PDQ Bach

Writing a blog full of technicalities can get boring at times, which is why today I would like to share with you all an oddity in the world of fine arts.

While everyone has probably at some time heard the name of J.S. Bach, famous classical composer, almost no one has ever heard of PDQ Bach, a musical jester who makes a living by making classical music that makes fun of other music. Claiming to be the long lost third cousin-of-the-brother-of-the-grandson-of Bach himself (or something like that), he has written pieces like "A sportsmens guide to the 5th Symphony", a piece that gives American football style, "play by play commentary" during the famous 5th symphony "fate", "A piece for a whole lot of winds and brass", the "1712 Overture", which shamelessly butchers the melodies from the 1812 overture and cannons blasts are replaced by slapstick or firecrackers, church bells are replaced by what seems to be brass cups, and the entire symphony takes a huge collective breath in the repetitive sections.

The guys work is all over youtube, just type in PDQ Bach whenever you get a few minutes of time. Heres a video of his satire of the 5th symphony.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzXoVo16pTg&noredirect=1

Orbital Power Grid

Ever since the advent of communications and navigation via satellite, there was always a demand for more and higher quality satellites to service the new systems. Thanks to the large bulk of most commercial satellites and the high cost of launching payload into orbit, currently around 3,000 USD per pound for a small rocket, the satellite industry in general has barely grown since its inception. In an economy plagued by speculation and lack of consumer demand, there are always telecommunications companies, oil and mineral companies, military organizations, and even third-world countries seeking a chance to put their own platform into space, and the industry of making that task easier could be quite a lucrative one indeed.

If we take a closer look at today's satellite systems, every continuously functioning satellite in orbit uses large solar power cells that can sometimes account for up to half of the mass and/or volume of the satellite which they power, if only there was a readily available power source out there in orbit, then future launches will only have to send up the core components absolutely critical to a satellites function, reducing the bulk and weight of the launch payload and making the process a simple matter of designing the most compact and efficient transmitter/receivers, taking the concern of power generation and management off the list of engineering worries.

Although setting up a commercially viable power grid in space seems a daunting task of astronomical proportions, I believe it is quite possible given that the earth acts like a giant magnet in space. Given this fact, our orbital power grid does not even need generators, all it really needs is a large web of conducting cables connected by transformer pylons. Cables of a strong and conductive metal alloy stretched over a long distance and quickly rotating around a magnet that is our earth effectively acts as a huge DC current generator, and the resulting power is then converted and redirected to functioning satellites at key pylon satellites which by their paths of orbit keep the cables taunt.

An advantage of this system is that all an incoming satellite needs to do is to reach very low earth orbit, connect itself to a pylon via cable, and then drag itself along the cable to a higher orbit. With this in mind, not only now would we need to send up less material, we also don't have to send it up as high. These factors working together should make it possible for even small companies to send up their own private communications satellites.

Dream Modeling

Ever wonder how fast the human brain could really operate if used with a higher proficiency? Consciously, we can only use about 20% of our brains processing power, I's sure we've all heard this before, but all it really takes to go beyond that is to dream a little.

When we dream, a level of our subconscious mind uses the knowledge we have to build the dream environment. If I dreamed of a city the cityscape would be constructed of my knowledge of architecture and modern city planning, mixed in with the mood I'm feeling at the moment. If I were dreaming of a forest, the dreamscape would be built based on my knowledge of plants and animals, and the natural cycles of life that I've been taught since middle school.

When the conscious mind makes a decision in a dream, the subconscious moves even faster to predict the outcome. When you step off a ledge, you know that you are going to start falling, when you get chased down by some big animal, you know that its probably not going to end well, and you knowledge of physics and anatomy usually fills in the gory details.

Dreaming has been working since the dawn of man, but why then, have we not sought some way of using this to our advantage?

There are already medications available to instantly send a person into the dreaming part of sleep, and some iffy physiological techniques such as hypnosis are readily available to alter memory. So say we wanted to model an event, such as the big bang and the formation of the galaxy, something beyond the capabilities of modern computing. We find a very logical and methodical patent, and somehow block his normal memories of being a person, family, daily life, etc, and limit his mind to ponder existence with nothing but a through knowledge of physics and its proven laws, it would be quite curious to see what conclusions that person may reach.

