Failing To See You're Freezing To Death

“Are you drunk?”

“No.”

“You swore to me there was no more booze down there!”

“I’m not fucking drunk!” shouted Gerry miserably. “I had grease on my glasses and I started running them under hot water and one of the lenses cracked because it’s minus fucking thirty. I can’t see shit.”

“Oh. Sorry.” The Berg glinted in the sunshine. “I thought you ate all the grease. And hot water?”

“Not edible grease. Grease grease. For the engine.”

“Hmmm.” The Berg drifted away from the boat a little as if to get a better look at Gerry; wavelets sploshed energetically against the hull. “Your head doesn’t look oversized.”

“My head’s not oversized! What’s that got to do with it? You’re really being very irritating today.”

“Sorry. Something’s too big though, more likely your eye than your actual head. That’s why you can’t see. Your eye focuses light on a point in front of your retina. If your eye was smaller you wouldn’t have a problem.”

Gerry kicked a bulkhead. “Well I do have a problem! I’m starving to death and freezing to death. I spend my days talking to a fucking iceberg. And now I can’t see!”

The Berg trickled sulkily. “Well, if that’s the way you feel… we don’t have to talk. I suppose it means nothing that I could help you get a new prescription.”

“A new prescription?”

“That’s the spirit!” said the Berg, butting against the boat and sending a clatter of shards on to the deck. “Have you got a ruler?”

“Uhh… I’ll see if I can find one.”

Gerry returned twenty minutes later to find the sun had gone in and the Berg floating in a stew of sea ice that had seemingly appeared from nowhere. The temperature had dropped alarmingly.

“Got it? Great. Now measure the distance between your eyeball and the lens you have left in your glasses. Actually don’t! It’s pretty nippy out here. Don’t want the ruler stuck to your eyeball. It’s probably a centimetre. We’ll say a centimetre.”

“OK. Where did you learn all this anyway?”

“I’m made out of ice. I’m reflecting, refracting, all that stuff. Optometry’s easy. Now. Which lens is broken? Left? So hold the ruler up to your cheek and close your right eye. Look along the ruler and move your finger towards you till you can focus on it. How far away’s that?”

“About ten inches.”

“Metric, man! We’re not barbarians.”

“Sorry. Maybe 25cm.”

“Wow, you are blind. OK. 25cm is your farpoint. That’s the point your left eye focusses at when it’s resting. If you weren’t myopic that’d be infinity.”

“Infinity?”

“Technically, yes. The moon, the stars, they’d be in focus.”

“Oh.”

“OK. So you need a diverging lens, one that’s concave on both sides. That’s more bad news actually.”

“More?”

“If you ever need to start a fire in the wilderness you have the wrong type of lens. It won’t focus the sun’s rays to a point.”

“That’s OK. When I get too weak to move I’ve still got a few matches and a cup of diesel put aside. I’m going to set the boat on fire and be warm again before I die.”

The Berg groaned and cracked. A tern that had been perched out of sight on its far side flew off across the water with a mournful cry.

“That’s the spirit! Getting your sense of humour back – that’s good, just let me know before you torch the thing so I can drift off a bit.”

Gerry smiled. He didn’t want to admit it but the Berg’s high spirits were making him forget the sense of hopelessness that had descended on him ever since the lens had cracked in his numb fingers.

“So your diverging lens will make things appear to be at your farpoint. It’ll move things all the way from infinity to 25cm from your face. Neat, hey?  We just need to figure out the focal length for your lenses. That’s just your farpoint in metres, so 0.25, minus the distance of your lens from your eye, call it one, so let’s say 0.24. You bang a negative in front of that and there’s your focal length! Negative 0.24.”

“I thought prescriptions were in whatsits… dioptres.”

“No problem at all. Dioptres are just a bullshit measurement that optometrists like to use. They’re just one divided by the focal length. So… one divided by -0.24 equals... -4.16.”

“Nice mental arithmetic.”

“Thank you. Now optometrists like the steps to be in 0.25 increments, so your prescription, Gerry, for your broken lens, is… -4.25!”

“Wait I thought you were getting me new glasses?”

“Pay attention. I said prescription. Where am I going to get new glasses? I’m an iceberg. The North Pole is just there over the horizon.”

Solar Mathletics

A 1.5kW solar photovoltaic system in Melbourne is supposed to generate an average of 5.4kWh/day. Does it?

My 1.5kW solar PV system has, as of today, generated 4079kWh of electricity during the 9039 hours it’s been in operation. That’s 4MWh!

I’m a little stupid, so I used this table to figure out that the average day length in Melbourne is 12.10785 hours. Then I realised the average day length anywhere on the planet will be the same over a whole year – that is, 12 hours. That either means the table, Melbourne, or celestial mechanics are wrong. Possibly all three.

