Perplexed

Ah!  June.  It comes after April showers and May flowers.  One might think that for a large portion of the Earth this leads to continuous sunny days.  But I can tell you that the number of warm sunny days this year I've had here in Giessen can be counted on 2 hands.  From what I hear, my home of Seattle has also been getting an extended winter.  Oregon and Montana as well.  What gives?  It's overcast and about a high of 19°C today.  This is not June 1st weather.  Does anybody have a handle on this conundrum?  I fear that spring will be glossed over altogether and I'll be forced to adapt to 32°C temperatures immediately.  Oh well.

In other news, today marks the day I first began counting down the days until my return to the States.  T-minus 69 days and counting.  

Stupid Questions

I just read a post on io9 that asked a question that irks me to no end regarding money and science.  Is it worth spending a crap-ton of money to prove [insert some science-y thing here] right/wrong?  That's the question?  I never really had a good counter argument that I really liked until I saw a fellow reader's comment back.  It went along the lines of "if we can spend crap-tons of money on movies that suck, why not on something more constructive like furthering humanity's knowledge."  Booya!  

Now, don't get me wrong.  I enjoy a beautiful CG romp of mayhem and destruction as much as the next guy, but if the plot is going to be crap it just isn't worth it.  This guy listed, among others, Transformers and the Star Wars prequels and I have to agree.  Big movies and all the money went into big names and fancy CG.  So what do we have?  2-3 hours of cool special effects, bad plot and a coaster (if you bought the movie).  I just wish that whoever funded these works of suck would consider sacrificing one movie's budget to fund a science project.  (Note: if they already do this, let me know and I'll apologize).  

To summarize, it is a ridiculous question to ask when so much money is spent on other less useful things.  But it does not have to be just on science either!  Sacrifice a movie and feed some people for a month or restore a poisoned water supply or anything like that.  I would love to hear about that happening as well.  It's just that this article was related to science so that is the first thing I thought about.  

Pseudo Anti-Deuterons

Today in my Methods and Applications of Atomic Physics class, we discussed antiparticles and CPT symmetry conservation (Charge conjugation, Parity and Time reversal).  The CPT thing is not what I'd like to discuss.

I know that having a particle interact with its antiparticle results in mutual annihilation accompanied by a release of energy.  I asked my professor what the possibilities are for gaining energy for free by using our available energy to create an antiproton that would then collide with a proton that we didn't have to work to get.  In case that made no sense this is what I meant: (No energy expended proton source) + (some energy expended antiproton source) = More energy than we put in coming back.  He said that it takes a crap-ton (rough estimate) of energy to make antiparticles currently.  Also, the number of antiparticles the world has thus far created, although numbering in the millions (if not billions), would hardly heat a cup of water if allowed to annihilate.  Drat.

My second question was a little more abstract.  I began with making sure I understood the matter-antimatter combination.  An antiproton will only annihilate with a proton, a positron will only annihilate with an electron, and so forth, right?  He didn't sound so sure but I asked my next question anyway.  What would happen if you could put an antiproton with a regular neutron?  A normal proton and neutron form the nucleus of deuterium also know as heavy hydrogen.  45 years ago we had already made antideuterium (antiproton with antineutron), but I want to know what would happen if you could mix different matter and antimatter particles.  He said he did not know but he guessed it would be bad (his words!).  

I really don't know what the point of such a particle would be, but I suppose that since the antiproton is made up of antiquarks the annihilation would come from the quarks messing with each other.  Just wanted to share those thoughts.  Does anybody know anything about this?  Has it been done?

Time has Velocity?

The period between school semesters is fraught with peril.  It would be like a ship of the line (circa 1857) traversing a shoal known for harboring Reefs of Peril®.  If you don't keep your mind active it's going to crash.  In an effort to stave off the intake of water followed by certain ingestion by a shark I have been reading The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene.  It is a good read but somewhat slow at times.  I did want to share something briefly that I came across and in conjunction with a previous post I did on time travel.  Greene was explaining relativity and the effect that moving clocks run slower.  I have often times had difficulty with these subjects since I have trouble identifying who the observer is at the moment.  If you were to look at a situation from the point of view of the other guy (the moving object), you would have a completely different problem.  Anyway, this is not about that.

