User:Greg L
I’m working on an expanded exposition on fuzzballs here at Exposition: Fuzzballs (string theory)
This exposition is a work in progress. Please don’t let the fact that it resides in a sandbox in user-space deter you from contributing. If you have good reason to believe you are an SME on an aspect of fuzzball theory and desire to improve this exposition meaningfully, you are more than welcome to make edits to it. If you are anticipating a substantial change, please discuss it first on its talk page, which I have set to automatically watch and alert me if you post there.
Below are a few of the images and animations I made for the exposition. I also devoted a significant amount of time over the years to email exchanges with Ph. D.s who wrote some of the original scientific papers to help me translate arcane scientific works into an encyclopedic treatment directed to a general-interest readership (albeit an advanced readership that takes a keen interest in the subject matter).
Rather than link to poorly written articles—say, to a tangential topic on Einstein’s theories—I covered important tangential topics in the exposition. The result is a book-like treatise on the broad subject to ensure readers benefit from proper and accurate facts with far far fewer errors, fewer omissions, and without over-reliance on Wikipedia’s signature (and overused) Click to Learn & Return©™® where even simple one-word terms, like obscure specialty lingo with a high likelihood of being unfamiliar to the target readership, is mentioned with a link that users must click and spend time reading a whole new article in lieu of a pithy and imminently helpful parenthetical explaining what the specialty term means.
This expanded exposition is predicated on Wikipedia: Ignore all rules, which is official Wikipedia policy, and states:
“ | If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it. | ” |
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/50/Neutron_star_collapse_animation.gif/350px-Neutron_star_collapse_animation.gif)
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/6.8-solar_mass_black_hole_over_Oahu.jpg/350px-6.8-solar_mass_black_hole_over_Oahu.jpg)
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/Drop_of_fuzzball_as_a_granite_ball_over_Manhattan.jpg/350px-Drop_of_fuzzball_as_a_granite_ball_over_Manhattan.jpg)
Most any long-term wikipedian knows that Wikipedia’s science-related articles are generally an abysmal mess across the entire project. The root cause of this is Wikipedia’s “anyone may edit”-manner of participation combined with the fact that the general public poorly understands science. Consequently, many who are contributing here are writing sheer nonsense. Clearly, a collaborative writing venue where a 7th-grader can contribute without so much as creating an account is just asking for trouble. Nowhere but on Wikipedia would such an arrangement be considered sensible. I’ve long contacted the original Ph. D.s who wrote the original scientific articles on which various articles were based. When I told them I was a wikipedian and what I was doing, one of them wrote back, “You’re doing what?!? Why would you author on a venue where some kid could undo everything??” I recall that he didn’t mince words and rhetorically questioned my cognition with the “R-word.”
It is generally far too easy on Wikipedia for those at the “Peak of Mt. Stupid” in the Dunning–Kruger graph to wade into a Wikipedia article, get over their heads, and muck things up. The result is often unnecessary wikidrama where an experienced and wise wikipedian will just *sigh*, disengage, and perhaps play some soothing music like ‘Artic Water’. The nucleus of the effect holds as follows:
“ | The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. | ” |
The Dunning–Kruger effect is ubiquitous worldwide because it is an innate aspect of natural human behavior that affects everyone at all stages of life, up to engineers and scientists nearing retirement. There’s even a version of the Dunning-Kruger graph for engineering projects showing how whole groups of engineers can get over their heads, fail to deliver, and their project gets canceled.
The confluence of these shortcomings in the basic wikipedian system resulted in a loss of confidence by the general public insofar as the usefulness of Wikipedia, which no doubt underlies the inexorable decline in visitors over the years, as evidenced by this Pageview Analysis. I anticipate that powerful artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT will contribute to further declines in Wikipedia’s visitation rates because of AI’s ability to provide focused, pointed, and concise answers that are typically superior to Wikipedia’s lead sections. Many of Wikipedia’s leads have become grossly bloated due to years of drive-by-shootings by random contributors willing to devote at most only five minutes to the project and don’t have a basic grasp of proper grammar (not that I’m the best grammarian in the world).
Wikipedians must improve articles’ leads so they provide quick and informative TL;DRs that don’t require users to engage in Click-to-Learn & Return to understand basics, such as an obscure unit symbol like “kBq” without so much as the courtesy of introducing the unit of measure using plain-speak (the becquerel, or kilobecquerel in this case). Wikipedia is currently flooded with contributors who, flushed with an epiphany over the power of unit symbols, believe they somehow make our articles extra-sciencey by writing in the lead of an article—without introductory explanation,
“ | The radioactivity in a typical home smoke detector is approximately 37 kBq. | ” |
Prose that doesn’t clearly, efficiently, and quickly communicate to the target readership or that calls attention to itself for any reason is poor prose for an encyclopedia directed to a general-interest readership. Another example of poor prose is as follows:
“ | Suppose you are an on-call emergency room doctor. The secretary for the head of neurosurgery calls you at 2:00 in the morning. There’s been a traffic accident and she wants you come in immediately, he says. | ” |
Marilyn vos Savant (228 I.Q.) used that trick—I vaguely recall it was in a Sunday Parade magazine insert in the newspaper in the ’90s—while making an entirely different point; she sailed right on past the sanctimony of the tactic. It doesn’t take the I.Q. of Marilyn vos Savant to conjure sentences that induce (*!*) neuron interrupts and force readers to double back and re-read the sentence to ensure they correctly parsed it. Such practices amount to a combination of,
- Virtue signaling (the expression of a conspicuous, self-righteous moral viewpoint with the intent of communicating good character), and,
- Pretending they are helping society evolve in a way the author desires by tacitly using prose in an “Oh… didn’t-cha know??” fashion because the author correctly anticipated most readers would form a mental picture that the head of neurosurgery would be male and the secretary female. You know: “Shame! BAD reader! Learn to form no expectations based upon life experiences and instead be superior, good, and smart-smart, just like me!”
Both #1 and #2, above, are poor motivations and unnecessarily call attention to the prose, unnecessarily call attention to the author, and distract from the mission, which is to communicate and teach on the subject at hand. No part of the purpose of any encyclopedia entails giving glancing lectures to readers about how they have neanderthal-like morals and must evolve. Volunteer contributors to Wikipedia must eschew the sanctimonious pipe dream that engaging in the tacit promotion of social fads through the use of distracting prose like the above example somehow improves the human condition and makes Earth a better place to inhabit.
A final note: Aggravating the above mess, particularly on science-related articles, is Wikipedia’s policies place a premium on citing secondary RSs. That often ends up being free-to-read science-related websites. One problem when citing reliable secondary sources after an error has existed on Wikipedia for a while is the purportedly “reliable” secondary source might actually have acquired its information from Wikipedia and is just parroting what we have here! I’ve seen this occur many times over the years. Such situations create a self-perpetuating vicious circle of misinformation that can only be broken by tracking down the original scientific papers and citing the papers in a way that points wikipedians to the relevant page in the paper and quotes the salient passage; we have to make it easy for other wikipedians. Of course, wading through and parsing scientific papers is not for the faint of heart and generally requires at least an advanced amateur who understands the subject matter rather well to determine the true facts. Wisely, Wikipedia’s WP:SCHOLARSHIP advises, “When relying on primary sources, extreme caution is advised.”
Enjoy! –Greg
Five Great Minds:
A great inventor, a great observer, a great thinker, a great engineer, and a great experimentalist.
Around the time of the French Revolution, scientists such as Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, were referred to as “naturalists.” Why? Because they endeavored to understand and explain the workings of the natural world without invoking supernatural phenomena.
Ideas like how infectious diseases are spread by microscopic pathogens, not evil spirits, seem common sense today but were considered heretical at one time. So too the notion that the Earth is a planet that orbits the Sun and the Sun is just another star; for espousing such a view, Giordano Bruno was burned alive at the stake—with his tongue tied so he couldn’t address the crowd.
Instead of labels such as “agnostic” or “atheist,” I am—at my core—a naturalist. ‑Greg
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” ‑Carl Sagan
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/32/Hasegawa_Tohaku_-_Pine_Trees_%28Sh%C5%8Drin-zu_by%C5%8Dbu%29_-_left_hand_screen.jpg/768px-Hasegawa_Tohaku_-_Pine_Trees_%28Sh%C5%8Drin-zu_by%C5%8Dbu%29_-_left_hand_screen.jpg)
Left Screen of the two-screen painting, Pine Trees (Shōrin-zu byōbu) by Hasegawa Tōhaku
In the Japanese language, the word 間 (“ma”), for which there is no single-word English translation, refers to the interval between substance. To understand ma is to understand how void shapes form; how emptiness influences substance. The best industrial design, technical writing, and page layout embodies ma, for it is just as important as substance.
Hi
• This user believes fuzzballs likely exist. (Infinite curvature sucks.)
|
If you’ve arrived here in search of information on U.S. Navy SEALs, click here to automatically scroll down to the relevant section of this page.
If you’ve come here looking for my essay about not overlinking articles or linking to dates, here’s the link: Sewer cover in front of Greg L’s house
This is a “user page” for Wikipedia authors. Wikipedia is the premier, Web-based, free encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to. User pages are where authors often maintain a “sandbox”: a place to store the digital bricks & mortar that comprise Wikipedia articles. The animation at right is one of those “bricks,” which serves as a technical note to myself detailing some of the intricacies when creating certain kinds of animations.
I worked for seven years as a fuel cell engineer and am now working on medical equipment. Three of my fifteen patents pertained to entirely new ways to calculate the properties of gases. One involved a new way to back-calculate the equation-of-state of sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) to—in effect—find the terms of its quadratic equation when given only the pressure and temperature. This was not an easy task because SF6 has a very high molecular weight and is far from an “ideal” gas. The other two gas-related patents were a method for calculating the dewpoint of air using an analog circuit when given the relative humidity and temperature. Before this invention, the only known way to calculate dewpoint was to use a microprocessor. Interestingly, there were geometric solutions to both these problems (separated by many years). The SF6 problem was a relatively straightforward 2D solution. The dewpoint problem, though also a geometric solution, required complex 3D geometry (and logarithmic “math” in the analog circuitry). The reason for the dew point development is certain types of hydrogen sensors (MOS) are influenced by dew point. We wanted to null dew point’s effect on the hydrogen sensor and didn’t want a microprocessor running firmware in a safety-critical circuit.
