It’s ok though… Pluto had it coming. Sitting out there alone, not joining the rest of us in the middle…
Still, Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of my favorite science spokesmen. He seemed to pop up out of nowhere and is now an icon. And hey, with a character like him, he makes wanting to learn about science fun. All it took was destroying a planet. (insert Vader music here)
(quick note: next week’s comic will come either late Monday or Tuesday.)
Question of the week:
Who is your favorite science celebrity?
Well folks, you may be just shocked that we were never able to come to a decision for those budget cut things because we have a 2 party system and neither side can agree. Thus, spending cuts across the board! Woot! The system has failed!
Good thing this was just over a measly what, $85 billion and hundreds of thousands of jobs being lost AND potential leap into yet another recession… Nothing important right? Uhg!
So what the heck is this comic about? Well, in 867 years, on March 16th 2880 A.D., either 1 of 2 things will happen… If we’re still alive by then… a LARGE meteoroid named 1950DA will either be billions of miles out into the abyss OR collide with earth. Kind of a big gap… but it was discovered and observed a long time ago and they didn’t get a good look at it. However, it will come into view again in about 2o years. At that point, we can figure out what it’s going to do.
Now… there is, unfortunately, a very high chance this thing could hit us. If it does, we’re talking about absolute devastation. This thing is big… like, a kilometer big… like, dinosaur killing mass extinction big. Ok, that one was like 4x bigger than this thing… but still, it has the potential to have the equivalent of 46,300 megaton bomb going off. Hiroshima, that was 16 kiloton. So… think of a nuke times 2.89 MILLION!! That’s big.
But on the plus side, we have 800+ years to prepare! And if we look at the current pace of politics and science, we’ll probably… well… not survive. Let’s face it, folks, the idiots in charge will bicker and argue back and forth, denying it would hit us, diverting the topic, pigeon holing the topic, or just ignoring it altogether. And since we like to cut funding for math and science in this country, our space program will consist of bottle rockets by then.
Oh, don’t worry… I’m sure by then some other smart country with less restrictive politics and large investments in technology will have something ready to save us. Maybe that 1998 movie Armageddon should have been shot in China or Bollywood to be more accurate. >)
So I just recently started up Just Cause 2, an open world “find n grind” shooter. I have to say, it’s kinda hard for me to get into, since it seems that 90% of the game is just taking over settlements and finding powerup things. Granted, this was a big part of the GTA/SR3 type games, but they had a lot more depth…
Anyways, we’ll do a proper review later… for now, lets just say my biggest problem with JC2 is the total disregard for physics. For a game that boasts an awesome physics engine, they sure do overlook things like, oh, gravity… But hey, what do I know? Maybe you can jump out of a helicopter and grapple hook into the ground and survive.
Maybe, but that’s my take on it. I’m pretty sure I’ve covered the Schrodinger thought experiment with an earlier comic, but the basics are this… The cat in the box experiment was meant to illustrate the paradox of states as it relates to the Copenhagen Interpretation. Which is to say, that in quantum mechanics, you’re dealing with a lot of “probabilities”, (as in electron clouds of probable positions as opposed to the cartoons of an electron orbiting a nucleus like a planet) but when you go to actually make a measurement (observation), it causes the thing you’re looking at to choose a state to be in. Basically, it’s that whole light argument where light acts like a wave until you observe it and it acts like a particle. This is because the wave is an area of probability while the particle is an exact measurement. Thus in the cat in the box experiment, the cat is not either alive or dead, but both! Well… until you make an observation and open the box, thus collapsing the wave and forcing one state to occur (so when you look, the cat has to be either alive OR dead, not both anymore). So… curiosity killed the cat!
Mind numbing I know, but this goes back to my fun little theory that “the universe acts like a program”. Like, not is. Just wanted to clear that up before everyone thought I was insane. Anyways, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t, I mean, the universe obeys certain laws and physics to make it work, and isn’t that just what programming instructions are? Equations and crazy math? Anywho, the math of this can actually be associated to gaming! Think about any of the large world or long leveled games you play. Now, your computer doesn’t process the entire thing all at once. To do that, it would take a majorly big computer or make your graphics card burst into flames. No! What happens is that only what you see (observe) gets rendered (wave function collapsed). So as you walk through a corridor, everything behind the walls still exists as just programming fluff. Once you turn the corner, that fluff has to be rendered into something tangible.
