The copper tunnel

I bet you are right now surrounded by the web of copper in our lives these days. Yea I'm talking about wires wires are used in literally everything that uses electricity though when you get down to it very few people understand what is actually going on in these copper tubes. To put it very simply it is a electrons game of leapfrog electronics is just the electrons moving from one atom to another.

Where does the power come from? Well your not really using electrons electricity can be easily explained with the parallel of a hose. If you are trying to spin a wheel with water are you using the water itself or the energy that is contained within the water? To be honest if you said the your moving the wheel with the water your both right and wrong. The water is simply a force carrier but your spinning the wheel with the energy that is transferred from the water.

Electrons are really just electromagnetic force carriers. Where does the energy come from well the electromagnetic force comes from copper intersecting lines of magnetic flux the magnets act like rotors in a pump though actually its kinda also not quite right to think of it like that.
That is really the basics of electrical generation though a rather cumbersome way of explaining it.

Though your probably wondering what goes on in those little copper tunnels that travel around you. Well the ones in your house that you plug your appliances into they are just a standard AC voltage either 240V 110V or somewhere in between depending on your country and have a frequency of either 50Hz or 60Hz. The other ones say for example the ones in your cellphone carry a series of pulses of electricity known as a bit this is either a +5V or a 0V signal a +5V is a 1 and the 0V is well a 0, Sound familiar? Yea I am talking about binary this is a very simple concept however to explain more would delve into digital electronics theory. how about those little white wires that go from your music player to your ears? those little wires don't carry pulses they carry waves of electricity that exactly match the sound waves that are intended to be produced. If I got an oscilloscope and measured the signals then ran them through a computer it would give me the same result.

So as you can see these little copper tunnels do a fair bit for you have a look around and thank the little electrons for their work.

DFTBA

What causes the shaking?

A cryptic title I know though there is a point to it being vague lots of things cause shaking. If you are shaking then well I can suggest you should stop drinking so much coffee and sleep instead... after reading the rest of this. of course you could just be cold or nervous or something boring like that though that's not really what this is about.

As a citizen of Christchurch New Zealand I can safely say I have felt an earthquake or two in my life well thousands really to be honest. what causes them though? well here is a quick and simple explanation followed by my own observations of what its like to be in an earthquake.

An earthquake is caused by the fault lines that run though the surface of the earth rubbing up against each other slipping dramatically when there is too much stress on the fault. For example if you get two pieces of fabric and push them together and rub the two surfaces together with some pressure they will suddenly slide past each other once a certain level of stress between them has been reached.

This stress can be built up by any number of things glaciers for example can causes seismic stresses, however the most common one is just the gradual movement of the tectonic plates, this movement is extremely small. However due to the mass of the plates and the size of them when the stress is too great and there is a failure of the fault then all the energy has to go somewhere, some of it into heat and sound but most of it is released in a kinetic or physical form this being a the shock wave we know as an earthquake this wave is not unlike the wave in a swimming pool its energy moving in a physical medium.

Now as I said before I would write about my own experiences of earthquakes. I have my reasons for this mostly because having had experienced a few I can safely say that they are nothing like I would have imagined or even like what movies show them to be like well at least some aspects of them.

First of all I have to say when an earthquake hits I can say that everything you have learned about what to do in a earthquake either packs its bags and goes a on a quick dash out the window or it takes over and you just react the former leaving you either stunned to a standstill or just ambivalent of the disaster happening around you.

I can certainly say that my first earthquake was a rude awakening leading me to wake up and think 'I think this is an earthquake ok doorway it is then' and then fail miserably to got to my door I made it to the wardrobe and introduced my self  to it with my head then made it to the doorway.

first thoughts on what that was like are to be honest if you think earthquakes are quiet you are so so wrong imagine a small train crashing into a pot factory then you have got an idea of how loud a earthquake. then there is the shaking now this isn't like a vibration kind of shaking its like your standing on a raft that someone is then pulling back and forth underneath you rather violently.

Now the unfortunate thing is that the more of these events you go through the less you react  to them. I was at work having a drink upstairs in the staff room and there was a 5. something I don't for the life of me remember the exact size and in all honesty my only concern was that I didn't want to spill my drink (I didn't). please note this is not the correct reaction the correct reaction is to get under a desk or something sturdy or next to something bigger than you that can protect you (not a wall) now if you are in a supermarket when one happens DO NOT run to the end of an isle stand in the center of the isle and avoid the parts of the isle with glass items on the shelves moments after an earthquake the ground will be slippery this is why running is a bad idea. If you are in bed lie next to your bed or get under a desk. No matter what move as little as possible. walking or running is very difficult when the ground is shaking.

Now I shan't bore you further with my accounts of earthquakes unless you specifically ask me to write more about them then comment. In fact if you want me to write about something then comment and suggest it and I will try get on to it.

Tech of yesterday today

I recently had the absolute honor of working on the Life Church Christmas production as a lighting designer with another guy who sadly I have forgotten the name of. Anyway the lights were amazing and everything (as I should have hoped they would be) though the night after I realized that I had just done something that when I was younger I thought was out of my reach now that was not being in charge of lights for a show but it was that I used a console with a touch screen, now yes I know I use touch screens every day but that's not the point I was using a touch screen to make something work. I can only think of the LCARS panels in star trek that when I was little I always wanted one because they were so cool. I had fulfilled a childhood dream of 'driving' something with a piece of equipment using touch screens.

Now I can imagine most people would have had similar experiences of commonly using tech that 15 years ago was absolutely impossible. think back and smile about how far we have come.