Quotations
It is the tool of bad leaders; its allure, the refuge of weak minds.
Myself Greg L (talk) 20:33, 30 November 2008 (UTC)
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
T. S. Eliot – 1942 *
It teaches not blind obedience to those in authority but to vigorous
debate, and in many respects that’s the secret of its success.”
Carl Sagan
For Tories own no argument but force;
With equal skill to Cambridge books he sent;
For Whigs admit no force but argument.”
Sir William Browne
- “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”
- “Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts”
of notebooks today, have high-resolution flat-screen reflexive displays, weigh
less than ten pounds, have ten to twenty times the computing and storage
capacity of an Alto. Let's call them Dynabooks.”
Alan Kay – 1971
the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the
meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that
ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”
Steve Jobs – 2000
America is under attack.”
(picture) at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, as Bush
visits a class of 2nd graders. Within minutes of the second plane hitting the
tower, a Boeing E-4 Advanced Airborne Command Post—a heavily modified
747 from which top military leaders can conduct war if Washington, D.C. were
destroyed in a decapitation strike—took off and orbited the area.
by the ground commander of DEVGRU—the counter-terrorism unit of the U.S.
Navy SEALs—to the operational commander in Afghanistan to signal that the
operation to kill or capture Osama bin Laden had been a success.
The only kind of respect that matters is that earned for who you are.
Myself Greg L (talk) 03:16, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
- “Identity is not inherent. It is shaped by circumstance [...] and resistance to self-pity.”
RELIGION: Answers which may never be questioned.
From a viral e-mail floating about in cyberspace.
words: “It is a law of nature, common to all mankind, which time
shall neither annul nor destroy, that those that have greater
strength and power shall bear rule over those who have less.”
reunion of the 42nd Infantry Division, which was
nicknamed the “Rainbow Division.” MacArthur took a little
license with what Dionysius of Halicarnassus actually stated.
but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
objective truths rather than offended by them.”
“The hard fact is that unless new resources are opened up, energy
derived from fuel will remain our chief reliance. The thermodynamic
process is wasteful and barbarous, especially when burning coal,
the mining of which, despite of modern improvements, still involves
untold hardships and dangers to the unfortunates who are
condemned to toil deep in the bowels of the earth. Oil and natural
gas are immensely superior in this and other respects and their use
is rapidly extending. It is quite evident, though, that this squandering
cannot go on indefinitely, for geological investigations prove our
fuel stores to be limited. So great has been the drain on them of late
years that the specter of exhaustion is looming up threateningly in
the distance, and everywhere the minds of engineers and inventors
are bent upon increasing the efficiency of known methods and
discovering new sources of power.
Nature has provided an abundant supply of energy in various forms
which might be utilized if proper means and ways can be devised.
The sun's rays falling upon the earth's surface represent a quantity of
energy so enormous that but a small part of it could meet all our demands.”
Nikola Tesla – 1931
seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust
In 1980, during Northrop’s development of the B-2 stealth bomber that the company was proposing
as a strategic bomber, they received special permission from the U.S. Air Force to show a model of the
B-2 to a now-wheelchair-bound 84-year-old Jack Northrop, who had long passed on the leadership
of the company he founded. Jack was brought into a classified viewing room to see what his flying wing
had blossomed into. Unable to speak and with tears of joy in his eyes, he penned the above words to the
new generation running the company. Jack passed away on February 18, 1981, only 16 days after his wife.
“Because the papacy often was treated as a political pawn, popes sometimes
found themselves at the mercy of ruthless rulers.
Consider poor John XVI, who thought he was the rightful pope, according
to Roman nobles who pushed him onto the papal throne in 997. Unfortunately,
another politically powerful pope, Gregory V, was alive elsewhere in Europe.
Gregory returned to Rome with an army and wasn't amused at finding a rival.
He ordered John's eyes put out as well as his nose and ears sliced off.
Then, to underline the point, John was excommunicated. Should he wish to object,
his lips, teeth and tongue were removed next. And his mutilated body,
still alive, was shipped to a monastery.”
David Crumm, Knight Ridder Newspapers
“For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from
the wars enjoyed the honor of a Triumph—a tumultuous parade.
In the procession came trumpeters and musicians, and strange
animals from the conquered territories, together with carts
laden with treasure and captured armaments.
The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed
prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes, his
children, robed in white, stood with him in the chariot or
rode the trace horses.
A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and
whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory… is fleeting.”
screenplay for “Patton”. Voice-over at the end of the
movie by George C. Scott as the title character.
this White House. I have been watching this thing a long
time. I have seen people in the White House try to build a
fence around the White House and keep the very people
away from the President that he should see. This is one of
your hazards. The special interests and sycophants will
stand in the rain a week to see you and will treat you like
a king. They’ll come sliding in and tell you you’re the
greatest man alive—but you know and I know you ain’t.”
Representatives, to Harry S. Truman on his first day
in office after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
As accounted by David McCullough in “Truman”.
the consumer experience on the iPhone to make your
network tenable.’ They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re
going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’
and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and
see who wins.’ ”
AT&T executives, who were concerned about the high
network load caused by Apple’s iPhone and wanted Apple to
de-feature the product, as reported by ‘Wired’ magazine in
Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown.
“Steve” referred to Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs.
“The third choice that must not be missed is to cherish your human
connections: your relationships with family and friends. For several years,
you’ve had impressed upon you the importance to your career of dedication
and hard work, and, of course, that's true. But as important as your
obligations as a doctor, lawyer or business leader will be, you are a human
being first and those human connections—with spouses, with children,
with friends—are the most important investments you will ever make.
At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more
test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will
regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend or a parent.”
commencement address at Wellesley College, a women's liberal-arts college.
After hearing who their college had invited to give the commencement address,
the student body publicly announced that they did not welcome Mrs. Bush
because she had gained her notoriety through her husband and not through
her own accomplishments. Mrs. Bush delivered her address anyway.
you are permitted to cast a single glance earthward.
You see a amppost and an old dog lifting his leg against it.
You are so moved that you cannot help sobbing.”
whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive,
we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.”
John le Carré – 1974
Write
down ten `a's,
eight `c's, ten `d's,
fifty-two `e's, thirty-eight `f's,
sixteen `g's, thirty `h's, forty-eight `i's,
six `l's, four `m's, thirty-two `n's, forty-four `o's,
four `p's, four `q's, forty-two `r's, eighty-four `s's,
seventy-six `t's, twenty-eight `u's, four `v's, four `W's,
eighteen `w's, fourteen `x's, thirty-two `y's, four `:'s,
four `*'s, twenty-six `-'s, fifty-eight `,'s,
sixty ``'s and sixty `''s, in a
palindromic sequence
whose second
half runs
thus:
:suht
snur flah
dnoces esohw
ecneuqes cimordnilap
a ni ,s''` ytxis dna s'`` ytxis
,s',` thgie-ytfif ,s'-` xis-ytnewt ,s'*` ruof
,s':` ruof ,s'y` owt-ytriht ,s'x` neetruof ,s'w` neethgie
,s'W` ruof ,s'v` ruof ,s'u` thgie-ytnewt ,s't` xis-ytneves
,s's` ruof-ythgie ,s'r` owt-ytrof ,s'q` ruof ,s'p` ruof
,s'o` ruof-ytrof ,s'n` owt-ytriht ,s'm` ruof ,s'l` xis
,s'i` thgie-ytrof ,s'h` ytriht ,s'g` neetxis
,s'f` thgie-ytriht ,s'e` owt-ytfif
,s'd` net ,s'c` thgie
,s'a` net nwod
etirW
as described by Douglas R. Hofstadter
in the Jan 1982 issue of Scientific American.
looking down on empty streets, all she can see
are the dreams all made solid
are the dreams all made real
all of the buildings, all of the cars
were once just a dream
in somebody’s head
she pictures the broken glass, ’pictures the steam
she pictures a soul
with no leak at the seam
let’s take the boat out
wait until darkness
let’s take the boat out
wait until darkness comes
nowhere in the corridors of pale green and grey
nowhere in the suburbs
in the cold light of day
there in the midst of it so alive and alone
words support like bone
dreaming of mercy street
wear your inside out
dreaming of mercy
in your daddy’s arms again
dreaming of mercy street
’swear they moved that sign
dreaming of mercy
in your daddy’s arms
pulling out the papers from drawers that slide smooth
tugging at the darkness, word upon word
confessing all the secret things in the warm velvet box
to the priest, he’s the doctor
he can handle the shocks
dreaming of the tenderness-the tremble in the hips
of kissing Mary’s lips
dreaming of mercy street
wear your inside out
dreaming of mercy
in your daddy’s arms again
dreaming of mercy street
’swear they moved that sign
looking for mercy
in your daddy’s arms
mercy, mercy, looking for mercy
mercy, mercy, looking for mercy
Anne, with her father is out in the boat
riding the water
riding the waves on the sea
Lyrics by Peter Gabriel in his song “Mercy Steet” from his So album.
(♬♩iTunes link to “Mercy Street” ♬♩)
Intelligent Design. I and many others around the
world are of the strong belief that the universe was
created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He
who created all that we see and all that we feel. We
feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific
evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is
nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.”
“Flying Spaghetti Monster” is a character created as a satirical protest
to a decision by the Board to require the teaching of intelligent design as
an alternative to biological evolution. The proponents of intelligent design
swore under oath in Federal court that the “Intelligent Designer” mentioned
in “Of Pandas and People” had nothing to do with creationism nor God.
However, a researcher, examining draft manuscripts of the book provided
by the publisher found that every instance of “design proponents” had
originally been “creationists”. Further, she found a “transitional fossil” in an
intermediate draft. One instance of “creationists” had been incompletely
converted in a copy/paste error (creationists), producing “cdesign proponentsists”.
Science teaches why we live.
Myself Greg L (talk) 00:26, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
Two babies were born at the same hospital on the same day. They were
placed right next to each other in their bassinets in the hospital nursery.
Neither cried; they just laid there and stared at each other in silence.
