Zark's

The Many Digits of PI

The Wagon Wheel Approximation to PI
Image Credit: Wolfram Research

There probably is a direct correlation to your personal geekiness and the number of digits you know for PI.  I think my first HP scientific calculator had 10 digits which I memorized very early.  In a tunnel underneath I-75/85 at Georgia Tech, someone had written out PI to 26 or something digits, which I also memorized.

But I'm no competition for Supercomputers crack Sixty-Trillionth Binary Digit of Pi-Squared.  A scientist for the Department of Energy - David H. Bailey, had developed an algorithm for computing PI, but it would have taken 1500 years on a single computer.  Australian researchers partitioned the algorithm to run on IBM's "BlueGene/P" supercomputer and produced the result after only 110 "rack days".

On Bailey's PI blog, we learn that Archimedes of Syracuse was the first to show that the area of a circle is pi times the radius squared.  He did this in 250 BCE, without the benefit of "BlueGene/P".  Newton computed PI to 15 digits in 1666, admitting that he did it because he wanted to, not that there was a purpose.  Bailey tells that computing PI to 40 digits is sufficient to express the circumference of the Milky Way with an error less than the size of a proton.

If you are interested, the wagon wheel algorithm is hosted on the Wolfram site.  As you can see from the above, you sketch 2n+1 spokes evenly along the semicircle and also draw vertical bars for the semicircle, dividing it evenly into 2n+1 segments.  The intersections of a spoke and bar truncate the spoke into length tk, where -n < K < n +1.  t0 cannot be directly measured because the spoke and bar directly overlap.  t0 has to be inferred from the pattern created by the other intersections.  t0 approaches 2/pi and n -> infinity.

Courtesy of WolframAlpha, a pretty good estimate of PI is

Yes, I have the WolframAlpha app on my phone.  You never know when you might need extra digits for PI.

Was the Space Shuttle a Good Decision?

Concluding mission STS-115, Atlantis and her crew return to Kennedy Space Center and approach a landing before sunrise on Runway 33
Image Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

It is about the size of an MD-80.  With a max crew of seven, it has a gross lift-off weight of 240,000 pounds.  On reentry, the tiles heat to over 3000 degrees Fahrenheit, and glides at a speed of roughly 20 times that of an airliner.

The early studies for the space shuttle were begun in the late 60s, before Apollo had even landed on the moon.  President Nixon announced the space shuttle on January 5, 1972.  The first Orbiter was named the Enterprise after a successful lobbying campaign to change the name from the Constitution.  The first launchwas the Orbiter Columbia on April 12, 1981.

I found the USA Today's question interesting - Did investment in the shuttle program pay off?  A total of 133 missions and almost 4 decades of Earth orbit transportation, the U.S. will be taking a strategic pause in manned space flight.  NASA: Last Space Shuttle Flight to Launch June 28 tells about the last flight.

Back to the USA Today question.  Was NASA and the nation correct to embrace the space shuttle in place of missions like Apollo? 

Probably most space observers would comment that the space shuttle program under-achieved.  It wasn't within NASA's control, but several things happened.  First, the U.S. elected to spend far less money on spaceflight than originally intended.  Hence, the space shuttle never achieved the economy of scale expected for the program.  Second, the space shuttle became a bus for the international space station (ISS).  The ISS became a State Department outreach instead of a waystation to the planets and ultimately the stars.

 

Building Cheaper Fuel Cells

Fuel cells that provide electrical power for the space shuttle also produce water that is used by space station crews.
Credit: NASA

Last week I spent a considerable time with an engineer who works in alternative energy.  Since energy is one of my primary interests, I questioned, nay, bugged him for his insights about different energy sources.  He was surprisingly negative about solar energy, supportive of wind energy, and even supportive of hydrogen fusion.  The cost for developing the latter is so exhorbitant that it will not see fruition in our lifetimes.  He was also negative about hydrogen for two reasons - a) the cost of fuel cells and b) the inability to obtain 'green' hydrogen.  Today most of our hydrogen is derived from steam reforming of natural gas, which sort of defeats the purpose of hydrogen.

Say Hello to Cheaper Hydrogen Fuel Cells tells that researchers from the National Labs in Los Alamos and Oak Ridge have invented a hydrogen fuel cell that does not require a platinum cathode.  Platinum, at $1800 per ounce, is more expensive than gold, hence the hydrogen fuel cells used by NASA for manned space missions are very, very, costly. 