When you apply that to physics, think of it the same way as a game. Light, for instance, travels as a wave and acts like a wave until observed. Apply our game programming metaphor and it’s just easier to compute a wave moving and interacting than it is to compute an infinite number of particles. So, when you look, the program renders the wave into a particle and now you have a measurement! Woot! Not a bad connection, huh? (just a point of clarification, when we say “observe”, it’s not computing this for the sake of us humans, rather any interaction is an observation… meaning an electron being fired at your atom is making it react and collapse the any uncertainty. Just so we’re clear about this… we’re not that special…)
Moral of the story, don’t look in the box cause you have a 50% chance of killing it.
I always wondered this… we send off all of our creepy looking destructobots to these other worlds and if there happens to be life there, just imagine what they’d see! Maybe attach a little human bobblehead with a speaker on the hood just in case we find something and can tell it “hey, never mind the evil robot, we’re actually pretty cool peeps”.
So question of the day… How do you think we, as the people of this earth, are represented intergalactically? We leave tons of junk out there like satellites, exploratory probes, pieces of space crafts that just fall off, and all these little RC cars we race on other worlds. Heck, even our tv/radio signals get shipped out into the cosmos! Well, while those can only travel light speed, they’ll still start to reach far distant stars or passers by at some point in the future. Same with our space junk. So, if a tourists or a scout from a different world has decided to swing on by through the boonies in our neck of the woods, what would you think our first impressions would be? Would they see us as a curious and young species that’s trying to explore and understand the universe around them? Or overly militaristic with vast histories of bloodshed and conflict that carry on to this very moment? Or just plane insane since they might not know what a “tv show” is… I’m sure they’d be horrified by our scifi movies and treatment of aliens, though they’d probably feel reassured that at least a few aliens have integrated ok on that Jersey Shore show. Or will they see us for all our good and bad, that we’re doing the best we can to make it through life.
Personally, I don’t think they’d know what to make of us. We’re full of contradictions. On one hand, we come up with so much creativity and beauty in our world; poetry, music, art, etc… And even missions of mercy and peace. We’re great at coming together in a pinch and despite what those post-apocalyptic movies might tell you, humanity has a way of pulling together in a crisis. But on the other, we’re so capable of destroying ourselves it isn’t even funny. Through war, pride, or greed, everyone from the tiniest thief to the leaders of nations plot to exploit every one else. Which doesn’t end well for anyone. If we were to be judged, I’d hope it would be on our struggles with our selves and our nature as humans, rather than our actions… cause on a whole, we’d probably be in the red.
Anyways, thoughts?
PS… it’s going to get stormy here with some wicked hurricanes and such, maybe, so just a heads up, if the power starts to go my updates for this week might be effected. But barring an act of Gaia, things should move along as normal.Also, apparently Martians look like Plankton from SpongeBob…
A little play on words here! >) I was trying my hardest to uncanny valley the heck out of these drawings.
Ok, a little quick review; Uncanny Valley is the psychological concept that as the more realistic (human body/face) becomes in either art or animatronic, the more familiar the brain recognizes that figure in an “almost” linear fashion. This means, you have little connection to a toaster, but as it becomes more humanlike, you connect with it more as being “real” or having a human characteristic. So a toaster is 0,0 on the scale and a healthy human is 100,100. Makes sense? HOWEVER, it’s “almost” linear… meaning that somewhere towards the end, like around the 80% mark, the whole system crashes down. This is called the “uncanny valley”, or the area of which something looks very close to being human, but the emotional response towards that figure is pure disgust, horror, or just unease. It’s a feeling that’s hard to explain other than it being “weird”. Also, it’s a similar feeling to seeing a dead human body, especially if it is animated some how (like you make a body pop up out of a casket) or a zombie. They claim that it’s the mind’s way of picking out sickly people since the brain can make judgements on what the human form is supposed to look like and if it’s off, then it says “hey, something’s messed up here, lets pack up and get the fudge out!”.
So, there you have it, uncanny valley in a nutshell. You mostly see this with CREEPY robots that are human form but with some sort of skin pulled over top. Very unsettling! Or a lot with CG movies or games where the people just don’t look right. I think it’s mostly noticeable in the mouth/teeth and eyes.