Their families came and took them away. They each grew up and
served separately in the war. After the war, they worked hard and
raised families. They each had grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
They each followed remarkably similar, but separate, journeys in life.
By some bizarre coincidence, they both ended up in the very same hospital
and again were put beside each other, this time in a semi-private room.
They just laid on their deathbeds. Neither moaned; they just stared—again—
at each other in silence.
Closely based on a comedy routine by Steven Wright
Lance Cpl. Dawson: Yeah we did. We were supposed to fight for people who couldn't
fight for themselves. We were supposed to fight for Willy.
Aaron Sorkin in his screenplay for A Few Good Men.
- “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
A father bull and his son were strolling along one day.
They eventually came to the edge of a bluff. Below was
meadow in which a hundred cows were peaceably
grazing.
The young son, his tail waving in anticipation, looked
up wide-eyed at his father and said “Say Dad! Let’s
run down there and fuck ourselves a couple of those
cows!”
The father bull stared down at the sight for a moment.
Without breaking his gaze from the spectacle below, he
tilted his head slightly down towards his son and said
“No Son. We’re going to slowly walk down to that
meadow and we’re going to fuck ‘em all.”
A philosophy I hold dearly
- …and on a purely Wikipedia-related note:
doors is their business, but please don't do it in public.”
User:Dweller 13:58, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
Quotations Ideological certitude is one of the great weaknesses of mankind. It is the tool of bad leaders; its allure, the refuge of weak minds. Quotation Ideological certitude is one of the great weaknesses of mankind. It is the tool of bad leaders; its allure, the refuge of weak minds. Quotation Ideological certitude is one of the great weaknesses of mankind. It is the tool of bad leaders; its allure, the refuge of weak minds. Ideological certitude Ideological certitude Ideological certitude
Contributions
So far, I've contributed to the following:
- International Temperature Scale of 1990 (mostly under 67.185.28.163)
- Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water (VSMOW) (mostly under 67.185.28.163 and 67.185.42.231)
- Kelvin
- Kelvin symbol plus K.jpg (graphic)
- Thermodynamic temperature
- Translational motion.gif (animation
)
- Dist-Inverse Speed.png Maxwell distribution graph.jpg (graphic)
- Thermally Agitated Molecule.gif (animation)
- Energy vs. phase changes.jpg (graphic)
- Zero-point energy vs. motion.jpg (graphic)
- 1D normal modes (I compressed an existing 6 MB animation to 4.7% of its original size) (animation)
- Sun at 304 Angstroms.jpg (graphic)
- Close-packed spheres.jpg (graphic)
- Anders Celsius (a Photoshop-cleaned version of a image from elsewhere on the Web) (graphic)
- Carolous Linnaeus (a Photoshop-cleaned version of an image already on Wikipedia Commons) (graphic)
- Translational motion.gif (animation
- Facula (graphic, minor contribution)
- Specific heat capacity
- Kilogram (here is what the article originally looked like)
- CGKilogram.jpg (graphic)
- Image:Prototype mass drifts.jpg (graphic)
- Image:Michelson Interferometer Laser Interference Fringes-Red.jpg (minor color swap to an existing image)
- Image:Meissner effect zoom.jpg (minor cropping and image processing of existing image)
- Image:Watt balance, large view.jpg (solicited image from NIST)
- Mass versus weight
- Wet-bulb temperature
- Atmosphere (unit)
- Silicon burning process
- Celsius
- Gal (unit)
- Cobalt (CAD program)
- TransMagic
- Wikipedia:Why dates should not be linked
- Image:Unicode °C comparison.jpg (graphic)
- Sunspot with Earth Comparison.jpg (graphic)
- Sunspot (minor contribution)
- Close-packed spheres.jpg (graphic)
- Cannonball stack with FCC unit cell.jpg (graphic)
- Hexagonal close-packed unit_cell.jpg (graphic)
- Freedom from Fear (painting)
- Freedom From Fear war poster with Normal Rockwell’s work (I assembled and cleaned up the image)
- Image:Ray-traced steel balls.jpg
- Image:Mandelbrot_color_zoom.gif
- Table of nuclides (combined), my first two-author collaboration (with Quilbert)
- Fuzzball (string theory)
- g-force
- Tokaimura nuclear accident
- Close-packing (modest contribution)
- 3D computer graphics (minor contribution)
- United States Office of War Information (minor contribution)
- Parts-per notation
- Absolute zero (modest contribution)
- SI prefix (modest contribution)
- Meter (modest contribution)
- Triple point (modest contribution)
- Planck temperature (modest contribution)
- Atmospheric pressure (modest contribution)
- Rankine (modest contribution)
- Solar radiation (modest contribution]
- Elastic collision (modest contribution)
- Inelastic collision (modest contribution)
- Sucralose (modest contribution)
- E=mc² (modest contribution)
- Earth's gravity (modest contribution)
- Work (thermodynamics) (minor contribution)
- Power (physics) (minor contribution)
- Standard deviation (minor contribution)
- Wien's displacement law (minor contribution)
- Temperature (minor contribution)
- The various Planck units (minor contributions)
- Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (minor contribution)
- Multiple (mathematics) (minor contribution)
- Hafnium (minor contribution)
- Nuclear isomer (minor contribution)
- Normal mode (minor contribution)
- Phonon (minor contribution)
- Electron (minor contribution)
- Coldest temperature achieved on Earth (minor contribution)
- Fahrenheit (minor contribution)
- Equipartition theorem (minor contribution)
- Body mass index (minor contribution)
- Helium (minor contribution)
- Solder (minor contribution)
- Electrical conduction: Metals section (minor contribution)
- Solid solution (very minor contribution)
- Spacetime (I wrote most of the lede)
- Guide number (I wrote the entire article after throwing everything prior out the window)
Also, my son and I together added a small section on the Navy SEALs regarding the physical standards required to join the SEALs.
Please see the ITS–90 discussion page and the VSMOW discussion page before editing the articles. I don't do "drive-by shootings" on articles just to inflate the number of articles I've contributed to. I take pride in doing that which is hard. And doing well-researched, correct, tight, understandable (for the target audience) technical writing is among the more difficult tasks I ever attempt to tackle. I derive pleasure in making excellent contributions to just a few articles (as opposed to poor contributions to many).
The Last Conversation
On February 9, 2003, I went to a friend’s house and had a Last Conversation with him. His name was Jerral Joseph Smith—we knew him as “JJ.” He was dying of a smoking-related cancer that had spread. After my long visit, as I was heading out the door, I said I hoped he would find peace and tranquility in the journey before him and said goodbye. About a month later, my boss at the fuel cell company I worked for told me JJ had died.
Years ago, at a little-known fuel cell startup, a small group of talented individuals headed by a visionary began work with a couple million dollars of seed money and began research on fuel cells. We started from square one. We researched what we could from the literature and patents, toyed with small prototypes and, when we got puzzling results, some of the baffling points in the existing literature suddenly made sense. Eventually, we went beyond the current literature and could see where others had stumbled as we learned to circumvent the problems.
After not too long, we were preparing for a fuel cell seminar held only every other year. We didn’t want to miss it, for we were way ahead of the competition—even companies with many times more employees and which had been in business for years longer than we had were behind. For years, the fuel cell seminars would host exhibitors on the show floor with their mockups of what they were working on. These competitors promised the moon if one would just give them van-full of money. Our boss was arranging to actually demonstrate a functioning fuel cell—running off of real hydrogen no less. No official from the organizer had heard of such a request. The seminar was to be held in Palm Springs at a hotel convention center and there was simply no way the fire department would allow compressed hydrogen on the convention floor. So he arranged for us to demonstrate our fuel cells running just outside on the sidewalk.
Now we were busy as a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest trying to get a handful of functioning prototypes up and running. We wanted a demo unit, and a backup to the demo unit, and a backup to the backup of the demo unit. As I recall we were aiming for six units, at least three of which would be functional, with the remaining three in various stages of operability (at the very least, able to wink and blink its LEDs and act like it had a brain).
I had designed the opposing, compliant-pressure mechanism for the cartridges that comprised the fuel cell. The opposing, compliant-pressure method liberated us from the need for precisely machined, ultra-flat surfaces that normally squeeze on the MEA—the heart of the fuel cell. The cartridges were coming well enough along but we still had a lot of work to do to make the “subracks” that the cartridges fit into. My job getting to the trade show was to design the heart of the cooling system, the high-power electrical distribution and power outlet, and the hydrogen-supply and “bleed” system of the subrack. I later went on to specialize in hydrogen sensing, which was either expensive and large, or small and prone to fail unsafe. The subrack had a lot of electrical and electronic components in it, and with six subracks to make for the Palm Springs trade show, we had far too much labor to handle ourselves. So our boss hired a handful of technicians from a temp agency. One of those technicians was JJ.
One Friday afternoon, it was clear we were really running behind and were going to lose a critical weekend of experiments and tuning if the technicians couldn’t stay late and finish their work. We asked them all if they could stay late Friday. All but one gave various excuses for why they had to leave promptly at 5:00 PM. But JJ said, “Well, that’s what I’m here for: to help. Of course I’ll stay.” I never heard JJ embellish a story. And you could always count on him; he was exceedingly competent at everything he did. With (a lot) of JJ’s help, we got to the trade show on time. We loaded up a rented van with our equipment at 2:00 in the morning and our boss drove the equipment down to Palm Springs at the last possible moment. The rest of us caught up with him by taking a plane.
To this day, fuel cell industry insiders recall the Palm Springs trade show that was attended by our group, where we operated our fuel cell. The way the trade show worked, you attended seminars all day. Then, at 7:00 PM, the exhibition floor opened up. Since we needed extra time to pull out our fuel cell from storage and set up outside, we got to fetch our equipment just after 6:00. It didn’t take us long to set up. By 6:30, when attendees were bored and anxious for the exhibition floor doors to open, we were outside with a music and light show in the dark. It does no good to just make electricity, you also have to do something interesting with it. So we had made a huge light panel of fluorescent lights. The light panel wasn’t backed with gloss white, it was backed by mirrors; the thing really lit up the parking lot. We also had a boom box making music. With nothing else going on at that moment, we had attendees four layers thick crowding around us. Four layers thick around loud music and bright light. I had engineers from various companies that needed remotely generated electricity (can’t say who) who were begging me for fuel cells to provide power for their particular use. But, though we were ahead of the competition, we were still like the other exhibitors: we had no product ready to go out the door.
