Patrick here. You may remember back in 2008, I counted medals a bit differently. (initial post, final tally). We’re about 75% of the way through Vancouver, so let’s see where we stand with the population and GDP metrics.

Medals per Population
1) Norway (1 per 286K)
2) Austria (1 per 837K)
3) Switzerland (1 per 972K)
–
11) Canada (1 per 3.1M)
21) USA (1 per 11.8M)

Medals per GDP
1) Latvia (1 per $12.1B)
2) Estonia (1 per $18.1B)
3) Norway (1 per $21.7B)
–
16) Canada (1 per $120B)
23) USA (1 per $549B)

CT has a 30 Reflex AC*

This weekend’s snow storm.

*terminology bonus goes to Andy M.

Let’s find out how loud it would be if all the toddlers in China, localized to a single point, started screaming in unison.

China population: 1.3 billion
The age of toddling is roughly defined as 12-24 months
China Population, 0-4 years in age = 120 million
Assuming roughly equal distribution amongst that age bracket, that’s about 30 million toddlers.
According to this site, babies crying can reach about 115 decibels. Gah. that’s loud.

Now, let’s look at decibels.
While you can’t just add decibels together, you can use this handy equation:

10 * log((10^(a / 10)) + (10^(b / 10)))

Where (a) and (b) are two decibels that you are adding. To expand this to 30 million crying toddlers it’s best to use a program. I started with excel using a simple loop:

Sub Pop()

Dim i, limit As Integer
Dim multiplier As String

i = Cells(4, 5).Value
limit = Cells(3, 5).Value

Do
multiplier = Cells(6, 4).Value
Cells(5, 2) = multiplier
i = (i + 1)
Cells(4, 7) = i

Loop Until i = (limit + 1)

End Sub

This macro loops through the equation substituting in the current sound level and adding one baby at a time until we reach the limit set by the user. Ideally, the culmination of 30 million babies.

The problem here is that I’m not a very efficient programmer and this program runs excel’s memory dry after a mere 25,000 babies. After four times through the program, I was getting decibel levels of about 165 for 100,000 screaming toddlers. But, since we need 30 million, and I didn’t want to have to click through the program twelve hundred times, I had to call in the big guns. Enter Ryan Schenk.

Ryan Schenk took my code and re-implemented it as a ruby program. Take a look here:

unless (NUM_BABIES = ARGV.first.to_i) > 0
abort(“You need to tell me how many babies are crying\n” +
“\nUSAGE:”+
“\nruby cry_baby.rb 1234 # Where 1234 is the number of babies”)
end

SINGLE_CRY_VOLUME = 115.0
current_decibel_level = 0.0

NUM_BABIES.times do
current_decibel_level = 10.0 * Math.log10( (10.0 ** (current_decibel_level/10.0)) + (10.0 ** (SINGLE_CRY_VOLUME/10.0)))
end

puts current_decibel_level

He has 8 cpus on his computer so he can run 8 of these scripts in parallel, each computing the volume of 30m/8 babies. Ryan deems this the most efficient way to do it, one process per cpu core.

THE GRAND TOTAL:

189.771212549937 db

OH MAN.

Let’s compare our result with other sounds (source 1, source 2)

You’ll note that all the toddlers in China, operating as a singularity, screaming in unison is almost as loud as a Saturn rocket.

Dang.

Fun side notes:
This analysis looks at pure decibels and as such acts as a very rough estimation. If somehow the babies were screaming in different phases there would be the possibility that the babies crying would cancel each other out resulting in zero sound.

Hmm. this makes me wonder if you could build a speaker to read the sound wave of a crying baby and immediately respond with the inverse wave canceling out the cry.

We could call it Dr. ShutUp.

When you’re a kid, those forty-five minutes of playtime before dinner feels like 15 years. Similarly, the 15 years between 30 and 45 feel like forty-five minutes.

It seems somewhat intuitive that since we have less experiences as youth that maybe time feels slower, decades later the information isn’t as new and exciting so perhaps life feels faster.

Jesse took this concept one step further. Assuming a 100 year life, he drew a curve 1/X where X is number of years old. While nothing fancy, the graph can be integrated to show the percentage of your life your next year is. For example, at birth 100% of your experiences are new, fresh data. Year two, the newness has a potency of 50%. By year fifty, your new experiences are dwarfed by the previous 49 and your life experiences account for only 2% of your knowledge base.

