Back to our roots

Before just about everything else that features prominently in my life today, there was Star Wars. To recognise that, and in honour of the ever-important upcoming day in fan culture (props if you know what it is before I post it), I give you one of my favourite fan pictures I’ve seen in a long time.

The real question becomes why Jack didn’t do this when HE saw one of those mailboxes…

Numberologics

If you go to the Digg front page right now, you may notice a number. You may also notice that every single topic on the front page of Digg is about this number. This only happened in (I believe) the past 24 hours, when Digg took something about it down due to copyright issues…because, y’know, a number can be copyrighted.

This would have to rate as one of the fastest moving internet phenomena I’ve seen in a long time.

Things I’ve done to help

A while ago I posted something about just generally being pissed off with the lack of progress regarding climate change in this country and planning to do something about it. Well, the timing of that declaration might not have been the best, what with a wedding following it and numerous other things taking up my time, but I haven’t been completely lazy. Once the current volley of work is completed I’ll be attempting to finish off my paper on the viability of various fuel sources in Australia – the numbers are done, it just needs to be typed up. Some salient points from it are that we could make huge reductions in our transport carbon emissions if the automotive companies started producing/importing E85 or, even better, E100 optimised vehicles (currently there are no E85 vehicles commerically available that I know of, and only Saab has a 9-5 optimised to take full advantage of pure ethanol in Australia); hydrogen without Gen 4 nuclear power plants is a farce; Australia’s current electricity grid could only withstand a modest amount of electric vehicles (despite their obvious benefits); and that biofuels are a better proposition here than in the US but the industry is essentially being sabotaged by the government in favour of oil and natural gas. Additionally, I’ve started up a new blog regarding these very issues which is only in the prep stage at the moment but will go live soon.

If you’re looking to save energy (and who cares if anthropogenic global warming is real or not, saving energy saves you money), here’s five small things and five big things you can do:

Switch to compact fluorescent bulbs. Pretty much any argument you’ve ever heard against them has been overcome these days – they come in a variety of light tones, brightnesses and sizes. Dimmable CFLs are on their way to Australia soon.

Get your car tuned and tires pumped up. You can save a surprising amount of fuel.

Drive less. Walk, bike, use public transport – how many times do you drive two minutes to the shops?

Vote wisely in the upcoming election. Government policies will determine the course Australia takes, so pay attention to what each party says and decide who will make the biggest difference.

Shorten your shower by a couple of minutes. Admittedly I’m not very good at this one, but it has the added benefit of saving water as well as reducing the energy required to heat the water.

Properly insulate your home. There’s no point heating a room if it’s just going to get cold as soon as you turn the heater off.

Install solar panels (or a low-profile wind turbine). Labor’s pledged a $10,000 loan to install energy-saving measures in homes, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Liberals come out with something similar. On top of that, the electricity companies pay you for putting excess energy back into the grid.

Buy a more fuel-efficient car. A diesel hatchback or hybrid is leaps and bounds ahead of your average Commodore.

Plant trees. Okay, it’s not as big as some of the other ones, but if everyone planted one tree, twenty million of them would make a difference.

Don’t fly. As much as it pains me to say it, aircraft pollute about as much per passenger-km as an average sedan, while trains are considerably less than that. This is much more viable overseas, where trains like the Maglev and the Shinkansen exist, but until Branson and Boeing get their bio-Avgas in the tanks there are cleaner alternatives.

I has a phone

After many months of struggling with my Sony Ericsson Z800i, resetting it three times a day just to be able to receive a phone call, I’ve decided it’s time we parted ways. Its replacement is the absurdly popular Nokia 6288, which is the first Nokia I’ve ever owned (I missed the Nokia craze at the turn of the century…remember when everyone in high school had a Nokia?).

So far, it’s been behaving well. Key features:

3G connectivity

2 megapixel camera

FM radio

Bluetooth and infra-red

I think I like the slide feature better than the clamshell style of the Z800. The buttons are much more responsive and easier to press, though they’re closer together. The screen is much larger and clearer, and the OS is faster in most things (with the possible exception of memory card access). Unfortunately a large screen means it’s prone to scratching (much like my iPod) and the button layout takes some getting used to, but overall it’s a big improvement. Mostly because it actually functions as a phone now.

