I was trying to figure out how planes stay in the sky.
So this is what I came up with.
As the plane moves forward, a small vacuum is created above the wing. The vacuum is a low pressure zone which pulls the wing up and the air down to fill itself in (because Nature HATES a vacuum). This upward pull that the low pressure zone creates we call lift.
I thought, “Hooray. This isn’t so complicated! Planes stay up because they create small vacuums above their wings as they move forward, creating an upward force.”
Then I thought, “And this is why planes can’t fly in outer space, because there is no air to displace and create a vacuum.”
Then I thought, “But if there is an aether theory, why not?”
So as a wing moves through a vacuum, generally we don’t think there is anything to cause lift or drag. But if we have an aether theory of a vacuum, i.e. there is some substance below what we can observe that our matter exists within, then why can’t we create a vacuum in that substance?
My line of thought was: Air is to Vacuum as Vacuum is to Black Hole.
Can’t we just spin a propeller fast enough in outer space to create lift? As the prop turns small vacuums in the aether will be created, and, insofar as Nature hates vacuums, a force will be created to fill in this vacuum, pulling the propeller in that direction.
(Someone please tell me how this is nonsense so I won’t go around thinking I’ve come up with a new model of space flight.)
For the last few days or so I was in Amsterdam (briefly), Israel and Istanbul. I had some thoughts along the way and I hope you’ll find them interesting.
Amsterdam:
Heineken tastes MUCH better in Amsterdam. Now I won’t be able to drink it States-side, which kind of sucks. Hopefully the memory will fade soon and I will be able to go back to my ignorant bliss.
[On the flip side I had some Sam Adams while in Israel and near spit it out.]
Israel:
1) In the 3 days I was in Jerusalem I wanted to figure out why everyone finds it to be the place for religion. Here’s what I came up with:
These images were taken within the same minute at on Ben Yehuda Street, Jerusalem . However, my camera was set to New York time, so it is really 1:34 am (NY +7). I’ve put up two images because I want to give the best view of the street that I can to make my point: the top image was with flash, which only reaches so far, but does not make blurry images; the second image was long exposure and gives a more accurate view, but, try as I might, I can only hold myself so still. Hopefully you will be able to imagine how it looks between the two. (see this image from Wikipedia too)
The second picture – this is the more accurate to life shot – shows the street to be very bright and, in fact, unusually bright. Times Square-bright even but, as you can see, this street has normal stores and streetlights; no neon, no giant billboards. So how is this feat of lighting achieved?
Nearly everything in Jerusalem is made of the off-white Jerusalem stone. Ben Yehuda street is an old, pedestrian only street with no asphalt and hence is white on 3 sides. This makes it reflect light incredibly well, as I hope you can divine from my shoddy photography.
Imagine the extra hours of usable time that people would have because they needed less fuel for their lamps, and multiply this by thousands of years. I figure that a place with nice weather and well above average lighting conditions, such as Jerusalem, would be conducive to people sitting around reading and arguing about stuff, and hence religious studies.
2) Gaza:
Israel on the whole seemed rather safe and so completely normal while I was there that it was hard to reconcile it with the place the media covers. Granted I didn’t go anywhere near where the fighting was, but I was in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and observed how people were living, and I thought it could have been San Diego. I’ve never been to San Diego, but I think it must be pretty with a friendly population that mostly speaks English and has nice weather, which was my experience in Israel. So what is going on?
Again, 2 pictures:
The first map is of Israel alone and it is what we see when we are looking at the fighting going on. The second is of the Middle East. When an Israeli thinks about Israel, it is the second map and the distance scale of the first map that come to mind. From this perspective, it looks as if Israel is a teeny bastion of non-Muslims trying to eek out an existence in a world of Islam. If you look at the top map, Gaza doesn’t appear all that big, but since Israel is so small, that little bit of usable land is important.
Of course that bit of land isn’t so important to start killing people over.
However, what I was told, was that Gaza was part of long term strategy to take down Israel from within: Since there are many more Muslims in the region and world, if more can gain residency in Israel through Gaza, then in only a few years they will be able to out vote the Jews. So every settlement matters because each represents an increased voting bloc and tips the balance of power away from the current establishment.
This presents a dilemma because either the Jewish state must change its democratic principles if it wants continued existence, or else die slowly to the ever increasing Muslim population. So the crude, stop-gap solution was to just eradicate the Palestinian settlements. This at least explains some of the reasoning; whether the actions taken were justified is a different question.
