Big Red

Yesterday I assembled my Christmas present, a shiny red cement mixer from Northern Tool. It was actually fairly easy to assemble. Except for one corner of the motor housing that had been dinged up by some sort of forklift accident, everything was straight and the holes all lined up. Getting the rubber gasket between the upper and lower drum halves was amusing - if you can imagine a flat rubber snake with the patience of a two-year-old, you've got the basic idea.

So what does one do with a cement mixer? One mixes concrete. Which raises this question: if it mixes concrete, why is it called a cement mixer? Why are trucks that carry concrete called cement trucks?

Concrete is pretty amazing stuff, if you ask me. You just add water to this stuff and it turns into a greenish goo that in the long run cures hard as a rock?? That's pretty fabulous. There are things that are even more fabulous - hot dogs, for one - but still, that's pretty fabulous. Back in my youth my dad and I poured an awful lot of concrete for driveways and walkways. We were mixing it in an ancient cement mixer, so we tended to form up slabs that could be mixed and poured and finished in about a day. We used a huge pile of gravel ("ABC" round these parts) and cats also used it as a giant open-air litter box.

It was possible to determine the order in which we poured the slabs by counting the little irregular voids in the surface of the concrete where cat poops rotted and came out. The first slabs were smooth and clean, but then the number of cat poop craters began to increase. The last slab looked like Swiss cheese or perhaps a scale model of the moon. Some of those voids got pretty big - I remember not wanting to meet the enormous feral cats that produced some of those poops.

Fun facts about concrete! The first actual concrete was invented by the Romans, and was used to build all sorts of interesting things. So far as I know, the Pantheon in Rome remains the world's largest, and oldest, unreinforced concrete dome. Modern Portland cement of the form we use today was a product of the Industrial Revolution, invented in the mid-1800s by some British fellow. (I used to think that Portland cement came from Portland, and I worried that at the rate people were building concrete buildings and superhighways, that one day Portland would be nothing but a huge crater from all that mining, as though the Borg had come.)

Here's another fun fact about concrete: mixing concrete in a wheelbarrow is one of the most unpleasant tasks known to man. I'd rather dig splinters out of my fingers. I'd rather try to give Baxter T. Cat a pill. I'd rather sand the raised panel lines off a 1970s-era Monogram airplane model and rescribe them (and if you know me very well at all, you know that I regard rescribing panel lines as exceedingly unrewarding).

Hence Big Red. Now that I have it, what do I propose to do with it? Building a Pantheon might be a little ambitious, but maybe a nice sunken garden...

Death Metal Dead

Death metal has been pronounced dead.

I had occasion to read the list of the top ten metal songs of the year, as picked by "Noisecreep", whoever they are. I'm not normally prone to reading this sort of thing - I like what I like and generally don't require validation from alleged cognoscenti. But it is interesting to note the bands who produced their top ten songs:

Priestess

Fear Factory

Scorpions

Iron Maiden

Mar De Grises

High on Fire

Deftones

Nachtmysterium

Ratt

Triptycon

Not a death metal act in the whole bunch. Actually, not much metal of any kind at all.

Here's one of their comments on Nachtmysterium:

'No Funeral' pulsates like something you might hear in a darkwave/goth dance club, and despite its gorgeous synthesizer-led melodies, many closed-minded metalheads shunned it.

If I wanted darkwave/goth dance music, then I guess it would make me happy. But I don't, so it didn't. But I guess that makes me a "hater".

Here's another comment on Deftones:

On top of everything, Chino Moreno's angelic crooning during the track's chorus is total ear candy.

It's like a segment from Sesame Street where we're enjoined to guess which one of these things just doesn't belong - metal music on the one hand, and total ear candy angelic crooning on the other. It's like going to a Mexican restaurant and getting Hollandaise sauce on one's enchilada - someone somewhere didn't get a very important memo. There's nothing wrong with Mexican food, and there's nothing wrong with Hollandaise sauce, but I prefer that the two not fuse into some horrid postmodern mess.

