Illuminating Reality

I’ve often said that technology is the great anachronism.  What I mean by that is that technology identifies a period in time better than anything else.  Anything that has a “style” attached to it, be it clothing, architecture or even language, would seem an obvious choice for an anachronism, but those things have a tendency to change and return in various forms, being cyclical in nature.  Technology on the other hand rarely, if ever, takes a step back.  When we look at a picture of an artist in his home with an early Macintosh, we can pretty much assume it’s from the mid-80s just the same way we can look at a picture of a person talking on brick of a car phone with the curled cord going into the console and say “early 90s.”

Personally, I think it’s when a technology that has become such a staple of modern life becomes obsolete, that’s when we really notice what I’m talking about.  For example,  from 2000 to 2010, several stalwart technologies we’d all grown up around more or less disappeared.  Who uses phone books now?  When was the last time you bought a CD in a store?  Or had a land line installed in your home?  Or best of all, used a phone booth on the streets, let alone see one in operation?

The Huffington Post has a great gallery of technology that became obsolete in this decade…

This is a bit old but quite good footage worth talking about…

The Yarmouk Traffic Circle was a particularly bad location in Mosul when I was there in 2004-2005, often the site of some bad ambushes by the bad guys as well as IEDs.  In this video, special operations aviation is doing gun and rocket runs on targets in the area.   You’ll notice that they have a pattern to their runs:  miniguns, cannon, then rockets.

The DAP is the brainchild of famed Nightstalker Cliff Walcott, who died in Operation Gothic Serpent in Somalia.  Up until that point, the only attack helicopters used by the 160 Special Operations Aviation Regiment were AH-6 Littlebirds, armed with 7.62mm miniguns and 2.75″ rockets.  While agile and capable, the AH-6s don’t have the range nor the payload for sustained fire support missions, so operations that required heavier support relied on coordinating with conventional AH-64 Apache elements.  The compartmentalized nature of special operations often made this difficult, so it was determined that an “intermediate level” attack capability for the 160th was required.  The DAP was born out of this requirement by taking an MH-60, special operations variant of the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, and fitting it for attack purposes.

MH-60s normally mount 7.62mm miniguns on door mounts to provide defensive fire when ferrying troops to and from targets.  Because the DAPs mission is purely offensive, the miniguns are locked forward firing and hard points are mounted to the fuselage allowing a wide variety of munitions.  The most common configuration is large 2.75″ rocket pods (larger than the ones carried by the AH-6) and a 30mm chain gun (the same used on the Apache gunship).  This is what is seen in the video with the forward mounted miniguns roaring onto the target followed by the 30mm chaingun and rockets.  DAPs can also mount Hellfire laser guided missiles for longer range precision standoff capability as well as Stinger missiles for anti-aircraft needs.

There’s a similar video out there of DAPs doing runs near the MAF (Mosul Airfield) at “Gilligan’s Island.”  There aren’t any active targets in that video – it’s more a series of practice runs or a “show of force” on the south side of the runway in a wide open area bad guys liked to setup mortars in.

Did you know that gravity is a bit of a mystery to scientists?  Given that we have space probes orbiting Saturn and Mars right now, you’d think it would be well understood, but the reality is it’s the most mysterious of the Four Fundamental Forces of Nature.   Mathematically it’s well understood and can be calculated with great precision, yet it’s so weak compared to the other forces, all of which are roughly comparable to each other.  How weak? Try – 10⁴⁰ weaker than the electromagnetic force, in other words:

0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000001 times as strong

Don’t believe me? Ever notice that you can pick up a paper clip with a refrigerator magnet, which is pretty weak, with relative ease?  The gravity from the entire mass of the Earth is being defeated by that little magnet, which seems so unintuitive and bizarre, doesn’t it?

The Four Fundamental Forces of Nature, according to the Standard Model, are Electromagnetism,  Strong Nuclear Force, Weak Nuclear Force and Gravity.  This isn’t speculation either – the Standard Model is one of the greatest achievements in Science, forming the backbone of modern physics and it works exceptionally well.

