Robot with Laser-Blaster Going to Mars Next Year

Asteroid discoveries

Pro doing software development in real-time

It's interesting to me to watch a modern professional doing software development in real-time. This image is from a Google presentation (which looks like it happened on their campus, on some lawn) showing their new 'Google AppEngine' (or some such name).

Now what the guy blazed through in just setting it up - using TextMate and setting up Python and running a "Hello World" on Firefox - that's what I would like to learn. All the little stuff that's second nature to him and his audience and that books don't really describe, because it's a combination of various bits that work together, whereas books concentrate on just the parts (Python, or Firefox, or TextMate) and don't tell you how to put it all together from the get-go. I guess what I really want is a computer pro to sit next to me and tell me everything I want to know about programming. I want the hodgepodge approach that suits me. But I ain't gonna get that, am I?

Real Studio Tutorial over; Chapter 2 of User Guide begins...

Now this is nice. I've been waiting for some entity to mention intelligently how programming has changed. And here in Chapter 2 of this User's Guide, I found a proper acknowledgement, clearly stated.

Before computers used graphical user interfaces, applications ran by simply executing a series of programming code statements starting with the first statement and ending with the last. Interfaces were all character-based. A menu was just a numbered list of commands that the user selects from to instruct the application to do a task. Most of the time, the application was just sitting there waiting for the user to make up his mind. When the user finally chose a command (perhaps by selecting the number next to the menu item and pressing the Enter key) the application would take whatever action was associated with the chosen command. When the user pressed the Enter key, an event occurred. In other words, something happened to which the application can respond. Now that desktop computers use a graphical user interface, users have a far more intuitive way to interact with applications...

Ah. That feels good. I swear I haven't come across that simple sentiment in all my trolling of the software world over the last decade.  I, and I know many others like me, felt completely abandoned when simple programs like BASIC and Fortran were tossed in favor of Bill Gates and his "Windows" concept. F Bill Gates! is a common sentiment among my mental kin. He and Microsoft cavalierly destroyed all the fun we were having, and created a disgusting, fetid, stinking monopoly in the doing.

I'm becoming more and more glad I bought Real Studio. (And no, I am not an employee.) Of course, it could be that there are dozens of other kits (?) that do the same thing. (Am I supposed to call it a "development suite" or some such? Fuck that.)

Simple BASIC!  How I have missed you! Real Studio/User's Guide/Chapter 2, here I come.

Cetane, the special hydrocarbon

Cetane is one of the more interesting hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons as you likely know are chains of carbon atoms surrounded by hydrogen atoms, and to do that you need twice the number of hydrogens as carbons, plus two more hydrogens to stick on each end of the chain.

Cetane is the 16-carbon hydrocarbon (and therefore has 32 plus 2, or 34, hydrogens). Interestingly, C16H34 (chemical formula for cetane) is used as the reference hydrocarbon to assign a quality measurement for diesel fuels. Diesel fuels are rated by their "cetane number," just as regular gas is rated by its "octane number." (Octane is the 8-carbon hydrocarbon, C8H18.)

Why do I find this interesting? First off, it's exactly double the number of carbons as octane. That makes me think that what's going on in the engine with the fuel is a series of snapping these chains in half over and over again until you get single-carbon bits that come out as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide or perhaps unburned methane. 16-carbon chains blast into 8's, and they blast into 4's, which break into 2's, which break into singles.

Second, I read in wikipedia that diesel fuel is thicker than regular gas, which makes sense if the chains it contains are longer.

Interesting bit 3: the chemically scientific name for this is not cetane, but hexadecane, because "hexadec~" means 16. But why should that be???

THAT, is the most interesting bit of of all. It's called cetane because of the word "cetus," which means whales or dolphins, because it was found to be the main component of whale oil!  So, it got its name BEFORE all the chemically scientific hydrocarbon names came out: methane, ethane, propane, butane, pentane, hexane, etc. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.)  I had wondered how it got such a simple name, how it rose above the rest so to speak.

And why did I get interested in this? I'm thinking of buying a car, and one I saw that I liked is a diesel, and so I wikipedia'd that because I was curious, and wikipedia told me diesel is rated by "cetane number," and that is one "~ane" I had not come across before, which puzzled me.  God I love science.

Real Studio Tutorial continues...

So I went through 2 tutorials with my new Real Studio software. There was some BASIC-style coding at the end of the second one. But it's all that wrapping that you have to set up that's always bugged me about learning non-procedural programming. I guess it's not that bad though - this is like my second or third attempt at coding after BASIC and FORTRAN went obsolete.