Jesse integrated under the curve for blocks of time representing 25 years. Here are his results! (click on the graph for full size)

How curiously depressing!

Today, just for kicks, I decided to take my temperature throughout the day and graph it. Over a 12 hour period I took 28 temperature readings. I figured this exercise would give me a control for when I do get sick and also provide some insight into how body temperatures change throughout the day. I took a temperature reading about twice an hour, though I didn’t do it on the clock so the data points are not perfectly spaced.

Researching the experiment before I started, I found the following graph on the American Psychological Association’s website. It shows a normal temperature expectation for a day person and a night person through a waking period.

37 Celsius = 98.6 Fahrenheit

Now, let’s see how my temperature scatter plot measures up to that norm

And now with a trendline

Analysis:

Average temperature: 97.14F (36.2C)
Lowest: 95.4F (35.2C)- 8:45am
Highest: 98.3F (36.8C)- 4:25pm

It should be noted that these temperatures resulted from a mostly sedentary Mike D. I’ll try and remember to bring my thermometer to Kung Fu tomorrow and see what happens to my temperature post workout.

A short while ago I was talking with Shamus about batteries. Specifically, Lithium Ion Batteries. Lithium Ion Batteries are everywhere (ipods, kindles, laptops, phones, etc.). and Shamus and I were debating the importance of letting a battery go dead before recharging. Was it necessary or harmful? Here are the two most important facts we learned:

#1. Keep it half-charged
#2. Keep it cool

Do not completely drain your batteries between charges. If you grew up with Nickle Cadmium batteries as I did, you might be familiar with the idea of battery memory. This is the tendency for batteries, if they are charged too often, to have unused cells that lose their potency.

Lithium Ion batteries don’t have this disadvantage. In fact, letting your lithium ion go dead regularly is not good for shelf life. Internet sources suggest that if the voltage of the battery drops too low you then the individual battery cells can reverse charge, causing permanent damage. That said, for digital devices that have a ‘fuel gauge,’ letting the battery go dead is the easiest means of re-calibrating that gauge so that it’s accurate. The general online consensus suggests letting your Lithium Ion battery drain completely about once every 30-50 cycles.

Inconveniently, if you keep it at 100% power you have loss of power as well. To quote Wikipedia:

high charge levels and elevated temperatures (whether resulting from charging or being ambient) hasten permanent capacity loss for lithium-ion batteries

Sadly, I searched around on the internet and could not find a real reason as to why this is. All the websites agree, but they also all quote one another. If anyone knows a battery expert, hook us up. We want credentials!

This chart from BatteryUniverse.com does a good job of summing up temperature and battery charge levels. Crazy!

For your laptop, the best way to get additional cycles out of it is to unplug the battery when the laptop is plugged in. That way, you’ll drop its active temperature and keep it from overcharging. For your ipod or phone, just let the charge dip to 10-20% before recharging, with a full recharge once every 30-50 cycles.

For these few disadvantages, Lithium Ion batteries have one of the best energy/weight ratios and are exceedingly popular. I hope some of these tips help you extend the life of your equipment.

Schenk wrote an awesome article!

Check it out here!

Connecticut has a place called “Fun Squared.” You can check out their website here.

Their motto is “Double the fun.”

Seriously?

STOP IT. Stop propagating stupidity. You’ve got a place for kids, and you’re naming it with a math term and then immediately defining it incorrectly.

I hate stuff like this.

Roommate Kevin went to some physical therapy this week for his back and got fitted with one of the coolest medicinal devices I’ve seen.

Kevin had this patch applied to his back. The patch has two sides: a positive and a negative.

Kevin’s Patch

Kevin’s Patch, close-up.

On the negative side, you’ve got some negatively charged sodium chloride and on the positive side you’ve got a polar, hydrophilic drug. This is, in essence, a battery. The negative side tries to scoot over to the positive side. At the same time, you’ve got the positive drug wanting to seep into the patient’s negatively charged skin.

My MSPaint (props to Viv for some guidance)

Apparently a more primitive application of this occurs in normal drug patches. Nicotine patches for example have a positive charge to attract them to the skin, but they don’t have the negative side of the battery present. This means that the drug just seeps into the skin. This system is not as advanced because you can’t control the rate at which the drug is administered to the patient. It just kinda seeps in at an inconsistent rate.