DFTBA 

The human spirit

First off I would like to say I am writing this post in dedication to a man I admire who has recently been diagnosed with cancer as much as it saddens me to hear that news I find it hard to feel bad for him or feel down about it. Why? Not because I don't care or anything like that but because his attitude to the whole situation is just incredible in fact I would go so far as to call it admirable. So big ups James Eggers.

Now down to my intended post subject, well this is not exactly much of a hey this is the universe kind of posts this is look at the world around you and have a think about it.

Over the last year I have gone through a major natural disaster in my city now I know that sounds crazy and to be quite honest it seems crazy to me to be writing it though to be frank that really is the reality of it. Though through the disaster the thing that struck me the most was not something physical or tangible it was the way people reacted to the whole situation, I did not once find a person who took up the 'O woe is me' perspective on the situation. Now I do not go as far to say that there were not those people however the overwhelming majority of the people I met were very positive for people who some had lost much of their livelihood, in fact probably my favorite memory of the days surrounding the quake and the resulting cleanup was a family that had decided that cleaning up their section was good reason to throw a party. Now if that is not celebrating the little things then I have no idea what is.

Now if your wondering what the overall point of this blog is then well it's simply this. When life is bad don't bring others down or yourself just celebrate the little things and let others help you up.

DFTBA

Seeing into the past

Have you ever thought about what's going on on the sun right at this very moment? Well fact is very few people do think about it it's a rather odd idea really to think about the sun other than the concept of 'is it sunny?' we tend to think of it as a constant bright ball in the sky that gives us heat and warmth. Yet the reality is its not as placid as you think. It's about as relaxed as a stroll though a lake of fire with no protective footwear while you get showered with hydrochloric acid. Now the issue with this is that there are things called solar storms, what are solar storms? Well they are storms on the chromosphere that cause the expulsion of electromagnetic radiation that is not only harmful to humans but also can knock out the entire electronic world throgh a electromagnetic pulse far more powerful than that caused by a nuclear detonation. The main issue with this is that there is no way to predict one of these storms. Even if we had a satellite positioned in orbit around the sun monitoring the suns activity the data would come to us after the radiation had already hit us because the electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light so with processing times we would know after we had observed it. So in that way we. Can only see the past and this effect gets more pronounced the further away you look.

So when you look up at the sky either at the stars or the sun remember that's not what's happening right now.

So remember nothing is quite what it seems.

DFTBA

Is it there or is it not?

Ok here is where it gets complicated this post is about my musings on the quantum world. First off I would like to stress I am in no way an expert on these subjects I am merely a hobby studier.

Anyway a couple of weeks ago someone asked me if there was a way round the shrodingers Cat experiment. The fact is there is no way to know wether the cat is alive or dead without observing it in one way or another, however in this instance saying observed to me leaves to many holes. Basically as soon as you find put what state the cat is in the superposition breaks down into only one state. Ok I know it's hard to imagine so honestly don't try and imagine the inside of the box it just breaks your mind because nothing can both exist and not exist at the same time. People often tell me quantum states don't exist, if your thinking that then your kinda right they don't exist as long as we are observing them at all other times they do. Still mind blown? Yea well just wait till the next paragraph.

Ok now is the time for me to tell you something that changed the way I understood the world. You ready? No? Well to bad, ok here goes.
Every atom is everywhere and nowhere in the universe until it's observed by something or someone. It makes my world seem so tied into something or someone at such a basic level that to me nothing can justify then universe quite right. Well that's where quantum conciseness comes into play. However I'll get to that later.

Time

Time is a awesome and annoying thing really isn't it, we never really seem to have enough of it. Also it seems to be a resource since we can spend time and waste time. Though to be completely honest that is not really want to talk about (why do I write talk when I am writing about things?).

What I want to talk about Time as in the dimension there are varying ways in witch people explain  how we see time in every day life some people explain it our temporal perception as being like watching a parade through a keyhole that you can only see a small part of it at any moment, others explain it as if you were walking down a hallway that it pitch black and the lights only turn on behind you making it impossible to see where you are going but its easy to see what there was behind you. both of these are good ways of explaining it the only issue is that they only really tell half the story.

the way I see time is that it is like drifting down a river in a inner tube from a tire at night we can only see things where we are and we cant stop moving because of the current. Now I know what all you clever people are thinking now, 'but James what about the laws of relativity?' well ok I will admit that's a flaw in the explanation but to be honest that is not what the explanation is about, its about how we perceive time not the actuality of our temporal existence witch can be easily effected by gravity and speed and the like. Why can our actual temporal velocity change? what is temporal velocity? you may want to know temporal velocity is the rate that time changes in relation to a fixed time point it can also be measured by measuring the quantity of change between two identical clocks. there is a whole lot of math involved in calculating the exact deviat between the two clocks.

Any of this can be calculated by some rather complex math though I don't really understand the math so I cant really go into it. Though I can tell you that relativity has been proven by putting two identical atomic clocks one in a 747 and another on the ground and when they flew the 747 fast for a while (I cant remember the exact details of the experiment) however they found when they checked the clocks the one from the 747 was slightly behind the one that had been on the ground. Now here is something I bet most of you have never considered just by going about our lives and walking around, driving, flying whatever you do to move is actually slowing your personal time so we actually move out of sync all the time compared to each other however never enough for anyone to ever notice.

I know that may have been hard to take in so I am going to break this up into a few more parts.

Fellow time travelers I bid you farewell until another post has come into our local temporal existence. (it already exists)