The thing that Greene mentioned was about how time and space work.  The top speed in the universe (so far) is lightspeed (that speed from Star Wars that would make the galaxy the size of our solar system).  Also remember that one moves both through 3D space and also through time from one second to the next.  Greene wrote that one's total velocity through space-time is equal to the speed of light.  Wha?  Your speed through space plus your speed through time is equal to the speed of light.  Basically, if you're sitting still and not moving at all your speed would be 3 times 10 to the 8 meters per second.  Alright?  Now, start moving.  Since your total speed in space-time can't exceed lightspeed, some of your velocity in time must be transferred to your motion in space!  Whoa!  Thus your watch starts going slower.  Get going faster and faster and a crap-ton of your temporal velocity gets stolen by the space motion.  That's why if you approach lightspeed in your ship, turn around after a  few years (by your clock!) and come back to Earth that you'll find many a decade have gone by (according to the Earth clocks).  I believe the real explanation would be nothing like this, but it was the best description for the reason moving clocks go slower that I've ever seen.  How cool, eh?

Disclaimer: After writing this post I notice that I used speed and velocity, but being too lazy to fix it, know that I meant velocity with every instance of the word speed.

Day X - Cold

It was -5 degrees celsius today and I needed to go grocery shopping.  It was a classic example of sucky timing.  A little bit of wind chill helped us along as well, plus the still remaining pockets of compressed snow-ice.  Needless to say it was treacherous.  I think I may have been looking at my computer screen all day except for the two hours I was away shopping.  My head is a little on the pained side and my eyes are doing funky things.  It's probably a bad sign and so I'm now deciding to type with my eyes closed.  Note to self: be sure to do a spell check.  

It's a funny thing to type with the eyes closed.  I find that I drift away from conscious thought, in a sense, and start typing on automatic.  Typing whatever comes into my head at that moment.  I become more conscious of my inner monologue.  Kind of like free writing.  That is what it's called, isn't it?  When some writing instructor tells you to just write exactly what is in your head as it pops up there.  For example, while writing that sentence, I started thinking about Winston from 1984 sitting in his corner of the apartment away from the telescreen so he could write in his journal.  Who knows where I would have gone next.  

As you can no doubt tell, another unremarkable and uneventful day has transpired here in Giessen.  A forecast of plans include Marburg on Wednesday and Frankfurt on Thursday so let's hope I'll have bloggable material to swoon and stimulate your imaginations.

Day VII - How to Start?

I'm finding it very difficult to get my thoughts in order for a short story.  Where do people come up with ideas?  Maybe I'm just having an off day, but I can't seem to get it together.  I've gone through half a dozen ways of getting to the end of my story and can't pick one that I like the most.  I've read hundreds of short stories in my life and now that I'm in Germany, away from all my books, I can't even look at them to get an idea for how they're laid out.  I'm not going to give up though.  Some piece of fiction will be written so help me.  I'm afraid this is all I have for today.  

On second thought, it's possible my lethargy, apathy or whatever else my block may be is derived from a feeling of homesickness.  The past couple days have been a little more difficult than normal.  Oh yes.  I am homesick every stinking day.  I'm excited to be abroad, yes, but am most definitely thinking of the Pacific Northwest all the time.  I guess we'll see what things are like tomorrow.

