The Astronomer and the Universe!

The lonely shopping cart

2012-01-03T21:46:00.000-05:00

Onescene that seems to appear in most post-apocalyptic movie or series is a scenewhere you see a single shopping cart standing in a parking lot. It seems to sumup the loneliness of the loss of much of civilization. It’s also a scene that precededthe zombie mob or other danger left in the world appearing.

Whyam I mentioning this? Well, I’ve experience the scene in real life walkingtoward my job early morning Monday. It is peculiar to walk thought a shoppingmall parking lot and see that lonely shopping cart alone, not a sound, no humanto be seen. Suddenly, a soft moan rising from the distance. It was the highway,but still creepy and awesome in a way.

Post-physicallity

2012-01-03T21:29:00.001-05:00

Oneof thing I realized recently annoys me in science fiction is the concept ofpost physicality. You know, the idea that a sufficiently advanced civilizationreach a point in its “evolution”/ technological develloppement when it abandonthe base needs of the physical to become something “better”. Usually, thatmeans they become energy, or ascend to a higher plane of being. The first thingone would need to ask his how would becoming “energy” be removing yourself fromthe physical, energy is physical, yes not in the sense of “crude” matter butgiven e=mc², one would argue there is no difference.

Sothat would leave the higher plane of being thing, sound like a religiousconcept, the “lucky” species is not in heaven like the god they have become.Leaving the universe behind apparently to greater things. With usually one oftwo results, they vanish from the universe never too be seen again or theywithdraw from affair of mere mortal… except when they get involved for all theproblem it can cause (see Stargate for an example of these alien). The firstkind could be taught of as a mass suicide, no one ever sees them again and theynever influence event.

Nowwhat is annoying about it? Well it makes no real sense, there is no benefitsfor them as far as anyone can tell (even themselves if the Ancient fromStargate are an example) and it seems to exist only as homage to the belief ofreligions. It is an example of heaven that the good species can aspire to ifthey are nice and become one with the “spirit”. By itself it could make a goodstory, but it is so pervasive that it is becoming annoying, a sort of crutch orthing you have to include into your high civilization to make it “believable”.It is also a way to remove hyper advanced civilization from the scene and let humanitytake a place in the stars. Sure it is “less” depressing than having them dieoff, or extinguish themselves to wars or plague or what have you. But it alsoremove the interesting story of having to deal with them, having to think, ofhow a specie that can accomplish everything.

The ever new universe

2011-12-03T21:01:00.001-05:00

Todaywatching the Star Wars the clone war cartoon series I noticed something thatreally annoyed me. The ever new universe, what I mean is that the new enemiesor species encountered never seem to be using Starship, weapon or architecturewe have seen before in the universe. While that might make sense in universe where the characters are alwaysat the edge of their known space and encountering species we have never seenbefore, it really breaks down in Star Wars.

Thegalactic republic is supposed to have existed for some 20 000 years, it’sculture and law been respected all over the galaxies. While it isunderstandable that the variety of starship and architecture we could encounterin a galaxy is way beyond what we could see in a tvserie, it also stand toreason that better design would be more prevalent (or at least design withbetter marketing teams). And there will be probably some form of standardizationover large market, particularly if some group try to join one of the majorfaction (in the clone war era we are talking Separatist and Republic) eitherthere will have ship that are on part with both, or they will ask for ship toimprove their fleet to be on part with both (so as to not get overwhelmed inbattle) leading to a standardization of ship.

Nowthat not the only mater, according to the expended universe Star Wars, someship are supposed to be very common like the YT-1300 (the base hull for the Millenniumfalcon) yet how many do we see in the movies and tv series?

Now do not thinkI’m saying that Star Trek is better, far from it. It had the opportunity withEnterprise of showing first contact with many iconic race of the Star Trekuniverse. Instead we got new species of the week that was never heard frombefore even if they brought incredible technology to the federation (holodeckanyone?). I guess what I’m trying to say is: writer innovation is great, butget a feel for the universe first and showing things we’ve seen before mightactually be a great think to produce a sense of internal consistency in youruniverse.

So some news

2011-12-03T20:48:00.001-05:00

Ifanyone reads this blog regularly they might have noticed that despite mypromise to post regularly (like everyday) about a month ago post stopped alltogether. Well, they probably won’t be back to a daily affair, but I will tryto post a little more often out here. So you probably want to hear why thesituation changed, well quite dramatically. It is quite simple I got a new job(more like a job, since this is technically my first real one) in another city,with a very rapid turn over.

Sincethis is a very publish form and that I’m a relatively private person I will notgive information about my employer here. I’ll say that my post is as aphysicist and what I’m doing is R&D (research and devellopment). It is avery interesting job, with a lot of new challenges; I must say that what I’mdoing is very different that a PhD in astrophysics, but the skill set is roughlythe same.

Asfor the move well here is roughly the story of how I got the job and where I amnow. After finally, resigning myself to needing money and getting an interviewthanks to a friend for a minimum wage job, I went out to get something fordinner. When I came back home, I had not one but two messages on my machine.First message telling me that I was hired at the minimum wage place and that Istarted Monday, second message from a place I had applied to looking for aphysicist and wanting to see me for an interview Tuesday. It was 16h55 on a Friday,with little hope I called back to see what it was actually about and if I couldreschedule my interview a day I wouldn’t be working, not expecting an answergiven the time. Well minutes later, I got a call back. Scheduling a smallinterview for the next day (Saturday), it went well and we planned for anotherinterview with the company I would by working with owner. Fast-forward thefollowing Friday, where during a trip to Montréal to see a friend I took adetour (thank you Isabelle for the lift) to Sherbrooke to meet with the ownerand my interviewer.

Soin a rather long interview (that felt really short) I was offer a relativelywell paying job in Sherbrooke. Which I accepted and to reduce the financial burdenI was, decided to start two week from the interview. So in these two weeks, Ifound an apartment in Sherbrooke, planned and executed a move and got ready tostart a new job. Afterward well there was the settling in period in a new cityand here we are now I can write again on this blog. Look forward to more of my thoughtsand ideas.

The zombie problem

2011-10-19T19:07:00.002-04:00

Thewalking dead TV series got me thinking about zombies and really how much of athreat they would be in a real situation. Logically zombies are only dangerousto unaware populations that do not know their weakness. They are slow moving,most asthma sufferer can outrun one, they are unable to use tool so a lockedsturdy door can keep them at bay for a while, they seems to have human levelsenses so they need to see, hear or smell you to find you, they are stupid asshit, the average zombie can be tricked to fall from a building top by someoneon another building and finally they are very fragile.

Nowthe last one might surprise a lot of you as zombies are often characterized asalmost unstoppable with unending endurance. While it is true that zombies seemsto be able to survive trauma that would disable or kill an average human being,they like the previously mentioned human being are very susceptible to headtrauma. In fact, jugging by the mythos on the subject zombies seems to bedestroyable by any damage to the brain. Now most authors require the trauma tobe in the form of a bullet or force sufficient to pierce the skull, but one hasto wonder why. If these impacts were sufficient to destroy the brainpowerrequired for a zombie any similar head trauma would cause similar result.

Thatis where the zombie loose some if not most of their threat. While a group ofsurvivor probably does not have access to high end military hardware, in the unstoppabletide of undead stage of the collapse (before the world become an apocalypticwasteland) the armies of the world are still sufficiently organize to deploy asa response to the threat and use modern high explosive and powerful weaponry.Now, World War Z would have you believe the undead masses would simply shrugoff high explosive as they don’t need most of their body function to survive,but that is forgetting that explosive force created a great deal of headtrauma, and as we’ve seen zombies are pretty bad with that. Not to mention thatunlike living human, they do not have any protection reflexes, which mean theywill not protect their head from debris increasing the likelihood of fatal headtrauma.

Finally,there is a “final” nail in the zombie’s coffin (too many pun on that lineright?). Information, 20 years ago almost no one had any idea what to do incase of a strange outbreak of reanimating corpse. Today, well even non geekknow that in case of reanimating corpse outbreak you should 1) avoid contactand bites, 2) aim for the head and 3) double tap, always double tap. Imaginehow well the zombie apocalypse will go for the zombies when everyone and theirdogs know how to efficiently kill them.

Everybody's opinion

2011-10-19T00:44:00.001-04:00

In a free society everybody is entitled to his or her own opinion. However, just because someone has the right to an opinion doesn’t mean this opinion is right or true. And I believe that the right to have an opinion is not a protection from having your opinion challenged. In fact, I believe that in a free society opinion should be challenged and that not every opinion as the same weight/worth.

The opinion of an astronomer on the probable influence of the passage of an asteroid close to Earth, is much more likely to be correct than the opinion of an astrologer or someone with no knowledge of physics or science. And even where this astronomer to be wrong about the asteroid influence, his opinion should still have more weight than the astrologer’s and profane. That might seem strange, but the opinion of this astronomer is based on years, if not decade of studying the universe and how asteroid or other celestial object behave, his opinion is based on repeatable fact and information. The opinion from the astrologer is based on demonstrably false concept and there is no telling what the profane opinion is based on. You might counter by saying, but what if the astrologer’s opinion was right? It still doesn’t matter (unless the principles of astrology could be shown to be true, or even just workable) arriving at the right answer when you make a guess (uneducated) is just a coincidance.

Finally, based on this opinion should not all be given the same weight in the media, it is not showing both side to give as much time to creationist as is given to scientist. It might seem fair and unbiased, but it is very unfair and biased toward creationist. Think about this, their opinion is demonstrably wrong, is based on the words in a book with lots of demonstrably wrong conclusion about the world and held by a very small minority of scientist (strangely almost none of which are actually studiying biology). It’s exactly like having a medical show talking about birth and pregnancy and giving half the time slot to proponent of the stork theory of birth.

Is money the only problem?

2011-10-19T00:21:00.003-04:00

I’mtalking about our system right now, no my own situation, is money really theonly problem? I mean lets say the occupy wall street and the other anticapitalistic movement manage to do what they seem to want and “overthrow” capitalismin favor of a more equalitarian society, would the problem we now face besolved?

Ido admit and believe that people and institution with money have an undueweight in our western society. It is far too easy for rich people to influencethe decision of the elected (or unelected official for that matter) with gift,and reason that their welfare help the nation through jobs and investment. Itis after all much easier to answer the needs and question of a single personthan those of the population.

Now,lets say we get the rich to pay a larger share of their income in taxes orwhatever do we solve the problems? Even with a 100% tax rate for the wealthiest1% of America you do not make a significant dent in the deficit and debt. Notonly that but with any reasonable tax rate, the wealthy still have more thanenough influence to put their goal in the center of the political stage.

Infact, I think that adding regulations to prevent the kind of action that leadto the debt crisis we are currently facing will not help the situation much. Ithink that we need innovation, new ideas and new views to solve this problemand these kind of things flourish in free environment, not in restrictive one.We need more freedom, and it counter part more responsibilities. That meansless bailout, even if in the short term it is going to hurt the economy and jobmarket, failure must be an option in our economic system at every level,nothing should be too big to fall.

Finally,we need the democracy to become more direct, our distant representative systemas been created for a time where travel times and communication times couldtake days or weeks between two points in a single country. We now live in a world where even thirdworld country have access to light speed, reliable, cheap communication (in theform mostly of cell phones). This means that it is much easier to communicate,to share ideas, to figure new things, laws and the future of the countryshouldn’t be decided by distant representative only accountable every fewyears. The representative should be easy to reach, and easy to make accountableand be replaced. Even in a country such as Canada it should be much easier andcheaper to hold mass election.

More annoyance with Windows 7

2011-10-16T23:10:00.002-04:00

Aftermore than one year of having nothing but good things to say about windows 7,once again tonight one of its behavior just make me go, WTF. I was playing anMMO (DDO, which is my MMO of choice at the moment) and suddenly the game quit,my software started to close themselves automatically and windows started toreboot by itself. After getting the don’t turn off your computer windows isupdating itself and seeing the computer reboot and tell me the windows updatingitself message, I figured that the cause was the windows update process…

Wellof course, apparently the default behavior is install the updates right fuckingnow, including rebooting automatically for maximum annoyance to the user. Howcan anyone think that any user could want this kind of behavior? Force quittingeverything and rebooting with minimal input (none in my case, it might havebeen a pop up with a timer, but it didn’t acquire focus from the game I wasplaying so I could not stop it) is not a good way to proceed with update. Atworse, put up periodic message to remind the user to reboot or if no userprocess are currently running send a timed message asking for reboot that willautomatically reboot if no user process is started in the next 2-3 minutes. Hopefully that will be my last complainwith windows 7, I actually like the OS right now and would hate to startfeeling it is just another annoyingly bad iteration of windows.

The advice you receive when you are single.

2011-10-15T22:38:00.001-04:00

I’vebeen single a while now and I have received (and read online) quite a fewadvices on how to find a girlfriend. Some of them are self-contradictionary, other strange and some more puzzling.Let’s looks at a few, and if you ever gave me one ore more of these advicedon’t be insulted by my comment, it is only in the name of humor.

You’ll find someone when you stoplooking.

Allright, I can speak from experience to say that it doesn’t really work, withoutlooking I have yet to find a girlfriend (well I’d say that looking hasn’t beenthat much more successful).

You have to put yourself out thereif you want to find someone.

Whilenot looking I suppose? What putting yourself out there means is not alwaysclear.

To find the girl you’ll love youhave to do what you love.

Whatelse do you think I’m doing? You don’t think I go running around doing things Ihate right?

It’s a number’s game, flirt withenough girls and one is bound to fall in love with you.

Now,wow that does sound like good advice annoy girl until you find one that pityyou enough to be seduced. Ok, I’m behind cynical here, but flirting with girl Idon’t find interesting just in case I find someone that might want to date mesound like a very bad base on which to build a relationship.

Wellmy cynicism is satisfied for a moment so I will skip the other advices for now.Ok, it’s not just my cynicism it’s also “humor” that can’t follow with more badjokes.

Again with R2D2 and C3P0, please let them be background characters again…

2011-10-15T01:40:00.000-04:00

I’vebeen following the new Stars Wars: the Clone Wars tv series and it is generallymuch better than the prequel movies. But the last two episodes that concentrateon the adventure of R2D2 and C3P0, well the bumbling adventure would be moreaccurate. While I’m not opposed to a comic relief episode (except when thecomic is Jar Jar) it is always problematic to have these kinds of episode inwhat is basically the worse war in Galactic history (if you follow the StarWars mythos at least).

Whileit makes sense that these stories occurred within the confine of the war, whilein hell would you tell them before other stories in the war? Particularly sincethey don’t even have background effect on the course of the war ordeveloppement of important characters. I could understand if the bumblingadventure caused a new ally to join the Republic or if they somehow thwarted aside plot of Grievous or Dooku (considering the quality of planning we do seefrom these two, they must have millions of side plots that can be thwarted byfive years old, and not the smart kind of five years old). But that is another problem with thewhole clone war stuff in Star Wars, we are supposed to find Grievous and Dookuto be dangerous shaker and mover of the galaxies that almost defeated therepublic (under the direction of Palpatine), but well lets just say thatPalatine did not pick the sharpest crayon in the box (probably for a reason,the republic command doesn’t seem to be made from much shaper crayon).

Lastly,there is the scale of things, I understand that in a movie you might or “live” TVshow you do not want to have too many battle involving thousands of ships anddroids on screen (or even more than a few dozen). But this is a animated show,you can easily put more than a few Venator or Banking Clan Frigate in a combat,make us feel like the resources of the republic and separatist fleets aregalaxy sized not small poor country sized. Oh and one last complain, please letthe separatist win on screen once in a while, with so many defeat it’s a wonderthey do not simply give up and ask the jedi for forgiveness.

Well now I have something bad to say about windows 7

2011-10-14T18:17:00.000-04:00

I’ve been largely satisfied with windows 7 since I’ve had it (which is close to the very beginning of windows 7’s run). It looks relatively good and it works well (I have yet to experience a major crash). But now I’ve found something annoying about the OS, it as a size creep that slowly fills my hard drive. Now, usually that probably wouldn’t be a problem since I would be working on a modern desktop with a few hundred gig of hard drive space. However that not the case, my window bootcamp partition on my Mac is only 30 Go and is used to play one MMO (DDO online if you must know), since windows 7 is supposed to take some 15 Go, and the game somewhere around 5-7 Go, I should have plenty of free space.

Well you can understand my surprise when I found that I had less than 1 Go free this Sunday. I had installed some other old games for distraction a few months back so I decided to delete them and fee some place. With a few Go free, I used the disk cleanup to free a few more Go, by removing some windows temporary files (2 Go worth of windows temporary files…) Now, before rebooting I looked at the free space on my hard drive and found it was at a small but comfortable 4 Go. One reboot later… less than 3 Go free, the missing Go taken up by one of windows system folder.

After reading up on the issue apparently windows vista and 7 set up a folder where they keep and use former version of dll and configuration files to maximize the compatibility and efficiency of the process. The problem is that it seems set up to keep multiple copies of the file, or at least the way it set up the link produce a false computation of files size and free space. In short it seems to compute the size of some file more than once when looking at how much disk space you have. A few extra Go on a hundred gig hard rive is not much of a problem, you’ll probably have far more temporary files and random junk than the size lost to this process. However, on small partition or hard drive well it can be a problem.