But, then again, Noisecreep picked Judas Priest winning some kind of award as the top metal moment of the year. Since when did metal care about awards? And since when was Judas Priest metal? I don't dislike Judas Priest by any means - but if you think Judas Priest is metal, you probably think canned tamales are Mexican food.

And the very thought of a Ratt song being the #2 metal song of the year made me buy a whole Amon Amarth album by way of overcompensation.

Vacuum Collapse

People talk a lot these days about the "zero-point energy" or "vacuum energy". You know an idea is hot when people start trying to sell you gadgets that supposedly exploit whatever the idea is, and I've seen at least a few products or services that were in some way supposed to derive some kind of power from the vacuum energy.

Unfortunately for them - at least if I understand this correctly - the vacuum energy predicted by quantum field theory is the minimum allowable energy. Since the vacuum is already at its minimum energy potential, there's no way to get any energy out of it (once the gas tank is empty, you can't get another 20 miles down the road by making the gas tank extra-empty). Virtual particle production continues apace because - again, if I understand this correctly - the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle allows a little slop in time and energy, as though the universe doesn't mind violations of the conservation of energy if they're sufficiently temporary.

Curiously, these virtual particles can actually be promoted and turned into real particles, but you have to supply some energy to do it. Hawking radiation is one example of how you can make virtual particles real.

But what if the vacuum isn't at its minimum energy? What if it's as a false minimum? What if, by means of quantum indeterminacy, or some sort of high-energy procedure carried out by earnest physicists, the false vacuum is allowed to tunnel or collapse to a lower energy, presumably the real minimum? Physicists argue that such a collapse would completely destroy the universe in its entirety - the mathematics of such things argue that the potential energy of a new pocket of lower-energy vacuum actually increases as its volume increases, so it would propagate outward at just below the speed of light, and we'd have no warning whatsoever. Not that there would be much we could do about it even if we had advance warning. The whole universe would end up collapsing to this new minimum energy vacuum, and us along with it.

For a while people were worried that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN might do the trick, but it seems unlikely. I'm no physicist, but it seems to me that if all it took to cause a vacuum collapse was a sufficiently energetic collision, it would have happened already - cosmic rays hit the top of the Earth's atmosphere with energies many times above what the LHC can generate, and we're still here. Even more dramatic, if current theories about the Big Bang are correct, there was a time in the very early universe when energies were much higher still, at the Grand Unification level if not the Planck energy itself. And we're still here.

So I think it's safe to assume that we aren't ripe for a vacuum collapse.

But even so, when I go outside to look for falling stars, I prefer not to think about the notion of a vacuum collapse. I have enough to worry about as it is without having to fret about the possibility of the entire universe being destroyed in a catastrophic vacuum collapse, thank you very much.

Most Obnoxious Noise

I am pretty sensitive to noise pollution. Light pollution doesn't really bother me. Air pollution is unsightly and unsafe, but I can sort of ignore it. If I come across a stream clogged with old tires, shot-up cars and beer cans, I'm irked, but I can always close my eyes. But I have a hard time shutting out noise pollution. It works its way into my brain until I'm actually listening to it. I'd almost rather have toxic chemicals in my water supply than noise in my ear.

Most forms of human endeavor seem to create noise, and most of the time it's okay with me. You need to mow your lawn or cut your firewood? Fine and dandy - I can live with noise that exists for some gainful purpose. You want to race your dragster at the nearby drag strip? I'm okay with that too, because you're racing your car at a place that was designed for car races, and sometimes I sit outside on a Friday night and listen to the roaring of the V-8s in the distance.

But there are certain classes of noise that just irk me to no end.

Commercials on the radio are especially annoying. They blare in my ear, and they're always so damned insistent. Commercials on TV are annoying too, but I'm usually in a position to mute them as they occur. Radio commercials always seem to feature a rapid-fire torrent of goofy sound effects with a breathless announcer with maximum reverb bellowing Bring Your Camera!

