Pharaohs, Part 2

I have a couple of pet theories about Egypt.

1. In ancient times, before the pyramid building craze got started, say 10,000 years ago, Egypt was covered with trees. Then the Pharaohs came along with their crazy pyramid schemes. Some smart aleck came up with a way to make concrete, so instead of having to cut all those blocks of stone, you could just stir up a batch of concrete and your army of hod carriers could haul it up the hill to dump it in the form. Problem is that making concrete requires heat. Western Europe got into a glass making craze in the middles ages and destroyed many of their forests in their quest to fuel the glass making fires. I think a similar thing happened in Egypt. Their pyramid craze went on for thousands of years, causing them to search out all of the firewood in North Africa. The were so hungry for firewood they even dug up all the stumps, and that is why Egypt and the rest of North Africa is a desert today.
2. This one is even better. All those hieroglyphics found on the walls of the tombs? They are actually advanced flat panel displays that were frozen when the power went south. Ancient Egyptians actually had an advanced semiconductor / nanotechnology industry. Silicon is made from sand (sand, and most rock, is made of oxidised silicon). They used to have an alphabet and a written language, but then they invented computers, and some prehistoric Bill Gates came up with Windows and those stupid icons, and the foolish Egyptians liked the pretty pictures so much they started using those and abandoned their alphabet and their written language and relied entirely on their pretty icons displayed on their advanced flat panel displays. Abandoning their alphabet was the downfall of their civilization. All the technical knowledge was lost, since no one could read the old documents anymore. All they had to do was point and click. Then one day the power failed and that was it for the pharaohs. And where are the remains of their fancy computers? Well computer chips are made from silicon, and silicon oxidizes and becomes sand. And what does Egypt have a surplus of? Sand! What more proof do you need?

Pyramids

I think the Pharaohs may have been onto something. Our Protestant work ethic is trying to turn us all into shopkeepers, and most men are not suited to being shop keepers. War, especially for young men, is more their style. Primitive warfare is probably best, people are killed individually. Modern warfare where you can kill thousands with one blow is a mechanical aberration.

Look at ancient Egypt. That civilization survived for thousands of years and I think one of the key elements was that they kept the population occupied doing hard manual labor. Go out and break rocks all day, and you are too tired to cause much trouble at night. And it was for the glory of god! Or so they believed.

I am thinking maybe we need something like a pyramid project here in the U.S. Something that would require hard manual labor from a million or so people. Maybe a road, or a bridge, or a dam. Or maybe a pyramid! Give people some purpose, something to do besides meth.

Ozone

Something, probably fluorescent bulbs, got me started on the ozone layer. Supposedly, ozone in the stratosphere blocks most of the UV (Ultra-Violet) light from the sun and keeps us all from frying to a frizzle. But there is not a great deal of ozone up there, we are talking parts per million. And ozone is constantly being created and destroyed by this same UV light, at least according to some folks. Other people say ozone is created by lightning strikes and is wafted upwards into the stratosphere. If this is the case, why is there more ozone in the stratosphere where there is no weather and therefor no lightning, than there is in the troposphere where there is lighting? Okay, ozone is special and is blown upwards by special ozone blowing forces.

But if ozone is being created by UV light from the sun, then wouldn't the creation be absorbing as much, or more, UV light than the destruction?

Ozone is created when you have a bunch of O2 molecules, and some of them get blasted apart by high energy photons (lighting, electrical arcs, UV radiation). The free oxygen molecules latch onto non-blasted O2 molecules and form ozone, or O3. Now ozone is unstable, except it is long lived in the troposphere (on the order of half an hour). Sooner or later it will break down by itself into an O2 molecule and a free oxygen atom, which will search out another free oxygen atom and combine to form another molecule of O2. This breakdown can be accelerated by being blasted by a high energy photon from (what? again?) UV light! Breakdown can also be hurried along by the presence of chlorine (which is also what makes bleach so powerful).