Istanbul:
Everyone is interested in Obama. These ads were ubiquitous (notice the second ad right behind the first on the left hand side.):
Garanti is a bank.
This is what Google Translate tells me the text says:
support loan interest rates
using the most comprehensive credit insurance for Turkey is out of 3 women in markets bonus
warranty package to revive the economy of the world will envy
Much of the world still operates with the dollar. I bought some ridiculously nice leather shoes from a dingy shop for US $30 – they didn’t even accept Turkish Lira. I handed the guy 2 20s and the man immediately became concerned: this confused me until he pulled a stack of Benjamins (US 100s) out of his pocket an inch thick and started going through it looking for a 10. He had to go across the street to get me change.
My thought was that the current US president is, for all intensive purposes, on the $100 bill. Money has value because people believe that it guarantees something of worth, goods and services. This guarantee of worth is made by large, trusted institutions likes banks and governments, and as the head of the biggest institution, Obama is where the buck stops.
So the unsurprising conclusion is that the entire world is counting on Obama to fix the financial crisis. I don’t know anything about Garanti Bank, but 1.19% loans do sound good.
Most of the time video game designers are trying to make 3 dimensional virtual worlds that are as realistic as possible, or focus upon a particular art style, and tell a story within that world.
What I would like to see is a lifelike 3-D world that has a main character that has special abilities, or levels, taken from modern art. This means, for example, that a character with Cubist special abilities (or in the cubist level) can flatten parts of the world that they are looking at into a 2-D space, but in this space they have the ability to see around corners, rearrange objects and do all the other funky things that happen in cubist art.
On the flip-side, when using the Cubist skills, the character would lose depth perception, motion would be funky, and other sorts of strange phenomena would go on.
Moreover the character could get skills associated with other artists or artistic movements. Say there was a Dali gun: it could stretch the legs of elephants (or any other animal) such that they become unstable. Or a Duchamp Readymade skill which combines random objects in the world into other objects depending upon the angle at which you are looking at them. Frankly I think that there are too many different and good ways to go; it would take some effort to really take a few ideas and make them work well.
This would be a great way to combine the ‘new’ media form of interactive video gaming and more ‘traditional’ modern art. It might even be considered educational. But if executed well, it would definitely be fun, interesting and visually impressive.
For all of you out there who, if you aren’t beating someone up with your oversized brains and education, appreciate a good physical put down too, there really isn’t a better fighter in the world then Fedor Emelianenko.
Fedor fights MMA, for those of you who don’t know, stands for Mixed Martial Arts. MMA is well named: the fighting ranges from boxing to grappling, and just about everything in between. This means that not only do you have be an excellent boxer, but skilled in kickboxing, Judo, Ju Jitsu, and a variety of other fighting styles if you want to be successful. It sometimes gets a bad reputation because of the no-holds-barred attitude, but all the top fighters are incredibly skilled at martial arts.
Fedor is the best in the entire world. Bar none. There isn’t anyone in the entire world who would likely win in a fight against this man; there is no strategy, there is no size differential, there isn’t anything short of having a gun or a posse than would give you an advantage if he were standing in your way. His nickname is The Last Emperor.
The NY Times just (Jan 20) had a whole piece on him as a lead up to his most recent fight (last night). And the LA Times has the follow up to last night’s fight (spoiler alert, if you can’t guess who won already by my beaming praise).
But the best thing to do is to just watch videos of him in action. If you know something about martial arts and fighting, he is something to behold; if you don’t, then there is none more exciting or better to learn from.
Animal of the Month: The French (no insult intended). Anyone who would even consider having this as their national tourism logo is deserving of praise:
I don’t normally post anything that I’ve seen on Digg or Reddit, but this turns jaw dropping at around 1:28 [3:45]: moogaloop.swf
“Over its forty year life the mouse has seen some interesting re-inventions, and the new Orbita mouse is one that’s eye-catching. Its designers have taken the idea of a scroll wheel and inverted it, making the entire top surface of the mouse into a scroll dial.”
“I am totally fascinated by Swiss Trompe L’oeil artist Felice Varini whom I just discovered.Dont be fooled by your first percetion of this work. These are not photo rendered images, it is master craft! He has worked on many interior spaces and exterior spaces which are even harder to believe. Varini’s work is comes together in full in only one exact point where the entire geometric calculation is percieved. From anywhere else it looks like some graphic design made of lines, concentric circles, and triangles of color. Here a gallery of some of his works.”