Now, add to this that it is almost impossible to know which copy/link are actually still required for your computer (windows program are notoriously bad at cleaning up after uninstallation) and the idea that it keep the undo data of each update in a system folder that is difficult to identify and delete and you see windows 7 filling more than 25 Go of your hard drive easily. It makes me think that somewhere in the developpement process of windows vista a problem came up and a work around was found. It worked relatively well but was not perfect but not annoying enough to warrant an urgent fix. It got ported to windows 7 as it still worked but it starting to show it’s flaw but wasn’t bad enough to require a fix. Maybe in a new version of windows or when it starts to be a major annoyance (unlikely with the cost of disk space) it will be fixed.

It's storytelling time

2011-10-13T20:19:00.001-04:00

By looking at the side bar some of you might have noticed that I have another blog, well a story blog according to the description. That second blog is an attempt by me to perfect my “mastery” (or lack thereof) of french by writing short (and no so short) story. This blog had been even more neglected that this one, but in the spirit of writing some more. I’m trying to post some more over there as well. I’ve also updated the layout and posted the beginning of the story I wrote last year for NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. Editing it to correct some of the grammar and spelling mistake and straighten the story, I’ve come to realize there are many flaws in the story but hey you might enjoy it, or the others that have been/will be posted there.

The Borg

2011-10-13T18:00:00.002-04:00

Yeah, weird title following the previous two posts but I feel like talking about something that relate to this “famous” Star Trek villain. Namely, I feel like talking about how they can be used in a game or in a way in a work of fiction.

One of the main problem with mostly unstoppable villain like the Borg is spikeification, the heroes can only defeat them so many time before they stop being an unstoppable villain and become just another minor threat your hero wipe the floor with. The easy solution to this problem is simply to rarely use them. This raise another problem however, you can’t really use them as the main “villain” or adversary of your work/game. Since you only use your Borgs a few times in your entire campaign they become more like guess stars than the real evil force at work. Another way would be to have then have servant like sub-villain, that the heroes encounter and they get some power and thematic quirks that make them borg-light in a way. I think however that this reduces to the previous problem; your heroes are fighting the Borg impersonators not the Borg themselves. So what to do?

Well, an idea I had (for the Borg themselves, it might not work with other villain or in other universe) is to have them win/ defeat the heroes. Imagine if you will a new Star Trek serie that will feature the Borg as the main villain for a season at least. The first episode of the season would star with the heroes encountering a Borg ship (the smaller the better) around an anomaly (which are so common in Star Trek, it might as well just be an average region of space), as the episode plays out your heroes are soundly and rapidly defeated/assimilated, however before the mid episode commercial break the heroes sent out a distress probe that inexplicably vanish through the previously mentioned anomaly.

Coming back from the commercial break we find ourselves on the bride of our non-assimilated ship, some unspecified time before the Borg encounter. They intercept a distress call from a probe of their own ship and like all good starfleet personnel move to investigate. They as expected find the distress probe from before the break. It is being partially assimilated by the Borg but luckily the recovery team manages to stop process (not without losing a red shirt of course). The probe is being brought on board and the command staff watches the future ship recorder (with the audience). We are treated to a recording of the Borg attack on the ship, however it is different from what we saw in the first part of the episode. The episode ends with the crew starting a deeper analysis of the distress probe to try to find if it is from another universe or the future and the captain hoping that there is enough time to find ways to defeat the Borg before they attack.

Then the next episode goes on at normal, with people occasionnaly speaking about computer problems and malfunction and other talking about how to fight off the Borg. Some ideas sound pretty good and are discussed in more detail as the crew defeates this week problem in “record” time (i.e with more than 5 minutes left to the episode). Than in the last 5-7 minutes the security chief ask to see the capitain, he shows him the video of the Borg attack on the ship in which we see the crew try the tactic they where talking about in the episode and failling to defeat the Borg.

This thread continu in about one episode every three, where at the end of the episode we watch a new idea tried by the crew and the Borg countering it easilly and assimilating everything again. As the season progress the mood between the senior officer becomes ever more grim as it more and more evident that the probe is from their future. The mid season is a bait and swich two parter episode. It’s starts as a story of the week, but the computer problem get increasingly worse until all of the ship’s replicator activate and spew out Borg-like robot. The assimilation of the probe was not just physical but had a software component that failed to be understood or detected by crew. As the first crew member become assimilated by the Borg software robot, the first part of the episode end, clips of senior personels and unnamed crew man are shown fighting the ennemies some failling (including recuring characters) while other reach area of the ship with no replicator.

The second part of the season stars with a fight for the control of the ship, as the virus progress toward communication protocoles. Desperate gambles and heroics save the ship and most of it’s crew from the assimilation, just in time as the virus was second from signaling the Borgs. The mood grows darker as the Borg have struck the first blow and part of each episode (usually before or after the mid commercial break) are reserved to showing the progress of the video, with the crew failing with more or less success. The season ends with the Ship being sent to investigate an anomaly, and the Borg ship arriving and starting the fight. I think I would spend the next half season fighting the Borg, winning but barely in the first part of the mid season two-parter. The next half of the season would be dealing with the wound and pain left by the assault and finding as much as possible about the Borg from the captured hardware. Opening the way for new ennemies or another bigger plot by the Borg.

Well this once again proves that I like to write novel like posts. The whole point of this exemple is that powerfull vilain should require powerful stories and scare the crap out of the heroes. I think that they need to defeat the heroes more often than not to remain scary. It’s very hard to do in most medium (even more so in RPG) so you have to use indirect defeat but still, a badass vilain deserve victories.

A new layout...

2011-10-13T16:29:00.001-04:00

So I’ve been working on the layout here, I think it looks much better, or at least less tacky. The next step should be to work on the name, getting a new banner to go with the name and to put some more colors around the title. I should also add a few link to friends and things I read online, mostly stuff I check often and find interesting, if you have suggestion dear readers please feel free to e-mail me or comment with your suggestion. So back to work on this template and name things. More post are coming… just like winter, to finish on a Game of Throne quote.

New beginnings of sort

2011-10-13T01:02:00.000-04:00

It’s been more than a year since my last blog post. More then a year ago, after I had successfully defended my PhD thesis and looked hopefully toward the future, I asked where do I go from there?

More than a year in which my life seems to have stagnated, I spent this year first as a post-doc place holder to work on some papers (still to be published), then as a full time unemployed person looking for work (the hours are very flexible, but the pay sucks). I’m still at this step, now close to a year after the official end of my PhD, I still don't know where I will go from there.

It has been the darkest (so far) year of my life, economically and emotionally. First applying to jobs after jobs and receiving not even an hint of interest, then applying to still more jobs and getting a few interviews, but always falling into second, third or worse place. It all hit me hard, very hard and I think it is why I return to my blog, writing is a creative venture, a way to express the pent up anger and unreleased emotions.

I plan on returning to a more regular posting schedule, changing the name: the astronomer and the universe isn’t me anymore. Well, no it’s still me, but it’s a faint part of me, a part I am proud of, but far from what I am now and from where I am trying to go. I will try to change the design too; this blue lack luster theme is so passé. And I will probably change what I will post about, my life might look like it stagnated in the last year or so, but I am not the same person I was July 21st 2010. I’ve learned about myself, I’ve grown and changed, I still love science, debate, RPG, and of course I’m still one of the biggest geek I know but in a different way. New beginning it will be, new thoughts, new words, new rants, new questions, and hopefully new readers. My words will probably be but brief flickers of electrons in this small corner of the web, but I take pleasure in writing them, pleasure in expressing myself this way, pleasure in my geekyness and love of life. Hopefully, they will entertain you.

Where Do We Go from Here?

2010-07-21T12:08:00.002-04:00

Well it is done, I have defended by phd thesis and the jury has found my research impressive enough to grant me the title of Doctor (well Philosophiae Doctor to be precise but still). But now I am let with the question: “Where do I go from here?” For the past two years or so I’ve looked at job offer and applied to a few job, with depressing result (only one interview) but I had problem being serious about it. Now I think I’ve finally (well not really recently still I’ve got to speak about that problem) come to understand why. I don’t know what I want to do.

You see I’m convinced that my studies and experience in research have given me a truck load of skill that would be usefull in a array of fields (from scientific research to statistical modeling of economics and many more). The biggest problem being convincing an employer that the skill I’ve devolleped can be usefull for his compagny. Now I’m pretty sure I’ve got the people skill to make a pretty good case for myself and convince quite a lot of people to at least try me out. But now I’m left with the question, whom do I want to convince?

Simply put I could send out resume and CV to just about every compagny that might, in a blue moon, hire a physics phd but do I want do? And more importantly, if I’m just fishing for a job how can I convince anyone of my worth? I’ve got to hurry tho I won’t be paid for writing articles forever (probably 1-2 months top) and it would be better to have a job to at least pay my bills by then.

So well, there is a good news for the few reader that are left, and that is that I will probably post more often. Posting things about my job search and it result (or lack of) and my thoughts about where I want to go with my lift. I hope you will enjoy the show and that I will find a job soon.

Tim Minchin - Pope Song (Warning - Offense Possible)

2010-04-30T22:41:00.000-04:00

Math part IV: Chaos Theory, Statistic and the Rest

2010-02-15T11:46:00.000-05:00

In my last post I said that what I had presented about math could deal with known and unknown quantities, shape, position, size and mouvement of a thing in just about any dimension but that it could not yet deal with “undeterministic process”. That was slightly false, Calculus already hosted quite a lot of undeterministic equations. In fact, some equationi system have an infinite number of solution and as such are undeterministic. Does that means math can’t say anything about them? Of course not, it just mean that while math can give you the shape of the solutions it cannot give you a clear solution without more information. There are also equations that are very surprising and that gave rise to a field of math known as chaos theory.

You see we found that some system of equation in which 3 or more variable are dependant on each other where very (but I do mean very) sensible to initial condition. They are not stricly speaking undeterministic but small variation in initial condition can result in widely different answers. Throught the study of these equations and phenomenum we can study things we though purely random before, such as the weather and turbulance. In fact, Chaos theory explains easilly why we can’t pretty the weather accuratly over large period of time. As it happen the weather is a chaotic system where the influencing factor depend on each other and since we cannot known perfectly any of those factor at any point in time (there are always measurement error) the little errors make the solutive diverge more or less rapidly. Of course the less accurate your mesurement the faster it diverge and you find yourself away from your predictions.

Which will bring me to statistics; you know the lies, damn lies and statistics. Strangely people believe that statistics are falsehood and should not be trusted. The thing is that statistics are very easy to missuse with people that do not understand statistics. Take for exemple your usual pre-election polls. You have daily polls telling you who people want to vote for, with usually a 3-4% margin of error 19/20. How many of you understand what that means? The 3-4% margin of error most people guess means that each number might change from up to 3-4%, which is mostly correct. But what does that 19/20 actually means? Well, that what is called a 95% confidence level, a slightly low confidance level (for exemple, in science below a 99.9% we usually can’t say that we have measured a quantity, we only detect it’s presence), it means that depending on your sample size your pourcentage are spread out over a larger pourcentage that if you had a stronger measurement. If you couple this with the selection bias in phone surveys, relatively small number (you shouldn’t trust a survey with less then 1000 participant) and misleading questions you can explain strange discrepty between statistics and reality.

But enough explaining why statistic can be made wrong, lets talk about what statistics are. Well statistic is the study of probability and distribution, that means its studies the odd of something happening give some (or no) preexisting knowledge. It also give tools to understand how random (or semi random) event combine to provide a range of possibile result and the probability of theses result occuring. For exemple, lets say you threw 35 coins up in the air, what would be the odd of getting all of them showing face (~1/35 000 000 000) or any combinaison of the side you might want. You can also determine if two things might be related (a correlation) to each other and how strongly it is. You need statistics to understand quantum physics, thermodynamics and all that. For exemple, it’s impossible to follow the behavior of all particules in a gaz, however thanks to the distribution of velocity we can determine a lot (if not all) of the behavior of the gaz, all without ever knowning much about the details of the gaz particules.

Now, about the rest of math you get theory and system to deal with how groups are formed, how number and function are related to each other (group theory), theory to deal with order (order theory), how space behave (that topology), study of fractional dimension (fractal geometry), theory about how measurement are related to reality (measurement theory) and idea on how to analyse and represent system. What I presented in those four post barely scratch the surface of mathematics, I’ve failled to talk about vectors, complex analysist and trigonometry just to name those few concept but already you should see that math can be used to represent and characterize everything in reality and even much more. It use the rest of science to anchor itself in the universe but it allows us to explore even more complexe space and set up.

To finish by going back to the initial conversation with Yofed, what does blue+yellow give? Green, to a human, other creature would see other colors, or no color at all and the two photons (i.e remain blue and yellow) would remain independent until caught by a photodetector. Explaining love mathematically might sound amazingly dry and boring to some of you but here is the language equivalent of it (mostly because I do not have the neurochemicial knowledge to write the equation… not to mention that I’m pretty sure it’s way beyond our current understanding of the brain). So here I go, you have an initial release of neurochemical, from the stimulus of smelling, seeing, hearing basically relating to the other person, depending on the current chemestry of your brain (how the recent past was for you) this reaction might find itself amplyfied triggering neuron firing and identifying this person as someone interesting. You star forming attachement through short term memory, then depending on a billion factor from the environnement and within yourself the chemestry soup and electronic mess inside the labyrinth of neuron of your brain this attachement might grow stronger or weaker. As it grows you find yourself more and more attracted to this person, more in love, if a simillar process happen in the other brain you can say that you are both in love and if condition are right and the process remain or other process with simillar result replace them you can stay in love for a long time. The complexity of the process is amazing (well the complexity needed to make the human mind is just so beautiful) and anyone that would claim love is more then “just” chemical reaction and electrical response just doesn’t understand how much chemical reactionand electrical response are, and just how beautiful their complex interaction are. And this might lead to a future post about free will…

XKCD: scientific romantism.. or not.

2010-02-12T11:28:00.005-05:00

Don't worry I don't do graph like that, beside it's not like I would belive that correlation would mean causation anyway... still it's funny, in a shark with a party hat kinda way.

Math part III: Algebra and Calculus

2010-02-12T10:58:00.000-05:00

So after numbers, arithmetic and geometry I get to the last part of mathematic that is taught in high school science: algebra. It is also the point where most people that already dislike math move up to hate and what they hell will that ever be usefull for. So what happen at this point, well most people will tell you that it’s the addition of letter to the number that just sound illogical and learning all those new “rules” to work with these letter. Now, you can probably guess I don’t agree, first off because I always found (elementary) algebra easy and second because I know that it is found everywhere and that almost everyone (even those that have not been taught algebra) use it everyday.

First off because, I think, the problem is how algebra is taught in school. In my opinion algebra is taugh way too late in the curiculum, it should be taught right at the beginning when we are learning the rules of arithmetics and numbers. You see, algebra introduce in math the concept of variables, i.e. unknown quantities. The problem is when you are first taught about this concept you have already been using math with unknown quantities when solving problem. So you have to relearn how to incorporate unknown in your math and the “special” rules you need to use to apply arithmetic on unknown quantities. Lots of duplicated work and lots of confusion from student as you have to basically rewrire the brain. Also, what we are taught is just the surface of algebra. So in the spirit of these post about math what can we do with algebra that we could not do before?

Well, a lot. You see algebra is not just the study of what happen when you replace number with variable, it is also the study of what happen when you change the operation and rules relatated to them and (more importantly, I think) how to apply mathematical operation on thing other then numbers. This last thing gives us chemical equations that give us the opportunity to understand what happen in chemical reaction, such as combustion. In fact, most of not all of science need algebra to be represented in comprehensive mathematical form. So basically, algebra add to the ability to representing physical and imaginary, manipulating these quantities and representing their shape, position and size, the ability to work with unknown or variable quantities, the ability to see how other type and set of manipulation would work and most importantly how to apply mathematical logic beyond numbers.

So with all that power, math must surely being done for right? Wrong, we now get to calculus, a part of math some of you might only have heard through horrified mention of college student having their first taste. So what is this dreaded discipline? Well calculus is slightly akind to geometry, in the way that while geometry deals with the shape and size of thing calculus deal with the movement and change of things. It involve such concept as the limit (seeing how as you approch a quantity another varies), fonction (describing a quantity in relation to others), derivative (describing the change in a fonction as it’s input change), integral (the reverse of the derivative and also the area under a fonction) and infinite series (numbers with recursive proprieties between themselve).

Lost of component that have an unparallel power, just about everything in the univers can be represented by a fonction, a derivative of a fonction or it’s integral (depending on what the phenomum involve). Most of advanced physics, engeenering, economic, all science in general involve calculus to a great degree. To continu with the language analogy, if arithmetics, numbers, and algebra form the “letters” of the language in our models of relality, geometry and calculus (and some would argue calculus alone) is the gramar, words and text structures. Throught this we can for exemple show how blue and yellow light form green light (it involve the transmission fonction of our eyes photoreceptor coupled with the wavelenght of the light we are seeing and how our brain intepret the resulting electro-chemical signals). Maths can be used to model much more complex phenomenum, such as the nuclear fusion in stars, chemical process involving complexe molecules (such sugars) and would appear at this point to be limited to predictable, deterministic process. In the next post I will talk about how maths deal with undeterministic process when I talk about statistic, chaos theory and probably the more advanced maths that I am only slightly famillar with (such as group theory).

Maths part II: Arithmetic and geometry

2010-02-11T11:34:00.000-05:00

So let get into another post about the beauty and power of math, this time I will talk about arithmetic and geometry. The first one because it is the next logical step after numbers, it’s the branch of mathematic everyone is the most famillar with and it is the oldest part of math, while the second countributed so much to our understanding of the universe early in our history that including it later would do it much disrespect.