So, the 9039 hours my PV system has been operating is equivalent to 753.25 days.

If an average 1.5kW PV system is supposed to generate 5.4kWh/day then mine should have generated 4067.55kWh.

Only 11.45kWh off. That’s probably due to the strange error in the solar system, and/or Melbourne’s place in it, identified earlier.

How Long Till I Get Some Fucking Marmite?

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock I’ll summarise the situation:

February 22, 2011: the Christchurch Earthquake kills 185 people and destroys large areas of the city – the damage compounded by aftershocks in the coming months.

November 2011: Sanitarium shuts down production of Marmite at its Christchurch factory… the only source of Marmite in the entire world.

March 16, 2012: I buy one of the last remaining jars of Marmite from New Zealand eBay before Marmageddon.

February 18, 2013: I run out of Marmite

March 20, 2013 – Marmite production starts up again

Today, 3 and a half months later, there’s still no Marmite on supermarket shelves. Sanitarium have indicated they wish to stock the product in New Zealand before beginning export. Horrifyingly, I watched this video where, behind the cheesy comedy, you can see the new plant in action. It seems to produce a 250g jar of Marmite every 2 seconds, or 30 per hour. From this we can start to see the true scale of the problem:

Population of New Zealand: 4,468,200

Weeks that plant has been in operation: call it 16

Worst case scenario - plant operates an hour a day on weekdays: 1 jar of Marmite for every 31 New Zealanders.

Best case scenario – plant operates 24 hours a day, 7 days week: at least 1 jar for every New Zealander

Probable scenario – plant operates for 8 hours per day on weekdays: another 46 weeks until every New Zealander has a jar and they can start exporting some to Australia.

Forty-six weeks! And this assumes that the filthy Kiwis are spreading the stuff abstemiously! What if they’re eating it by the spoonful? Slathering it all over their obnoxious, sweaty selves and then licking it off one another with craven delight? If this is the case there might never be enough to satiate their greed.

The solution? I propose we send the Australian Navy to annex Christchurch and divert all the Marmite that is being produced to Australia. Plausibly we could also send raiding parties into the surrounding countryside to secure even more of the delicious spread. If nothing else, now that Afghanistan is a peaceful democracy, it will give our armed forces something to do (other than demeaning homosexuals in between bouts of sodomy/hazing-the-new-guy).

I believe we have no other option.

Life in the Old Dog Yet

Humanity V. Horses

In other startling news surrounding the Melbourne Cup, it seems that the time for the horses to run the 3200m race is getting steadily less. By juxtaposing the unrelated, but similarly timed, Men's World 1500m record, we can see that:

a) by 2020 it will take less time for the World's fastest man to run 1500m than it will for a horse to win the Melbourne Cup

b) somewhere around the year 3000 we will all be able to run faster than a horse

c) in the distant future all races will be run instantaneously, bending both time and space into dangerous knots that may adversely effect race-goers.

Toiling in the Satanic Mills

The clever quote doing the rounds at present was posted on MetaFilter by blue_beetle on August 26, 2010:

“If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.”

What blue_beetle does so nicely with this elegantly worded statement is make you think about your place in the digital economy. I want to think about that, but specifically about myself as a cog in the two largest machines in town – Google and Facebook.

Examining Facebook in economic terms is difficult, as it’s still a private company and so therefore can keep its finances to itself. It does like to boast though, so we know in 2010 it had advertising revenues of $1.86 billion, and about 500 million active users. Divide one by the other and you can see that a single one of the products made by Facebook (e.g. me) provide them with an annual revenue of $3.72 – maybe time for Zuckerberg to crack the fucking whip?

Google’s a bit easier in some respects because as a public company it has to produce an annual report for shareholders. From this we can see it had revenues in 2010 of $29.321 billion, but expenses incurred in obtaining that revenue of $18.94 billion, so a net revenue of $10.381 billion. Of course Google is a more diverse company than Facebook, so these revenues are from more than just advertising. Still, without products such as yours truly running Chrome as their browser and deriding Bing at any opportunity, Google wouldn’t exist at all. So let’s be generous and divide things up equally - 85% of the world’s 2 billion internet users use Google, so each is responsible for one one-hundred and seventy millionth of the revenue. This works out at $6.11 per person.

Looking at the quote again we can see we’re not really a product - that just sounds cool. Google couldn’t sell us, because who’d buy? As always, we’re human capital, toiling away not only for our own boss, but also for Zuckerberg and the worthy shareholders at Google. We make them money (nearly $10 a year) and in return we can look up stuff, have somewhere to put this blog; have somewhere to organise a party, then show pictures from it. I’m not a product, I’m a sharecropper.