Day IV - Nothing

Can one write about nothing?  Definitely not because of course by writing something you've written about something, correct?  I have no idea.  I guess it depends on your at-the-moment concept of nothing.  I start with this since I couldn't think of anything to write about, but the experiment must go on!  There was a funny show on during the 90's that I never heard about before coming to Germany.  It's called Newsradio and had Phil Hartman in it before he passed away.  In an episode just recently watched, he made the point about the phrase "it's nothing."  "'It is nothing' implies an it, which is something."  Of course the way Phil Hartman said the sentence is much funnier than just writing the same.  So then my first sentence of this post means the same thing, no?  Well, I added the word about, didn't I?  You can not write nothing, but you can write about nothing and I did just that.  Sorry to have wasted your time, but it won't be a waste if you try to check out that show I mentioned.  It is a great diversion from physics homework and it's silly stupidity is refreshing in such serious times as these.

Day II - End of the Universe

What is an interesting thing to think about if you're a long term thinker?  How about the end of the universe?  Apparently, a new calculation of the amount of entropy in the universe has revealed much higher numbers than originally thought.  Of course the researchers can't put a number yet on when exactly every particle in the universe is around the same energy excitement level, but they assured us that it would be after the sun has done its red giant blossoming thing.

I wonder if this 'heat death scenario' is the same as another end of days theory I've heard about?  It involves the expansion of the universe eventually leading to a point, the 'Big Rip,' where no matter will coalesce and form new stars anymore.  Everything in the universe - stars, planets, moons - will be smeared out to elementary particles just floating in space.  They'll never get back together for a reunion party in a star's core or a planet's crust because everything will be too spread out.  Boring!  Of course before that happens the expansion, which increases, will cause every galaxy to disappear from view.  That's right.  They'll be so far away the light won't reach us.  The only stars will be those in our own galaxy and of course those will be going out as the galaxy evolves and no new ones will form...and it leads to particle butter scraped over too much bread!  

Day I - Falling Snow

I'm from California.  I'm sure you've heard of it.  It's that place that has sunshine nearly every day of the year and where snow only falls high in the mountains.  Specifically, I'm from Sacramento, which is down in a valley.  Snow there is a 30 year or so rarity.  It doesn't rain much there either and so 4 years ago, I moved to Seattle.  And contrary to popular belief, it is not always raining there - it just seems like it does.  Since Seattle is at a higher latitude, I asked locals about snow.  They said it doesn't usually snow.  I guessed then there were winters where it never snowed.  Imagine my surprise when for the next 3 years, not only was there snow but it was so cold that the snow compressed and froze, lingering for a week if not more.  It only snowed once or twice but boy was it beautiful and special.  

Now I'm living in inland Germany.  It is winter and it has been snowing at least a little bit nearly every day for the past month.  Naturally I am rather tired of it by now since it hinders my mobility and makes for depressing walks to the grocery store.  But the snow is still beautiful and special even though it falls every day.  Watching the snow gently come down and cover the local cat's footprints while also coating the trees in white is a daily event.  The pleasure of sipping hot tea and reading a good book is also augmented by the regular precipitation.  It's just so funny to realize that I've seen more snow fall in the past month than I had in my whole life until now.

Outraged

While reading the XKCD for today, I read on the mouseover that NASA pretty much threw in the towel on the Mars rover Spirit.  My best understanding of what has happened is that Spirit got stuck and has been immobile for some time.  NASA now calls it a "stationary research station" and expects dust buildup on the solar panels to eventually force a final shutdown.  Of course, this little rover has been active for 5 years more that it was supposed to be so big kudos to the design gang.  Wanting to get the full story though, I performed a search for 'NASA news' and the first thing to pop up was this.  Obama is canceling the Constellation program!?  I am so pissed right now.  First Bush cans the shuttle program thereby removing any independent method for the US to get people into space, and then this guy cancels funding for the next generation of space-faring craft.  Instead the government will outsource ISS trips to other governments and encourage funding for private sectors to develop spacecraft or some crap like that.  I can understand canceling the shuttles; they're old and we need something new.  But scrapping the new plan is stupid.  Also don't misunderstand me in that I think it's great that other countries are getting to develop their own manned missions.  I'm just angry that we (the US) won't have one anymore.  The article also says that NASA will be encouraged to focus on Earth-based science like "monitoring climate change."  Huh?  Doesn't the government already have somebody (who is already getting funding) doing that?  I suppose the next step would be to shut down satellites that do silly non-climate-change-sciency things.  What does 1/4 of NASA stand for again?  Space.