Arithmetic in short the manipulation of number, allow us to work with many quantities and predict an outcome. For a simple example, what happen when someone has 4 stick and you remove 2 and 2/3 of one (your left with 1 and 1/3 of another). Arithmetic includes a lot of way to manipulate number, at the beginning we have addition and substraction (which are basically the same thing, one with positive integers and the another with negative). Next in the “simple” operation we have multiplication, division and exponentionation. These operations are mostly the same operation, exponentionation is repeted multiplicaiton of the same number, division is multiplication by a fraction. Now, multiplication are basically addition, so we could technically say that we have only one operation on number, the addition. However keep in mind that writing everything as addition is very time and space consumming. After the sample operation of addition we have more complex operation such as finding the roots of a number (square, cube or even higher power) the root of an equation is in short the exponentiation by a fractional number of another number, and also logarithm of number. The logrithmic operation is much more complex, it consist in finding the number that elevate another number to give the number we are taking the logarithm from. To be clearer, say we have log(10 000)=4, that means that 10 to the 4^th power is 10 000 (the 10 is implied in the log without a base denominator). Now, this might seem to old very little power, but being able to predict relationship between quantities and answer question those relationship imply is a corner stone to our thinking.

Now to talk about another ancient field of math, geometry. Geometry is the study of shapes, sizes, positions and proprieties of space. At first, geometry was described for a plane following a set of axiom that forms a basic for logically dedicing a lot of theorems and from those theorems information about the nature of shapes, sizes, posititions and all. This form of geometry called Euclidian geometry (for the greek that formulated it as a set of axiom) is what most of you learned in high school and use most of the time to infere information about the spatial relation and distribution of things. If you combine this with cartesian coordinate you get a very powerful tool to move about and locate thing on the Earth (as long as they are not too far appart). But geometry doest not stop there, we have found through experiment and observation we have discovered that we can formulate other axiom that describ other type of space. Such as for exemple, if our universe was on a sphere, the proprieties of a sphere lead to some interesting phenomeon such as having square triangles with more then 1 90 degree angle, or that the shortest distance between two point is not found as a straight line but as the arc of a circle. Many other geometry are possible for space, in fact curved space is an observed thing in astrophysic notably around very dense and massive object. Oh, one last thing about the power of geometry, understanding shapes, size and position might seems like something that not really spectacular, however one should recall that the greek measured the size of the Moon, the diameter of the Earth, the distance between the Earth and the Moon and many other quantities with amazing precision using only Euclydian geometry principles!

Now, adding arithmetic to number gives humanity the power to predict relation between quantities and manipulate, trade and use number as a model of what is happening or will happen in simple terms. If you have knowledge of geometry too you get an in dept knowledge of the shape of the world you live in, the shape of the object around you, ways to relate to them and predict their positions. In short with just math that was availlable to the ancient greek you can understand and model quite a lot of the world. Your models are time consuming to use but still you have a phenomenal understanding. My next post will show you how math power can make those model faster to use, become more abstract to represent even unknown quantity and even study very small and very dynamic things while I talk about, algebra and calculus.

Math part 1: Numbers.

2010-02-10T14:21:00.002-05:00

As I said in my last post this should be the first post about maths. Let me first give you a little history about why I’m doing these posts. Well it all started last time I met with Yofed on her visit to Quebec city. I made the claim that math could potentially explain and represent everything, so Yofed challenged me with the old explain love with math (quickly answered by simplistic 1+1=2 answer) and blue+yelow (answered with a not so simple answer of adding to wavelenght of blue and yellow to get green, which I quickly admited was wrong but that there was a way to add blue and yelow mathmatically to show that it would give green for our eyes). Now the conversation continued with a “you should make a post about the power of math.” So instead I choose to make many post about it!

So before I start I must say that I am not an historian of science, nor a mathematician. The ideas expressed below might not be completely acurate. Now that it’s out of the way, I’ll first start by writing about the numbers, the part of mathematics most people are arguably famillar with. Now the power of by themselve is only descriptive but we are deceived by their ubiquity into forgetting just how powerfull they are. Lets start at the beginning of number, the positive integers, you know the first number you know (1, 2, 3, …). Those number can represent almost all physical quantity, from the number of pencil, to the number of stars in the univers as long as it is something physical the positive integer can represent it.Now, you can not, with those nomber, easilly quantify lack of something. For that we extend to the integer set, adding the minus sign before a nombre give us a representation and quantification for the lack of something. Your missing 15$ so you have -15$, simple. Then we have the zero, strangely a relatively recent invention, that recent the absence of quantity, emptiness, it’s the very usefull quantification of nothing.

Not with the natural number set (integer +0) you can arguably represent any physical quantity, however you can’t easilly represent part of a whole. So we have another set (that include the natural numbers), that we call the rational set. The set includes the rational fraction, i.e fraction that can represent “physical” fraction of a thing. For exemple, 1/2, 1/4 and 1/10 would be these some of these fraction, they are constructed from any number that can be constructed from the ratio of two non-zero natural number. We now have a lot of descriptive power, however there are still quantity that cannot be represente, for exemple, the square root of 2. To represent these quantities we have another set greater then the rational that is call the irrational set. It includes the rational number as well as all those quantity that cannot be expressed as the ratio of two non-zero natural number. They describ slightly more esoteric quantity so as the lengh of the hypothenus of some triangle and some logarithm (more on those in a later post) they might also include very fondamental constant in natural such as pi and the euler number e (it’s still not clear if pi or e are member of the rational or irrational number).

Now with the irrational set we can pretty much describ every quantity you find in natural (in fact I’m pretty sure you can describ everything physical thing with them), however math descriptive power is not limited to nature, or our 4-dimentional univers. Lets imagine for exemple you want to find the square root of a negative number. Now, you know that two negative numbers squared give you a positive number while two positive numbers squared also give you a positive number. While it might seem unlikely to encounter such a thing in nature they are essential to solving many equation. So to represent those quantity that have no “real” manifestation we expend our knowledge toward another set of number called the complex (or imaginary) number. These numbers are very special because you need 2 real numbers to represent them, for exemple one such number is 3+2i. Now, what do we need them for? Well they are usefull in engineering, quantum physics, chaos theory, and I could not easilly (or shortly) explain how they are used and why. You’ll probably never have to use them if you’re not working in advanced scientific field, but you probably encounter device who work on principle needing such number to be understood.

So just from the number in math we can gather a lot of information about the world, quantitative information. In fact, number do not just give information about the world but they can give us information about world event imaginary or world without relation to our own. In a way if you try to consider math a language for describing models of reality and predicting reality from those model you could think of number as part of this language alphabet. It’s only a part of this alphabet because number are not the building block of the communication of mathematic, equation are. And while number are usefull to solve equation and to obtaint physical representaiton of that solution they are by themselve meaning less. In fact, I think you could say that numbers are what we would use to translate between the models and the “real world”. In the next post about math, I will talk about two of the oldest branch of mathematique, arithmetics and geometry.

State of the astrogeek

2010-02-10T10:42:00.002-05:00

I haven’t posted on this blog for a while now, novembre 2009 if I believe the last edit notice from blogger or july if I believe my word document where I keep most of my recent post. So since Anyflower asked and because I’ve been hitching to post again, here is a short post on the state of the Astrogeek today, it should be followed by a long post (the first of a many) to asnwer yofed challenge about math from the last time we’ve met.

So where is the Astrogeek at now? Well I’ve finished the writing part of my thesis… I’ve had finished that in june 2009 anyway. At the moment I’ve sent my thesis for the first part of correction where one professor read the 431 pages of it and comment on what I should change to make it acceptable for the next step: the evaluation part. Hopefully very little will need to be changed and all the change will be cosmetics. On a more personal note, well I’m still single. I’ve meet a few girl but nothing came out of it. I’m looking for a job so if you’d know any one looking for a phd in physics send them my way. Well, so that’s mostly it, I’ll give more news as stuff happen I guess.

On an unrelated note: screw you word 2008 stop putting html/xml tags in my copy-paste!

The Adventures of Lil Cthulhu

2009-11-03T10:20:00.001-05:00

Lil Cthulhu is your friend.. or at least you sanity destroying planet killing monstruosity.

The stupid it hurts!

2009-10-27T09:46:00.001-04:00

Ok, now clearly that person doesn't understand anything about physics. If you put all the mass of the universe in one place you will get something much smaller then a bowling ball.. you'll get something with no dimension called a point. Why? because that much mass you'd instantly collapse into a black hole like object.

Let us not forget that according to our theory of how the universe came into being, all the mass AND all the energy (which thanks to Einstein theory of relativity we know are the same thing) was present in a dimensionless point (i know tautologie here but it illustrate the point).

For all of you that belived math was useless

2009-08-18T13:40:00.001-04:00

It has no shown it's ultimate use, teaching us how to prevent the otherwise inevitable zombie appocalyspe. Read about it, here...

The Guild - Do You Wanna Date My Avatar

2009-08-17T13:07:00.001-04:00

Nice song no?

On Feminists and Burkas

2009-07-29T21:13:00.001-04:00

Oh, the Feminism topic ...

2009-07-26T13:41:00.001-04:00

A giant leap for mankind.

2009-07-20T11:35:00.001-04:00

40 years ago today the Appollo XI mission landed on Earth’s Moon and Neil Angstrom pronnonced the now well known: “This is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Like I said in my facebook status, 40 years since our giant leap… maybe it’s time to try another one. Mars is something like 35 Millions km away, yeah that a terrifyingly farther then the Moon is, but the reward for going there are so much greater.

First because the challenge to get there are so much greater, think about it to get to Mars we have to be able to create a environnement that can sustain human life in the most hostile environnement known to us. Not just for minutes, hours or even days, but for years and without the protection of Earth magnetic field to protect the astronauts from the sun deadly radiation. Second because Mars is another planet and if we listen to the doom prophets and we are indeed using with our lifestyle 7 Earth worth of ressources the ability to harvest another (or more) planets worth of ressources would give us a lot more time to figure out a solution to this problem. Third it will be a steping stone toward the Asteroid belt and beyond where even more fantastic discovery awaits humanity and for the capitalistic minded even more ressources.

Some of you might say that before we go to another world and destroy it with our crap and stupidity we should solve our problem here. Well, part of the solution to our stupity and crap rest in being able to expend and understand more and more of the cosmo. Most of our problem and the source of a lot of our stupidity can be tranced back to bad gestion of ressources and/or distribution of those same ressources. With space exploration we need to find away to reuse as close to 100% of the ressources we have as we can. It’s simply not feasible to be as wastefull as we are on Earth with it’s wide open space and plentifull ressources in the close small dirt poor confine of a spaceship.

You might also say that our money would be better spent ending hunger or curing disease. Well consider this: the world space exploration budget (25 G$) is small then Quebec’s health care systme cost (29 G$), it doesn’t register on the global budget (being less then 0.05% of the world GDP). The amongts of money expended toward space exploration could be multiplied by 20 before it reached level significant on the world scale.. and you know what even mutiplied by 20 it would be less then Canada’s GDP (it would only be about a 3rd!) Not to mention that even multiplied by that 20 it only be the level of the US military spending. So the point is that humanity could spend those 500 G$ on space and still have enough money left to fight disease, cure world hunger and teach every kids on the world to read and write, hell they’re would be enough money left to keep enough armies around to wage wars for years.

The main difference is that instead of looking at our feet, we would be looking upward, toward a bright future, wonderfull discovery, amazing adventure and new worlds. So I say onward toward the stars!

An explaination why religion and god don't matter

2009-07-16T10:04:00.002-04:00

I've been ask a while back by a girl I was meeting for the first time how come an astronomer with all the stuff that we can't explain and the majesty of the universe was an atheist. Well PZ Myers (from the atheistic biologist blog Pharyngula) as posted links to two pages with approximatly the same answer I gave that girl.

While science can not test the existance of god it can test the effect of it's existance on reality. i.e instance where the known principles of the natural world would be altered/broken by the action of this supranatural being. You know those divine intervention, miracle, vision, prophecies, explanation for natural phenomena and all? Well in all the cases tested a naturalistic explanation was shown to be correct, i.e nothing outside of the known (or to be more rigourous knowable) principles of the world was at work. Now, if you have something that act exactly like the natural principle, is undetectable and is unknowable, doesn't it make much more senses to just go and say: well it doesn't exist or at least matter. You'll get the exact same result with or without it's presence anyway...

Don't give me the argument, well god set those natural principle into place in the first place! AHAH checkmate atheist. It's an argument from ignorance we don't know how those principles came into being in the first place however just look at the few millions argument from ignorance for god and you'll see that up to now the it's not god after all answer comes up.. well all the time. Beside we already have theories about how those law came about and you won't be surprised to learn that exactly none of them involve supranatural beings...

Now the religion part, if religions was something that stabilized society and lowered crime rate we would expect the country with the smallest religion base to be the most unstable and with the highest crime rate. Well strangely the crime rate is inversely proportional to the pourcentage of atheist in the country... Also atheist are the only underepresented "religious" group in prisons. It should make you think about the value of religion no?

Welcome to the Universe - III: The Size of Things

2009-07-08T09:53:00.001-04:00

The size of things in space... impressive isn't it?

Where as astrogeek being?

2009-06-25T08:24:00.000-04:00

Hi, very faithfull reader to still be coming here after what 4 months semi hiaitus is very commendable. So, Anyflower asked if I’ve being either dating or writing and surprisingly the answer is: both. Mostly writing but still I went on a few date with a nice woman, it didn’t work out in the end but still it was fun going out a few times and meeting her. There’s not much else to say, an aborted relationship and a new friendship are not really post worthy in the situation.

Now about that thesis writing, well it’s still not done (I’m procrastinating by writing on this blog at the moment) but it’s close. I’m at more then 400 pages, 13 of my 14 chapters written down, and only the conclusion needs to be finished. Ok, the last 3 chapters will probably need a major revision before I can call them truly finished but at least the first draft is writen down and most of the idea are there.

The next step, once I’m done with that first draft of a conclusion is seriously looking for a job. I’ve half heartedly looked in the past year or so, but when you’re not sure how long it will be until you’ve finished writing you’re a little less attractive to prospective employers. So in the next few weeks I’ll be looking forward to getting paid more then minimum wage.

Now for the final thing that keeps me from this blog, I’ll be moving very soon, after a month of hell thanks to my landlord renovation of my appartement for his future use. Yes, that cheap on his part and his employee are apparently not the best construction around because they start project but apparently don’t finish them… it’s been about a month now, there are 5 projects started in or around my apparentement and none of them are completed. Hell one of them has not moved in 2 weeks and the only thing left to do is put in stairs! It’s now way beyond the point where I feel I’ve been cheated by his settelement. What he gave me falls way short of the annoyance his work caused me. Not to mention his latest annoyance, he called me on the 23rd late in the evening to tell me that someone would be working in my apparement on the 24th in the morning… I’m sorry but last time I looked 8 hours is a lot less then 24, particularly when you’ll be bothering someone on a holiday at ungodly hours in the morning.

Well I’ll be gone from there soon, that might not mean I’ll write more on the blog but at least I’ll have one less annoyance in my life.

Isabelle Fleury - Emilie

2009-06-25T08:04:00.002-04:00

I love this song, however like I teased Isabelle about, this story only proves that there is no scientist or intelligent people either in Heaven or Hell. Any scientist would figure out that the lenght of the spoon's handle doesn't matter, what matters is where you hold the handle.

Yeah I know that would remove the moral of story but still you've got to admit it's a pretty clever work around the problem.

What's going on in Iran? (1) - June 2009 - Green Revolution

2009-06-19T15:11:00.001-04:00

The Invisible Beauty

2009-06-19T09:11:00.001-04:00

Why date a geek

2009-04-20T11:52:00.001-04:00

I think this link says it better (and with exemple) that I ever could. Now if only this could get sent into the general population...

Another nice talk from TEd

2009-04-16T13:21:00.000-04:00

"The Internet Symphony" Global Mash Up

2009-04-15T10:13:00.001-04:00

The concept is just fantastique, the execution is beautifull and my friend sings in it!

So enjoy!

Open-mindedness

2009-04-04T22:23:00.001-04:00

Soooo cool

2009-03-24T12:11:00.003-04:00

the only thing I'm not too warm about is the person tag part of the video. Aside from that I want one of those! Oh and ain't science cool?

Robin Ince on Creationism

2009-03-23T11:05:00.001-04:00

A magic man done it!

Free speech is sacred

2009-03-19T11:45:00.001-04:00

Free speech as a religiion... well if you can make law that defamating religion is illegal, why not make Free speech and atheism religion and religion a defamation of those...

TED talk

2009-03-14T11:29:00.000-04:00

Once again a very interesting TED talk

The Ride of a Lifetime

2009-03-13T17:26:00.001-04:00

Wow

Nuclear Information Reel

2009-03-06T23:40:00.001-05:00

Well I guess only the loyal subject of the queen can and will survive a nuclear appocalyspe...

Rejecting Atheism

2009-03-06T18:02:00.001-05:00

Pearlist, hmm nice title no?

Susie Smartypants explains the evolution!

2009-03-04T14:39:00.001-05:00

Come on we really need a serie called someone Smartypant.

TED talk, always facinating

2009-02-25T09:57:00.000-05:00

Things people do to save the world...

