Cobination unLock

Sometimes the things I learn are useful.



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Protest Nothing

This was organized by a group called NODE from Berlin and Oslo in the year 2004.

This demonstration was part of our workshop “Means of Promotion” at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn. The workshop examined different strategies for being a parasite on existing media. We organized an unregistered demonstration with empty banners by the Liberty Clock monument in Tallinn. Estonian law requires a demonstration to be registered by the authoroties. We did not ask for such permission, thereby posing the question to the system whether or not this was an illegal action. The event was covered by all major TV-stations and newspapers in Estonia.

More than meets the eye (ugh, sorry)

The other week, while I was happily working on painting a 4ft diameter fiberglass globe destined for the United States Congress (that is serious by the way) A loud noise rang out, echoing off the other building down on Fulton Market Street. I looked out the window to see a number of people looking down the street next to our building, and just as many backpedaling out of the alley at a decent clip. I then noticed a number of people from the warehouse on the corner shouting and waving at me. They we're shouting things like "You're on fire!" and "Hey! Get the hell out of there." They also persisted in pointing above and behind me as if there were something of importance that I was somehow missing. Since I was not at that point on fire, I had difficulty believing them and responded with things like "What?" and "Really?" So we begrudgingly toddled out of a possibly flaming building and exited into the alley to find two cars completely engulfed in nine feet of flame. Soon after the spectacle took effect, tires started exploding left and right, which served to bring us back to reality. The gas ignited, spewing flame out of the ...uhh..gas filling hole? But anyway, I have a much more realistic understanding of how cars burn, than Holloywood ever provided.



Upon speaking with a fellow gawker he informed me that the transformer had blown, raining down fire on to the innocently parked car, which went up apparently like a car that burns quickly and turned the SUV next to it into a nice toxic bonfire. What is in a transformer that rains down as balls of fire I thought. Why do they have to go and explode all the time in the first place?

Well as is the nature of this blog, I found out. Here is the simple definition of a transformer via Wikipedia:

A transformer is a device that transfers electrical energy from one circuit to another by magnetic coupling without requiring relative motion between its parts. It usually comprises two or more coupled windings, and, in most cases, a core to concentrate magnetic flux.

An alternating voltage applied to one winding creates a time-varying magnetic flux in the core, which induces a voltage in the other windings. Varying the relative number of turns between primary and secondary windings determines the ratio of the input and output voltages, thus transforming the voltage by stepping it up or down between circuits.

Amongst the simplest of electrical machines, the transformer is also one of the most efficient,[2] with large units attaining performances in excess of 99.75%.[3] Transformers come in a range of sizes from a thumbnail-sized coupling transformer hidden inside a stage microphone to huge giga VA-rated units used to interconnect portions of national power grids. All operate with the same basic principles and with many similarities in their parts, though a variety of transformer designs exist to perform specialized roles throughout home and industry.

Allright, fair enough, so what the hell produced a huge ball of fire and a loud explosion?

It's actually much simpler than this post justifies. In generating current, transformers build up a tremendous ammount of heat (lost energy) to counteract this, transformers are filled will coolant to keep the temperatures down, older transformers, and many outdoor transformers use mineral or canola oils to keep them cool. At very high temperatures, these can ignite, and turn into big hot balls of grease fire. The explosion is the electrical arc escaping from the confines of the transformer couplings.

It is important to remember that not all explosions are the result of a blown transformer. Some are populations, emotions, or terrorists.

On Breathing Liquid

Unbelievably, I saw the movie the Abyss for the first time last night. In this film, as the rest of you know, they breath liquid to keep their lungs from collapsing below 2 miles of ocean. I was aware of the concept, but unclear on it's validity and history, so of course, I found out.

It turns out the concept is mostly sound. The lungs can be filled with oxygen rich solutions and function relatively normally. The problem arises in the expulsion of excess carbon dioxide. This was initially circumvented by keeping the liquid at incredibly low temperatures. One subject mouse survived for over 20hours breathing liquid at 18 degrees celcius. This is a problem however because it would induce hypothermia in the animals, and would not serve as a functional application. Unfortunately almost all animals tested have suffered varying degrees of lung damage. There have been some advancements in the application in recent years.

from Wikipedia

During later years, the techniques of liquid breathing were constantly refined and improved. The survival rate of all the tested animals in recent years has been very high, thanks mainly to improvements in carbon dioxide elimination. Current liquids used can dissolve over 65 ml of oxygen and 228 ml of carbon dioxide per 100 ml perfluorocarbon. By the early 1990s this procedure was developed:

1. The animal was anesthetized with intravenous sodium thiopental.
2. The animal was put on its back. A tube was placed down its airway, ready for the liquid breathing medium.
3. A blood sample was taken. The temperature of the liquid was adjusted correspondingly. It was no longer necessary to make the animals hypothermic.
4. The perfluorocarbon was instilled into the animal's lungs through the tube.
5. A floor-mounted 3-litre reservoir was filled with the perfluorocarbon. The liquid was driven by a pump through a series of machines which warmed and oxygenated the liquid and took the carbon dioxide out of it. The liquid flowed through a tube into a 3-way pneumatic valve which directed flow to the animal. A computer controlled the respiration (18 ml of fluid per second), pumping the liquid into the animal's lungs, then back out again to the reservoir, at a rate of about 6 complete respirations per minute.
6. At the end of the test, the animal was tilted for about 15 seconds and the perfluorocarbon was allowed to drain from the lungs. This can be seen in the film The Abyss where Ensign Monk drained the liquid out of the rat's lungs: in the filming, the rat genuinely breathed liquid.