I kind of like the "dot notation" that goes on now.  That's alright. Stuff like "ConnectURL.Enabled=True", "ListURLlistbox.text", or "Window1.ListURLlistbox.CellBackgroundPaint".

Still, I'm waiting to get to a place where I can just free code.  All I want is control of the computer screen to put images on, like a screensaver. I really don't give a crap about all these windows and buttons and text fields and list boxes. But that is where the computing world has gone in my decades-long absence. (As a cell phone network engineer, I didn't code anything. The closest I got was making parameter changes to the software that ran a cell site - things like the signal power coming out of the antennas, or the hysteresis values that controlled when handoffs would occur.)

What I want to do is control IMAGES. Scientific and mathematical images. That's all.  (Maybe I should have bought Mathematica, but that's a thousand dollar item, and this was a hundred dollar item. I had to start somewhere, right?)

Computer frustration hope?

So, I got my Real Studio, and, I've got to admit, I'm getting some hope.  At first there was the standard tutorial about building a browser and pushbuttons and captions and all that bullshit. Me, I just want to program code again!  Also, it turns out it was downloadable. One of the 3 emails they sent was for "license keys" and clicking the link there brought me to their site from which I downloaded the .dmg (Yes, I'm mostly using Mac for the time being) Here's the splash screen:

And here is the app their tutorial had me build.  (I made it ugly just to know it was mine:)
Before:

During:

and After:

But I can see hints that this wrapping stuff is just some necessary first steps before the coding comes in.

I can't wait to program again!  :)

Computer Frustration

There's a lot I want to put in here, or somewhere. Conceptions of mine regarding science and math, but it's frustrating because all the computer tools seem so ridiculously complicated.

For example, I used to program in BASIC (and Fortran) back in the 1980's and 90's. I loved writing programs using the Random function (RND did the trick) making simple animations. I had one I called Squirrelly or Worms. It was just differently colored circles on the black background of the computer monitor. It was probably 20-30 lines of code in all, and I ran it from DOS. Does anyone remember the good old days of DOS? To do that program today would probably take over a hundred lines of code because programs today are object-oriented bullshit (OOB), instead of what I guess they are now calling in hindsight "procedural programming."  I guess, because all these terms are like a fog to me. A fog of bullshit. (Will blogger allow 'bullshit'?  I guess I'll find out.)

So here I am with good ideas spinning around in my head, and I can get them down with good old paper and pen or pencil (GOPAPOP), but I get continually frustrated at how to simply put them online. I mean Microsoft Office doesn't even have Paint anymore! At least not on my Mac. I got a nice big-screened Mac in 2007 after getting eternally frustrated with the machinations of Microsoft and their Vista bullshit and endless upgrades. I've got to admit though, Macintosh is not the nirvana I'd hoped it might be. (Though this 24" screen is great for watching Netflix Instant Watch!)

I just put down $100 for something called "Real Studio," and I'm waiting for it to arrive in the mail. Not sure why they didn't just download it to me. I've also been considering buying a Wacom or Bamboo tablet. I use a program called "Grapher" that came with this Mac, but what I really would like is if I could program it a bit to give me hundreds of related graphs, and then stick those in an animation program. Christ, I know other people can do this, but I can't find them to tell me. And the people that work at the Apple store down the street are not that helpful.

I also had hope when I discovered gif's, and I got one to work after using a program called GIFfun, but then it stopped working.  I read somewhere that gif's are in competition with png's - something to do with copyright. Lord, I hate copyright. Check out this blog for a little on that. Originally copyright was intended to stop people from printing and selling books written by other people for a period of 14 years. Period. 14 years, no more. Now we got f'ng Mickey Mouse protected for the foreseeable (or even unforeseeable!) future, even though Uncle Walt's been worm-food for decades. Absolutely f'ng ridiculous. I'd like to shoot Mickey Mouse in the head.

Doctors (M.D.'s) and radiation

Here are two excerpts from an interesting pair of articles that appeared in the New York Times recently.  In one, they tell of patients all over the country getting radically overdosed by hospitals that x-rayed their heads for a computerized tomography scan (CT scan), leading to hair loss where the x-rays entered their heads, and, more to the point, possible brain tumors down the road from the radiation damage; in the other, they tell of medical schools beginning to waive the science requirements for admission, because they are just too hard for some of the doctor wannabes, many of whom are children of doctors or hospital executives. One of them just didn't want to "waste a class on physics." Another, Kathryn Friedman, has 3 relatives high up at Mt. Sinai Medical Center. 