After our success at the trade show, my boss drove the van back by himself. He was unloading it into our big main test room over the weekend when he heard a knock at the window. JJ looked a bit like Santa Clause’s wild younger brother. He was tall and lanky, with a mop of salt & pepper hair—more salt than pepper—and a beard to match. There at the window was a backlit form with JJ’s signature hair. He had driven down on his day off and was anxious to hear how things had gone at the trade show. There was no doubt JJ was going to become a permanent member of the team. JJ had in spades, what my boss looked for in his employees: enthusiasm. Even though the crush of getting to the trade show was over, JJ was now our new electronics technician. And even though he continued to work for a while as a temporary employee through a temp agency, he was given the key to the building so he could get into the lab any time he wanted. As soon as he could though, my boss hired JJ directly.
JJ was older than me; a Vietnam vet. He was also a smoker and this made hiring him as an employee problematic. At this time, our fuel cell spin-out was still a wholly owned subsidiary of an electrical utility. They had instituted a new hiring policy where they would no longer hire smokers. Was this discrimination? Oh, yes, they said; but it was legal discrimination. As a utility, they had more generous heath insurance than most workers get in the private sector. The extra burden that smokers presented was costing the utility serious money and they were simply going to hire non-smokers from then on. My boss had clout and they made an exception for JJ. He would be the last smoker the utility ever hired.
I was friends with JJ and many times pushed him hard and gave him pep talks about quitting smoking. But he was really hooked. Roughly five years later, the news came out that JJ had developed squamous cell carcinoma of the esophagus. Apparently, the combination of smoking and drinking alcohol (something JJ also mildly indulged in) is a particularly nasty combination of nasty habits. The carcinogenic tars from the cigarettes not only goes down the trachea, but also gets into the throat before the esophagus and trachea diverge. And some of the tars from the smoke also gets into the esophagus itself. Then you take this wonderful solvent comprising water and ethyl alcohol and you soak carcinogens into delicate mucous membranes in your throat and esophagus while you inhale more of the carcinogens. Nasty. Very nasty.
JJ soon got so weakened from the cancer treatment and needed so much time off for treatment, that they had to let him go. After many months of this, it had become clear that the radiation and chemotherapy hadn’t been successful and that JJ was terminal. I can’t recall exactly how the invitation came up, but one day my boss told me that JJ would appreciate visitors at his house before he died. I “signed up” and found myself at JJ’s house a few days later.
JJ had never married but had a long-time girl friend who was effectively a common-law wife. He lived in a modest home deep in the forest off a dirt road. He invited me into his living room and I sat on the sofa as JJ sat in his easy chair. What does one talk about under such circumstances? It wasn’t awkward for long because JJ seemed to have a need to tell me about his life. I listened, and asked questions when I needed clarification. I wish I had brought along a tape recorded. Being an engineer, only two things stand out clearly in my mind and they are both the technical aspects of some really special tasks he did in Vietnam.
JJ had been an electronic technician in the Army. At that time, the Army had radio communications equipment that had encryption. The really, really secure stuff was theater-wide communications. But the squad-level, man-portable radios used a much simpler frequency-hopping technique. Apparently the frequencies that “hopped” were selected by inserting a sort of key into the side of the radio. That key was basically a matrix of pins that pressed into matrix of receptacles in the radio, each of which had a small electrical contact. So the key was an electromechanical way of selecting frequencies. Not surprisingly, in the fields of Vietnam and all that rain and mud, the radios would periodically stop working. The problem was often mud and dirt packed into the frequency-selecting receptacle contacts. JJ’s job was to go into the field and repair these squad-level radios. He soon improvised little tools the Army hadn’t provided him that drastically sped up the repair job: a sort of toothpick to pick out the gunk.
One day, the word passed through the electrical technicians’ ranks that the Air Force was looking for volunteers out of the Army who could quickly and accurately site stars with a sextant. This was something JJ thought himself to be particularly good at so he volunteered. He soon found himself in a classroom setting with dozens of other volunteers. They were told that what they would be doing was classified and they couldn’t tell them what it was for. All they were told is that the fastest and most accurate of them would be chosen for this classified task. They were given written tests and then they were put into a simulator dome where they each took turns with a sextant getting star fixes. JJ won.
When JJ told me this account, he still didn’t know precisely why he had done what he did, but he knew what he had done. He rode in the backseat of an SR‑71 and took star fixes as it flew high over Vietnam. For this, he wore a pressure suit; the SR‑71 flies very high. My guess is that the military was testing an advanced area navigation system at the time. Before GPS, there were other systems such as the U.S. Navy’s NAVSAT system. It could be they wanted to confirm the accuracy of a satellite-based system. Or perhaps they were testing the military equivalent of a LORAN (radio beam-based) ground-based system. Whatever it was, they wanted to check out the accuracy of something and they wanted to do so at extremely great altitude. The thing that stood out in my mind is just how high he went. The official “sustained” altitude for the SR‑71 is 85,069 feet. JJ said they shot ballistically and rode the flame to 176,000 feet. Indeed, it was an unsustainable altitude, but it was clearly very, very high. At 33.33 miles or 53.6 km, JJ was half way to his astronauts’ wings.
Our conversation (JJ’s account of his life) petered out after he had told me of is Vietnam experiences. The rest of his life after that had become that of just one more unremarkable, post-Vietnam veteran whose ambitions weren’t that great. His drinking, smoking, education, and the diamond-in-the-rough manner of the way he dressed and groomed his hair and beard had all binned him at the margins of society—both figuratively and literally if you looked at where he lived. For much of his life, he was the stereotypical “Vietnam vet”; someone we may dismiss as just one of those guys who gets an extra ten points on his civil service test only because he had been in the military. I can't tell you the feelings I had while I sat there talking with JJ. I didn't just listen, I asked many questions to be sure I properly understood what he was saying and to solicit greater details. It was clearly his intention that he tell me how he had mattered in the world and that I should become a living piece of JJ—a bit of his legacy—after he died. After only a couple of hours, he was content and our conversation had naturally concluded. I said goodbye.
A few days later, my ex boss and a machine-designer friend of mine visited JJ. When they got back to work the next day, they told me of how profusely JJ said he appreciated my visit with him. I took that as a sign that I should go back. But I didn’t, probably because I feared the awkward silence that might arise since he had already told me his story (tick… tock… tick… tock…). Of course, the only reason I didn’t go see him again was because of concern over how ‘I’ would feel, not over how he would feel. He died a few weeks later. To my knowledge, he had never had children to carry on his legacy. Were it not for my writing about him, precious few humans would know JJ had ever existed.
JJ came to mind the other day when I received this endlessly-forwarded e-mail:
Wal-Mart greeter
Harry, a new retiree greeter at Wal-Mart, just couldn't seem to get to work on time. Every day he was 5, 10, sometimes 15 minutes late. But he was a good worker, really tidy, clean shaven, sharp minded, and a real credit to the company who clearly demonstrated their ‘Older Person-Friendly’ policies.
One day the boss was in a real quandary about how to deal with Harry’s tardiness. Finally, he called Harry into the office for a talk.
“Harry, I have to tell you, I like your work ethic, you do a bang up job. But your being late so often is quite bothersome.”
“Yes Sir, I know boss, and I am working on it, and I'll improve.”
“Well good, you are a team player. That's what I like to hear. It's odd though, your coming in late. I know you’re retired from the Armed Forces. What did they say if you came in late there?”
To which Harry replied, “They said, ‘Good morning, General. Coffee this morning, Sir?’ ”You rarely know the life story of the older people you meet.
What if UFOs came to earth?
I have no “respect” for fruit flies. They are so easy to kill. Now, house flies, they’re worthy of some respect. Unless you have a rolled-up newspaper in your hand—or an genuine flyswatter—house flies are hard to kill; rather “sporting.” My brother, Mark, not surprisingly, found a novel way to kill house flies. When a house fly would alight somewhere in his office, he would shine a laser pointer at it. He’d get the laser pointer good and close so he could clearly see that the beam was awash over the fly’s head. Then he would take his finger and slowly push it towards the fly until he mashed it. It turns out that the air disturbance preceding a quick hand swat (or the whip of a horse tail) triggers special hairs on the fly and induces a reflex action to fly sideways to the disturbance. So, once blinded by the laser, you can slowly mash those wile flies. But fruit flies… any half-way decent hand clap can easily smash them out of all existence. Whenever I kill a fruit fly, I often marvel at how instantaneously it died; no pain. I often contemplate one other thing: how clueless they are to my very existence in the seconds preceding their death.
Fruit flies and their utter cluelessness to the nature of their surroundings got me thinking about how they compare to more advanced organisms. A fruit fly seems to be unaware that a human is a half meter away from them when they are flying about. They only start to react when a hazard encroaches within their alert zone, which isn’t very big. They can not distinguish or understand the nature of “inside a house” versus “outside.” The extents of their awareness is pretty much limited to food, hazard, and sex. The “poop” part is probably rather reflexive. Dogs on the other hand, can understand an awful lot. A dog can understand the “inside the house” and “outside”. They are social animals and can deeply love their masters. They understand the distinction between “other” dog and “other human.” Moreover, they understand the distinction between individual humans; particular members of a family, and who is family and who is a “stranger.” They can understand what a door is and that the door handle is something a human must manipulate in order to open the door and that they, the dogs, lack the ability to adequately manipulate the door handle. Genius dogs can actually manipulating the door handle with their mouths. But no dog can possibly understand how door handles are made and come to be there, attached to a door: how their raw materials are mined from the earth, fabricated into the shape of a door handle, sold by a distributor to a retailer, sold, and installed. A door handle simply “is.”
When the Aztecs and the Incas encountered Spaniards, they could see that the Spaniards had armor, horses, guns that fired projectiles with a boom, and a cannon that did the same thing but on a bigger scale. To the Aztecs and Incas, the means of making the guns must have seemed understandable—not magical—but profoundly beyond their grasp.