With the battery setup, you can control the flow from the negative side to the positive side and thus create an even administration of drug to the patient.

Awesome!

I mentioned last week that I wanted to try and find a way to promote MikeDiDonato.com. So I’m doing what I know how to do best: MSPaint and T-shirts.

I have designed a sweet t-shirt. Check it out:

It’s the perfect combo of Geekery and Rockery! All the while mocking corporate sponsership! I am going to be giving two of these t-shirts away. This is how it works.

There are three ways to get yourself entered in the drawing.

1. If you e-mail someone you know and tell them about my website (you must include a link to the website) and CC me in on the e-mail, then I will enter you into a drawing for a t-shirt. The person who sent the winning e-mail will receive a free t-shirt, and so too will the person who had the e-mail sent to them. For each person you send an e-mail to, you get one entry. One e-mail, one entry. If you send one e-mail to 8 people, you’ll only get one entry. If you send personalized e-mails to 8 people, then you’ll get 8 entries. E-mailing people who already openly read the blog doesn’t get you entries. Nor does e-mailing the same person multiple times. Please be respectful to the people you e-mail.

2. If you add a blog post about my website on your website and include a link to my website, you get two entries. Please e-mail me a link to your blog. Limit one blog post per person. If you are selected the winner via this method, you will receive two t-shirts in the mail.

3. If you share my blog via Google Reader you will get one entry – please make sure I’m following you first by sending me an e-mail. Limit one shared post per person. If you are selected the winner via this method, you will receive two t-shirts in the mail.

DEADLINE: The deadline is the end of Labor Day weekend (September 7th, 11:59pm EST). On September 8th, I’ll take those entries that I have received and randomly pick one lucky winner. I will mail out the winning t-shirts after I get the winners’ size and color requests.

Limit 15 entries per person.

I reserve all rights to deny entries to anyone I think might be spamming or stretching the rules in a way that’s sneaky or underhanded.

My e-mail address is: MikeDiDonato AT gmail D0T com

The t-shirt design above might change slightly between now and September 8th, but if it does it will only get more awesome. If the winner would prefer a Breakfast Squad t-shirt, then that’s cool too.

Good luck!!

A brief history of the smallest known objects:

A long time ago – Chinese philosophers suggest five basic elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water

Early 1800’s John Dalton comes up with his Atomic Theory. He suggests that all matter is made of indestructible, indivisible Atoms.

1897 – J.J. Thompson finds evidence of a smaller particle, the electron – develops the plum pudding model of an Atom

1919 - Ernest Rutherford does his alpha particle/gold foil experiment, finds evidence of a nucleus. Discovers the proton.

1932 – James Chadwick uncovers the neutron

1936 – The Muon (think heavier electron) is discovered by Carl Anderson

1960’s – Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig begin work into the classification of the quark. Quarks are what make up protons and neutrons. There are six known quarkes named: Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Charm, and Strange.*

Late 1960’s early 1970’s – Scientists begin to suspect that quarks, and leptons (electron family) are made of single dimensional strings

1975 – The Tauon (think very heavy electron) is discovered by Martin Perl

1990 – String theory adapted to include the potential for multi-dimensions by Polchinski

1995 – Edward Witten develops the M-theory which suggests 11 dimensions for strings

A few weeks ago I was talking to Sander about a computer game (gimme friction). “I love this game because it appears to be perfectly analog, but really it’s limited by the number of pixels within the screen. That means that there are not an infinite number of games, it’s actually closer to finite than one originally observes.” Sander replied: “But aren’t most games defined by their resolution?” And he’s right.

As the simplest example, there’s tic tac toe – a game with only 9 binary pixels. Connect four has 42 binary pixels. Even more complicated games like risk have a set number of countries, a set number of pieces, a set number of cards, and a set number of dice potentials.

When I think about our quest for the smallest building block, I think we’re really looking for the pixel of the universe. I think we’re trying to define a resolution for our world. After which, things might suddenly become a lot less infinite.

*fun fact: according to wikipedia the top and bottom quark used to be referred to as the truth and beauty quark. Neat!