I love these things: You print them, cut the piece of paper and glue, and you have a brand new toy in less that 10 minutes! I think this is one of the great successes of modern technology.
Best for last: I watched this thing over and over.[1m] via
I’m not sure if it is the gorgeous priest (this is the first time I’ve had that thought), the overall beauty of it, or the love on their faces. check out this live performance of the song and realize how amazing a singer she is.
I saw watching a TV show called “Whatever, Martha!“ Old ‘Martha Stewart Living’ shows are watched and commented upon Mystery Science Theater 3000 style by Martha Stewart’s daughter Alexis and her friend Jennifer. It is freaking hilarious.
Advanced Beauty is a wondrous new DVD compilation comprised of 18 visuals by 20 artists, or rather sound sculptures, as curator Matt Pyke of UK-based Universal Everything would say. These transient pieces made by processing are for us to see how far you can really push the aesthetics of software generated visualisations and play around [...]
“For those who haven’t seen the footage, McCain and Obama appeared last night at a charity dinner in New York to roast themselves and each other. Some of it was very, very funny. McCain was really, really funny…. (candidates’ speeches, McCain, Obama – 14:53, 13:39 respectively)
Awesome vision of Alice in Wonderland (written by a logician, for those who did not know what Lewis Carrol’s day job was.) [scroll down a little to see the Alice pictures. And I would be forever in someone's debt if they bought me a print.]
“Either you’ll be intrigued by the fascinating way Dutchman Levi van Veluw applies materials on his face, neck and head — or you’ll be kind of appalled by this weird appearance.[...]”
— All I want to know what this man does for Halloween.
“Okay, this is one of the funniest videos I’ve ever seen. It’s that evil little succubus Rachael Ray getting all naughty with an ear of corn – and being far more excited about it than any human being should be….
Videos of the coolest cars designers could draw in an hour. Unbelievable skills and cars. (I think this would be a good idea for philosophy: 1 hour philosophy challenge. You would have to write something on a philosophical topic in no more than 1 hour of actual write time. Expect to see this in the future some time and contact me if you want to help setting one up.)
Video of this man selling vegetable peelers: “By night, Joe Ades dines with his fourth wife at exclusive restaurants, sips Veuve Clicquot at the Pierre, and goes home to a three-bedroom Park Avenue apartment. By day, he is something else altogether. At 72, the “peeler guy” in the Turnbull & Asser shirts is a New York legend.” —– I can personally vouch for the impressiveness of his presentation. If I wasn’t broke at the time, I would have bought a peeler.
The Electric Nomad is a standard sized electric guitar that features all the usual features usability and playability of a normal electric guitar however it is designed so that it collapses.
“Sometime over the course of new arrivals’ first year in the city, they find themselves becoming New Yorkers.” Also confirms above survey with anecdotal evidence.
Two and a half pages on how to write better, not just for philosophy. I like, “You should assume that the first draft of each sentence will have to be fixed up.” (my emphasis)
Warren Buffet’s letters to his shareholders. Makes for surprisingly good reading… I just wish I had his sort of bad news, like, there’s no way you can expect us to keep doing this well. – I’m sorry that our predictions from last year were off. Of course, we did much better this year…
I recently had a discussion with Mr. R. Brown about eating meat. He tried to maintain that vegetarians have the moral high ground. Even though I successfully defended my omnivorous position (even against his cannibalism tack), I’m thinking Zizek’s ad hominem is now the way to go (26s) [via]:
Johnny Chung Lee pretty much shocked the entire video game world (and lots of others) with this video (5.8 million views, 5/5 star rating with 21,000 votes):
This is a pretty nifty bit of engineering, using the off the shelf Wii Remote and a relatively cheap extra (safety glasses with IR leds <15$) to provide a very high level virtual reality setup.
Secondly Nintendo has recently come out with the Wii Balance Board. This peripheral can accurately measure your weight distribution.
If we combine the potential of head tracking with weight distribution it would be possible to create a very accurate Matrix-style dodging bullets experience, simulating what is seen in this clip:
This would be a damn sweet feature if integrated into a full action game. It could likely be accomplished with head-tracking alone, but the combination of board, head-tracking, and Wii Motion Plus makes for near full body integration. The Matrix franchise is perfectly positioned to take advantage of the technology, seeing as everyone wears sunglasses in the movie anyway.
Welcome. I'm interested by metaphysics, relativity, philosophy of science & language and women philosophically inclined or not. But there will probably be a bit of everything here.
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