Currently Making my Life Hell…

Imagine, if you will, that you’re a mechanic. Not the world’s greatest mechanic by any means, but a decent mechanic who earns a decent wage fixing and tuning cars and trucks.

One day you get a call from someone wanting you to come out and tune up their car. So you hop in your van and drive out to their address. On arrival however you discover that it’s not a car.

It’s this….

Helicarrier
Image from comicvine.com

Before you have time to react, the Captain whacks a hat on your head, says “Welcome aboard! You’re our new Head Engineer!” and drags you down to the engine room.

Which looks like this…

Engine Room
Image by Bodvar Eggertsson

Mistaking your look of horror for one of mere concern, the captain says “Don’t worry, the manuals are right here…”

Manuals
Image by _sgj_

You pick up one of the decaying books at random and open it. Every single page looks like this…

Instructions
Image by Damian Cugley

The Captain continues “All set? Your tools are over there…”

Tools
Image by Benchilada

“…and we think the forward port engine is about to fall off. Have fun!”

Through strenuous effort (and a lot of desperate banging on random pipes) you manage to keep the ship in the air. You even manage to accommodate some of the crew’s requests, such as restoring the air conditioning and halting the gradual detachment of the starboard mess hall. Buoyed by your apparent competence the crew send in a flood of new requests for things such as hot tubs and mood lighting, some of which you can manage and many of which you have to ignore.

Making matters worse, through all of this the Captain insists on a weekly meeting at Airship HQ in Zurich. Once a week you have to fly to Zurich and sit in a small room staring at a list of requests and upgrades. After about an hour the meeting is declared a success and you fly back to the airship to continue banging on pipes.

You find yourself entertaining thoughts of sabotaging the engines, or at least ignoring the more desperate maintenance tasks so the ship will fall out of the sky and (as long as you survive) you won’t have to deal with it any more. But your professionalism wins through, you take a deep breath and get on with tightening a valve that you think will correct the water pressure on deck three. Maybe.

On Spiegeltents

People will tell you that ‘spiegel’ is Dutch for ‘mirror’, and a spiegeltent is hence called because of the mirrors used to decorate it. This is untrue.

A spiegel is a cross between a spaniel and a beagle. The breed was developed in Belgium in the late 19th century and became famous for its ease of training and ability to howl in tune. Choirs of spiegels toured Europe in tents and these ‘singing dogs’ were a major attraction of the age.

Spiegel choirs fell out a favour during the rise of fascism in the 1930s, and the last of the touring companies folded at the start of the second world war. Today only the tents remain.

(Went to the Perth Fringe Festival last night with Rebecca. We ended up seeing Face the Music, which was fantastic – highly recomended. We also saw the Spiegeltent, but without the dogs we judged it not worth paying to go in…)

Dachshund Antibiotics II

About this time last year, while recovering from a badly failed holiday and probable scrub typhus, I made a post titled ‘Dachshund Antibiotics’. This was a somewhat lame pun based on the fact that I had been put on doxycycline for the typhus, and ‘doxie’ is American slang for dachshund. “Doxie-cycline” therefore equals “dachshund-antibiotics”. See?

(I said it was somewhat lame…)

In any case, my blog is apparently now quite popular among people looking for antibiotics to give to their wiener dogs – I get several of them a week in my referrer stats. Not an anticipated consequence of my pun, but an interesting one.

Anyway the reason I bring all this up is that I’m back on the doxies as a result of a case of bronchitis which has resisted two rounds of amoxicillin, even when supplemented with super-duper clavulanic acid (guaranteed to kill the trickiest of amoxicillin resistant bacteria!). I feel like hell, am coughing like an infant at a homeopathic vaccination clinic and am only at work today because we’re in the middle of a heatwave and the office has better aircon that my apartment.

Hopefully the doxycycline will cut in before my skin combusts.

Paging Saint Malachy

Well, assuming I’m not delirious (my bronchitis has returned with a vengeance) Pope Benny is going to retire at the end of the month. Time to return to the Prophecies of Saint Malachy!

In the extreme persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will sit Peter the Roman, who will nourish the sheep in many tribulations; when they are finished, the city of seven hills will be destroyed, and the dreadful judge will judge the people. The End.