The Radiation Boom: After Stroke Scans, Patients Face Serious Health Risks 

By Walt Bogdanich

Published: July 31, 2010

When Alain Reyes’s hair suddenly fell out in a freakish band circling his head, he was not the only one worried about his health. His co-workers at a shipping company avoided him, and his boss sent him home, fearing he had a contagious disease.  

Only later would Mr. Reyes learn what had caused him so much physical and emotional grief: he had received a radiation overdose during a test for a stroke at a hospital in Glendale, Calif.
Other patients getting the procedure, called a CT brain perfusion scan, were being overdosed, too — 37 of them just up the freeway at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, 269 more at the renowned Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and dozens more at a hospital in Huntsville, Ala. 

Getting Into Med School Without Hard Sciences

By Anemona Hartcollis

Published: July 29, 2010

...“The default pathway is: Well, how did they do on the MCAT? How did they do on organic chemistry? What was their grade-point average?” ... “That excludes a lot of kids,” said Dr. Kase, who founded the Mount Sinai program in 1987 when he was dean of the medical school...

“You have to have the proper amount of moral courage to say ‘O.K., we’re going to skip over a lot of the huge barriers to a lot of our students,’ ” said Dr. David Battinelli, senior associate dean for education at Hofstra University School of Medicine. 

... [The students] forgo organic chemistry, physics and calculus...They are exempt from the MCAT.

Among the current crop is Ms. Adler, 21, a senior at Brown studying global political economy and majoring in development studies. Ms. Adler said she was inspired by her freshman study abroad in Africa. “I didn’t want to waste a class on physics, or waste a class on orgo,” she said.

A classmate in the program [is] Kathryn Friedman, 21, ... a senior, majoring in political science. Her mother and uncle are doctors at Mount Sinai; her father, Robert Friedman, who works in the entertainment business, is on the Mount Sinai Medical Center board.

The humanities program has allowed her to pursue other interests, like playing varsity tennis and going abroad, she said. 

 

Apparently for many people we share this world with, the laws of science are just an obstacle, and damn the consequences.

 

Planetary alignment happening NOW

For the next few weeks, there's quite an amazing visual spectacle happening in space, an astronomical event more rare than a lunar or solar eclipse. All the visible planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) are lining up. (Were the Mayans off by a couple of years?)










These images are the same except the planet names are given in the image above. Earth is the blue dot. (They are from Sky View Cafe, an excellent site created by Kerry Shetline.)

The moon even joined in on July 12-16, and it will be even closer from August 10-13! And it's a new moon, so it won't be outshining the others. Nice of it. Just find yourself a good place to view the sun setting on the horizon, around 15 minutes before sunset to an hour after. Jupiter will rise in the East just as these planets set in the West.

And where are they pointing to? The constellations Virgo on the Saturn side and Pisces on the Jupiter side. And considering the center of the galaxy is in Sagittarius, smack dab between Pisces and Virgo, this is a pretty interesting lineup. Mercury will be the first planet to leave the apparition as it fades in brightness, around August 17th.  Enjoy! (Because I'm pretty sure you'll have passed on by the time this happens again.)  :)  :)

The energy of FIRE

Loosely crumpled newspaper tossed on a fire, or perhaps only embers. It burns hugely bright and blinds, but lasts only half a minute. A big release of lots of energy, bright and colorful. Myriad rearrangements of the weirdly manifested numbers 1, 6, and 8. Cellulose becomes smoke, steam, gas, and ash.

Electron miscrope picture of paper (almost pure cellulose)

Paper and wood are made of cellulose, long chains of 1's, 6's, and 8's (Hydrogens, Carbons, and Oxygens) along with a scattering of other atoms. In the corners above that don't have a letter there are carbons (elsewhere designated 'C'). (The ultimate abbreviation - no lettering at all!)

The leftover ash has a lot of this in it:

Calcium Carbonate. So many oxygens left behind! The greens are 20-proton Calciums (oddly smaller than the others considering that they have substantially more protons, but there is a reason), the reds are 8-proton Oxygens, and the mostly hidden blacks making up the skeleton of this chunky thing are 6-proton Carbons, truly the building blocks of living matter.  A nice picture. It's from Wikipedia (2010 Jul 28; File:Calcium-carbonate-xtal-3D-vdW.png; author CCoil).
Some theories suggest that life could have been 14-Silicon-based instead of 6-Carbon-based, but all the life we know of uses carbon for its framework. (Thank you Star Trek - Episode ?)