A TV in another room always kind of irks me, especially if the TV isn't being watched. It just sits there, pumping out its endless blare of noise, and it always seems to be tuned to a TV show I really can't stand, like The Obnoxious Self-Absorbed Housewives of Hoboken. I'm trying to understand the Schwartzschild solution of General Relativity, and suddenly the TV is screaming at me about the ignominy of having a flat butt.

Loud motorcycles are no picnic either. Several towns in Arizona have enacted noise laws because the incessant racket of thousands of these rolling ego-machines eventually pissed off the whole population, and I don't blame them.

Telephones. I've never liked talking on the telephone. Never. I don't know why; I just don't. And the idea of calling someone on my cell phone because I'm bored just never occurs to me. It therefore should be no surprise that I don't like telephone ring tones, and I don't enjoy listening to people talking on their phones. I know they enjoy it, and I don't mind that, I just don't particularly want to listen to someone saying "Dude, guess where I'm at! No, man! Guess again! No, dude, not even close!"

I don't like crowd noise at concerts. I'm there to hear the music, not to listen to a bunch of people go WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Honestly, people, just shut up and listen. I like to watch videos of my nephew's doom metal band on YouTube, but they're hard to fully appreciate because there's always some beered-up numbskull in the audience who keeps screaming FUCK YEAH! It isn't the cursing that bothers me; it's the fact that I can't hear the music over his beery screeching. (Closely related to this are the people who want you to listen to some groovy new piece of music they found, but they're so busy talking about the groovy new music you can't actually hear it. Sometimes they have to explain what makes the music so groovy, but more often than not they think it'll put the music in context if they explain in great detail everything they were doing and thinking at the moment they discovered this music - "I first heard this when I was in high school, Ted and Scruffy and I had gone to the Tastee-Freez in Avondale, this was back when going to the Tastee-Freez was what we did, you know, we'd go to Tastee-Freez and talk about girls and stuff, and Ted was wearing this hat... Oh man, I remember that hat! It was like...")

There are people who echo everything I say, and embellish it. I'm in the parking lot at work, walking to my car to get lunch, and the following conversation ensues:

"Where you going?"

"Lunch."

"Lunch. Munchies. Grub. Where you going?"

"McDonalds, probably."

"Micky-Ds, the Golden Arches, Ronald's Place. Whatcha getting?"

"Maybe a Big Mac, I haven't decided."

"A Big Mac. Big Whack. El Mac Grande. Mac-a-rack-a-ding-dong-dang. Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce--"

"Look, I have a half an hour for lunch, so if you want to chat, get in the car and come with me. If not, can we pick this up again later?"

I honestly think that the main reason people make so much useless noise is that introspection makes them uncomfortable.

Lose-Lose

Proponents of unmanned space exploration rejoice! The space shuttle is dead. Well, dying, anyway.

How do we get into these situations? Why do people always insist on turning things like this into zero-sum games, where anything that the manned space exploration part of NASA loses, the unmanned side gains, and vice versa? And we all know what's going to happen anyway - whatever money is saved by shutting down the Shuttle program isn't going to go toward new unmanned space science; it's just going to vanish in the overall Federal budget.

Nobody wins, as far as I can see.

Now the only way to get people into space is the Russian Soyuz. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the Soyuz except that it is too small, can't carry any meaningful cargo, and can only barely reach orbit in the first place (the reason Mir and the ISS have to be re-boosted every so often is because the basic Soyuz-U booster can't reach a higher orbit, so the ISS has to orbit so low it encounters a good deal of atmospheric drag). Ever seen the interior of a Soyuz TMA with the crew aboard? It looks like one of those fraternity row stunts where they try to pack as many people into a phone booth as possible.

