Pollywogs!

The Aristocrats!

I must have felt it coming…basically, the movie is a straight documentary about a joke, its interesting but unless you are depraved, don’t bother watching. Personally, I thought is was pretty good (see title).

The Mpemba effect
THIS has bugged me for years. I’ve always known it was bullshit, it only works through minutia and details which must specifically occur and which basically take it from interesting to a technicality.

The ‘reason’ my intuition is ‘wrong’:

What’s wrong with this proof is that it implicitly assumes that the water is characterized solely by a single number — the average temperature. But if other factors besides the average temperature are important, then when the initially warmer water has cooled to an average temperature of 30° C, it may look very different than the initially cooler water (at a uniform 30° C) did at the start. Why? Because the water may have changed when it cooled down from a uniform 70° C to an average 30° C. It could have less mass, less dissolved gas, or convection currents producing a non-uniform temperature distribution. Or it could have changed the environment around the container in the refrigerator. All four of these changes are conceivably important, and each will be considered separately below. So the impossibility proof given above doesn’t work. And in fact the Mpemba effect has been observed in a number of controlled experiments

I added the italics and bold. Notice the phrase? Other factors? JESUS FUCKING CHRIST…I have two buckets of water, one is tiny and one is huge. I drop some liquid nitrogen in the small bucket and it froze first. The impossibility proof doesn’t work…give me a break. Of course if you alter the conditions of each volume of water BEYOND the temperature in an extreme enough fashion, it might be able to create specific and controlled conditions where you can utilizes specific processes which might enable the warmer liquid to cool faster than the cool liquid. Lets boil the water, remove the dissolved solids and gasses so that each container has DIFFERENT water in them, fashion a very specific container which maximizes surface area to volume, maximizes convective possibilites and also maximizes evaporation so that the end quantity of water is as small as possible, and then fashion the environmental chamber with conditions which will wick and conduct this extra heat and water vapor away as quickly as possible while constantly introducing new cool and dry air.

Yea, my intuition was waaaay off base…

The full explination, summarized:

If you take warmer water which isn’t the same physically as the cooler water, and put it in a different container in a different environment from the cooler water, under certain specific conditions it might freeze faster.

1) Evaporation: if the hot water evaporates signifigantly more than the cooler water (assuming extremely specific conditions regarding environmental humidity and ambient temperature, surface areas of the water masses, etc), there is less of it and it might freeze faster simply because it has less volume. Very stringent and specific starting conditions?

GIMMICK

2) Dissolved Gasses: if the warmer water has fewer dissolved gasses (due to the fact that various dissolved gasses are liberated on heating and boiling), it might freeze faster due to ‘changes the properties of the water’…but as far as why it might freeze faster, there are only guesses?

Not only a GIMMICK, but a wild guess with no good theory!

3) Convection: water density changes due to temperature, and these different temperature and density portions of a given volume move about (you can watch cold water pour off ice to the bottom of a glass of iced tea which is sorta neat). The ‘hottest’ part of the water would be at the surface, which supposedly would give off the most heat. Further assuming that the surface is the area giving off the most heat, it is possible that the warmer volume will maintain a ‘hot top’ as they call it throughout the cooling process, creating a faster cooling voume of water. Again, you need very specific conditions, specific volumes and container shapes, specific ambients temperatures and humidity creating specific cooling at specific sections of the water…

GIMMICK

4) Surroundings: The warmer water may affect the local conditions of the environment (the example they give is melting frost in the freezer which may increase conduction through the container, which could potentially REALLY increase the cooling to the warmer container).

GIMMICK

Here, all along I thought that this was a scientific experiement with conditions as closely controlled and monitored as possible. Actually, its an experiment where the idea is to create conditions as favorable to the outcome as possible to ‘prove’ that hot water can freeze faster than cold water. Can. Under extremely specific conditions for reasons STILL not fully understood to ‘actual’ scientists who have examined this phenomenom (I’m not terribly excited by the research done to date).

Terribly, terribly misrepresented. Its not counter-intuitive that, when you load the dice, they fall the way you want them to…

I’d want to take cold water, hot water, and do it for myself before I’d sign off completely on it, but under most real world (outside of a kitchen or a lab) conditions I’d say this would NOT happen. That said, I think that ice cube trays and frost free freezers would be an ideal replication of the conditions you’d need to re-create this. Extremely cold and dry, with good air movement to constantly remove the warm water vapor and evaporate the remaining liquid away, with small volumes of water relative to their surface area, typically rounded bottoms and smooth edges for good convective flow, and potentially a little bit of frost on the bottom for the warmer fluid to melt, increasing conductive heat flow while the cooler tray remains insulated by a layer of ice crystals.

