Second Law of Thermodynamics As It Relates To Evolution

The laws of thermodynamics are simple. The first law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it is only converted from one form to another. The second law of thermodynamics is also fairly simple, but before I say what it means, I’ll say what people have tried to convince me it means.
I’ve been told that the second law of thermodynamics says that everything is heading towards disorder. Some people add that only closed systems are headed towards disorder and that order can come about through the addition of energy. Other people claim that the second law of thermodynamics only came about after the eating of the fruit from the tree of knowledge. The conclusion that I keep hearing from this is that the second law of thermodynamics states that evolution is impossible because evolutions talks about things going from a low level of order to a higher one.
As always, one should be careful regarding claims expanding a scientific principal beyond that which it was intended. The fact that it is the second law of thermodynamics suggests that we should think carefully prior to trying to apply this information to things outside the realm of thermodynamics. A simple analogy can illustrate the dangers of making such an extention of scientific laws without though. I was told that one reason a lot of stuents have trouble understanding quantum physics is because it’s like putting a bunch of things in a box, walking away with it and having half the items staying on the table. From this, one can conclude that public transportation is a meaningless affair because boarding the bus doesn’t neccisarily mean that you’ll travel with the bus. You may be left at the bus stop despite being completely contained within the vehicle prior to departure.
In simple, easy to understand terms, the second law of thermodynamics states that in any conversion of energy, some energy is converted into multiple forms. One conclusion of this is that no thermodynamic system can be 100% efficient because some of the energy converted is in a form other than the objective output form. The various other forms that energy is converted into are often more difficult to work with. If you want to use the term entropy in your definition of the second law of thermodynamics, that’s fine as long as you have a firm understanding of what is entropy and what states are considered ordered and disordered.
Which of the three would be considered to have the highest level of order? A flat plane, a flat plane with a giant stone pillar in the middle or a mountain range with continously varying slopes and elevations? Instinctually, one might see the mountain range as being disordered, the flat plane as being ordered and be puzzled as to where to rank the plane with the pillar. If we approach this from the common misconception of the second law of thermodynamics, which says that we get more entropy with each change, which is considered more organized? I can start chipping away at the pillar or the mountains, get energy out as pieces fall down and then I have the flat even plane. As the flat surface is the end result of when so many energy conversions are performed that no more work can be done, it therefore must be the most disorganized and random state. Although by knocking down the mountain, we’ve gone from what is viewed as disorder to what is viewed as order. Another quick analogy, if I were to apply this to a herd of elephants, as they travel, they’ll become less orderly and I’ll have a random distribution of elephants. Herd mentality is therefore contridictory to the second law of thermodynamics and doesn’t exist. Because of the confusion that can arrise, a good scientific understanding of the terminology is needed prior to attempting to draw conclusions.
If the second law of thermodynamics did not exist prior to the eating of the fruit from the tree of life, Adam could have set a ball bouncing and it wouldn’t have stopped because energy is retained within the system and is never converted to other forms. The ball would also be bouncing silently and background audio from any intended sound would exist indefinately causing noise levels to rise indefinately due to the motions not being converted into heat. Friction would also be completely non-existant because it converts energy into heat. This poses serious problems for the paradise of the Garden of Eden, turning it into more of a scifi b movie horror scenario.
So, if I were to try to apply this concept to biology, does it say that I cannot produce more advanced creatures? It does say that creatures need to take in more input energy than the theoretical minimum required output energy that they expend and the second law of thermodynamics makes no further comments.

Space Colonization For Idiots, By Idiots

When europeans first started exploring the americas, the ships were not realy suited for transatlantic travel, there was a strong risk of getting lost, we had no measure of longtitude. There was however a promise of a new land with new riches and whoever got there first was going to control it. We know there’s stuff out there in space for us. It’s almost like the vast oceans that the europeans faced. Our capacity to travel through space is very limited, there’s all sorts of things that could happen to us along the way. For a long time, we tested our sea faring technology in coastal waters where getting too far away didn’t mean that all hope was lost. We can see the moon, we can see mars. Our robotic scouts have gone to visit, and reported back to us. We now know what’s there and what isn’t.
On the subject of what isn’t there, what’s with people wanting to have an orbital colony. There isn’t anything there. We’d be bringing everything with us and then it would need to contiously be supplied. It makes about as much sense as the europeans stopping to build a giant mid atlantic island to further their colonization of the americas. The resources to build aren’t present and it’ll just be an outpost in the middle of nowhere that needs to contiously be maintained and is also subject to more hazards than the americas. Building facilities in space has some logic to it, a permant settlement though exposes us to hazards that need to be dealt with indefinately and overall just doesn’t make sense to me. The moon provides some limited temperature regulation and there’s matter there, which can be used to make things to sustain a colony. Mars does an even better job at temperature regulation. We can also dig into these bodies and use them for debris protection. Forget the large bodies, any random small rock will have merits that beats a middle of nowhere colony.
I suppose I’ll conclude by saying, we still haven’t built the large floating mid-atlantic island, but we do have large coastal construction facilities for building large floating structures. There just isn’t anything there motivating people to settle.

