The Yin Blog

Talk about an understated news headline . . . .

This story shouldn't be a surprise to any of you who are astronomy junkies, or anyone who's read the classic Larry Niven short story "Neutron Star," but check this out: the news headline reads "Neutron Star Crust is Stronger than Steel."  Considering that neutron stars are just one step short of black holes in density, this is what you'd expect.

But if you read the story, you'll see this:

A new study suggests how strong they are: The crust of neutron stars could be 10 billion times stronger than steel, based on an innovative model of elements compressed as tightly as they would be on the surface of a neutron star.

10 billion times stronger than steel!  The headline doesn't exactly convey the scale of how much stronger neutron star crust is than steel, does it?

Of all of the books to get on Kindle . . . .

. . . "When Technology Fails" would not seem to be one.  I mean, if there's an EMP attack, your Kindle or other e-reader is likely to be fried, so you won't have access to all of the good low-tech or no-tech info contained in the book.  Strange that amazon.com is offering a Kindle version of the book.

Travel delays and airline schedules

Happy New Year to everyone!

Yesterday, our return flight from Atlanta was delayed by half an hour, but we still landed at the scheduled time. . . .  At first, I figured it was merely the usual sort of padding that airlines put into their schedules so that they can inflate their "on-time arrival" percentages, but half an hour is a lot of padding.  Besides, if that were the entire explanation, there would be a lot of flights arriving half an hour early, which I can't ever remember happening.

So my working hypothesis is that the scheduled departure/arrival times are based on maximum fuel efficiency, the equivalent of driving at 55 mph.  When the flight departure is delayed, however, the pilot flies at a faster, less fuel efficient speed, the equivalent of 90 mph.  It burns more fuel, which is bad from the airline's point of view, but it helps maintain the flight schedule, reducing delays and traveler frustration, which is good from the airline's point of view.

Am I right about this?

Let's hope Gabrielle isn't next

How many planets are there in the Solar System?

Nine is the answer today, but it might not be for long.  2500 astronomers are meeting right now to debate whether Pluto really is a planet, and if so, whether a larger ball of ice dubbed "Xena" by its discoverer is also a planet.

Xena?  The warrior princess?  Okay, Xena is acceptable, but let's just not go for her annoying sidekick, Gabrielle. . . .

Three arms are not better than two, I guess

Here's a strange story about a Chinese baby who was born with three arms (two left, one right), which apparently happens frequently enough that doctors were able to say that this boy's case was a "rare" instance in which both left arms were equally well-developed. . . .

Study on how Asians and North Americans see things is missing . . . me

Here's a story about how North Americans and Asians literally see things differently:

Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently. Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to University of Michigan researchers.

The researchers, led by Hannah-Faye Chua and Richard Nisbett, tracked the eye movements of the students — 25 European Americans and 27 native Chinese — to determine where they were looking in a picture and how long they focused on a particular area.

Well, I suppose you can draw some conclusions from that, but notice that the comparison group consists of European Americans vs native Chinese.  So, assuming that the distinction is statistically relevant and not the product of small sample sizes, it could be a genetic factor or a cultural factor.  We can't tell between those two possibilities.

On the other hand, if the study had included a third group -- Americans of Asian descent, like me -- you might be able to tell which it is.  My guess is that on a test of perception like this, I'd score like the European Americans, but you never know.

Just what I'd want to hear if I were a shuttle pilot. . . .

NASA May Bend Rules to Launch Discovery. . . .

Just another reason I'm not astronaut material

I think I would be worried about this:

With the countdown for Discovery in its final hours, NASA was dealt a setback Tuesday when a window cover fell off the shuttle and damaged thermal tiles near the tail.

And I don't think I would be reassured by this:

But the space agency said it probably could fix the problem in time for Wednesday's launch.

Not when you consider this:

The mishap was an eerie reminder of the very thing that doomed Columbia — damage to the spaceship's fragile thermal shield.

Here's hoping that NASA does indeed fix the space shuttle, and thank goodness the shuttle crew is braver than I am.

Five things wrong with the original "Star Wars"

Now that we've entered the dead zone of TV, I've started pulling out DVDs on my shelf that I haven't yet watched.  I felt like seeing the "special editions" of the original "Star Wars" trilogy, and while watching the original "Star Wars" (aka "Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope"), I noticed some things that bothered me on this viewing.  And I don't mean the ridiculous Greedo scene. . . .