2009-02-24T09:37:00.002-05:00

You might find this article interesting if your interested in the things we are doing to "save" the world.

Annoying rule bound people

2009-02-12T22:13:00.002-05:00

Ok, I like to write, I mostly follow conventions of writing and even if my spelling tends to be atrocious my text structure and ideas are usually above average. One thing I don’t do when writing is assume that there are strict don’t break or the police will arrests you rules in the format of the text. For example I believe that I can write a 4 paragraph long introduction for a text, even if the text is only about 10 paragraphs long, simply because I can use the paragraph divisions as a way to bring forth the topics the following paragraphs will develop. Sure in some case it might be better to write only a single paragraph for the introduction but it’s not rule, I don’t have to use only a single paragraph or else my text won’t be read by anyone and will spontaneously combust.

Now, I agree that there are “rules” for writing text, there is a certain order to the paragraphs and the introduction usually precede the conclusion. But the format of each of the part can be pretty loose, and trying to enforce a set up is writing by rote, not understanding writing. It following a recipe for a text instead of cooking your own, while that is not bad it can lack a certain level of originality and it can often make for dry text and in my opinion most of those people would make pretty bad poetry writers.

Ok, that just a minor inconvenience, but I suffered through it today so I’m gonna share it with you. What the person really wanted to say was that my introduction was too long, and he was right it was. However it was not too long because I use three paragraphs, it was too long because I was too verbose and went into too many details in my examples. In a way I was using a story as an introduction for the rest of my text and telling the story in one paragraph would make for one giant weird looking paragraph so I split it off where the ideas demands it, in a way the introduction is it’s own text, with an introduction to the story, the story itself and a short conclusion that introduce the main topic of the text. I do not think I have to do all that in a paragraph, in fact I’m sure that it would harder to read.

Ok, enough ranting about a minor thing oh and in case the person reads my blog that rant is not directed at you, you just triggered something that had been waiting for a event to be released.

Wrong solution

2009-02-12T21:54:00.002-05:00

I was reading a link posted by yofed about the cost of food in Halifax and while I find it strange that it cost more there then it should there is something in the article that makes me thinks Halifax won’t see a lowering of it’s food price anytime soon. You see Patty Williams one of Halifax nutrition expert is proposition a very bad solution for the healthy food problem faced by “poor” families. Her solution: raise the minimum wage by 4 to 5 dollars an hour.

Now maybe you think, what up astrogeek that a good solution! Give more money to those that receive the less and they should be able to afford all the stuff they can’t right now. Well let me ask you something, do grocery stores hire lots of employee at the minimum wage rate? Then, consider that raising every minimum wage employee wave by 4 to 5 dollars an hours should cost that store about 160$ a week for each employee. That add up to 8320$ per employee per year. Doesn’t sound like much for just the grocery store but then remember their is a chain of people working for minimum wage between the food production and the grocery store each one costing 8320$ a year more. Now, no business men wants to reduce its profit (or worse go into deficits) so the easiest and most logical choice would be for them to increase the prices of everything. The end result being that the minimum wage worker have at best as much spending power as it had before and at worse less, because other employee that where paid above the minimum wage would like an increase in their wage to keep up with the increased cost of living which will by itself also increase cost of living.

This increase of minimum wage idea is the start of a vicious cycle, every time you do that, you actually make the situation worse by increasing the prices across the board. Now a wiser solution (at least according to me) would be to lower one of the many taxes that are imposed on the food from its production to its consummation. One tax that would really benefits everyone (and the minimum wage worker in particular) is a lowering of the fuel tax. The amount of fuel required to take food from our field to our homes is staggering and it account for a significant part of the price of everything, lower that cost and you should lower prices across the board making healthy food more accessible. And that would also strangely give more spending power to the minimum wage workers. Wouldn’t that be a better solution?

Happy Darwin's day

2009-02-12T09:40:00.003-05:00

200 years ago one that was to be named Charles Darwin was born. His contribution to science was so great that 150 years after the publication of his world changing book we are still using the basic idea he was proposing. Today celebrate the advancement of human knowledge and Darwin's day.

oh a weirdly related note, today the campus for christ organisation is having a talk about 5 reasons for the existance of god and 3 reasons why it matters. I'm sure it just a coincidance but considering the anti-evolution sentiment I've read in their promotional leaflets in the past I have to wonder.

Playing god

2009-02-12T09:36:00.001-05:00

Skepchick as a great article on "playing god" and what it seems to be meaning now a day. I found it very interesting.

Leave my internet alone!

2009-02-10T23:24:00.000-05:00

Once again Quebec’s artistic community is asking the CRTC to impose regulation on the internet. They want to force TV and radio station that stream content online to follow the same quota and regulation that the non-internet radio must face. Once again the argument to justify those regulation comes from the idea that we must protect our culture. Ok, lets make something clear: If I’m not watching your TV, listening to your Radio or reading your newspaper it’s probably because your culture isn’t mine. STOP fracking trying to force me to listen, read and watch your crap, produce something of quality and you can be sure I will read, listen or watch it but for the moment you’re of not interest to me. Imposing more regulation on my internet content will only push me farther away from your culture and will insure that I will look to go elsewhere. I want to be free, not controled, I want access to information and content not censorship, I’m an adult human being I can decide for myself what is right or wrong from me (provided I have the information of course) so I don’t need you to control, censor or decide for me. So please, CRTC, Quebec artist and whoever else want to regulate the internet: LEAVE MY INTERNET ALONE!

Guys and girls

2009-02-10T23:15:00.001-05:00

I had an argument today about boys and girls, more precisely the existance of the difference between the two. Now I was arguing that part of the gender identity comes from genetics, and that boys are different from girls. Now, I admited that part of the identity also comes from society and education but there are still difference in gender beyond (and maybe reinforced) those of society. Now the argument continued toward the fact that we should not teach little boy the “stereotypical” male attitude of when you’re hurt you don’t cry you continu and do the job. My vision of the thing is that there are times to “cry” and times to keep it inside to finish what needs to be done until it is possible to “cry”. Some people can also keep things inside and then let them go, of course there are also some people that keep things inside and then explode.

Now someone argued that it was bad and that humanity would be better without that social phenotype (the guy that don’t cry). That is something I can’t agree with, I think that humanity need this social phenotype. There is a need (and a place) for people that will not stop and cry or explore their feeling everytime something “hurt” them and simply do the job that need to be done.

In a way I think that rejecting this social phenotype is rejecting the male social phenotype. I think that it would be a great lost for humanity and that it does a great diservice to future generation to try and make sure everybody cries and explore their feeling the moment things hurt them. Now I’m not saying you should encourage guy never to cry or explore their feeling, but letting it be ok not to explore them right away is probably not a bad idea, sometimes times is what it takes not crying. Oh well, I just had to rant about that conversation even if that rant ended up being confusing.

The teaching of history

2009-02-07T22:01:00.001-05:00

The whole Battle on the Plains of Abraham once again made me realize how crappy the education system is at teaching history. When I was in high school we could take at most 3 history class, the first one on the ancient world, the Greek, the Egyptian and the Roman (go forbid we talked about the Celt, the native American, the Aztec, the Maya, the Chinless or the Indonesian civilizations) while the second is supposed to be on the world history until world war 1 with emphasis on Quebec and Canada. Now my memory of that second class is pretty hazy I know we talked about the end of the renaissance and the beginning of the colonization of Quebec. We saw in some details how the colony was settled up until the English conquest and then learned about that battle (and that battle only, nothing about the rest of the war, such as Chevalier de Levis’ attempt to capture Quebec). Then it was major event in Quebec with particular insistence put on event that the English minority at the time put inflicted on the Quebecers. The patriot revolt (with failure to mention the English patriots), the declaration of the high and low Canada and all the other stuff that reinforce the idea that Quebec is an oppressed province in Canada. But we skip over any realization by the Canadians and most of the thing involving Quebec that are not “inflicted” by the English.

Sure I understand that the class is limited in time and that we have to cover the “important” event but I fail to see how skipping part of the patriot revolt really inform Quebec student about it and how failing to mention the treaty of Paris influence on English rule really help. I would think that the history we teach should at least be complete and true. Now if I was redoing the curriculum for high school there would be history class at every grade. I would also insure that the program includes both Canadian and Quebec history and that it goes up about 10 years before the last class (i.e. 1999 this year). I think we need to learn a lot more about our history to understand where we come from and to be ready to step into a greater role in the world. Not to mention that it would help us take another look at the decision of the past and if we can give the next generation a better understanding of these decision they would be better equipped to see if we need to change them. It probably would reduce Quebec’s reliance on the: “it’s a choice we made as a society” answer when we question our model.

Well, in a way that part of my a better education is the best way to solve most of our society problems and to insure that our society’s future is bright and free of tyranny. I really think that education is much more important the health care (well one is actually part of the other, a good education includes preventive health care which is sorely lacking) and should involve a great deal more of our effort.

Public speaking

2009-02-07T21:20:00.001-05:00

Last Monday I had to give a talk at an amateur astronomer club and well it went relatively well. I say relatively well, because my one hour talk lasted for 1h45, and well I didn’t go through all of the stuff I had prepared for this presentation. I was supposed to talk at length about the Canadian telescope and the science we do there. In fact the talk was intitled: “Canadian Telescopes: Unsong heros of astronomy” and I barely got to talk about any modern telescope (the last one I talk about was the cloud covered pic of Mont Megantic which is hardly the most recent one). Part of the reason for this “failure” lays squarely with me, I underestimated the amount of talking I would do at each telescope and the amounts of question I would receive, another part of it lies with the club that held a 45 minutes talk about february night sky, right before my presentation and the last part comes from a question that really surprised me. Someone asked me to sell to the group the idea of the Quebec-Canadian governement building a Megantic-like telescope today within the current economic crisit.

I really liked that question, even tho I had absolutly nothing prepared to answer something of that kind (according to the asker I succeed quite well). I like the question because it forced me to think on my feet, to convince someone that my science was worth investing in even when the economy isn’t that strong and to answer something I’m prepared for on the fly. In short, that might be a good preparation for my thesis defense!

Nonetheless, that not what I brought up the sujet, I brought it up to speak about public speaking. Now, those of you that know me know that I am very verbose and that I can speak quite a lot. Given the evidence of my speaking too much above I assume that even those that don’t know me very well understand. You might think that my next sentence would something along the line: but I’m scared of public speaking or some such. You would be wrong, I love public speaking, it must be part of my attention whore side and no I’ve never been that scare of speaking in public. Still, I’ve heard and tried many of the “tricks” to help yourselve speak in front of an audience and frankly I don’t think any of them really works. Imagining people naked, yeah that sure is going to get me too feel better, I’m giving a talk in front of bunch of naked people. Finding someone that looks sympatic to me in the audience and looking at him while I speak, great only one person came to hear me. Looking above the audience to the wall behind, great no one came to hear me talk. None of that works, at least for me, I prefer to talk to the audience. I’m talking to everyone there as if it was a single person, when I answer question I start my answer toward the person asking the question but I go on to talk to everyone, using the logic that if someone asked the question most of the group probably was wondering the same thing.

Well that my idea about it, I’m certainly not an expert on public speaking and it probably doesn’t work for every kind of public presentation there is. I’m pretty sure that an act can’t work well with that technic or any kind of performace that doesn’t require feedback from the public but I don’t know. So what do you think?

Stimulus for your economie

2009-02-07T10:09:00.001-05:00

The conquest or the giving away of Quebec

2009-02-03T23:45:00.001-05:00

I listened to Pierre Falardeau one of Quebec artist complaining about the recreation of the Battle on the Plain of Abraham in Quebec. Now in a previous post I said that I not a big fan of celebrating the defeat because for the french speaking majority of Quebec associate this historical event to a defeat and it could be seen as rubbing the defeat in their face. So I’m not hot on the idea, but I would welcome an historical recreation particularly if it was set in within the Fête de la Nouvelle France.

Now many of mister Falardeau’s follower parrot that the battle was the conquest of Quebec. Now while Quebec city was conquered in this battle, most of Quebec was still free, one proof of that is that Chevalier de Levis (a french general) fought for Quebec in 1760 and defeated the British at the battle of Ste-Foy. However the British managed to retreat the to fortification of Quebec and hold out the siege until English reinforcement arrived and forces Levis to retreat to Montreal where he was forced to capitulate by September of 1760. So while the battle of the Plain d’Abraham was a major defeat for the french it was by no mean the end of the war in fact if France had send reinforcement for Levis he would probably have retaken the city.

Next we have to remember that in the Treaty of Paris the French where given the choice between taking back Canada or the island of the Guadeloupe. They chose to take the Guadeloupe leaving the snowy fields of Quebec to the English. The nicely provided closes in the treaty protecting the french living in Quebec and giving them a 18 month period to move out (basically). So remember, France GAVE Quebec to the English, they could have kept the territory if they had let go of the Guadeloupe.

So yes, the British conquered Quebec, but the French did far worse they abandoned Quebec. For a few gram of sugar they gave Quebec away without a second though and without ever trying to retake the province from the British. Yes we where conquered but we should own no loyalty to the people that abandoned us, Quebecers are their own culture, we are one part french and one part english and completely unique. This is what we should celebrate, that our destiny was changed by a battle and a name on a treaty but that we nonetheless forged for ourselves a new destiny and a new identity.

Introduction to the Ontological Proof of God's Existence

2009-02-03T23:17:00.001-05:00

An interesting arguement, however it suffers from a few flaws. First, it assumes that existance is a greater statuts then non existance because if you can imagine a being that which nothing can be greater and it doesn't exist well you can imagine a being that nothing can be greater and that would exist and say that this is greater. Second it is circular, the argument is that if you can conceive a being it must exist because if it didn't exist you couldn't conceive it.

Nice try but still no proof for or against the existance of god.

A little less game in my RPG please

2009-02-01T16:05:00.001-05:00

In the last few month, Wizard of the Coast as produced two new editions of their award winning game, the Star Wars Saga edition and the Dungeon and Dragon 4th edition. I’ve started playing in a Star Wars Saga game and as the high level geek I am keep informed about the new D&D and I think I’ve come to a realisation. Theirs is too much game in 4th edition for me to enjoy it, in fact from what I read and seen you could probably remove the RP from description of the 4th edition. Star Wars Saga follows the same tread but it seems to be weaker.

It might seem strange for me to decry a game for being well, a game but let me explain and I hope you will understand. Like I said before I do RPG for the stories, the characters and the settings the rules are kinda like the physic behind the universe and while they shouldn’t be too quirky they should not endanger “belivability”. You don’t want people to read your rule, think for a second and see that if the rule existed in our world that would bring forth amazingly stupid situation.

Now when you see the RPG as a game first and the rest second those kind of rules “creep” in naturally with the rules to insure game balance. The idea that every character must have the same amongt of utility in combat (at least according to D&D and it’s descendant), most designer will claim that their system is made to represent both combat and non combat encounter but seriously when everything hindge on the mecanic that tract how close you are to dying it’s hard not to think of it as a mecanic for combat even more so when the mecanic only reproduce very short action. Sure it’s balanced and everyone has “exactly” the same amount of influence on the game and many people call that fun, but to me it’s so illogical as to make the game far less enjoyable.

Think about it, in Star Wars Saga some character can have the opportunity to recruit followers, in a way have someone follow them and their orders. Well to presever “game balance” the game designer made it so that for your follower to act you the character have to sacrifice one of his own action. Think about this in reality, the corporal and his soldier are in a fight, for the soldier to fire his weapon the corporal as to stand and wait! That just wrong, but it makes for a balanced game, the character with the follower does not get more “game time” nor does he get extra power.

I guess I prefer simulations to game, and roleplaying to game balance, sure I don’t want character x to be always better then character y in all situation and about everything but I don’t want character x and y to be completely identical except for the name of their abilities. So please tone down the gamy feel in future supplement I’m sure you’ll be able to get a larger share of the market.

Which century is it anyway?

2009-01-30T10:40:00.002-05:00

I’m flabbergasted the Tulsa school district in Oklahoma as not only been suspected of witchcraft and casting hexes on her teacher but she as been suspended for it!!!! Read about the case on the ACLU website. I don’t think there is anything more that can be said about that, for got sake witchcraft!

Now, I’m sure they use the very serious and completely scientific process outlined below to insure her witchiness:

Harper might have lost the war to win the battle

2009-01-28T22:54:00.001-05:00

The last federal budget was “approved” today by the last of the opposition party giving the conservative the vote they needed to stay in power at least for a while and prevent either an election or a coalition government from two of the three opposition parties. However, to have this budget accepted by at least one of the opposition party, they moved away from their theoretical right measure and embraced a far left lets spend everything we’ve got and then some attitude. It worked, the liberal choose to forgo their words and quit the coalition and vote with the conservative on the budget. However, no one is happy about the budget for the left, already opposed to the Harper government it doesn’t do enough, for the right it is a betrayal of the ideals and promises made during the previous elections.

I think that his will hurt the conservative chances at a majority government far more then anything they have done in the past. Simply because they alienated the people that viewed them as an alternative to the ever increasing bureaucracy and involvement of the state the Liberal and NPD propose. And, like the ADQ in Quebec politic they are still viewed by the more left leaning part of the electorate as dangerous Capitalistic Murderous, Environment Destroying Scumbag, who they would never vote for. In short, they lost the vote that usually go to them, and did not gain any new votes.

