Final eval...

For the third and final eval

close out

so this is the "close out" of my blog. I would like to thank my followers for reading this and I am just letting you all know that this is the ending to this blog. Many of you know I started this blog for a class I took on communicating science and now that the semester is ending I will not be continuing to post. This has been a fun topic for me and I hope that yall got something out of it as well. Once again thanks for following and commenting  so that I had feedback on my posts etc...

Decomp.

I say an interesting show the other day that i enjoy called unsolved mysteries. One of the listed offenses was a murderer who had killed his family. the interesting thing was how he was caught. they called in a man by the name of  Dr. William Bass who runs the body farm at the university of Tennessee. He is considered to be the for most expert on the decomp of human bodies. His name has been refereed to in such shows as CSI. Anyway the prosecution brought him in and he predicted that the bodies were deceased for one month but was startled that there was not a specific remain of the flies that begin to hatch from maggots. He stuck to his guns and funny enough, when the defense brought in there pictures to counter his expert testimony, they had several pictures that the prosecution nor Dr. Bass had access to. Long story short, they had the evidence that proved Dr. Bass correct. This is a good case of what documenting studies in science can do. Dr. Bass went in open minded made a conclusion based on his 20+ years of research, that his predictions were proven based off of the good science he had and continues to set forth. Dr. Bass stated that going in without knowing potential times or dates etc... is how he does these studies, he simply looks at what is present based on his research, and then draws a conclusion merely based on what he sees vs. the research. A good aspiration for future scientists and engineers.

aliens

So i came across an interesting point in an article that relates to my blog about how in many movies the "alien" life forms are all human looking in design. I starting thinking about movies that have many aliens in it and for the most part it is true. Many movies show an alternate life form that has several or most human characteristics. Now I know its Hollywood but with all the crazy movie themes and the plots etc you would think that Hollywood would not show these "advanced" life forms as being very human. For the other life forms to exhibit many of the things we do, there planets atmosphere etc.. would have to be almost identical to ours and we all know that the other planets that surround us have very different atmospheres etc... I guess to me it is absurd to think that these so called advanced races would appear to be just like us and know English and all  the rest.

The Book

So this is titled the book because we have read the book dont be such a scientist in class. In chapter 3, there is a comment made that when star wars came out it was a good movie etc... Now I have done posts on star wars and many of you know I agree with the statement. The reading goes on to say that it was criticized for having simple science errors that take a little away from it, specifically that in one scene han solo refers to time in a measurement of a parsec. A parsec is a unit of distance used in astronomy and is equal to 3.26 light years. If you dont know what a light year is it is also equal to 31 trillion kilometers. the book goes on to say that it is little things like this that take away from the movie. I agree but also feel that the movie explored areas that were not very understood or were in early phases when it came out. So I still recommend the movie even with the small errors.

How clean

So I have seen this commercial several times and feel that it is time to question the selling motive. Lysol has a new soap dispenser out that automatically dispenses soap when a hand is placed close to it. Very cool technology wise. This device implores several things such as motion sensor electronics and dispensing motor etc... While very cool, the ad states that you will never have to touch a germy soap dispenser again which is possible I guess. The fact is though atleast to me, is that the point of soap and washing of the hands is to kill the germs and in my mind if you touch a germy soap dispenser to get soap and then wash your hands, you kill the germs anyway so I guess I dont really see the point. I realize this is a commercial and the goal is to sell a product but I feel as though people understand that using soap kills germs, thats why we wash our hands.

How far

So it has come to my attention through someone else that in battlestar glactica, they refer to distances in space by microns. Not so bad except as all of you know space is huge. A micron also known as a micro meter is very finite in its size. A micron is a meter times ten to the negative 6. in comparison, wikipedia has supplied me with some things measured in microns

To help compare different orders of magnitude this page lists some items with lengths between 10⁻⁶ and 10⁻⁵ m (between 1 and 10 micrometres, or µm).