Angry, Bitter, and Unemployed

I went to bed in the middle of drafting yet another cover letter. Going over old memories and trying to put my qualifications in words.
I almost got a perfect score in one of my university classes. The only thing was, I had a dispute over sign conventions with the TA. I drew my vector in one direction because I knew that it should go there and expressed my numerical answer as a positive in the direction indicated. This was the opposite of the answer key, the vector pointed the other way and had a negative quantity indicating that it should really go in the other direction. I was right and pleaded my case only to be told that I needed to think about the problem rather than simply relying on my calculator to get the right answer. I did think about the problem, which is why I drew my vector in the correct direction. As for relying on my calculator, after sitting through so many reviews I decided that I won’t be needing it on the test, the math was trivial. I never took it out. Despite all this, my second appeal failed and I heard the same reply again, think about the question, don’t rely on your calculator. All the other work I did in the course was dead on.
There was another time where I had a very simple exam. It was electronics for non-electrical engineers. Having completed an electronics course in highschool and played around with several circuits of my own design it was a trivial course for me. I walked into the test and pretty much walked out in the first five minutes since the course was geared towards people with little to no electronics knowledge. After a brief discussion with the TA, he felt convinced that I was indeed deserving of a perfect score and not a trip to the dean’s office.
I also had three courses where my entire set of notes could be written on the back of a business card. One was chemistry, which covered a bit less than my highschool IB class but had one equation that I hadn’t already familiarized myself with. The two were introduction to economics and engineering economics. From all my observations, those two subjects are either ones you understand right away or are simply doomed to struggle with.
There was also a time when we needed a high voltage power supply to do some smart materials testing. Before the study of where can we find such an item and how long will it take to get it concluded, I tossed one together with the parts I had around. Then became absolutely terrified that I was going to give it away to a group that probably won’t have anyone who could correctly bias a transistor.
In my graduating class of aerospace engineers, we had people who could size a control surface, and pick an actuator, people who could design an appropriate structure for the control surface, actuator and air frame, and people who could pick an actuator, and design the control system. I was probably the only guy who could size the control surface, pick an actuator, design the supporting structure, design the control system, and code the autopilot.
For a lot of reasons, many of my friends consider me the brightest guy they know. Despite all this though, I’m the one who’s been unemployed for almost a year. I’m getting sick of writing coverletters and revising resumes, specially with all this talk about the labour shortage, and how this is a boom town. We desperately need people to help stock shelves, wash dishes and get things from point a to point b. I can’t seem to get a job that requires more than simply being old enough to work.

Why just oil?

I heard a few more of those people pushing the belief that oil is spontaneously generated in the earth and will never run out. None of them really say what needs to go down there in order to get crude oil, but apparently they think it’s a very quick process. From what I’ve heard some of them say, oil really isn’t a cycle where stuff goes down becomes oil and comes back up again. It apparently is just created. Why are there so many people thinking that oil is limitless? If I were to say that uranium is continously being replenished in the earth and we’ll never run out, people would think I’m nuts. The price of uranium has shot up greatly with more reactors coming online. It’s a very important resource. If anyone were to claim that there’s a conspiracy here, nobody would believe them.
We’ve also been pulling copper out of the ground for ages. We keep using it in a lot of things. Nobody is claiming that we’ll never run out of copper. The price for that has shot up quite a bit too. Enough that people risk themselves to steal high voltage power lines to sell as scrap metal. Should we scream conspiracy about this as well?
There’s always biological material going into the earth, but if this process was a quick process, oil would litterally be everywhere. We’d be pulling vats of crude oil out of places like pompeii instead of finding empty pockets where people were burried under volcanic debris. Every swamp would have oil slowly bubbling up to the surface. The empirical evidence doesn’t support this theory. Oil tends to be concentrated in regions, so there needs to be a couple of conditions needed to produce oil. Most of the matter seems to be reabsorbed into circle of life, but some still manages to detour for a while. Specially so when we burry stuff in landfills. We’ve only ever gotten methane and a few toxic substances out of those though, which are all fairly typical of decaying matter. Longer chain hydrocarbons are completely absent though.
Yeah… my mind is pretty scattered right now, organization in this post sucks.

The Pains of Recycling

Some people don’t like recycling because it costs money instead of bringing in money. Other people don’t like recycling because they think it’s troublesome. Well, I’ve got a new one to add to the list.
The way recycling is handled here is actually pretty reasonable. There’s a fair number of recycling facilities around the city placed at various locations that people go to anyway, like grocery stores. Toss your recycling into the appropriate bin and away it goes. It’s a bit of an extra step to get it out there, but compared to the cost of sending trucks all around the city, I like it.
Yesterday when I went, they were in the process of emptying the bins. I recycled some glass, followed by some newspaper then it was time for cardboard. Cardboard was on the end, so I stood there for a moment to figure out where to go. There was someone working there trying to clean up the area, which was a complete mess. All the bins were full and people just left stuff where the wind could blow them around. After spotting the tag I walked over and mummbled, “Ah cardboard here. Looks a little full.”
The guy looked over at me and said, “Leave that on the ground and I swear you’ll be sorry.” I looked at him funny for a while and he added, “And you’d better pick up that paper that you dropped.” So I looked behind me, and yeah there was a mess but none of those papers were mine, I was being falsely accused. I also had no intention of littering and I was being threatened. So I turned and started to walk away. Then he changed his mind about me and told me that if that’s all the cardboard I had, I could just toss it in the truck.
I understand being angry because people made a mess of your work place, but still, lashing out at random people is inexcusable.

