Why I Love/Hate Web 2.0

From the time I was born until I was about 16, my father owned a burger joint.  The Castle Burger. He opened every day at 11 am. For many of those years, I remember the local dentist, a nightclub owner, and two other men would take a booth and drink coffee for an hour or so.  They would sit there, sip on the coffee, and talk about current events.

That’s how much social commentary happened. Over a cup of coffee, a glass of beer, at the dinner table. Unbeknownst to everyone at the time that began to change in 1993.

That’s when the European particle physics lab, CERN, gave the world the World Wide Web.

I joined the Internet in the fall of 1994, and I created my first web page shortly thereafter. To do that, I learned some basic html at an American Association of Physics Teachers workshop and taught myself more advanced coding by examining the source code of pages I liked. Web page production became a hobby, and I changed the look of my pages almost annually – just because I could.

One had to be technically literate to create a page, or one had to have the money to have one created. The information was static and flowed one way – from the content creator to the viewer. For the most part, I think the Internet shared whatever credibility more established media enjoyed.

Then sometimes in the 2000s, the Web changed. We now had Web 2.0. Users became content creators without having to bother creating a web page.

Everyone could now contribute. MySpace and Facebook allows us to easily stay in touch; Wikipedia makes it easier for experts to share their knowledge; Tumblr, WordPress, and Blogger make it simple for anyone to share their thoughts.

The true democratization of the Internet.

I joined this democracy movement in April 2010. I created my FaceBook profile. I was motivated by my desire to reach out to my students at Rio Hondo College. I tell them what I think of them - they are the best students at Rio Hondo and they will be the best students at whatever university or college they transfer to, but despite their obvious interest and perhaps because of the times, they are not always aware of the scientific, engineering, and technological advances being made everyday.  I thought that I could do something to sneak in some learning.

Then I got a bit bored in July 2011. So one afternoon I signed into Blogger and started Oenobareus, my blog dedicated to science and reason written after a glass or two of Pinot Noir.

That is what I love. Both the blog and FaceBook let me share what interests me, and my expertise. Plus they give me a creative outlet. I try to be informative, occasionally funny, and every once in while, I let out some righteous anger.

Let me share some of my favorite blog posts:

Transformers 3 - Dark ofthe Moon: I applied some basic physics to calculate the gravitational effects of Cybertron on the Earth.
Don’t Ask Marilyn - parts 1 through 4: Marilyn vos Savant is a columnist in Parade magazine. In a 2011 column, she defends herself against a math teacher in a problem in probability. The post prompted several emails and three other posts where I patiently explain probability and entropy.
Santa Claus Science: Did you know it takes 11 million reindeer to pull Santa’s sleigh?
Flying Aircraft Carriers:Physics and Engineering in The Avengers: Another piece inspired by a movie. What I really enjoy about this piece is that I hope that students (and others) realize how one can do a quick calculation without sophisticated theories.
July 4th isHiggsdependence Day: Announcing the discovery of the Higgs boson. This was particularly fun as I have a brother-in-law named Higgs.
Twas the Night Before What?: A Newtonian twist on Clement Moore’s poem.
Au-some: There were many reports in the press how scientists had discovered the nuclear process by which gold was created. What I like about this one is I really had to delve into the literature. Nowhere in the article was gold mentioned.

These are some of my favorites, because I was sharing my expertise.

Why do I hate Web 2.0?

It all started late in 2011. I received a friend request from Aaron, an acquaintance of a former student. He stated he was interested in intellectual discussions. As it turned out he was a libertarian, anarchist, christian, young earth creationist.

I made a smart-ass comment about Bristol Palin when Aaron asked how to end teen pregnancy. That led to me educating myself on the issue and my post Making Babies. Which led to You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

And thus began my intense dislike for Web 2.0.

Through Aaron I found True Dinos, a Facebook profile of a Texas fellow who like dinosaurs. This young earth creationist (YEC) witnessed a pterosaur when he was 11 years old.

It was at True Dinos that I ran across Cowboy Bob Sorensen and The Question Evolution Project.