These tests of the early 90s were successful: dogs could be kept alive in the perfluorcarbon medium for about 2 hours; after removal the dogs were usually slightly hypoxic, but returned to normal after a few days. When the animals were necropsied, the typical findings were mild oedema and some hemorrhaging, clearly an improvement over the lung damage of earlier tests.

The application of liquid breathing in human medicine, deep sea diving, and space travel is still speculative, but perhaps some day we will all get the opportunity to breath liquid. The mouse at the top is alive by the way.

Two things I just learned about that make me want to fucking kill myself.

And no it's not global warming, or pollution, or our terminal race of military inflation; not poverty, nor famine, death, murder, or disease. I want to die because there is A) a newly discovered spider that FUCKING EATS CHICKENS! and B) a desert arachnid that can run at speeds up to 10 miles per hour.

Here is the lovely subject A:

I thought bird eating spiders were the worst, but this lovely beast was just discovered in a hole in the Amazon. They can grown to be bigger than a foot in length, are rumored to eat chickens.

More on the discovery.

Then there's subject B:

A pair of camel spiders. This photo shows two of them dangling from each other, but yeas they are that FUCKING big and they can run 10 miles an hour, which is just a little bit slower than I would be running if I ever saw one of them. They are not actually spiders, but a classification of arachnids, like scorpions, all their own. They do not purportedly carry any venom, but they can probably bite you arm off, so I still wouldn't recommend trying to start anything with one of them.

I have fought long and hard to overcome a childhood fear of arachnids, and feel that I am doing pretty well, but the existence of these two creatures on the same planet as me is really, just a bit much. I'm considering suicide as an option, but I think I will probably just relegate my travel to areas with no confirmed sightings of these monsters.

Link if you care to see either of these beasts in motion.

Just a Second

Not just Mississippi.

Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.[1] This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K (absolute zero). The ground state is defined at zero magnetic field.[1] The second thus defined is equivalent to the ephemeris second.

The international standard symbol for a second is s (see ISO 31-1)

Originally, the second was known as a "second minute", meaning the second minute (i.e. small) division of an hour. The first division was known as a "prime minute" and is equivalent to the minute we know today.

The factor of 60 comes from the Babylonians who used factors of 60 in their counting system. However, the Babylonians did not subdivide their time units sexagesimally (except for the day). The hour had been defined by the ancient Egyptians as either 1/12 of daytime or 1/12 of nighttime, hence both varied with the seasons. Hellenistic astronomers, including Hipparchus and Ptolemy, defined the hour as 1/24 of a mean solar day. Sexagesimally subdividing this mean solar hour made the second 1/86,400 of a mean solar day.[citation needed] Hellenistic time periods like the mean synodic month were usually specified quite precisely because they were calculated from carefully selected eclipses separated by hundreds of years—individual mean synodic months and similar time periods cannot be measured. Nevertheless, with the development of pendulum clocks keeping mean time (as opposed to the apparent time displayed by sundials), the second became measurable. The seconds pendulum was proposed as a unit of length as early as 1660 by the Royal Society of London. The duration of a beat or half period (one swing, not back and forth) of a pendulum one metre in length on the earth's surface is approximately one second.[2]

In 1956 the second was defined in terms of the period of revolution of the Earth around the Sun for a particular epoch, because by then it had become recognized that the Earth's rotation on its own axis was not sufficiently uniform as a standard of time. The Earth's motion was described in Newcomb's Tables of the Sun, which provides a formula for the motion of the Sun at the epoch 1900 based on astronomical observations made between 1750 and 1892.[1] The second thus defined is

the fraction 1/31,556,925.9747 of the tropical year for 1900 January 0 at 12 hours ephemeris time.[1]

This definition was ratified by the Eleventh General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1960. The tropical year in the definition was not measured, but calculated from a formula describing a tropical year which decreased linearly over time, hence the curious reference to a specific instantaneous tropical year. Because this second was the independent variable of time used in ephemerides of the Sun and Moon during most of the twentieth century (Newcomb's Tables of the Sun were used from 1900 through 1983, and Brown's Tables of the Moon were used from 1920 through 1983), it was called the ephemeris second.[1]

With the development of the atomic clock, it was decided to use atomic clocks as the basis of the definition of the second, rather than the revolution of the Earth around the Sun.

Following several years of work, Louis Essen from the National Physical Laboratory (Teddington, England) and William Markowitz from the United States Naval Observatory (USNO) determined the relationship between the hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium atom and the ephemeris second.[1] Using a common-view measurement method based on the received signals from radio station WWV,[3] they determined the orbital motion of the Moon about the Earth, from which the apparent motion of the Sun could be inferred, in terms of time as measured by an atomic clock. As a result, in 1967 the Thirteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures defined the second of atomic time in the International System of Units (SI) as

the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.[1]

The ground state is defined at zero magnetic field. The second thus defined is equivalent to the ephemeris second.[1]

The definition of the second was later refined at the 1997 meeting of the BIPM to include the statement

This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K.

The revised definition would seem to imply that the ideal atomic clock would contain a single caesium atom at rest emitting a single frequency. In practice, however, the definition means that high-precision realizations of the second should compensate for the effects of the ambient temperature (black-body radiation) within which atomic clocks operate and extrapolate accordingly to the value of the second as defined above.

via Wikipedia