Distances shorter than 1 µm

• ~0.7–300 µm — Wavelength of infrared radiation
• 1 µm — the side of square of area 10⁻¹² m²
• 1 µm — edge of cube of volume 1 fL
• 1–10 µm — diameter of typical bacterium
• 1.55 µm — wavelength of light used in optical fibre
• 3–4 µm — size of a typical yeast cell
• 3–5 µm — size of a human spermatozoon's head (radius by length)^{[citation needed]}
• 6 µm — anthrax spore
• 6–8 µm — diameter of a human red blood cell
• 7 µm — diameter of the nucleus of typical eukaryotic cell
• 3–8 µm — width of strand of spider web silk^[1]
• 8 µm — width of a chloroplast
• 9 µm — thickness of the tape in a 120-minute compact cassette.
• about 10 µm — size of a fog, mist or cloud water droplet

also the size of a human hair is 

The diameter of human hair varies from 17 to 180 µm (0.00067 to 0.0071 in)

So you see that to use a micron in space as it was in battlesatr glactica, is just not very feasible. 

Snakes

Last week I was watching a movie with some friends called snakes on a plane. In my opinion not such a great movie but kinda funny. The premise is that a high powered criminal has put exotic snakes on a place, laced flowers with pheromones (snake stank) to excite the snakes and make them aggressive. So for any that don't know, pheromones make animals aggressive because it it what is release when a female is in heat causing the male to seek it out for mating purposes. In this response things like snakes become aggressive as well. Now the premise behind this is that the snakes get out and go all over the plane and bit most of the people etc.. Stuff you all can figure out for a movie. The problem comes in on several levels. First of many is the snakes they choose. They are almost all exotic snakes which is fine however snakes hibernate when temperatures get cold or relatively cold because they are cold blooded. Exotic snakes especially. The belly of a plane while pressurized remains cold at elevations of 30,000 ft which would cause the snakes to bed down. Next the speed at which some move. There is a scene where an  anaconda is moving through the plane and falls due to weight, the passengers throw a dog to keep it away all sounds plausible but the speed at which it moves is way to fast, anacondas move slow due tot he weight association and after attacking the dog and eating it, it still attacks a man and eats him very fast. This si another problem because anacondas eat slow due to swallowing the prey whole it takes several hours, sometimes even days depending on size. The last thing i want to bring up is the landing. Upon landing, the FBI has employed the help of an expert in snakes and there anti venoms. This is fine except they manage within a short time to identify and acquire all the anti venom needed to treat the survivors on the plane. They do this by finding the guy who put the order together and taking his anti venom. The problem is the quantity. In the movie they mention that for most snakes the U.S. does not even carry the anti venom and to think that one guy has stored enough to treat all the potential victims that may have been bitten is just absurd.

There are several more things that I will leave up to you to find and inquire about but these should get yall started.

Explosions or something like it.

Another thing that is in many movies and is wrong but enjoyable to watch is explosions in space. Many of us know that this is false but we still constantly see it in many movies. In my senior design class my group and I have worked on a project that deals with explosions. Explosions are different than deflagration and different than combustion. the main difference is the rate in which they occur, meaning the time and speed at which they occur.
An explosion is a rapid increase in volume and a release of energy in an extreme manner
Deflagration is a combustion at a subsonic level meaning slower than the speed of sound
Combustion is slower than both and deals with burning in general
technically, deflagration and combustion are in the same category and deflagration is faster or (high/ fast combustion) but there is a difference.

With that said, all these have a key similarity which is they need fuel. In space the presence of oxygen as fuel is non existent meaning when the ship or whatever blows up, you wouldnt see the grand "light show" that we call and explosion occur. Now I understand that there could be oxygen or fuel present by the bomb or on the ship etc.. however it would not in most cases be enough to trigger the huge flames and what not that is seen in the movies, that part of the explosion requires much more fuel to continue a burn and in space it is just not very realistic.

