Elders of the Internet

25 August, 2010 – 6:55 pm

How do I miss these things? It seems that seven people hold the keys to the internet – chosen to restart it if something breaks the domain name system and, I don’t know, stops phishing phraudsters pretending to be your bank account.

Apparently a restart requires five of the seven key holders to bring their smartcards to a secret location in the US, from their home countries of Britain, the US, Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, China, the Czech Republic and… Burkina Faso. (For those who don’t know, Burkina Faso is a landlocked African country; it used to be called Upper Volta, its capital city is Ougadougou and its main industry is lint.)

This is a fantastic opportunity for any lonely nerds out there. Despite the fact that some key holders have come forward, no one really knows who they all are. So all you need to do is mock up your own fake smartcard, and you finally have the key to attention and respect.

“Yeah baby, it’s true, I’m one of the seven secret lords of the internet. Me and Al Gore. But don’t tell anybody: it’s a secret.” (To be read in a Burkina Faso accent.)

But of course, this is old news. The truth about the hidden elders was revealed two years ago, in that excellent documentary series, The IT Crowd:

By Chris | Posted in science | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

Schrödinger’s parliament

22 August, 2010 – 1:04 pm

In a massive victory for science, Australia is in the midst of its first quantum election in over 70 years. Just as Schrödinger’s cat was famously caught in a state of being neither alive nor dead but somehow both, the Australian government is now in a superposition of Labor and Liberal, with somehow no one in charge.

Some might say this is Tony Abbott’s fault. When he was repeatedly asked about his views on climate change ABC TV’s Q & A, he exasperatedly said “let the scientists argue about that”. Well Tony, the scientists have had a talk, and they’ve voted for quantum mechanics. But the real question is, what do we do now?

Well, if you believe in The Secret, or What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?, or any other twisted, moronic, New Agey misinterpretation of quantum physics, then all we have to do is wish really, really hard and we can make our preferred party win. But of course, you don’t actually believe that utter bull#$*! (their term, not mine).

Instead, maybe you prefer the many-worlds interpretation, which would mean that we now have two parallel Australias. Just like in the US, there are the irreconcilable worlds of the “red states”, run by a feisty ranga, and the “blue states”, run by a man in budgie smugglers going for an ocean swim in the middle of winter.

Or perhaps we just sit back and wait for the postal votes to sort things out. This is what Einstein would have called “spooky action at a distance”. Or more precisely, “spukhafte Fernwirkung”.

But no, I say we enjoy this historic moment. Physicists have been trying for decades to create macroscopic quantum entanglements this size, so let’s not ruin it now.

Just like the cat, if we keep all the politicians locked in a little box, then they can stay in their magic superposition forever. All we have to do is to agree to never look in on them again…

By Chris | Posted in science | Tagged | Comments (5)

Gastroporn

16 August, 2010 – 8:26 pm

Not related to gastroenteritis…

…although you may change your mind after reading this. You see, last weekend, I attended one of those increasingly popular surprise housewarming parties. My contribution to the festivities? Lolly cake.

Lolly cake, close up

Every nation has its proud culinary traditions. But then there are those tastes that are acquired through the sort of forgiving ignorance that forms the basis of traditional family relationships. Such is lolly cake, New Zealand’s unique amalgam of fruity lollies, malt biscuits and half a tin of condensed milk.

For more information, and a picture of New Zealand’s the world’s longest lolly cake, see Isaac Freeman’s natural history thereof.

There you will also find a link to Star Wars/lolly cake fan-fiction. The internet: truly, the happiest kingdom on Earth.

By Chris | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (4)

Too, too Tango

2 April, 2010 – 4:30 pm

So, you couldn’t make it to Boston either (see the last post)? Where else can you see my work, preferably in the comfort of your own home?

Well, a story I wrote and drew appears in the recently released 9th edition of Tango, Bernard Caleo’s awesomely enormous Australian comics anthology. Each issue has a romance-based theme, this time being “love and war”; which goes together like… well… rama lama lama ke ding a de ding a dong, but with explosions.

This is the first time I’ve submitted anything to Tango, so you won’t find me in The Tango Collection, a retrospective of the best of the first 8 issues. But it was so much fun I’m definitely going to do it again, so look out for the next collected edition – in oh, 2021 or thereabouts.