A sense of perspective

“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

-Carl Sagan, 1996

(If I’m going to start posting here again, I might as well artificially inflate your expectations with something deep and meaningful.)

Countdown

Countdown to the Chaser. If you’re ever bored, watch it and laugh.

One more thing

And because I can’t go without serving up the finest pointless time-wasting the internet has to offer, here’s a recipe for beatboxing. I never was a good cook…

The last first

Uni’s back, for one more year. It’s a little strange to think that everything I do here will be for the last time, after having been here for four years previous to this. That said, for something that’s taken almost as much time out of my life as high school, it’s flown. It’s just all one big blur, almost like O-week happened alongside last semester’s exams. It makes me think a little about what memories I’m going to take away from here when I leave, but that’s somewhat difficult to tell when I’m still in the process of making them.

Classes are…a little lonely, I guess, as emo as that sounds. Kind of a bitter reminder that I didn’t make a particularly big effort to make new friends outside of my high school group once I got to uni, but to be fair, the people in aerospace seem to have slightly different interests to me (read: at the pub drinking). It’s disheartening to think I’m not cool enough to hang out with rocket scientists. The lack of people I know is exacerbated by my sheer lack of contact hours (about half of them involve a first year management class). This semester is pretty much all to do with the research subjects – my final year project and a “minor research project”, which is about 8000 words all up on boundary layers. The FYP at this stage is to do with using CFD to visualise three-dimensional wake instabilities (for those who know what I’m talking about, it’s a 3D extension of Karman vortex wakes) from non-circular cylinders, but that may change depending on what happens Monday. I’m trying to get into another project which involves full-scale wind tunnel testing of Ford vehicles (industry-based project rather than uni-based), which would be a decent consolation prize for the whole co-op fiasco last year.

There’s also the small event happening in about two weeks (how can it be that soon already), which we are very nearly prepared for. My parents have been so incredibly supportive of everything, it would simply be impossible without them. It’s a huge shift in our lives, but at the same time, very little of the day-to-day things really change as a result of it. Probably the biggest change will be not having to worry about planning it anymore.

Erm…that’s it, I guess. Kind of a long update about my life, but hey, it’s been a while.

A puzzle for you all

This is an older one, but a good one, and the responses I’ve seen to it have me intrigued. I want to see how you guys interpret it:

“Imagine a plane is sitting on a massive conveyor belt, as wide and as long as a runway. The conveyer belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. Can the plane take off?”

This is one of the more prevalent ways of asking the question, because it is how it appeared in the New York Times, but it also confuses the issue somewhat because of its wording. Assume, for the moment, that the wheels have frictionless bearings. I have an answer I’m fairly certain is correct, but I want to see if anyone else wants to venture an opinion first. Anyone game?

Alcohol + driving = good

I’d all but given up on ethanol in this country, but lo and behold, I’ve been behind the times. I found an entire chain of petrol stations (United) that sell E10 (10% ethanol, 90% ULP) for a few cents less than the going rate for standard RON 91 ULP. It’s not much, but it’s a start, and I’m surprised that more places don’t offer it given its benefits. There was a lot of anti-ethanol rhetoric flying around a few years back, so for the sake of full disclosure, here’s the key points regarding booze fuel:

It boosts the octane rating of the fuel (E10 is, in this case, 95 octane)

Any car can use E10 or under

Flex-fuel vehicles, such as most sold in the US, can use up to E85

Australia, unlike the US, has a much better capacity to produce ethanol: sugarcane produces twice as much ethanol per hectare than corn and has a far lower requirement for it

Using best practice methods, ethanol has a energy return greater than 1 (i.e. it replaces more fuel than is used in its creation)

Biodiesel’s still better by a significant margin, but at least in Australia, ethanol’s viable as an additive or even as a majority ingredient. It doesn’t make sense for us to have such limited access to it.

On a slightly related note, I’ve finally finished most of the calculations for the paper I’m writing, so now comes the fun part of actually writing it up. Hopefully I haven’t made any stupid multiplication errors or something in it, I’ll post up a draft version once it’s written. Surprising sneak peek: battery, plug-in hybrids and especially electrolysis-produced hydrogen would put far more strain on the grid than renewable energy like solar or wind would be able to supplement should the whole of Australia’s light vehicle fleet be replaced.