Fear and Hype

I find it totally understandable that people would think that costal property values would plumet if melting ice had the capacity to do what some of the global warming extremists claim that it can. However, I find it strange that this is used as an argument to down play the significance of global warming when property values in places like San Franscico and Shanghai are holding. San Franscico has a history of being decimated by earth quakes. There’s also a lack of emergency preparation there. Westerners typically aren’t as familiar with the issues around Shanghai, but the whole city is built on unstable ground. Some buildings have sunk almost an entire floor in the past hundred years or so. It’s also sinking unevenly. There’s buildings that you used to walk up a few steps to get into and since the building weighs more than the road, you now walk down a few steps to get into those buildings. Some of buildings are also starting to lean a bit because one side is heavier than the other. Knowing what we know about these areas now and knowing what sort of buildings will be built in a major city, I don’t think anybody in their right mind would want to start a city in those places. Property values remain high and despite all logic, the corellation between property value and risk doesn’t really seem that significant.

Where’s the Outrage?

I heard an on-star commercial on the radio and thought, gee, here’s a system that tracks the locations of cars as well as their operating status. It can also exert some amount of control over them. The locking and unlocking of doors seems to be the main thing. This all sounds fine and dandy. Where are all the usual privacy people jumping up and down worried about people knowing where cars are? People scream about all sorts of invasion of privacy issues and oppose all sorts of seemingly innocent things all the time. Why is nobody worked up about on-star?
Maybe it’s time that everyone just stepped back for a while and really thought about why certain things scare us. Tracking my car, not scary. Tracking my cell phone, not scary. Being able to get into my car, well, if someone really wanted to get in, I’m sure an ax would take out the window without difficulty. You can do that without an accomplis.

Information for RC Aerial Photography

I recently came across something called The Aerial Photography How-To Book, which is marketted as the definitive how-to book on getting started in the RC aerial photography industry. $50 for an 80 page book on “marketing tips, ideas, and quick start hints.” There are a few sample pages on-line for people to preview. The first one is page 12, which seems to be part of the basic introduction. Basically, the entire page can be summarized as, “if you aren’t familiar with photography, learn that shooting in auto mode doesn’t always produce the correct results.” Page 23 is the next one, the header is about the size of the aircraft and can be summed up as saying that larger aircraft have more potential for damage and greater liability. There’s also a brief paragraph at the bottom for selecting electric vs combustion engines. Still fairly introductory material in my view. Page 30 is an entire page on turbine engines and there’s a picture in the middle dividing the page. I’ll disagree with layout a bit here, the picture neatly divides the page into two columns, having lines go from one margin to the other with a break in the middle makes things a little difficult to follow. The information is once again what I would deem to be a very general level. Some camera triggering techniques are discussed on page 39 as well as a brief discussion on the benifits of a video ground link. Unfortunately, nothing is shown in good detail. The last preview page is 50 and it basically says to have a business plan and pick a good name.
Strangely enough, the table of contents isn’t one of the preview pages. That probably says the most about what’s covered in the book.
Thus far, the book has recieved some pretty good reviews. People like it. Personally, I feel that the content is at a fairly introductory level and likely not very useful. I’d love to see what the book says about the design of weak joints to minimize potential damage and repair time, how mounting a camera affects aircraft stability, and vibration damping. The table of contents isn’t available, so whether or not any of those concepts are even covered at all is a mystery unless I feel like wasting my money on it. There’s only really two things going for that book, it’s seems to be the only resource with that specialization and it’s written at a level that anyone can understand.

Configuring Opera

Opera remains my favoriate web bowser and today I installed it on yet another computer. For the most part, all the settings came the way I wanted them. there was one thing that I had to change though, and that was the ram cache settings. I only have 16mb of ram on this machine, so that’s something I have to turn off. This machine is a little slow. I can type stuff and it takes a while for the text to appear, but it all gets there. Anyway, I’m glad I don’t have to sift through thousands of extensions to find the features I want. Add on capabilities are a good idea, but lets face it, basic functionality really needs to come be bundled.

Turning Language into Religion

I had to check this a few times to make sure I heard it right. In a discussion of why there is so much religious tension in the world, Mandarin China somehow joined a list of various Islamic countries, and Hindu countries. Last time I checked we had a bunch of people in China speaking Mandarin and there’s a bunch of Mandarin speaking people around the world. There aren’t really any worshippers though. Unless I’m missing something, it simply isn’t a faith, it’s a language.