Schierer Space

As seen on actual ESD^[1] mandatory training material (emphasis mine):

“Static electricity is a simple form of electrical energy. Every time you walk across a carpet, touch a doorknob, and get a spark it’s because you were splitting electrons. When you move, you generate an excess of either positive or negative charges on your body. Upon touching something conductive, the excess electrons are trying to find an electron of the opposite charge in order to neutralize themselves. So, an imbalance in electrons creates a difference in potential, which may cause an ESD event that may cause damage to circuitry.”

This is so fundamentally wrong it just hurts my brain. First off, in the Standard Model of elementary particles, electrons are indivisible. Even if you could split them, doing so by casually walking across a carpet would result in a significant release of energy. (Note, the annihilation of a single electron would be essentially unnoticeable from an energy release perspective, but if it happened as easily as simply walking across a carpet, we would have serious problems.) The amount of charge one can feel dissipating on a doorknob is on the order of 10^18 electrons. If they were really combining with “electrons of the opposite charge” (aka positrons… or antimatter electrons) this would result in a significant antimatter explosion. Something on the order of 100-200 kilojoules. Enough to heat about 40 kilograms of water one degree. Or for the 10 grams in the tip of your finger… pretty much vaporization. (Somebody please check my math on that.) Regardless… ouch.

I sent a correction. I’ll be interested to see how well received it is.

1. That’s ElectroStatic Discharge for you non-technical acronym types. [↩]

In my continuing series on over-analyzing the crazy factoids posted at my workplace comes this little gem:

Skimp on sleep, consume more calories!
Staying up late and getting less than 6 hours of sleep can cause cravings and cause you to guzzle down about 200 more calories a night than those who get to sleep earlier.

So at face value, they’re saying that if you stay up late, you’ll be looking for that midnight snack, or as Taco Bell would say, “fourthmeal“.^[1] So an extra 200 calories, huh? According to the US Food and Nutrition Board, Institute of Medicine, National Academies’ Dietary Reference Intake table: a 65 inch male has a daily caloric need of about 2500 calories^[2]
Assuming that this is the intake for a day with a ‘normal’ 8 hour sleep period, that extra 200 calories would correspond to an 8% increase.
Of course, you’re awake, so aren’t you burning more calories than you would be asleep? According to Heathline’s Calorie Burn Rate Calculator an average US 35 year old male (190 pounds)^[3] burns 60 calories per hour when sleeping, but burns 108 calories simply watching TV. So for the extra two hours, our imaginary average person will burn 96 of those 200 calories just be staying awake. If even 30 minutes of that time is spent in mild exercise such as walking, an additional 168 calories will be burned. In that case, our imaginary person will actually burn a net 64 calories by staying awake.
So the lesson here, as always, is that 200 extra calories isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as it’s balanced with useful physical activity.
FWIW: The NCHS report I cited above, says that we Americans are about an inch taller and 25 pounds heavier than we were 40 years ago. Didn’t I read somewhere^[4] that sleeping makes you taller? Maybe it’s time to go for a walk instead of a nap.

1. Which is apparently a Taco Bell trademark. [↩]
2. Gross over simplification. [↩]
3. Mean value from the table linked from CDC National Center for Health Statistics 2004 report. [↩]
4. Various sources found, none that seemed worth referencing on its own. [↩]

At both work and play my life is surrounded by software. To be fair, this is probably true of most people whether they realize it or not. This software increases in complexity with each passing day and will soon pretty much take over the world.^[1] It’s a good thing it has no mass or we would be looking at an information event horizon.

Since I spend so much of my working life looking for and solving the crazy anomalies that crop up when complexity is multiplied by complexity, I am especially amused by funny little glitches I find in the programs I use. In my spare time, I’m often working my way through some video game or another. Whenever something goes awry I find myself thinking about whether it would have been practical to find a bug like one I’m experiencing. Unfortunately we live in a world where games are shipped incomplete, since the Internet can provide the patches (and missing features) later. In most games, this is immediately followed by wondering if this is something I can exploit when I get into trouble. Bill used to call this ‘optimizing’. My most infamous achievement in this arena is the famous Hyperspace Jump in X-Wing Tour 3, Mission 12.