8 Anecdotes about John von Neumann

The following problem can be solved the easy way or the hard way:
"Two trains 200 miles apart are moving toward each other; each one is going at a speed of 50 miles per hour. A fly starting on the front of one of the trains flies back and forth between them at a rate of 75 miles per hour. It does this until the trains collide and crush the fly to death. What is the total distance the fly has flown?"
In a strict mathematical sense the fly actually hits each train an infinite number of times before it gets crushed, and one could solve the problem the hard way with pencil and paper by summing an infinite series of distances. This is they way that most trained mathematicians will solve the problem. Conversely a mathematical novice will most likely solve the problem the easy way - since the trains are 200 miles apart
and each train is going 50 miles an hour, it takes 2 hours for the trains to collide, therefore the fly was flying for two hours, at a rate of 75 miles per hour, and so the fly must have flown 150 miles. Easy.
When this problem was posed to John von Neumann, he immediately replied, "150 miles."
"Ah, I see you've heard this one before, Professor von Neumann. Nearly everyone tries to sum the infinite series."
"What do you mean?" asked von Neumann. "That's how I did it!"

An MIT student cornered the famous professor in a hallway:
Student: "Er, excuse me, Professor von Neumann, could you please help me with a calculus problem?"
John von Neumann: "Okay, sonny, if it's real quick -- I'm a busy man."
S: "I'm having trouble with this integral."
JvN: "Let's have a look." (a brief pause) "Alright, sonny, the answer's two-pi over 5."
S: "I know that, sir, the answer's in the back - I'm having trouble deriving it, though."
JvN: "Okay, let me see it again." (another pause) "Yep, the answer's two-pi over 5."
S (frustrated): "Uh, sir, I know the answer, I just don't see how to derive it."
JvN: "Whaddya want, sonny, I worked it out in two different ways!"

"Johnny was the only student I was ever afraid of," the mathematician George Pólya once recalled. "If in the course of a lecture I stated an unsolved problem, the chances were he'd come to me as soon as the lecture was over, with the complete solution in a few scribbles on a slip of paper."

Von Neumann was the subject of many dotty professor stories. He supposedly had the habit of simply writing answers to homework assignments on the board (the method of solution being, of course, obvious). One time one of his students tried to get more helpful information by asking if there was another way to solve the problem. Von Neumann looked blank for a moment, thought, and then answered, "Yes".

In the 1950s, von Neumann was employed as a consultant to IBM to review proposed and ongoing dvanced technology projects. One day a week, von Neumann "held court" at 590 Madison Avenue, New York. On one of these occasions in 1954 he was confronted with the FORTRAN concept (the first 'high level' computer programming language); its developer, John Backus, remembered von Neumann being unimpressed and that he asked "why would you want more than machine language?"

"The spectacular thing about Johnny was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce an answer." - Paul Halmos, Mathematician.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, John von Neumann was strictly logical in his thinking. One afternoon his assistant, Paul Halmos, dropped von Neumann off at home. "Since there was to be a party there later, and since I didn't trust myself to remember exactly how I got there," Halmos recalled, "I asked how I'd be able to know his house when I came again. 'That's easy,' he said. 'It's the one with that pigeon sitting by the curb.'"

Henry Ford had ordered a dynamo for one of his plants. The dynamo didn't work, and not even the manufacturers could figure out why. A Ford employee told his boss that von Neumann was "the smartest man in America," so Ford called von Neumann and asked him to come out and take a look at the dynamo.
Von Neumann came, looked at the schematics, walked around the dynamo, then took out a pencil. He marked a line on the outside casing and said, "If you'll go in and cut the coil here, the dynamo will work fine."
They cut the coil, and the dynamo did work fine. Ford then told von Neumann to send him a bill for the work. Von Neumann sent Ford a bill for $5,000. Ford was astounded - $5,000 was a lot in the 1950s - and
asked von Neumann for an itemised account. Here's what he submitted:
Drawing a line with the pencil: $ 1
Knowing where to draw the line with the pencil: $4,999
Ford paid the bill.

How Loud is the Sun?

