Stuff AJ said (age 4-5)

9/25/05 : "30 days is too long to wait for a birthday. I know a way to make it faster. You have to make the clouds go faster. We should get a remote control that can do that. I think the Hulk should have one."

There should be a gun that can shoot little guns.

Stop singing that song, brain, and teach it to me. A brain is like a teacher. I want to take my brain out and put in a new one.

12/1/05: Now I can see at night because somebody put a bat head inside my real head.

12/10/05: Santa Claus lives in trees. He has a knife, and he takes it out of his pocket, and carves a little house, then he hides in there. That's a Christmas tree.

1/5/06: If you picked up a steak with your fingers, that would be a mis-steak

4/7/06: How do you make a bagpipe?

You know how they say if you get too close to a black hole, you will get stretched like spaghetti because your feet are closer to the black hole than your head, and they experience more gravity? Here's what I think would happen. Assuming you are orbiting the black hole (a good assumption since you are probably not going to fall straight in) each part of your body will have to orbit at a speed depending on how close it it. That means that your feet will have to orbit faster, and your body will get stretched out a long distance around the black hole, maybe multiple orbits. Alternately your body can orbit as a unit, but then you will experience a strong force from top to bottom.

However, as you get closer, time slows down, and force (which is m*d^2x/dt^2) would decrease by the square of that dilation. Would that be enough to counteract the stretching force? And, if you are moving in relativistic speeds around the black hole, that would cause shrinkage in the orbital direction, which would also counteract the stretching.

I guess we can't know for sure without doing the math.

Here are a few things that would make good blog posts (or at least the best ones I can think of at the moment):

• What books am I reading right now?
  
• How silver mining was done in the 1800's
  
• Design and pictures of A.J.'s clubhouse
  
• Herbert Marcuse
  
• Some classes I want to take
  

Here are some books I'm reading right now.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. This one is for my evolutionary psychology reading group. I first read this when I was 18 or so (25 years ago) and I remember that it was a huge revelation. I felt that I had a good understanding of why evolution worked the way it did. Since then, it seems like Dawkins' ideas have become an integral part of the general understanding of evolution, and nothing in this book seems surprising any more. I guess you also have to get past the emotional connotations of terms like "selfish" used in this context.

The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. I'm working on The Age of Louis XIV right now. I've been reading these books for 15 years or so - I pick the current one up, read a few chapters, then put it down and forget about it for 6 months. They are so well written, though, that it's a pleasure to read them. How can one person (or two, for the later ones) do so much research and know so much history to create a huge work like this? I can see somebody cranking out 10,000 pages of fantasy or mysteries in a few years, but for every page Durant wrote he must have done hours or days of research.

Outlaws and Lawmen of the West by M.A. Macpherson and Eli MacLaren. This is basically fluff - short biographies of a number of Wild West outlaws like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. An interesting point they make is that the era of the Wild West started after the Civil War, due to a large population of young men who had been trained in violence and whose lives had been upset striking out to seek their fortune. Many areas were newly settled and there were few institutions that could effectively restrain such lawlessness. It ended around 1900, when the frontier had more or less disappeared and the forces of order had taken control.

I've been reading this Marvel Comics series called Annihilation - it's a story that involves intergalactic empires, creatures that want to destroy the universe, unimaginable energies, etc. A far cry from Spiderman and the Green Goblin and similar human-scale conflicts.

It made me think about how a lot of science fiction suffers from a sort of power-level inflation in longer stories. Some examples - the Uplift Saga by David Brin - 6 books, starting with Sundiver, where the big deal is a ship that can travel to the inside of the sun, that finds relatively plausible creatures living inside, and ending with Heaven's Reach, which includes creatures living in "quantum foam" and the mimetic realm.

Or E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series - if I remember correctly (which is never a safe assumption) the books start with a character tinkering with his sewing machine and watching it fly out the window at extremely high speed (having just invented FTL travel or something like that) and ending with people throwing stars at each other using the power of their minds. Or am I mixing in elements of Pel Torro's "Galaxy 666"? Anyway, at the end of the Lensman books I know somebody was using mental powers to do something with stars.

