5 bucks for 2 831 litres. This means that my leak is costing me 19 cents per month.

19 cents per month.
= $2.28 per year.

So, yah! It is totally worth it to fix that tap. I’ll do it in the next few days and feel good. After purchasing a $0.30 cent rubber o-ring, the savings should start rolling in!