The new fuel cell uses a composition of carbon, iron, and cobalt as a catalyst and produces pure water as a byproduct instead of the fuel cell-choking hydrogen peroxide typically associated with non-platinum fuel cells.  The new design also tolerates cycling - turning the fuel cell off and on, again something not tolerated by alternative designs. 

Antihelium-4 Detected at Brookhaven

Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Hevy Ion Collider (RHIC) is in a Tunnel 2.4 Miles in Circumference
Image Credit: Department of Energy

Mmm.  Perhaps some are thinking about the old fire station in Ghostbusters, but this discovery was in Upton, NY, instead of New York City.  Antihelium is antimatter, meaning that when mixed with normal matter, they anhiliate each other, releasing energy and subatomic particle-antiparticle pairs.  Antimatter was first discovered in 1932 by a scientist studying cosmic ray collisions.

RHIC Physicists Nab New Record for Heaviest Antimatter tells that gold ions, traveling at just slightly beneath the speed of light were collided collided and the data recorded.  Out of a billion collisions, and half a trillion created fragments, the researchers at Brookhaven detected 18 antihelium-4 particles.  Unlike the lighter antihelium-3 detected earlier, this antiatom has two antiprotons and two antineutrons and does not radioactively decay.

Eventually, the antihelium collides with normal matter, so these antiatoms vanish about 10 billionths of a second after being produced by the gold ions smashing together.  US Scientists Get Glimpse of Antihelium explains these antiatoms are so stable that unless there is a fundamental change in accelerator technology, it is unlikely heavier antimatter will be observed for perhaps decades.  The next stable particle is antilithium, but is so rare that the collider would run for thousands of years before detecting a single particle.

The Bristlecone Pine

Bristlecone Pine
Image Credit: USDA

Definitely not categorized as ornamental, the bristlecone pine trees of Nevada and Utah are among the world's oldest trees.

Wikipedia tells that the tree lives in isolated groves and just below the tree line.  Consequently low temperatures, dry soils, and short growing season only permit the tree to grow slowly each year.  The wood is very dense and resinous, often dead, with only a thin layer of live tissue from the root to the active branches.  Each year the trees produce a new layer of wood immediately beneath the bark.

The U.S. Forestry Service has dated a bristlecone pine tree in eastern California to over 5,000 years old.  (The location is a closely held secret to protect the tree.)

Ancient Bristlecone Pine Natural History explains the tree has a needle arrangement like a cat or fox's tail.  Its name cames from the long prickly 'bristle' on the immature cone.  Although they do not particularly prefer highly alkaline soils, they can adapt whereas other plants cannot.  Consequently the bristlecone develops small groves in these regions of lesser competition.

Is Moore's Law Crumbling?

Solar-Powered Transmitter System, Much Smaller than a Penny, Emits an infrared Signal which has been Detected as far as One Kilometer in Stationary Field Tests at ORNL.
Image Credit: DOE

Moore's Law is not really a law of nature like the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  Instead, it is an observation that Robert Moore, Chairman Emeritus of Intel, made in the early days of integrated circuit technology.  He observed that the number of transistors that can be fabricated on an integrated circuit doubles every two years.  For over three decades, this simply prediction has been uncannily accurate.

Our global economy has built this expectation into everyone's business model.  Microsoft and other software vendors assume that the next generation of computers is only two years away, and it will have far more capability.  Critics of today's software products describe this expectation results in bloated and inefficient software.  The software companies counterclaim abstraction and other techniques improve productivity and the ability to maintain the software.  Cellphone vendors likewise expect their next phones will have at least twice the capability of today's models to offer more features to consumers.

However, The Microchip at 50: the end of Moore's Law speculates technology is running out of capability to continue this progress.  The fundamental element of electronics, the transistor, is now only 150 atoms in width.  The insulation layer (similar to the plastic coating for wires) is only 4 atoms in thickness.  Quite simply, it is not going to be possible to keep doubling semiconductor density because we cannot fabricate smaller than an atom.

The world has already witnessed the crumbling of Moore's law, because for the past four or five years, the processing speed of new computers has not increased.  Instead, the manufacturers are producing computers with multiple processors.  An I-5 Intel computer has four processor cores whereas the I-7 has eight cores.  Some problems can be decomposed into smaller tasks that can be independently tackled by multiple processing cores.  Other problems remind us of the adage that 9 pregnant women cannnot produce a baby in one month.

Because parallel processing is difficult and much more inefficient, it will be interesting to watch how our consumer products evolve in the future since they will not be able to reap the benefit of ever-increasing performance.