Here’s what you need to know about TQEP:

Welcome to "The Question Evolution Project". This is a resource that points to information showing the failings of evolution. We are also here to encourage people to speak out against evolutionary indoctrination.

Evolutionism dominates the media, education and so on. Pages like this are "equal time" to present information that is ignored and often suppressed. We attempt to help raise awareness that true science is not afraid to examine contrary evidence and allows alternative theories to the interpretation of the evidence (such as creation science). Specifically, evolutionists should not have the right to shout down, censor, censure or intimidate creationists / ID proponents.

I first earned the ire of Cowboy Bob, a biblical literalist, by insisting he confront his hypocrisy. I asked him if he was a geocentrist. Bob blustered about suing me for posting screenshots from FaceBook.

I mocked Bob after that by finding a photo of him and attaching this description: “Bob has read one book. It has made him an expert in biology, geology, physics, and chemistry.” Nine months later, Bob filed a Digital Millenium Copyright Act complaint and the photo was removed from FaceBook. But not for long.  I filed a counter-notification and a few weeks later, access was restored.

Another character is Kirk Hastings. Kirk has a few FaceBook profiles: What is Truth?, Freedom From Atheistic Scientism, and The Question Irreligiosophy Project. Kirk has a habit of pasting quotes. I came across one that I had to investigate.

Radio telescopes, linked with computers, simultaneously search millions of radio frequencies for a nonrandom, nonnatural, extraterrestrial signal—any short sequence of information. Yet, the long sequence of information in the DNA of every living thing on Earth is a signal from an intelligence—a vast intelligence—a Creator. Almost all those searching for extraterrestrial life believe it evolved naturally in outer space. If they ever accepted the DNA evidence for a Creator, the evolutionary basis for their search would disappear.

He credits a journalist for the journal Science and helpfully cites the volume, date, and page number.

I downloaded the article and searched for the quote. Even after calling him out for his dishonesty, he continued to claim that he was accurately quoting the journalist and insisted the quote from the very article I had in my hand. Only very recently has he deleted the post from his timeline. I’ll take that as an admission of guilt.

There is no shortage of creationists to joust with. There are also plenty of cranks out there who are willing to engage. Stupid politicians will continue to provide comedy gold as well as provoke anger.

But I reserve a special enmity for commenters. Even before Web 2.0, I never understood call-in radio shows, interviews with the person on the street, and the like.

Commenting seems to bring out the very worst especially behind a wall of anonymity. Just this past Friday night, the CBS affiliate aired a story that hits me rather personally.

For thirteen years – up to 2011 – I worked with students and teachers at a private elementary school. I coordinated the science program, developed science lessons with the teachers, and taught all levels from pre-school to 8^th grade. Until you’ve been in a classroom with these teachers, it’s hard to appreciate the job they choose to do.

So it was with deep sadness that I read this story. If true, a teacher violated the trust of a student, the parents and his co-workers.  If false, a man’s career is sidelined and his reputation is ruined. The article states that the teacher is forbidden by the California Department of Social Services from having any contact with any children in any facility licensed by the department. The Whittier police department closed its investigation and the District Attorney is not filing any charges

Let me read you some of the 863 comments [as of 9:20 am, Sept. 8.] These are not necessarily the worst of them.

• Should have identified the despicable deviant teacher by name.
Typical MSM and Union rats at work.
• Oh good, another liberal sicko exercising its uninvited deviant sexual desires on others, and once again, on a child. When liberals are not busy murdering children, or making it easier for others to murder children, they are busy molesting the children. They call it, "being progressive".
• No wonder he got in trouble...
He didn't say "Obama says".
• KILL the perv!
• On one hand you have the government brainwashing your children with communist ideologies and on the other hand they are being molested by these freaks. If god doesn't deal with these vermin then the people will. Soon. VERY soon.
• Another liberal pedophile who we have teaching our kids.He needs to be swinging from a tree at the end of a rope.
• sounds like black to me.
•  If I remember correctly, all pedophile teachers are sent to Kalifornia to teach. Kalifornia does not discriminate based on sexual preference. The zoophiles are sent there as well. What a wonderful inclusive place to raise a family.
• Not only are the Public School "teachers" Lefty Lemmings but they are also Pedophiles.
• I've never known a male to work as a preschool teacher.
• If it were a male of European decent or a Christian of any decent they would have blasted the face and name everywhere. I am gonna bet it was either a homosexual or a minority.
• Its now open season on Johnny's fartbox. Homosexual Sodomite Pedophiles are going to be raping children all over this nation this school year. You get what you voted for.
• only anal tongue darts are acceptable in California

And with that, thank you for letting me get all this off my chest.