A Strange End

In the world of modern high energy physics, there exists one type of particle that can single-handedly reduce the entirety of the Earth to a smoldering rock. That particle is whats known as a "strange" particle, a hadron (mass made of quarks) composed of quarks so massive that it needs to gain mass in order to maintain stability, and it gains mass by energizing the quarks of ordinary matter into massive "strange" quarks and then assimilating it. The process feeds upon itself and will continue until all the matter surrounding it has been converted and assimilated into one super massive particle, which will remain stable for an unknown period of time. It is comparable to some sort of viral/bacterial particle, changing and accumulating the matter around it in order to sustain its own stability.

While this type of doomsday particle exists only in theory, the fact that theory allows it is a scary thought indeed. The accidental production of one tiny little particle can destroy all of the Earth. In the future, should this particle ever become realized, it will posses the same threat to entire planets as what threat nuclear weapons posses against our cities today.

Dyson Sphere, Take II

A long long time ago some genius physicist by the name of Dyson predicted that as technology evolved and population grew, the only way to meet an advanced civilizations energy demands is to build a massive superstructure that would completely enclose the sun, capturing most of its energy for our use. Simple mathematics will reveal that such a massive undertaking is simply impossible because the amount of matter required to construct such a large structure simply does not exist within our solar system. This mathematical argument convinced me for a short while, but then an alternate solution presented itself.
The sun emits so much energy across so broad a spectrum that if we only captured a small spectrum of its emission, the energy gained would still be significant. While the Dyson sphere will capture all of the sun's rays, it would be possible to capture only the ionized energy by projecting via magnetic containment several panels of plasma-state gasses with distinct focal points on generators. While most of the visual light from the sun will pass through the plasma, ionized particles will be reflected to energize a generator. The same particles that power our auroras will then be shoved onto conductors where their excess electrons energize the circuits projecting the plasma barrier, and excess energy is shipped off elsewhere for consumption.
The concept is still a far ways off, but its a lot closer to reality than the massive Dyson sphere. The technology to contain plasma already exists, as with the ability to produce electricity when given a supply of ions.

Golden Rain

Mankind's military forces have grown better and better at delivering objects to distant destinations with extreme force. Ever since the first stone age man figured out how to make a sling, we have been trying to find better ways of throwing stuff with greater speed, precision, and range. However while we moved from bows to guns to rockets, there has only been one significant change in the payload which we deliver, and that is we switched from sharp/heavy objects to explosives. One could argue that a warhead could be engineered to perform just about any task, but I would counter by saying that once it is engineered, its purpose does not change. An armor piercing tank shell will do little agianst a squad of infantry, while an incendiary antipersonnel bomb will do little against a tank. Explosive weapons are inherently inflexible, and I would like to propose a possible solution.

A warhead is created composed mainly of individual rods of thermite, each with an individual fuse and spaced out by a thin layer of explosives. Depending on the target, this warhead will behave in very different manners.

If one hard target is to be struck, then the missile delivering the payload will follow its normal path. The thermite primer goes off seconds before impact, and the explosive spacers are not detonated. The result is one dense glob of burning metal boring a hole straight through a ship or a bunker.

If multiple soft targets are chosen, then the missile will follow a slightly altered course taking it over the target, at which point part of the explosive spacer is detonated, and then the thermite is lit, resulting in several smaller meteors of pseudo-plasma material, each of which will heavily damage vehicles and kill infantry.

Finally for area denial against infantry/light vehicles, the same high course is chosen, and all of the explosive spacers detonate before primer ignition. This will seed the air in the area with thermite fuel, and act much like a fuel-air explosive when the primers ignite the cloud of volatile powder, cooking all caught in the blast radius.

Barometric energy generator

This is just a crazy concept for renewable energy that i came across, I'm not saying that it will work, I'm saying it could work.

Basically, this is a scheme of sorts to generate energy by abusing the pressure differences on this planet. What we need is a decently deep body of water and a gas medium preferably denser than water. A flexible "bag" of gas is dropped from a factory down a pipeline into the depths, where the gas becomes pressurized. A simple mechanism at the bottom of the lake transfers the gas from the flexible container to a rigid one. The rigid container is large and takes several bags to fill, once it becomes filled to capacity with pressurized air, it is brought up to a surface generation plant where the pressurized gas is either packaged and sold or used to power gas turbines for power.