Superconducting

Room temperature superconductivity sounded great. I read the paper, and decided I couldn't comment. Some of their measurements sounded interesting, but the critical bit was a plot of voltage and current--and it didn't look flat in the central region. Almost. Was that because bits of the sample had gone superconductive and other bits in between hadn't? That demanded some experimental work, and I have neither the domain knowledge nor the facilities.

As you all probably know by now, the answer is that nobody's been able to verify it. Too bad.

The high pressure superconductivity looks interesting, though not yet very useful. The pressures required are comparable to those at the Earth's core. I wonder, might the core of some cold moon superconduct as it cooled down? If it had a magnetic field, and if the outer part of the core cooled below the critical temperature while the inner core retained its magnetic field, the Meissner effect would try to expel the field from the outer shell (probably in patches at first)--what would that do to the currents in the inner non-superconducting part of the core?

Mobs hint at something?

I ran across, but cannot give proper attribution to(*), an observation summarized as "Man loves, men hate."

A man can love, but groups of men (and women) do not; the emotion that comes most easily is hate. And fear.

It seems as though when your face vanishes in an anonymous mob, the face that shines through is that of a demon.

Maybe people can be both individuals and a collective organism. That collective could be the bride of Christ, but it looks like the default is someone else.

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(*)Quote is from Ralph Peters

Armless--or nearly so. Why?

They've found another tiny-armed dinosaur, one of the Abelisaurus-types

Those arms are relatively smaller than T-Rex's, and T-Rex's arm's look pretty useless.

When I looked at the illustration of a Carnotaurus at the first link, my first thought was "vulnerable belly."

Suppose the thing ate large critters. I don't see attacking with a biting or slashing head attack as wise--though it does have plenty of place to hang strong neck muscles on. If it's close enough for that, it's close enough for the target to get a side swipe at its belly, which might be a tad uncomfortable. It could slash with its feet, sure. Batter with its tail, sure--that'd be a pretty deadly club. But attack with its head?

This dinosaur model seems to have been a popular and successful enough that there's probably a way to use the head without risking too much, and make it a three-threat predator. The neck is long, which helps--suppose there were something like heavy scales or keratin layers on the belly. It would slow it down a tad, but ... T-Rex had "gastrailia" which they think might have helped Sue breathe, but maybe they also helped with stiffening the flesh to hold the "armor". Bone plates would be way too stiff and heavy, but "leather belt armor" might work to stave off "mule kicks". And if slashing kicks from prospective victims were a regular risk, Carny would have two options with his arms--make them big and strong enough to hold their own, or small enough to be out of the way.

Pain and Mary

I ran across the reference: Did Mary have labor pains?

The official (but not fully authoritative) word from the Catholic Church is "no". That link cites Isaiah 66:22 "Before she was in labor she gave birth; before her pain came upon her she was delivered of a son. Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things?" OK, that could be a reference--or maybe not. It doesn't cite Revelation 12:2, which is cited in other contexts to refer to Mary as Queen of Heaven, and which refers to pain in childbirth. Further, arguments like "Many Fathers of the Church and theologians down through the centuries deemed it fitting that Mary alone would be exempt from such pains as a sign of her unique holiness. Thus, Mary’s freedom from the pains of labor is one of many reasons for belief in her Immaculate Conception." are a bit circular.

I don't know. I'm not obligated to believe in the Immaculate Conception, though I will cheerfully concede that her relationship to her son was not going to be ordinary. But stipulate the doctrine for the sake of the discussion. (FWIW, the Orthodox reject the doctrine, since they don't have the doctrine of Original Sin, which, as Chesterton noticed "is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved." But they believe in a painless birth.)

What would Mary have answered if God had asked her "Would you rather have a painless childbirth, as a reminder of what Eden was supposed to be and as a promise of what will be, or would you rather share the pain your sisters do?" She wasn't going to be pain-free later (Luke 2:35). Her Son came and shared our pain.

Revelation 21-22

"There will no longer be any night." Two meanings come to mind: no more night in the sense of danger and evil ("So after receiving the morsel he went out immediately, and it was night."), and also in the sense of "party's over, go home."

On thing that has always annoyed me about large parties is that you can't be with everyone you want to. Somebody is always at the far end of the table--you can only talk with the 2 to 4 people next to you. That is the sad consequence of a table's geometry.

The New Jerusalem has some curious features--there's a river through a cubical city 1500 miles on a side (the Earth was known to be round) with the same tree on both sides of the river. I get the impression that this isn't a literal image but an impression. Lovecraft was enamored with the idea of non-Euclidean geometry to evoke alien dangers. I wonder if a different geometry might have its wonderful aspects.

Dinofeathers

I've seen a number of images recently of theropods with feathers, often fairly flamboyantly colored.

Somehow or another the creature has to keep feathers clean. Try to imagine a T-Rex preening feathers with that jaw. Even with some extra "beak" there's too much that's unreachable. The forelimbs aren't much use either. What's left?

Rolling in the dust might work if the tail was flexible enough to right himself afterwards, and it would probably have to be (everybody falls down sometime).

The forelimbs might work OK for preening another T-Rex's feathers.

If the T-Rex had significant feather-ation, I suspect he'd have to roll or else groom in groups.

No need to thank me for the mental images...

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Yes, I know that T-Rex would be too heavy to roll on feathers, exactly--thrash around would be more like it. And unless you're a pack hunter that herds prey into a trap, flamboyant colors on a predator seem like a recipe for fasting.