And here’s the cool thing; this is not at all restricted to just CG and robots! I have found that a great deal of art (especially in the early days) fall greatly into this category because of the slight lack of realism. You can see it all over, even it works by the pros like Michelangelo (good lord he had some weird proportions) and DaVinci (there’s a reason why people just don’t get why the Mona Lisa seems so… off). It happens with the young artists and ones just starting out and as you improve, you have to pass a threshold where it’s getting better but it just has a weird feel. Uncanny valley is a real drag to work with and I don’t think it’s taught at all in art schools as something to be aware of. Sure, you know it’s off when you see it, but you can’t really understand why. Faces tend to be the worst since there is a lot that can go wrong and proportions have to be just right or you risk falling into the valley. Doing stuff that’s more cartoony or just waaaaay off is an easy cover to bypass the valley completely. Probably the best trick I can give to spot check your work is to make a digital version and flip it horizontally; if it looks wrong, then you’ve got something a bit off.
So there you have it! Heard it here first! World exclusive content! Uncanny valley in art! Think I’ll need to write a paper on this sometime all official like, but yeah… Shawn’s Patented Pending Theory of U.V. in the arts!
It’s funny cause just the other day I was talking to my friend about this very thing! We were discussing why there are still A and B drives, not just in the hardware, but in the operating system as well. NOBODY seems to use the A or B drive letters for anything. You don’t usually see them for say, a hard drive or dvd drive, now do you? Rather, they are relics left over from a time when those were an industry standard. Maybe not so much with the A drive, as 3.5″ floppies are still in service on some desktops, but they’ll probably be phased out within a few years. B drives, or 5.25″ floppies, I’d wonder if anyone under 20 even knows that they once existed. So decades or centuries from now, what will people think of these two drives? Will they even know what purpose they served as time passes?
Now here’s the twist! Those same questions, the same weird ghosts of the past tied up into the very construct of the computer are mirrored exactly in us; all of us. Where computers have archaic codes and hardware, we too have the biological equivalents all smunched up in our bodies. From appendixes, to layers of nerves, and even our very DNA, these fossils have since lost all meaning, all purpose, to newer systems or outdated needs, but they still persist. The trick is to try and figure out what they were for when still in use. So we’ve got a good handle on the whole appendix thingy, but what of the DNA? Well, we did that genome thing and we’ve come a long way to figure out what certain things do… but one thing seems to be very evident; there is a LOT of junk in there! That’s right! It’s driven scientists up a wall trying to understand why there’s so much bits of data in our programming that do basically nothing. Well, now after some research, it seems that most of that junk data is a sort of residual from our evolutionary past. As things evolve, you’d think it would kick out the bits it didn’t need, well… nature doesn’t seem to be very efficient. It just keeps building up! Think of it like a hard drive; the longer you have it, you delete the things you don’t need. That data doesn’t get lost, the index just says to skip over it to the stuff that’s active. Same with DNA, most of that junk is the evolutionary history that could probably be traced back to the dinosaurs. Cool stuff huh? You might have a little T-Rex in ya (err… probably not, but you get my point)! The rest are errors or snippets from viruses that managed to get passed along to the rest of us.
Now, what does the A drive in our DNA do? Heck if we know! And probably won’t find out for a good long time! I’d wager a great deal of it is damaged or so old it might not even be relevant enough to test (with modern equipment). Kind of like trying to run an old C64 file on a Windows 7 machine… Or try running that file on a machine 100 years from now. That’s the problem we face now. Though I am very sure we will be able to decode a great deal of the old stuff, especially when looking back through our genetic history at our possible precursors and seeing what is active there and what we have that’s new. And that right there is the exciting future of this kind of study! It is essentially the smoking gun for evolutionists (despite the other mountains of evidence…); being able to read through our DNA, an exact chronology of our advancement, and seeing where the changes would have likely occurred and when. Again, this is WAY off, but the theory is sound and it’s very exciting. Not only that, you have all the tools you need now to pick up an old 5.25″ drive from a flea market and slap it right into your PC. See what I’m getting at here? All the blueprints are there. The data libraries are just waiting to be accessed and by the mere flick of a switch, you could have a tail, or idk, gills (if it’s not degraded). I’ll be interested in seeing how this all progresses, and who knows, maybe one day down the line we’ll get an itch to run that genome test again and find there’s extra bits in all of us… and wonder what the heck “noses” were.
