Thanks for the feedback so here are some of the improvements "explanation" is replaced with "the explanation for this answer goes as follows" I've looked at the silence before the explanation, considered code to clean it up and audacity code, for the moment I think its down to my skill settling in so we will see how this goes. I will see how this build goes as some of my code proofing directories means they are not straight forward to clean out so let's see now the silence fix should come through, bit of a head scratcher here
Wow I have to put in the code to send html5 carriage returns, its brutal. I have so nearly got to the directory cleaning. It is real cat and mouse with Windows 10. It is kind of sad when I hear people say that that is a Windows 10 screensaver view.
This is the first synthetic quiz in which I have really no known software bugs to look out for. The first couple of questions were recorded with the computer microphone and thus will sound a bit echoy. The topic of Electron Configuration itself is one at the fulcrum of the transition from classical to quantum education. I have had to make some calls on convention like the use of the terminology. It is probably best to back this up with a video Future steps is setting up archive and reedit facilities, I think that will take on order 14 days, while a week to setup conversion to Apps. Thanks for listening... it is still early days for this technology.
Well still fighting me and found a few high level mistakes and low level ones two... but the future for this looks bright.
Another podcast while driving. This means the quality is not that high. I apologize.
Now the main trust of development is to support my rehab, and thus the quiz format. Making the quiz means you have to make a call and condense the vague ideas out there that are never quite addressed if you are at sea diplomatically with teachers. They have really incomplete knowledge and it doesn't smoothly link with further study. The question asked is what they are teaching 80 % right, and from some angles yes it is from others no it is not. The problem is catching them before they have taught the lessons for a number of years and set test questions that reinforce the errors. It really sets up and echo chamber of errors.
I also look at the meager progress on simple experiments that dumbfound the mind.
I am really surprised by the positive impact of doing boxing and exercises while balancing on a balance board.
I can see from the extended podcast while driving time that indeed going a non freeway route back to Penrith is a very slow affair.
Having chatted with folk in the post op wards, I have come to the opinion is that may be we are witnessing a bystander effect, except in this example the victim is failing to help themselves. It is one of those funny observations that seem so absurd that you instantly discount them then you say "Wow, that mad thing is actually true"
Please google the bystander effect, but in a nut shell two actors, one in homeless clothes and one in business clothes collapse in the street on different occasions. The first is attended to in 14 seconds while the other it takes over an hour.
This shorter Podcast looks at CERN and what comes next. The Higgs is the only thing it has found at 125 GeV which is less than 1% of its total 13000 GeV smashing energy. I think if we don't mix tera and Giga things are a lot more clear. Looking at it this way it seems way to early to break out the cheque book and build a bigger beast. To make an analogy it is like having a Formula One car you have driven down to the shops and you park it back in the paddock after a week as you want to build something much faster.
I am amazed to the point of feeling uncomfortable about the number of things I thought would never happen in my life time but are now so routine that people don't know what the fuss is. I think the Earth's magnetic field is just to weird to hold in my brain, and I think we are several steps away from handling dark matter. I like to call it cosmic Jello as if the galaxies are held in shape by jelly. I think CERN finding dark matter would be an insult to my version of reality, so insult me.
The Higgs is a boson as it has spin zero ie it is not playing in angular momentum space. We are in the Higgs field which has a broken Mexican hat symmetry, and particles have a hypercharge that interacts with the field. The particle, which there is always the virtual ones had been coaxed into reality so we can have a look at it. I will have to go in a reboot my understanding of this.
I find the symmetry violation CERN has found really interesting and I will have to check whether this discovery has stuck arround.
This is a practical tour of Chlorine from a Quantum mechanical perspective and move beyond the bounds of school science explaining how chlorine can pick up an electron or lose seven.
Seems pretty stable, I have added more synthetic audio around the post explanation recap.
As I get feed back about specific explanations I will have to build a quiz library at this end so I can index and change items and reorder and add questions. I have also taken on board comments about this being a learning tool and not just a testing tool.
I find the feedback that older and disenfranchised learner like this format very instructive.
