Cumbres and Toltec double header plowing snow

Scott seems to have trains on the brain lately. This one has a pair of real, live steam engines pushing a snow plow and pulling a short train across the border between New Mexico and Colorado.

Guaifenesin

Iowa Andy reports on an alternate use for cough syrup:

Amazingly my chronic hip/leg pain/stiffness is relieved with:
Guaifenesin
Found this out when taking guay for a cold,  felt like crap from my cold, but my hip pain was gone.. Ha!

How do you pronounce Guaifenesin anyway? Goo-A-fen-es-in? Even the experts can't agree, Merriam-Webster has two different pronunciations.

Seems this stuff has been around for a long time and has been used for a number of ailments. This is the only thing in the Wikipedia article that correlates with Andy's story:

The 1955 edition of the Textbook of Pharmacognosy states: "Guaiacum has a local stimulant action which is sometimes useful in sore throat. The resin is used in chronic gout and rheumatism, whilst the wood is an ingredient in the compound concentrated solution of sarsaparilla, which was formerly much used as an alternative in syphilis."[3]

Andy's hip pain is from arthritis, previously known as the rheumatiz. And who knew there was a field called Pharmacognosy? Pharmacology I have heard of, but this is the first time I've heard of Pharmacognosy, and no, I don't know how to pronounce it either.

London & Clockwork

I've read a couple of books recently and we just watched the movie Hugo (music starts playing automatically), and they all involve London or clockwork or both. Hugo is set in Paris, but it has more than it's share of clockwork (that's Hugo in the picture). The books:

• The System of the World by Neal Stephenson
• Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
• The Difference Engine by William Gibson & Bruce Sterling

I haven't finished Perdido Street Station, and technically it isn't set in London, but having just read The Difference Engine, the description of the city of New Crobuzon sounds very much like London in the 1800's, which doesn't sound much different than London in the 1700's in The System of the World, except for the addition of steam engines and calculating machines, which are under development in The System of the World. All three of these books paint a picture of a city that is just really gross and disgusting. Really makes you appreciate things like modern plumbing, sewage lines and the EPA. 

As usual, there are almost no pictures of the fabulous clockwork from the movie Hugo out on the web. Lots of boring pictures of the actors but virtually nothing of interest. I did find one on The Economic Voice. Hugo is a pleasant little story, but it also has fair bit about one of the pioneers of film making: Georges Méliès.

Heart Plug

Remember the Jarvik artificial heart? It worked off of compressed air and required that the patient/victim be hooked up to this big noisy machine. That was back when everyone thought that a pulse was a requirement. Surely a body that has been evolving for zillions of years would have gotten used to having a pulse and would even require it for some unknown function. Maybe we still do, but whatever function it serves, besides pumping your blood around has become less obvious since the advent of the turbo-encabulator artificial heart (the link goes to a really good Popular Science story).

Most of the mechanical pumps we use everyday are rotary pumps. They have an impeller, or propeller or something that sits on the end of the shaft of an electric motor and spins at high speed (thousands of revolutions per minute (RPM)). There might be pulsations in the fluid being pumped due to the impact of a blade of the impeller, but they are minuscule in amplitude and much higher in frequency than the kind of pulsations you get from any kind of reciprocating pump, or a biological heart.

Now there is an artificial heart in development that has more in common with everyday rotary pumps and not much in common with a heart. There were two concerns about using a rotary pump. One is the lack of a pulse, and the other is damage to the blood cells caused by the blades whirling around. Turns out neither one seems to be much of an issue.

This new, and so far experimental, heart requires power, but it only needs a little electricity and that can easily be supplied by a battery similar to one from a laptop computer. It's small enough you can carry it around with you.

Now we're getting into the realm of science fiction. This reminds me of Dune where the bad guy had heart plugs installed in all his minions. If one of his people displeased his, the baddy could kill him by simply pulling his plug. Of course, we have lot's of ways to kill people, and some of them aren't any more difficult than flipping a switch. Pulling the plug, I dunno, that just seems kind of slippery to me.

From the PopSci story:

"As many as five million Americans suffer some form of heart failure, but only about 2,000 hearts a year become available for transplant."

I kind of doubt that all five million are candidates for an artificial heart, but there is certainly a market for thousands per year.

Eternity II Odds

I got to thinking about the Eternity II puzzle again this week. I've made several previous attempts at solving it, but they have all gone down in flames. This time my idea this time was to build up one edge of the puzzle, that is 16 square tiles all against one side. Build up one edge, and set it aside. Then build another edge, and another. Build all possible edges, and then when you have a complete set mix and match until you find a set that will make a complete square. That is it will use all four of the corner pieces and all 56 of the edge pieces, and it will use each piece only once.

This depends on being able to generate all of the possible complete edges. That should not be too hard. We have 56 edge pieces, and 22 possible colors, so that's something less than 3 possible matches for each piece. We have to find 15 edge pieces and one corner piece to build a complete edge. So that is like 3 to the power of 16. 3 to the 4th is 81, 81 squared is just a little greater than 6400 (which is about 3 to the 8th). Square that again gives us 3 to the 16th. 6400 squared is 64 squared times 10,000. 64 squared is 4096. Call it 4,000. So 4,000 times 10,000 is 40 million. So 3 to the 16th is roughly 40 million.

I have a computer that can do a billion operations a second. It should be able to crank this out in short order. I've been thinking about this all week, and last night I finally dug out some old code that could be made to do this job with minimal modification. This morning I beat it into shape and fired it up and it ran and ran and ran. Hmmm. Something is not right. It has gone way past 40 million. What's going on here?

I go back and look at the index I generated and I find the problem. The sneaky devils who designed this puzzle didnot use all 22  colors for the edges between adjacent edge pieces, they only used five. Which means that for each piece there are 12 possible matches (60 divided by 5), not 3. So the total possible complete edges is more like 12 to the 16th power, which is like 100 Quintilian, which is a billion times bigger than 40 million.

So million, billion, quintilian, we've got a lightning fast computer, it should be able to handle this right? Well, maybe so, maybe no. Say it can do a billion operations a second. Then it can do about 100 trillion operations a day, or 10 quadrillion operations a year. To perform a 100 quintilian operations then would take ten thousand years. Now if you got really fast computers, and optimized the code you might be able to cut the problem down by a factor of 10 or even a 100, and if you got a hundred computers to all work on the problem together you might be able to generate all possible edges in a year. But that is only the first step.

You still have to sort through that list of a 100 qunitillion edges to find a complete, unique set. That's going be even worse. And then you still only have the outside edge of the puzzle. This is not the way to go.

Quote of the Day

"We spoke of Mr. Hooke's observations of snowflakes - their remarkable property, which is that each of the six arms grows outwards from a common center, and each grows independently, of its own internal rules. One arm cannot affect the others. And yet all the arms are alike."

Baron Von Leibniz speaking to Daniel Waterhouse in the novel The System of the World by Neal Stephenson, page 695.

I have oft heard the old saw about how no two snowflakes are alike, and I have often observed that all six arms of a snowflake are alike, but it never occurred to me to consider how that happened. Mr. Hooke refers to Robert Hooke.

My son gave me a copy of Neal Stephenson's latest book - Read Me, so I was finally free to read his last book which I had been saving because really good books are few and far between, and I always want to have something in reserve, you know, just in case no more good books ever show up.

FSM

Spaghetti, Wenches & Metaphysics: Episode 1—The FSM from Matt Tillman on Vimeo.

Courtesy of the Church of the FSM.