Today’s silly example is from a game called GT Legends by SimBin Studios. (more…)

1. See Augustine’s 17th law: “Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics – it always increases (Law Number XVII)” [↩]

In the last week or so I have discovered that there are a lot of people in the world who don’t know how easy the ISS is to see!

If you didn’t know, or you knew but just haven’t bothered, why not!?

If I told you you could just step into your backyard and witness one of the most complex technical achievements of mankind… wouldn’t you do it!?

If you’re along the east coast of North America, the viewing conditions are almost ideal right now and tonight you can see the shuttle and ISS playing tag overhead! Many nights have two visible passes, one just after sundown, and one an orbit later (about 90 minutes). The space station is easy to see because it’s in a relatively low orbit and because it’s HUGE. After this week’s shuttle mission it will be bigger yet. There will be no debating that it is the brightest thing in the sky except for the Sun and Moon.^[1]

Want to see it? Great! For a simple set of information on where (and more importantly WHEN) to look, I recommend SpaceWeather.
On the right hand side of their main website is a link for “Satellite Flybys“. Put in your zip code and Shazam! A convenient list of readily observable satellites, times and places appears.

Go! Look! You’ll be impressed that the brilliant yellow light is really a distant outpost of humanity in space. There are real people up there and who knows, maybe they’re looking at you too.

1. And I suppose some aircraft landing lights if they’re pointed right at you. [↩]

In the continuing saga of “What were they thinking when they did that?” we’ve discovered another interesting construction artifact in our house. Let’s back up a little.

A few days back K announced that she was fed up with the paint in the master bath and that it had to go. “I’m painting the bathroom!” she said with that just-dare-to-defy-me-this-fundamental-right tone.
“Ok” I said.^[1]

So yesterday after work she informed me that my responsibilities in this effort were to:

1. Remove the toilet tank so she could paint behind it, and
2. Remove the mirror so she could paint the edges behind it.

No sweat. So this morning (as I decided to take a day off to spend with the fam), I quickly remove the toilet tank. ^[2]
Now time for the mirror…. well, I better remove the light fixture too, I think, otherwise what’s the point. It’s a box style with four individual protruding sconces. There are two screws on top which hold the front panel (and the lights) to the cheezy^[3] sheet metal box mounted to the wall. K flips the breaker and I detach it… and the metal box for ultimate painting convenience.

Now for the mirror… it’s simply a rectangular piece of silvered glass with two metal supports on the bottom and two plastic supports on top. Turn the two plastic supports, tip the glass away from the wall and I’m golden. K helps spot me through the door as it’s surprisingly disorienting to be looking into a mirror as you maneuver through a confined space.

We walk back in the room and… there is another random hole in the wall behind the mirror. Wha?!

(more…)

1. It hasn’t been almost 12 years of marriage for nothing. [↩]
2. It is handily mounted with wing-nuts, brass and rubber washers as I refit hardware a year or so ago. [↩]
3. yes with a Z [↩]

Did I mention that I hate FeedBurner?

That last post was supposed to get published tomorrow, but I mistyped the date to December 8th instead of 28th… so bing… out it went. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, except the FeedBurner plugin snags the post and IMMEDIATELY distributes it to all of your feed-readers with no opportunity for revocation.

This also means that when I edit the posts to correct spelling and grammar that I inevitably spot after posting, MOST of you will NEVER see those changes… because FeedBurner has decided that the first posting is the One True Post… updates don’t seem to be carried through (at least that I can tell).

Hate.

K apparently gets some useful features out of FB which is why it was installed in the first place. Perhaps this will be revisited soon, but obviously this isn’t important enough to annoy her for.

No this is not a reminisce about the days when we thought cold fusion had been achieved… but a comment on the Gillette razor of the same name. I would normally link to Gillette’s website here, but it is so annoying ^[1] that I can’t bring myself to subject you to it.