Happy day one and all! On July the 4th, 2012, the good folks at CERN officially announced that they found the long sought after Higgs particle! This is, of course, worded they found a new particle with characteristics in line with the theoretical projections of the particle with a 5 sigma confidence. While that all may sound wishy washy, it’s still like saying they’re 99.9999426697% sure it’s the Higgs Boson, which is pretty darn sure. Of course, there will be some time before we will know for sure what’s going on under the hood, but for the most part, this is a huge discovery!
Why? Well, the Higgs Boson was the particle theorized to be associated with mass! (I think I explained this before, but here’s a quick run down) Every one of the 4 forces has an associated particle, so like electromagnetic is the photon, gravity is the graviton, etc. But the more we tried to understand how things worked, there was this little hole where mass should be. We couldn’t figure out why things are heavy. What makes one thing more massive than another? Sure, you can say size, but why would size matter? What mechanical device makes something that is bulkier have more mass? Well, Old Man Higgs came up with a cleaver theory that the universe is saturated in a giant field (Higgs Field) and as we know, every field has its own particle. (field particles are like things that can blip in and out of existence, meaning, we can only know the probability of where they might be, but not where they are at all times… it’s a complicated thing… check the youtubes for some info)
So yeah, the theory said that the universe is filled with this field… and this field is made up of little particles (Higgs Bosons). So think of it like the universe is submerged in a giant ocean. Think of the ocean as the field and the water molecules as the bosons. Now, when a little fish swims around, it can dart through the water with the greatest of ease! Because it’s so small, it can zip through the water molecules because there’s less resistance! We would say that little fish had low mass. A big honkin’ whale has to push much more water around to go the same distance, and thus, goes slower. We’d say this has a lot of mass. Seems easy enough, but we had to build a massively expensive machine to make enough energy to bring this little particle into existence to prove that, well, it existed!
So there you go! Some majorly cool science just happened in your lifetime! It’s like our generation’s discovery of gravity.
Also, I’d really like to stress this now… There is still a LOT of work to do now to figure out what all this means for science AND we might some day find this wasn’t the particles we were looking for. But, that said, it does seem pretty legit and I am absolutely amazed at the ability of the Human collective to construct the most complicated experiment in the history of the world and provide striking evidence for the very thing it sought out to test. Truly amazing work peoples!
So now that we got that crossed off our list, I wonder what the next big thing to discover will be!
This is a bit of a response to the recent ad campaign going on Europe that’s set on trying to get more women into the science, math, and engineering fields. I think this is a wonderful idea! I remember growing up and some kind of bogus statistic saying girls were bad at math, which is why they don’t make good scientists and etc… all BS. Then again, that was when blood was still blue and electrons orbited the nuclei like little planets. Though I’d wager it was more of a skewed statistic coming from the “boys club” type mentality. Quite a shame too.
So now there’s an attempt to push the demographic of your egg headed super heroes to include the ladies! Great… but there’s a catch. See, the ad agency running these endeavors seemed to have employed some folks that were a few chromosomes short of vegetable and thought the proper target audience for these ads were girls aspiring to be Elle Woods from Legally Blonde. And that’s fine if you’re a girly girl type who also likes to split atoms on the side, but it is not a proper demographic to target. Basically, the problem is that paints an idealized (and stereotyped) hyper-sexulized version of women on one hand while trying to break another stereotype with the other. “Come be a scientist! There’s like, pink unicorns and lipstick, and stickers, and stuff”… Really folks? Really? It’s kind of belittling if you ask me. It’s like trying to use the Benny Benassi video, Satisfaction, to get more women into construction work. Not saying there’s anything wrong with doing some pinup (over idealized) arts, but let’s not pretend it’s an acceptable genre for use in women’s rights. Similarly, it’s like using Gil Elvgren painting to get girls into library science.
Again, it’s fine if you’re the type of lady that likes to wear cherry red lipstick and high heels in the lab, but this isn’t the right way to portray women in science nor is it the right way of inviting the younger generation to join up. A real good way is to push science itself! Science is crazy interesting and loads of fun! It’s a lot of math and hard research, but if you want people to start joining in, then you need to show how diverse and wonderful the field is, not using stereotypes to lure young minds.
I think the greater issue starts from the very beginning of the chain. You can try to pass off some sort of invitation now to get more women interested, but you are also fighting a whole history of misogynistic marketing that has told them different. A very clear message gets sent out when on tv, little Billy is playing with his chemistry set and football while Sally plays with dolls. The initiative needs to start on this very basic level! Counter marketing needs to be in place (like Truth ads next to a cigarette one) that shows women in positions of higher learning, who split atoms and rearrange genes, who are not any weaker or stronger than their male counterparts, rather are peers. No more no less. If the goal is to have more diversity in the sciences, then we need to level the playing field at an early age.