Other examples include the Dune books, Riverworld, Dragon Ball, and lots of others. The point is that every entry in the series has to top the previous one in terms of scope and power of characters.

This doesn't seem to happen in other genres where series are the rule. As Agatha Christie's books go on, Miss Marple doesn't go from solving a murder in her small village to foiling international villains, 007-style. The Sopranos didn't go from controlling Northern New Jersey to taking over South American countries and building nuclear arsenals. Even Scooby Doo didn't move up to fighting galactic infestations of zombies, Peter Hamilton-style.

I wonder if this is because Sci Fi isn't constrained by what actually is plausible, but rather what could be, with the restriction that it not obviously violate known laws of science. Or maybe because Sci Fi readers and writers are optimistic by nature about the possible limits of human power and ingenuity? Or because science in general is about advancement and progress, while other genres are primarily concerned with human nature, which as we know doesn't change.

A while ago I went around the house with a Kill-a-Watt electricity meter, trying to figure out what was using up the most power. It's a nice gadget - you just plug it into the wall, and then plug your appliance into it. You can get instantaneous wattage and also average power over time. (One disadvantage is that it's a pain to plug it into tight spots - it helps to use an extension cord to connect it to the wall. Also it's not as nice as the "clamp" type amp meters you can just place around an already-plugged in cord, but it's cheaper.

Anyway, we use around 30 kWh a day. That's kind of high and it's not clear to me where the power hogs are. Here are a few measurements I took.

Dell Dimension E510	All on	180 W
	Monitor off	140 W
	Standby mode	17 W
Mac PowerPC Mini	All on	100 W
	Monitor off	50 W
Older Gateway PC	All on	150 W
	Monitor off	80 W
Older linux box	CPU only	150 W
Low-voltage lighting	Backyard	56 W
	Front stairs	11 W
Microwave oven	Full power	150
Kenmore fridge	1-day avg	50 W
TV, etc	All off	38 W
	TV	100 W
	TiVo	40 W
	VCR	40 W
	CD + stereo	30 W

The things I haven't measured yet are the lights and the hot tub (heat is gas, so it's only the pump and the ionizer). Still, I don't see how it's going to add up to what we're actually using. Needs more research.

BTW, blogger.com needs to improve the way it deals with table formatting. The html for that table has to be all on 1 line, otherwise lots of BR's get inserted and mess things up.

I just got a copy of "The Eternals" by Neil Gaiman and John Romita. The premise is that we humans share the Earth with two other groups - the Eternals, who have names like Ikarus and Thena (i.e. Icarus and Athena) and are the basis for the gods of legend, and the Deviants, who are the basis for our devil myths. They (and humans) were created by giant inscrutable aliens called the Celestials, who may be coming back soon, with unknown consequences.

The original comic book series was written and drawn by Jack Kirby, and he had a very modernistic style - his creatures and machines were all drawn with clean lines, and his stories had drama but not a lot of moral ambiguity. They were like the fiction of Asimov and E. E. "Doc" Smith - they had this post-war optimism about the future and the promise of technology.

Neil Gaiman is much more post-modern and complex, and Romita's art is a bit less comic-booky then that of Kirby. I haven't finished it yet, but so far the story is somewhat different and (I think) harder to follow.

The Eternals would make a great movie... That is, if they don't mess up the screenplay like the first Fantastic Four movie.

Okay, now I really am going to start posting to my blog. Ideally I'd be writing a novel and making a resolution to write a chapter a week, but I think I'll start small. Here's the challenge - think of something every day that other people would actually be interested in reading.

Here's a fun game that I read about somewhere... Go to Wikipedia and hit "Random article". Keep hitting it until you get to an article that you recognize (i.e. not an obscure Welsh train station or Slovenian member of parliament). Then hit "Random article" again. Your challenge: get back to the previous article by clicking on links in each page. Using features like "What links here" or searching within a page isn't allowed, and to make it more of a challenge you can exclude "list" pages too.

For example, you can get from "Taplan, South Australia" to "Balloon swallower" via South Australia -> Convictism in Australia -> Prison -> Crime -> Smuggling.

Hours of excitement.

First post. I guess I should try to put some stuff here.