Awesome Epicness

Let’s see folks:

there are two kinds of people in this world: epic ones, and the rest.

you may think you are among the epic ones, but you’re probably not. Not to blame, it’s hard to get into this category.

How can you distinguish those who walk along the most epic of the epic? how can you distinguish those who leave a stomp in history? how can you know, as fast as you feel them, that you’re standing among an abnormal human being, way superior to you?

There a simple threat, a glimpse, that will tell you awesomeness is in there.

The epic god is walking the Earth in front of you.

Probably just once in a lifetime you may be able to see it: keep it in your mind.

1st: suit: awesomeness is nothing without a suit.

2nd: attitude: he/she knows he/she is epic, and so even the air they breath is epic.

3rd: cow suitcase.

nothing is more epic than a cow case.

hard to find, harder to see. Not many people are brave enough to buy one of those and walk straight on the street.

Cow Suitcase.

that’s where epicness comes from.

in fact, if you change some letters, you’ll see a direct relation between awesome and cow-suit-case (just push your obviously not-epic brain a little)

COW SUITCASE

if you ever see a wielder and not bow, be careful, you’re standing in front of a living god and not paying respect.

AI Planning

I’ve recently started a MOOC (massive online open course, or something close to that) about AI planning, made by the university of Edimburg, pretty interesting

This course explains the basis of AI Planning, and how to emulate the immediate planning we humans create to solve immediate troubles or problems that appear in front of us.

I’ll keep you informed as I keep up with the course!

Human stove

Humans are hot-blooded animals.

We emmit heat.

How much?…

Some scientist called Josef Stefan, in 1879, gave birth to an equation called Stefan-Boltzmann equation, that can help us calculate stuff like that!

Aproximating, you need 4 medium-sized healthy people to produce the same heat than a 1000W stove.

Heavy, isn’t it? now imagine how much heat generate a class full of students taking an examn, or the audience of a massive concert … up to your imagination 🙂

Some facts about planes

Everybody loves planes!
And with that thought in mind, and coinciding with a great oportunity for someone close to myself, I’ll dedicate this post to her:

As it’s commonly known, the flight attendants, or cabin crew, are traditionally females… generally wearing a tight handkerchief around their soft necks … well that’s indeed true, but a curious fact about it is that their origins are not female-based : the first steward was a young male named Heinrich Kubis, a couple of years before the first WW.

After this trial, the sons of the main businessman and heads of the airflights companies started to work as stewards at the planes, and they started to be called “cabin boys”, whose main purpose wasn’t security (as it is now), but just serving and granting a fine flight to the passengers.

As times passed by, aviation evolved, getting prestigious day after day, more and more cabin boys were needed, untill disaster knocked at the world’s door: the Great Depression (1927).

…

…

Something happened by that time: not many work positions were avaliable, and a huge number of people applied for every job, and a steward job wasn’t the exception. But something unexpected happened!… A huge airline from that time (Transcontinental and Western Airlines) recieved over 2000 applications for a handful of steward positions… from women!!

And then someone’s mind just started to work: hey! no matter how cool, goodlooking, handsome and charming a boy is, he will never, never be able to compete with a girl at face-to-face public jobs.

Companies easily changed their “cabin boys” for good-looking youg girls, who wanted (and needed) the job, and so the legend was forged.

But the part where the main character lives happily ever after doesn’t start here: in fact, for those premier girls who dared being the first stewardess in history didn’t have an easy time: while being poorly payed (around 1$ per hour… working over 100h a month) they had to deal with gropers, padding butts… and as in every sad story, at some point a white flag appears, with a good-looking knight riding a big horse… in this case it was called Rights Fight

Black people were fighting for their rights, women were fighting also for equality!!

Maybe the next post will further explain the last part… it’s getting too long 🙂

Summarising:

At the end, they could earn some respect for their job, and even though most of the people won’t know, there’s another curious fact conceerning stewards and stewardesses: they’re not there to serve snacks: they’re there to ensure the safety of the flight, so be respectful to them, they don’t deserve ill manered weirdos trying to mess with the harmony of the plane and disturbing their workplace just ’cause they want to.