Now just imagine how bad things will be for them when the measured proposed fail and all the opposition parties blame them for it saying they did not do enough? Past tentative to save economies by massive spending and investment in infrastructures have not given any positive result, why should we expect it to be different in Canada?

I think the conservative should have gambled the government on making a budget that would have actually helped the economy instead of trying to force it to restart. First, I don’t think the governor general would have given power to the coalition (they are not numerous enough to pass any vote without the bloc which will had only agreed to vote with them on non-confidence vote, meaning the conservative could paralyze government by simply voting against everything) and second I think that people would be intelligent enough to understand while spending billions of dollars when you’re strapped for cash is not a good idea.

Oh well, all this to say that the Canadian left will probably have their wish, Harper and the conservative out of power in the next election. Some will say for the best, other will say it’s about time, many won’t care and the last group will go is there anyone out there would can represent me? That reminds I’ve got to go and see what the green party as to say about the budget, in the last election their fiscal plan was very interesting.

I'd like that kind of relationship

2009-01-27T22:48:00.002-05:00

Those two videos are of the parent of a youtuber arguing philosophy about life and the universe. Isn't that a great relationship? Beign able to debate, argue and talk about deep subjet. Now, I'd like to have that kind of relationship with a woman, that would be nice and interesting. What do you think?

Starting the day well

2009-01-27T22:37:00.001-05:00

This day started well, and aside from the minor annoyance of the federal budget went pretty well. I’ll go into how the day started well, it’s quite average but it really set the tone for the day. The day started exactly like every other and well seems to be normal or boring, until I got into the bus. I sat down, in a mostly empty bus so that a nice plus then, a mother with her small kid (can’t be more then 1 years old). About 5 second after the kid sat down he (or she I’m not sure, you with the winter clothes and all) started laughting, the pure, cute laught of a child. All along the bus ride, the little one keep smiling at people and laughting whenever someone winked or smiled at him. That made my day great, the kid laughting and smiling; sometimes it’s the smallest thing.

Praying and my atheism

2009-01-25T23:38:00.001-05:00

I’ve said in the past that I’d pray for someone or to help someone, and I’ve pray in the past for myself. Now you might go, but asaathi you’re an atheist who the hell are you praying to and why are you doing that?

Actually, when I say I’ll pray for someone it’s mostly because I think (or know) that this person will fell better knowing that I would do that. It’s a way to tell them, I care about what is happening to you and yours and I would like it to be resolved in the best way possible. It as nothing to do with a creator or a god watching and waiting for prayer, and everything to do with sharing the fact that I care.

Now, how about when I pray for myself, well that I think is even easier to explain, first I’m not praying to any particular entities or even something with a conscience or intelligent. Praying is a way to articulate my fear, my hope, my dreams in a way that will make me fell better about them and perhaps find solutions to what ails me. It is a way to vocalize internally what I think, what I have problem with and in a way relieve some of the stress but making the problem more realm and more concrete. It’s also a way to analyze what I feel and think about a problem or a situation. I’m not expecting answers from an outside source or even miraculous occurrence to solve the problem or situation but it does help to talk about it, even if it is only to myself.

Cooking with the Astronomers

2009-01-24T22:49:00.000-05:00

Spicy and swirly galaxy
Preparation: 10 000 years or so
Cooking times: roughly 13.2 Billion years
Feeds: unknown un species as ever eaten a whole one

Ingredients
Between 10 to the 8 power and 10 to the 10 power hot stars of various ages and metallicity
Between 10 to the 10 power and 10 to the 13 power cold stars of various ages and metallicity
Neutral hydrogen gas, to taste
Ionized hydrogen gas to taste
1 super massive black hole (between 10 to the 6 and 10 to the 9 times the mass of a typical G stars)
10 to the 13 power cold dark matter as can be found in any good universal store
an hint of dark energy.

Cooking step
1. Put dark matter in a large empty area of the universe along with cold hydrogen gas
2. Add the cold stars of the lowest metallicity
3. Stir for a few millions years
4. Add a second helping of cold stars with an high mettalicity
5. Put the super massive black hole in the middle of the dark matter
6. Add the rest of the cold stars
7. Add the young hot stars all over the galaxy
8. Add the ionized gas
9. Stir for the reaming cooking time
10. For extra spice add more ionized gas around the super massive black hole

Here you go a perfect, spiral galaxy with just an hint of nuclear activity. And aside from the fact that the neutral gas is actually the sources of all the stars you will find in the galaxy that a pretty good interpretation of how galaxies are made. And that actually part of what I do for my PhD, of course since I can’t mix the dark matter and cold hydrogen gas my work is a little more complex.

You see, what I do is kinda like trying to figure out how the cake was made simply by looking at the cake (nope not tasting it) and in what proportion everything is present. Let me tell you I’ve made cake and it quite easier to make them from the recipe that to figure out the recipe from the cake. Now luckily I can look using special tools otherwise well the information I could get would be much more limited. You see light contain an amazing volume of information about what emitted it and what stood between you and the source. You can actually measure temperatures of the gas, quantities of elements, velocity of the stars and gas relative to the line of sight and of course what happen around those pesky black hole.

You see, every elements emit in very specifics AND unique way so you can differentiate between the elements simply by seeing what light you are receiving. Also, movement cause the light to either become bluer (if the object is moving toward you) or redder (if it moving away from you), then the intensity of the emission depends on the temperature, pressures and other condition in the medium. The dependence is not unique but every light depend more strongly on one or the other of these condition so you can compute them from the ratios of many lines. So you can tell quite a lot from just the star, but you need to understand quite a lot of thing to make senses of all the information. It’s fascinating to say the least.

Taureau Rouge Glace Concassée

2009-01-24T00:10:00.001-05:00

What is:”Taureau rouge Glace concassé” well that would be the french title for the Red Bull Crashed Ice event (that not an official translation, but the words are all correctly translated). Why would I speak about a non-existing translation of a sporting event name? Well you see this week-end in Quebec City, were hosting the what seems to be becoming an annual event of the Red Bull Crashed Ice, and their has been a manifestation to give the event a french name. Now, that perfectly reasonable… if the manifestation was done by people from Quebec City in Quebec City, the problem is the manifestation was held in Montreal, by people from Montreal.

Excuse me Montrealer, don’t you have enough problem with the well everything about your city (remember, in the last year part of the subway threaten to collapse, many important water conduit broke, you lost the Canada’s formula one race and not to mention report that the main bridge into the island is not that safe anymore)? I don’t think we need more of your opinion about what is happening in Quebec City, please let us enjoy our sports and well work out to fix your city. Oh and BTW, if Quebec ever become a part of the Red Bull Air Race, I sincerely hope it will remain the Red Bull Air Race and not some weird french translation of the words.

Remember if you want French name for your event, start them yourself don’t complain when someone else comes in to host an even and doesn’t call it to your sensibilities. Beside, I don’t think anyone is forcing you to watch the event and if you don’t like the name don’t participate it will move away if no one get involved you know.

Higher dimension video

2009-01-23T19:03:00.002-05:00

How To Imagine The Tenth Dimension - Watch more How-to

I'd like to point out that even if this is a pretty good way to see higher dimension it is by no mean the only way, and even if it does claim that we cannot think of anything beyon 10 dimension, this is actually quite false as some version of string theory require up to 24 dimension. But still it should give you an idea of how to interpret dimension higher then 3. And the balloon and flat-lander is a good analogy to us and the expension of the universe.

Recreating the battle of the “Plaine d’Abraham”

2009-01-22T22:51:00.000-05:00

Apparently for the 250th anniversary of the Battle on the Plaine d’Abraham, the Canadian Battlefield commision as decided to recreate the battle in Quebec City on the plains. While the idea as some merits, it is afterall the battle that deceided much of the fate of Canada. However, it is a french defeat and the french speaking majority in Quebec associate itself with the french for some reason, I’m guessing it’s the kisses. Now, the historical value of the battle is indeniable, but well I kind of a thing agains celebrating defeat and I can justly imagine that the separatist of Quebec will see any comemoration of the Battle will be seen as a slap in the face. I don’t oppose slapping the separatist movement in the face (expecially with it’s current leaders), I think that many Quebecers will feel slapped with such a celebration. It’s a very thorny issue I guess. Hmm maybe there is a way to make such a recreation in a way that won’t make Quebecers looks like losers, we could for example make a demonstration not protesting the recreation but honoring the French’s death that fought villiantly, even if they lost, to protect Quebec City. Imagine, a few hundred people all dressed in black watching the baltle. When it ends they walk away in silence up to a cimetary and then a simple word for the French soldiers. I think that this way we both remember the importance of this battle in our history and the value of our french heritage. What do you think about this recreation?

So about that girlfriend issue

2009-01-21T21:42:00.000-05:00

Well since you haven’t seen any announcement on facebook that my relationship status as changed you probably guessed that there hasn’t been any change in that area of my life. You might think it is because of my astronomical standard for a girlfriend or that I’m simply too geeky to get a girl. While both might have something to do with it, I’m pretty sure it as more to do with my lack of social life at the moment, aside from gaming with my friends and my salsa classes I’m basically spending all my time in front my Mac typing away at my thesis.

Now, in the last few years I’ve gotten to the point where I believe that the most important factor in getting date is being out there. Without much of a social life there is very little chance your gonna find anyone. Even dating web site, while they are useful and can work will not be very successful if the only thing you are doing is looking at pictures of woman and not sending hundreds upon hundreds of messages (and that’s in the hope of getting a few answers).

So how do I feel about still being single? Well, honestly, I pretty much don’t care at the moment. I’ve got little to no time to spend on thinking about a date, no woman I’m interested in hooking up and very little change of meeting any and well I’m so unsure of my near future situation as to make meeting someone problematic. Just imagine if the only job get ends up three continent away… got to be the shortest relationship in the history of thing lasting longer then a one night stand. In short, I’m not worrying about, I still feel lonely at time but I guess that can’t be help, you can fell lonely in crowd so I guess it’s not hard to feel lonely when you alone.

Oh well, that was the romantic situation update, don’t worry most of the future post won’t be about things like that, beside it‘s not like I need someone’s approval to write on my blog. Not to mention that I don’t think I’ll get a girlfriend through well this blog, even tho at least one woman started speaking me because of it… hmm hey you never know.

I have Obamamaniistist

2009-01-21T10:35:00.000-05:00

Yeah you read it right I’m sick and tired of Obamamania, mainly because that is what is keeping me from learning about Obama and his ideas. Sure Obama’s election is an historic event, the first African American elected to the post of president of the United State of America but we shouldn’t just all degenerate into a blissful unthinking state because it happened. Everywhere I’m turning to find more/learn more about Obama I’m greeted by journalist in the orgasmic bliss that tell me how great they thing he is without telling me a single thing about the man. It getting so bad that I’m actually avoiding news Channels because I’m starting to get angry the coverage, come on there are other things happening in Canada and the world beside Obama’s inauguration.

Also, but this is another rant, STOP DOING VOICE OVER TRANSLATION, I was trying to listen to Obama’s speech yesterday and after a few words in English we get that freaky, whinny voice doing the translation over Obama. Subtitle would have been so much more interesting and would have given me the opportunity to be sure that what I was hearing/seeing was what was actually said. I just can’t help but feel that someone is trying to hide the actual words when they are doing a voice over or that they consider me too stupid to read/understand the words actually spoken.

Anyway, remember journalist Obama did no cure cancer, fight off an alien invasion or staves off world hunger so please please oh pretty please stop treating him like some kind of messiah that as already saved us all from terrible danger. I’ve read part of his inauguration speech and yes he sounds like he as good idea, but give him time to show he can also accomplish them before you pronounce him a saint. Otherwise I’ll star to think your setting him up to fail by making the things people expect him to do actually impossible to achieve.

Two kinds of people

2009-01-20T23:19:00.000-05:00

There is two very different ways that people look at science and the answers and question it provides, the open minded way and the believer’s way. The open minded way require that you adress science as tool to understand that natural word, without alreay assuming answers for your question. While the believer’s way look at science as way to prove that his answers are true.

Most often this comes in the form of religion, where the believers need science’s answer to be god did it. Science might explain just about everything but in the end the result must be, god did it. This lead to twisting of observation and interpration of theories to give them supranatural weight or worse trying to force observation to fit with scriptures, which tends forbid avenues of knowledge and reduce the impact of science on humanity.

Will writing this post I realised something, the open minded person does not approche science without looking to prove his answer are true, but he is willing to accept his answer might be wrong. This is the greatest difference between the two, one is willing to accept his answer to be wrong, the other claims science is wrong with observation disagree with his answer.

Tell me, which one would you prefere the next generation of scientist to be?

The Government should save the economy

2009-01-18T12:52:00.001-05:00

Since the beginning of the financial crisis we keep hearing that the government should save such and such because if it doesn’t everything will fall apart. We’ve seen huge amount of money fuelled into banking but the crisis as not slowed down it speed up. Now all around the world people are clamoring for the government to increase spending, increase taxing do everything to save the economy, it sound like a panic where everyone is turning toward the first authoritative figure in the room and asking: SAVE US!

But shouldn’t look at the past action and result of that authority figure before we hope it will save us from this crisis? In the past years, at least in Quebec, the government has been involved in a lot of rescue attempt, to save companies from bankruptcy. Most if not all of them resulted in spectacular failures, oh some companies where “saved” and by that I mean that with constant cash inflow from the government they are spared the shame of closing, in the process keeping jobs in a region and vote for the political party that promises to keep the cash coming. In short, in the past government help seldom resulted in a real economic cure but it became an economic artificial life support.

What I don’t understand is that it quite easy to see why things happen this way, yet people continue to use that solution. It’s human nature at its worse, why find new and better way to produce our product so that we can compete with the other producer when someone is willing to give you money to offset your lack of sales? Companies doing this are easy to spot with a simple test, cut the money flow for one year, if they must close it means they did not use the cash to improve themselves and become competitive but instead to count as additional revenue and pocket it. It a show of laziness, but given that our society consider planning for 2 years in the future long term planning and that the average government exist for 4 to 8 years in Canada, it easy to see why it would be a preferred choice. Furthermore the basic principles of democratic society help this along, if party A give money to keep a companies and job opens in an area and party B won’t there are pretty good chances that the people working for the companies will vote for party A.

Now you might wonder what do I think the government should do in the next few years to help the economy go back on tract. Well, it not easy, it’s not simple and it involve been almost certain not to be reelected (particularly in Canada’s current minority government situation). First, reduces taxes given people and companies more money, don’t expect that money to be sent back in the economy and credit to soar again; instead it will be used to pay back debt and go into savings. While this will slow the economy down further it will also build back confidence and funds to be lend to companies with new idea and for new developments. Second, the government should reduce trade restriction (at least on basic material) to increase the volumes of trades going on that will really stimulate the economy, which is completely based on the amount of trade going on. Finally and that the biggest and hardest thing, reduce the amount of bureaucratic red tape preventing new companies from being open or closed.

That should really help people get back toward economic help, not giving billions after billions to companies that are only gonna use it to survive one more year and retire their CEO in golden paradise.

Battlestar Galactica

2009-01-17T22:46:00.001-05:00

First of the last few episode of Battlestar Galactica aired yesterday. It doesn’t seem to be headed in the same direction as Stargate: Atlantis and was actually very interseting. I’m pretty sure one of the characters was wrong when he identified the fifth cylon and I’m very puzzeled by a few characters actions. However, it does seem like one of my theory might actually be true, and if it is that would be really an amazing result. Sorry to be vague but I don’t want to post any spoilers for you. On and if you haven’t started watching it yet.. what the FRAK are you waiting for?

Gaza, Hamas and Israel

2009-01-17T22:29:00.005-05:00

Today, the security cabinet of the Iraeli prime minister Ehoud Olmert declared an unilateral cease-fire. To answer this declaration Hamas spokeperson,Faouzi Barhoum: Hamas will not stop fighting. Makes you wonder which side wants peace and security doesn't it?

One side, fires rocket from school, churches, hospital, and residential area trying to hit the same target on the other side and use (according to it's spokenpeople) human shield to deter the other side from striking back. The other side, build shelter from it's citizen, sound alarms and ready drill to try to protect them as much as possible, as in the past let rocket attack go unanswered in the interest of trying the diplomatic solution. Yes, that side also fired bomb and missiles at school, churches, hospital and residential area in the first side, but they also dropped tracs telling the civilian the area would be targeted for bombardement in the day.

I'm not taking side yet, this war is more complex then the actions taken in the last few months, but one side prides itself on it's use of woman, children and elderly as human shield...

edit: Today Hamas as decleared it's own cease-fire to allow the Israely troops to leave the area.

TV science

2009-01-15T21:44:00.001-05:00

As someone studying in science I must say that I find most tv series to pathetically bad at science. Most of science fiction use the concept of the super scientist, you know the guy he’s got a phd in Astrophysics but can in flash splice the genome of a new species, find the cure to an alien disease, understand language dead from millenia and of course build from scratch a device that interface amazingly advance technology with the USB port of a computer (what I call the Atlantis offense). Still that gringe worthy but well it’s not that bad and it can be considered an artistic license.

However, somethings are really scarry, you know the basic highschool science failure kind of thing. Like for example in the last Knight Rider (yeah they remade that) we saw a plane go beyond his ceiling, which could have made the presure destroy the plane while keeping a ground speed of more then 100 miles per hours and finally flying away from an exploding nuclear weapon (and surviving with it’s cargo door opened!). Now that like 7 imposible things before breakfast, a plane cannot go beyond his ceiling, the plane ceiling is the maximum altitude it’s wing can find enough air for it to fly. Past the ceiling, the plane doesn’t fly… so imagine 20 000 feets above the ceiling.