Lasers

Staying on the topic of of Sci Fi movis, there is another topic that is funny. Slow moving Lasers. Now I am no laser expert but that fact they they are slow moving is the fallacy here. Lasers move at the speed of light and in many movies, (star wars, independence day etc) they show the laser moving slow moving and visible. Now in some cases they could be visible I suppose (once again not an expert) but in space where there is no air particles for the laser to reflect off of, you wouldn't see the light show that you do in the movies. Now I will be the first to admit that it made the movie much more enjoyable to watch with the lasers being shown however the science behind it is not sound and just wouldn't make sense.

A little background, lasers are devices that emit light through optical amplification.
wikipedia has what seems like a good article discussing the science of lasers with some background that can be found at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasers

Planets....

I came across an interesting article this week that explores my topic well and there is a post that I really enjoyed.
It deals with star wars which as yall know is a favorite of mine. It talks about how all the planets in the movie are not only "simple" by nature but they all have different weather climates. For instance there is a Forrest planet, an ice planet, a desert planet etc... Also the simple comes in for all the planets supporting all different life forms because apparently they all breath oxygen. The fact is that unless they were all like earth with the atmospheric structure etc it would not support all life without compensation for breathing. Another is the climate it is pretty weird that each planet is different in climate. It the previous is true that the atmosphere is similar to earths, we all know that different climate regions occur so it is hard to make the leap that each planet (or moon) would be only one climate as far as forrest or ice or desert. Just some thoughts on an interesting post I read.

Video Post

Video Post - This is a video post explaining one of the posts from my blog along with watching a short clip of the movie clip that was chosen.

Choosing the right car

So again with the gold but in reality a lot of films use gold because of its worth. In the movie the italian job, they again are stealing gold. to transport the gold, they outfit mini coopers by using weights to simulate the weight of the gold and then make the modifications to the suspension, chasis etc.. to be able to handle and manuver while still keeping good horsepower. This ll is plausable from a standpoint of being able to make the necessary modifications to the select components. The problem in this example is that the weight either the gold or the steel plates would not be supported by the frame. Many cars today are made with a unibody design. this design is widely used but is much weaker in design than a straight frame which today is used primarily in industrial equipment or in some trucks. the flaw in the unibody design is that under those weight conditions, the unibody design would crimp and fracture due to design.

The unibody design is can be best described by the carfax site. The link is http://www.carfax.com/car_buying/car_frames.cfx.

Basiclly the detailed information is in the link but for an overall assesment, The unibody design is a cast uniform frame that is a mold. This creates weak spots in the design when loading because you take away the potentially stress releasing sites that comes from assembling the body in several pieces.

How much do you think you have??

I was watching an old movie the other day that many of yall know, Die Hard with a Vengence. The premise of this movie if you havent seen it is terrorists come and rob the federal reserve in New York by a series of games with the police. Good movie with some science flaws. The one I am going to address in this post deals with gold. They steal roughly 140 billion dollars of gold from the federal reserve by loading it into dump trucks and simply driving it out if the city to be loaded on a boat and home free, sounds plausable. There is one scence where they say that in each dump truck there is 13 billion dollars of gold per dump truck. Now we all know that dump trucks are made to haul large loads. the average city dump truck you see on a day to day basis will haul somewhere in the neighborhood of 26 metric tons. As many of my posts before have shown, gold weights much more than most people think. So here i am gong to lay out some basics and show the calculations so that anyone can follow and so we are all on the same page.

• Metric ton = 2,204.6 Lbs (Standard Ton = 2,000 Lbs.)
• Standard Dump Truck = 57,319.6 Lbs, 26 tons ( Standard = 52,000 Lbs, 26 tons)
• Troy Ounce of Gold = 31.1035 grams
• Troy Lb of Gold = 373.26 grams/Lb
• Todays current gold rate is about $1400 dollars per troy ounce of gold

Using these calculations above, we can calculate that the weight per each dump truck is about equal to:

• $1,400/31.1035 = 45.01 $/g
• In this case they said they had 13 billion per truck to equal 13,000,000,000/45.01 = 2.8E8 grams
• 2.8E8/1E6 = 288

This number means that each truck would be hauling 288 metric tons ( 634,924.8 Lbs) which by previous statement of standard dump truck is way too high. To put it in perspective, a mine hauler (industiral mine dump truck) hauls in the ballpark of these loads.