Anyhow, I received one of these orange, blue and chrome marvels in the mail some many, many months ago as a promotion. Give a guy a razor and he’ll have to buy blades, right!? Wrong. I’m decidedly unimpressed. Here’s why:

First, some context.

1. I regularly use a Gillette Sensor Excel which has a solid metal handle, rubber grippies and a pivoting double-bladed head with a strip of white soapy stuff. I’ve pretty much been using this kind of razor since I started shaving somewhat regularly in college 15 years ago.^[2]
2. I haven’t used shaving cream, gel, lubricant, etc. regularly for probably 10 years. I shave in the shower, and I’m not the hairiest guy in town, so it’s generally not an issue. If I miss shaving for a few days (like a week), I usually wish I had some gel, but most days it’s no big deal.

When I ran out of blades a month or so ago, K suggested I use the FUSION. So I popped the 5 bladed neon monster out of the box and hung it in the shower.

The next day it took me about 3.7 hours to shave. Ok, I exaggerate, only 37 minutes. There are two major problems with this razor:

1. Relative to the Sensor Excel, the blade head is roughly the size of Montana.
2. Relative to the state of Montana, the blade head is roughly the size of Montana.

So I find that I have to press the razor into my face with about 4x the force I used to to get the blades to actually cut anything. It sort-of makes sense, with 5 blades instead of 2, the force per linear distance of blade is reduced by 2.5 times. In addition, the surface area of the surrounding blade head has increased, so the amount of force which actually causes the blades to reach your facial hair is reduced further. On the plus side, this did seem to cause significantly less irritation per pass, since the likelihood of the blades cutting anything, let alone your face, was similarly reduced.
Now we come to the problem which has plagued razors since their inception: human bodies (and especially faces) are very poorly approximated by the planar head of a razor. As such, the side of the razor tends to bump into objects that don’t wish to be shaved off like your lips, nose and ears. So the effective useful area of the Fusion razor was about 4 square inches on each of my cheeks and my neck. It was like trying to get a stretch Hummer down Lombard Street. Good thing they put that little trimmer blade on the back (yes! a sixth blade!) so I could shave the rest of my face.

I didn’t give up though and dutifully used the Fusion for a month or so, even after K had kindly replenished the supply of my standard shaving apparatus. Although I got considerably better at maneuvering the Nimitz class razor around my face, it still seemed to take considerably more passes to get the job done. A week ago, I finally switched back.

I nearly removed my face on the first stroke (high pressure on small surface area=BAD), but quickly recovered to my previous abilities.

Sorry Gillette. No deal.

1. There is an especially high-pitched chirp every time you mouse over a menu item that is overwhelming my audio “bear detector”. [↩]
2. Actually, I used an electric shaver most of the time while I was in college, but in grad school I could no longer afford to replace the little foil screen that wore out every six months and switched to blades. [↩]

One of the big news items in the last few days has been modifications to the failed bailout government bailout bill. One item that just floors me that has had quite a bit of discussion in the last few days is increasing the FDIC insurance limit on accounts from $100k to $250k.

Sounds great at the surface, right? Protect folks savings. Very important. Except, who with any real financial sense, has over $100k in savings sitting in an ordinary account at ONE bank? The current FDIC insurance protects retirement accounts (IRAs, not investments) up to $250k already per person, per bank. So if you have $100k in First Bank of Podunk and $100k in Last Bank of Podunk and $250k in your IRA at Podunk Bank, you’re fully insured by the fed already. So unless you have OVER $100lk in a single bank in ordinary bank accounts, this has NO impact on you.

This combined with the fact that the average savings rate in the US has been negative for years and declining prior to that for decades. I’m pretty convinced that only really really REALLY wealthy people have this kind of cash just sitting around liquid in CDs.

I’d like some more time to research this, but this is my gut reaction. How about reducing credit card rates so people can actually pay them off? That might affect most Americans.

Another couple of supposed “facts” from our company fitness center. Good thing they call them “factoids” because it’s hard to imagine where they come up with this stuff.