The Bizarre Electrical Connection Between Saturn and Enceladus

This artist's concept shows a glowing patch of ultraviolet light near Saturn's north pole that occurs at the "footprint" of the magnetic connection between Saturn and its moon Enceladus.

Image and Title Credit: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/University of Colorado/Central Arizona College/SSI

The Cassini spacecraft was launched on 15 October 1997.  Recently it has detected a magnetic circuit between Saturn and one of its moons.  The magnetic field also provides a path for electrons to flow as illustrated in the graphic above.  The electrons following this path creates an ultraviolet glow, similar to the "Northern Lights" of the Earth.

 

Childhood Music Lessons Endure Throughout Life

Christian recording artist Jamie Grace shares some of her music.
Photo Credit: Kevin Stabinsky (USAG Fort McPherson)

No doubt that it is has been edited several times, Wikipedia defines music as an artform that uses sound as a medium.  There are attributes such as pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and timbre, but little agreement on what is best or even pleasing.

Although we may not agree on the music we want to hear, almost everyone is touched by music.  The  right music is able to sail effortlessly into our very soul.  Medical personnel are becoming more convinced of the healing qualities of music, and it is increasingly used for patients unable to communicate.

Childhood music lessons may provide lifelong boost in brain functioning explains a recent study has focused on the childhood music training of a group of senior citizens.  As you might expect, those senior adults who had musical activity as children, exhibited higher cognitive skills than those that had none.  The cognitive skills had direct correlation with the number of years of musical training, even though some of the seniors had not played a musical instrument in years.

Those that continued to play music did not appear to have better cognitive skills than those that had dropped playing later in life.  Hence, it appears that the early childhood music lessons are not really forgotten by the brain, and those lessons are not music but instead, increased connectivity and processing speed.  The ability to read ahead in a music score, and the faster mind/body coordination required to play an instrument apparently results from physical changes in the brain. 

Those physical changes provide a parallelism that is beneficial later in life when mental acuity naturally declines.  Much remains speculation, because the study shows a correlation between cognitive ability and musical training.  It does not indicate a cause and effect. 

Parents - push those music lessons!

The Need for Serious Energy Invention

On the left, we see actual data for the price of petroleum as of April, 2011.

Below, I include the energy estimates in the government's 2010 Energy Outlook.

Recall the divergence of the three cases was 2010, at the time of the report. 

Does it look like the High Price estimate is being realized? 

Below, I show one more graph - the latest trade balance for the nation.

I would wager that next month's trade balance will be substantially worse due to the price of crude oil.

Someway, somehow we need energy independence.

The Encode Project

This fused chromosome has two functional centromeres, shown as two sets of red and green dots.
Image Credit: Beth A. Sullivan, Duke University

I am a big advocate for the government creating a collaboration of private industry, universities (is there any difference today?), and government research labs.  I think there are things that only the government is big enough, or when it alone can cut through the self-interests of private industry.

A recent success was the Human Genome Project.  This was a highly collaborative project with the basic goal of mapping the human genome.  For a period, there was a competing private industry consortium which reserved the right to basically patent anything it believed profitable.  As Wikipedia explains, President Clinton in 2000 proclaimed the human genome sequence could not be patented and should be made available to all researchers. One of the heroes of the political intrigue was Francis Collins, now Director of the National Institutes of Health.

Although something like 8 percent of the human genome is still being mapped, the project is considered a success.  As a follow-on, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) has initiated the ENCODE project.  Wikipedia explains the goal is to identify the functional elements of the human genome.

Decoding Human Genes Is The Goal Of A New Open-Source Encyclopedia explains there are about 3-billion base pairs in the human genome.  The scientists are attempting to discover the design patterns of the genome, much as a music composition can be identified or reconstructed by its chords.  Breaking the genome composition into easier-studied segments will facilitate understanding and practical application of the new knowledge.

The ENCODE project can be reviewed here, and the public data base is here.  You can search, download, and visualize.  I wish we had something similar in the energy sector.

Mmm.  Does anyone else think Standard and Poor's financial warning about U.S. debt is self-serving?  Who makes more money from higher interest rates?  In my second novel, Butterflies Escape,  a subtheme is that we should be wary of multinational corporations.

This past weekend I was asked to participate in a brainstorming session to assist a non-profit that was no longer sustainable.  It seemed obvious to me that the organization should seek to have more contributors rather than only attempting to obtain more donations from its existing base.  Similarly shouldn't part of the U.S. debt solution be to grow the economy instead of retreating into the bunkers?