J.J. Cale and Eric Clapton

Interview article found here.  Bonus: YouTube clip of them playing After Midnight, live.  Scroll down to the bottom.  Just freekin' amazing.

Ever want to tour Chernobyl?

Well, here's the next best thing: http://www.kiddofspeed.com/, a picture journal from a crazy Ukrainian biker chick who blasts in, takes snapshots – carefully! – and gets the hell out before she spends too long and gets cooked.  It's not that hot there.  At least, for a day of photographs and nuclear tourism, it's pretty safe.  A quick run through the radiation numbers she discusses indicates that a partial day is safe enough, a week would be noticeable but manageable, but a month starts getting into serious doo-doo.  Out around three months' stay and the doo-doo gets even deeper, six feet deep to be precise.
Weird place, reminds me of the worst parts of Katrinaland.  Except that people can live in Kartinaland without dying from it.  At least not directly.
Hat tip to The Atomic Nerds for posting this recently and reminding me of it.  I'd seen the site a long time back, but had dropped it somewhere in my mental slushpile.

Earth Day preparations in New York

*facepalm*

I... I just can't add anything here.

Such Hate

This guy Scott Merrill is just eaten up with it in this article.  
*CAUTION* graphic images of violence, including kicking and baseball bats.

Monetary Conundrum for the Week

Ever since I figured out that money was something deeper than the paper dollars Mrs. Moran paid me to mow her lawn back in Jr. High, I've thought that our central banking "logical money" system was pretty weird, even if it does sort of work.  Now some people are playing with quantum money schemes.


My first thoughts were "Oh great.  Now I won't know if I'm broke until I actually look in my wallet.  Uh, bartender, I'll catch that tab next week."  Or maybe pickpockets in the future would do their work by rubbing empty wallets against targets' back pockets or purses and letting the cash tunnel through.  Or something strange like that.


No, nothing so cool.  It's just mathemagicians playing around with quantum encryption schemes for the secure transfer of digital cash.  Still, pretty damn cool.

Entropy, Housework, and harnessing the Forces of Disorder to clean under the fridge

Got that lesson on entropy from yesterday?  Well, go re-read it because the test is next cleaning day.

Now let’s talk about dirt, disorder, and entropy.  I don’t know about you, but my household has a good working relationship with the Forces of Disorder (FoD).  A strong relationship.  A frequently disgusting relationship.  Now here’s the cool part: you can harness those forces to help keep your house clean!  Yeah, no kiddin’.  Listen up.

So let’s define the “temperature” of a patch of floor as the amount of dirt per unit area (square foot, square inch, square meter, doesn’t matter), and dirt is kind of like heat energy.  So a dirty patch of floor will have a higher dirt density – or “temperature” – than a clean patch of floor.  Now suppose the whole kitchen floor is dirty, but you don’t want to move appliances around to sweep under them.  So just sweep whatever’s easy, whatever you can get to, and harness the FoD to take care of the rest.  How?  Well, say that random wind and scuttling rats will redistribute whatever dirt is on the floor until it’s pretty much random, i.e., sort of even.  So you’ve swept the middle of the floor, but not under the fridge.  The entropy equation for any further random motion will look like:

dS = dH/T(clean floor) - dH/T(under the fridge)

Under the fridge is “hotter” – that is, it has a higher dust bunny density.  So for the disorder to increase (and we KNOW that is going to happen, given all those random breezes and scurrying rats), dirt will have to move out from under the fridge onto the clean floor.  Where it is easily swept up, with no appliance moving required.  Viola.  You’ve just harnessed disorder to help you keep house.

You may have heard the old saying “a clean house stays clean.”  Well, there may be a psychological aspect to that (aka broken window theory), but the real truth of the matter is that it’s just thermodynamics (dirtodynamics?) at work to increase disorder.

Next time: Doing your laundry like a supercomputer.

Bethel Trails Tato-Nut Ride

And it was a fun day in the woods.  More pictures can be found here.