More importantly, how would Spaniards at this time have regarded each of these life forms: fruit flies, dogs, and South Americans? To any 16th-century Spaniard, a fruit fly is something you can squash out of existence and forget about it. For many 16th-century Spaniards, a dog would be an animal that you wouldn’t mistreat. There wouldn’t be any laws governing a soldier’s treatment of a dog in the new world, but social peer pressure would ostracize any soldier who mistreated a division’s mascot. Some other soldiers might acquiesce, or even approve and encourage, another conquistador’s shooting of an Aztec’s dog. Others might not. To the conquistadors, the Aztecs and Incas were humans. But they were inferior humans who had wealth the conquistadors coveted. Neither the Incas nor Aztecs spoke Spanish. The conquistadors thought them immodest for their sparse dress and backwards for their lack of industrial capacity. The only reason the conquistadors likely afforded them the initial courtesy of negotiating with them was fear: there were a lot of them, foes who had spears and other hand-propelled weapons. But the Incas and Aztecs didn’t have horses and when the conquistadors saw that they had a clear upper hand and allies from neighboring tribes, they destroyed both cultures and took what they wished.
In modern society, civilians and their elected representatives have higher expectations for their soldiers. Wars, after all, are fought to achieve political ends and all modern democracies have their armies serving at the pleasure of the politicians. But in the field, the armies of Western civilizations often struggle with individual soldiers and squads running amok and killing innocent civilians in urban conflict areas because the soldiers view them as less worthy of being treated like a full human. In modern society, there are laws governing how humans can own some animals (dogs) but not others (chimpanzees). There are laws governing how you may treat them, house them, and when and in what manner one can “put them down” (kill them). In all cases, anyone who owns an animal can kill them. The degree of pain involved in killing depends on a variety of factors: the extent to which the animal is capable of suffering like a human; how cute the animal is; how much of a nuisance the animal is and how much economic harm it causes; how much economic gain there is to killing the animal.
Accordingly, a coyote can be poisoned. A dog must be gassed, given an injection, or in rural areas, shot. A farm animal like a cow or a pig must have a rod smashed through its skull, gassed, or electrocuted before being bled out. It is all a sliding scale and there is no black and white. Below a certain level of Linnaean sophistication, below say, a turtle, it is OK within the law to cause extreme suffering. Slug bait no doubt causes some pain but no one cares. Many children aren’t even admonished for using a magnifying class to fry ants. To this day, I still use salt on slugs outside. My wife and I have some colossal-size slugs that you could slip on like a banana peel in a cartoon. I salt them. They clearly suffer. I don’t give a crap outwardly. But I’m thinking about all this each time I do it. And I seem to recall that I instructed my children to at least think about how the ants might perceive what was happening to them as they nuked them with a magnifying glass. I then walked away and let them noodle on this concept. As I recall, none of my kids killed ants with a magnifying glass beyond that first day.
It should be clear by now where I am heading with all this when we contemplate what might happen if extraterrestrials came to earth from another solar system: we’d be royally screwed. No doubt, E.T. would be a highly advanced civilization. Also, given that even E.T. can’t escape the laws of physics and spacetime, even if they travel at a 99.499% the speed of light where spaceship time runs at one-tenth the rate of their home planet, the very fact that they traveled long distances and left behind loved ones who will be hundreds of years older when they return, means that they probably live an exceedingly long time. To them, we will be short-lived organisms. We would be to them, as a dog is to us: something that lives only maybe one-seventh as long as we do. Another possibility, and more worrisome, is that E.T. coming here could be pilgrims who are leaving their home planet behind. As such, they would be traveling in complete family units and wouldn’t care if those left behind would be much older by the time they could arrive back; they don’t intend to go back. If this were the case, then the only limitation on distance would be the speed of the ship. If E.T. could travel at 99.980% the speed of light, they would be traveling at a Lorentz factor of 50; which is to say, they could travel 50 light years for every year of ship time that elapses. As the Nausets soon discovered on Manhattan Island, simply accepting some beads from pilgrims in return for a bit of central Australia doesn’t solve anything in the long term.
Moreover, the more important question is how advanced would they be to us and how little sophistication would we have in their eyes? If they seem like conquistadors to us, then we could see that they have advanced technology. We could understand the nature of what it does and how it generally works. But we could only marvel at the sophistication it must have taken to make the technology and know it is well beyond our grasp to replicate it in our lifetime. They might negotiate with us. Do they want a bunch of our salt? Go for it. Do they want us to be kitchen slaves for them and make their dinners? Enslavement will be acceptable to death for some. The reverse for others. Science fiction often deals with this level of disparity: magical, advanced technology that is still within our ability to grasp and convey to an audience.
What if we are dogs to E.T.? It’s hard to contemplate, let alone describe the notion of how there can be concepts that are beyond our comprehension. Makers of sci‑fi movies don’t venture into this realm that I am aware of. It is damned hard to convey the incomprehensible; audiences would walk out of theater wondering “What the hell was that about?!?” Just like a dog can not understand how a door knob came into being, or even the nature of the question, it is likely that there are E.T.s that are sophisticated beyond our ability to comprehend. They would be so sophisticated, we wouldn’t know what it is we can’t know. A dog being used in a medical experiment will know it is having something shoved down its throat. But it can not understand who the veterinarian truly is, and how he is different and has different economic motivations from the drug company’s representative. The dog can’t understand the nature of drug trials, and how human trials come next, and how drugs then go to market and how they are distributed, and the economic motivations of everyone along the way. To us, E.T. would simply be magic. The only thing that would make our lives bearable is there would likely be E.T.-laws governing how humans receive humane treatment—or E.T-esque treatment. But only if we luck out and are as cute and sophisticated to them as dogs are to humans.
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/91/Smiley_green_alien_disapointed.svg/150px-Smiley_green_alien_disapointed.svg.png)
What if we humans are annoying fruit flies in the kitchen of E.T. when he/she/it arrives here on earth? We would scarcely be aware that they have even arrived at all. They’d swat an annoying scurrying human that is in their way and we would be dead or completely gone. Then they would rinse us down the drain. If earth is a big farm waiting to be planted with E.T. food, earthlings might be like locust in a corn field rather than like a single fruit fly in their kitchen. E.T. wouldn’t bother to smash an individual and rinse him or her down the drain; they’d exterminate us in wholesale quantities and leave the billions of our corpses out in their “fields” to rot—too numerous to count. Suddenly, we might only be aware that a giant force is rolling along the land, like an invisible steam roller squashing everything it its path. If the crushing force advances along at the speed of sound, most would not know of their impending doom until it was already upon them.[1] Really, a nice, targeted (species-specific) “humacide” would be a likely tool as it causes no collateral damage to the ecosystem and is highly efficient. They’d spray their fields.
This comes to mind when I hear about how we earthlings contemplate beaming radio messages into space saying “Hi, we’re here.” In 1974, NASA beamed a radio message to M13, 25,000 light years away. Although transmissions like this to very distant stars carries little risk of harm per transmission, the general practice is very, very unwise in my opinion. If anything at all can be learned from earth history, it is that advanced life forms and advanced civilizations with advanced technology always subjugate the lesser. Always. And the greater the disparity, the greater the subjugation. Whenever there is extreme disparity between the life forms, the consequences are always catastrophic for the lesser one. We should be using the the Arecibo Observatory only to listen for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence—SETI style. If NASA started using Arecibo to broadcast powerful messages to every star within 200 light years, I’d be thinking “Oops. I hope E.T. doesn’t send pilgrims and I hope we aren’t like pesky vermin to them.”
The most exceedingly unwise thing to do on earth
Fresh off of my work on Fuzzball (string theory), I was thinking about the density of fuzzballs, which are thought to be the true quantum description of black holes, and their “singularities.” I note that a conservative lower limit for the mass of a black hole produces a “singularity” density (according to one aspect of string theory) of 2.5286×1018 kg/m3. A bit of such a black hole the size of a drop of water at that density would have a mass of 126 million metric tons, which is equivalent to a ball of granite 449 meters in diameter (taller than the Empire State Building). Said another way, one teaspoon of such a fuzzball would have a mass of 12.5 billion metric tons. This is greater than the density of neutron stars, which are thought to be in the range of 1.8–2.9 billion metric tons per teaspoon.
Since mass and energy are interchangeable, I was pondering how profoundly unwise it would be to create even a cubic millimeter-sized zone on earth with an energy density equal to the mass density of a fuzzball. If one were to assemble a large number of converging lasers so they concentrated their beams at a power density of 6.8×1037 watts into a volume of cubic millimeter for 3.34 picoseconds, that should create a black hole on earth. This would probably be the most unwise thing to do on earth as the 2.53‑million-metric-ton black hole would drop out of the convergence zone and fall towards the center of the earth, feeding upon the earth, growing the entire time. Within about 42 minutes, such a black hole will have reached the center of the earth, where it would continue to feed upon the earth at an ever-accelerating pace. I suppose that within a few more hours or so, the earth would entirely disappear to produce a black hole with an event horizon measuring 1.774 centimeters in diameter. Normally, a mass equivalent to at least about 1.7–2.7 suns would be required to create enough compression to smash matter to a density of a black hole; gravity is, after all, the weakest of the known forces and very great quantities of mass are required to generate a large gravitational force. A laser-beam approach like this would nicely circumvent such an inconvenience.
I had often wondered if there was a fundamental quantum upper limit to light intensity. I suppose this power density, which is 6.8×1039 W/cm2, is it since there would be no way to get more strings crowded into a volume. Fortunately, this intensity is 340 million billion times more intense than the world’s most intense laser beam. Even if a millimeter-sized black hole was unstable and “puffed up” to a miniature neutron star with a diameter of about 2 millimeters, the outcome for earth would be the same: it would fall to the center of the earth and quickly consume it. Greg L (talk) 21:46, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
The world’s second-best April Fools Day joke
My older brother is a stockbroker. Over the decades he advanced up the ranks to become the manager of a local branch of a worldwide financial institution. After a merger, he later became an assistant manager. Stockbrokers in the United States have onerous SEC regulations restricting their activities and governing the documentation of their communications. I learned about this just by chance. I was at my mother’s house for a family gathering that my older brother was attending. Over dinner, he told about an embarrassing incident with a letter his then-girl friend had written and mailed to his work.
