We are accelerating

I just finished "Faster" by James Glieck.

In this book he examines all of the things in day to day life that have become faster. We eat faster, we drive faster, we do more with less time... we are BUSY.

Restaurants and retail outlets crop up faster than we notice (lately they've been disappearing faster than noticeable). Computers have loosely continued to foe fill Moore's law, stating computer processor density will double every 18 months (maybe every 2 years or so now). Planes, trains and automobiles are faster than ever. In fact, historians have noticed that things don't ever get slower, always faster.

What effects could this have? what happens when a geneticist has the power to work one million times as fast as nature? what abominations could arise? Does the acceleration continue? will we ever ... chill out, relax, slowdown? I hope we can at least ease off the pedal a bit. The development of nuclear energy sure didn't last long before we managed to get ahead of ourselves (i.e. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, 3 mile Island, and of course, Chernobyl). What about runaway technology itself? It makes me wonder.

With technology almost entirely fueled and pushed by consumer demand, the question then becomes: Will we ever be satisfied? Will we ever say, enough is enough? Gotta wonder. I recommend reading: Enough, by Bill Mckibben. He touches on these issues and the social and scientific implications they have.

Well, I gotta run (ha ha) , later

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february 09, 2009 11:42am

Book Review: The Canon

The book's full title is: The Canon: A Whirligig tour through the basics of Science, Written by Natalie Angier.

This book covered a wide variety of topics on science. It started out with her basically assaulting those who don't take science seriously. At first I thought the whole book would be a giant revolting blob of complaints. Alas, it turned out to be a pretty good read. She used a lot of similies and metaphors that were so comical, I wish I would have written some of them down. Though the book is refers to the basics of science, it actually goes deeper in some areas. I dare say I learned more from this one book then my entire time at school. It helps that I'm now interested in science much more, but its still a great read.

I recommend this book because after reading it , you gain an appreciation for the world around you that money can't buy. Knowing science is unlike anything else. It is everything. A stamp collector knows about stamps, a golfer knows about golf; but a scholar of science knows something about everything. Its almost spiritual.

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february 05, 2009 07:15pm

The world is a fishing net

I think that its interesting the way that normal people perceive the world. Everything is taken for granted; I mean the really basic things: light, gravity, matter... all the simple things that our day to day lives are composed of.

The interesting thing about the world, that I've found, is that most everything is a kind of illusion almost. For instance, the light that we see is just the photons that happen to be constantly slamming into our eyes, or the electromagnetic field that repels you every time to step on the ground (instead of through it).

One of the most bizarre things that I've found has to do with atoms. They are basically composed of Electrons, which , for lack of a better word, orbit around the nucleus. And, The nucleons : Protons and Neutrons. You might remember all of this from school or who knows where, but I bet the diagram of the atom showed the electrons orbiting relatively close to the nucleus. Well, actually, the electrons are quite far away. In fact they orbit so far out that the nucleus is less that 1% of a total atoms volume while it takes up over 99.9% of its mass. So, you ask, whats in the vast space between the nucleus and its orbiting electrons? NOTHING. Thats right, so that means everything that you touch and feel is 99.9% dead space. I think of it like looking at a stalking or a really fine net. If you get up close enough, you can see that its just a mesh, but when you are far away it looks like a solid object. This is the trick or Illusion that all matter plays on us every day. It might sound like hocus pocus, but its just the way things work on such a small scale (very, very, very small).

So what keeps everything from falling into eachother? Thats what those electrons are busy doing. They make quantum leaps jumping from hear to there. I can't really say much more on that because it starts to get a little bizarre and difficult to understand. Its all in the realm of quantum mechanics. Things don't operate the way we'd expect them to, and its hard to cope with.

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january 27, 2009 04:56pm

Starting out

This is my first blog. There will be many like it, but this one is the first.

I have a lot of different things to get off my mind and this seems to be the likely place those thoughts are to end up.

Well, first I just have to give some of my quirky anecdotes that are holding me down at the moment. For instance, did you know that for every square centimeter of your body you have 100,000 bacteria ? Yummy right? that includes your eyelashes by the way. I've been reading about how life came to be, and bacteria play a most important role. They still do, of course. Those bacteria on you are good for you (mostly) keeping you healthy and alive. In fact, your actual cells (or parts of them) could actually be evolutionarily related. I don't know the specifics but it has something to do with one bacteria eating another one. The one that was eaten became the nucleus and that's (apparently) how the eukaryote cell evolved. We're all bacteria's ancestors, isn't that great? Enough about the germs, some might get a little skittish about them.

I hope that you are enjoying this website. I wish that you would take serious the notions that are evoked in some of our articles. I don't like to make everything into a serious AHHHHH!!! scenario, but it is important to be aware, and care about the world.

Thanks for reading this first blog. I'm going to have a lot of fun writing them. Hopefully I don't always get too carried away with things. Anyway, Till next time , good day.

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