**Disclaimer after the fact: I apologize for my poorly researched rant.  Should anything I've said not be true, please inform me nicely.

Here is the story about Spirit though.

Stuck in Wonder

Last night was a birthday party for a friend that I've made here.  She is from France and turned 21 yesterday.  I was under the impression that we were throwing her a surprise party.  Rachel and I helped our other friend from France to make her a cake from scratch (which I never saw again at the party which makes me think it didn't turn out).  I should also preface this little story by saying that the dormitories at JLU are spread out and each one leads somewhat to segregation in the student population.  Obviously my dorm has the coolest people in it and the others can just live with that.  See what I mean.  Anyway, surprise party, right?  No.  

Rachel and I show up to Jeff's dorm area and in the common area are already more people than I thought I knew and more and more people from the summer course kept coming through the door.  Turns out this wasn't a surprise anymore and that about 35, maybe more, out of 55 summer course students plus 4 of out mentors made the trek to come to our dorm building.  Not being very good with large groups of people, I promptly placed myself outside with Victor where we could have pleasany discourse and smoke a pipe.  Topics included The Doors, spirits, pipes, karaoke, Romanian drinking practices, beer and more.  

The real point of my story is the following.  While standing outside watching the people inside talking, I realized that I was in Germany listening to conversations around me in English.  Then I noticed that our mentors and some Russian students were talking in German, while the other Russian students were speaking Russian.  Looking in I saw the kids from Spain speaking Spanish or Catalonian.  I also knew we had several people here from Poland that were gathered together at that moment and I'm sure the birthday girl and the other girls from France happened to be speaking their native tongue at that moment.  It was just a very interesting revelation of what a diverse... I don't know... thing I'm doing.  There were more that 6 languages being spoken in an area no larger than 30 or 40 square meters.  It was cool and gave me pause for a moment.

Rediscovery

With only 8 days until the great grand adventure, my panic attacks have begun to come more frequently and even while I sleep.  The intensive language class is ending this week and since it has slowed down considerably (i.e. all homework is now completed, 3 days ahead of schedule), I have discovered something amazing.  Well its actually a rediscovery.  

I like science.  I mean REALLY like science.

It's like a festering scab wound thing that you just have to itch and it makes it worse but it feels so good and you just have to itch it one more time because of some weird feeling it gives that makes it feel better than when it is festering, scabbing... i think you get the idea.  I just read the two latest issues of Discover and Astronomy magazine and I'm borrowing the May issue of Science (very fancy) from the Physics department.  And I'm reading almost every article.  Geography, Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, Physics, and yes Astronomy.  I can't get enough.  Just one quarter without taking any kind of science class and I find that I can barely contain myself.  I want to be doing two research projects and learning how to present my work with new computer programs.  I can't wait for these plane rides so I can just sit and read magazines.  If only I could get my hands on the Astrophysical Journal I'd be set.  Alas, that costs quite a bit.  

Anyway, this just makes me feel better about the choice I made in picking the Sciences. Even though it is really hard at times, I enjoy it and just need to find that special niche where everything clicks for me.  I know that I'm not going to be a super genius, but I still love reading up on everything.  Jack of all trades, master of some - that's what I'm aiming for.  Prost!

Saturday Morning Musings

I'm at a local independent coffee shop right now called Gretchen's Place. Their Americanos aren't bad and I would recommend you come early when there aren't a lot of people. The table I'm typing on right now is single stem style with four base protrusions and it's wobbling, making my screen bobble with every slam of my fingers on the keyboard. Thus why I always prefer three legged or three-legged-protrusion-single-stem tables. And if you can't figure out why that makes a difference, then we have a problem.