These forces interact with matter via carrier particles (aka bosons) and have a finite range to their interaction – except gravity.  To this day there is no known force carrier particle for gravity (they’ve been theoretically dubbed “gravitons”); it can’t be absorbed or shielded like the other forces; it has an unlimited range and it’s behavior is always attractive in nature; it’s somehow tied to the mass of objects in that it interacts with every particle that has mass.

Understanding gravity has been a long and storied endeavor, but it was Sir Issac Newton who made the first significant breakthrough when he published his Principa Mathematica in the 17th Century, wherein he described his universal law of gravitation.  His simple equation was highly accurate at calculating the motion of everything from objects falling out of a tree to the orbit of planets.  His work survived for two hundred years as the dominant theory of gravity until Einstein came along in 1905 and fundamentally changed the way we think of gravity.

Part of the problem was that there was no known mechanism for gravity.  It’s effects could be calculated, but it wasn’t clear how, for example, the Sun reach out to the Earth, across 93 million miles of empty space and tugged on it.  Einstein wondered if the Sun disappeared, how would the Earth know?  In other words, how did the force actually work to travel that distance?  Part of the problem it turns out was that we were thinking of Gravity in the same way we thought of the other known force at the time: electromagnetism.  Einstein radically overturned Newton by defining gravity not as a typical force but as curvature of space itself.  When Einstein published his Theory of Relativity ushered in a new age of physics, solving many of the outstanding problems of Newton’s theory – mainly that because gravity distorts space, the Sun reaches out to the Earth through that distortion to pull the Earth inward.

Einstein’s theory was confirmed  in many areas such as resolving the long standing anomaly with Mercury’s orbit that Newton’s theory couldn’t account for as well as the observed phenomenon of light being refracted by the mass of the Sun during a total eclipse.  Like any good theory, Einstein’s work makes lots of testable predictions that have been observed over the years, but around the same time he was getting lots of attention in the world, the world of atoms was slowly being revealed and it required a new kind of physics to describe.

Quantum Mechanics is to sub-atomic particles what General Relativity is to the orbit of planets.  It’s the physics that accurately models the way atoms and sub-atomic particles interact and has been tested to a high degree of accuracy as well.  There is a really big problem though: Quantum Mechanics does not jibe well with General Relativity.  Physicists tried using Einstein’s equations to model the interactions of molecules and atoms to find that as you get down to those very small scales, everything starts to fall apart and you get gravitational values of infinity (psst, that’s a sign there’s a problem with your theory).

So General Relativity is shown repeatedly to be correct on large scales and Quantum Mechanics is shown to be accurate the same way at the sub-atomic scale – what gives?  Gravity is messing things up in a big way or should I say our incomplete understanding of gravity is messing things up.  Finding an accurate quantum-scale model of gravity has been an elusive quest for physicists.  Some of the ongoing attempts include Loop Quantum Gravity*and String Theory, both of which are so theoretical that they currently can’t be tested in the first place.

This is why the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)  is particularly exciting to physicists.  It’s hoped that when it’s operating at full power, the LHC will be able to expose the innards of the sub-atomic world at an energy scale never before witnessed.  This could be the very device that detects gravitons, the theoretical force carrier for gravity or the Higgs boson which is theorized to give particles mass (remember, gravity is related to mass).  Exciting stuff!

So gravity remains a mystery for now; something we understand well enough to calculate its behavior extremely accurately, but mysterious enough that its mechanism remains elusive.

* Read Lee Smolin’s “Three Roads to Quantum Gravity” for an introduction to the theory…have aspirin handy.

Before there was Paul Blart, there was Gecko45…

This is a collection of the wisdom posted on the internet by a guy calling himself Gecko45. It all started back at the end of the halcyon summer of 2001, and his posts have created a certain urban legend that many refer to as the Mall Ninja. Hang out at any gun shop, gun show or shooting match and you’ll see one of these guys; you might even see a group of them since they are known to associate in the wild.