It’s all pretty sad that we have to undo centuries of bad press, but at the same time, at least a basic level of tact needs to be applied. I’m not a fan of this ad campaign the EU tried to pass off, but I’m a fan of what they are trying to accomplish. The best solution would be for them to just fire their marketing staff and hire me! Buuuuut a more realistic approach would be to just be respectful and not use bad advertising techniques to draw in an audience. Hell, for all I know maybe this was all a ploy to piss off everybody with offensive ads to get people talking about it. In that case, good troll my good sirs… but that’s probably being a bit overly optimistic about it.
Anyways, I think my ad is much better! Shows a lady in science, not sexualized or stereotyped (except for glasses… but all us geeky peeps are a bit blind… I blame computers), nor in a position of helplessness, vulnerability, or survivor of assault (which seems to be a nice new trope they like to use now), rather an inventor and person in power. So there you go! Fixed! Share this with all the girls you know and remind them they can rule the world with their brain… and a labcoat.
Yup, so there you have it. Gals with goggles! Need more of em! So get to it! (And heck, I think everyone should get into science and math, no matter what you do! It’s good for the soul!)
Sigh… a once in a lifetime event foiled by clouds! Ah well, I “attempted” to take some photos through some breaks, but didn’t see anything. I guess just knowing it happened is alright enough.
As a Floridian, this is one of those things that’s been bugging me about our state and its politics. See, for whatever reason the powers that be have decided that “non-native” invasive species of plants and animals are “bad”. While on the surface you may agree; being that certain species can threaten the entire ecosystem and balance therein. On the one hand, yes, plants and animal species not from this biosphere can cause damages on a massive scale. The lack of predators and limiting factors allow alien species to flourish unchecked and sometimes they can just overrun everything, and if the environment doesn’t prevent growth, they can destroy that too. It’s amazing how destructive such innocuous creatures from outside an ecosystem can ruin everything.
So by now you might not be seeing a down side to the extermination and control of such things. But here’s the problem, they might not be all bad! See, invasions and rebalancing happens all the time in nature! It’s not just a part of nature, it IS nature. While equilibrium is the natural state of things, discord and chaos are also a part of this process. The constant destruction and rebirth are just cycles of the greater picture, we just have to step back and look at it objectively.
I guess the issue with us is that of reluctance to change and convenience. We don’t like change and especially don’t like things that inconvenience us. But nature is an ever present force and to quote Jurassic Park, “life WILL find a way”. It has a way of spreading and beating upon the walls of our civilization with the strength of a thousand hurricanes. While it can not be contained or controlled, it can be managed… and can be destroyed. It is a paradox; both powerful and fragile at the same time. And unfortunately, the more we humans interfere, the worse things usually end up for everything that’s not us.
Some more specific problems with Florida would be with stuff like the Brazilian Pepper, that destroys some of the natural foliage (specifically the plants that are structural to the coastline… ie… very very bad) or the anaconda and those cute little iguana lizard things as well as a number of birds (like parrots) and even monkeys. I think what we need to do here is try and draw a line in the sand with what we are willing to exterminate. Some stuff moves in and fits right in, like the monkeys and parrots, while others destroy public property (like the lizards), some just like to fight with the gators for predatory dominance (snakes), and some are just plane destructive like that pepper tree. So the question is, at what point are we willing to mass murder a species? Is it because it needs control because it causes hazards to the environment and its inhabitants? Or is it because they are pests to us humans? We’ve already seen how we humans can over hunt/exterminate a species into absolute extinction just because, well, we wanted to. There are many many creatures on the “never to return” list because of us. And we need to really take a good look at what we are doing because at the end of the day… WE are the invasive species.