My brother, “Terry,” and his girl friend, “Janine,” had gotten into a spat and ‘separated’—if you can call it that—where she stayed at her house and he at his. This mutual pout went on for a week or so, after which time she was feeling rather apologetic. So she wrote a letter to him, mailed it to his work, and marked the envelope “PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL.” Well, such a disclaimer on the outside of an envelope changes matters not one twit in the eyes of the SEC. One could have all sorts of behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing by rogue stockbrokers if all communications weren’t monitored, documented, and archived. Accordingly, the SEC requires that all e-mails and snail-mail must be read by an office manager and a copy archived for inspection by the SEC if there is an investigation. Audits are periodically conducted to ensure managers are rigorously adhering to the rules.
The day’s mail is opened by a front-desk receptionist. She reports directly to the office manager. As required, she opened the letter to my brother, Terry. The letter had some drama in it about how Janine was sorry for the spat and wished they would get back together again and how she looked forward to him bringing his gear home as she was interested in some serious make-up hubba‑hubba. As required, the receptionist put a copy into the filing cabinet for the SEC and printed a copy for the office manager and then gave the original to Terry. Well, as one would expect, the letter proved to be the source of much good natured ribbing and office buzz for the next several days. Terry is an exceedingly mature individual and highly respected at the office. The events surrounding the incident was, though embarrassing and unfortunate, quite understandable and very human. Amusing.
Well, I was only half tuned in on this at dinner and wasn’t sure I was comprehending this quite right. “You mean that even if you write a letter and mark it ‘PERSONAL AND NON-BUSINESS’, the office manager has to read the letter and they have to put a copy on file for the SEC to look at even though it obviously doesn’t have jack to do with stocks or financial dealings? What the hay!” But that’s the rules, I was told. Well, my mind working the way it does, I instantly filed that bit of information in my mental filing cabinet marked “For Future Hijinks.”
So here is a letter that I wrote and mailed across the town on March 31st so it would arrive on April 1st, April Fools Day:
- Dear Terry:
Please let me apologize for last night. I was short with you
because my feelings were hurt; I love you and will continue
to forever. It just seems like you are procrastinating on
leaving Janine. When I first surrendered my body to you, it
was because I thought I was your only true partner in love
and that your relationship with Janine was purely physical.
I know this is still the case— I really do— but when my
feelings are hurt, I lash out with my insecurities; I know this
isn’t the Christian thing to do.
What I want is for you to stop here first, before you stop at
Janine’s. It seems like every single time you go to her
embrace first, she satisfies your physical needs right as you
get in the door. By the time I get you in my embrace, you
have less fire and desire for me and this doesn’t satisfy me.
I can always tell the difference. I love that fire of desire for
me you have in your eyes when you have not been with
Janine. When you are like this and we are one—
emotionally, physically, spiritually— it’s like the very
creation of the universe for me. I can feel your power flow
through every fiber of my being.
I’ve talked about this with Grandmother. I don’t think she
understands or maybe even cares. She just gives me her
Greek philosophical “que sera sera” or “slag sloof lirpa”
attitude.
Please, oh please; try more often to stop here first. If you
have to stop at Janine’s first, try to resist her advances so
that I am still the one that you first bring your loins to.
With All My Love,
Bob
Oh, yeah! This was fodder for juicy gossip. As I had planned, the letter arrived and was stamped as having been received April 1st. As I had hoped, their regular receptionist, who fully understood the SEC regulations and her duty, was working that day and opened my brother’s letter. And she made a copy and put it into the filing cabinet for the SEC to audit. And she made a copy and put it into the office manager’s IN basket. And she spilled… her… guts to the entire office gossip mill.
Now, mind you, I had ensured my brother would have an easy-out once the embarrassment had taken its course. How? Well, “slag sloof lirpa” is “April fools gals” backwards; this is a practical joke, after all. I was perfectly pleased that he would go into the mens’ room to relief himself, walk up to the urinal next to one that was currently being used by one of his co-workers, and the co-worker would ever-so-slowly turn his body away from my brother while doing his number. But like all good practical jokes, the humiliation must eventually end for the victim and everyone who was gullible enough to believe that letter would realize they were as much—or more so—a victim of the joke as anyone else. One has to want to believe what was in my letter to fall for all that melodrama.
So what does the office manager do? He could have quietly just ignored the matter. The office buzz can take its course and die out. Stick to business. That is certainly not what he did. He called my brother into his office for a discussion:
- “Hi, Terry. Have a seat, please.”
- (He pushes the letter across the desk over towards Terry.)
- “Read this.”
- (My brother reads the letter.)
- “I don’t know a ‘Bob’ ”, my brother responds.
- (The office manager throws his hands up, palms facing my brother and wags them back and forth, tilts his head down slightly and too the side, and says…)
- “Of course… of course. I’m not making any judgements here. Your personal business is just that: personal. But I thought you should see this letter and might want to take measures to avoid having others come to the office.”
- (My brother’s tone getting a bit persistent now.)
- “But, I really don’t know a ‘Bob’ and don’t know what this is about.”
- “Of course not. Of course not. Hey, far be it me to be passing judgements here. I just thought you should know about this. OK? I think we’re done with this now. I just wanted to help you avoid more of this in the future.”
I waited for several days without hearing from my brother. I fully expected he would know who was behind the letter. I had anticipated that he would be called to his manager’s office, be presented with the letter, read it, see the “slag sloof lirpa”-bit, and it would all ring a bell and he’d say “the joke’s on you guys; this is an April Fools joke.” But he didn’t. And why would I expect him to figure it all out so easily? Because I had sent him nearly the exact same letter several years before and he entirely forgot every single thing about that previous incident. There is actually a human being on this planet who has his head in the clouds worse than I.
That first letter, from years before, was signed “Ramona.” Except for that, it was identical, including the “slag sloof lirpa” part. In that particular case, they had a temporary receptionist who was opening the mail that day. She didn’t know that the SEC requires that all correspondence—even exceedingly *private* letters—must be treated like all other mail. She opened that letter from Ramona and read it for a few moments. Her eyes opened wide and she uttered “Personal – personal – personal - PERSONAL! ” And then she hurriedly re-folded the letter and feverishly stuffed it back into the envelope like it was going to self-destruct in five seconds.
That first letter quickly and discreetly ended up in my brother’s hands. He didn’t know a “Ramona.” This must be a practical joke. And he noted that it has been printed on a toner-type laser printer. Mind you, this was in the very-early 90s and, though many people owned ink jet printers, few had laser printers. I had access to one at a graphics arts business where I periodically did consulting. My brother took the letter to his office friend next door. He showed him the letter. “This is some sort of practical joke,” my brother told him. “I don’t know a Ramona. Who has access to a laser printer who would play a practical joke like this?” They looked at each other and came to the obvious conclusion at the same time: “Greg.”
Later in the evening on this first time I sent him the love letter, I was coincidentally again, eating dinner at my mother’s house. He walked in the front door and entered into the kitchen. The fan and lights over the range obscured his face but I could see his torso as he stood in the kitchen. I ducked my head down to make eye contact. He looked at me and said “Hi Ramona.” He explained how it would have been a great joke but they had a temp worker that day opening the mail. He explained how he and his friend deduced it was I who sent it. I then explained to him how, if he was being burned big-time by the joke, I had given him an “out” to prove the letter was a prank by imbedding the “slag sloof lirpa”-bit into the letter. He said they hadn’t even picked up on that odd phrase. So…
I fully expected that, several years later when he was in his manager’s office and the letter was shoved in his face, that he would go “Oh! This is a prank. And here’s the proof.” But the letter didn’t ring a bell; not the foggiest recollection. He suffered for several days as I waited and waited for him to call me at my work saying “Smooth move.” I imagined he’d tell me all about how everyone had egg on their faces once he showed them my clever proof that they bought into all that drama and it was all an April Fools-day joke. But I never got that call.
After about four days, I finally called him. I asked him how things were going at work. Fine, he said. “Was anything a little odd lately there for you”, I asked? He asked me why I would ask such a question. So I asked him if he had received an odd letter. Why, yes, he said. “Well, for God’s sake,” I told him. “It’s that ‘Ramona’ letter I sent you years ago with the ‘slag sloof lirpa’ bit to prove it’s an April Fools joke.” Normally, when I provide some bit of information I think is earth-shaking and exceedingly important to my brother, he sorta yawns and says something that generally amounts to “Yeah. I suppose I can take that to them one of these days and do something about that.” This time, upon hearing (again) that the letter had an imbedded code proving it was all a hoax, he quickly got off the phone and marched into his office manager’s office to break the news.
Roughly a year later, I was talking to him at his work and asked him about the details of how this joke went down. Our conversation was one of those “reminiscent”-type conversations where you go “Hey, remember that ‘Bob’ letter! Wasn’t that just great?!? Tell me how it all went down.” He said “Well, it wasn’t very funny at the time… *ipt* [interrupting himself]… Come to think of it, it really isn’t all that funny now!” I was at my work in my cubicle, falling off my chair in laughter. I’d get back into my chair only to fall back out when he was telling me of how the conversation went with his office manager.
Anyway, now I’ve told the world about the little SEC rule over personal correspondence. Anyone know a stock broker who is understanding and forgiving? As for the *best* April Fools joke (not second-best), that’s for another time. I played that one on my younger brother. Greg L (talk) 21:40, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
An open letter to extraterrestrials
Dear extraterrestrials:
Enjoy your visit to Earth; but please don’t stay long.
Given that you have arrived here from another star system, you are clearly more advanced than we are. Accordingly, you no-doubt see us as inferior, at best, and as pests at worst. I hope you will treat Earth as a “Celestial Natural Park” to be preserved and enjoyed by future tourists from your world rather than a new land over which you have eminent domain.
Earth is a planet inhabited by many species. Of the many species, the most advanced are humans. I am a human. By “advanced,” I mean our species is best able to increase the average live span to very close to the theoretical maximum age to which we can live. We do so through cultivation and control of our food supply, through hygiene and control and eradication of disease, and by greatly limiting predation by other species. Seldom do humans get eaten by other species, and when this does occur, it is often because of extreme risk taking or foolishness.