This is a practical tour of Chlorine from a Quantum mechanical perspective and move beyond the bounds of school science explaining how chlorine can pick up an electron or lose seven.
Well the malware is gone so things are running so smoothly, No compile errors or missing components reported. There may be a problem of not clearing the intermediate directory, but I will have to gradually check that. The sound recording is improving. I am getting some of the old skill back where the solution to problems just kind of announce themselves and I don't have to nut them out.
I think the value of Quantum Mechanics is just much more naturally obvious when you look at problems that people teaching classical physics and chemistry move you on... move along now, nothing to see here.
Well I am pleased to report that I finally nabbed some malware and my computer is singing along.
There are a series of article here the School space camera on the international space station is a pretty amazing out reach by NASA. What got me is how close the clouds are to earth and basically how unbelievably thin the atmosphere and biosphere is. Another thing that came to mind was linking this with earlier cube sat article that has really opened up space science but was aimed at being something achievable in an undergraduate semester. Both examples of education really interacting with science.
The story on the bird dinosaur that experimented about becoming a bat seems to have so many threads and require fairly careful reading to unpick them. China has all the rare earths and is also blessed with super geology to preserve fossils on a scale the world is yet to really come to grips with. I feel there are two human stories here, one that gets told of the evolving science and scientist and this is a conflict with the farmer turned fossil fossicer that track into key sites. There is also the private collectors. It really does my head in. I really don't think we are being smart enough here: There are two paradigms here of ownership and access. Ownership is a social construct, while access is a science idea. I think you could get the idea of ethical collectors that cooperate with scientists and support communities and education. I think untrained amateurs no doubt are doing damage as was seen in this one fossil, however we don't have a handle on the impact of this damage.
The malaria article when in on the 4WD angle and missed unpacking the seven year old who was diagnosed in seconds as having malaria. I think this article needed work with maps, and tables to sort out the 4 types. There is a lot to store in your head about which ones kill, which ones are in PNG, which ones are recurrent. I would also like a time line of sorts and some random facts that has more entry points into the article. There is also the human interest element here of a scientist growing a family, and having two kids in the area. I just feel this is a dimension that allows us to relate our world of PNG which if you get past conceit has a highly insightful deconstruction of what we hold dear to our own western society.
Again the main idea of this write up is to test my recall...
There was an interesting article listing 4 extremophiles. The high temperature tolerant bacteria from the thermal springs of Yellowstone National Park, where used for laboratory DNA amplification which is the cornerstone of our current gene technology. The freezing frog was just a treat, and can freeze for 7 months and reanimate, and further go through a shadow period of nightly freezing was fascinating. I see the connection with freezing transplant organs, but it seems hard to genetically engineer. The water bear are the poster child of mad extremophiles. They have just the most evil looking mouths. Then there was the radiation resistant bacteria, the secret here is their ability to make anti-oxidants.
Dr Normans Swan article was masterful. I like how the information about diagnosis is placed into the situation of a doctor diagnosing the disease. I also really like the A,B,C W and Y strains of the specific variants as at this point your interest is up so you are ready to load it all in short term memory.
The article about the Scientists against Trump, was rather a sad affair be cause Trump has largely won. It really shows the contempt for logic as the oxygen of reason has been sucked out of society.
The article on white dwarfs by Prof Duffy was pure mastery as far as I was concerned. I feel this guy had a list of points to make and crafted the sentences to nail them. I was so impressed. My reflection on this topic is that we are living in a cultural universe, Star Wars etc where there is only sun like stars, and if you talk about anything variant, people become very wary. I think saying that the white dwarfs are diamonds really is an analogy to far away in so many ways.
The article about nanopore technology to electrically read DNA is breath taking. 10,000 base pairs per second, on a single strand no splicing and supercomputers to reinterpret the data is just astounding.
These are crazy facts about our neighborhood the Solar System. I am still wowed by the idea of a huge ballerina skirt whirling though the solar system. For me it has been a quite time tracking down papers and working through equations and then suddenly it hits you what is actually happening. Its far grander than I have ever been told.