That’s right, if you ever go to Florida or have ever lived there… just look around (or remember it)… Everything you see there was, at one point, the ocean floor. The native species of plants an animals were oceanic. Seaweed was our grass and fish our birds. Fastforward many years and through a series of mishaps, accidental wanderings, mass invasions, destruction, and rebirth, we find this state as a lush ecosystem of flora and fauna living in balance. Then we show up and everything goes to hell. But at least after a few decades of destruction we’ve gotten the hint and given the EPA a lot of mess to clean up. We’re getting there though. So before we start adding our little buddies to the “kill on sight” list, maybe we should take a big ol look at that big objective picture. Because the invasion, destruction, and rebirth cycles have been going on for millions of years now… and who do we think we are to stand in the way of that? Just a little food for thought. (queue up the “the more you know” jingle)
Yikes! This one ended up being a little more gruesome than I originally intended… buuuut I think I made my point. >)
I think this might be the only time I may ever concede that a “game” could promote violence. And here’s my theory… There have been a few little games out in the last few years that use a basic form of EEG to convert the electromagnetic activity of the brain into a game controller. At first, there were only a few, mainly just moving a ball back and forth (suspended by an air jet) and all you had to do was “think hard” or concentrate to move it. Of course, there was a Star Wars one and something that’s more useful for console or PC controls. The idea is pretty simple; the brain sheds tons of electromagnetic waves all around the exterior of the head, which is why they can give you brain scans and such to measure activity. I haven’t used one so I can not comment on the accuracy of control, but many reports say it’s pretty responsive.
But here’s the rub… Look up at my drawing again. Now down at me. Now up. I’m on a horse! And not just that! I’m on a high horse with a crazy supposition! That EEG thingy is resting right on the frontal lobe just above the eye. This region controls a whole host of psychological activities! One of which is your emotional responses to anger. (which is why old lobotomies would shove an instrument through your eye and scrape a little gray matter) So my stretch of imagination says, “if you exercise the part of your brain that’s related to anger, rage, strong emotions, and even been linked to stuff like schizophrenia, then all you’re doing is making that area stronger in those types of things”. Long story short, if you lift weights with the evil hand, then you’re going to punch puppies or something. *I’d like to insert here that this is all just massive speculation!
The way the EEG works is by measuring the electromagnetic energy being produced in an area. This much you know. I’m redundant. But that energy is caused by the electrical activity of that area… it’s like looking at a hard drive; if you access your picture files, they are on one part of the disk, if you access your music, they are on another, so without looking at the screen, you can figure out what’s being accessed by looking at what part of the hard drive the read write head is at. Same thing, parts of your brain light up like Vegas when doing different things. For instance, a very specific part of the brain lights up when a person is asked to imagine playing tennis. Cool stuff! But my point with all of this is that forcing yourself to concentrate on certain areas might have unknown effects. It may make this area overactive from stimulation and cause undesirable thoughts, or make you have better control of that area, idk! So if you focus or concentrate on the area that deals with tennis, does that make you a better tennis player? Even when you aren’t thinking about tennis, just concentrating on that location in the brain? I don’t know. That’s for the lab coats to decide. But I will say this, I think we’re entering a very cool, but very dangerous area of technology that starts to incorporate the brain directly into our activities. I encourage the development of this, but also warn of the dangers. Messing with the processor is really something you should do when you’ve got a fairly decent idea of what you are doing. Like, I am deathly afraid of overclocking my CPU because I’m 100% sure that I’ll probably fry it. So same thing here, when we tamper with the old sponge we need to proceed with caution.
That said, I’m all for the integration of technology with biology. I’ll probably be the first in line for cyber implants! Well… for nothing else but to have blinking lights everywhere. What can I say? The SWTOR feng shui bug has gotten to me. However, I just want to be clear… Before we start rolling out with technology that directly influences the brain or specific regions within, we need to be absolutely sure that the effects will not cause us to hoard bodies in a suitcase under our beds. Just saying, it’s good to err on the side of caution.
Alright kids, gather round! Bring it in! Take a knee! We’ve got some science to be talking about!
Yup, another episode of “Crazy stuff you never knew and probably didn’t want to”! This week, we talk about colors. It seems so easy and innocent at first huh? We all remember growing up and coloring in the books… green for grass, blue for sky, yellow for sun. A shame it’s all wrong though…
A and B are the same shade...
So this thing called color is some weird stuff. It’s not just what we see, but what we think we see. As a photographer, this is the hardest and most obnoxious thing in the universe to get right! The problem being, well, no light source is “white”. Think about that for a second… let it sink in… No light source is white. We see white right? Well, yes and no. We hardly ever see the actual colorless surface of white. Like a dress or a cloud or a piece of paper. The reality is this almost always saturated with the color of the source of light. But even so, something magical happens within our brains that automatically adjusts and filters out any excess color pollutants. Especially with things that we know. People and skin tones are almost always retooled as being, well, skin tone. Paper and such will turn white. Apples are good one too. They will almost always be red, regardless of the color of the light source (try it, pull out an apple in a room lit up with a blue or green light… see what your brain does!). And by far, the most magical and impressive illusion of them all… the sky!
