Summer Reading 2015 program theme is "Every hero has a story" so I grabbed some scrap paper and put superheroes all over our 7' display board, took a photo and turned it into an activity sheet for the kids next month: name the hero. Some are kinda hard (Nick Fury, Black Widow, etc.)
I was going to have each character do a word balloon (in the classic Comic Sans font) that hinted at their origin:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-"I was a turtle that got irradiated in the sewer"
Hulk- "I was a scientist that got hit with radiation"
Thing-"I was radiated...I think...probably..."
Spiderman- "I was bitten by a radioactive spider"
It got boring with all the radiation, so I just went minimalistic:
I had fun with scrap/garbage pieces of paper I saved and made random super hero faces--and Cat Woman, who somebody pointed out was a villain, LOL! It was actually a complaint from my boss, whom I placated by doing a Bat Girl face (bottom center).
I had to fill Seven feet of display board, and I also took a picture of and made an activity-sheet for next month's Summer Reading Program weekly thing: Name as many as you can.
People used to be impressed with nuclear energy and hopeful of its future; then they were afraid of the nuclear bombs--now people seem to know nothing about radioactivity or nuclear particles or science in general...besides it's effect on spiders-and the men they bite!
And no, my facial hair was not totally inspired by X-Man superhero Wolverine, it was mostly inspired by the guy in Kiev whose photo shows up if you search "modern ukrainian cossack playing bandura" in Google/Images.
Anyway, I'm patiently awaiting for a delivery from United Nuclear to build my own irradiating Neutron Gun!
What's so neat about neutrons? Well, among other things they can have a direct impact on their environment. They can knock out atoms in a crystalline structure, it can eat away at metals-causing then to become brittle, or can knock enough atomic particles around to actually change one element into an entirely different one via a process called transmutation.
If you aim the neutrons at heavy water/deuterium ($10) can create tritium (for modern glow-in-the-dark watches and gun sights)...although it would take years and years to accomplish. By the way: tritium slowly decays into helium-3 which is what Geiger counter tubes (Geiger-Muller tubes actually) are filled with.
Back to the design I scribbled above:
Alpha particle hits the beryllium. The beryllium turns onto carbon+a neutron. The neutron hits the paraffin wax and does one of two things, it either: slows down and continues on its merry way, or it hits a nucleus of a hydrogen atom in the wax really good and that sends a proton zinging out.
A word about Beryllium safety...according the internet it's super-deadly. In real life it's used in golf clubs, spark-less hammers, copper-beryllium tools, non-sparking drill bits, DENTAL crowns and implants and all sorts of other common, everyday stuff.
Hopefully some of this will cause my Geiger counter to click. If that fails then hopefully a neutron will hit some of the boron sprinkled into the paraffin wax, which will zing out an alpha particle-which can't be seen by my current Geiger counter, but can be seen by my radioscope ($29).
Now, if I replaced the paraffin with more uranium the neutrons would change any U-235 into U-236 (fission!). The U-236 promptly explodes and send off THREE new neutrons which then do the same to more and more U-235 atoms until...well, until the U-235 runs out.
Now, any U-238 in the blob of uranium goes through a similar process and becomes U-239, which blasts of beta particles of all things (which are detectable by my Geiger counter) and it breaks down into neptunium (also number 239). The neptunium-239 zings off yet another beta and becomes plutonium (again, still number 239). The plutonium zings off, are ready for this: more stupid alpha particles! Just like the ones we started with like a billion sentences ago...of course, the whole plutonium end of this reaction is pretty rare: even in a nuclear reactor it would take days.
This is in contrast to the boron portion, which is easy; so easy that hitting boron's huge neutron capture cross-section had been likened to hitting a barn door (a barn is the unit of measurement for denoting the size of a capture cross-section). A single barn unit is about the same size as the cross section of a uranium nucleus...boron's neutron capture cross section is 3800 barns! That's for B-10, regular boring boron still manages 760 barns.
If I replaced the beryllium with aluminum foil the result should be the same. I could replace the uranium at the beginning of the process with any alpha emitter, alpha particles being identical to a helium atom nucleus (2 neutrons bound to 2 protons); although it's like helium-4, not the helium-3 mentioned earlier.
It's all a big circle: helium, uranium, plutonium, helium-3, neptunium, neutrons, neutrons, neutrons...and of course our friend boron.
At the end of May 2015 Saturn is at opposition which gives us the best and brightest view of it all year.
Here's a lousy afocal astrovideo I took of Saturn through my 9mm eyepiece and 8" Zhumell reflector telescope on May 23, 2015. The actual view was much better than the cheap cellphone could convey.
A cheap telescope will show you at least the ring, which with even the cheapest binoculars on a tripod will look like Mickey Mouse ears. Early astronomers thought it might be a moon on each side. I thought, "how could a ring look like two moons?" but I went out with cheap binoculars and lo and behold! It did look like a big circle with two smaller circular 'ears'.
A small 40mm tasco type should still let you see something. Jupiter is even easier because its bigger and almost straight west to the right of the moon.