First: “The tongue is the strongest muscle.”
This seems to be the subject of great debate amongst purveyors of psuedo-science throughout the internet. I have to agree with those who declare simply that it is hard to imagine any objective criteria that would lead to the tongue being identified as the strongest. Wikipedia has a rather nice (if un-cited) list of potential strongest muscles using various criteria. Some say it is the strongest by size, but it’s not clear how one would measure this… ever try lifting a weight with your tongue? This useless answer on “wiki-answers” posits that your tongue will win a ‘finger war’ with your pinky… which of course must prove it is stronger than ANY other muscle. Oh… and for what it’s worth, my pinky wins.

Second: “Every 5mph over 60 is like paying an extra 10 cents per gallon for gas.”
This at least SEEMS plausible, but it certainly seems to be WAY to general. I would expect this to be a strong function of the efficiency of the car, the gearing, the aerodynamic properties, the base inefficiency of the vehicle (non aerodynamic losses) not to mention… THE PRICE OF GAS.
At www.fueleconomy.gov (yes there is one), the result is slightly different:

Observe the Speed Limit
While each vehicle reaches its optimal fuel economy at a different speed (or range of speeds), gas mileage usually decreases rapidly at speeds above 60 mph.
You can assume that each 5 mph you drive over 60 mph is like paying an additional $0.26 per gallon for gas.
Observing the speed limit is also safer.

Well that settles it for me!
What, you want some other opinions?

• EarthFirst.Com quotes: “Each 5 mph you drive over 60 is like paying an extra $0.30 per gallon for gas.”
• The Department of Energy quotes: “Each 5 mph you drive over 60 mph is like paying an additional $0.15 per gallon for gas.”
• US New & World Report quotes the EPA as saying: “According to the EPA, each 5 mph over 60 that you drive decreases fuel efficiency by up to seven percent.”
• NPR quotes the EPA as saying: “Assume that for every 5 mph you drive over 60 mph, you might as well be paying an additional $0.20 per gallon for gas.”

That definitely settles it! We need to do some math.
Q: What change in efficiency is required to cost an extra 10 cents per gallon of gas?
A: Here we go… (more…)

This article has been making some rounds on the ‘net due to a Slashdot posting.
The noise is along the lines of “Scientists prove carbon dating has errors therefore all carbon dating is fallacious!!” Let’s be clear: The inconsistencies identified by the source paper indicate errors on time-scales of 10 MILLION (that’s a thousand thousand) years.

I won’t attempt to pull a one-liner out of context from the paper to prove my point, instead I’ll emphasize a few words from the paper’s abstract.

The carbon isotopic (?13C) composition of bulk carbonate sediments deposited off the margins of four carbonate platforms/ramp systems (Bahamas, Maldives, Queensland Plateau, and Great Australian Bight) show synchronous changes over the past 0 to 10 million years. However, these variations are different from the established global pattern in the ?13C measured in the open oceans over the same time period. For example, from 10 Ma to the present, the ?13C of open oceanic carbonate has decreased, whereas platform margin sediments analyzed here show an increase. It is suggested that the ?13C patterns in the marginal platform deposits are produced through admixing of aragonite-rich sediments, which have relatively positive ?13C values, with pelagic materials, which have lower ?13C values. As the more isotopically positive shallow-water carbonate sediments are only produced when the platforms are flooded, there is a connection between changes in global sea level and the ?13C of sediments in marginal settings. These data indicate that globally synchronous changes in ?13C can take place that are completely unrelated to variations in the global carbon cycle. Fluctuations in the ?13C of carbonate sediments measured during previous geological periods may also be subject to similar processes, and global synchroniety of ?13C can no longer necessarily be considered an indicator that such changes are related to, or caused by, variations in the burial of organic carbon. Inferences regarding the interpretation of changes in the cycling of organic carbon derived from ?13C records should be reconsidered in light of the findings presented here.

So yes, dates based on carbon dating may be wrong, but the only way this error can be identified is by looking at patterns that took 10 MILLION YEARS to occur.