I just collected 15 hours worth of data on the hour on 2 separate days for 13 different asteroids. So that comes out to (15*2*13) lines I put onto my computer and organized in a neat orderly fashion so that later today, after orchestra and Battlestar Galactica, I can convert some of the data into other units and do some easy math to find out some cool stuff that I'll use later on to do more cool stuff. But honestly, I fear I may be over my head this semester. But that's another story. Tests may be next week in all three of my primary classes, but today it's all research (since I haven't done any in about 10 days and that's bad of me).

I'm planning on using some of the portions of my tax return to buy a good size whiteboard. A wha? Yes, you read right. I'm going to buy a whiteboard and hang it on the wall in my room over my bed. I want to be able to do practice problems of math and physics without having to look for paper and pencil. I mean, it'll save the environment and I'll feel like a BA while writing there. There is something special about doing homework or practice on a large board. You can step back, hold the pen in your mouth or something, stare at the board and just think. It's great and I recommend it. Trev, that goes for you. Try translating Greek on a chalkboard and tell me it isn't fun.

Well, I finished my Americano and now have to head off to play Horn. It's sectionals today and so you're more exposed. I hope I don't suck. Until next time everyone. Cheers!

Time Travel

So, about 12 hours ago, I saw a cool t-shirt online that was about Back to the Future. About 15 minutes ago that t-shirt popped back up into my mind spurring a random string of thoughts that I'd like to share. Now, for your pleasure, is a glimpse into how Brian's mind works when he is driving alone, thinking.

"that was a pretty cool t-shirt earlier. i really want to buy it cause i would wear it for sure. 88 mph sure is fast. the future. hmmmmm. the future.

you know, i've always thought about travel through time as a motion when really, just because relativity involves moving at the speed of light, it doesn't mean travel through time has to involve motion in the original 3 dimensions. hmmmmmm. That would mean that Wells' The Time Machine had it closer than Back to the Future i think. still. i don't think travel to the past is possible, but if you could unsync yourself from normal time, you could bypass a large chunk of time. but you'd have to somehow uncouple the interior of your 'time bubble' as well, otherwise you would experience the passage of time. argh!

let's see, somehow your time bubble would have to be 'moving' at relativistic speeds unless some hitherto unknown process could accelerate time around an object. hmmmm.

how fast can superman go? i saw an episode of the Batman Superman Adventures that had the flash melt himself out of ice by vibrating his body so fast the friction melted it. superman of course had heat vision. but still, if the flash and superman were racing and nobody was winning, that must mean superman can go pretty darn fast. if so, then could he (or the flash) vibrate so fast in place that they begin to 'move' at relativistic speeds and bypass time? this is where my idea of travel to the past as illogical comes from. one can only bypass time, not go back. at least that's how i see it......"

Blah, blah. So you see, those are the paths my mind takes. What you didn't see is that during all this I was being even more elaborate, singing along with a song, thinking about an intense dream I had last night, playing a movie clip of all my thoughts as they cued in my head, and pondering my dinner selection tonight. Not to mention driving. Cue discussion about time travel if you like.

3.3 Microseconds

It's a full moon. I've started listening to Christmas music. I'm freeing up space on my computer. And this is my 60th blog (but technically my 59th posted blog). It seems only fitting I discuss an interesting matter that has been muddling around in the back and front and sides of my head (nooks and crannies are free of this thought).

Take a moment and consider light. Go on................ It has a velocity: 3.0 x 10^8 m/s (or verbally, three hundred million meters per second). That's pretty stinking fast you say. Duh, I know, I'm an astrophysicist (in training). Anyway. Now consider what light does for us. It illuminates things. Everything you can see with your eyes is because light is reflecting off of it. Shocking! If it were not for light bouncing off things, we would not see them, unless the object itself was a source of illumination. Now, put these two ideas together. Velocity and that things we see are because of light. We are constantly seeing the past.