But still depite it’s outrageous science Knight Rider irks me far less the Fringe. Fringe is a show where “fringe” science is real, you know speaking to the dead, raising the dead, airborn chemicals that melt skin, instant cloning and all the rest of the paranormal stuff. In itself it as nothing to make me cringe but well it adresse everything with pseudo-scientific jargon, they also try to make everything sound scientific…. But they still get basic high school level knowledge wrong. Not to mention that the show isn’t that good.

But you know what really made me stop watching Fringe, while I’m still watching Knight Rider is that the first take itself seriously while the second doesn’t. Knight Rider science is outrageously wrong, mentally retarded wrong in fact, but the whole show fits in a parallele universe where holywood laws of physics rule. Fring on the other an take itself very seriously, the are a serious investigative team, involved in countering the patern in wich evil scientist experiment on the world, thankfully they have one scientist on their side who can explain everything “scientifically”.

The moon isn't turning around the Earth

2009-01-14T23:40:00.000-05:00

Surprising right, but it actually true, the moon does not rotate around the Earth, its rotating around the sun and making a sinusoidale patern around the Earth. Now this illustrate a little misconception a lot of people have about gravity. You see the force of gravity doesn’t point exactly to the center of the most massive object. It points to the center of mass of the system, that means that for exemple the Earth-Moon system (if it existed outside everything else in the universe) would orbit not around the center of the Earth but around a point that correspond to center of the mass distribution between the Earth and the moon. Now since that Earth is much more massive then the moon this point is currently inside that Earth’s crust, but if the moon was farther away it could move outside the Earth and both would be turning around empty space. Fascinating isnt it? Oh and btw that also means that you are attracting the Earth toward you with the same force as the Earth is attracting you toward it.

How and where is the universe expending

2009-01-13T23:32:00.001-05:00

I was reading a post on anyflower’s blog and she was telling us that she is having trouble understanding that the universe is expending into nothing and that dimensions were folded into themselves. I won’t say it’s quite simple, because well it isn’t and quite frankly it is unintuitive.

First, let us set some base, there are two answers that are helping me understand the expansion of the universe: everywhere and 13.7 billions years ago. Like 42 these don’t help mean much without the question those answers answer. Well the question are: where did the Big Bang occur, and When did it occur. It might sound strange to say that the Big Bang happened everywhere but let me walk you through the reason. This reasoning is quite simple, we observe that the universe is expending, since it is getting bigger in the future, we can safely say that it was smaller way in the past. And if you continue to look into the past at some point the dimensions of the universe are going to be zero, it’s gonna be a point. Now, this point containing all the matter and energy of the universe is the Big Bang, well no to be completely accurate this point is the result of the Big Bang, it comes into existence at instant 0, which can only exist simultaneously with the Big Bang.

Now, this point contains all the matter, energy AND space in the universe. So all the everywhere of the universe is contained in that point. Which means that in that everywhere the Big Bang happened. You might wonder why when we do not know where the Big Bang occurred, how can we know when. Well through the same process as we figured out the entire universe was in that point. You see the reversal of the expansion produce this point some time in the past, that why we know “when” the Big Bang occurred.

This existence of a when with nowhere (or with everywhere) helps us in the where does this universe expend into. You see nothing is not exactly the answer I would give. While it is true that the universe does not expend into any space (if their was space to expend into it would be part of the universe…). You see everywhere stays the same, but when changes, in a way the three-dimensional expansion we see are the result of the explosion of the Big Bang but in time instead of space. Each second the universe becomes older and this manifest as space being a little bigger.

Now, this ties in with the folded dimension idea. This idea comes from string theory, which basically says that the universe is the manifestation of vibrating object. One of the interesting prediction of this theory is that their exist an number of extra dimension that are too small to be observed by humanity (depending on the version of the theory you see it, it ca be as much as 22 extra dimension). Now we explain those hidden dimension as being folded over themselves to insane amongst. Now “before” the Big Bang every dimension was folded in this way. At the moment of the Big Bang, 3 spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension for some reason unfolded and created the space-time we observe.

This lead to another way to understand the expansion of the universe, the dimension of space have not yet finished to unfold and are slowly relaxing into their full size. Kinda like a t-shirt that would be folded and help by only one layer of the fold, it would quickly restore itself to its original size. But that doesn’t really answer the question of what it is unfolding into, and one again we much go back to the time answer I am usually giving.

So here I’d welcome questions about the expansion of the universe, tell me about what puzzles you and I will try to answer. Now I do not hold all the answer, in fact I don’t believe science as all the answers to that question figured out yet. However I will try to answer and explain to the best of my abilities.

Science and religion

2009-01-12T23:10:00.001-05:00

Listening to creationist videos and the biologist and other scientist to those videos makes me want to ask about science and religion. Some scientists expect religion to disappear replaced by the wonders of the natural world, logic and reason as the basis for or societies and laws. Other believe that religion will always exist as some part of humanity will be unable to leave behind the idea of god. But it all comes down to a single, are science and religion opposite ideas?

I would answer strangely, religion is the opposite of science, but science is not the opposite of religion. The opposite of science would ignorance and even the most backward of religion is based on knowledge, often knowledge without understanding but knowledge nonetheless. If we follows the thoughts of some anthropologist and biologist to think that religion arose from a new to understand the event of our life and feel that we have an importance in the universe it as no choice but to be based on a little knowledge. Any religion that would not offer explanation for natural phenomenon or would not thought its ritual offer observable protection from unexplained problem would quickly disappear in favor of more personal god. You just have to think about the rules against eating pork that many religion have, its easy to explain, undercooked pork meat as a very risk of making you sick or infecting you with parasite. You don’t need to know how it is dangerous but you need to know it is.

Now, I say that religion is the opposite of science for a simple reason, science is the quest for more understanding, for more knowledge with at it’s core the knowledge that there is no forbidden knowledge, that the problem is not in the knowledge itself but in how we will find ways to use that knowledge.

As a side note, this explains why I think the story of Adam and Eve depict god as a dangerous monster. Think about it, you have here an all powerful being creating intelligent being with curiosity, free will and the power to learn and grow; yet forbidding them the fruits of the tree of knowledge. Then, when those creature he created follow curiosity he build inside them, and use the free will he so graciously provided to disobey and taste the fruit to learn and grow, something else the creator put into them. This god, cast them out of paradise curse them to die and be tortured for all eternity afterward, curse them to pain and suffering and finally blame his creation for their own punishment. Already at the beginning of the story this god person sound evil, denying knowledge that he already has, and then he proves it by his action when things follow predictably from the condition he himself set.

Anyway, back to religion as the opposite of science, religion by it’s very nature as a set of ritual and an explanation for the natural world by an outside intelligent or energy must change very slowly or very rapidly but catastrophically (just look at Christianity schism in the Renaissance). Rapid change would not make sense to explain, things we see, as human, as unchanging, like the mountain and the stars. In short, to maintain it existence religion needs to oppose new knowledge and new explanation for things. It’s part of the god in the gap problem, most of our religions are based on what is missing from human understanding but as we fill those gaps the place for god seems to disappear. Even more problem start to appear when science contradict the teaching of religion by demonstrating that a phenomenon that religion explain do not work as religion advocate. Try think of someone today that would follow the Greek Pantheon of god, how do you reconcile Zeus sending lightning bold down from the star with humanity using electricity and producing it own lightning for experiment. If Zeus is supposed to smite the infidel claiming to use his power he is taking his sweet time about it.

One last thing, science is not a religion no matter how little some people understands science or how it works. Even if those people see similarity in how scientist act toward people with less knowledge and how priest and holy men act toward the less enlightened. Even if science looks like it as dogma that cannot be challenged just like religion. It is false, there is no absolute law in science, anything and everything can be challenge… but there is a few catch, you must have something to replace the law, that not only explains all the phenomenon the law you are challenging explained (it was obviously valid for some phenomenon otherwise it wouldn’t have been used), it also has to explain the phenomenon you used to challenge the law in the first place and it must not invalidate other laws (except if it respect the two first condition for those laws as well). This is why, you do not see many big changes in the theories of sciences, it is very hard to find something that would at once explain what was previously explained AND explain the new objection.

There are only a few good recent example, but they should give you the scope of the change that can occur in science: Relativity. Not only did it explain everything Newton explained about gravity (in fact General relativity is mathematically identical to Newtonian dynamics in the limit of slow moving object in “weak” gravitational field) but it also explained why Mercury was behaving strangely, how light travelled through space, what would happened if you increased an object mass to infinity, what were the possible future for the universe and many other unexplained observation of the time. As a second example, Quantum mechanic not only did it solve the problem of the single electron interference pattern, it also explained the radiation of the stars, the nature of light, the nature of elementary particle and so many other fantastic things that it is just mind boggling.

That last difference is quite interesting, when science change it is most often by building on what already existed, expanding our knowledge even as it is changing it. When religions change it is by tearing down the old and replacing it with the new. It burns what it didn’t like with the ancient and provides a new explanation and new sets of rules to go with that.

I wanted a House tonight

2009-01-12T21:31:00.001-05:00

No, not the building house but an episode of House, md, well have been hearing for the past month or so that House was moving to Monday. So I expected the first one to be tonight, instead I got two hours of the new season of 24. I’m not really into 24 so you can imagine that it not really I was looking for. Oh, well it not like I’m gonna lose any sleep over missing an episode of House.

On a side note, I’ve been browsing dating site tonight and I’ve realise that education really shows in the message the people use to present themselves and to say what they are looking for. The average message looks a little like this:

“Hey, I’m a fun guy/girl who likes sport, good food and a good bottle of wine one in a while. I’m looking for a girl/guy like to have a little fun and maybe more.”

I kid you not, I just showed you about 90% of all messages over there, no wonder some guy use only the picture when they decide to communicate with a woman. Anyway most educated people will have a much longer message with, well sometimes the above message included but usally as part of something more or as a sarcastic remarque on the quality of messages they see. Oh and you also see that a lot of people have phd apparently… 18 years old with phd that type in SMS and barely string too sentenses together while saying they are studying to be hair dressers claims to have phd. I think it’s proof positive that their very little you can trust on dating sites.

A themed week

2009-01-11T20:05:00.001-05:00

Last week, had a theme, a very annoying theme if you ask me but a theme nonetheless. The theme cancelled games. You see last week I was supposed to have 4 games, one Sunday, one Wednesday, one Saturday and one today. My first Sunday was cancel because of the DM note having any time to prepare since he was working over the holyday. Next my Wednesday game was cancelled because of snow, Wednesday night was one of the first snow storm of the year over here. Just as I am starting to see the patern emerging, my Saturday game is cancled on Thursday, because of one of the players being sick and hers and another player’s child being sick so no game. Then tonight, well I hadn’t hear from that game DM about a game so I send out an e-mail and made a few phone, turns out… no game tonight DM still isn’t ready. That’s what I would call a theme week, every single game I was supposed to have has been cancel.

Realisations come from the strangest sources

2009-01-10T22:49:00.001-05:00

At the moment between my long bout of writing text and producing figures for my thesis I like to watch lighthearted comedies and anime. At the moment I’m watching the very interesting anime Pumpin scissors. It’s about the tribulation of a military unit after a large war (kinda like our second World War) that is assign to the task of helping society rebuild itself and fight “war aggravator”, i.e. people that are corrupt and keep thing bad for their own profit. While watching one of the episodes I though, wow: I’d love to tell that story in one of my RPG games. That when it hit me, one of the biggest reasons I do not like the new edition of D&D and I want my game to be interactive storytelling. I want to tell the story of the characters the players made in a situation or another. The latest D&D, the 4th edition, doesn’t feel that way for me, oh I’ve read the book and the feel I’m getting from them is that I’ll be playing a game, only a game. Not telling the story of my player’s characters and the world I am crafting. Already in D&D 3.5 (the previous) edition I’m finding it hard to tell some stories as the mecanic of the game, well more like the mood and feeling intrinsecly link with the game are pushing me toward a game and not a story.

Writing about this I also understand why some of our games have moved into legend. You know games that we talk about for years after we have stopped playing them, games where you find the old characters sheets and you go: man that was a cool game, remember when Alcarne did that? All of those game where about the stories of those characters. From the neonate vampire born in the first cities search for something that cannot exist, to the first 4 space cops in the starship Destiny by way of the young force sensitive that found and rebuild an hold jedi starship, those story have entered our memories has legend.

Through the magic of sharing an universe and the will to have our protagonist survive despite what the universe threw at them, I think we’ve made stories and myth. And that is what I try to recreate with my games, oh I often fail, well I think I fail most of the time. Yet, I must not be doing so bad, my player keep coming back to one of my game after 7 years and I learned that they even talk about the game with people that do not play any RPG (must be weird for them…)

Yet another realisation has hit me (must be the hour of realisation or something), gaming and interactive storytelling has shaped a big part of my personality. It as made me more expressive, more assertive, and it as gotten me to talk a lot more. Well, when you’re most often the world builder/main storyteller of your game you spend a lot of your time talking and well you end up enjoying it. Well, maybe I should try listening a little more, it might make my life even better… and my games too.

The futur of science-fiction on TV

2009-01-10T20:06:00.001-05:00

I’m looking at what has been announced for the next season in term of science fiction serie and I must say it’s not really impressive. In short, there is the last half Season of Battlestar Galactica and the second half of Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicle second season. However I have little hope to see a third season of Terminator, Fox as just moved the serie to Friday night and that usually a dead sentence (as was observe with Firefly and Dark Angel). So what else is in the work?

Well, Stargate:90201.. oups sorry Stargate: Universe, a new hippier Stargate, that sounds like a poor remake of Star Trek: Voyager. In short the show’s premise is that humanity learns that the Stargate ninth symbole is use to open a gate to a gatelaying ship the ancient sent off millenias ago. As can be expected they send an expedition to the ship which find it cannot gate back to Earth and while have to finish the ship mission if they want to see home ever again. Oh, did I mention that the ship is moving and that if they are not fast enough some people might get left behind and that they will be using a younger cast to attract a younger audience.

Also, Capriaca, Battlestar’s first spinoff is supposed to be in the work. It should be a look at how and why the cylons came to be be and maybe part of the first human-cylon war. It looks promissing but given they only gave the widely popular and interesting Battlestar Galactica only 4 seasons worth of money, I can only wonder how long and how deep the serie will be.

And that about all I heard about, kinda depressing. Particularly when you realise that there are new season of just about every reality show that are announced and that American Idol will once again be aired. I know I’m not the usual target democraphic of tv network but I’d at least expect an effort to get me to watch the network. Oh well, I guess it’s back to book and the internet for me. Maybe I should try to write my own series, you never it might not suck as much as instinct tells you it will.

National Novel Writing Month is a big challenge

2009-01-09T21:50:00.001-05:00

I’ve always wanted to participate in the NaNoWriMo contest, I talked about this before on the blog, basically it s a challenge to write a 50 00 words novel in one month (november to be exact). Now, I’m someone that has little problem writing lots and lots of text, I’m easilly inspired so to speak. Well, as a way to have an archive of what I wrote on this blog I started to record all my post in a word document on my computer. The first post I recorded was the Anti-Religious themes about the golden compas. Well that was in 2007 (november to be exact) and you know that in word you can check the number of words you have written. Well in that more then 1 years of post there is less then 35 000 words in 50 pages of text. So in one year I’ve barely managed to word 2/3 of what would be required of me in 1 month should I participate in NaNoWriMo. Impressive when you think about it no?

Stargate:Atlantis is over, finally

2009-01-09T21:38:00.001-05:00

Stargate: Atlantis is over, finally.

Tonight marked the abrubt ending of the Stargate: SG-1 spinoff of Stargate: Atlantis, while the serie had a very good beginning and lot of potential for great stories, something missfired and made the serie sucky. My observation is that the serie generation coincided with the end of Stargate: SG-1, i.e. the transfer of writer from the old serie to the new serie and the weird decision to aim for self-contained episodes instead of a season wide story. This lead to faillure to have any kind of continuity and lead to increased convoluted ideas and stupidity to make the plot of the week posible while still keeping a semblance of evoluting setting.

This is while I’ve decided in the post to talk about reimagining Stargate: Atlantis. I want to talk about what I would have done with it, how the initial story would have progressed and all that. I won’t go into 5 seaons of episode but I will try to go with the main lines and the critical season opening, mid season two-parter and season ending episode. So without further introduction here is Season 1:

Season 1:
Season opening:
Pilot episode would remains largely the same, Atlantis crew find itself on Atlantis with no way to get back to Earth, in the process of exploring the nearby planets of the galaxy meet with Teyla and encounter the Wraith. After invading the Wraith sleeper ship they keep the keeper and awaken this ship and it’s hive. The Atlantis expedition find itself at risk from an enemy that appeartly defeated the Ancients.

Before the mid-season episode, The Genni:
While looking for allies against the Wraith and supplies to feed Atlantis, Teyla brings the explorer group to the Genni home planets. While investigating strange neutron radiation reading the team discover that the Genni are much more numerous that any other planet they have seen before AND possess technologie on part with Cold War Earth. After being found the expedition is capture by the Genni, with a demonstration of superior technology and the revelation that the nearest Hive should be awakening. Humanity and the Genni strike a deal to try and destroy the Hive mothership. Follows the desatrous success of the mission, while the nuclear weapon destroy the mothership loses amongts the Genni are high because the Atlantis expedition refused to leave behind humans captured by the Wraith to be feed upon. The end is the same as with the initial Genni episode in the serie, the Atlantis expedition makes a new ennemi, the Genni.