Soyuz just doesn't seem like the road to the future. Neither did the Shuttle, to be honest, as its design requirements forced it to be much heavier and less efficient than it should have been (in particular, the abandonment of the "flyback booster" and the high cross-range wing demanded by the single-revolution return to launch site abort requirement). But I always thought the shuttle would just be a sort of stand-in while a more sensible replacement was developed.

But no. Turns out, there is no replacement. The Shuttle is gone, and all that's left is Soyuz. No X-33, no NASP, no Lockheed Starclipper, no Rockwell low-cross-range orbiter, nothing. In a single move, we go right back to the same booster that launched Sputnik. I don't see that as a positive development.

I am occasionally accused of being opposed to unmanned space science, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Unmanned probes often return astounding insight into the nature of things, and often at next to no cost. It is quite impossible to look at the accomplishments of such unmanned probes as COBE, WMAP, Galileo, Voyager 1 and 2, Opportunity, Spirit, Viking, SOHO and others without being forced to say "Yeah, those were excellent investments."

But I also happen to believe that people have business being in space, and I think that the next logical objective should be the establishment of a manned presence on Mars.

So to me, it isn't a question of unmanned space science or manned space science; I think it should be both. Yes, I'm a naive dreamer. But is seems to me that if we as a society can spend billions on hair replacement, billions on erection pills, and billions on breast enhancement, we could also spend billions on manned and unmanned space science.

But honestly, I don't think we give a rat's ass any more. The Far Left is suspicious of space science, because it rejects the notion of science in general. The postmodernist stance seems to be that science is "just another myth" and that "the project of the Enlightenment is dead." (It amuses me that they use the product of that "western scientific myth", namely computers and the Internet, to write and publish their profoundly mistaken bullshit.*) Religious conservatives, on the other hand, are known to argue that anything we need to know is already encoded in scripture and that attempts to learn about ourselves and the universe amount to some kind of strange secular assault on religion. And in between, the majority of Americans seem so absorbed by numbnut celebrities, the wonders of their smart phones, and irrelevancies like "style" and "self-expression" to have any kind of curiosity about the universe around us.**

And meantime, people who should really be allies - the proponents of manned and unmanned space exploration - savage one another to try to get as much of the dwindling pie as they can.

*I recently read a quote from some postmodern scholar that argued that Einstein's famous equivalence, E = MC^2, is "sexed" and "biased" because it accords a special power and significance to the speed of light, thus discriminating against other speeds that are just as useful to us. But what galls me even more than the aggressive stupidity of this allegation is that I can just picture this scholar's acolytes, all shaking their heads and whispering oh, the injustice! That Einstein was SUCH a white male oppressor! Sometimes all I can do is grip my forehead in both hands and sigh.

**Here's a "fun" (read "depressing") statistic. According to CNBC, the "diet industry" amounted to $59.7 billion last year. NASA's budget for 2010 was about $18.7 billion.

Dark Flow??

I do a lot of reading on the subject of cosmology. I find the field fascinating for a variety of reasons, not least because it includes aspects of quantum mechanics, General Relativity, high-energy physics, thermodynamics, astrophysics, and a heap of other stuff. If you read about, say, quantum chromodynamics, all you get is quantum chromodynamics, but if you read about cosmology, you get the whole enchilada.

And it's so weird.

At first we thought that all there was in the universe was matter and radiation. Then it turned out that there wasn't enough matter to explain the behavior of stars in galaxies, so we had to postulate the existence of "dark matter". Nobody knows what dark matter really is, but it seems almost a given that is has to exist, even though we can only guess at most of its properties. Then it turned out that the expansion of the universe was not slowing down, as one would expect, but actually speeding up. So we had to postulate the existence of "dark energy" to explain this accelerating expansion. Thus far nobody has any idea what dark energy really is, and there doesn't even seem to be much agreement on what observations we might make that would give us insight into its nature.

