Theft deterent for power lines

In Southbend, Indiana some moron had to be rushed to hospital after he tried to steal a power line of all things. There’s been a string of slightly more successful thefts near Reno. Two people were arrested in Moore county for stealing power lines. Sure, copper is getting expensive, but power lines are dangerous things to play with, often lethal. With that sort of natural protection, what can be done to further protect power lines? It feels kind of like dealing with suicide bombers, only they’re not motivated by some sense of higher purpose.

Space Travel for the Current Day Man

This is inspired by some nutcase on the radio talking about developing faster than light space travel using a bunch of fancy buzz words and analogies. He talks about there being three strata that slow moving objects. The three being air, water and space. Air and water at mach numbers of bellow 0.3 behave the same. Above 0.3, air starts doing some neat stuff, water… As of yet, I haven’t learnt much about super sonic liquid flows because liquids have really high speeds of sound. I assume they’d still compress, but differently than gasses. Anyway, that’s besides the point. This kook is talking about how the astroid belt is going to be a major obsticle and says that the oort cloud will be even worse. I also heard a few things about crushing space travelers while trying to turn to avoid things.
So to start with, we have sent numerous things beyond the astroid belt. Voyager 1 and 2 being two of the more well known objects. This was done at a time where we simply didn’t have the computing power we do now. Checking for potential astroid collisions would have been a painfully long and tedious task. Designing the space craft to detect and navigate around astroids would mean that it would have to carry a large amount of fuel and be really heavy. Sending a large number and hoping a few get through is simply sheer lunacy. Only two were launched and two made it through. On the cosmic scale, there are a large number of objects there. In a practical hands on sense, take a bag of marbles and scatter over a large area. Use your town, your country, even your continent if you have to. On this planet, you simply can’t create a representation of the astroid belt with a bag of marbles. They need to be spaced much, much further. The volume of the astroid belt is simply enormous.
I suppose the second thing to talk about with faster than light interstellar travel is where do you want to go. The astroid belt, like most of our solar system, is roughly planar. Going to most stars, we can simply blast the space craft in that direction and ignore all the bodies in our solar system because it’s like lifting the needle off a record, go a little bit in one direction and you quit running into grooves.
Finally, for the day that we might eventually start traveling to other stars, never turn your space ship to avoid something. The only time you turn a space craft is because something, like a planet, is pulling you towards it. If you want to avoid a collision, thrust at a right angle from the path of the object you wish to avoid. The acceleration you need is minimal and the energy required is much much less than turning. A space craft in isolation can accelerate in any direction or rotate in any way. Turning is nonsense.

Hmm… what category to file this in? I guess “does not compute” works best. It’s a little early to make a tech project out of this. As for the world, if we do start travling to other stars using faster than light travel, it could eventually become common place enough for people to wonder how collisions are avoided. Too early for that now though.

Less Social Spending, More Tax Credits

We’re paying down a large porition of the federal debt, spending cut backs were announced and there’s also more tax credits. Tax credits for things like fitness. I can see how the programs were useful. I can also see the motivation for the tax credits. Personally though, I don’t like tax deductions and tax credits. Lets face it, income tax isn’t a very simple system. The more you know about it, the more you can save. Administering social programs aren’t exactly cheaper or easier, but at least we don’t all have to deal with it. If income tax really must persist, I’d like to see this thing eventually reduced into something that can be done on a single sheet of paper. Preferably with all the instructions one would ever need on the back. I just think it would be better than having large numbers deductions to encourage people to do things.

The Source for Illegal Guns

A gun amnesty program was announced and people have been complaining that it isn’t going to do anything. Usually people who use these programs inherit guns from relatives and don’t want anything to do with them. It’s never the criminals turning their weapons in. I find the suggestion that police try to find the source of illegal guns instead. Lets find this mysterious illegal gun factory that’s churning out all the guns used by criminals and shut it down. While we’re at it, lets catelog all the patents that were violated and see if the patent holders will help out. All the guns are such stunning reproductions that we refer to them as if they were the real thing.
Somehow, I don’t think there’s a mysterious illegal gun factory somewhere. It sounds much more likely that crminals are just stealing legally owned fire arms. Of course, the people saying all these things aren’t the people with guns sitting around wondering how to get rid of them. If you’re not going to use it for anything, making sure criminals can’t use them makes sense.

Last Day of Summer

It’s been a very nice past few days lately. The sun’s been out, and it’s been a rather clear sky. The geese are migrating too. A formation flew right over me during one of my walks. I managed to get a fair picture of it. Personally, I think it’s alittle over exposed, but my camera disagrees with me. I’m a big follower of an image correction process I like to call “Next time just take the shot you want and be done with it” so I won’t be messing with it.
One of the things I like about this city is that on a clear day, seeing the mountains is simply a matter of finding a road in the right direction and a hill helps. Putting enough distance between you and the nearest hill will do in a pinch, but that probably takes more energy. It’s another thing that I couldn’t get a good photo of. It’s a neat little ribbon along the horizon. The mountains are huge, but they’re still quite a ways away.