Well, not so much the sky as the daylight around you. No, the sky isn’t a reflection of the oceans… That’s as archaic as blood being blue or the world being flat. No, the molecules in the sky diffract the light and diffuse the rich blue color more, thus we see a saturation of blue and the other colors get sent off into the great big yonder. But here’s the weird part… it isn’t just the sky that’s blue… it’s everything. We are bathed in a massive shower of the color blue. If you walk outside now, everything is blue. EVERYTHING! It’s hard to imagine. You can kind of do this by spending some time in an enclosed room lit by standard lights, then running outside. You should notice that there is thick saturation of blue before your eyes start to adjust. And adjust they will! It’s why a piece of paper looks white whether you’re inside or out. That paper is super blue outside and super yellow inside. You can kind of see this by using indoor or tungsten film outside (everything will be blue) or outside film in a room lit by incandescent lightbulbs (everything will be yellow/orange). Heck, you can even see things turning super blue at dusk while your eyes adjust to night. And it even goes beyond automatic color adjustment, your mind will adjust shades too! Why? Well, because your brain is stupid! Ok ok, your brain isn’t stupid, but your consciousness is. That part of your brain that gives it sentience and your basic heads up display… well… turns out that it can’t really deal with a lot of info. In order to facilitate this, your subconscious, the big super computer processing center, takes in info and makes judgements on what it “should” be. You know, to make things easier on it’s slower cousin, the consciousness. It can insert objects, shades, colors and even erase things completely, just because it wants to make things easier to process at the top most levels of brain functions. Basically the tl;dr cliff notes version told to you by your best friend’s cousin’s friend’s mechanic. Granted, life would be much more stressful if we had to process full raw data, but still… it makes us see things that aren’t natural.
Speaking of color correction… some fun facts about that… at some primal juncture in our evolution (or a bug in the programming if that’s your bag), our brains decided for us that red/orange/yellow spectrum of light was hot. We call these colors warm for a reason. I would assume this goes back to fire, but there could be some other reason for the association (maybe something to do with blood?). And you would logically assume that the blue part of the spectrum was, of course, colder. Well, this couldn’t be further from the truth. While it is true, that fire produces a yellow/red color it’s relative hotness is fairly low. Fire is around 1700 kelvin, not very hot color wise and stuff like say, a bright day or the sun is nearer to the greenish end at 5500 kelvin (well, in space it’s more of a whitish very light pinkish sorta)… really hot stuff like 20000 kelvin blue dwarf stars that are, well, blue. So hot = blue!
So yeah guys… brain is bad… mixing up all our colors and stuff! So now you know! And knowledge is power! But power corrupts… Thus, you are now all evil! Mwahahahaha!
So the CDC (Center For Disease Control) released another community bulletin about how to deal with the problems facing us today, like zombies or giant global disasters. This time is the topic of dealing with space invaders! Now, some might say it’s a bit unusual or just a waste of time for our governmental bodies to be making procedures for epidemics localized only to your favorite “B”-movie, but I disagree! Having preparedness for anything and everything is essential to the future survival of the Human race. Now I’m not talking about stocking up on a 10 year supply of baked beans and tin foil hats that you keep in your nuclear bunker you made in your closet… No, I’m talking about sets of helpful tips for the general public to access before, during, and after any kind of threatening event. It’s good to know what to do so that you can calmly and collectedly deal with any situation without panicking and possibly causing even more problems. I know those pre-flight tutorials we all hate sitting through are redundant at best, but I bet that any one of you can tell me the proper process should there be a sudden loss of cabin pressure!! Stuff like that seems second nature to us, and it should! In that instance you would know how to keep safe.
So when we start rolling through some of the less probable events, they seem trivial or just laughable to us, but that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. Now, I said “probable” for a reason. We don’t know if we are alone in the universe, but depending on how you look at the Drake equation, we could be in a world of hurt if we are not prepared for meeting up with an extra-terrestrial species. My only concern here with this report from the CDC as opposed to the zombie invasion one, is that it seems less serious than the previously mentioned. It basically tells us to just roll over and let them have at it, and on the surface, that’s just bad advice.