I am gearing up, doing periodic tests of the synthetic lesson software and I have yet to bed down the production process. At the end of the day I have to produce a few quizzes a week with no bother. We are no where near that. I will now add funky end music to the car quiz. It is all uploading now, its a bit creepy that everything is doing what it should with and almost insanely low level of bugs.
This time I think/ hope all the systems are nicely lined up. Still not all the directories clear as I work and compose from audacity first. I will clean that up soon. The last quiz was two questions and that generated an array of error or bugs that was quickly tracked down. Now composition directly into the computer and tagging as you go reduces the time significantly. It is taking me about an hour to pump out the quiz, but fingers cross the automation should produce synthetic lessons. I will ask all those kid people for critical feedback. I am touched that people who have gone through schooling and not liked the way science was taught like this format. Indeed it is a point of wonder to me that we provide so much resources behind incomplete and confusing explanation. For me the issue is not that there are no short cuts, but rather people often take short cuts in deep understanding and then are not really in a position to judge the impact on the learner when genuine understanding is not backing up the teaching.
It is not much to recount in a podcast but the picture of the disintegrating Larsen A,B and C ice shelves has on one level a lot of detail but on the other a simple message of an unfolding catastrophe for Earth.
The finding of PCB and dioxin in the crustaceans in the ocean's deepest trenches really is a sign of how bad things could have got if the scientists didn't ring the alarm bells.
It was good getting the details of the seven planets orbiting Trappest star. I found out that they are named after the telescope system. I do thing the instability of dwarf stars and the really long time scales here it is on the cards that these are thoroughly dead worlds. The number 69 light years away comes to mind.
The testes shrinking effect of the Zika virus might not be of a concern as this was only for mice studies.
The article about the evolution of the horse after speciation really shows how strong a hold simple textbook content can lock in a sequence of understanding. This links with the investigation of fossil whale ears that showed they were hearing deep notes well before their size increased.
The story on new man made gems and minerals did let slip the number of natural minerals at 5000 and 207 man made.
This is a real exercise for me in memory and I don't feel I have performed all that well. I do think Cosmos is a rung above New Scientist as the articles are derived from publications in the journals and are less speculative with traps for the unwary.
There is the first go to definition that "Mass is the amount of Matter in an object". I look at this for a while and it really does not say that much and at the end of the day puts a damper on curiosity.
I then look at the Mass as procedure and expand following a developing understanding from early school to the last years of an undergraduate degree. There are four procedural angles in to understanding mass. This is Gravitational, Inertial, Essence and Quantum. The last has come into favor with a definition of the kilogram based on Planck's constant.
Just as I was coming to terms with the more complex nuances of a socially defined concept outside our grasp, the Higgs boson is discovered. A deeper understanding is slowly emerging. With out meaning to be condescending I think we are in a pretty poor shape in our understanding of the concepts that lead to comprehending the Higgs field.
I think I have a humble insight into our non-understanding mass, by going back to the birth of the idea by Giles of Rome. Reducing what he says I think he means Mass is the answer to problems we know need solution, but we don't fully grasp the problem or solution yet.
The last word where readers help other readers was of reduced interest to me as I already knew how car keys work. They work on listening for the next hundred of so numbers in a pseudo random number sequence. I know about pseudo random numbers operating on an algorithm based on Mercen prime numbers and repeat exactly ever cycle which can be very large. So there is the prime and the key and the algorithm, which allow encrypted communication.
I found the AI art showing the struggle against face recognition to be a bit contrived to be honest. It some how would make me feel excluded and I although I do see that our perception of humanness is complex, the relation with AI seems to be giving the concept greater import than it really has. I also feel the art installation about fake news generation by AI a bit deflating to read about. I think the issue here is that society operates on a tissue of folly and deception already and the sinister intrusion of sophisticated players like foreign states in domestic affairs seem to be just rousing us from a semi consciousness where people had become to addicted to thought by association. I did search Francis Bacon's roll in this and it is not the famous scientist but a much more modern famous portrait artist. My memory failed me on searching for a Greek word with similar spelling to Eulabeia, however this is fascinating to read about anyhow.