Yes, we are always seeing the past. Never the now. A little meta-exi-physi-stensial for you? Well, I'm only putting it how I heard it and then thought about it. Light takes time to travel from an object to our eye. Thus, unless the object is in your eye, you are experiencing it as it was in the past (and we won't discuss neuron sensory path time). There is no now when it comes to visual stimuli. It's easy to say light from a star took 100 million years to get here because it's 100 million light-years away, but it's not something people think about when they look at a train coming at them from say....1 kilometer away. Do you know how long it took that light from the train to get to you? It's Math Time (insert intro credits to favorite TV show here).

Distance = velocity x time so t = D/v or t= (1000m)/(3 x 10^8 m/s)

t= .0000033 seconds

AHHHH! That train could have exploded and you wouldn't know it for 3.3 micro seconds!!!

So, cue a discussion if you like. Perhaps others are so adamant about the absurdity of my statement that an answer to life, the universe, and everything will come out of discusssion.

P.S. As an aside, or I guess more accurately a post script, I would like to point out the distance from the Sun to the Earth is 1.49 x 10^11 meters, which is 149 billion meters. Couple that with light speed and the Sun could explode and we wouldn't have a gorram clue for 8 minutes. Makes me chuckle just thinking about it.

Hysteria

It feels like it's been a while since I shared. Yet it's been all of 17 days. I can only conclude that these seventeen days have either been so filled that I haven't properly fathomed the passage of time or they have been extremely slow days. Regardless...

It's Finals [feels like it should be capitalized] week. The nine week summer quarter here at UW is reaching its end. It's been rough, I'm not going to lie. Here's what it's been like in an analogy metaphor whatever form that should ring true with anybody that has ever visited Seattle.

*shimmering cross-fade* My first quarter at the U feels like I was walking along Pike's Market, minding my own business, taking in the sites and the people, smelling the flowers, getting those flavored honey stick things when all of a sudden... [thought I'd make you wait a sec on the edge of your seat] ... a giant fish slaps me in the face, stunning me into near unconsciousness! It had come from them fish throwing folk down in the corner and boy was it a big fish! I numbly get back on my feet when one of the dudes in the orange overalls comes over real fast, helps me don my own orange pant suspender doohicky and proceeds to throw me into the fray of taking orders and throwing fish. Fully recovered from my fish in the head incident, I quickly get the hang of taking orders and throwing fish. But then the lingo starts getting more complicated and the busy time of the day is here and I can't keep up and ... and........ I freak out! There's fish everywhere! Here fish, there fish. Crawdad things are crawling out of the tubs! Mini-fireworks shoot out of the ice packs! People are dancing in the streets and that blind guitar player is going to town! Dogs and cats, living together...Mass Hysteria! *cross-fade back*

That's what it's been like. I can only hope that next quarter will be a smoother ride the whole way through.

On Being Prepared

I had a very interesting dream that seemed to segue into my work day on Wednesday and then a similar dream that started out my day today. Unfortunately, I don't exactly remember the dream...at all, but I do know that when these incidents happened, I remembered that I had dreamed it already.

The first instance was when I arrived at work after school on Wednesday. My co-worker was jesting with me and said it's appropriate to shave before coming to work. Now I have a beard and I like it. Suddenly, I had this recollection of being in, say, an alternate universe where facial hair was illegal. I didn't know how I got here, but I knew if I was to survive, I'd have to pretend I knew all about whatever they were saying to me, including the facial hair thing. I panicked just a bit at my co-worker saying this, fearing I had somehow slipped into this alternate reality for real somehow. He still had his hair though so I didn't panic for long.

So, I tell you this because I want you all to be prepared. Too many times, I've seen people (on TV shows and what not) be all dumb whenever they land in some alternate reality or timeline. They expect people to instantly be understanding when you tell them their [insert something here] isn't the way it is supposed to be. Stupid! You need to get with the flow right away and then work out where you are, how you got there, and what you're going to do or who you're going to tell about getting back to your home. Say somebody walks up to you and says, "Hey, what happened to your biometric facial interface?" You don't say "my what?" You say, "It's getting repaired," or "It just broke but I'm heading out to get another one right now." That's how you survive in alternate realities. Be prepared and quick on your feet.