Unsurprisingly, being a closet geek, I love browsing through New Scientist magazine. Months and months ago now I submitted a question to a regular feature they run on the back page called “The Last Word” where readers can ask odd questions and other readers (usually scientists who are experts in the particular field to which the question relates) can answer them.
My question was along the lines of: “If the space between the Earth and the Sun was filled with air – but a hypothetical air whose only physical property was to transmit sound – then could we hear the sound of the Sun, and how loud would this be?” I had a wonderful vision in mind of the Sun peeking over the horizon every morning with a sound like some giant, yet distant, bowl of Rice Bubbles.
Well, for some months there I wasn’t keeping abreast of the latest issue of New Scientist. Then, about two months ago, I was wallowing in the air-conditioning at the Richmond Public Library, flicking through some of the issues I’d missed, when I discovered they’d published my question! Not only that, the issue I had in my hand wasn’t the one with the question, it was the later one where people have written in with answers! I was one excited little motherfucker.
But my glee was short-lived! Reading further, I discovered that to save space the editors had cut my question a little, knocking out the caveats about the hypothetical sound-carrying substance having no other physical properties. As a result a tidal wave of outraged geeks had written in attacking my question on its supposed inaccuracy, whining on and on about how the Earth couldn’t orbit the Sun with the drag created by so much air, and how that much air would collapse the solar system, and blah b’blah blah blah. One cunt had the gall to send in something saying, “The question seems to imply some sort of odd, pre-Copernican view of the solar system…” Piss off mate, I know the Sun’s at the centre. Christ.
Fine, I thought, I’ll figure it out myself then. So that’s what I spent a good deal of the weekend doing.
I started off with the idea of finding out how loud a 1-megaton nuclear bomb is, then how many megatons the energy produced by the Sun is equivalent to, then multiplying one by the other to get a decibel level for the Sun. Annoyingly though, I discovered our system for measuring sound is a bit of a bastard. The decibel scale is a logarithmic scale, which makes it very nasty to graph, so scaling the dBs from a 1-megaton nuke up to the dBs produced by the 91,467,495,219 megatons the Sun is equal to was a bit much for the addled remnants of my high school Advanced Vegie maths.
Besides that, explosions are apparently notoriously difficult to determine dBs for. The sound peaks very quickly, then trails off, and at higher dBs the sound becomes a shockwave, which behaves differently altogether.
Luckily, I found that dBs can be converted to watts and vice versa. The sun produces about 3.8e+26 watts every second, or 383 yottawatts (whatta lotta yotawatts… sorry), which, as you would expect, is an absolute pants-load of energy. This translates into 290dB, which is very loud indeed.
But, the Earth is 149,600,000 km away from the Sun. Applying the inverse square law, that tells us how sound intensity decreases with distance, I found the Sun would actually deliver about 125 dB here on the surface of the Earth – hardly a distant bowl of Rice Bubbles. 100dB is a jackhammer at 2 metres, 120 is your ear about a metre away from a train horn, and 130 is physical pain.
And what sound would you constantly hear at this excruciating level? Something like this, but immeasurably deeper: http://soi.stanford.edu/results/thr_modes_1_0_1_2_30s.au

Late night maths

Here’s a sample of the rubbish that occupies my brain at 2:30am, unable to sleep. First some background, in March 2006 I was walking with two friends when a madman jumped out of his car and tried to stab us all. He got one friend in the kidney, the other in his huge, overflowing heart, killing him, and me in the arm, severing three nerves and an artery.
Some amazing surgery managed to reattach all that, but then the nerves have had to grow back, leaving my right arm at first without movement or feeling, and now, coming up to a year later, with pretty coarse movement and feeling (though a lot better than nothing), and a sensation of pins and needles with every touch on my hand. At night though my hand often aches, and that was why I was awake. Normally I take two Panamax before bed, but that night I had decided I didn’t need to, managed to get to sleep, and then woken up because my hand was aching.
“Shit,” I thought. “I’m going to have to take these for the rest of my life.”
Now, the Victorian Government had very kindly already paid me some compensation (a bit under ten grand since I know you’re curious), but I can reapply to have that compensation changed in future, should I say, need expensive treatment that wasn’t at first evident when I made my initial claim. Lying in bed I calculated the following:
-100 Panamax at $6.00
- 6 cents per tablet, 2 tablets per night, 12 cents per day.
- $43.83 per year.
- I live for 50 more years
- $2191.15 to keep me in Panamax from now till death.

But, inflation is 3.3%! So, when I die in 2057, not only will my box of 100 Panamax now be costing me $31, I will have spent a total of $5584.22. Shit.

But, the interest rate for investments is higher than the rate of inflation! So, by awarding me a modest sum now, by investing it at, say a cautious 5%, (all this assumes we’ll still be getting 5% on our investments and inflation is 3.3% in 2057 – highly unlikely if we’re out of oil and we’re still talking about ratifying Kyoto – if that’s the case I suppose I’ll be scrounging my Panamax in some sort of urban wasteland), my future Panamax needs can be catered for by a pretty small outlay.
Just how modest a sum? $487. Shit.

Then again, I would have to invest that and then never touch it for that to work. In reality I would be withdrawing the cost of the Panamax each year. That being the case an initial investment of $1486 would do it.

Pretty bored, or pretty anal? Or perhaps Scottish?