I used to know that ozone had a distinct smell, now I am not so sure. Some places claim it does have an odor, some places claim it is something else that is created when ozone is created that smells. And it might be lethal, though how you would get enough to kill you seems to be a bit of a trick. I suspect at ground level it would breakdown before you could breath enough to hurt yourself. But don't try it on my say so.

Fluorescent Flicker

So I have a dozen fluorescent fixtures in my house. The ballast in one of them failed a couple of years ago, and looking at the difficulty in obtaining and replacing the ballast, I bought a whole new light fixture, which in turn meant buying all new bulbs because the new fixtures use T-8 bulbs (the eight means the number of eighths of an inch in diameter, so T-8's are 8/8th's, or one inch in diameter) and the old bulbs are T-12's which draw more power, so you can't use T-12's in the new fixtures.

Now two more fixtures have failed and I have half a dozen spare T-12 bulbs, so I think I will go to the trouble to obtain new ballasts and install them. First place I go is Google to study up, and I come across this really bizarre statement in Wikipedia:

Flicker at mains frequency is more noticeable in the peripheral vision than it is in the center of gaze.

I would really like to know why that is. Someday I may even look into it.

Death Penalty

I am opposed to the death penalty. Now, don't get me wrong, I am sure there are people who deserve to die. What I am opposed to is the way our justice system arrives at the decision to kill someone. Half the time they have wrong guy. All the time it takes millions of dollars in lawyers fees and court room costs. Of course it does keep reporters employed reporting on these shenanigans, and it does keep people entertained hearing about these court room circuses, but I am sure reporters can find something else to report on that would keep the masses entertained.

What about the supposed deterrent effect generated by having a death penalty? I think we can do more for society by redirecting our resources. For instance we could do something about prisons. Take the crazy people out, put them in houses dedicated to dealing with crazy people. Relieve the overcrowding in prisons. Try some real rehabilitation instead of warehousing.

And then there is the whole drug business. As long as we have laws against drugs and we continue to enforce them, we are going to have problems with them. The sooner we legalize drugs and start taxing them, the sooner we can send all the trigger happy cops over to the middle east, or whatever hot spot is in need of some additional turmoil.

Note that I am not saying all the cops. I suspect that some people are drawn to law enforcement by the opportunities for violent confrontation, and I suspect the DEA has a bigger attraction than most. Now the way we are running the "War on Drugs", this is probably the kind of people we need in law enforcement, but I am totally opposed to the "War on Drugs". I think it is stupid and misguided waste of everyone's time and energy. The only thing positive is that it keeps a fair number of people involved in hostile cat and mouse games. Should the "War on Drugs" ever be called off, these people are going to be out of a job. Oh, they might pick up jobs as shop keepers or truck drivers, but that is not really the same as planning an assault with automatic weapons, is it?

Digital Observatory

It just occurred to me that it might be feasible to build an astronomical telescope, or any kind of telescope for that matter, by assembling an array of digital cameras. Instead of building a giant mirror to gather as much light as possible, spread out an array of 10,000 cameras. Each lens is tiny, but add a bunch of them together and you can get a large amount of light gathering power. Of course there are a few problems with this idea. I doubt whether the lenses that cameras come with are suitable for this application, but building thousands a small lenses is something camera companies know how to do. I would hope it would be cheaper than building one giant mirror. Then you would need some sophisticated software to combine the digital images from all these cameras into one usable image. And lastly, it might take more like a million cameras to duplicate the light gathering power of one large telescope. Still, it might be worth looking into.

Plastic Pelletizer

With all the recycling going on, and the difficulty in recycling plastics, I was thinking that what every home needs is a plastic pelletizer. You dump whatever old plastic items you have in the top, the machine munches, mashes, heats, and eventually beats all the plastic into little pellets, which it deposits in a bucket. When the bucket is full, you put it out on the curb with all your other recycling.

This machine would take all your old plastic items: milk jugs, yogurt tubs, cellophane plastic wrap, old CD cases, shrink wrap, whatever. Grind them up and melt them into a plastic goo and then extrude this goo into little plastic pellets.

I am sure there are numerous problems with making this idea into a real device, but I as an idea, I really like it.