 

Chess

Everybody has heard, at least once, of one of the most famous games of all ages: the Chess. And mostly everyone knows it’s rules, they’re pretty simple in fact, which makes it a game easy to play.

But not many people know about it’s origins, and that’s what I’d like to put some light upon today!

The roots where he modern Chess game is sustained are found within the Indian territory around the 6th century. Around those dates, the first comertial routes where opened, and with the help of the military power of Persia, and a couple of conquests, the game reached the pharaonic Egypt.

There’s a big event from that time concerning the Chess game: the ambassador from Persia taught the egypts the game, and it became so famous it even reached the pharaon, which granted the persian any desire he wanted. Seeming gentle and humble, he asked for a grain of rice for the first square of the game, two grains for the second, four grains for the third, and so on till he reached the 63 squares. The pharaon, unknowing the hidden maths of the wish, granted it to the ambassador, and huge was his surprise, when his councelor came the following day, begging for his pardon, and telling him that not only there wasn’t enough rice in Egypt, but not even the world had this much.

In fact, if you try to calculate it, the result is 2^64 – 1 , which is like… 3.000.000.000.000 tones of rice!! An easy way to imagine this: if you could take eeeevery chineese person in the world and give each one a thousand tones of rice, you’d just get to a third part of what you need to accomplish… imagine!!

of course, the game rules were much different back then, in fact, the modern chess, the one we’ve always played at, dates from the XVIII century! barely a hundred years before the first world tournament (which was held in 1886, in the USA, confronting Johann Zukertort and Wilhelm Steinitz)

And this is it! See you for the next round! 😉

Link

We have all heard of a phenomena called “Quantum tunneling” or simply “tunneling”… what is it?

To put it simply, if you remember from older posts that old friend Jim, who lived in the pacific 2 dimensional city, working in a 2 dimensional multinational from the 2 dimensional world … we announced the next: by folding his 2 dimensional world (the piece of paper where he lives) we would be creating a shorter route for him to go from his home to his workplace! (more time to sleep for Jim then!). Problem is: he would never know, since he would never grasp this extra dimension, hence he would never be able to jump, or “tunneling” till the other side in a whimp.

Now the point: tunneling can be understood in various ways: to move from one point to another in a route shorter than the shortest way in our 3 dimensional universe, or to upcome a potential wall without going over it.

What do I mean with the potential wall ? imagine you have a huge wall right in front of you, and you need to cross it to get to the other side, the only way to cross it is to jump it over, isn’t it? then tunneling would be to traspass it (nearly impossible if this wall is infinitely long and indestructable) to get to the other side.

Well then, even if it’s a relatively new concept, the first one to design it and demonstrate it’s existence was …. (drums…) … NEWTON!

Let me explain myself:

According to Newtons Law’s for the Classical Mechanics, you can simplify any body to a punctual particle in it’s mass center. According to that, let’s make the example of the wall again, but instead of a person, we’ll use a rope.

Imagine the rope stacked to the wall and the floor, moving like a wurm. If you think it calmly, the rope’s mass center won’t jump over the wall, but go through it!!!

That’s what this weird genious called Newton named as “tunneling effect”, though it’s kinda different of what we understand for it nowadays.

 

Bohr and the height of a building

That’s the story of one of the most brilliant minds humanity has ever given birth to, (as far as I remember, the story talked about a young Niels Bohr) in his middle ages of University.

Here we place the young man in the exam day, in the general physics subject, and the teacher gives him a baromether, and says: “how would you find out how tall is this building we are, using this baromether I’ve just given you?”, at what this young genius answers: “Easy: I’d tie it on a rope and use it as pendulum on the top of this building, by knowing the air’s density, lenght of the rope and gravity’s constant, it’s a child’s game to get the height.”