To conclude, it just is not possible for a standard dump truck to haul 13 billion dollars worht of gold in one load by todays gold prices, the movie was made in 1995 when the price of gold was roughly $385 which means this number would be even larger and even more outside the realm of possible.

Weight...What????

So many of us have heard the old joke what weights more a pound of feathers or a pound of something??? Now there are commercials that are addvertizing things like whats heavier, a lb of gold or a lb of feathers?. Most people right off the bat answer this thinking a pound s a pound, which seems like a very plausable answer I mean 1 pound should be equal to 1 pound makes sense. In reality for most things this is a correct statement, but in the case of precious metals, this is in fact a false statement. When talking about precious metals, a different weighing scale is used. The standard Avoirdupois scale is used when weighing standard things like feathers, tables, chairs etc.... This is a system based off 16 oz. or 454.6 grams. When dealing with precious metals the Troy scale is used which is based off of 12 oz. or 373.24 grams. This is a common misnomer when dealing with weght. In this context 1 Avoirdupois pound is equal to 1.21 Troy pounds. Moral of the story I guess is the next time someone asks a what weights more question try not to be to hasty to answer because the 1 pound equals 1 pound answer may just be wrong (even though its on T.V.)

Grading Evaluation #2

For this second grading evaluation

2012..The End...???

A movie that came out in 2009 called 2012 portrays the end of the world in a series of cataclysmic events that spawn from many factors. How "real" is this.... well, on another show called "Conspiracy Theory" also profiled the 2012 disaster. This all stems from the Mayan calender, Nostradamus, and some other predictions that people are taking as certain ending of days. If you ask me this is nothing more than another Y2K being blown way out of proportion. Below are 2 clips, one is the 2012 movie and the other is the conspiracy theory show.

The conspiracy theory show is part 1 of 6 on youtube so if you want to see the entire thing just search for it. In the show, they show contractors that are selling "condos" built in old missile silos that will supposedly house the occupants from a numerous amounts of dangers for an extended time. Scientifically this is somewhat possible to design but is in the hypothetical realm as far as we have never tried many of the methods they discuss. the other thing is that each condo is selling for a cool 50 million a piece which excludes many in the world. This is one reason it is on a conspiracy show, the fact that they are catering to the rich and famous and not humanity is a certain question that no one is willing to answer. Personally this is yet another reason to me that this is another Y2K and a quick way for many to get rich. Hollywood in this case personifies the scare tactic that many take as science and is just crap overall.

Robots Are Here

So many people have seen the movie I Robot that came out in 2004. It is based on the thought that A.I. has become a thing that humans utilize as commonly as cell phones. Pretty far off right.?? Maybe not. Recently, IBM released what they call Watson. Watson was released this year to compete on jeopardy. Watson, while being a computer performed almost without flaw when compared to tries of the past. The last "super computer" to do something like this to my knowledge is the computer that defeated the chess champion of the world which at the time was impressive however can not compare to Watson. recently,  Nova profiled the Watson story:

In this story they show how the concept at first was over looked and the challenge was accepted by IBM engineers. Watson competed on jeopardy and won against the two most successful people ever to be on the show. Not just did Watson win, he landslid-ed them. The most impressive part to me about this is that Watson was not connected to the internet like many suspect, he was solely contained.

Are we at the point of the I Robot movie, not quit but Watson is one step closer and has now revolutionized the thought and process of how to pursue A.I. and where the bar can now be reset.

How fast is fast

On the same show that Stan Lee does on super humans, there is yet another episode that catches the eyes of many. One of Stan Lee's characters, Bullseye is is able to use almost any object as a lethal projectile, be it weapons like shuriken and sai or seemingly harmless objects like playing cards and pencils. He is one of Daredevil's chief foes and serves as an antithesis to the hero by showing what one might become when blessed with keener abilities than most. His aim is uncanny, at a nearly preternatural level. This is yet again an example of something most people say this can't or doesn't happen.

