Exoticmobile

Mercedes-AMG's Hybrid Hypercar

I like to think I've gotten over my lust for ridiculously expensive exotic-mobiles, but then something like this comes along and catches my eye. Absolutely useless, but still absolutely gorgeous.

Voodoo

I originally title this post Chemistry!, but by the time I got done I had decided it needed something a little stronger.


Reaction between Bromine and Aluminum
Deliberate daughter has started a chemistry class and I am following along. Lesson 1 includes a video of Aluminum reacting with Bromine. I was surprised how much smoke was generated from the small amount of liquid. But now I want to more about this Bromine stuff. I mean you never run into it. Just what the heck is it anyway?

Periodic Table with a few elements pointed out

Note where Aluminum and Bromine reside in the Periodic Table. Aluminum is our well known friend, used to make airplanes, new Ford F-150 pickup truck bodies, beer cans and aluminum foil.

Bromine is kind of obscure. It is one of the Halogens, highly reactive gases. Florine and Chlorine are two popular examples. They are in the pink column in the above chart, right next to the Orange column at the right hand side that contains the inert gases like Helium, Argon and Neon. Only Argon is shown in the chart.

People used to use Bromine for a number of things, but most of those applications have fallen by the wayside for one reason or another. These days all it seems to be used for is

• as a disinfectant for hot tubs (like chlorine for swimming pools), 
• drilling mud (as in drilling for oil), 
• facilitating the production of other chemical compounds, and 
• Halogen lightbulbs

Halogen lightbulbs was a surprise. I had no idea. I had never even made the connection between Halogen lights and the Halogen family of elements. I think I had them confused with the inert gases. I mean they make lights using Neon and Xenon, maybe Halogen is just a fancy name for them. No, Wrong. How did I miss this?
In the video up top, Nile (that's what I'm calling him) alludes to making your own bromine, for which he has another video. We get into some real chemistry here.


Making Elemental Bromine (from household items)
"Greasing the joints with concentrated sulfuric acid". Are you freaking kidding me?  How the hell could you do something like that? This is an alien land we are dealing with.

Update two days later, made a bullet list out of the uses of bromine.

Heroes

Magnum Force (10/10) Movie CLIP - A Man's Got to Know His Limitations (1973) HD
This phrase came up at lunch today, which got me to wondering who has replaced Clint as our All American tough guy? There are Arnold (age 69) and Bruce (61), but they're nearly as old as Clint (86), and then there's Nicolas Cage (52), but he has made too many movies to be categorized as a tough guy. Now there's Vin Diesel (49), Jason Statham (49) and Clive Owen (52), but Jason and Clive are Brits. Vin? I dunno. I liked the Riddick movies and Babylon A.D., but the Fast & Furious movies were just chickenshit. Is he ever gonna be in a movie as great as any of Clint's? I suspect not, but not because he isn't as good as Clint, but because society has moved the goalposts that are used to judge a movie. Fast & Furious sells tickets ($3.9 billion worth), so that's what Hollywood makes.

Psyche

Psyche and Spacecraft
Video is an artists concept, but a very cool one. The asteroid is Psyche 16 and this is some real Star Trek shit: we're sending a probe to investigate an anomaly:

The Psyche mission will explore one of the most intriguing targets in the main asteroid belt - a giant metal asteroid, known as 16 Psyche, about three times farther away from the sun than is the Earth. This asteroid measures about 130 miles (210 kilometers) in diameter and, unlike most other asteroids that are rocky or icy bodies, is thought to be comprised mostly of metallic iron and nickel, similar to Earth's core. Scientists wonder whether Psyche could be an exposed core of an early planet that could have been as large as Mars, but which lost its rocky outer layers due to a number of violent collisions billions of years ago. - JPL

An asteroid that is mostly iron and nickel should have a stronger gravitational field than one made of rock, as iron is denser than rock. I suspect that a planet half the diameter of Earth, but made entirely of iron would have a surface gravity as great as we have here on Earth. Wouldn't make much difference in this case, Psyche is only about hundred miles in diameter, not a couple of thousand.

If this thing is really solid metal, it would make prospecting for metallic ore asteroids moot: here is all the metal we'll ever need. Of course, we would need some new mining techniques. There are big chunks of solid copper buried up in Northern Michigan that no one has dug up because how do you cut up a 100 ton chunk of solid copper into pieces small enough to handle?

