Tagged: physics
Knowledge Is Irresistible; It Defies Rebellion
Come close, ya stiff-necked supercargo. This one is important. This is a story about laundry. It is a story about power. It is the story of knowledge.
It may come as a surprise that pilots, especially military pilots or their veteran counterparts like me, spend many nights of each year in sleeping bags. As an Eagle Scout who knows the true value of a quality sleeping bag, I remember being very proud when I heard that our deployed commander used one instead of sheets while in Iraq. You see, I was no longer alone. To this day, I spend about 1/4 of the year’s nights in a sleeping bag—not including camping trips.
Naturally, this level of commitment leads to the need to wash a sleeping bag, and wash it with more regularity than your own sleeping bag laundering habits have ever included. In fact, you’re likely thinking this very moment, “Where is my sleeping bag?”
Washing a sleeping bag is an adventure of its own. Not just the washing, but the drying as well. For any ground-pounding, civilian pukes who never have spent a night under the stars (let’s not forget the boldly illiterate hippie camping community), there is a tag right on the bag that says, “Only dry in commercial dryers” or some similar wording that forbids the pilot from his perfect dream of living as an island.
(I have laundered my sleeping bag(s) many times at home and never had a problem. This post is not about rule-following.)
So the other day, despite both cars revealing mechanical issues almost simultaneously, I learned at night that the dryer stopped heating. (LORD? You watchin’?) It made the same noises and tumbled as surely as any other day—even longer when on the “automatic” setting; but the clothes wouldn’t dry. I tracked down that they weren’t getting warm either.
Enter YouTube.
There were two probable issues. One was that a thermal fuse on the heating element had tripped/blown. The other was the heating element itself had broken.
I tracked down an appliance parts guru in town who loved to chat on the phone and he assured me it was the fuse. But I forced him to concede it was worth ordering both just in case his foresight proved dim. During this back-and-forth, he said something like, “It’s all about airflow. The air has to blow the heat from the heating element into the dryer and then that air has to find its way past the clothes, past the lint trap, and through the vent all the way to the outside world. If any part of that path is blocked, the heat will remain and eventually blow the fuse. You may never know why the path got blocked. Could be stray article of clothes got caught in the wrong spot or maybe someone washed too big a comforter. But it’s all about the air.”
Fasten your seatbelts.
“Only dry in a commercial dryer,” the tag reads. Any warm-blooded human says, “Huh?” And we proceed to rebel and possibly damage the dryer.
But…
“It’s all about airflow. If the sleeping bag blocks the incoming heat, the fuse will blow—which is annoying. If the fuse doesn’t blow, the heating element could potentially overheat and cause a fire—lots of variables in that one,” the facts are. And any warm-blooded human says, “Okay.” And then assesses the risks and gets on with their decision.
The passive, uninformed warning fosters rebellion, and well it should. Instinct informs us to demand respect! “Don’t boss me! You have my attention. Now treat me like a man!”
But the knowledge is irresistible and fosters sound judgment and good decision making. “Hmm. Good to know. I’ve dried many things of similar size in this machine and so I’ll risk it.” Or whatever.
What is knowledge? Knowledge is irresistible. It defies rebellion.
Go get some.
PS – It was the heating element. And Speed Queen dryers are super easy to work on—should they not live up to their name.
PPS – Yes, I have gone back to the original name of my blog. I do want to use the fact that I stare down death for a living to get your attention. Whether I can keep it is the thrill.
Fatherhood: Stopping Entropy
I randomly clicked on a video explanation of the thermodynamic concept of “entropy” by Brian Cox. In it, he is sitting on a sand dune type local, an abandoned, weather-worn house as the backdrop—both concretely and symbolically.
I randomly watched my two toddlers play with (generally “break” would be more the appropriate description) their unseemly number of toys—unseemly as I never wanted to turn my children into spoiled brats and so am not sure how it came to this.
Did I just repeat myself?
Spiritual truths, such as entropy, take nothing more than observation, certainly not formal education.
Brian who? An on-location TV special is necessary which explains what any father knows?
The real question, the remaining question, of course, is when (if ever) do humans stop destroying everything they touch?
The answer: some combination of—
1. The advent of written language.
2. Writing down observations that can be confirmed.
3. Writing down laws—with the express purpose of sticking to the spirit of the law, if not the letter.
Bear in mind, fellow fathers, entire civilizations have never avoided entropy.
So let’s get to work.
My Review of Oppenheimer, by Christopher Nolan
I’ve always heard that the newspaper USA Today was written at a third grade reading level. A reading level is an interesting concept. Try this sentence from USA Today’s The Weather Book by Jack Williams, “A fusion reaction fuses atoms together, creating other kinds of atoms and giving off energy.”
No third grader on earth could understand whatever that means. A few savants may sound smart trying, but keep in mind that they would never actually be explaining that sentence to us.
I also remember that in the 1950s children encyclopedia, so-called The Book of Knowledge, the author of the chapter on “atoms” began by having a child imagine cutting up a candle into smaller parts. And then smaller parts. And then smaller parts. Even then, you could still reform the candle parts back into shape. But, the author went on, there are even smaller parts, which when the candle is cut down to these teeny sizes, it wouldn’t matter what happened, they could not reassemble to build a candle.
Can anyone explain that concept? I feel like I get it. But it’s basically saying that there is something besides the obvious ingredients comprising the obvious objects. And that fact is something I can repeat, but I do not understand it.
The problem, so far as I can tell, is essentially one of “barrier to entry”. Atoms and Fusion Reactions require knowledge of such things as very few of us will ever think it worthwhile to learn and master.