Some of Earth’s species have adapted to survive by evolving thick hides, or sharp claws, or long teeth. Still others have evolved defensive mechanisms, such as producing toxic substances or armor. Humans’ adaptation has been our brains and our minds, which are more highly advanced than any other species. Our minds have enabled us to share concepts with each other and to fashion tools and modify our environment to a spectacular extent in order to better suit us.
Humans have the ability to think abstractly a great deal. Death is often on our minds. Other species such as chimpanzees can understand death of a member of their troop and grieve. But whereas other species understand the concept of death, they don’t dwell upon it when it is not imminent. Humans, on the other hand, ponder death even when it is not a pressing and immediate concern. Naturally, like nearly all life forms in the Universe, humans have the instinct of self preservation. Accordingly, our ability to ponder over something that takes our lives but which we can do nothing about lead many of our species to invent religion, wherein many of us believe in fictitious beings and forces that are not part of the natural world—things called the “supernatural.” We imagine these mythological beings have magical powers that can give us the gift of an eternal life after death. This liberates many of our species from the fear of death.
You will see that there are old people amongst us who are dying away. You may also see that the younger people with much of their life ahead of them do not give much respect to these older people and do not spend a great deal of time learning from their experiences. This is curious to me and many others of my species because these older people have life experiences and knowledge, which can be passed down via speech and the written word. Inasmuch as our species survives through our intellect (we have no sharp teeth, long claws, nor thick hides), this, at first sight, seemingly makes no sense. This is because a form of knowledge and judgement called “wisdom” is accumulated by older people precisely because they have more experience. This wisdom enables those who have it to better discern the distinction between what is important and what is not. Wisdom also enables humans to better predict the behavior of others and to detect deception. This ability to predict the future behavior of others protects social groups (where there are older leaders and younger followers) from harm and better ensures survival of the collective. This is important because humans are social beings and different social groups often struggle in battles over limited resources or because of differences in the cultures of the various collectives.
Given the importance of wisdom to survival of a collective, you might find it a curious phenomenon that young humans are not currently doing a good job of ensuring that wisdom is passed down from old to young. This is largely because of two reasons: 1) a Great Struggle on Earth that profoundly molded the worldview of our elders, and 2) a lesser struggle that profoundly changed the worldview of a younger generation. The “Great Struggle” was known as “World War II”. Yes, there were two of them. This struggle affected nearly all people on our planet. The lesser struggle was known as The Vietnam War. It affected primarily the young people from just one country (a “country” is collective of people who live under a common set of rules).
World War II was a great struggle between good and evil. A few leaders lead a great number of followers on both sides of the struggle. Each side fought to the death. Combatants died in great numbers. Non-combatants died in even greater numbers. Those members of our society who were followers bore the brunt of the risk of death; leaders did not. But this was a necessary element of conducting war and everyone on both sides did their part to win the struggle. The “good side” won this struggle. And for one of the first times in the history of our species, those who won the struggle did not vanquish and kill the remaining survivors amongst their enemies; they cared for them and protected them and showed great magnanimity in victory. They helped their vanquished foes rebuild their societies and guided them to develop a system of societal rules to ensure that their leaders governed with the consent of the governed.
For those who lived through the struggle, that period of their lives was formative and shaped them in many ways. They learned that by pulling together, they could prevail. They learned that sacrifices—often at great personal cost—was sometimes incumbent upon many. Most dominating of all the aspects of their worldview, was they learned that one simply had to follow what their leaders told them to do and had to trust that the orders they received were for a good reason; usually, they were.
The children of this generation that had lived through the Great Struggle were eventually faced with the lesser struggle known as the Vietnam War. This was a war that for the much larger country on one side of the dispute, did not carry a risk of their being invaded and killed by their enemy. The leaders from the larger country wanted the war for less direct, long-term, strategic advantage; immediate survival and preserving their culture was not an issue. This lesser struggle resulted in the deaths of a great many of the followers and almost none of the leaders. Given our instinct for self preservation, and the realization that not fighting the war would not result in the larger country being vanquished by its enemy, the followers lost confidence in their leaders. They shortly learned to very much distrust their leadership.
The worldview of the younger generation made no sense to the older generation that had learned to follow orders in order to survive as a country. The youngers’ worldview seemed selfish and cowardly. To the older generation, following the orders of their leaders was incumbent on each individual and seemed a necessary and vital element of living in a societal collective. To the younger generation, the new war was not worth fighting. To the younger generation, questioning the wisdom of leaders who wanted to fight this new war seemed not only a right, but a duty. In large part, this was because—in the larger country on one side of the dispute—leaders govern with the consent of the governed. Accordingly, fighting wars are ultimately done only because the governed want to do so. During the Great Struggle, nearly everyone who was the governed wanted to fight the war. The leaders of the “good side” at that time, who had great wisdom, concurred and recognized the need for the war.
To the younger generation, the older generation’s worldview seemed narrow-minded and lacked critical thought. The older generation seemed to lack wisdom. The two generations lacked respect for each other because of a difference over the need to fight the lesser war. As a result of this great difference, there is now a great number of younger people who are now at an age where they should have great wisdom. They are now looking around and are realizing that in many cases, they have forever lost the ability to absorb, through communication, the wisdom of their elders who have died.
I personally fell victim to this when I was a very young adult. I had a friend and his father argued with me about fighting the lesser war. I thought his father to be a fool and did not respect him. He seemed to lack any critical thought and seemed to have blind acceptance of what our leaders wanted even though the war was a useless waste. I simply did not understand *why* he thought the way he did. He died several years ago. It had been decades since I last saw him and I did not say goodbye. I heard that he had developed a great interest in literature in his later years and enjoyed discussing what the authors meant. He died of cancer—a disease that humans have not yet eradicated. Though in pain, he enjoyed boating. As he lay on his bed, his last words to his children were “Take me gently across the water.”
Though I still believe the older generation was wrong about the lesser war, I now understand why the older generation had the worldview they did. Living through the Great Struggle and pulling together against great odds had greatly influenced how they saw the world. For them, there was little ambiguity (also known as “shades of gray”); things were very “binary”: living or dying; good vs. evil; leaders vs. followers. For them, there was no shades of gray in war; one did not question one’s leaders.
Unfortunately, I have largely squandered my opportunity to have wisdom passed down from the older generation to me. Considering that the human mind is the evolutionary adaptation that gives our species its survival advantage, this failure to absorb wisdom from a passing generation seems a scandalous waste and a failure. It is. And for that I am sorry.
Yours truly,
Greg L (talk) 23:43, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
P.S. I hear that beef jerky tastes much better than human jerky. I suggest you try the former and not make any of the latter during your visit to Earth.
Advisory/Disclaimer:
The thoughts and opinions expressed above on this user page are not intended to be offensive to any particular minority group (based on race, religion, ethnicity, country of origin, gender, gender identification, disAbility, occupation, meat-eating/vegetable-eating practices, and hobbies—even hunting). Note too that parenthetically mentioning “even hunting” in the preceding sentence was not intended to signal any disapproval of the sport; the author does not wish to disparage the legal, safe, and most humane-possible methods of hunting. This preceding statement should not however, be construed as an endorsement of the sport; the author values all the biodiversity of earth and no animal should suffer at the hand of a human. However, that preceding sentence should not be construed that the author is indifferent to the plight of workers displaced by environmental issues; the author is mindful of the plight of timber workers vs. the plight of spotted owls. The preceding sentence should not be construed that the author thinks there is only one group of workers who have been financially harmed by environmental issues; there are others and not mentioning these others by name should not be construed as suggesting they are any less important than another. The author wishes to ensure all who review this communication that he values diversity and has the utmost respect for the law, government officials, the institutions of the United States, the wide variety of social customs and diversity of its peoples, and the civil treatment of other Wikipedians, even if they come across as assholes. This statement should not however, be construed as being intolerant of others who have contrary or differing values or who might hold the U.S. in disdain. The author embraces the wholesome notion that no person’s or group's values are any more meritorious or valid than another’s, and the author does not wish to suggest that by stating an admiration for America and the U.S. Government, that this ought to be construed as deprecating the many other fine systems of government throughout the world and the social practices of its peoples. Notwithstanding that the author wrote the word "he" three sentences ago, (the author happens to be “anatomically male” by birth) this should not be construed as diminishing in any way, the existence of the word "she" nor does it signal that the author is adverse to the use of the gender-neutral "he/she" where appropriate. Furthermore, the words "he" and "she" should not be construed as being exclusionary or diminishing to the transgendered. This paragraph was not intended to be understood by blondes.
- Hecho en China
Charles Algernon Parsons
P.S. If you’re wondering why I honor Charles Algernon Parsons with the picture included above with such prestigious company, it’s because of how well he designed the first steam turbine; not that he was also the first to do it. The current Wikipedia article doesn’t give him his sufficient due in my book. If one studies steam turbines, you will see that there is “this issue” or “that issue” that must be technically addressed to make a reliable and efficient turbine. And in pretty much every case, the lesson reads something like “Oh yeah, on this issue too, Parsons figured it all out and properly addressed it with his first design.” The development of his steam turbine is analogous to the development of the first airplane, only instead of ending up with the 1903 Wright Flyer, he ended up with a 1936 Spitfire on his first try. You can make a turbine that’s different, or bigger, but Parsons didn’t leave much room to make one better and more efficient. At a time when steam power was synonymous with big, inefficient pistons, Parsons’ invention was truly way ahead of its time.
And for a visionary, check out Paul Otlet. A description of his 1934 book, Traité de documentation (Treatise on Documentation) is here on YouTube.
PERSONAL SANDBOX
Moved to User:Greg L/Delimitnum sandbox
Sewer cover in front of Greg L’s house
Delimitnum sandbox
Moved to here.