1) Let's start with the lack of safety designs in the Death Star.  This thing has some kind of power coupling that's built into a column that's in the middle of some deep abyss, and yet there are no guardrails to keep users from falling to their deaths.  Think of the products liability lawsuits that would generate.

2) In addition to the bizarre lack of guardrails by the power coupling station, the Death Star has these catwalks (also missing guardrails) that retract.  Why?  If it's for security purposes, why not just have a door?

3) Having tracked our heros to the moon of the planet Yavin, where the rebel base is located, the Death Star ponderously manuevers itself into position to blast the moon.  This adds 29 minutes to the process.  Why not just blast Yavin?  If the resulting shockwave and planetary fragments don't destroy the rebel base, it won't take long before the remaining fragments scatter, and with the resulting loss of gravitational attraction, the moon would spin into space (ala "Space: 1999").

4) As the rebel fighters attack the Death Star, an Imperial trooper tells Darth Vader that the fighters are too quick for the Death Star's conventional lasers to hit.  So Vader says the solution is to chase them in TIE fighters.  Does it really make sense to go from trying to hit moving targets from a fixed platform (i.e., the Death Star) to trying to hit moving targets from a moving platform (i.e., the TIE fighter)?

5) What happened to Princess Leia's British accent?  She had it during the scenes with Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin, but sounded American when talking with Han Solo and Luke Skywalker.

Finally, this goes outside the original "Star Wars," but why doesn't Kenobi remember C-3PO and R2D2?  After all, in "Revenge of the Sith," Kenobi is giving orders to R2 -- who ultimately saves him and Anakin from the falling elevator!  (Not to mention, why, in "The Empire Strikes Back," is Kenobi surprised by Yoda's statement that "there is another"?  Didn't he remember that he, Yoda, and Senator Organa split up Luke and Leia as babies?)

What would digitized human consciousness mean?

Last night, we (re)watched the Governator flick, "The 6th Day," which is set in the near future where a corporation has not only developed the ability to clone people, but can make a "syn-cord" (i.e., a synchronized recording) of your memories and upload them into the clone.  In other words, if you die, you can be "restored" to the point of your most recent syn-cord into a new cloned body.  This makes for some fun mayhem, as Arnold goes around killing the bad guys, only to confront them again.

This follows my recent reading of Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, set about 500 years in a future where human consciousness can be digitized and store in a "cortical stack" that's implanted at the base of your brain.  If your body is killed, as long as the stack is intact, you can be put into another body (which they call "sleeves").  The really rich can afford "remote storage," whereby their digitized consciousness is uploaded once a day to a secure location.  This too results in mayhem and violence. . . .  (In fact, if Altered Carbon were a movie, I think it would be rated NC-17 for extremely graphic violence and graphic sex.)

The idea of digitizing your consciousness and thereby achieving immortality isn't as simple as it seems, however, and both "The 6th Day" and Altered Carbon do manage to confront some of the difficulties.  [SPOILERS AHEAD]   In "The 6th Day," the evil CEO Drucker gets mortally wounded by one of his inept henchmen, so he makes a syn-cord and brings a clone online.  Due to Arnold's mayhem, the cloning process is only 84 percent complete when interrupted, so the resulting clone looks kind of yucky, but in fact is Drucker.  But the mortally wounded Drucker isn't dead yet, even as the new clone demands his clothing.  "You mean, you aren't going to wait until . . . ." sputters the old clone.

To the external world, "Drucker" is still alive (or would have been, if Arnold hadn't taken care of the new clone Drucker).  But the old Drucker clone must certainly feel as if he is dying. . . .

In Altered Carbon, things get even weirder.  The narrator and hero Takeshi Kovacs has been resleeved in the body of a corrupt police detective; the body's owner is cooling his heels in stasis for about 200 years, the result of judicial punishment.  At some point, however, Kovacs illegally duplicates his digitized consciousness into a synthetic sleeve so as to be able to trick the bad guys.  He then ends up having a conversation with himself, of a sort, and since the novel is narrated from his point of view, we have the odd situation of having -- at that point -- the synthetic sleeved Kovacs picking up the story and describing the conversation with the corrupt cop sleeved Kovacs, even though the latter was the narrator up to that point in the novel!

Philosopher Richard Hanley addressed similar issues in his book, Is Data Human? (aka The Metaphysics of Star Trek).  Hanley points out that the bodies that we inhabit today are not the same as the ones we inhabited 10 years ago, if you look at a cellular level.  Old cells died and were replaced by new ones, not all at once, of course, but by now, your body has replaced itself. . . .  Are you still you?