As many of you Scrabble aficionados know, proper nouns are not allowed in Scrabble. What might come as a surprise however is that chemical elements (molybdenum, uranium, oxygen) are not proper nouns. In fact, words like these are referred to by Willy van Langendonck* as appellative mass nouns meaning common nouns that can be measured without unit specification (ex. money).

This means that you can use the names of elements in Scrabble. If someone has the word SCAN on the board, then heck yes you should proudly add DIUM at the end. In fact, go one step further and feel confident in pluralizing it and taking that triple word score. Take that triple word score and take the lead. And if someone calls you on it, then you raise your chin high, get yourself over to Scrabble.com, and as you type SCANDIUMS into their online dictionary, breath calm because you will win this fight. You will win this game!

Periodic Table + Scrabble = Awesome

*An excerpt from his book, if you’re interested

*Wikipedia article on Mass Nouns

I apologize for the lack of updates. Work is really crazy this week. Yesterday I put in a 16 hour day, and today might rival it – though if we’re lucky we’ll be out at a reasonable hour tonight. The hours, though crazy, have been way fun. We’re doing some extremely helpful tests this week which could boost our product offering dramatically. The testing requires some pretty hardcore equipment and extensive data acquisition. Each test run consists of a few hours of prep work and then 5 minutes of pure action.

I think this is one of my favorite parts of engineering, the point where you can confirm your radical ideas with huge equipment, complicated rig-ups, and tons of excel programs.

Three cheers for Science!

Alicia e-mailed me a hilarious musical… experience (?)… that my sisters and I put together a few years ago using my guitar and a weird little ‘learn the solar system’ toy that my folks got for me as an ironic Christmas present. I think I may have posted about it when we first completed it, but I can’t find the link – so here’s a refresh.

zolarzyztem.mp3

It’s weird and fun.

Interestingly, Jupiter actually has 63 moons, not 16. Also, I love the desperate scream of ‘Saturn!’ in the midst of the Saturn harmony.

The core of the sun swallows 600 million tons of hydrogen a second to maintain its 15 million degrees C temperature. This makes it the second hottest place in the solar system. The hottest place? It’s in the English village Culham in the Joint European Torus fusion reactor.

(with pictures and sweet youtube vid of plasma)

if DEAD people understand hexadecimal, how many people understand hexadecimal?

Whoa!

My Friends:

Nereus, the underwater vehicle I have been working on since 2005,
touched down in the Challenger Deep, 10900 meters depth at around 10am
this morning and has been working all day collecting rock and core
samples. We have had plenty of problems with nearly all the vehicle
systems during a series of shallower dives over the last 2 weeks but
overall everything is working well and our scientists Tim Shank and
Patty Fryer are very happy with the pictures and samples. Nereus is
currently the only existing vehicle that operates below 7000 meters.

-Daniel

AWESOME
Amazing job Daniel and co.

The Nereus before its dive to The Deep, The Challenger Deep

from the Schenk Tank.

This is a sweeeet graphic showing all objects in our solar system that are bigger than 320km (200 miles) in diameter. It’s really fun to compare objects. (click the thumbnail above to expand the picture)

Examples:

Ganymede and Titan are bigger than Mercury!
The Moon is 71% the size of Mercury
Earth and Venus are virtually the same diameter
Pluto is smaller than the Moon!
Saturn’s moon Mimas (third smallest) looks alarming like the Death Star.
(it would appear I’m not the first to notice this – it’s even in the death star wikipedia article)

Which brings up the obvious question… Where does the Death Star fit on this chart? Well, I did some quick research and it seems like the standard accepted diameters for the Death Stars were 120km and 160km* – well below the sizes of any of the objects in the above linked graphic.

What about the borg cube? Wikipedia uses a Seven of Nine quote to size a borg cube at about 3km square. Pretty weak in comparison. Let’s look at a Mike D created graphic:

The borg cube is that single pixel off to the right. Whoa tiny!
Props to Alan Taylor, the creator of the astronomy size chart. If you’re interested you can purchase the full size poster here.

*or so claims this extremely technical analysis of the death star.

Special thanks to Lauren and Professor Stodder for passing on this gem: Math and the City

The article points out a very strange correlation between a city’s population and the city’s size ranking.

