Peter Hill Explains

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. Quiz ToolboxChlorine Quiz:Orientation Chlorine Quiz:Test on your phone or in your car Chlorine Quiz:Play this for a class test Chlorine Quiz:Just the information Welcome to the Quiz Toolbox for Left click to play any of that above files. Right click and select "save link as", then select your devices drive or your USB to download and play on the go or in class. To down load right click "save link as" the following link. Chlorine Quiz:All files

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. MP4 recording     MP3 recording -- -- Your browser does not support the audio element.

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. MP4 recording     MP3 recording -- -- Your browser does not support the audio element.

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. Quiz ToolboxSolar System Quiz3:Orientation Solar System Quiz3:Test on your phone or in your car Solar System Quiz3:Play this for a class test Solar System Quiz3:Just the information Welcome to the Quiz Toolbox for Left click to play any of that above files. Right click and select "save link as", then select your devices drive or your USB to download and play on the go or in class. To down load right click "save link as" the following link. Solar System Quiz3:All files

A surprising talk while walking for a blood test. 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. MP4 recording     MP3 recording -- -- Your browser does not support the audio element.

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. MP4 recording     MP3 recording -- -- Your browser does not support the audio element.

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. MP4 recording     MP3 recording -- -- Your browser does not support the audio element.

The major insight is that rather obscure experiments might be particularly provocative to students imagination. They are uncluttered and the effect is hard to ignore. Cognitively, it cuts through cultural conditioning to that loads student's perceptions and renders them agreeable to our education system. I am not some far left alternative radical here, but a scientist who has made steady progress understanding through a series of frontiers. The is nothing special about this, its just what you do. As you progress there is a smaller and smaller fraction of people you associate with who get there is a gap between what we are capable of knowing and what circulates in common cultural consciousnesses. There is no particular drama here, until things reach crisis points. Generally I find, that it is a life threaten illness of a person or the someone they care for, and there is a requirement to interact with advanced technology and concepts that till that point have been pushed into the background. In overview, I make no particular judgement on this state of affairs, there is nothing particularly positive that some on attending to daily affairs and domestic activity can do with electron spin. At no point in the day is relevant. Yet the metric, relevance to the conduct of personal affairs although seductive and pleasant runs a course to tragedy. My mind turns to some industrial accidents I have been as a first responder and disconnected power or poured water on acid burns. For those people the connection with the reality of our underlying technology mattered. Rather than being a point of contempt that someone understood and knew what to do, there was appreciation that there was one in a hundred who wasn't like the crowd. I think here we are not going for a big measurable hit in understanding in our kids. We are not going particularly a rise in the score in our testing which has been leveled out across so many variables like social background and time (If the testing yields better performance this year and it would have shown better performance had it been used in previous years ... that is not valid or equitable). I suppose what I am interested in is seeding curiously in a few, perhaps one. The profound thing is that new insight is something used when it is most critical and it tends to be most critical in a situation that no one could predict and we can somehow get that one in hundred thinking outside the square makes that critical difference. In the quiet time you share with people after those big accidents we talk about this sort of thing and how society as a whole doesn't get it. So what do we have in mind. The Einstein de Haas experiment. Einstein is a big draw card here. He is embedded as a kind of symbol in our cultural language. People ask who is the de Haas guy and is he really necessary. It is interesting when people make this comment as they reveal how they are thinking with Einstein as a proxy for actual understanding. It is bit like, for me, attending a piano recital and the musician walks out on the stage and says "Piano, not just any piano but a grand concert piano that can sound awesome to people who can hear. Piano, piano, grand piano Yamaha!", then the people around me applaud saying "Bravo!". In the circumstances one has to understand the absolute lack, vacuum of understanding before you. To say that Einstein fudged his analysis, fell folly to bias for scientific results that confirmed what he was thinking would be like saying the Queen or the Pope were just ordinary people. So one saves this for later, years later for your one in a hundred student who is going to resonate with the profound. Not that Einstein was wrong, that is hardly profound. What is profound that we are immersed in a cultural, to borrow some terminology here, field that does not allow him to be wrong. To be more precise our culture does not allow us to think that he is wrong. The experiment itself is humble, profound and connects with our universe

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 s

Struggling through the podcasts here. The most significant story here is scratching humanities head unpicking what is happening with entangled photons. Here the basic story get mangled. The entangled photons have to be created by a doubling crystal which down converts short wavelength light in to two entangled infra red photons that hit a beam splitter. Even this bit is rather nifty. The point is even this basic piece of science is left out, and in its place is mystery. It may not be though to do much harm is spreading a little mystery about as the full explained universe only is good for one story. What it does do is drive a wedge between humble have ago physicists like myself and those who see such activity as mystery killers sucking the humanity of being human. It also sets the bar pretty low as the story unfolds the Alice and Bob or Amanda and Bruce for Australian entanglement measurement, wind up measuring vertical of horizontal polarization, while if I remember correctly the issue is that you can measure the linear polarization but not the circular polarization or visa versa, and statistically you can't sneak around this by entanglement. Overall the Chinese competition gave this slightly strange experiment a good nudge, whilst it generate a whole slew of questions in my mind. MP4 recording     MP3 recording -- -- Your browser does not support the audio element.