From Wired – July 2004:
The universe comes in a box. It’s a big box, and you almost never see the walls, but its boundaries are immovable – the speed of light, gravity, the way atoms interact. Even if time and space are unlimited and illimitable, physics, chemistry, and biology dictate maxima and minima in the universe. Like the strict meter and structure of a sonnet, they make the final product all the more beautiful. – Adam Rogers
- 5 billion Years – Maximum time Earth has left.
- That’s when the sun goes red giant and expands past Earth’s orbit.
- 5.4 * 10-44 seconds – Shortest possible time.
- Any shorter and quantum mechanics can’t tell whether events are simultaneous.
- 1.419 * 1026 meter (15 billion light-years) – Maximum distance we can see.
- The universe is about 15 billion years old - this is light’s travel time.
- 1.6256 * 10-35 meter (6.4 * 10-34 inches) – Shortest possible distance.
- Planck length: any shorter and quantum mechanics can’t tell between here and there.
- 34.92 km (21.7 miles) – Maximum height of a mountain on Earth.
- Uplift reaches equilibrium with pressure at the base.
- 3.048 * 10-7 m (1.2 * 10-5 inches) – Minimum size of an actively growing cell.
- Free-living cells need room for a full genome, proteins, and guts.
- 130 m (427 feet) – Maximum height for a tree on Earth.
- Gravity overcomes surface tension in the plant’s circulatory system.
- 265 – Minimum number of protein-coding genes for life.
- As seen in the smallest known single-cell organism.
- 200 million years – Maximum age of sub-oceanic crust.
- Older than that: it cools, becomes denser, and “subducts” back into magma.
- -273.15 ° Celsius (-459.67 ° Fahrenheit) – Minimum possible temperature.
- Heat is a function of molecular motion, which stops at absolute zero.
- 338 km/h (210 MPH) – Maximum wind speed for an Earth hurricane.
- A storm can acquire only so much energy from the sea.
- 0.24 second – Minimum delay of a signal sent via geosynchronous satellite.
- It’s light speed up 35.600 km (22.300 miles), and back down.
- 430.000 Mbps – Maximum speed to record data to magnetic media.
- Bits won’t flip reliably with a pulse under 2.3 picoseconds.
- 100 Tbps – Maximum information bandwidth over optical fiber.
- Higher power levels mash signals together.
- 1051 operations per second – Maximum computational power.
- Quantum rules won’t let the ideal 1-liter, 1-kilogram laptop crunch data any faster.
Contributors: Sunny Bains, Thomas Hayden, Greta Lorge, Michael Myser, and Boyce Rensberger / Sources: Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order (Knopf, 1995); Institute for Genomic Research; Lucent Technologies; MIT; NASA; National Institute of Standards and Technology; Nature; UC Berkeley; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Yale
via Andrew Ferguson and bytehead.org
Technorati: science
Thus a drug called melanotan (…), which was developed as an analogue of this hormone to promote a natural tan as protection against skin cancer, was found to have the side effect of dramatically increasing libido in men and women during clinical trials. Female rats increased their rate of copulation by 300% after a dose of melanotan, and 80% men suffering from impotence reported getting normal erections after taking this drug. Melanotan also inhibits appetite by suppressing the action of the hunger center of the hypothalamus. So it makes you tanned, thin and horny – which is why it is sometimes called the “Ken and Barbie drug.”
from www.hss.bond.edu.au
Now let’s see how long it takes before I get my first “Herbal Melanotan” spam mail.
Also covered in: dissectleft.blogspot.com – www.adamsmith.org – news.bbc.co.uk
Technorati: health
Published on
October 10, 2004 in
science.
If you’re interested in high level conversations on a wide range of topics, check out edge.org. Their motto: To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.
There’s fascinating stuff about quantum computing and black swan dynamics, but a piece in the last publication jumped out, a discussion on ‘A self worth having’:
An increasing intelligence would also reach a point where it became aware of its own intelligence and that’s a highly dangerous spot because an intelligence that was naked and transparent would be susceptible to intellectual manipulation. The first thing that a mind smart enough to see itself would do is start to hack itself.
Kevin Kelly (on edge.org)
The irony of this is that the research performed by Mr. Kelly is doing just that: trying to hack the mind. But he makes a great point. The above quote actually comes from a reply to an earlier article, the original ‘A self worth having’ thesis:
This case stayed with me � to remind me, if I should ever forget, how much consciousness matters. Even to the extent that mattering may be one of the main reasons why consciousness exists. What if it’s consciousness that gives us a reason for waking up every day, and going out into the world �to experience the qualia of a rainbow, the sunset, music, interactions with our friends, sex, food? What if consciousness provides such an incentive for living that, as human beings, we would not � and probably could not � do without it?
