Bored

Week before last I went to three or four meetings/events and they were very interesting. I also walked about 15 miles and my foot started hurting, so last week I took it easy and didn't go anywhere, so I am a little bored.

I also spent some time with my daughter this week. She is my acting personal coach, wants me to get a job. I would like a job, but the job market doesn't look promising. So we were talking and I blurted out something about going back to school. I mean if I am not getting paid, I may as well do something I am interested in, and quantum physics may be just the ticket.

I don't believe in "dark matter" or gravitons or the Higgs boson or string theory or the multi-verse. If anyone comes up with any experimental evidence I will have to re-evaluate my position. There's plenty of physics to keep one occupied without going off into never-never land.

Meanwhile I am thinking about electromagnetic radiation (radio, heat, light, gamma rays, etc.) and it occurs to me that room temperature materials may be giving off radio waves. Or maybe it's only really cold materials that do that, or something weird, like radio transmitters. Something does not quite jibe here.

I am also looking for a chart that relates emitted light frequency to electron energy level changes of atoms. White light is made of all frequencies, but light comes in quanta and each quanta has a specific frequency, so there must be a whole bunch of excitation level changes that produce different frequencies. Surely someone has mapped this all out. Or maybe not.

Hot And Cold

You'll Catch Your Death of Cold

I suspect that we are all, if not infected, at least carrying around any number of agents of disease. Viruses mostly, though there could be bacteria in the mix as well. What keeps us healthy, at least when we are, is that none of these agents has a sufficient toehold to cause any real trouble. Our immune system keeps their population in check. However, any little upset in the current order can tip the scales such that some of these miscreants can increase their numbers to the point where they can cause trouble, and that's when we get sick.

Twice in recent memory I got cold, and a couple of days later I was feeling miserable. Not sick exactly, but not functioning at my peak. The most recent event was Monday. I lay down in the TV room to take a nap. Not the warmest room in the house, but I had a blanket, and I thought I would be fine. I was cold when I lay down, but when I got up I felt fine. But yesterday I paid the price. I spent all day sleeping, and when I was awake I couldn't concentrate on anything more complicated than solitaire. Basically a wasted day. But today I am feeling better.

The previous incident probably happened last winter. I went for a walk in the cold. It was chilly starting out, but after awhile I warmed up a bit. I never did get hot though. I managed to generated enough heat to keep from feeling cold all the way through, but my arms and legs still felt it. This one quite wiped me out. Took at least a day to recover. I think it was exhaustion more than anything. Not just from walking but from having to generate enough heat to keep warm.

So maybe there is something to that old saw about "you'll catch your death of cold".

Update March 2016 replaced missing picture.

Vision

Light is a form of electromagnetic radiation and as such, forms a part of the electromagnetic spectrum. A chart of the electromagnetic spectrum labels types of radiation with their corresponding frequency and/or wavelength. If you look at such a chart you may observe that visible light forms a very small part of the spectrum. This is often remarked upon, but I have never heard any explanation as to why that might be. But this evening as I was out for my daily constitutional, I thought of a reason. Lower frequency radiation is more vague, it behaves more like a wave. It spreads out in all directions from it's source and flows around obstacles in its' path. Light is the lowest frequency radiation that travels in straight lines and does not exhibit this flowing characteristic. This means that visible light will reveal the precise direction of its' source. Radiation at lower frequencies will give you a vague idea of the location of the source. The lower the frequency, the vaguer the location. Infrared radiation, which is just below visible light on frequency spectrum, can be seen by some instruments, but the pictures they produce are a little fuzzy. This could be a limitation of the instruments, but I suspect it is more because of the nature of infrared radiation.

Radiation above that of visible light (ultra violet) and above is too energetic. It takes too much energy to produce and when it impacts living tissue it can cause damage. We survive because there is not too much of it around.

So the fact that we can see is a fluke of nature. Visible light is energetic enough to travel in straight lines and not flow around objects, and it is of low enough energy for it to be produced in enough quantity that being able to detect it is worthwhile.