Back to the video. Watching the probe 'fly' over the surface was mesmerizing. I'm thinking we need a live feed from the ISS (International Space Station). Set up a big screen TV somewhere where you would like to have a window and just let it play all the time. Star Trek @ home.

LSD, Part 2

Alice and the Caterpiggle

“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important — creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.” ― Steve Jobs

When I got out of high school, all I wanted to do was make money. I heard these stories about self-made millionaires who started with nothing but an 8th grade education, and I thought I could do that, too. Took me eight years to figure out that I wasn't going to get rich on my own.

I think part of the problem was that my dad threw over his engineering career to become an apple farmer, and that was a frigging financial disaster. Permanently soured me on farming and being broke, so money became my focus.

On the other hand, I suspect that one of the reasons my dad bought the orchard was because he wanted us to understand what was real and what was bullshit. That lesson may have had some impact.

The reason I didn't get rich was because I wasn't that concerned about money. Oh, I wanted money when I didn't have any, but when I had enough for my immediate needs, any number of things became more interesting. Basically I was a gear head with no business sense, as opposed to a people person who could sense a money making opportunity and had the drive to pursue it.

The Beautiful sequence

Red Bull Rampage, Virgin, Utah, 2012
Rider: Brandon Semenuk, Photographer: Christian Pondella
Quite spectacular. The only connection between this photograph and my post is the title.

I've come to realize that solving programming puzzles is, for me, akin to solving crossword puzzles for people like Jack, i.e. people who like doing crossword puzzles. It's mental exercise, but I'm not sure there is any value in it. Actually, there is no value in it: the puzzle has already been solved. It does separate those who can muster the logic and reason needed to solve it and those who don't give a fig. I'm not sure that distinction has any value either.

Anyway, I picked up a puzzle yesterday and started looking at it. Here is a description of the problem.

We define the beautiful value of an integer sequence as the product of the value of its smallest element and its length. You are given an integer sequence containing Nelements, and you should find out one of its continuous subsequences, such that it has the largest beautiful value among all the continuous subsequences.
Please solve this problem with an O(N) algorithm.

So the simple way to solve this is to read all the numbers into an array, then pick a number and scan up and down the array until you find a value that is smaller. Now you know the range (a continuous subsequence) and when you multiply that by the number, you get the beautiful value for that number. Repeat this for all the numbers in the array and eventually you will have the biggest beautiful value.

The problem comes with the last line of the description:

Please solve this problem with an O(N) algorithm.

What this means is you can use as many steps you want to find the beautiful value for a number, but it has to be a fixed number of steps. It can't depend on how many numbers are in the array. For instance, if it takes you 100 steps to find the bv for a number, then it won't take more than 100 x N steps to find the largest one. The simple solution I set out above is going to take more like N squared steps, which is definitely not an O(N) class algorithm.

This morning I am climbing stairs as I try to do every day in order to get some exercise. Normally this can be a bit of a chore. The first few minutes go by easy enough, but once I get past the ten minute mark I am looking for the end. Today, though, I was thinking about this problem while I was climbing and when the timer went off it caught me unaware. I was so surprised that at first I suspected I had entered the wrong amount of time, like two minutes instead of twenty, but that wasn't the case.

Nothing like getting wrapped up in a problem to make time become meaningless. This might be why it is so difficult to determine how long it is going to take to write a computer program. You ask a programmer how long it will take to do something, and you get some answer, but then he/she goes off and starts working on it and if they get absorbed in a problem it may be months or even years before they come up for air.

Update Saturday, January 14, 2017. Took me a couple of days to figure out that I need to use a binary search algorithm to determine the range for each number, and then a couple more days to realize that the index into the sorted array is not the same as the original index, and then an hour or so more of fiddling around to get it straight in my head when to use the sorted indices and when to use the original indices. The binary search means the algorithm is an O(log N), but since we also need to process all of the elements, and the whole list needs to be sorted, I'm going to call it O(N x log N). I think this might be as good as you can get.

Let's Go To CES

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ELIZABETH BROCKWAY/THE DAILY BEAST

The Daily Beast has a fine story this morning:

I Dropped Acid and Saw Into the Future: My Surreal First Time At CES
Maybe the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas was a bad place to take LSD for the first time.
by Erin Gloria Ryan

Via Detroit Steve

Update April 2017. Made a copy of the story here, just in case.