Here’s the issue here, supposing we meet up with some alien race in the near future, the general public will completely lose their minds! Without some sort of unified plan, I’m sure the majority of us would reach for our shotguns and start wildly firing into the air. Lord help us if there’s a sci-fi con happening at the same time… poor poor cosplayers… but they knew the risks. Anyways, surely there would be an excess of panic. I’d say the best procedure would be to stay indoors, watch the news, and to make sure everybody knows to stay calm and not act out. It could be a whole diplomatic mess if people started getting involved. On the other hand, it’s also not a bad idea for people to know how to properly defend themselves and survive without provisions. It would also probably align well with how to deal with modern day wartime invasionary procedures, like readiness for biological, radioactive, or chemical attacks; though the biggest threat would be via biological and that’s where the CDC can really shine.
But you know, maybe there is something to the whimsical nature of the CDC’s response to this issue, in that when faced with a threat from an alien species, throwing in the towel is probably the best and only option given our current state of technology. Yeah, we’ve come a long way from throwing twigs, rocks, and other more primitive biological weapons, but if we’re up against a race that has the technology to close the gaps between stars, well, we’re pretty screwed. I’m sure a few of us could survive much of anything, but I think Michio Ikaku said it best when talking about fighting aliens, “it’s not like most would think, a David vs Goliath situation like in the movies, rather it would be Bambi vs Godzilla” ~paraphrased. This disparity between technology would most likely be absolutely immense and any attempt to rebel directly would most definitely end poorly. Though I did see a program that made a very interesting point, if we were faced with such an encounter then guerrilla tactics would be the best. That is to say, it’s not a mission to win the war through brute force, rather win by default by making it nearly impossible for the other side to make any progress. As in, be a pain in the butt as much as possible so it just because so uneconomically feasible that they just give up. So… that’s my plan! Punking aliens until they leave. >)
It’s funny how throughout time and history, great minds are ridiculed and looked upon with great disdain only to be regarded as pillars of science years after their time. Well, lets look at some modern day philosophers that I think don’t get enough credit, not for any discovery or scientific break through, but for asking the right question too all the things things we take for granted. And that question… How do they work?!
Sure, we can laugh off the Insane Clown Posse as making just another lame song and dance that outlines pure stupidity, OR we can look at their videogram critically and realize that it was a clear plea for us to never settle for the standard textbook definitions of the world around us, bleached and spoon fed in the most laundered version possible, and ask, at the very most basic level, how the heck does it work!
Now lets look at one of their more famous postulations, “Magnets, how do they work?” Sounds simple enough at the surface, but once we dissect this question, it becomes a much more complicated task than expected. At first glance, one might be tempted to give the textbook answer that it is an attraction or repulsion between two permanent magnets via their generated magnetic fields. Right, A+ on your paper, time to move on… But wait! That never answered the question. That’s just an observation, not an explanation. Alight, so where do these magnetic fields come from? Well, the classical model of this is that the electrons get polarized with their spins, thus creating an electromagnetic field. Ok, getting somewhere! Now, what’s that field made of? Well, that gets tricky, but the current theory is that the fields are much like clouds of probabilities where virtual particles blip in and out of existence. Every field (ie. force) has an associated particle, electromagnetic gets the common household photon. So if you can imagine, these fields have a sort of flow to them, and so when they’re moving in the same direction (such as out of the N end) they would repel, like a jet of water pushing against another jet of water, and you get the opposite to make them attract. Well, less like a stream because it’s more chaotic than that, but you get the idea. There, we’re done! All is explained! But wait, there’s more! Because all we’ve done is regurgitate some theories about the mechanics, but nothing has been explained about what that “force” is. And that’s where we hit the wall. See, we can visualize the interactions, guess at how these particles are bouncing around and playing nice, but at the end of the day, nothing we have in our current physics explains WHY any of these fundamental forces interact. Field theory says the fields are made up all these little happy particles just moving about and interacting to do all those fun things they’re supposed to be doing… but… why? What causes more stuff to generate more gravitational force? Where does mass come from (will, Higgs, but we’re still testing that). Why doe subatomic particles “stick” together? And what is this “force” made of and how does it work? That’s the last bit of the puzzle, that force, and despite any amount of science we have done, it’s still a bit of a mystery… Force, energy, ether, whatever you want to call it still has some time ahead of it before we get even a hazy understanding of its mechanic, but give it some time, and maybe if we keep asking the right questions, we’ll finally figure out why!