Here's another video with a 2x barlow attached to the 9mm eyepiece, making it a 4.5mm with higher magnification.
More zoomed in but darker and less crisp focus. Such is the physics of optics and light.
A great free phone app for astronomy is SkEye...which you'll need because the planets move around quite a bit (planet is Greek for "wanderer"). I also feel elated after getting some cosmic photons in my eyeballs.
"The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed."
We must weigh the horror of war vs the horror of peace: Game Theory for the uninterested
I like the idea of game theory, but I find discussions about imaginary parlor games used to illustrate game theory extremely tedious. However in a book by William Poundstone (cousin of comedienne Paula Poundstone, and a man routinely described as "The Smartest Man In the World") I found a description of a simple game invented by Martin Shubik.
Shubik's Dollar auction is simple, unlike the dice throwing, three-sided coin tossing, etc. contained in many of the theoretical exercises dreamed up by employees of The Rand Corporation:
1) The highest had to pay what they bid, but they get the dollar bill. 2) The next-to-highest bidder has to pay what they bid, but gets nothing!
A penny is bid for the dollar. What a deal! Someone else bids two cents. Eventually the bids reach 99 cents and $1. If the bids stop the 99 cent bidder will pay 99 cents for nothing. If they bid $1.01 they'll pay $1.01 but get the dollar being bid on so they only lose 1 cent!
The other bidder sees this and his even higher since a winning bid of up to $1.99 would result in paying a $1.99 but getting the dollar bill-meaning they'd only lose .99 cents, of the bidding stopped there the 2nd place bidder would pay $1.98 and get nothing-a loss of $1.98.
Throwing good money after bad, only in this game you're trying to lessen your losses by doing it. In real life you'd maybe pay your auto-mechanic a few hundred dollars more to hopefully fix the problem and not have to spend tens-of-thousands on a new car-which would be a win and not just a lessened loss...unless the mechanic bill reaches into the thousands (blown engine, ruined transmission, etc).
Routinely games like these were used as jumping boards for the theories of how to wage wars, how to "win" an all out nuclear holocaust, etc. In "Prisoner's Dilemma" relates a Dollar Auction moment when Saddam Hussein said, "Iraq's material losses are already so great that we must fight to the end."
The scary thing is that unlike most of game theory, in the Dollar Auction there is no mathematical way to prove what is the most rational way to play. It's a simple game that is hard to tell when someone is winning, or even what winning looks like.
Poundstone's book is actually a biography of John con Neuman, Game Theory and the issues surrounding nuclear war. It's filled with great tid-bits (even of you skip over the dice-throwing and amoral tic-tac-toe-like games).
“Probability is really just plain old chance.”-Michael
Logusz
"Gefühl ist alles name ist schall und rauch."-Goethe's Faust
This ties in with my last post about 1 = 0.99... and "common sense", "normal thinking", etc. versus mathematical theory and terminology.
Probability merely studies abstract models and not real life! Probability is better
understood sometimes as “possibly” or “more than likely” or “usually”. Chance!
Games of chance (gambling). The probability that I would
never win at the slot machine approaches zero. Am I (and every other tourist in
Vegas) a guaranteed winner? Nope, but the way some people approach probability
in mathematics would make it seem so.
If you flip a coin the chances of heads/tails if 50/50.
If you flip a coin 99 times and get heads 99 times, the
chances that the next time you flip the coin it will also be heads is still
50/50. Math deals with ideas, not necessarily the real world.
My "monster toned" 1922 penny that I recently bought (with free shipping!). It sure is a beaut! If I it the "chances" are that it'll land on heads is 50% theoretically speaking. I just flipped it three times and got three tails in a row :(
For instance mathematicians deal with lines a lot.
Their lines have no depth, breadth, width, etc. Engineers deal with lines in
the real world: if you make a 1” hole in something and try to put a 1” peg in
it, it will NOT fit! Engineers need to make the peg slightly smaller than the 1” hole to get it inside.
A common problem with CAD/CAM design is that people design
things the ‘math way’ and do not take into consideration the width of the line
they drew with a pencil—or with the computer. The result: parts are too tight
and can’t go together.
So if (as discussed in the last post) infinities of nothing can still add up to something is there something analogous with chances? Yes: quantum tunneling. In many of my posts I reference radioactive alpha emitters, usually AM-241. According to "regular" physics it's impossible for a slow/weak alpha particle to break past it's barrier and be emitted. Impossible. Hmmm...according to quantum physics it's insanely rare. An alpha particle would have to bounce around three times ten to the thirty-first power! Almost no chance but still a nontrivial possibility. Schroedin and Heisenberg came up with the answers, alternating fixed time or the basis on their related equations...but that doesn't matter because of you read my other posts you'll see that I have a tiny piece of Americium-241 that blasts out so many "ultra-rare" particles every second of enough to irradiate old silver dimes and cause an amazing display in a radioscope (see later post "So you wanna see atomic particles with your own eyes huh? Part II").