“if you tabulate the biggest cities in a given country and rank them according to their populations, the largest city is always about twice as big as the second largest, and three times as big as the third largest, and so on”

Professor Stodder of RPI went one step further and actually checked the results using census data:

It’s known as Zipf’s law and it is eerie, spooky, and countless other words that mean creepy.

“Something is enforcing this invisible law, but we’re still in the dark about what that something might be. “

The article then digs deeper and talks about resources within the city. Gas stations (a decent indicator of energy consumption?) appear less frequently in bigger cities (per person), this is also true with roadways. So the bigger the city, the more efficient (this may be the wrong word choice) that city performs. THEN, we learn that the same is true for organisms. The article compares Mice to Elephants. Cells WITHIN those organisms have vastly different rates of energy consumption compared to their size (think economies of scale), but those same cells when removed from the animal show the same rates of metabolism. Weeeeeird? Yes.

“These numerical coincidences seem to be telling us something profound.”

Then we take a step from eerie coincidence to deeply philosophical as the researches realized that the metabolic needs of an animal increase in size at nearly the same percentage rate as a city’s needs for gas stations increase as they grow in size. All this without any real outside influence… it just happened naturally.

Math is freakin’ sweet.

Dad D. sent me a beautiful story regarding his trials and tribulations surrounding his exploration of the anatomy of a Mortise Lock. It’s an awesome story and a brilliant mechanical device. Enjoy!

“The Mortise Falcon”

My jaw was clenched on that dark and stormy morning as I stumbled out of that small local church that I called my own. This was not the cathedral that inspires the soul to leap but a quiet, yet pleasant, rustic building where very few parishioners were left from a once mighty congregation. Oh yes, there had been hundreds, but that was centennials ago.

Why the clenched jaw? I had another assignment! There is a rule among those that “do” that 10% of the crowd does the work and 90% come along for the ride. Well, when typical attendance is 12, 10% is not a whole lot of people. And when the average age of an aging church is 92, if you‘re under 60, you’re it!

My assignment? “The door knob had been ripped off a back door, could I fix it?” There had been a theater group that had used the church; and unfortunately, when they could not get the back door open, they applied significant leverage and the door knob exploded into their hands. An emergency exit for the church had been murdered, and as Sam would say to Bridgid, ”When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it.”

The church is well over 100 years old. There had been a fire around 1930. We should assume that this door mechanism was at least that old. There is no question that I expected an adventure and the discovery of a mechanical marvel that would rival any “figurine of gold and encrusted with jewels.” With trusty multi-blade screw driver in hand, I began to remove the Mortise lock.

The trick to removing the mortise lock is to remove all inside and outside handles, remove the screws that hold the mechanism into the door mortise (hole in the door jam), and most importantly, remove the cylinder that contains the key coding – this cylinder simply unscrews once the long set screw on the face plate of the mortise is removed.

I chose to do this myself since the church does not have a lot of money. As Sam would say, “to keep family troubles in the family.” Sure, it would have been easy to get a locksmith to come over and fix it, but the web clearly suggested that a replacement mortise lock would be as much as $500 for an antique replacement and locksmith labor is a premium cost since they are always busy getting car doors open when electronic or mechanical keys are left inside.

So once the Mortise lock is removed, this is what it looks like.

The Mortise Lock controls the deadbolt (#1), the override buttons (#2), the latch (#3), the thumb clip (#4) exterior handle, the inside door knob (#5), and the key access (top left corner).

There’s the lock cylinder which unscrews (the image above shows in screwed back in).

This is a lot for a 6” by 3” by 1” antique mechanism to do.

Immediately, being minimally versed in high tech communication systems, I began to look on the web for instructions, hints, or exploded views. And there was not much. So whatever I found had to be posted on the web to close this information hole! The name on the Mortise Lock was RUSSWIN and it was inscribed with “P1213”. I found the RUSSWIN company (now Corbin-RUSSWIN) and wrote an email. The answer: “Sorry, we don’t carry information nor parts for something that old.”

So I took it apart! And this is what it looks like:

(1) Deadbolt and Deadbolt thumb Knob Socket
(2) Override Buttons
(3) Latch
(4) Outside Thumb clip*
(5) Inside door knob socket

After I took out each precision mechanical part, the case looks like this.

Balloon 1 points to the Murder Victim – a broken cast pin.

