Saturday, March 29, 2008
A slogan of Google, Inc is "do no evil". They are getting grief for some of their actions, and I'm not here to defend them. We should judge a person or corporation by their actions, no so much by what they say. PR people often pay a lot of lip service to their company being moral which may or may not be true, but instead of listening to what they claim, pay attention to their actions.
One such small action that google did today is blacken their page for energy consumption. They are already aware that a black webpage will not save any energy when displayed on the currently dominant type of monitor in use.
The blacking of the webpage does draw attention at Earth Hour, which can save a noticeable amount of electricity. I'm going to throw some numbers at this based on the following assumptions and see where it gets us:
- the average home turning off its lights, tvs, etc, saves 500W of power for one hour
- only one home in 100 might do this
- apply this to only the USA and Canada (about 330 million people)
- about 2.5 people per home
Still, this number might not mean much to most people. Instead, I'll translate this number into money. In this region of the world power is extremely cheap at about 0.06 $ per kilowatt-hour. 660, 000 kW-hr of this extremely cheap power would cost about 39.6 thousand dollars.
If we were generating 660,000 kW-hr of energy continuously over a full year, this savings would represent elminating the need for a 75.3 kW generator. That's not the size of even a moderate power generation facility, but it's not nothing. Keep in mind that this speculative estimate was only for Canada the United States of America. The worlds a lot bigger than that.
This is a token amount. It won't save the world, but shows how we can make a difference in our world power requirements if we are simply slightly more frugal. Every Watt counts.
It's a small good, but it's a good. Google, keep trying to do good. Thinking about implementing clean technology like this.
Burton MacKenZie www.burtonmackenzie.com
More Math in the Head: Simplifying the Square of a number
0 comments Posted by burton mackenzie at 2:56 AMThe other night I was out in my garage and needed to know what 75*75 is, and couldn't remember. I could always work it out by multiplying columns by hand quickly (i. e. long multiplication) but I find that when I try and do it in my head I can't remember all the numbers I need, simultaneously. To multiply larger numbers in my head I've had to learn many different methods.
One of my favourite techniques for doing multiplications in my head is using the properties of a square polynomial expansion. For instance,
Thinking of 75*75 as an unknown square with some offset away from a square I do know, I can do an easier and quicker calculation than long multiplication. For instance, if I say in the equation above that x = 80 and a = -5, I can substitute (x + a) for 75:
For me, this method requires less short term memory space so I'm able to do it in my puny brain.
What if I don't know a perfect square really close? In that case, I just jump farther and farther to one I do know.
Very often you can find a nearby "nice" (easy-to-square) number allowing you to simplify the calculation in your head.
It works easily for rational reals as well! For instance, if I needed to square 0.75, just convert it to 75, do the same algorithm, and remember where to put the decimal place in the answer. ( 0.75 * 0.75 = 0.5625 )
In previous posts I have discussed topics largely overlapping with this here, here, and here. I also have some more unrelated math-in-your-head tricks here, here, and here.
If you go looking, there's lots of interesting alternate multiplication algorithms online here, here, and here, and a bunch of other places. I have no idea if they'd fit in your head. They're not in mine yet.
Good luck!/Bonne Chance! Happy Computing!
Burton MacKenZie www.burtonmackenzie.com
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Humans can see halfway to edge of Universe ...with the Naked Eye!
0 comments Posted by burton mackenzie at 1:12 AM
On Wednesday (March 19), astronomers detected a huge gamma ray burst. It was visible to the human naked eye. The light from this explosion has been travelling towards us for 7.5 billion years. The universe is only 13.7 billion years old, which puts this explosion at over halfway to the edge of the visible universe (13.7 billion light years away from us). This is amazing...
Humans, with their naked eyes, have seen a celestial event that is halfway to the edge of the visible universe. I don't even think Superman boasted to have that kind of super-sight! Not only that, we are actually witnessing an event that happened 7.5 billion years ago - we are literally seeing into the past. [1]
It's also the brightest object (intrisically) we have ever observed in the universe. Specifically, it was 2.5 *cough* million freaking times more luminous than the brightest observed supernova. Compared to that amount of energy output, the output of our own star may as well be the equivalent of a stray spark from a burning log. It is a good thing that we don't live anyhere near it.
The words of Don Juan inspire me at times like this: "I am a candle flame burning against a cosmic background of a hundred billion suns, but I will be the best candle flame I can be."
Even more sobering, this explosion has been visible in a sphere that contains approximately 1/8 of the visible universe. There are trillions of galaxies (which each contain billions of stars and their associated planets) in the visible universe. Even if life were so rare that it only occurs once per galaxy, this celestial event may have already been witnessed by hundreds of billions of forms of extra-terrestrial life, and almost certainly caused the extinction of some of them, including intelligent ones. At least we'll have something to talk about if we ever meet aliens. [2]
As new and interesting this explosion is to us, if you believe life is possible elsewhere in the universe, please take a moment of silence to reflect about all the life in the universe, our cosmic siblings, exterminated because they were too close to this monstrous celestial event.