Nicholas Humphrey (on edge.org)
So, making out under a rainbow, Marvin Gaye in the background, just after a picknick with some excellent Sancerre is not by accident an enjoyable event: you are actually celeberating the Self. And far too busy to start picking your own mind.
[Listening to: "It had to be you" - Warner Bros. Orchestra - Casablanca DVD]
Published on
August 8, 2004 in
science.
I caught an episode of Top Gear the other day. The rather excellent Jeremy Clarkson was talking about ‘driving very economically’ with an big Audi and mentioned all kinds of mpg (miles per gallon) measurements. For me, having lived in the metric system for all my life, conversion from ‘mpg‘ to ‘l/100km’ (liter/100 km) proved to be non-trivial. Some research revealed the following stunning data:
- Length:
- 1 mile = 8 furlong, 1 furlong = 40 rod, 1 rod = 5.5 yard, 1 yard = 3 feet, 1 foot = 12 inch
- Which gives us: 1 mile = 1760 yard or 1.609344 km
- Weight
- 1 stone = 14 pounds, 1 clove = 7 pounds, 1 pound = 16 ounces, 1 ounce = 16 drams
- Which gives us: 1 stone = 224 ounce
- Volume
- 1 gallon = 4 quart, 1 quart = 2 pint, 1 US pint = 16 US fluid ounces but(!) 1 Imperial pint = 20 Imperial fluid ounces
- Which gives us: 1 Imperial gallon = 160 Imperial fluid ounces or 4.54609188 liter
Two observations:
the English will never be Europeans. They drive on the wrong side of the road, they refuse to use the euro (before 1971, each UK pound was divided into 240 pence, but they reluctantly gave in to decimalisation) and they stubbornly cling on to a measurement system that can only have been invented by a bunch of anarchists with an atypical number of fingers and a taste for strong herbs.
for some reason they have forgotten to complicate their time measurement. They still use the ordinary hours and seconds, like every other deadly boring chap on the Continent.
In order to bring ‘Imperial’ time measuring on par with their other units, I propose the following:
since a ‘day’ corresponds to a full turn on the Earth, and the English are condemned to sharing it with the lot of us, there is no point in changing that.
a day is divided in 7 nunes, of which typically 2 to 3 are spent sleeping, and the rest working, drinking tea and reproduction. You wake up in the mor-nune (± 7h-10h25) and go to work, you have lunch during the noon-nune (commonly called just ‘nune’), you continue work during the after-nune, and go home to spend the eve-nune before the TV. You then have late-nune, night-nune and dawn-nune for sleeping, going out or procreation, in whatever sequence.
a nune (roughly 3.5 hours) is divided into 15 moments or mo’s (something like 15 minutes). “I’ll just be a moment” will then be a more realistic prediction, and tax consultancy companies like KPMG and PWC will now be able to invoice in a unit that sounds indivisible and not open for discussion by clients, and is slightly smaller than the current 15 minutes (but still the same price, obviously).
a moment is divided into 97 instants (why 97? because it’s a prime number, of course). An instant is something like 8 seconds, so for someone with basic dexterity, ‘instant soup’ becomes a reality. And AOL does not have to worry about the snappiness of their Instant Messenger, any response time under 8 seconds will do.
an instant is divided into 36 winks. It has been scientifically proven that it is possible to wink one’s eye in .23 seconds, which is the metric equivalent. After some intake of alcohol, a wink may be slower than a wink, but time perception under influence has always been somewhat flexible. For all practical purposes, this also is the smallest time unit, but just in case the rest of the world would want to contaminate the system with their ‘micro’ and ‘nano’-nonsense, the prefix ‘d’ will signify ‘dozen’ and can be added in any number to allow for tiny measurements. i.e.: a ‘dddwink’ is a 12*12*12 or 1728th of a wink.
This brings us to the following summary of the new Imperial Time System:
- Time:
- 1 day = 7 nunes, 1 nune = 15 moments, 1 moment = 97 instants, 1 instant = 36 winks, 1 wink = 12 dwinks
- Which now gives the English the possibility to express speed as ‘instants per inch’ (ipi) or ‘inch per instant’ (ipi), whichever is the most impressive number.
Since Greenwich is still England, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) cannot be abandoned just like that, so it will be renamed to Greenwich Mazy Time, and midnight will still be midnight (or actually, it will be mid-nune and happen every day with at least one metric hour difference with any non-English country). The suggestion to have a ‘Daylight Saving Time’ system is still under investigation, it might make things unnecessarily complicated.
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