Snow desert and interpolation problems

The winter is as harsh as it can be here in Ann Arbor. The city seems like a snow desert, in a sense that instead of sand being blown by the winds, you can see small particles of snow almost creating moving dunes of snow. Temperature has never ben so low. Sunday the temperature reached the -30oC, and we had winds of 60km/h and sometimes even surpassing the 100km/h. Of course, I just stayed quiet at home. At this moment, it is windy and snowing outside, and I am sure all the transportation system in the city is disrupted. I am still at the University, just gathering my courage to go outside and endure this "warm" weather (-20oC) while I wait the bus. And the adventure continues!! I love this place, and this cold!! :P

I guess I finally understood why the program I was modifying to calculate the line profiles I seek so vehemently is not working. One week ago I finished my modifications, and I was sure that after those modifications the code had to work perfectly, but it did not. So I spent the rest of the week trying to figure out why in the name of the Infinity Layers of the Abyss that god forsaken code was not working!! Just looking at my results I could figure out the problem was in the optical depths of each of the rays (the optical depth is a measure of how deep you can see a ray of light before the medium becomes opaque). The optical depth was becoming too large inside a region where it was not expected to be so large. Large optical depths mean one thing, and it means that the atomic level population densities where not being properly calculated.

I started to track the values of the population densities where the optical depth was becoming too large, and then I found something unusual. To calculate the optical depth between two points I have to calculate an integral between these points, and to calculate this integral I need the population densities in these two points. If I have two points very near, I don't expect the population densities to be very different, and what is happening is that near the edge of my wind the difference between these values for these two nearby points is very large (something like 10000 times from one point to another). And that was the reason why the optical depths are becoming too large in a very low density regions where they should be very, very, very small (instead of being something like 0.001, the values are something like 100, and it means that the ray is not able to cross a region where otherwise should be almost transparent).

Diving deeper in this problem I realize that the problem was in the interpolation function that was called by the program. The problem was that I have not changed that, so if the program was working before, it should be working now, but I decided to verify anyway. And after some debbuging, I could not find anything wrong with that. All the physical quantities being calculated by that function were correctly calculated. The grid file I have calculated to used as an input to this program was also perfect. Then I remember the flux program needs a input that is a little different from the one I give him, and to get this grid file I have to use another interpolation subroutine in IDL. I looked at this other grid file, and there was the cursed error!! The problem with the population densities appear just after I use the IDL program to re-grid the original grid file. There is a strange function it uses to interpolate called "Triangulate" that is causing this problem. I have no idea how this function works, but the problem surely is due to the fact that the problematic region is exactly in the border of the wind, and borders are usually problematic regions.

Now I just need to figure out how to solve this interpolation problem... And I don't think it will be easy... And my time keeps running out... 27 days left...

Tesla Anti-Theft Device

Have you ever wondered about what kind of anti-theft device would be able to make even the most professional of thieves scared of stealing your car!? Or even to scared away those pesky people trying to sell thing or begging while you are standing still in the red traffic lights!? Here is the answer for all your problems!!!

BEHOLD!!! THE TESLA ANTI-THEFT DEVICE!

Now I have a good reason to buy a car!! Just to install a Tesla Anti-Theft Device and start to vaporize car thieves everywhere!! Tesla coils are sooooo damn cool!!!

Your health and the Earth destruction.

Today, wandering through the cyberspace, two things caught my attention. Two very interesting top 10's. The first one is "The Top 10 Bad Things That Are Good For You". I am not going to spoil that here, but it worth to see it. I, particularly, loved the number 7. (I guess I will turn myself in an alcoholic just to have a "good" reason to use that... Hehehehehe).

At the same place, looking at the other Top 10's, I found this other one: "Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth". The fun in that one is a little more restricted to physics, but if you are nerd enough, I am sure you will understand and laugh at least a little bit with that.

My source was a very interesting blog (in portuguese), that it is very worth to take a look if you can understand it: Favoritos.

Games and Science

The great hype of the moment regarding PC Games is a game called Crysis. It is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game, and the story revolves around the usual alien invasion, this time in a fictional future, and you are part of a military force bound to fight the invasion. Just the usual shoot all the aliens, or demons, or enemy soldier, or whatever you want, game. A kind of story that is getting kind of tired. Anyway... All this hype has nothing to do with its "revolutionary" story, but is due to the higher machine requirements, and the level of realism of the game.