Lest Darkness Fall on a Connecticut Yankee

Stackexchange is a collection of different question/advice groups, some extremely technical and some speculative fandom. Lazy students sometimes try to get the pros to do their homework for them; they rarely succeed. (Pros can recognize homework-caliber problems.)

While trying to discover the source of an obscure mysql error(*), I looked at the sidebar on stackexchange and saw What could an average modern human achieve in medieval times? Those kinds of stories can be fun, but...

The advice was a crazy mixed bag. Your hero will probably die of dysentery within a month if he doesn’t starve (no immediate skills, foreigner w/out a family). Best bet is probably to get to a monastery where they are required to show some hospitality, and then try to show them something about printing or some such skill.

Quite a few commenters had very odd ideas about witches and heresy and technology, and a surprising number didn’t seem to realize that the natives would be quite skillful with their own technologies. You’re not going to make a better arrow or crossbow, or even a lighter, than they would. Given time and an adequate budget you could work up some improvements, but first you have to earn those.

Even printing. Yes, with a printer you can turn out books or pamphlets cheaper per unit, but the upfront cost is high, and they wouldn’t look as pretty—and the market you’d be starting with wanted good looking books. (Why else would monks spend so much time on fancy illustration?)

And as many noted, modern technology demands modern technological infrastructure too—you’re not going to build a useful steam engine. Toys engines you can make, if you can raise the money for them. Reliable motors, no. Remember the story about the pencil, which no single person knows how to make?

Somebody suggested "healer." Not hardly. In Africa even real doctors, who know how to set fractures and other little things our putative hero doesn’t, tend to get called on only after the local village healer fails.

If you knew how to grind smoothly you could try to make magnifiers—if you knew how to make clear glass. If you had some ham you could have some ham and eggs if you had some eggs. You could do a few interesting and useful things if you could demonstrate your bona fides and persuade them to follow you.

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(*) It turned out that a newly minted administrator had created a special job to kill off processes that were abusing the database, and his code mistook the nightly backup dump for a rogue user process.

Supertime speculation

I referred to the science fiction notion of humanity as a psychically linked collective organism in a previous post. If that were the case, we'd be one unhappy organism. When cells in your body decide to go "every man for himself" we call it cancer. And if the super-organism carried our individualist attitudes up to the next level... The world=The flesh=The devil and the church is emergency surgery.

Burning time

We took a couple of youngsters to Indian Lake Park this afternoon. They liked the trail and the views, and discovering new things. One of the signs explained that in Indian times the whole area was prairie, preserved as such by fires. When German settlers started living there they suppressed (or did not set) fires, and trees began to take over the hill--they dominate today.

We've been through a few years of drought, and though there were sporadic fires they weren't widespread. Assuming the climate was the same 200 years ago as now (not always a safe assumption), I estimate that fires would have been more than 20 years apart, which would be plenty of time to get some trees started. (Googling suggests that's a good estimate) So I'm WAG'ing that fires would have been set.

So what was their cue to toss the coals into the brush and take to the lake? Given that some of the plants could grow over 2m tall in a year, maybe it was when the grass got too high; which might be every year or every other year. It seems a drastic way to mow the lawn, but in the event it seemed to work.

Language of smells

I'd been musing on the question of whether we could more easily distinguish smells if we developed a language for them: that having words for a scent might make it easier to identify. I see a bird and think "bird" but Eldest Son notices details of plumage because he likes to identify the kinds--so he registers things I don't.

I vaguely remembered an experiment in which people were asked to track the scent of some target object dragged across a field, and were remarkably successful (though they had to go on hands and knees to do it).

So I googled for it, and as usual other things turned up. It turns out we do seem to have a good sense of smell after all, and Shepherd beat me to the speculation that we need a vocabulary: "In the enlarged processing capacity for perceiving and discriminating odors, language plays a critical role. This seems paradoxical, for we have great difficulty describing a smell in words."

I wonder how you'd go about such a thing. I guess the first step is to try to collect the work perfumers and wine tasters have done along the way and try to test some "standard scents" (concocting brand new names with minimal associations), and see how far one can get with combinations and how far one has to expand the set of "standard scents". If the set numbers more than a few hundred, only children are likely to be able to learn the new language. Which also might be interesting to look into--can children easily learn scent language?

UPDATE: 8-July-2013: See the New Yorker article about wine tasters. There's a lot of expectation in the evaluation, but we can do fairly well...

More CO2

I just thought of another source of CO2: soda. The information below is matched in other places, but I don't have a definitive reference.

The normal human body breathes to eliminate CO2, producing 200cc per minute that has to be eliminated at the same rate.

One can of soda contains up to 1000cc of dissolved CO2, most of which is absorbed into the blood stream by the intestines.

The Lungs are presented with the extra CO2 to eliminate by increased minute volume leading to increased respiratory effort.

A normal individual won't have a problem with this extra CO2, as the extra CO2 absorbed via the intestinal track will signal the central chemoreceptors to "immediately" increase the respiratory rate.

Hmm. If the CO2 is quickly absorbed then as a wild guess that would mean 10 minutes or so of increased CO2 blood levels. Does that mean 10 minutes of reduced initiative? Don't let Bloomberg hear about this aspect of "Demon Sprite!"

It wouldn't be hard to repeat their experiment with the subjects constantly sipping soda, provided the tests didn't last a long time. Blood tests of CO2 level are apparently not that easy, and drinking doesn't play well with wearing a mask to measure breath CO2 levels.