Use the Force, Luke

The United States will not be building a Death Star.

Death Star from Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977). CREDIT: Lucas Films

On November 14, 2012, John D. from Longmont, CO petitioned the White House to "secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016."  The appeal suggests that "by focusing our defense resources into a space-superiority platform and weapon system such as a Death Star, the government can spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more, and strengthen our national defense." 

The White House has responded.  While the Obama administration is supportive of the petitioners desire for job creation and maintaining a strong national defense, the government will not be allocating scarce research and development funds on a Death Star for three reasons.

Reason #1:

The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We're working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.

Reason #2:

The Administration does not support blowing up planets.

Reason #3 and the absolute best reason for not building this weapon of mass destruction:

Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?

Flying Aircraft Carriers: Physics and Engineering in The Avengers

CREDIT: Marvel Studios

I saw the Avengers on Memorial Day.  Awesome movie, and if you've read one of my early blog posts, Transformers 3 - Dark of the Moon, you might guess I sometimes think about physics during the movie.  One thing that caught my attention was the flying aircraft carrier.  What would it take to make one fly?

Thanks to Wikipedia, I found some specifications for a modern US navy supercarrier.  They are 333 meters long (1,092 ft) and 78 meters wide (260 ft), and its displacement is 100,000 long tons which is equal to 224,000,000 pounds and 101,600,000 kg.  It is powered by two nuclear power reactors that provide 190 megawatts.

Now for science!

There was a shot in the movie when two of their fans were shut down and the ship was plummeting.  The altimeter read between 17 and 18,000 ft.  So I will begin by assuming they were cursing at 30,000 ft.  This is also where many commercial flights travel.  I will also assume that it takes about 30 minutes to reach cruising altitude.

CREDIT: Marvel Studios

Now I can estimate the acceleration.  Kinematics, the study of motion, says that for a body initially at rest, the acceleration is given by

Plugging in gives a value of 0.006 m/s/s.  For you non-students of physics, this means that for every minute, the carrier goes almost 1 mph faster.

Now for Isaac Newton.  To produce this acceleration, Professor Newton says that unbalanced forces have to act on the carrier.  Newton's 2nd law:

Here I will have to use the ship's displacement as its mass.  The displacement measures how much water an object pushes out of the way.  Rather than trying to calculate the ship's mass, I'll take the shortcut.  The total unbalanced force is about 570,000 Newtons.

There will be two forces acting on the ship - the thrust and the gravitational force (commonly referred to as the weight).  The thrust has to be 570,000 Newtons larger than the weight.  We can find the weight by multiplying the mass by the gravitational field (9.8 N/kg).  Therefore the thrust is approximately 10,000,000,000 Newtons.

The total energy used in both speeding up the ship and raising it can be found by multiplying the thrust by the distance.  

Since power is the rate at which energy is converted, we can take the energy and divide by 30 minutes.  To raise SHIELD's ship requires 5,000,000,000 Watts; that's 5.0 gigawatts!  Earlier I noted that the 2 reactors aboard a US carrier provide 190 megawatts, SHIELD needs 52 nuclear reactors.

Now for those fans providing the thrust.  To try to calculate the thrust of a ducted fan, one needs an extensive knowledge of fluid dynamics and aeronautical engineering plus a powerful computer.  I'll take the quick path to the answer.

With a 0.16 second Google search of "thrust fan specifications", the first result was for Ventry Solutions, Inc.  They sell a 24 inch ventilation fan that supplies 108 Newtons of thrust.  I'll scale that up for the ducted fans seen in the movie.  