And then I found the problem, the pin (identified in the above jpg) had broken off so all motion from the knob was no longer rotating the adjacent mechanism but simply sliding it to the left in the picture. The pin was a few thousandths more than ¼ inch. A standard size! The inner diameter of the brass pieces that surrounded that pin were 10 thousandths wider – perfect ! All I needed was a new ¼ inch replacement pin.

Not thinking that I would even try to weld this, I found a threaded standoff, cut it to 3/8”, drilled a hole where the old pin had been and screwed in the new pin with a new brass screw from the bottom. ($0.70). The new knob $8.00.

Success! Now all I have to do is hang this Mortise lock back into place with hope that my new pin would work and would last.

And as Sam Spade said to the guilty murderer:

”I hope they don’t hang you, precious, by that sweet neck… The chances are you’ll get off with life. That means if you’re a good girl, you’ll be out in 20 years. I’ll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I’ll always remember you.”

And now that I know what a Mortise Lock looks like, I will be ready to replace the pin again after 20 years to life.

*Thumb Clip isn’t the best description for the device. When you push that with your thumb, the button pushes a bar that hits this little clip . The clip transfers the motion to push the latch open bar which needs to rotate around that pin that broke.

Thanks Dad D! Awesome exploratory look into the depths of the Mortise Lock.

Jesse introduced me to a pretty fun game idea. The basics are this: Without looking anything up, can you arrive at a reasonable solution to a problem (within an order of magnitude)?

The questions will vary in difficulty, and you might have to make a few blind guesses for numbers. But you might know enough slightly related information to deduce a quality answer. You can use a calculator if you’d like, though paper and pen results deserve additional accolades.

Let’s look at two examples.

Question one:

How does the total volume of human blood on Earth compare to the total volume of oceans on Earth?

Question two:

What is the distance to the moon?

If you’d like, you can stop reading here and spend some time to try and figure out the two answers. Remember, you’re not allowed to look anything up. Otherwise, I’ll guide you through Jesse’s and my methods of calculating solutions to the first question and our attempts at the second.

(more…)

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, we’ve had a reduced number of sunspots as of late. Kind of neat, kind of weird, nothing to be worried about. It’s really only a bummer to the aurora seekers, astronauts who will be exposed to a bit more radiation, and anyone with a solar filter on their telescope who likes to watch sun spots.

But all this talk of Suns makes me wonder what would happen if the sun just blinked out one day. As if someone found an unexpected lightswitch in his or her basement and mistakenly turned off the sun. I’m less interested in all the mass mayhem and political uprisings as much as how quickly we’d get cold. And this, my friends, is why the internet exists. This very question was raised in a BadAstronomy/Universe Today forum.

Interesting. They don’t really get to an answer, but it’s a cool conversation. There is an article in popular science on this, but I really dislike that publication. So if you’re interested, you can google it.

Yay Science!

Jesse sent me an e-mail this morning. Check it out:

I had to get up at around 5:00 this morning due to car swapping logistics. I didn’t get to bed until after midnight last night, so needless to say, I’m tired as heck. Got to work at about 7:45, and the rest of my team doesn’t usually show up until around 9:00, so what was I to do? I decided to take a nap at my desk. I left my cell phone in the car, and I didn’t want to go get it just to be able to set an alarm, but I also didn’t want to be found passed out. So then what did I do?

I wrote this (even has a Snooze!):

Sub AlarmClock()

Dim hourOffset, minOffset, secOffset, snoozeTime As Integer

hourOffset = 0
minOffset = 45
secOffset = 0
snoozeTime = 5

Do
newHour = Hour(Now()) + hourOffset
newMinute = Minute(Now()) + minOffset
newSecond = Second(Now()) + secOffset
waitTime = TimeSerial(newHour, newMinute, newSecond)
Application.Wait waitTime

For i = 1 To 5
Beep
Application.Wait (Now + TimeValue(“0:00:02″))
Next i

snoozeOn = MsgBox(“Snooze?”, 4)

If snoozeOn = 6 Then
hourOffset = 0
minOffset = snoozeTime
secOffset = 0
End If
Loop Until snoozeOn = 7

End Sub

Not since the fabled Giotto circle (sometimes attributed to Da Vinci), has anything so perfect been created by hand.

Well done Science!