However, to keep you interested here’s a little teaser, the first page of my 4 page epic, Love and War and Icypoles:

Page 1 of Love and War and Icypoles

If you want to see the rest, you’ll just have to buy it online, or keep an eye out in selected quality bookshops.

And the added bonus of being in Tango? I finally have my name in Wikipedia.

By Chris | Posted in comics | Comments (4)

Destination Boston

29 March, 2010 – 9:15 pm

Long-time readers – those hypothetical, long-time readers – may remember Destination Day, my short film about a man who travels back in time to change his past, only to run into the woman who made him want to change his past in the first place.

(And no, it’s not possible to talk about time travel plots without tying sentences in knots or giving yourself a headache.)

Well, Destination Day recently screened at the Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival. And although I couldn’t be there to see it myself, some people who were there have been kind enough to post reviews. Here, in the tradition of Hollywood-style quote mining, are the slightly edited critical reactions:

“This is another Australian entry… The ending of this one pretty much makes it too.”
Film Forager

“* * ¾ (out of four)… The opening hook…is neat… It finishes on a visual gag that’s clever.”
Jay’s Movie Blog

“Tim (Richard Pappas) travels back in time… references Perth’s Destination Day … No one … in the future … Have no interest… Rating (4.9)” (out of 10, I think)
Soresport Movies

“No one in the future have no interest.” That one’s going on the poster!

Now, go read the originals and see if you can come up with your own interpretation.

By Chris | Posted in film | Comments (2)

Tell me

2 November, 2009 – 12:40 pm

Is this meant to be ironic:

Adidas 3 tongue sneaker

Spotted being worn by a hip young Twilight actor at the recent Armageddon nerdfest in Melbourne. Yes, there were lots of people in costumes from Batman, Stargate, Yu-Gi-Yoh, whatever, but these shoes are what really amazed me.

I honestly can’t tell whether they’re serious. Or how you’d operate them. And the Adidas website is about as helpful as a fox.

Kids today…

By Chris | Posted in kids today | Comments (3)

Getting somewhere

11 October, 2009 – 7:28 pm

Apparently, a good thing to do with blogs is rant about things that annoy you. And I’m all in favour of doing good things with blogs…

By the way, today’s theme is – vaguely – science.

  1. The other night NASA smashed a space probe into the Moon. Liking both astronomy and large explosions, I naturally looked it up in the newspaper the next day. What category do you think it turned up in? World news. I think they’ve missed the point.
  2. Kirk Cameron, renowned creationist and growing pain, likes to use bananas as an example of intelligent design. How they’re perfectly designed for us to eat, etc., etc. But what about those annoying stringy bits down the side? Which are clearly an anti-eating defense mechanism caught in mid-evolution. Explain that!
  3. Zeno’s paradox, dating back to ancient Greece, the notion that before you can move a distance you have to cover half the distance, but before that a quarter of the distance, and so on. You therefore have to cover an infinite number of distances, so motion is impossible. No offence to the ancient Greeks, but that’s clearly ridiculous.

As demonstrated by my effort today in attempting and completing a half marathon. Thank you, thank you. It was difficult, but made easier by weeks of carb-loading, hydrating and whinging.

And I did it as part of the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre’s Run for Refugees team.

You should acknowledge my heroic, ancient Greek confounding effort by donating lots of money to this worthy cause. Please donate online at www.ourcommunity.com.au/giving/appeal_details.form?appealId=1733

Don’t make me smash a space probe into your crater.

By Chris | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (2)

Mobile phones are no good for poetry

3 February, 2009 – 1:05 pm

Or at least so claimed the graffiti I saw on the way to work this morning.

But is that really true? My first guess would be “of course not!” But I’m having trouble thinking of txtspk that rhymes better than “C U L8TR L E G8TR”.

Can anyone suggest a better one? A mobile limerick, perhaps? Or maybe we should just change the rules, so that instead of 160 characters, each SMS has to be 17 syllables?

As the kids say*, that would be totally Obama.

* At least so the Sunday Age assures me. But really I’d rather go with the bloke outside the pub last night, who claimed the band inside was “totally off the hook”. Right on.

By Chris | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (2)

Little things

1 February, 2009 – 8:25 pm

Dear diary,

Sorry it’s taken me so long to write – my stars, you wouldn’t believe the things I’ve been doing.