Judging from the photo above, the fans have a diameter of about 40 meters (130 ft).  If - a very big if - the thrust is proportional to the diameter, then one fan can give 7100 Newtons.  Uh oh.  7100 Newtons per fan; 10,000,000,000 Newtons needed.  

14 million of them.

Rise of the Planet of the Hominoidea

While you're watching the latest summer blockbuster, realize the name of the movie and all of its predecessors were not appropriately titled. One, it is biologically inaccurate. If Earth is the planet of anything, it's probably the Planet of the Insects.

Two. The taxonomic classification Hominoidea is the family in the order Primates which includes Hylobatidae (gibbons) and Hominidae (the great apes). There are only seven species of great apes still around: Bornean and Sumatran orangutans, Western and Eastern gorilla, the common chimpanzee, the bonobo, and humans. The Rise Planet of the Apes - that started about 65 million years ago.

Transformers 3 - Dark of the Moon

Saturday night I went to see Transformers 3 - Dark of the Moon. Did I like it? Well, it was loud and I was out of the house for three hours.

As I was watching it though, I began to wonder about some physics (SPOILER ALERT) when Sentinel Prime began transporting the remains of Cybertron. So I said to myself, "Self. What sort of gravitational effects would that have on the Earth?"

Let's start with Cybertron. I will need to find its mass. So I'll need its radius and an estimate of its density. I need an image to make measurements, but I couldn't find an image from the movie, so working from memory, I made one. It appeared to me that Cybertron would be much bigger than the Earth. By the time Earth was saved, my estimate is that about 1/16 of Cybertron (by volume) had been transported. Then the Transformers' planet had a radius five times larger than Earth's. Since the war had destroyed much of Cybertron, only the cubic structural elements were left, so instead of a solid, we have a lot of empty space. Judging from the width of the structural beams, I'd judge that 105/125 of the planet is empty.

Now for geometry. The volume of a sphere is

The radius of the Earth is about 6400 km. So the volume of the transported Cybertron is approximately 2 X 10^22 cubic meters.

We can get from the mass from the density and the volume. Aluminum has a density 2700 kg/m^3, steel has a density of 7500 kg/m^3, and 4500 kg/m^3 for titanium. Now maybe the Transformers are using graphene for their structures, but doesn't their technology look metal-based and not organic? So I'll use the density of titanium as an average value. Plugging in the numbers yields for Cybertron's mass 1 X 10^26 kg. Yikes! Seventeen times more mass than the Earth.

Before I start with the gravitational effects, I need an estimate of how far Cybertron is from Earth. It wasn't very far - maybe 1 Earth radius away; that's 6400 km (4000 miles).

The biggest effect would be that the Earth would in effect become a moon of Cybertron; technically though, they would be a planetary binary system. Binary systems orbit about their common center of mass. If we calculate the center of mass, (it's okay to think center of gravity) it would be located 470 km beneath the surface of Cybertron,

How long would it take for the Earth to orbit Cybertron? Just under 8 minutes. Let's start with Newton's 2nd law of motion. Substitute Newton's law of universal gravitation, and the expressions for the centripetal acceleration and the speed of an object in circular motion. Now solve for the period.

Night time every 4 minutes.

Now let's consider the tides. Tides occur because of the Moon, the Sun, and the Earth's rotation. The major effect is called the principal lunar semidiurnal constituent and is due to the Moon. In short the Moon's gravitational pull is slightly larger on the side of the Earth nearer the Moon than on the far side; physicists call this a gravitational gradient.

So all I have to calculate is the gravitational force on opposite sides of the Earth and subtract the two to estimate the gradient. I find that Cybertron's gradient is three hundred million times stronger than the Moon's. I wouldn't be living near any large body of water.

It's a good thing Optimus Prime is on our side.

P.S. I noticed that when Decepticons came through the portal, they maintained their motion. That's what Newton's first law of motion would demand. But when the transportation of cCybertron occurred, it didn't maintain its motion. Violation!!!