The article on fast and slow thinking styles I think really got down to the vast confusion people have about an mechanistic theory and a descriptive law of framework. I honestly think there should be corporate reflection to pick apart who is shoving instinctive stream of consciousness direction flood by inaccessible subconscious reflexes. The field of bias and our bias about bias is key to untangling our current distopia.
These tiny earth-size stars are compressed on the brink of becoming a black hole.
Compressing a star is no easy feat. In space no one can hear you scream, but there is another thing there is nothing to push against. This is because space has nothing in it. However there are many interesting flavours of space being nothing but that is a story and a universe of imagination a blog post far far away. So with nothing to push against, you have to bring your own wall or other words rocket fuel. When you follow the black board maths you have to rocket out a lot of material like well over half to get the smaller fraction in the final white dwarf. Imagine if you will a helpful grocery assistant offering to help fill your boot up with veggies, and coming with over ten trolley loads and he (or she or it if it is a crazed robo- grocery assistant) then proceeds to pack by chucking most outside the boot. In space this packing is seen as a huge plume, cloud, or to use the latin nebulae.
Now if you have ever stuffed anything you will know that you have to have a container, jar, cupboard, sleeping bag cover, underpants draw or any bag that you mum noted "It's not going to fit in that". Now just a note for our non-Australian readers, and there are a few and they have a right to be non-Australian, its not their fault, stuffed is a special word in Australia. "Honey, I stuffed the dish washer" would translate loosely as "Oh esteemed loved one of even temper and just disposition, I (the same in most languages dialects) have rendered a vital piece of equipment central to our happiness not functional". Another example, though I have warned you and claiming "I read it in a blog" is not going to help you get out of a head lock, another example is saying to an Aussie policemen "Get stuffed".
So not so much how do I stuff a star, and by the way white dwarfs are stuffed stars they aren't doing that merry little E=mc2 after a few billion year shining look at me, I am star. They are stuffed. It is not so much the stuffing, but how do they remain stuffed. When I use the word "remain" I am using this word at industrial strength. Remained in this context is until the death of the universe. White dwarfs who got in early in the first years of the universe are still out their dimming away, now only a few thousand degrees, not making energy, not cooling down like the good old days and it 13.8 billion year o'clock. So what is this stuffing bag in which we stuff stars so they are completely stuffed? Well, if you rewind this blog to the word "blackboard" and use the latest blog enhancement software you will probably make out the Gravitation formula, written in the corner. The rest of us will just fake it and say we saw it at the time. What is really interesting about this formula is not the big M which is the stars mass, but the sneaky little r hiding below the line up to its old reciprocal tricks. Never trust a formula. And what would you expect it wearing a 2, meaning its inverse square. So it has a trick, when you make it smaller it is way bigger. Let's think about this, particularly as I am getting typing practice. 1/1 is a lot bigger that 1/ 100 ^ 2, 1 it 10,000 times bigger that 1/10,000.
However 'one on a hundredth squared' is 10,000. That means taking the Earth as an easy to visualize example, if we were to stuff our planet from a radius of 6100 km down to 61 km two things would happen. The gravitational field strength would be 10 000 times larger. This means schools on tiny stuffed earth would have to use 9800 m s-2 in their calculations and in the problem of the teacher being thrown out the second story window, the teacher in stead of hitting the ground in 1 sec would hit the ground in a hundredth of a second, we inside the reaction time of any student timing the event. Yes the teacher would also hit the ground not at 9.8 ms-1 but at 980 ms-1 and yes you could do a speed of sound experiment. The second thing to consider is that the material in your stuffed star is going to be rather compressed. This state of affairs is blithely called
'gravitational collapse'.
So white dwarfs are epic all time fails and fascinating to get into the last days saga covered in the Podcast. What I fascinates me is that they are zombie undead stars way out in space, staggering distance from us. This contrast with the number of souls ever so close to us that live their lives never pondering matter under lock down.