Yes, something so rare it's impossible in regular physics but can easily be seen with some zinc-sulfide smeared on an eyepiece (radioscope / spinthariscope). Don't believe your eyes? Irradiate an old silver dime with AM-241 wrapped in aluminum foil: your Geiger counter will let you know you've done " The Improbable " a few zillion times over.
"There are two sorts of eternity, from the present backwards to eternity, and from the present forward." -Abraham Cowley
Yes!
An infinite amount of nothing adds up to something. I find it creepy that the above two numbers, 1 and 0.999999... are considered the same by mathematicians, but they are.
There are many more proofs of the above that are more complex, but you don't need them because 1 = 0.999...
Creeped out? Keep reading.
No!
Even more odd is Zeno's Paradoxes, specifically the one about a race between Achilles and the Tortoise. The wording is difficult so I'll put it a more digestible way:
If you walk halfway across a room, and then half of that distance, and then half of that distance... on and on forever (according to Zeno) two things will happen:
1) You will never reach the end of the room, and 2) You will never stop moving!
Zeno was Wrong because of the same thing that (sort of) explains 1 and 0.999... being equal: transfinite infinities. If the distances become infinitely small, so does the time to traverse them.
The infinities eventually add up to 1 (or getting across the room).
Now don't you feel better about 0.999.... equaling 1? Me neither, but at least it takes the edge off so I can sleep.
My next post on probability/chance briefly goes into infinities of nothing adding up to the possibility of something big: quantum tunneling.
HARNESS THE AWESOME POWER OF STATIC WITH THE CLASSIC LEYDEN JAR
I built a Leyden jar in three minutes to produce sparks. I lined an old plastic 35mm film canister lined inside and out with aluminum foil. A wire runs from screw on top touching the inside foil. Another wire runs from outside foil to a gap almost touching the screw. Some thin pieces of wire are also on the screw and fanned out to act as static antennas.
Hold a pvc pipe in a cotton cloth and with other hand rub pipe past antennas. Every stroke makes a loud spark between the wire and screw gap. Pvc and hand don't touch the Leyden jar.
One strip of foil outside, one inside. Wire from inside foil almost touching wire from outside foil. Add frayed thin wires for static collectors to the inside wire.
Use solid-core wire for the inside and outside wires. Use multi-strand wire for the static collectors and unweave the strands and fan them out.
I made my little 35mm one a little fancier by having the inside wire go to a screw, which comes out of a hole in the cap of the film canister. The white thing is just a piece of wire insulation, with multi-strand wire untangled and fanned out to collect static. The foil and wires were attached to the foil and the Leyden Jar with Scotch tape only. The static collectors is just wrapped around the screw, but I put a nut on it just for kicks.
Here's a video it in action:
Tiny jar equals tiny spark. Imagine the huge spark you could get by lining a garbage can with foil! Even after a spark this tiny thing acts as a capacitor and still has stored electricity which must be discharged by touching the gapped wire to the screw or else you'd get a shock by touching it.
Yes, bigger jar means bigger spark. How about more or thicker foil (the dielectric)? Well, what if instead of measly foil I filled the jar with salt water? I did just that with my next few Leyden jars:
It took me 10 minutes from walking in basement and starting building to getting sparks. It's easier on dry days with low humidity. Sine days I can get one spark per wipe. Some days it takes five or six. The larger the Leyden Jar, the more wipes it takes to spark.
The beast on the left is a daily water Leyden Jar. The spark takes a while to build up (lots of wiping the PVC with wash cloth) but it is larger and a lot louder!
Here is a scary, but true scenario: a battery slowly discharges it's electricity. Think of a flashlight. A capacitor discharges instantly. Think of a camera flash. In a non-existant "perfect" capacitor, the capacitor would fire instantly and emit 100% of its charge, leaving 0% energy left.
However, in the real world dielectric relaxation causes a brief delay in the firing of the capacitor. Worse yet, dielectric absorption stops the capacitor from emitting 100%, meaning it stores a small amount above 0% after firing. In a regular dry capacitor there can be 3% of the charge left after firing. In a wet electrolytic capacitor the left over charge can be a whopping 15%!!!
The result of all this? When the little, dry Leyden Jar fires it is pretty "empty" afterward. The wet, salt-water filled electrolytic Leyden Jars on either side can fire a huge spark, and then zap your hand with 15% charge if you touch them afterwards! Ouch!!
I can use the PVC pipe to force the in inside and outside wires to touch and get closer to 0% charge (there is a small spark when this happens) but even then, if left alone the charge can reorganize and zap a human hand when touching it!
Think of the tiny (yet much more efficient) capacitor in a stun gun. Then look at the salt-water filled behemoth on the left in my photo. I made a Leyden Jar out of a 1 gallon container: I fired it once and immediately disassembled it so no one would get hurt by it.
Every time I touch my back paw to my ear I get zapped! Too bad I don't have a tail: its dielectric absorption would give me stun-gun claws! Meow.