The Mall Ninja is easily distinguished by an abundance of “tactical” gear, such as fatigues, a thigh holster (with, of course, a Glock), combat boots, bandolier and other accouterments that you’d usually only see on a SWAT operative. Median age is usually 19-25, and they tend to boast about their various exploits with certain Special Forces units, all of which they’re too young and idiotic to have joined (real Special Forces types don’t brag). They typically have opinions on everything, regardless of expertise, they are uniformly poor shots, and they tend to exhibit a frightening lack of safety training.

For further enjoyment, enter the  Shrine of the Mall Ninja…

One hundred fifty years ago today, Charles Darwin published one of the most important publications in all of Science – “On the Origin of Species.”  Darwin had been developing his scientific theory of evolution by natural selection for a number of years based on evidence gathered from around the world, particularly his excursion in the Galapagos Islands.  If his theory was correct, it would challenge the very fabric of our understanding of life on Earth, something that he wisely didn’t take too lightly in the 17th Century.

In the decades that followed, Darwin was attacked and ridiculed particularly by the Church of England, but in the scientific community he was supported and eventually lauded for his work.  But for the man himself, who was once firmly entrenched in a religious life, the results of his work led him to more secular beliefs which deeply conflicted with those of his wife.  It’s ironic that in many ways Darwin was exploring biology to help confirm his religious beliefs yet in the end the results he could not deny ended up pushing him to adopt agnosticism.

So as much as “On the Origin of Species” is a scientific triumph, a scientific theory that has become the foundation of modern Biology and been confirmed by many independent fields (genetics, for example), it is also seen as a key publication in the eyes of the atheists, agnostics and secular humanists.  They see it as the first major attempt to push back against theology in the post-Enlightenment era.

I think Richard Dawkins summed up the importance of Darwin’s book when he wrote, “Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over 300,000 million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.”

Galaxy Zoo,  just kicked off a new project: mergers!  For those unfamiliar with Galaxy Zoo, it’s a project started a couple years ago that takes data from the robotic Sloan Digital Sky Survey and distributes it online.  Using an applet, users can look at a galaxy and use tools to identify its features and classify it.  For a detailed explanation of Galaxy Zoo, read The Story So Far.

Earlier this year the Galaxy Zoo team attempted to start a new project to identify supernovae, but it had a few hiccups and was put back in development.  However, today they rolled out a new project that allows us to help them identify and classify galactic mergers.  These are some of the most beautiful objects in the Universe, when two or more galaxies are drawn together and fling apart and then together as their constituents are ripped by tidal forces.  It looks violent, but there’s literally so much space between stars in a galaxy that few if any ever actually collide as a result.  What I find really cool about this new project is that the applet identifies a merger, then runs a series of quick 2D simulations of galactic mergers with different parameters.  We look at the results and see if any of these match the look of the actual galaxy.  If a match is found, then it helps explain the initial conditions that lead to the merger.

Neat stuff! Join in and help out!

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN successfully collided two proton beams yesterday!  Yes, we are still here – the Earth hasn’t been destroyed by a black hole or created a rift in the space/time continuum.  This has been a long time coming, especially after the setbacks of the last year – first with a superconducting magnet failure and more recently with a mischievous bird dropping pieces of baguette in vulnerable areas.

That picture over there is part of the detection display at the  CMS experiment (click the image to see the full display).   Where those green lines converge in the center is the point of collision.  The green lines shooting out are tracks of unstable, charged pions as they fly to the detector strips in the device (the yellow rectangles).  The red and blue boxes show where the energy was detected and that’s key to these experiments.  At higher and higher energies, particle collisions tend to reveal their “guts” in more detail and the LHC will be operating at the highest energies we’ve ever collided particles with.

Exciting times ahead!