A Gay Friendly School Curriculum

Because of Ted Morton’s bill, people here have been discussing the gay friendly school curiculum in BC. From what I’ve heard from other people, this new curriculum teaches kids that homosexuality is ok, which according to them is a bad thing. It leaves me wondering what’s in this curiculum. I’m having trouble finding any information, but personally, I think it’s a great idea to have more information about homosexuality in schools. For our school children, this is the greatest social issue of their time.
There’s a serious deficiency of discussion of current big social issues in schools. There’s discussions of big social issues, like racial segregation and slavery. There’s also discussion of current events. However, there’s surprisingly little discussion of the heated topics of today. These people leave school and nobody knows why people yell and scream and get in fist fights every year when gay pride marches by. Even some of the people there have no idea how it started. People also tilt their heads at movies like Alexander before it really sinks in that by accepting homosexuality, history texts mean that it was prodominantly bisexual society, which was male dominated.
It’s hard to discuss things when you don’t know what they’re about. I wish I knew the background behind some of the arguments in discussions of homosexuality. Is there actually a link to child molestation? Do areas with more out homosexuals really have more economic prosperity? Do long-term committed homosexual couples really have a shorter life expectancy than their hetrosexual counter parts?
I’d also ask if there’s any truth about homosexual relationships being shorter than hetrosexual ones if I was convinced that I’d get any sort of meaningful data. If there’s any group that doesn’t seem to be able to hold down a relationship, it’s students. Sure, there’s some long term relationships, but there’s so few of them that they can be shrugged off as a statistical anomoly. Thanksgiving is the first major holiday where people go home if they can. It’s also known as the oliday with the most breakups where people who just aren’t serious decide that they can’t stand having a long distance relationship. There’s quite a few week and shorter flings where people will introduce themselves as boy friend and girl friend. There’s also a startling number of people who plan break-ups well in advance to work around exam schedules and long holidays. In general, I think we seriously underestimate the number of break-ups that occur. There’s a lot of casual dating regardless of sexual orientation.

The World in a different light

Just for the sake of it, I went for a walk at night and took a few pictures. The world looks so different at night. My camera has some difficulty in low light, which can be said about most cameras. Tripod is key here since it’s hard to keep hands steady enough over a few seconds to not blur the image.

Answering a Tough Question

There was a big shooting at Dawson College in Montreal and it’s sparked a lot of different discussions. One of them is about the blog and free speach, another is about gun control, goths, stress, the right to dress and act differently. I haven’t really looked at that many of the discussions yet, so I’ll let others talk for a while.
All that aside for now, one of the things people usually ask after something happens is why bad things happen to good people. When you’re shooting up a school, you see people as potential targets, it’s all a matter of who is in the room and who can plainly be seen. You don’t specifically aim for people who cheat on tests or give money to charity, you shoot at the people who are there.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if rapists prefer people they find attractive as opposed to people who drink and drive, dog owners, or community leaders. People break into houses that look like there’s valuables inside and appear to be easy targets.
So, yeah, the reason bad things happen to good people is simply because the people doing those bad things picked those people.

Making Crude Oil

I hear a lot of rediculous things. Some times, it’s rather obvious why these things are absurd. Other time, I can kind of see why people might think these things. The latest one is the spontaneous generation of crude oil.
Carbon 14 is a pretty neat thing. It’s formed in the atmosphere and slowly radioactively decays over time. Anything that takes in carbon, in some form such as carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere will reach some sort of balance of stable and unstable isotopes of carbon. Any plant will and so will anything that feeds off of those plants and pretty much anything on a food chain that starts with plants will. Once the intake of new carbon stops, the relative quantities of the carbon isotopes will change as carbon 14 decays.
If we take an old piece of wood, seperate the carbon and put that through a mass spectrometer, we can take a guess as to how old it is. If we were to carbon date a sample of crude oil, we find that there’s very little carbon 14 in it. This means that it’s been dead for an increadibly long time. Every oil deposit we’ve found thus far has not lived any time recently.
There’s also no notable folding of earth that takes in fresh organic material and burries it into the depths that we find oil at.
Of course, both of these only mean something if we assume that biological material is the only source of fossil fuels. If we just assume that something is making oil and gas using carbon and hydrogen that’s already deep in the crust, we can forget all this. However, we still need to face the fact that the ingredients still need to get down there and will deplete eventually.
We keep hearing about the discovery of oil deposits all the time, and new methods let us get more oil out of old wells, but the old wells just don’t mysteriously replenish themselves. I don’t really understand the process which produces crude oil, but still, the assumptions sound pretty reasonable. There also doesn’t seem to be anything that suggests that new oil deposits are being created instead of finding old ones that we just didn’t know about before.

Not a Surprise for me

I don’t know if this surprises people, but today I found some hate graffiti. It was on a garbage can next to a train platform. Someone wrote, “Jews go here.” on the garbage can.
Somehow I tend to notice these things. There’s actually more hate graffiti than most people realize. People see these things, but usually they don’t think much of them. Without a running tally, we really don’t know know how many times it pops up. Anyway, when the offices open, I’ll see if someone will clean it up.