When you think about what it takes to pull a weapon, aim using your eyes, hands and mind, pull the trigger and put the gun back. Scientifically, the video mentions that Bob Munden (fastest gun in the world) can pull, draw, and fire than a human can blink which is 3/10th of a second to blink. Pretty fast! Also in the video Bob Munden does two shots in a split second giving it the sound of one shot. Another fascinating part of this is how he aims. This in my mind can be equated to that of a computer. Bob's eyes and hands some how work together like a targeting system programmed with electronics. The helmet systems in helicopters and other equipment have a site that is controlled with the eye and then aims the gun on the piece of equipment. Bob's brain and hands work together to accomplish this making him literally the fastest gun in the world. For a good laugh, watch the video and see Bob get measured with an accelerometer. they have to use an accelerometer because the human eye cannot see this occur. This also makes Bob "super human" with the speeds he hits and with the accuracy. A "Modern Bullseye" if you will

More to come.....

Echo Location?

On a show I have been watching recently by Stan Lee who is famous for comics such as X-Men, Daredevil, and much more has a show called Stan Lee's Super Humans. This show is about real people who posses "super" human abilities. This is one I found particularly interesting on echo location. Echo Location is the ability animals such as bats and dolphins use to see and communicate. Stan Lee has set out on this quest to find people with abilities that are considered super human and relate to his comic characters. For those who don't know, Stan Lee's character Daredevil is a man who is blind but uses sensor sight or echo location to see his surroundings. Many say that this is not possible, or it is fiction and made up and rightfully so when one considers what it takes to see. From his movie many thought this is cool but this is fiction for daredevil and it is just part of his super human ability. Well, there is proof on several shows, Stan Lee's included.

This is a clip from a different show showing how someone is really using echo location. pretty fascinating when you consider that the human eye is made up of three coats, enclosing three transparent structures. The outermost layer is composed of the cornea and sclera. The middle layer consists of the choroid, ciliary body, and iris. The innermost is the retina, which gets its circulation from the vessels of the choroid as well as the retinal vessels, which can be seen in an ophthalmoscope. Within these coats are the aqueous humor, the vitreous body, and the flexible lens. The aqueous humor is a clear fluid that is contained in two areas: the anterior chamber between the cornea and the iris and exposed area of the lens; and the posterior chamber, behind the iris and the rest. The lens is suspended to the ciliary body by the suspensory ligament (Zonule of Zinn), made up of fine transparent fibers. The vitreous body is a clear jelly that is much larger than the aqueous humor, and is bordered by the sclera, zonule, and lens. They are connected via the pupil.^[2] 

 he retina has a static contrast ratio of around 100:1 (about 6½ f-stops). As soon as the eye moves (saccades) it re-adjusts its exposure both chemically and geometrically by adjusting the iris which regulates the size of the pupil. Initial dark adaptation takes place in approximately four seconds of profound, uninterrupted darkness; full adaptation through adjustments in retinal chemistry (the Purkinje effect) are mostly complete in thirty minutes. Hence, a dynamic contrast ratio of about 1,000,000:1 (about 20 f-stops) is possible.^[3] The process is nonlinear and multifaceted, so an interruption by light merely starts the adaptation process over again. Full adaptation is dependent on good blood flow; thus dark adaptation may be hampered by poor circulation, and vasoconstrictors like alcohol or tobacco. The eye includes a lens not dissimilar to lenses found in optical instruments such as cameras and the same principles can be applied. The pupil of the human eye is its aperture; the iris is the diaphragm that serves as the aperture stop. Refraction in the cornea causes the effective aperture (the entrance pupil) to differ slightly from the physical pupil diameter. The entrance pupil is typically about 4 mm in diameter, although it can range from 2 mm (f/8.3) in a brightly lit place to 8 mm (f/2.1) in the dark. The latter value decreases slowly with age, older people's eyes sometimes dilate to not more than 5-6mm. (compliments of wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_eye). So the movies in this case seem unlikely but it is an actual possibility for humans to use echo location.