A year ago this month, members of the large Pakistani militant organization Lashkar-e-Taiba attacked several sites in Mumbai, India.  For the most part, their 173 victims were random civilians located at two upscale hotels, a bar as well as a hospital.  The attack unfolded in realtime on television and via the internet and sowed tremendous confusion amongst the people of Mumbai and the security services.

Recently a documentary was released that covered the attacks in detail.  I found it particularly interesting to see how unprepared the Indian security services were as well as how the attackers were “controlled” by their leaders in Pakistan.  It’s almost chilling to listen to them commanding the murder of innocent people without any sort of emotion.  The attackers were rather run-of-the-mill Muslims from Pakistan, not hardened fighters nor anti-social or psychotic.   They just maintained an intense belief in what they were doing and quite obviously planned to die in the process in classic martyr style.

It’s an interesting look into the jihadist mindset…

Veteran’s Day is celebrated in the United States on November 11th, but this wasn’t always the case.  In fact, it’s origin can be found back in 1919, after World War 1 ended, as Armistice Day.  That war ended when the Germans signed the Armistice at the 11th hour on the 11th day of November, 1918 – so President Wilson proclaimed Armistice Day to commemorate that day.

This all changed in 1953 when a Kansas shoe store owner made a push to expand it to encompass all veterans in all of America’s wars.  The cause was promoted by various groups and turned into a bill that was pushed through Congress.  President Eisenhower signed the bill in 1954, creating Veterans Day as the national holiday that we know.  Between 1971 and 1978 it was moved to the fourth Monday of October to comply with the Uniform Monday Holiday Act.

In 2006, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs was inspired by seeing civilians wearing their medals on ANZAC day in Australia.  He urged American veterans to do the same on Veterans Day and so on this day you may be served your coffee by a young man wearing an Operation Iraqi Freedom campaign ribbon. We are everywhere and we are proud.

Happy Veterans Day!

NASA has officially told the gullible “no, the world isn’t coming to an end in 2012″.  As if they really needed to say that; it should be obvious to anyone with even a slightly skeptical mindset.  Of course there’s been a long history of doomsday scenarios being spread by word of mouth from ancient times up until even recently.  Remember Y2K?  Doesn’t it make you wonder why people still fall for this shit when every single one of those predictions has been wrong?  The pervasiveness of the Internet seems to have made the “word of mouth” part a lot faster and easier to propagate internationally.  The latest doom and gloom scenario involves the last day of the Mayan calender, predicted to be in December of 2012. “The Mayan calendar ends so the world comes to an end – the Mayan’s knew something we didn’t!” On this date countless maladies have been predicted by people who haven’t asked one simple question: how does the Mayan calendar work?  Because if they had they’d know that like our Gregorian calendar, when you get to the last day of the year – you just start over again.

Now Roland Emmerich’s new disaster blockbuster hits theaters this Friday and the subject is just that: the end of the world in 2012.  First off, I want to congratulate my friends Marc and Volker for producing and supervising one hell of a visual effects movie and to the many artists I know who have worked on this effects animator’s dream project.  Okay, with that out of the way I’d like to ask you if you think there are lots of people who actually believe the kinds of things you see in this movie are going to happen in 2012?  Yes, people really are fucking idiots and will leap to the most unreasonable conclusions while dismissing the conclusions drawn by experts (aka the scientists).

It’s so bad that NASA has put out a press release basically debunking the whole notion that the world is coming to an end in 2012.  No, there is no crazy planetary alignment and if there were it wouldn’t do anything special.  This reminds me of the bullshit CERN had to go through with the LHC, calming people’s fears that it wasn’t going to destroy the Earth.  No, there isn’t a rogue planet zooming by us any time soon.  No, the magnetic poles flipping wouldn’t cause widespread catastrophe.  I guess people really want to feel like they’re in on something no one else knows about?  Or maybe they want to feel like they know more about something than the average person?  This is a perfect case of the Dunning-Kruger Effect but could easily be remedied by a little science education.

Sigh.

Now, please go see “2012″ this weekend and support the visual effects industry