The left side picture shows the real life version, and the right side picture shows the in-game version.
(Click for a larger version.)

As you can see in the picture above, the realism level in the game is simply outstanding. If you want to see more, take a look at this small video made by the guys at Tom's Hardware Guide showing some of the things you can do while playing the game, and pay attention at the graphics. The physics realism as you can see in the video footage is also unbelievable. Unbelievable is also the system requirements of your computer, if you want to play this game. I am not going to the details about the minimum and recommended settings to play the game, but I will just say that even the best PC computer in the market will not run the game with all maximum settings without glitches. If you are curious about the system requirements take a look here. Amazing to say the least.

The point I want to talk about is not exactly about the game itself. You can find more about the game in the links above, and all over the Internet. The main point of this post is to compare a game like this with current scientific simulations. How can these game companies make something so perfect that simulates our environment almost perfectly in real time, and in science we use codes to run models that sometimes are static models, and the code takes hours and hours to run. What is the problem here?

The first thing to notice is that even the physics in a game being seemingly flawless, the amount of simplifications or approximations made to simulate the physics are enormous. The laws of physics there are far from being perfect, but that does not demerit the game, it shows that the only real thing limiting the game engine is the today's computer hardware. There are really a lot of approximations, but the amount of details that you can see is also huge. So there is not only one physical process being calculated in real-time, but a huge amount of physical processes being calculated at the same time in real-time. That is what make the games of today so perfect, and in the future things will seem more and more real.

In real science you have to model the physics in a much more detailed way than in a game, and physics is not so simply as it may seem looking at the game. Far from that, actually. Most of the problems in physics cannot be solved without approximations, an even the largest computer clusters cannot compute some complex physical processes in real-time, and they usually took hours and days until some results can be obtained.

Looking at this game, and knowing a little bit about scientific simulations, something came to my mind. Most of the current computer simulations that are done these days are not as efficient as they should be. People still use a language called Fortran 77 in scientific simulations. A language older than me, and I am an old one! This old language is totally out of date, and surely is far from being optimized to run in our current processors. I don't understand why people in science tend to be so conservative regarding a programming language. The CPU of almost every computer today is also a multi-processor CPU, so parallel programming is starting to be a very useful skill, and surely these old languages are also not optimized to make codes that run in various processors at the same time. If you want to do something more efficient today, you have to evolve and forget about these old languages many scientists still insist to use. They are still good languages when you are learning how to code, but they are just that.

Another new concept that should be taken into consideration in future scientific simulations is that it is not only the CPU that can process data. Currently the processing capacity of modern GPUs (graphic processing units), or video boards, are larger than today's CPUs capacity. Until some time ago, GPUs were only useful in processing graphical data, and 3D calculations, but the new NVIDIA GPUs can be used to do any kind of calculations, using C programming language, and this can take fully advantage of the GPU hundreds(!) of on-chip processors in a optimal way (this technology is called CUDA - Compute Unified Device Architecture).

The gaming industry is always running a little behind the hardware development, and as far as I know, science is a lot behind the gaming industry. I know that learning science is not easy (far from that actually), and that to keep the pace with developments in any scientific field at the same time as you keep the pace with hardware and programming languages development is an herculean task, but a lot of improvement could be reached with a small evolution regarding scientific coding. Some conservative researchers, from the old school, need to to understand that a 30 year old computer language is not exactly the best to be used in our current computers. And even not-so-old languages like C++, must used in a new way to improve processing efficiency. Computer today are very different from computers 10 years ago, and science must evolve as the games do.

(Maybe I should not complain too much, in the current way Entropy tends to be maximized... :P)

Entropy and Global Warming

Saturday night, I am alone at home, after being part of a very funny "mock" Thanksgiving with the Astronomy Grad Students here in Ann Arbor. The party was really awesome, with great people and great food, but this time I decided to stay clean.

So here I am, sitting with my computer in my lap, hearing some music, in full control of my consciousness, and then inspiration came. Actually I was thinking about writing about this thing for a while now. The post today will be about Global Warming. Yeah... This will be fun. An excellent way to spend time in a Saturday night.