Finally, do you need some new wallpaper? One or two of these might make a nice desktop, most are too small tho…
http://visi.com/~reuteler/leonardo.html

I wonder if its thick and juicy?

I wonder if it also contains a copy of the rant I emailed to the White House in the spring of 2001 about the follies of maintaining an army geared towards fighting a third world war against the USSR when the true dangers of the future were terrorists and rogue nations. I want a copy of it…I sent it about 2AM, I was pretty much foaming at the mouth by the time I was done. I’m sure writing hostile letters to the president gets you flagged.

What am I talking about? Oh, the usual…’King George’ breaking the law, violating (no, not violating, raping and shitting in the mouth of) the constitution.

(thanks go to thedailykos.com for the heads up)

This administration’s disdain for the Constitution really knows no bounds.

A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens.

The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.

Isn’t it handy when all these things fall into place? Congress discontinues the program, but its activities can easily be carried on under the cover of classification at the NSA. And even more conveniently, this program just happens to have components that could aid in the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.

Tom Armour, the Genoa II program manager, declined to comment for this story. But in a previous interview, he said that ARDA — which absorbed the TIA programs — has pursued technologies that would be useful for analyzing large amounts of phone and e-mail traffic. “That’s, in fact, what the interest is,” Armour said.

How much longer is this Congress going to stand by to see its will subverted, its power eroded? How many more times can this administration thumb its nose at Congress before our legislators wake up to the fact that they are becoming increasingly irrelevant? With BushCo sycophants Frist and DeLay in charge (and make no mistake, DeLay is still in charge, even if just behind the scenes), it’s not going to happen any time soon.

So thats how it is…and now I hear that the government is going back through the National Archives and ‘reclassifying’ information as they see fit without telling anyone what or why. Ahh, yes, the sweet sound of history being re-written and covered up, so todays ‘facts’ turn out to have been true all along. Twenty-five years from now, we’ll all remember the Bad Old Days before Father Bush took the nation under his wing and Protected Us from ourselves and the Bad People in the world who were out to Harm Us, and the Glorious Rebirth of our nation in the years that followed into the new Kingdom of Christ and Cheney, where everyone loves Father Bush and sleeps safe as long as their smile is 100% honest…

On a lighter note, would you like to witness (after the fact) the evolution of a song? First, a brand new Pearl Jam song, they have a new album coming up soon (I’ve got NPJAA for sure), this is a little taste I guess :

http://www.musiccherry.com/archives/2006/01/gone_a_new_pear.htm

This was a day or two before the concert we went to, apparently Ed had written it in the hotel a day or two prior. Apparently Ed didn’t think it would make the album. I did get the original demo copy (from the hotel room) as this years Christmas single, but I haven’t dusted off the record player to listen to it yet. The other side of the single was ‘Little Sister’ with Robert Plant recorded late last year at a Katrina benifit. Coming full circle (as full as my circles go), you might remember that I saw the hillbilly in the redneck bar play ‘Last Kiss’ and ‘Little Sister’ back to back a couple days after the concert (probably better than PJ, tho maybe it was the alcohol…) if you read that paticular blog entry. BTW, did you hear the guy holler ‘You’re gonna die’ at Eddie at the end of the song? What a jerkoff…

http://www.musiccherry.com/archives/2005/11/pearl_jam_light.htm

This link has two copies of ‘Light Years’. A demo and the studio version. I don’t really care for the studio version…but I fucking adore the demo. Strange how amazingly far the song traveled from where it started to where it ended. I wonder what they said in their heads during the process where the answer they came up with was ‘lets scrap this and do it completley differently’.

http://www.familywatchdog.us/search.asp

Unforntunately it doesn’t work in Pennsylvania. I stuck in the only address I knew out of state, 90210 : 9641 Sunset Blvd, Beverly Hills, CA 90210

You click on one of the dots, it gives you their full address, crime, photo, etc etc.

This is a very good idea. The website suggests you write to your representatives if you live in a state which doesn’t provide the data for use in this database.

This map makes me wonder what a map of the US would look like if you had all of the various released criminals plotted. Sorta like one of those ‘maps from space at night’ but awash in a multitude of colors?

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond

…huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton…British financiers…quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value…feared that…diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.

7 pages long, thats my kind of article…my own opinion is to imbue something understated and personal with signifigance, and imbue a rock which symbolizes ‘pulling the wool over’ (whether we’re talking about denying Africian nations the wealth of their own natural resources, the virtual slavery under which the rocks are harvested, or the century long marketing campaign that has brainwashed the masses) with the correct perspective.