Actually, I remember back in the days of snail mail (not that they called it that then, but you young kids wouldn’t know anything about it) that I used to start all my letters that way. Hmm, you would’ve thought I’d learned something over the years, but no. Electronic communication just makes you late sooner.

So, what have I been doing? Birthday, Christmas, New Year, Robbie Burns day (no, not really, no haggis for me this year), a record Melbourne heatwave (a good reason to forego the haggis, I guess)… Some sciency reading, including Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, which has got me all fired up about evidence-based medicine and the sorry state of science reporting. And got me into an argument with my osteopath – not really recommended when they’re in a mood to wrench your vertebrae around. I’ve got the bruises to prove it.

Also, Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible, a birthday present I’d been greatly looking forward to. There are a lot of books out these days about sci-fi science, like time travel, teleportation, robots, etc. But to me this one stood out because of Dr Kaku’s genuine physics credentials. OK, yes, it could have done with a bit more editing. And the chapters that aren’t so much physics, like the one on telepathy, which delves into neuroscience, aren’t quite as good. And he has a curious obsession with nanotechnology (UFOs are nanoships built in a nanobase on our moon! That’s why they’re so small!) But yes, there is some really good physics there and well worth the read.

However, it also makes you think about the big picture, like how far away from a Theory of Everything are we really? Let’s just go back to my last post comparing atomic and astronomic scales.

Imagine scaling up an atom to the size of the solar system. What comparative size can we measure with today’s technology.

Well, with quantum mechanics the smallest distance we can measure corresponds to the highest energy instrument we have, i.e. the embattled LHC. When fully operational it should be able to get up to 14 TeV in energy, which can “see” scales of about 8.86 x 10-20m. At our atom/solar system scale, that’s equivalent to a distance of 8,400 km.

For a Theory of Everything we need to get down to much smaller distances where quantum gravity starts to kick in. This is the famous Planck scale, about 10-33m. It’s about how big you’d expect a superstring to be.

On our solar system scale that would be roughly 9.53 x 10-11m. Or about the size of an actual atom.

So I’m thinking we’ve got a long way to go; that’s an awful lot of orders of magnitude for something to happen in. Which is good, because it’ll keep physicists in a job. Just don’t hold your breath waiting for the secrets of the universe, that’s all.

By Chris | Posted in science | Leave a Comment

A matter of scale

3 November, 2008 – 5:48 pm

So I recently checked out the Melbourne Solar System, a nifty scale model of our little corner of the galaxy. The sun is down near the St Kilda Marina (itself pretty cool, what with the whole boats on shelves thing) and Pluto is 5.9 km away in Port Melbourne. Overall, an excellently nerdy and highly recommended way to spend a day at a beach that, well, you probably wouldn’t want to swim at in any case.

Anyhow, it got me thinking about the scale of things. As Douglas Adams famously said, space is big. Really, really big. At the scale of the Melbourne Solar System, the nearest star would be roughly 32,000 km away. That’s already getting pretty hard to picture – to get it more manageable we’re going to have to shrink things even further…

Now, a lot of people have pointed out that the solar system looks a leetle bit like an atom – well, not a real atom of course, with quantum uncertainties and weirdly shaped electron shells, but a classicised version, with electrons orbiting the nucleus much like a tiny solar system…

So, randomly choosing a gold atom as a model (not so random really – I found some good relative figures about gold, but also the sun is vaguely gold-coloured and according to Wikipedia they’ve long been connected), the sun’s diameter at 1,390,000 km is 9.53 x 1022 times the size of a gold nucleus at 1.46 x 10-14 m. And that works pretty good, because the size of the entire gold atom at 1.26 x 10-10 m turns out to be proportionally the same size as the heliosphere, the extent of the solar wind and one measure of where the solar system ends.

At this new scale, the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is a mere 0.421 μm away (roughly the size of the tiniest bacteria, but still pretty large compared to an atom). Our entire galaxy then is about 1 cm across. And the nearest galaxy (the Andromeda galaxy) is only 25 cm away. Which makes the entire observable universe, 92 billion light years wide, about 9.1 km in diameter.

Imagine that: a sphere extending roughly between the aforementioned Port Melbourne and Clifton Hill, full of tiny galaxies, each smaller than a fingernail and about a foot apart. And in one of these little golden galaxies, round about Federation Square, there is a single atom with an electron that corresponds to Earth.

Puts it all into perspective, eh?

By Chris | Posted in science | Comments (2)
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