As a Doomguard, and a physicist I have to think in Global Warming in terms of Entropy. Global Warming is caused just by the increase of Entropy of our small planet. The increase of Entropy is always a natural process, the real point here is that due to humanity extremely high needs of energy, the natural process is being accelerated to uncontrolled levels. Of course, to produce energy, you have to produce heat, and heat in a manner of speaking is Entropy. There is no way to produce energy without increasing the Entropy of your surroundings.

As I share the Sinker point of view regarding Entropy, I guess in this case I have to help the Regulators, to reduce a little bit the Entropy increasing rate of the planet. Global Warming in my point of view, is not directly related to the Greenhouse Effect. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is just proportional to the energetic necessities of the world, due to the fact that most of the energy produced in the world came from thermal power plants, and the burning of oil or coal, and the efficiency in these processes are at most around 50%. More efficient ways to produce energy will decrease the rate of Entropy gain of the planet, but Entropy will still increase, and then there will be different sources, alike Greenhouse Effect today, to blame for Global Warming. Another way to help decrease the Entropy gain of the planet is to decrease the energy needs of humanity, but that is probably out of question. The energy needs of this civilization just tends to increase, uncontrollably, and this will also lead to an uncontrollable increase of heat produced, and then no way to escape from the fearsome Global Warming.

Energy consumption will not decrease, so humanity needs to find a way to control its needs for energy, so Global Warming can be controlled. And humanity also needs to find more efficient ways to generate energy. These two things would help a lot towards controlling this problem, but anyway, the increase of heat will continue. As I believe in the laws of thermodynamics, and I don't believe in a perpetual energy source 100% efficient, the only way to solve this problem would be to produce energy using sources outside the Earth. The most straightforward answer for this conundrum is Solar Energy. That is the only actual way of reducing Global Warming on Earth currently known. The Sun is like a battery, there is no known way of pulling more energy than it generates, but it produces energy enough to sustain life on Earth for billions of years yet. Using the Sun energy we can lower the Entropy of the Earth, and in this way end once and for all the warming problem of the planet. Eventually the Sun's Entropy will reach values so high that it will become a red giant, almost enveloping the Earth orbit, and destroying this beautiful planet, and all traces of civilization here.

We can surely create a lot of power plants in Mars soil, this way we can generate enough heat to warm the martian surface, making the planet more susceptible to accept earthlike life-forms. Then using some interplanetary energy tranfer methods, yet unknown, to bring this energy to Earth. Maybe the microwave radiation background generated by the Big Bang could also be used as a clean energy source. There are many possibilities, but currently the only feasible one , to really reduce Global Warming, is the use of solar radiation as a source of energy. Nothing else is really a solution. While most of the energy generated in Earth come from earthly sources, there will still be heat being generated and the Entropy will still increase.

This is Entropy berk! It can be delayed but never defeated. So, lets embrace Global Warming, because we cannot run away from it, yet. Solar power is somewhat a reality, but only an ephemeral part of humanity energy is generated that way. There is a long and winding road ahead of us before humanity can use the Sun as its most important source of energy again. Decay, Death and Destruction will be always in our doorsteps, one way or another, so be used to it...

The 2007 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

Each year the Institue of Improbable Research honors achievements "that first make people LAUGH, and then THINK" with the Ig Nobel Prize. The winners of the 17th First Anual Ig Nobel Prize are:

MEDICINE: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, UK, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, USA, for their penetrating medical report "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects."
REFERENCE: "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects," Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer, British Medical Journal, December 23, 2006, vol. 333, pp. 1285-7.

PHYSICS: L. Mahadevan of Harvard University, USA, and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of Universidad de Santiago de Chile, for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
REFERENCES:
"Wrinkling of an Elastic Sheet Under Tension," E. Cerda, K. Ravi-Chandar, L. Mahadevan, Nature, vol. 419, October 10, 2002, pp. 579-80.
"Geometry and Physics of Wrinkling," E. Cerda and L. Mahadevan, Physical Review Letters, fol. 90, no. 7, February 21, 2003, pp. 074302/1-4.
"Elements of Draping," E. Cerda, L. Mahadevan and J. Passini, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 101, no. 7, 2004, pp. 1806-10.