Mid-season: Wraith awakening
The team find itself trapped on a world the Wraith are culling, while the Genni are building a weapon to destroy the Wraith destroyer in orbit doing the culling. Mckay is capture by the Genni and the rest of the team must dodge the Wraith dart and attemp a rescue attemp the construction of the Genni rocket progress rapidly, with Mckay’s help the nuclear weapon it supposed to be carried is improved the Earth standard, notably with the inclusion of naquada (revealing in the process the usefulness of the mineral to the Genni). The episode ends with Wraith dart attacking the Genni position after the rocket as been launched.

Second part:
As the Wraith dart are attacking the rocket hit and inflict critical damage on the destroyer. The destroyer crash land and unleash a torrent of Wraith on the population making the situation not that much better. The Atlantis team manages to rescue Mckay but with the Wraith in number on the surface and protected by dart they require the Genni help to get off world. Both the Genni and the team finally get off world and split off after a tense face-off, but facing Atlantis superior weaponry the Genni team backs off. The last scene of the episode show Sheppar asking Mckay where he’d lose his weapon.

Season final: The Storm, part I
This would be the season 1 mid-season that we got to see, the Genni trick the expedition and manage to invade a low on personel Atlantis during a catastrophic storm.

Season 2
Season opening: The Storm, part II
This would be the season 1 mid-season that we got to see, the Genni trick the expedition and manage to invade a low on personel Atlantis during a catastrophic storm. Sheppar manage to repel the invsion and the take a prisonner. Unfortunatly investigation reveals that a lot of advanced weapon and munition were stolen during the Genni retreat.

Before the mid season: The Genni
This would be the first in a serie over the season of episode feature Genni exploration team. We would not see anyone from Atlantis instead we would be following the Genni equivalent of the SG team. We would see what Earth could have been with less regard for exploration and more of a focus of survival and the aquiring of technologie no matter the cost. In short the Genni would be a dark reflexion of Earth.

mid-season:Distress call
While investigating a distress call on the ancient newly working sensor thanks to the fabrication by the expedition of a few new naqueda generator (naqueda is more common in the Pegasus galaxie then in the milky way) the team find itself in the middle of a Wraith gathering point. We see the Wraith fleet of 3 motherships and a few destoyer gathering for some mission that is still unknown. Using the cloaked jumper the team tries to locate the source of the distress call. They find it on the planet coming from a crashed ancient ship. It’s automatic system detected ships in orbit and activated its destress becon. Of course the Wraith laid a trap and manage to caputre the team

mid-season: Discovery
The episode open with the team trapped on a Wraith cruiser and Wraith very intrigued by the team appearance with highly technical item on a planet with no indigenous human population and with only a space gate. Thanks to Teyla previously unknown Wraith DNA they manage to hack into part of the ship computer and escape using a Wraith landing craft. The episode ends with the Wraith searching on the ground near the crashed ancient ship and finding the cloaked puddle jumper by running into it. One of the noble Wraith looks and the other and says as the screen fade to black:”It is as a we though Atlantis as risen from the sea.”

Before the season final: Letters from Atlantis
This episode is almost exactly the Letter from Pegasus season 1 episode.

Just before the season Final: The stand
The Wraith fleet is in route, the Atlantis expedition is preparing to abandon the city when the gate activate. It’s the SG-1 and as soon as the shield is lowered, soldier carrier heavy equipement come running into the Atlantis gate room. For a whole 28 minutes, soldier and equipement is being rush in Atlantis as tightly pack as possible. The leader of this new force inform Dr Weir that Stargate Command as decided that Atlantis secrets where too valuable to destroy and they send a force to defend the city with the most modern hardware human possess. He also mention that a small fleet of human warship is in route toward Atlantis, one should be there in a few days thanks to a ZPM plugged in a retrofitted ancient hyperdrive. The rest of the fleet should be there in a month. New and improved generator are plug-into every critical system they can power. Unfortunatly the shield would require more power then the human can produce without a ZPM. Luckily a few ancient weapon can be powered and the Asgard-tech weapons the human have build should be a nasty surprise for the Wraith. The season end on a massive Wraith fleet existing hyperspace above the planet and unleashing a torrent of dart.

Season final: rolling the dice
The Deadelus is still hours away from Atlantis and the Wraith dart are falling like plague of locus on the city. The defender put on a great fight, stoping the wraith initial assault completely thanks to very heavy anti-aircraft fire the like of which the Wraith have never seen in before. The seacon wave of attack include heavier Wraith attack craft some of which manage to land despite the heavy defense of Atlantis. Part of the fighting is moving to the streets of the city and yet more and more Wraith craft are being sent down. Finally the human defender fire the Asgard weapon to the ship in orbit instead of the incoming craft hoping to destroy the ship while still in orbit. The plan succeed however in retaliation the orbiting start firing at the defensless city, knocking out the asgard weapon on the first salvo and the moving to secondary batteries, without shield Atlantis is doomed.

Season 3:

Season opening, part II: Only the dead won’t weep
Explosion rock the city, the defenseur slowly retreat toward the city spire, destroying teleporters and computer terminal on their way out. Everything seems bleak, the Deadelus should still be horus away, the Wraith are gaining ground and the teams are hard pressed to destroy every computre access to the city before the Wraith capture the ground. Weir orders the destruction of the city just as an hyperspace window open: the Deadelus as arrived. With is shield and weapon powered by the ZPM the opening salvo from the ship destroying one the Wraith mothership. The Wraith are trown into disarray, their fleet is not quite large enough to destroy what they think is a new model of Ancient vessels. Under fire from the Earth ship the Wraith fleet flees leaving it’s ground troop without support and without protection againts the human ship and teleporters. Not only is Atlantis saved but it as gained a fully charge ZPM. However the episode end on a scene from one the Wraith mothership bridge, the Queen whispers to her ship captain: “The Ancient are back in Atlantis, we need to waken the other hives.”

Before the mid part: Unexpected surprise
Previous episode have shown strange symbole poping up on ancient computer since the ZPM has been plug-in and we see one of the expedition repair team moving along a corridor to repair a computer terminal that as been destroyed in the fighting only to find it fully repaired and fonctional. As the fighting with the Genni and the Wraith appears to be in a cease fire, Mckay explore the new possibility availlable to the city now that it as a ZPM as a power source. It finds that the city as rerouted power to many previously unused areas and that at least two of the unknown symbole are related to this area. After every commercial break, we come back to teams of P90-like weapon equiped Genni exploring and fighting strange creature in some unknown ruins. As the Atlantis team learn that the city is now repearing part of itself it also find that the city as tremondous manufacturing capability, as exposed by the fact that the city as build 2 more ZPM and require human input to plug them in it’s power generation system. The episode ends with the Genni existing the ruins, many wounded but smilling an carrying a device we recognize as a ZPM.

Mid-season: the ennemy
Atlantis sensors are now fully back only and they detect a fleet for Wraith warship heading for the Genni homeworld. Discussion follows about the morality of warning or not warning the Genni, warning finally comes as the solution and a team is prepare to be send with the warning to the Genni planet as the main team is away gathering intelligence on Genni activity. The gate open and the team comes through but does not radio back, humanity witness the first other civilisation to have put an Iris over it’s gate. The Atlantis expedition nonetheless tries to contact the Genni via radio to warn them of the danger. The Genni do not answer and the gate closes. After the main team arrival it is decided that three of the 2 of the 5 ship defending Atlantis will be sent to try and help the Genni. The episode ends with the Deadelus and the Apollo opening hyperspace windows.

Well, I’m gonna stop here tonight I’ve got ideas for still a few season but this post is already long enough and I’m getting tired of writing. Tell me what you think, wouln’t this be better then the Atlantis we’ve had. Putting the Genni as the secondary ennemies a dark mirror of Earth’s humanity, the Wraith as a slightly overconfident enemy that won against the Ancient mainly by numbers not technologie or tactic and mostly no FUCKING REPLICATORS!

2009

2009-01-08T21:16:00.001-05:00

Well after the previous monster posts I’ll do a little short and sweet just to inform/remind you that 2009 is the international year of Astronomy. In this year we will celebrate the achievement of humanity in understading it’s place in the universe and the nature and structure of this universe. That we have been looking at the stars, dreaming and trying to understand since the very first breath of sentience does not mean we understand the cosmos. There is still a lot to learn and a lot that will surprise and bring wonder to our world. So joint us astronomers, to celebrate discovery, science and wonder all present in Astronomy.

Happy Internation Year of Astronomy! Clear skies and bright stars for everyone.

Cosmic Evolution

2009-01-07T19:45:00.001-05:00

This is the 3rd and final kind of evolution I want to address. This is supposedly the evolution of that deals with the evolution of the cosmos. Quite Simply the evolution of the universe i.e. the creation of time and space, the Big Bang according to science would explain that. Now, I have shown that our understanding of stellar evolution is born out of our observation of hundreds of billions of stars, but you guess that we do not have millions of universe to look at, so how in hell can we build an understanding of the evolution of the universe.

Well we first observe the universe and see what tracers of its origin we could find. It’s a little like looking at someone and trying to find tracers of his past by seeing traces of broken bones, scars and antibodies form past sickness for example. So what do we see about the universe that tells us about its past. Well first the universe is flat, as far as we can tell there is no curvature to space. There is no reason for this to be, in fact if matter was prevalent in the universe we would expect it to have a curvature proportional to the amongst of matter in it.

Second, everything in the universe is moving away from us, or everything in the universe is moving away from everything else. I’m making the distinction between the two because observation shows that just about every objet outside of our local group of galaxies is moving away from Earth. That would make Earth the center of the universe, except that this does not make any since from what we know about the Earth. First, it’s not the center of the solar system, and it not even at the center of our galaxies (not even close) which mean that having the whole universe rotating our us would violate the law of gravity. However, we can interpret the result of everything seeming to move away from Earth as everything is actually moving away from everything else i.e. there is an expansion of the universe.

Next we observe a uniform radiation field everywhere in the universe. It’s almost uniform in every direction and the small variation (less then 1 part in a 1000) can be associated with the presence of large volume of matter in the universe for example cluster of galaxies. This would indicate that the source of this radiation field is actually located behind the clusters. Anything that would be behind this source would be revealed by peculiar emission structure in this radiation field.

Also, we observe that there is a lot more photons in the universe than matter, about a billion time more. This would mean that at some point in the past part of the energy of the universe became matter but the very large majority of it remained in the form of energy. We also know that the globally the universe is homogeneous and isotropic as far we can see. That mean that there is no preferred place in the universe, all vantage point are roughly the same and that is no discontinuity in the fabric of the universe.

The Big Bang, with a cosmological inflation period explains all those observation. In fact the Big Bang is so good at explaining those observation that it predicted the existence of the uniform radiation field, the so-called cosmological microwave background. The theory is also explaining the primordial abundance of light element (Helium, lithium and Deuterium). Of course we cannot observe the Big Bang, it happened at least 13.7 Billion years ago and lies beyond the surface of last diffusion, i.e. origin of the cosmological microwave background which is the maximum distance from which we can receive photo that have not been scattered into losing all the information from source. However, the Big Bang is at the moment the only theory that manages to explain and predict more fact. Sure it as flaws, but it is supported by observations and it actually explains a lot of how things occurred in the early universe to build what we observe now.

So here you have it, 3 evolution that do not exist that we have no proof of and no observation in support of according to at least one young earth creationist. I’ve not addressed the Darwinian evolution they seem to hate so much, but if what they tell you about 3 of the 6 kind of evolution they claim exist are false. Shouldn’t you wonder about there honesty toward the fifth one: Darwinian evolution.

Stellar Evolution

2009-01-06T19:43:00.001-05:00

Well as an astronomy student I must say that I always cringe when I hear someone mention that stellar evolution is impossible. Even more so when I heard that the reason it is impossible is that we have never observed it directly, i.e. we have never seen a star birth or a star changing into another stars. I will start by answering this since we have never seen it directly it cannot happen and then I will talk about stellar evolution itself.

So for the sake of argument lets imagine a sentient specie of bacteria that lives on average for an hour. Meaning that for this specie that every minute is roughly the same as a year of human life. Now, in a 24 hours period 1440 years would have happened in this civilization history. Suppose that in the last 12 hours they developed optical means to see humanity. Now since one of our minute as the same meaning as a year for them and that one day is about the timescale of their current civilization humanity would look like eternal unchanging but moving object. Now this species is rather limited in its measurement capability it can only tell three things about any given human, the speed it moves with, it height and the number of wrinkle it is showing.

I will show that with only these three parameters they could get a pretty good idea of how a human evolve in his life, without ever seeing a single human evolve. The first thing they would be doing is plotting the size of the human vs. their height, now this would be a pretty annoying plot because after a while it falls back on itself and you can’t really tell anything. However if you add a third dimension to this plot, i.e. the number of wrinkle you get a three dimensional curved surfaces that actually allows you to identify ages for humans. You have the slow, tiny and without wrinkle that are young, the fast, tall and with few wrinkles, the adult and finally the slow, tall and with a lot of wrinkle, the olds. You could event identify the pregnant woman in their own particular area of the diagram, they would be tall, slow and with few wrinkles. Granted this would only give them a rough idea of the evolution of humanity still admit that with only three easily observable parameters we can get a lot of information about the evolution of a human.

How this works is quite impressive, you see the bacteria in the example cannot ever see a human evolve, even a whole civilization of the bacteria would never see a human change (at least not significatively) except for the occasional accidental death. What gives them the information about the evolution of humanity is the diversity in the humans that they can observe. They’ll see old, young, adult, and everything in between that they can characterize them with some observable parameters. In fact, give them a few more observable and they can tell a lot more about humanity.

It’s the same thing with stars, and we have a lot more then 3 observable, not to mention that the, we’ve never seen star evolve is slightly false. We know of at least 1 star that went supernova and left a nebula with a pulsar inside. So we went to a star visible in the optical wavelength, to a big explosion that shone like a galaxy for a few days to a ball of expending gas that as a lighthouse like object that is only visible in radio emission. So we have seems a star actually change shape and nature. Of course, no single person saw this change, some documented the existence of the stars, another group saw a flash of light and we are seeing the pulsar and nebula. Still our records are good enough for us to identify all those step in the process.

Now, just what do we know about stars, what kind of stars have we seen? Well first we have what we call the main sequence stars, the stars that are like the adult of the human races. We see lots and lots of those; they are stars that according to our observation burn hydrogen in their core. We’ve seen “baby stars” like the T-Taury variables, they are stars without clouds of dust and gas that we see gas actually falling toward and sometimes when density reach critical points on the stars a flash of fusion occur and it expulse a jet of matter. We’ve seeing older stars, stars that are past their prime so to speak they now burn helium and other heavy elements in their core and have bloated to unimaginable proportion. For example, Betelgeuse, the largest star we know about, it’s about 1000 time the radius of the sun, i.e. only a little something like 700 millions km, that larger then the orbit of Mars! We also know of rebellious, middle life crisis kind of stars called Wolf-Rayet stars they are massive stars with stellar wind so intense that they expulse a significant fraction of the Sun mass every year. We also know of dying stars, little slowly cooling core of highly compact matter that we call white dwarf. We call them white dwarf because those stars are so hot, they emit what can only be called white light.

Not to mention that we also see dead stars in the form of neutron stars, and the inferred black holes in binaries system. We basically have a whole picture, not only that we have pictures of families of stars with different distribution of stars that well can be explained as an evolution sequences. We can see that from the amounts of heavy elements in the stars themselves, the groups of stars showing the most massive stars on the main sequence are also those that have the most heavy element (in general there are some exception of course). Since we know that heavy elements are produced in stars, it doesn’t take that big a leap of logic to see a sequence there.

Now, we cannot observe stars evolving, except in the spectacular supernova and even then it might be years before we can see the end result. You see, the fastest evolving star we know of, should have a lifetime on the main sequence of a few millions years, that way greater then the average research grant lifetime. However, we have more then enough examples of stars in various stages of evolution to be able to get a pretty accurate picture of the sequence. Remember that we only 3 parameters about humans you can get an evolution sequence, imagine what we can do with hundreds.

Fine tunning the universe

2009-01-05T21:35:00.001-05:00

It seems I’m starting a series on dispelling falsehood propagated to undermine science and promote religious dogma as the explanation for natural phenomenon despite the evidence. On future post I will talk about cosmic and stellar evolution and show that even if it cannot be completely observed, we have enough evidence to conclude in it’s existence or at least to know that our theories and hypothesis are adequate enough model of reality. In this post tho, I’ll talk about the idea that the universe is fine tune for the existence of life.

The argument goes roughly as such: if you change any one of a number of universal constant (such as the charge of the electron, the gravitational constant, the fine structure constant, the speed of light, etc.) life becomes utterly impossible in our universe. For example, elementary charge (the electric charge carried by an electron or a proton) was a little higher or lower, atoms would be unable to form, as electron would rapidly spiral into the nucleus or not be attracted enough to the nucleus to form an atom at all. At first glances a good argument for the design of the universe by some intelligence to eventually produce life.