I hope we fare better than extermination when Betelgeuse goes supernova. We'll probably be ok ... unless its axis is directed towards us; then we die.
Burton MacKenZie www.burtonmackenzie.com
[1] One can (successfully) argue that this is true everywhere. Even light coming from a metre away travels for a measurable (and nonzero) amount of time. Seeing picoseconds into the past doesn't seem to stir the same emotion as seeing 7.5 billion years into it.
[2] the alternate ending for this post was going to be:
Us: "Hey, do you remember that huge gamma ray burst from 7.5 billion years ago?"Photo Credit: See alt text for NASA credit
Aliens: "Yeah, that really sucked."
Us: "We thought it was cool."
Aliens: "Hey man, we knew some dudes that got exterminated by it."
Us:"Sorry, dude. I was just sayin'."
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
After years on the internet, my WTF? receptor is overtaxed. ("WTF?" means literally "What the Fuck?", commonly used to express confusion or surprise) As the internet grew in size (i.e. information content), so too did its assaults on my sense of order in the world. Who can forget their feeling of WTF? at seeing their first goatse? (If you haven't seen it, don't click there. Once seen, things can't be unseen! Also don't click on tubgirl, at the end. Remember I warned you.)
Via reddit, I read a blog post titled "Philosophy is like an Erection (… the more you think about it the harder it gets)". It started out ok with "In ancient Greece (469-399 BC), Socrates was widely lauded for his wisdom...", and thought I was reading commentary on an actual historic happening. Most of the way through it, a minor WTF? detector was going off about something in the margin. A reddit comment summed it up well, "What does a rather mild joke about Socrates have to do with a Thai girl in a sailor suit and an animated gif of 'Super Hot Asian Teens'?" The internet makes me ask questions like this daily.
Our sense of WTF? has always been there, but we just didn't absorb as much information [1] in the pre-internet era. Here is a WTF? from 1980, as presented in "The Shining":
That scene always creeped me out. When I read the book I remembered the scene from the movie, and was again creeped out. If I were walking around a big scary deserted hotel by myself, turned a corner and came across this, the WTF? alarm bells in my head would be deafening. I'd probably execute a speedy 180 and run.
I think a sense of WTF? is selectively adaptive. It seems to always be a juxtaposition of the known with a detail or details that do not fit into our understanding and expectations. I argue that an early hominid noticing that there were strangers in the woods with weapons, thinking that strange and acting on it (rather than ignoring it) would tend to live longer.
A feeling of WTF? is an activation of your knowledge that something is happening in your environment that you don't understand, and may need to immediately act on - like "fight or flight". I think "wtf?" for me has reached status of emotion. It's like the first time I ever saw tubgirl - it feels kind of like being sad.
Burton MacKenZie www.burtonmackenzie.com
[1] It will be interesting to find some sort of quantitative maximum (per individual) on rate of ability to absorb information. As we get to understand the nature of net traffic in finer and finer grained details, we will likely find an average information processing and absorption rate for each person. (And I suspect a Bell Curve, as well) Information transmission and absorption on the net is merely a much more complex equivalent of using a telegraph key to send and receive morse code. With the telegraph, humans themselves acted as a codec for sending/receiving data, and people exhibited different individual transmission rates and other characteristics. From wikipedia on Telegraph Keys, "The alternating action produces a distinctive rhythm or swing which noticeably affects the operator's transmission style (known as their 'fist')." Each one of us likely has a quantitatively distinctive style of interacting with the internet. For instance, I can type faster than the letters appear on my screen. Sometimes I take a break every sentence, just to let the screen catch up. That is a quantitative measure of my information transfer rate.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
I found this enormously interesting. From Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight:
"Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another."
Go watch it. Cool is an understatement. She expresses many spiritual opinions, but they are cast in the context of her direct perceptual experience of the right brain while her left brain was incapacitated. Her first hand descriptions of having a stroke and subsequent recovery illuminate our description of our perception of consciousness.
Burton MacKenZie www.burtonmackenzie.com
Patient Readers,
I have more content on the way. I have draft posts pending more analysis and research, posts ready but the visualizations not, or only unfleshed content draft titles, but I'm running low on time. Please check back every few weeks for new content. In the meantime, please enjoy reader favourites, on one of the bars on the left ( <------ ). I'll try and get a few more posts off when I can.
Burton MacKenZie www.burtonmackenzie.com
Monday, March 10, 2008
There was a recent post to reddit.com about UPS being late because of a train derailment.
Here's a more typical reason why your package isn't arriving when you expect it (reading break!):
(click to enlarge)