Therefore, allow me to state the obvious: if you leave the theater believing that you now know something about atom bombs, you’re fooling yourself.
Mr. Nolan doesn’t abstain from attempting a layman’s explanation, but he also doesn’t belabor the point. Perhaps he doesn’t get it either.
The reason I open the review with this lengthy aside is because I, as I suspect you, had nursed the idea that maybe Nolan could succeed where others failed when I first heard he was making this movie. But he didn’t really even try. And I was a fool for thinking he might. The film is called, “Oppenheimer,” not, “Atom Bomb.”
Moving to my next hope for the movie.
Does Mr. Nolan satisfy my curiosity about the man Oppenheimer, which is bracketed by the following two questions:
1. What exactly was his role in the “invention”?
2. How would some nerdy academic handle being responsible for such death then and forevermore?
Yes. And no.
The way he accomplishes this paradox is by sticking to purely emotional storytelling where paradox is not forbidden. While there are many moments which caused me to wonder, “Did that really happen?,” there were many more which unexpectedly evoked near tears and kept me deep in contemplation about implications of what Nolan seemed to be trying to say rather than poised to fact check every seeming “they must have a record of this” moment.
On the whole, everything about the movie works. The chosen vessel for storytelling works. The casting works. The psycho-sapio sex scene works. The conveyance of palpable stress works. And, most importantly, the a-bomb test works.
This Is Not COVID
The above image and caption is from the CDC site. https://www.cdc.gov/media/subtopic/images.htm
I could not emphasize enough that not one of you, nor I, can explain that caption.
If I break it down grammatically, like 8th grade sentence-diagramming, it says, “The particles contain cross-sections.”
What does that mean? Is there a problem when particles contain cross-sections?
Beyond this, “spherical extracellular viral”, and “through the viral genome”, and “seen as black dots” are also utterly unintelligible to me. To be clear, I’m saying that even after reading “seen as black dots,” it would be silly for me to say, “Oh, I see what you mean,” given that the entire image is black dots against a white backdrop.
COVID is black dots? Stop the press!! It’s all over my phone screen!
All this is on my mind partly because of that line I included in my recent “stupid” post about the stupidity of COVID illustrations, and partly because I’ve been listening to a podcast called “Closer To Truth” which is some sort of fun “X-Files”-feeling, state-of-physics-today (in layman’s terms) show. It generally accomplishes its purpose, but the other day one of the interviewees referred to an illustration to make his point about multiverses and the size of everything. This use of illustration to explain truth, then, triggered me again.
The simple fact is using illustrations to convey truth bothers me.
A little backstory: Before modern script writing, like alphabets and even syllabaries before them, man often used something like emoji’s to communicate across great distance, time or space. We might call them pictograms or hieroglyphs. And when it came to numbers, some cultures used certain animals to express differences between say hundreds, thousands, and whatever they thought (but couldn’t utter) was bigger than thousands. A cow might mean hundreds, a frog, thousands, and an infamous one to express the largest amount was a stick figure of a man apparently examining the grandness of the starry night with open arms. To our eyes and ears and minds, this fact—this use of pictograms by our ancestors—is intriguing at best, and downright embarrassing at worst. But here we are again, using artist’s renditions to explain “truth”.
So what should happen instead? Here’s an example. If you’re tempted to ask, “Is there a multiverse?” The person you’re asking should say, “That’s the wrong question.” (The physicists would admit that.) The right question is, “Will our children think the idea of a universe is a quaint, but obsolete understanding of things, in the category of earth-as-center?”
And my point here is not physics, but reasoning, dignity in fact, so I need to say that if my children are going to think in terms of multiverse, they’d be fools for doing so because of illustrations. This is no different than how I believe you’re foolish if any part of your atheism or belief in evolution comes from the illustrated sequence of a monkey gradually standing upright.
Same goes for COVID. Is there a new virus or illness or health issue on Earth? Whatever our opinion, we’d be foolish if we based it on an illustration.
Another example of getting at truth properly: I knew I could be a pilot because I saw planes fly.
And another (negatively): Not one writer of the Bible uses an illustration—whether clay, or ink, or tapestry—to persuade either their contemporary audience or us.
I must insist on decrying the use of illustration when it comes to truth because, interestingly enough, the experts keep using it. At its root, an illustration can only ever be truth in the sense that the illustration commissioner, upon reviewing the piece, says, “That’s exactly what’s in my mind.” That the illustration matches his imagination can be true, but that does not move the argument along. The further—and necessary—step of “…and what’s in my mind is truth,” is not contained in or advanced by the truth that the illustration matches the mind. The man behind the imagination still has work to do. The truth debate is between individuals. Talk to me. Use your words. I’ll listen.
Don’t be fooled, folks. If someone pulls out an illustration to answer your truth question, still or motion, assert your manhood or womanhood; give yourself dignity and ask them to use their words.
About COVID Relief Checks, A Review of Tenet, by Christopher Nolan
SPOILER ALERT: I didn’t need Christopher Nolan and his latest sapio-sexy film in order to believe that there are no parallel universes or, what is the same, that we’re all living in one big tapestry of existence. I didn’t need him to highlight that entropy is conceptually unbound from time. No. I already believed it and have proved it. How else could I have spent my COVID money before it was even deposited, huh? How else?!
As the old proverb goes, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
Confession: I’ve been entraipsing through time my entire life. And it’s fantastic.
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(To be sure, I needed the money because I thought I had all the books I would ever need—I was wrong. Now I have all the books I will ever need.)
Captain’s Log 