Note, from the previous two posts you probably already guessed that this first glances is not the end all be all of this. First, let’s talk about something a little known fact, humanity exist. Surprising I know, but bear with my sarcasm for a second. Suppose that the particular set of constant we observe in the universe is one that allows the possibility of the human life is not the only one possible. Now, let’s have pure randomness determine every single constant in the universe. Given that only one set will produce humanity, the only set where humanity will be around to observe is the set we are in. Even if all the values are taken at random, if fact there is no reason that an infinite number of other space time with other fundamental constant do not exist, each one of those without humanity and as such without anyone to ask the question: “Why are all those constant at the right value for human life”. In short, the fact that we exist to ask the question: “how or why are those constant existing with those value” is not a valid reason to invoke an intelligence, pure, complete random luck could produce the exact same result without the need of a directing intelligence.

Now, I know that the previous argument isn’t going to be standing very strong with most people, and it is logical. It’s much easier to think that something was put there with a purpose in mind then to figure we are nothing special. This why I like this second argument better. You see the fine-tuning of the universal constants is a lie. The fact that if you change the value of only ONE constant life become impossible is true, however it is only true if you change ONLY ONE constant. You see there are many way to have an universe almost exactly like our own without using the exact same physical constant. To retake the elementary charge as an example, if in addition to a change in the elementary change you have slight change in the coulomb constant and in the strength of the weak nuclear force you can build another universe that should look a lot like our own. The fact is that our set or value for those universal constant is just one of many that allows for the possibility of matter and probably the possibility of life.

A third thing to consider is the other lie in the opening argument, that life becomes utterly impossible. It is only true in the meaning that life as we know and experience it as human being probably becomes impossible. Science-Fiction writers, dreamers and scientists have conceived form of life based on other chemistry and other biologies for years now, true that not the same as life based on other physical principles but given the challenge I’m pretty sure someone could conceive a way to create life out of a very alien universe. And if we can conceive a way for life to exist in such an alien place, there a good chance that if such a condition existed there would be life there. Cause you know, up to now, humanity has found life everywhere it didn’t expect life to be possible except outer space and other planets. And even there, they are mounting evidence that life could have/has/or will exist one day.

Think about this, scientists are seeing evidence that the condition of the small floating rock known as Mars were once fertile ground for the devoleppement of life. Scientist know of spores that could survive the vacuum of space and being irradiated with cosmic rays for thousand if not millions of years and still produce living organism if introduced in a adequate environnement.

One last thing about the fine tuning, it’s not that fine. While some universal constant values have a very narrow range that is favorable to life most can change quite a lot without any adverse effect on life. Take for example the distance from the Earth to the Sun varies by about 5 millions km twice in a year. The habitable zone around the sun is only about 120 millions km wide, with the Earth orbit around the middle slightly closer to the inside edge. To give you an idea that Earth is only 12 000 km wide, that means you could fit 10 000 other Earth in the habitable zone of our sun! And that only if life is impossible on Mars and Venus which would expend the habitable zone dramatically. So you see, the fine tuning isn’t that fine, it more like gross approximate tuning, or rough tuning, or well you know a your lucky if it works tuning.

Primordial Energy

2009-01-04T13:24:00.000-05:00

A comment left on my post about Chemical evolution ask me to comment about where did the initial energy came from for the Big Bang. I could have answered in a reply to his comment but the scope of the answers and the hypothesis I must explain to answer means it deserves a post of it own. I must say before I begin that prereionisation physics is not my field of research and that the ever more complex physics of the plank era (not to mention the “prebig bang physic) is probably beyond my understanding of physics. I will attempt to explain things but it will only be to the limit of my understanding and it could very well prove to be wrong.

Ok, first off do we need initial energy for the Big Bang, many would say yes because of the Law of Conservation of Energy. The problem is that a lot of people incorrectly interpret this law, it is though to mean something like Lavoisier law of conservation of matter: “Energy cannot be created or destroyed”. This is false, the law merely state that energy in a closed system must be conserved, i.e. that the sum of the energy present at any moment in the system remains a constant. I know, it sound like it’s exactly the same thing but it is not. The law of conservation of energy does not preclude the creation of energy provided that exactly the same amount of negative energy is created at the same moment. Up to a 1999 negative energy would get you laugh out of most scientific establishment but astronomer have discovered that such a kind of energy appears to exist in our universe in the form of the cosmological constant which produce an acceleration of the expansion of the universe. You might ask how this constant can be a negative energy, well it imposes a negative curvature on space while every other kind of energy impose a positive curvature on space. It has to be energy of opposite amplitude, i.e. a negative energy.

Now that we know that we can “create” energy, lets look at what could happen in a perfect vacuum, i.e. 0 energy, 0 space, 0 time. (the condition before the Big Bang). Well your 0 energy could spontaneously break into x part positive energy and –x part negative energy without any violation of conservation of energy. Once you have this separation of energy, many things could possibly happen, one of them would be the Big Bang (another would be annihilation of these energy to restore the vacuum state). Is it unlikely that the Big Bang would have occurred, yes and no. Yes because we do not know if a Big Bang event is likely and no because well if this is the explanation of the origin of the Big Bang it happen so the probability of it happening is 1. This hypothesis has at least one problem: the total energy of the universe has to be exactly 0, which doesn’t seem to be the case from our observation. But it does show that you do not absolutely need an energy field to have a Big Bang.

Another way to produce a Big Bang without requiring a preexisting energy would be through “quantum fluctuation”. Once again we must consider a vacuum where you have 0 energy, 0 space, and 0 time, now according to the quantum uncertainty Principe is you know the position exactly you can have “infinite” fluctuation of the momentum. Now, this uncertainty principle can also be used with energy and time. i.e. if you know the time exactly you have no idea of how much energy is involved. This could mean that their exist fluctuation in the vacuum state of energy of unimaginable proportion. Now, one of our theory for the origin of the universe stipulate that the Big Bang is a manifestation of the unwinding of 4 string to “create” the 4 known dimension (i.e. the 3 dimension of space +1 dimension of time). The energy requirement to unwind a string is staggering, as proven by the idea that no other string has begin unwind since the Big Bang. So imagine the situation, we have the vacuum state, fluctuating widely to follow our uncertainty principle one of those fluctuation reach the level of energy require to unwind the strings and Big Bang you get the universe with everything in it, the energy left over from the unwinding becoming the “positive” energy of the universe and causing the creation of matter.

A third way, more mysterious and I’d say esoteric way involve membrane theory. This production of the Big Bang implies that two (or more) multidimensional membranes collide with each other. This collision produces an interference pattern in a few dimensions that is observed by lower order dimensional being as being this universe. I must admit I am not very familiar with Membrane theory and it’s implication and construction (in fact you are close to have been shown the entirety of my understanding of the theory) but from what I know it can produce a Big Bang without an existing energy.

Of course there are hypothesis for the origin of the Big Bang that requires a preexisting energy level and various natural explanation for where this energy field came from (anything from tachyon moving back in time to the moment of the Big Bang to the rest state of vacuum to being a none zero level). Humanity understanding of anything before the reionisation of the universe (the cosmic microwave background) is sketchy because of the difficulty of having any observable. It’s understanding become purely theoretical when you approach the inflation era as the laws of physics start to leave the boundaries we know and understand. And finally it becomes almost purely conjectural when you reach the Plank epoch (before something like 10^-43 s after the Big Bang) when all our knowledge of physics fails. You can imagine what happen when you try to go into the condition before the Big Bang “when” its not even sure that physics works.

However, this can only be seen as an argument for a “god in the gap” i.e. we don’t know so it must be god. There are naturalist possibilities that do not involve supernatural intelligent or its intervention. These possibilities also respect one of the most interesting structures of physic the idea that there should be no discontinuity in the laws of physics. This means that at the boundaries between two laws (i.e. before and after the big Bang for example) the equation explaining both phenomenons must give the same answer. Since by definition god must be a discontinuity in the laws of physics any explanation involving him must be backed by much more evidence that: well we don’t know what does it.

Canadian Politics

2009-01-03T15:31:00.000-05:00

I’ve had the joy a few weeks back of having to explain the current political weirdness to a Greek friend. Well I must admit that compared to the crisis in Greece our political problem seems like children arguing whom as the strongest dad. Still it made me think about the situation and I can’t help but conclude that it is a proof that our system is completely bonkers. We’ve got on one side a prime minister that has to ask for a unelected representative of a Queen for permission to stop the working of our government even though it is every arguable that she as the actual authority to say no. On the other side we had a coalition of two party with a third promising not to vote against them in non-confidence vote that wants to declare that the people of Canada have lost confidence in the government and that the prime minister should ask the same unelected representative of a Queen to give them the power (or to declare a 3 election in two years.) Considering that the crisis started mere days after the election of the government it is hard to believe that the coalition talk did not begin during the election campaign. It might just be me but I do not believe that such a situation should be possible in a democracy.

Furthermore I think the problem of Canadian government comes from the root of our parliamentary system. We build a system on the opposition of two view points, technically our government works by having a party in power doing just about whatever it wants and the opposition party trying to point out flaws in everything the party in power does. Sound like a receipy for disaster no? Not to mention that our voting system is also weird, we have in our constitution declared that no matter how the population is distributated in Canada some provinces will never have less then % of the deputy. In part that is logical, it makes sure that no province dominate Canadian politics but on the other hand that means that 1 vote in some province might be worth more then a vote in another province. Finally, our voting system work with the premisses that the elected representant is not the one that get the majorty of votes but the one that gets the most no matter how little of the people he actually represent.

Now as is the tradition in Quebec, someone is bond to say: yeah yeah you complain but you do not have anything to propose to solve the problem! Well actually that not true, I have something to propose, it’s rought for the moment but I belive it might increase the stability of Canadian governement AND make them more representative of the people of Canada. We first have to positively scrap the current system I’d keep just about nothing. I’d start by making the office of leader of the country (presently a prime minister in the future whatever you want to call him/her) elected separatly from the parlement. I’d even go has far as to demand that the people running for that position be outside the “parties” or at the very least that they cannot be the leader of any political party. This office would be determined on a multi-tour majority win baillot, i.e you cannot become the leader of Canada without getting the support of at least 50%+1 vote of all Canadian.

The second part would be a proportional vote for the party the citizen feel would better represent them in Canada. The proportional vote means that if say the liberal get 42% of this vote they would get 42% of the proportional deputy in parlement. There is no candidate attached directly to these vote you vote strictly for the party and the party choose a number of deputy from it’s member to represent them.

Finally, you vote for the deputy from your circonscription. This person task in parlement is not to represent the ideals of a party but to represent the people in his circonscription. In a perfect world they would not belong to any political party but I doubt such a situation is possible (at least at first).

Now it might seem like I would be increasing the number of deputy considerably, actually no. The first thing we need to realise is that large densly populated area of the country tend to work as a bloc (Montreal is a good exemple of this, you actually need only 2 deputy to represent the 2 Millions people of the Island!) This means that we can dramatically reduce the number of deputy in large city without loosing any representativity. Now before you start screaming that this would mean that a vote in Montreal would be worth less then a vote in for exemple Rimouski you have to remember the proportional section of the vote. There are hundered of thousan of more votes in Montreal then they are in Rimouski meaning that the population of Montreal proportional vote wills competly eclispe the regional vote. Restoring the balance in vote vs population by in a way associating the floating proportional deputy to large city.

The last part of the idea, is that the elected leader would have to go and ask the leader of the party with the most vote to be his prime minister and to form a governement representative of the vote from the people of Canada. Minister would have to be elected from the members of parlement and may be remove by the will of parlement. The leader of the country has no vote except to break ties in parlement, but he as more power to propose new bills and law and could have a limited veto power in the form of asking for a bill to require a strong majority to be accepted. I think that even if this system is far from perfect (or even ready to implement I’m sure they are a lots of thing I failled to take into consideration) it would still be more stable AND instead of being based on an adversarial fight between to idea it rest on ideas of cooperation toward the common good of the voters of Canada.

Chemical evolution

2009-01-02T20:31:00.001-05:00

Creationist like to say they are 6 kinds of evolution and that only the 6th as ever been observed. Those sixth kinds of evolution are as follow:

1. Cosmic evolution
2. Chemical evolution
3. Stellar evolution
4. Organic evolution
5. Macro evolution
6. Micro evolution

Today I wan to address a few videos by Kent Hovind (look on youtube none of his stuff is copyrighted) who says that aside from the 6th, none has ever been observed and are unscientific. As you might have guessed from the title I’ll be talking about his second kind of evolution chemical evolution. Hovind claims that for chemical evolution to be happening hydrogen would have to transform into every element from Helium to Ununoctium (actually he stop at Uranium but since we scientist go up to element number 118). Note he is not completely clueless as he mention the first method throught which we obtaint heavy element in the universe: fusion and the restriction of fusion, i.e that it is not energy efficient after the fusion into Iron. Before I go on to rebutte the thing let me go on his second claim to disprove the possibility of chemical evolution: a chicken and the egg problem for the stars. You see he says correctly that elements are produced in stars and he continu by saying that since stars are made out of element we have a circle without any beginning.

Well let me answer the second part of his argument first (it’s easier), first by pointing out that egg laying animals existed millions of years before chicken so the problem only exist for creationist. Second even if you consider the metaphore for it’s actual sences that the problem is that you have a product that is the sources of the the that produce it, i.e a circle of causation that cannot be started since you would need a first chicken to lay the first egg and a first egg for that first chicken to be born, the problem is inexistant for stars. First, because hydrogen is not created in stars, as a matter of fact all hydrogen in the universe was created at the Big Bang. Second, you do not need anything other then hydrogen to make a star (even if the Big Bang did produce small quantities of other element (notable Helium)). In short, you have an outside supply of the building block for your stars so no chicken and the egg problem, the hydrogen comes from outside the first stars and the first stars produce the first heavy elements.

Now for the first part of the equation, Hovind talk about fusion i.e the proces through which a number of low atomic number nuclei are transformed into one of an higher number. Such as the very well known and observe p-p cycle happening in our first own sun and experience in part here on Earth as part of thermonuclear explosion that transform 4 Hydrogen atom into 1 Helium atom and a shitload of energy. Process such as these exist for many elements up to Iron, but how do we get heavier elements such as Uranium, Colbat, Nickel, Gold, Mercury and Californium?

Well we know of a number of processes to explain that are called r-process, s-process, p-process and rp-process (aren’t astronomer just poetic when comes to name?). All of those involve that collision of an heavy nucleii with something which will eventually create a new heavier nucleii. Both the r and the s process are process involving neutrons colliding with the nuclus of an atom and after a short amount time the neutrons decaying into a proton and an electron (neutron unlike proton are not stable particule) increasing the atomic number of the atom by one. The p-process is special; it is a process through which the weight of an element is actually reduced by colision with a gamma ray and subsequent alpha-decay (emission of an alpha particule, i.e a helium atome nucleus), this change the force binding the nuclus toghether and explains the existance of a few heavy element. The p-process is simple the direct addition throught collision of a proton to an already neutron rich nuclei, changing the atomic number of the element and again producing a new element. Now, none of those process have been observed in laboratory the reason being that you need stellar condition for them to be possible, however there is one more way to produce heavy element and this one as been observed on Earth as evidence by the existance of synthetic elements, i.e element that where constructed in laboratory through a collision of two heavy element or through neutron capture in nuclear reactor. Since we know how to produce these element in our lab AND that we have observed technium (the first artificial element) in stars we know that stars produce heavier element from lighter element.

So in short that the inexistant and unobserved chemical evolution for you… So inexistant that we are using it. So unobserved in fact that we have 6 elements that have not being given a name yet because they have only being observed in laboratory for split seconds. Makes you wonder if the rest of those creationist evolution if as unobserved…

NORAD track Santa

2008-12-24T10:44:00.002-05:00

For 50 years now, the NORAD people have promoted the idea that their radar and satellite system is tracking Santa Claus along his route to deliver gift to all the good children of the world. This year is no different and they've added to their website little videos about the places Santa is passing through.

I'm sure a lot of children will enjoy watching Santa approching their own little house and of course understanding a little more about the people on our planet.

The Mean Kitty Song

2008-12-22T22:52:00.001-05:00

Ok, juste to remind you my blog still exist ;-)

Dream Theater - Metropolis

2008-12-07T12:59:00.001-05:00

Ah music for a sunday afternoon

Gregorian - Nothing else matters

2008-12-07T12:32:00.001-05:00

Admit it, that's so cool.

See, the church is serving the Dark Side(tm)

2008-12-03T10:07:00.000-05:00

Buses and collisions

2008-11-18T11:41:00.000-05:00

Well this morning I’ve been in a bus accident, not a big collision just one bus going about 15 km/h hitting another bus that was at rest. Thankfully, almost no one was standing in either bus but their were still at least two peoples were hurt. I do not know the severity of their injuries but at least one was evacuated in an ambulance. From what I could gather (the wounded were not in the same vehicule as I was) the person taken away in an ambulance suffered head trauma. I was very disapointed with the way the drivers handled the situation, yes they called the ambulance, police and fireman but aside from that they did not do anything. They did not inform the people they should leave the bus to take the next one, did not inform us on what was happending, did no really try to do any first aid to the wounded and did not really check on their passenger. For exemple, in my bus one old person that was getting on the bus at the moment of collision felt right next to the driver, the driver look to see if she was allright but failed to ask anyone else on the bus about their condition and the woman next to me fell to floor. I hope the injured woman only suffered minor injuries and I must say I’m very grateful that this happened with buses that were not fully loaded with standing passengers. The number of wounded would have been much higher with probably a lot of serious injuries.