Note that the frequency times the wavelength is equal to the speed of light, which is very nearly 300,000 kilometers per second, or 3 x 10^5 km/s. The wavelength in the chart below is given in meters. The speed of light in meters per second is 3 x 10^8. You can multiply the values show in the chart below by adding the exponents. Note that this chart uses a logarithmic scale and is only an approximation of the spectrum. For more detailed information, you might want to try Wikipedia.

The Electromagnetic Spectrum

Renaissance Man

It used to be that a fairly smart person could know just about everything there was to know about science and technology. Such a person was called a "Renaissance Man", as least to my way of thinking. I never looked up the definition, but that was the impression I gathered. I don't know why they were called "Renaissance Men", instead of just really smart people who knew everything except, well, it's considerably shorter. There is also the bit about being a "know-it-all", which is more of a personality flaw than having anything to do with how much actual knowledge one had accumulated. And let's not forget that the term was Renaissance Man because back in those days women didn't count.

I think that impression stuck with me until about twenty years ago when I began to suspect that the total accumulated knowledge of the human race was more than one person could handle. Note only that, but knowledge was increasing at an exponential rate. Now it could be that I was just a naive youngster, and the actual amount real knowledge available to the human race has been more than one person could handle for thousands of years.

Just to be clear, I am talking about real scientific knowledge. Not the day to day minutiae of people's lives. Every minute of every day people produce more gossip than anyone can handle, but fortunately, gossip has a half life of about 30 seconds, so after a day it just so much heat energy being dissipated into space.

And there is another thing about knowledge. There is knowledge in books and there is knowledge in people's minds. Information stored in books is good. Printing multiple copies of books and passing them around is a good way to disseminate information (whether you do it with paper and ink or magnetic dipoles, electrons and phosphorescent particles is immaterial). But it is only when that information has been been absorbed by a person's mind and integrated with the knowledge that they already have that it becomes useful. So part of the exponential growth in knowledge is because of our increasing population and the generally increasing level of education.

Another part is the growth of the internet. For the last several hundred years, people have been establishing trade routes across the globe and devising ever more efficient ways of moving goods. You could look at these trade routes as blood vessels of the human organism. Over the last hundred years or so we have been developing electronic communications. This can be likened to the growth of nerve fibers in developing organism. So are we all part of Gaia? Or are we becoming a new form of multi-bodied life? Or perhaps as Agent Smith in "The Matrix" put it, we are a cancer on the face of the earth?

Suburban Army

Recently I noticed that several people I know have kids who joined a military service. Some people are what you might call "blue collar" workers and one might expect this kind of behavior there. But several people are "white collar professionals" and now that we have an all volunteer army, one might expect their kids to avoid the military and pursue a college education and a career. This is not always the case.

One of things I have heard (filtered by the media) from soldiers who have served in Iraq is that when they are over there, they can't wait to get home, but once they get home all they want is to go back to Iraq. I think I understand. Iraqis are crazy. Their way of thinking is completely alien to an American. Different things matter, things we take for granted in the U.S. are unheard of over there. Trying to deal with crazy people trying to kill you on a daily basis would be stressful, to say the least. Sure you would want to get out of there.

On the other hand, life in an American suburb is just a little too insular. Everything is safe, everyone is protected. It's kind of like Chris Tucker in "The Fifth Element" when they find a bomb on board the luxury liner: he is a surprised that there is a bomb on board and the bomb detector has not detected it, yet.


What's this thing with all these numbah's?
You come out of a very stressful environment and come back to the U.S. and all the concerns people have are going to seem so petty and inconsequential, no wonder they want to go back. Iraqis may be crazy, but at least it is real crazy, and not the silly crazy we have here.

There is something about being young that makes people (men especially) want a challenge, be it strength, skill, wit, or simply endurance, something where they can excel, where they can beat somebody at something. Failing that, if they can at least be useful they might be content. I suspect this is one reason people join the military, they want a challenge, they want adventure, they want to escape from our too safe American dream.

Update March 2016 replaced missing video.