Well, that’s cheerful…

(For my previous take on St Malachy back in 2005 see here and here)

Just another day at the coal face…

Client: Since you built my new website my Google rankings have tanked!
Us: OK, well if that’s true we’ll need to have a look at the structure of the site and the quality of your backlinks…
Client: No! My SEO Company says it’s because you have 70 words in my title tags and there should only be 60!
Us: Well, that’s not really the case anymore, Google takes a lot of factors into account…
Client: I’m paying them $5,000 a month so they must know what they’re talking about! I demand my money back! I demand you fix it free of charge! You don’t know what you’re doing! You should be ashamed to call yourselves a web design company!
Us: All right, give us a few days to look over the site and we’ll get back to you with a plan to address your complaints.
Client: You’d better, or I’ll sue!

We run a backlink analysis for the site. It comes back with thousands of comment spam links, over half of which are from porn sites.

Client: Well? What are you going to do to fix your mistakes on my site?
Us: Actually, as you can see from these reports your Google rank has collapsed because your site has thousands of low quality incoming links, most from comment spam and most of those from pornography sites. Google is really penalising this kind of thing nowdays.
Client: … I need to have a word with my SEO company…

As a wise man once said, there’s nothing more exhilarating than pointing out the shortcomings of others.

What If? Wyrmworld Style!

Not only is XKCD a wonderfully enjoyable webcomic, but every Thursday its author, Randal Munroe, answers crazy physics problems submitted by readers in his What If? section.

For a while now, I’ve been trying to think of something to send in, and just recently came up with one. But then I realised it was a question that I was perfectly capable of answering myself, if I got off my arse and did some research and some maths. So I did.

If all the excess carbon released into the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution was compressed into a sphere of pure diamond, how big would it be, and if it were placed into orbit would it focus a death ray of concentrated sunlight down onto the planet?

First step, how much carbon has been added to the atmosphere? According to Wikipedia about 12 Gigatons was released from 1751 to 1900, then a further 334 Gigatons from 1900 to 2008. Adding these together comes to 346 Gigatons, which is as good a figure as any. (It’s important to note that this is just the carbon – not the carbon dioxide containing the carbon. If it were the carbon dioxide we’d have to divide the weight by 3.67 to get just the weight of the carbon.)

The next step is to determine the weight to volume ratio of diamond, so we can figure out how much space 346 Gigatons of carbon would take up when arranged into its crystaline form. Some more poking around online provides a density figure for diamond of 3.52 grams per cubic centimetre. There are 1,000,000 cubic centimetres to a cubic metre and 1,000,000 grams in a ton, so the maths is nice and simple (gotta love the metric system) telling us that 1 cubic metre of diamond weighs 3.52 tons.

To get a volume for our 356 Gigatons of diamond we simply need to divide 346,000,000,000 tons by 3.52 tons – which leaves us with a volume of 98,295,454,545.45455 cubic metres, or 98.29545454545455 cubic kilometres.

So we now know just how much space our chunk of diamond takes up, but so far it’s just sitting around in a roughly shaped blob. We need to reshape it into a sphere.

The formula for the volume of a sphere is v = (4/3)πr^3, where r is the radius of said sphere. Turning this inside out we can derive r = (3v/4π)^(1/3). Plugging the volume figure in gives us a radius of 2.86296 kilometres. Doubling this for the diameter gives us sphere of pure diamond 5.72592 kilometres across – roughly the distance from New York City’s Battery Park to 33rd Street or from London’s Tower Bridge to the cafe in Hyde Park.

That’s one big diamond.

On to the second part of the question – would this diamond project a death ray? To figure this out we need to discover the focal length of the sphere – that is the distance from its centre to its focal point – the point where the light passing through the sphere is focused. The formula for this is pretty simple – EFL = nD/4(n-1) where EFL is Effective Focal Length, n is the refractive index of the material the sphere is made from, and D is the diameter of the sphere. We already know the diameter and Wikipedia assures us the refractive index of  diamond is 2.419. Solving the equation gives us a focal length of… 2.440274926004228 kilometres. Wut?

Yes folks! It turns out that the focal length of a sphere made of diamond is always less that its radius, meaning that the focal point is always inside the sphere! No death ray for you!

So in conclusion, if you could pull all the excess carbon out of the atmosphere, turn it into a diamond and launch it into orbit you would save the planet’s climate, but you couldn’t use it blackmail major population centres. Hardly seems worth it does it? 🙂

(yes, yes, you could shape the diamond into a lens instead and blackmail all the cities you want, but the maths required is just horrible ;))

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