GHofXaos's Note: In some more years, a fully-functional anti-wrinkling bed sheet will be available at the market, and then every kind of anti-wrinkling stuff. The iron will be a thing from the past. Even some kinds of plastic surgery will be a thing from the forgotten past.

BIOLOGY: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.
REFERENCES:
"Huis, Bed en Beestjes" [House, Bed and Bugs], J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, vol. 116, no. 20, May 13, 1972, pp. 825-31.
"Het Stof, de Mijten en het Bed" [Dust, Mites and Bedding]. J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk Vakblad voor Biologen, vol. 53, no. 2, 1973, pp. 22-5.
"Autotrophic Organisms in Mattress Dust in the Netherlands," B. van de Lustgraaf, J.H.H.M. Klerkx, J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Acta Botanica Neerlandica, vol. 27, no. 2, 1978, pp 125-8.
"A Bed Ecosystem," J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Lecture Abstracts -- 1st Benelux Congress of Zoology, Leuven, November 4-5, 1994, p. 36.

GHofXaos's Note: I guess a lot of people will not be able to sleep at night for quite some time. Some people might turn themselves into psycho-cleaners, and then evolve into psychopaths...

CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin -- vanilla fragrance and flavoring -- from cow dung.
REFERENCE: "Novel Production Method for Plant Polyphenol from Livestock Excrement Using Subcritical Water Reaction," Mayu Yamamoto, International Medical Center of Japan.

PRESS NOTE: Toscanini's Ice Cream, the finest ice cream shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a new ice cream flavor in honor of Mayu Yamamoto, and introduced it at the Ig Nobel ceremony. The flavor is called "Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist."

GHofXaos's Note: You can't trust nothing vanilla- anymore.

LINGUISTICS: Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, of Universitat de Barcelona, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
REFERENCE: "Effects of Backward Speech and Speaker Variability in Language Discrimination by Rats," Juan M. Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, vol. 31, no. 1, January 2005, pp 95-100.

GHofXaos's Notes: I ever thought that rats were one of the most intelligent creatures in planet Earth, superseding by far the human primitive intellect. This just confirms my thoughts. Only sometimes they cannot tell the difference... Amazing!

LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word "the" -- and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order.
REFERENCE: "The Definite Article: Acknowledging 'The' in Index Entries," Glenda Browne, The Indexer, vol. 22, no. 3 April 2001, pp. 119-22.

GHofXaos's Note: I always had problems with "The" while indexing my songs!! A real must this article. I'm sure it will help me solve a lot of problems with indexing.

PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon -- the so-called "gay bomb" -- that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other.
REFERENCE: "Harassing, Annoying, and 'Bad Guy' Identifying Chemicals," Wright Laboratory, WL/FIVR, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, June 1, 1994.

GHofXaos's Note: Make love, not war!! I hope this hideous device does not befall in the wrong hands. Imagine some gay mob throwing that in the middle of a Hell's Angels meeting, or in the middle of a 90%-male-students class. The consequences could be disastrous to say the least!! (FEAR)

NUTRITION: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.
REFERENCE: "Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake," Brian Wansink, James E. Painter and Jill North, Obesity Research, vol. 13, no. 1, January 2005, pp. 93-100.
REFERENCE: Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, Brian Wansink, Bantom Books, 2006, ISBN 0553804340.

GHofXaos's Note: This device could solve the famine problem in the world!! A self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup!!

ECONOMICS: Kuo Cheng Hsieh, of Taichung, Taiwan, for patenting a device, in the year 2001, that catches bank robbers by dropping a net over them.
REFERENCE: U.S. patent #6,219,959, granted on April 24, 2001, for a "net trapping system for capturing a robber immediately."

GHofXaos's Note: They will not be expecting that. Unless they read the Annals of Improbable Research (a must reading even for bank-robbers).

AVIATION: Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for their discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters.
REFERENCE: "Sildenafil Accelerates Reentrainment of Circadian Rhythms After Advancing Light Schedules," Patricia V. Agostino, Santiago A. Plano and Diego A. Golombek, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 23, June 5 2007, pp. 9834-9.

GHofXaos's Note: A very relevant study about such an extremely intelligent creature that can differentiate between backwards-Japanese and backwards-Dutch, and whatever other misterious backward-language we do not even imagine yet. I am sure they can speak scramblespeak too, and backward-scramblespeak!!

Source: Improbable Research