Category Archives: Life

The strange state of being me.

The Vacuum Cleaner Enigma

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The Vacuum Cleaner Enigma

A vacuum is, by definition, a region of space devoid of matter. While a perfect vacuum is a physical impossibility, very good approximations exist. Interplanetary space is good, especially far from the sun. Interstellar space is better, and intergalactic space is even better than that.

Along come humans, then, and they invent these things:

vacuum-cleaner-upright

. . . and call them “vacuum cleaners.”

Now, this makes absolutely no sense. There isn’t anything cleaner than a vacuum — and the closer to an ideal vacuum a real vacuum comes, the cleaner it gets. Since vacuums are the cleanest regions of space around already, why would anyone pay good money for a machine that supposedly cleans them? They’re already clean!

Even cleaning in general is a puzzle, without vacuums being involved at all. To attempt to clean something — anything — is, by definition, an attempt to fight the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Isn’t it obvious that any such effort is, in the long run, doomed from the outset?

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[Image note:  I didn’t create the images for this post, but found them using Google. I assume they are in the public domain.]

Statement of the Obvious, in Venn Diagram Form

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Statement of the Obvious, in Venn Diagram Form

Hello, Out There!

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Hello Out There!

This map shows where the hits on this blog have come from, since its inception.

A notable exception: Iran shows zero hits. However, I know that people in Iran have seen https://robertlovespi.wordpress.com/2012/12/02/love-letters-from-iran/ — but access to the Internet from inside Iran is difficult. Hits from inside Iran show up on this map, no doubt, but they show up as hits from other, less repressive countries.

I also don’t believe for one moment that no one from China has seen my blog. The suspiciously high number of hits from Taiwan make me suspect Internet traffic is simply being routed from The People’s Republic, through Taiwan, to get to the rest of the world.

Information wants to be free. People do, too — and are finding ways around those forces which seek to control us.

Is Wayne Coyne the Burger King King?

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Is Wayne Coyne the Burger King King?

Of course he is. Just look at these pictures. They clearly depict the same person.

The only logical conclusion is that Wayne Coyne, lead singer of the Flaming Lips, has developed a sleep disorder wherein he, while completely asleep, lives a double life, unknown to himself, where he is the King of Burger King.

Wayne, if you read this, please see a doctor!

The Hextrated Pentagonal Icositetrahedron

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The Hextrated Pentagonal Icositetrahedron

Years ago, I split a dodecahedron into four panels of pentagons, rotated the pentagon-panels and moved them outward from the center, and did so just the right amount to create gaps that could be filled with triangles. Thus was named the tetrated dodecahedron, which you can read more about here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrated_dodecahedron

The choice of word “tetrated” was somewhat unfortunate, for tetration already exists in mathematics, as a means of expressing very large numbers, and which I shall not explain here. I didn’t learn this until much later, though, and by that time, it was too late to turn “tetrate” into something else. It had come to mean an operation one does on a polyhedron: break it into four multi-face panels, move them out and rotate them just enough, and fill the resulting gaps with triangles.

As such, “tetrate” can, in the geometrical sense, be modified for differing numbers of panels of multiple faces from a polyhedron. Consider the pentagonal icositetrahedron, the dual of the snub cube. Here, it has been split into six panels, and then each panel moved out from the center and rotated, with triangles filling the gaps. The triangles differ between color-groups slightly, but are close to equilateral, except for the ones shown in green, which simply are equilateral.

(Image created with Stella 4d — software you can try yourself at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.)

News Flash: Big Snake on the Loose in Texas

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Newsflash: Big Snake On the Loose in Texas

This just in from Longview, Texas — a five-meter (~16 foot) Burmese Python is on the loose.

If you see it, do not approach.

Retreat and dial 911.

No kidding.

Also: learn the metric system.

Oceans, Further from the Sun

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Oceans, Further from the Sun

Since earth’s oceans will be boiled away by the sun’s increasing luminosity, as I mentioned in my last post, we’ll eventually need to find other oceans elsewhere — or learn to do without water, which seems even less likely.

The news today is running a story about a subsurface ocean under Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. Here, in an obviously-photoshopped picture from one of those news stories, it’s shown in an impossible location, next to the U.K., for the purposes of size comparison. In addition to this moon, subsurface water is expected to exist on Titan, another moon of Saturn, as well as three of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter: Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede.

The Jovian system doesn’t get closer than 4.2 AUs from earth, and Saturn’s moons are further out still — but at least our descendants do have other places to go, once our oceans become too hot to stay liquid. They’re expected to be boiled away, by the sun’s increasing luminosity, in ~1.5 billion years.

Time Is Running Out

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Time Is Running Out

A lot of people are complacent about the long-term fate of the earth because they know the sun won’t turn into a red giant for >4 billion years. However, we don’t have even half that long to find another place to live. The sun’s luminosity is increasing — so quickly that the oceans will boil away ONLY ~1.5 billion years from now.

Let’s get going with extraterrestrial colonization, people!

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[Note: I didn’t create this image, but simply found it with a Google image-search.]

My Wikipedia Userboxen Collection, Part V

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My Wikipedia Userboxen Collection, Part V

Finally: the last installment!

My Wikipedia Userboxen Collection, Part IV

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My Wikipedia Userboxen Collection, Part IV

If you’re also a Wikipedean, and want some of these userboxen for yourself, feel free to copy them from my userpage. To help you find it: my username on Wikipedea is RobertAustin at the time of this posting, but should change to RobertLovesPi in just a few days.