Dan vs Phases of Matter

Assume for a moment that we don't take for granted everything we learned in school.

Today's post is about the different phases of matter and mainly their reaction of going from one to another.

Coming from a naive perspective, isn't it weird how a liquid state can just go to a gas state in our everyday lives? (E.g. boiling liquid water on a stove) Would it not make more sense if there was more of a gradual change from liquid to gas, rather than just directly? It seems to not be a slow enough change, how science has defined it in classes.

~ Danial Goodwin ~

ps - This was just the basic version. Eventually, I may have a post about supercritical fluids and degenerate gases.

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Infinity Universe

I can only conclude that the universe has always been. I'll provide the argument from two different perspectives in this post - from the science side and from the religion side.

Science:
The major contender is the Big Bang Theory. If that were the case, then eventually more scientists will start asking what caused the big bang? And, what came before that?
There will always be cyclic thinking that something always came before. Ergo, the universe has always been around in some form [as far as we know/believe].

Religion: (most theism should fit)
The universe is basically defined as everything/totality (sidenote: a universe of multiverse, paradox?). So, whenever there was a deity, there was also a universe. Most religions believe that their deity has always been. Thus, the universe has always been [as far as we know/believe].

I'd be happy to hear more academic dialog about this. Just let me know in the comments.

 - Danial Goodwin -

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Share: What is so great about Computer Science?

"I don't know of any other discipline that makes you feel so much like a wizard. Even engineering doesn't really feel that way, because you actually have to do real work fitting things together and what not.

In contrast, when you program something, you're basically just muttering incantations and casting spells. Do it right, and incredible stuff just springs to life.

And the stuff you're manipulating is almost dreamlike. Take a simple bug fix, for example. The concept doesn't quite exist in other forms of engineering, because if you're building something physical, even a small design flaw is difficult to fix. You have to take it apart, whack stuff into position, and usually you just wind up realizing that it would be easier to rebuild everything from scratch.

Whereas for a computer scientist, that's normal. Change a few things here and there, and bam - your updated program bursts into existence. You can do this because manufacturing software is easy (compile and run, or some equivalent) - almost all the work and difficulty is in thinking of it and designing it. It's basically an abstract mental construct.

Also, if you're a lazy bum like me, you'll fit right in. All computer scientists worth their salt have a massive hatred of tedium. That's why we always want to automate and generalize everything! Repetitive boring work is for machines.

Case in point: I recently had to enter a bunch of data on a website. There was no nice bulk upload facility, so I was reduced to painstakingly copying and pasting stuff from my file into their forms. After doing this for about a minute, I came to my senses and remembered that I wasn't a Muggle.
 
Less than an hour later, I had a program that just mimicked all my copy/paste actions hundreds of times faster than me. Hours of tedious error-prone work turned into a few minutes. As a bonus, it impressed the hell out of people who passed by and saw me reading a book while a bunch of text fields magically filled themselves on the screen. (I may have put in a slight time delay just for fun...)

Like I said, CS makes you a wizard."

Source: Quora's Nadeem Mohsin

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Topic: Sleeping

I consider sleeping a hobby.

Some people like to do it more than other and some don't like it all.

Me.

There are sooo many other exciting things I could be doing or learning. Sleep is at the bottom of the list of things that I want to do in my life.

Statistically, people will sleep one-third of their life away. I really would like 20-40 years extra to life the way I choose.

But, I guess science (and my body) says I have to...

For now...

~ Simply Advanced ~

ps - For now, I guess I could also just call it "meditating all night". It is possible to figure out problems and solutions when lying on a bed.

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Acquired Savants

Another quote from the March 2013 issue of the great Popular Science magazine.

Acquired savants are perfect fodder for a society obsessed with self-improvement, reality television, and pop psychology.

You may draw your own conclusions by considering this to be a neutral post, just here for the spreading of some different perspectives.

~ Simply Advanced ~

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Spiciness and the Scoville Heat Units

For the past two months I have been slowly training myself to handle more and more hot sauce.

Thanks to the March 2013 issue of Popular Science magazine, I now know how to measure my spiciness intake everyday.

Scientists measure peppers' firepower in Scoville heat units, based on the amount of dilution that kills the burn.

It appears that Tabasco sauce has a rating of 2,500 SHU, cayenne pepper 30,000 SHU, Habaneros 100,000 SHU, common pepper spray 2,000,000 SHU, police-grade pepper spray 5,300,000 SHU, and pure capsaicin tops out this list at 16,000,000 SHU.

Enjoy. =]

~ Simply Advanced ~

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Dan Gilbert - The Surprising Science of Happiness

In this TED Talk, Dan Gilbert's video "The Surprising Science of Happiness" has been on my todo list for a while now and I'm really glad that I got around to watch it.

The first few minutes was so-so, but after that you mind will be blown by the information that you learn from Dan Gilbert. The main take-away is that we have the capacity to synthesize our own happiness. And our ability to simulate future happiness has a bug in it.

This TED Talk was well worth the twenty minutes of my time.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html

~ Simply Advanced ~

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