Not sure if the young boy is making fun of him or not, the teacher asks him to try again:

“Well then, if my first method isn’t of your like, I’d let the baromether drop from the top of the building, and simply counting how long does the sound takes to get to me again, I’d have a barely good aproximation of the height of this building”

after 3 or 4 more tries… with the teacher’s patience nearly at it’s limit, Bohr gives his final answer:

“Sincerly sir: If I were to look for the height of this building, I wouldn’t take all the work of measuring differencies of atmospherical pression and calculating stuff later… I would simply give this baromether to the janitor in exchange for the desired information.”

Because sometimes the easiest way may not be the stipulated by the rules.

Dark Holes … Such a mistery

Thanks to the filmographic efforts of Hollywood during long long years, most of the people think dark holes are portals to strange dimensions, where dragons and aliens await for their chance to destroy humanity…. that’s obviously not true.

What are really dark holes?

Stars, nothing more, nothing less.

When a massive star approaches the end of it’s lifetime, it surely explodes as a supernova (a gargantuescal explosion able to make a night day for a brief period of time; the last recorded, in 1604, was the cause of the decapitation of the whole astronomer team of the emperor of China at the time, as they couldn’t forsee that event before it happened)

As the star explodes outward, it’s nuclei implodes inward, generating a over-dense body with an enormous gravitational field. If this body mass exceeds what is called “Chandrasekhar mass limit” not even light will be able to scape it’s gravitational pull, and will be trapped in there with no possibility to scape. Since no light will come out, we won’t be able to see that body, so we’re gonna call it Dark Hole.

Since the gravitational field is so huge and strong, dark holes are the main protagonists of gravitational lensing, as I explained in the last post, here’s a modelized example:

The shell inside which light can’t scape, and outside which it can, is called “Singularity”, or “Even horizon”, and it’s the point where our physic laws stop working the way they should. Hence we absolutely don’t know what happens inside there.

A curious fact about dark holes (one of the many): If you could hypotetically approach a dark hole, the gravitational force pulling you is so high that you’d just start to get longer, and longer, and longer, till your body would become various miles long. This phenomena is called “spagettification”

Einstein’s Cross

One of the greatest contributions Einstein made to the world, appart from the Photoelectric Effect, which was rewarded with a Nobel Prize, was the Theory of Relativity, which gave us a new revolutionary way to understand the world.

A huge concept of this theory is the curved space: gravity isn’t a force designed by God to pull everything to the mass center. Everything moves to the mass center of the massive objects because of the bending curvature of the space-time.

In case of demmand, I’ll further explain the Bending Effect of the Space-Time due to the mass, by now, I’ll focus on the Gravitational Lenses, one of the evidences of the Relativity Theory exposed by Einstein nearly a hundred years ago.

When light approaches a massive body, it deviates from it’s original path due to the gravitational effects of the object (this wouldn’t happen if the light’s mass was 0!!). Therefore, we call that object Gravitational Lense.

A far yet beautiful proof of this effect is found on the Einstein’s Cross, which is shown below:

Einstein’s Cross

This is a quadruppled image of a quasar named Q2237+0305, placed about 10 billion light-years from us (Z=1.695 for cosmologysts). Between us and this quasar there’s a galaxy, with a supermrassive black hole at it’s center, perfectly aligned to us, at around 500 light years, making possible this awesome gravitational lense effect.

Interesting fact: With the appropiate telescope and preparation, it’s even possible to see this formation from the earth, no need to go to outer space!

Some links to further explain this phenomena:

Related articles

• Einstein’s Cross (3quarksdaily.com)
• Observational (observing.skyhound.com)

Link

Wandering through the internet today I ran across that video, which shows a wrong landing from an A380, one of the mightiest comercial planes nowadays, and then I asked myself, what might cause such a weird behaviour?

A wind shear is what is called a microscale metheorologycal phenomenon, occurring over a small distance, and it alters drastically the direction and strenght of the wind, producing violent turbulence on the planes approaching it’s reach. Without the proper preparations, it can even smash a plane to the ground. Nowadays, thanks to the technology the airplanes are equipped with, it’s possible to detect them soon enough to react and avoid serious  consequences or damage on the craft.

Another similar metheorologycal phenomenon it’s called the Explosive Cyclogenesis, which will be the main theme on a future post!