And now we have something new - "dark flow". Analysis of great heaps of data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe suggest that a fairly sizable chunk of the observable universe (the Local Group, the Virgo Supercluster and perhaps even the Great Attractor) all demonstrate a fairly uniform peculiar velocity (the term "peculiar velocity" refers to the velocity being directed in an actual direction with respect to the cosmic microwave background, rather than just being the recessional velocity that the Hubble Constant implies). This peculiar velocity is called "dark flow", maybe just because it sounds creepy.

It seems that us, the Local Group, the Virgo Supercluster and the Great Attractor are all being drawn toward something. But what? Something hugely massive, surely, but as far as we've been able to see, there's nothing out there that fills the bill. One theory is that it's something hugely massive that lies beyond the rim of the visible universe - not because our telescopes aren't good enough to see it, but because light from this sinister thing out there hasn't had time to reach us even though it's been traveling at the speed of light since the beginning of the universe.

I don't know if that's actually the case. Some theorize it's gravitational attraction from a parallel universe, or perhaps from a sub-universe that split off from ours during the period of superluminal inflation, or... But whatever it is, it fascinates me.

Cosmology can be kind of a bummer, because none of the theorized "ends of the universe" are at all appealing. The Big Crunch is bad. The Big Rip is bad. The Big Bounce is bad, but maybe not quite as bad. Universal heat death is just plain depressing. (I can fully understand why physicists like Fred Hoyle might have preferred the Steady State theory, which at least offers an eternal lifetime and doesn't require that the universe be obliterated in one way or another. Though I accept the Big Bang on intellectual grounds, a part of me pines for the comforting eternity of the Steady State model.)

But the presence of this unseen thing out there that causes dark flow might open the door for other outcomes. Maybe we really are headed somewhere special, and maybe the universe isn't just a really big, really long-playing exercise in the conservation of energy. Or maybe I just find ideas like the Big Rip or the Big Crunch spiritually unrewarding and hope for some other outcome because I find futility depressing.

Erroneous Celebration

I was watching a football game for a while earlier. I was actually working outside, but the tractor had developed a malfunction and I decided that it was more important to me that I eat something than fix it.

But anyway, I was watching the football game mostly because out of seventeen thousand channels on satellite TV, it was the least offensive thing. And they were playing, and the officials threw the occasional flag for "excessive celebration". And I think we as reasonable people can all agree that a seven-foot-six 850-pound lineman doing the Funky Chicken really is excessive.

But I notice there's a lot of other celebrating that goes on. Some guy comes off the field, downs a cup of Gatorade, and pumps his fist. "Yeah! I totally owned that beverage! Boo-yah!" Most of the time it seems to me that they're celebrating just doing their job. Excuse me, Mr. Defensive Tackle, but isn't it sort of your job to tackle the running back when he attempts to run up the middle? Why are you celebrating doing something that you're expected to do? Do you need more attention? Do you need a cookie? Other than paying you your generous salary, I'm not sure what more the world owes you for stopping the running back on a third-and-short.

But maybe I have it backwards. Maybe we should all celebrate doing our jobs. Maybe if I write a big chunk of code and it successfully compiles and links, I should jump up, windmill my arms, and shout "Oof! Oof! I pwned that do-while loop, oof, oof, who let the dogs out, oof oof. Oh yeah, look at that loop counter increment; I am THE MAN, I took that loop counter downtown and totally made it look like an unsigned short integer!"

Or maybe I just think "Well, that's pretty much what I get paid to do, and besides my ego is pretty secure and I don't require sustained pumping-up."

I finally had to admit to myself that I don't like watching basketball any more. The endless celebrating, taunting, pumping up, chest-bumping, huffing, puffing, and wall-to-wall tattoos finally got to me. I like playing basketball, and I like basketball the game, but I don't care for the NBA's apparent idolization of thuggery and nastiness (and I don't like how the only play they run any more is "clear out for the superstar"). And football isn't all that far behind. The only thing going in its favor is the fact that they wear more clothes and their tattoos aren't as visible.

And with that said, permit me to spin wildly in my chair and shout "Oh YEAH, I totally made this post my bitch! Boo-yah!"