Goals

So last Monday, I completed a goal I had set for myself more than two years earlier. In early 2006, I said that I would become a student at the University of Washington. Monday, June 23, I had my first class at 9:40a. How did it feel? Well, I certainly wasn't really thinking that hard about it. I didn't feel any different, but it was pretty cool to say "hey, I finished a goal I set. How about that?" I'd also like to say, I'm very proud of being a Husky. Go Dawgs!

Now, on to lighter matters. Besides the (pretty much included in prior goal) goal of graduating in three, maybe even two years, I have a much greater goal that is going to take some thinking, planning, praying, asking, pondering, and on top of all that, much information gathering. Are you ready for my new goal? Maybe it's not really a goal since that suggests an actual, I don't know, tangible ending. A "something" you can hold on to and present to people saying here it is! (i.e. my student ID) Now this thing I'm about to reveal to you is probably more of an intent to do research to determine if a goal to implement said research should be announced. Here then is my research goal. Are you ready?

I want to live on a boat.

Liveaboarders is one of the terms I've come across so far. I also understand some communities shun them while they're also a close knit group. [Aside] Please don't mistake me. I'm not going to go sell my truck, take a loan and buy a boat tomorrow. This is my research goal. I am going to learn everything I can about liveaboarding and boating. [End Aside] This could take several years and I understand that. It has always been a dream of mine to live on a boat. Not tied down to any one place: if I so choose, I'm up and away (or, more appropriately, Anchors Away!) Well there you go. Thoughts, advice, and slaps to my face are welcome.

Aluminum Cans

Two days ago, I had a terrifying moment of clarity. I think clarity is the right word. What follows may seem silly, but I'm fairly certain that if people thought like this more often, the world might be a better place.

Most people, I believe, go through the day very glazed or uncomprehending of the world and even the universe around them. I fall into this as well nearly everyday. I think it has something to do with how much thinking power it would take to go on with existing if you were having to always fathom, say, the size of the Earth, distances between stars, how unbelievably cool trees are when they're alive and growing, or how many tons of asphalt make up the United States highway system. Things like that. Who thinks about those every single day? I don't, but sometimes it comes up, and it scares the crap out of me. Two days ago, I was looking at soda cans that we have at my work. We store them in the bathroom and they come in the 36 pack containers and what not and there were probably 8 or 9 containers there. Yes, that's 288 to 324 individual cans constructed of aluminum that very likely will not get recycled. Anyway, let me try to give you an analogy to describe what happened next.

It's like when you're on Google Maps and you're zoomed into your home address or what not. You can see the surrounding streets and that's it. It takes up the whole screen. All of sudden, somebody/thing comes along, takes your mouse wheel and scrolls back, zooming the image out, and out, and out until you're staring at the entire planet. "Well," you say "that's cool and all. What's the big deal?" The big deal comes from the fact that you're still cognizant of being that tiny person on that now minuscule street that you can't even see anymore. It's an incredible dichotomy of feeling. And that's as best I can describe it in so few words. That's what happened when I stared at these soda cans. How many businesses must there be in the US alone that have these many cans? Then the world? Then I thought about the manufacturing plants, spitting out all these cans! Where the hell (pardon me) do all these flippin' cans come from? How have we not run out before now? I'll admit, I freaked out a bit, but hopefully you can see why we don't think like this.

I like to think we block these thought processes because they would cause too much stress or, I don't know, positive action. This is not an environmental activist blog post, but I just want you to take a moment and really try to comprehend the finiteness of this planet. Go ahead...

...you there yet?...

...scary isn't it?

Tagline

ONE POINT.
ONE LINE.
ONE DESTINY.
TO RULE THEIR OCTANT!

COMING SOON TO A WHITEBOARD NEAR YOU!

fine print: my math instructor said in class, just like a movie announcer (well maybe not quite like a movie announcer), those first two lines, and the first thing to pop into my mind were the next two lines. I think I've got something here...