Edit resources
Tables
Font control
Main page: Wikipedia:Manual of Style |
Using CSS span gaps
To see the difference between span gaps and non-breaking spaces, slowly select the two values below with your mouse:
- 6.022464342 (via em-based span tags, note how the cursor snaps across the gaps)
- 6.022 464 342 (via non-breaking spaces, note how the spaces can be individually selected)
- 6.022464342 (via em-based span tags, note how the cursor snaps across the gaps)
Val sandbox is at User:Greg L/Val sandbox
Example failure at User:Greg L/val failure example
“tl” Markup for templates and colon prefix for image links
Jimp: What does the “tl” in ((tl|SI multiples)) stand for and is there an equivalent syntax to do the same thing with links to images? Greg L (my talk) 20:53, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
- FYI: Tl stands for Template link (per documentation at ((Tl)). For images, are you wanting more than just insterting a colon ":" before the word Image in the image link? The nearest relative I could find for similar links to images is ((li)); but that one adds several additional links related to the image, so may not be what you want. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 21:07, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
- Well, let’s see… How about this CG-genenerated image? Yup, the magic colon. I didn’t know about that one. Thanks Jimp. Greg L (my talk) 00:09, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
SI templates can be linked to by inserting a tl prefix, as…
Regarding the "tl" template, see Barek's answer on my talk page. Another useful one is ((lt)). ((lt|SI multiples))
for example will give you the following.
For license tags, see Wikipedia:Template messages/Image namespace
The below graphic can be collapsed and expanded when readers have Javascript turned on. {| class="toccolours collapsible collapsed" style="width:395px; border: 0px;" !align="left"|Image:Z-machine480.jpg |- |[[Image:Z-machine480.jpg|thumb|left|440px|Now you can see the collapsed graphic and its caption.]] |}
Click on this link to go to graph of absolute zero’s relationship to zero-point energy.
Here's an image that is imbedded in text.
Unicode, which is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers, includes a special “kelvin sign” at U+212A. One types K
to encode this special kelvin character in a Web page. Its appearance is similar to an ordinary uppercase K. To better see the difference between the two, below in maroon is the kelvin character followed immediately by a simple uppercase K:
KK
When viewed on computers that properly support Unicode, the above line will appear as follows:
Click
to go to a Wikipedia internal image page link. There, you will need to click on the icon to go to a movie (with was converted from QuickTime to .ogg using ffmpeg2theora.
Linked graphics
Homecoming
Dorothy
Hugh Beaumont
Eddie
50s coffee ad
spitfire
whine.
senate
industrial-strength whining
double whining
happy
clam
futile
proud
lol
Clintn
wig
dove
obviously
flowers
drama
nerd in bed
censorship
amicable work relationship
backatcha
Don’t understand at all
Fabulous
crazy
funny
The Final Countdown (3:52 YouTube)
Link articles
((diff2|251174803|a Wiki-diff))
= a Wiki-diff (without the external link icon)
Parties
Support, the paragraph should stay: Please sign with # ~~~~
Oppose, the paragraph should be deleted: Please sign with # ~~~~
- Greg L 03:23, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
Debate
Other Proposals
SI multiples
Because SI prefixes may not be concatenated (united serially) within the name or symbol for a unit of measure, SI prefixes are used with the gram, not the kilogram, which already has a prefix as part of its name.[5] For instance, one-millionth of a kilogram is 1 mg (one milligram), not 1 µkg (one microkilogram). The most common prefixed forms of gram are shown in bold text in the table below.[6]
Submultiples | Multiples | |||||
Factor | Name | Symbol | Factor | Name | Symbol | |
100 | gram | g | ||||
10−1 | decigram | dg | 101 | decagram | dag | |
10−2 | centigram | cg | 102 | hectogram | hg | |
10−3 | milligram | mg | 103 | kilogram | kg | |
10−6 | microgram | µg | 106 | megagram | Mg | |
10−9 | nanogram | ng | 109 | gigagram | Gg | |
10−12 | picogram | pg | 1012 | teragram | Tg | |
10−15 | femtogram | fg | 1015 | petagram | Pg | |
10−18 | attogram | ag | 1018 | exagram | Eg | |
10−21 | zeptogram | zg | 1021 | zettagram | Zg | |
10−24 | yoctogram | yg | 1024 | yottagram | Yg | |
10−27 | rontogram | rg | 1027 | ronnagram | Rg | |
10−30 | quectogram | qg | 1030 | quettagram | Qg |
- When the Greek lowercase “µ” (mu) in the symbol of microgram is typographically unavailable, it is occasionally—although not properly—replaced by Latin lowercase “u”.
- The microgram is often abbreviated “mcg”, particularly in pharmaceutical and nutritional supplement labeling, to avoid confusion since the “µ” prefix is not well recognized outside of technical disciplines.[7] Note however, that the abbreviation “mcg”, is also the symbol for an obsolete CGS unit of measure known as the “millicentigram,” which is equal to 10 µg.
- The unit name “megagram” is rarely used, and even then, typically only in technical fields in contexts where especially rigorous consistency with the units of measure is desired. For most purposes, the term “tonne,” or “metric ton” is instead used.
The Greg L Sewer Cover Barnstar
![]() |
The Sewer Cover Barnstar | |
You have been awarded the Sewer Cover Barnstar because you can read through anything. You don’t know the meaning of attention deficit disorder, laugh in the face of boredom, and are wasting your talents if you don’t become a patent examiner. |
Templates
Category:Wikipedia templates
Category:Template categories
Category:Formatting templates
Help:Magic words
Help:Magic words#Formatting (formatnum)
Template:Days elapsed times factor:
The effect on the Moon’s orbital radius is a small one, just 0.10 ppb/year, but results in a measurable 3.82 cm annual increase in the Earth-Moon distance.[8] Cumulatively, this effect becomes ever more significant over time; since when astronauts first landed on the Moon approximately 55 years ago, it is now 2.1 meters farther away.
To transclude (imbed) text from another page, one copies to a subpage (like here Wikipedia talk:MOSNUM/draft) and transclude as though it were a template.
For instance, one could have this text
((WT:MOSNUM/draft))
and have the entire above page and its own green-div formatting (like this green-div) included here.((#expr:((age in days|1969|7|20))*0.00010459 round 4)) meters → 2.1003 meters
((days elapsed times factor|1969|7|20|0.00010459|4)) meters → 2.1003 meters
((#expr:((age in days|1969|7|20))*0.00010459 round 2)) meters → 2.1 meters
((days elapsed times factor|1969|7|20|0.00010459|2)) meters → 2.1 meters
Also…
Clearly, having the magnitude of many of the units comprising the SI system of measurement ultimately defined by the mass of a 145-year-old, golf ball-size piece of metal is a tenuous state of affairs. The quality of the IPK must be diligently protected in order to preserve the integrity of the SI system. Further, given that the third periodic verification took place 35 years ago, the average mass of the worldwide ensemble of prototypes is likely to have already gained another 8.2 µg relative to the IPK. The world’s national metrology labs must wait for the fourth periodic verification to confirm whether the historical trends persisted.
Val
{xt}
You have to use the “1=” anywhere there is an equal sign within the bracketed expression. There are at three four ways to work around this, depending on whether the = sign is functional or only for display. For instance…
((xt|1=''M''<span style="margin-left:0.15em"><sup>2</sup></span>))
→ M2 (the = sign is functional in a CSS span… the span here is just an example that came to mind.)((xt|2 × 3 ((=)) 6))
→ 2 × 3 = 6 ( ((=)) (template replacement of the = as it is only display)((xt|2 × 3 = 6))
→ 2 × 3 = 6 (character reference to replace the
Graphics and videos
GIF Scaling
This section appears to be largely obsolete. It appears MediaWiki’s ImageMagick plugin has been vastly improved over the years.
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Thermally_Agitated_Molecule.gif)
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/Thermally_Agitated_Molecule.gif/240px-Thermally_Agitated_Molecule.gif)
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/Thermally_Agitated_Molecule.gif/266px-Thermally_Agitated_Molecule.gif)
Click here for Theora-based video
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/64/TestVideo2.gif/226px-TestVideo2.gif)
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Translational_motion.gif)
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/Drop_of_fuzzball_as_a_granite_ball_over_Manhattan.jpg/375px-Drop_of_fuzzball_as_a_granite_ball_over_Manhattan.jpg)
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/6.8-solar_mass_black_hole_over_Oahu.jpg/360px-6.8-solar_mass_black_hole_over_Oahu.jpg)
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3c/Casimir_plates_with_color_coded_virtual_photons.jpg/300px-Casimir_plates_with_color_coded_virtual_photons.jpg)
When two perfectly conducting plates of the same material are less than about 1000 nanometers apart (about twice the width of a common bacterium), they begin to form an electromagnetic cavity that excludes larger-wavelength components of vacuum energy, reducing the radiation pressure inside. The pressure squeezing the two plates together reaches about one atmosphere when the plates are 10 nanometers apart (in the extreme-UV or the width of four human DNA strands) as a greater number of increasingly energetic virtual particles (vacuum energy fluctuations) with shorter wavelengths are excluded.
Here, two gold plates are 285 nm apart, which permits only virtual photons with wavelengths not greater than twice that to pop into existence between them. Thus no virtual photon redder than green can exist between the plates; no yellow, orange, red, or infrared virtual photons are allowed.
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/QED_oscillation%2C_anotated.jpg/335px-QED_oscillation%2C_anotated.jpg)
Here, the 3D QED field is projected onto a 2D plane and the vertical axis represents the vector momentum, p in an absolute (relativistic) sense. The upper and lower bulges represent virtual photons possessing positive and negative relativistic energy, respectively. This oscillation has no spin-angular momentum (polarization), which would appear as a helical twist. The diameter of the oscillation is its wavelength, (lambda), which cannot factor into the energy of oscillations possessing zero net momentum.
A single oscillation in the QED field comprises momentum components that are on average—but by no means always—equal and opposite. Consequently, the average net relativistic mass-energy of these oscillations is zero.
Zero-point energy comprises oscillations in all types of quantum fields and is the subject of ongoing research in theoretical physics. In part, zero-point energy arises from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle's effect on the QED field—vacuum energy—which allows for non-symmetrical virtual photon momenta (asymmetric bulges). Thus, some oscillations in the quantum electrodynamic field possess non-zero net momentum and non-zero net relativistic mass-energy before quickly vanishing. While momentum asymmetries contribute to vacuum energy, they are not required to produce Hawking radiation.
This image was created using Ashlar-Vellum's Cobalt for the 3D model, Adobe's Photoshop for the annotations, and Apple’s Preview for final color corrections.
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Thermally agitated molecule
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