Contributing to Wikipedia

I'm taking a course right now, MSE 582: Surface Physics with Dr. David Cahill, where we have been assigned to create (or significanlty improve upon) two Wikipedia articles that would be equivalent two writing two 6 page papers (double spaced). When I first heard that he was going to try this new assignment in lieu of actual papers I was pretty excited because contributing to the online encyclopedia as opposed to typing some paper at the last minute that will just get scanned and returned with an "ok you did it" grade.



Everybody loves wikipedia so I needn't go on about how great it is and how much I use it. But the whole contributing thing sounds new to most people and it certainly was for me. Aside from a few minor hiccups with image copyrights (which I still haven't resolved) it was disturbingly easy to create a new article. You just create an account using your email address then you have free rein to edit anything on there (yes, you could change the definition of ... to ...) and start new pages. I had already written my article in word, so it was as simple and copy -> paste. Formatting takes a little practice but what I would recommend doing is finding an similar article/definition that you like. Then copy -> paste the entire thing over just replacing the titles, etc with what you want.



The first article had to be on a surface sensitive technique, something where you get information about a material's surface but not from the interior. I chose something that a few professors here at UIUC have been pioneering called coherent diffraction imaging (CDI) just click on that link if you want the definition. The pictures in this post, I uploaded for the definition.

Tonic Immobility

About a month or so ago The Discovery Channel was doing their annual Shark Week. Normally I don't like shark week very much because they dramatize everything around the sharks and make them out to be these nasty man eaters. I am a diver myself and am always in search of sharks underwater. I have had a few experiences with the creatures that I would call spiritual, they have this dark energy to them that I really respect. In my experience they are just as curious about humans as we are about them. Certainly accidents happen where a shark or a human ends up dead, but it is rare.

Anyways, I came across this show on shark week about this guy called "Sharkman." He is a hardcore shark lover and seeks to spread awareness of sharks in order to save them from you know who. Well, in all his diving he discovered that the nose of sharks is very sensitive and if you rub their nose they can fall into a sort of trance called tonic immobility.

In this video you can see shark man massaging a reef shark into such relaxation that he is able to balance the shark, motionless, in the palm of his hand. Incredible! Also, at one point he lets the shark float backards away from his hand then gives the shark a choice: food or more massage. The shark clearly chose more massage. Although you can't see the food very well, thats how it was narrated when it was on TV. So the shark was interacting with the human in positive way.

I was simply blown away by this when I saw it on TV. Later in the show he goes on to do it on a tiger shark and get this, a GREAT WHITE. He swims without a cage with a great white and at one point he actually gets the great white to tow him along by her dorsal fin (after the massage of course). The whole point is that sharks and humans can live in harmony if people would just learn to respect them. They aren't these vicious man eaters that people make them out to be, not really even close to that actually.

In this video Sharkman is on scuba but usually sharks are scared away by the vibrations caused by scuba bubbles. When he swims with the great white he is just snorkeling to calm her down as much as possible. Sharkman is also a great free diver, which enables him to swim around for minutes at a time on a single breath. Its not the most safe thing to do and I should know. I have passed out underwater on two occasions. Your dear author is lucky to be here blogging!

The music in that incredible video is performed by one of my favorite bands, moe.. I am still trying to figure out the name of that song, will get back to you on that.

More Flight of the Conchords

"If every soldier in the wo-orld
Put down his weapon and picked up a woman
What a peaceful world this world would be-eee...
Redheads not warheads
Blondes not bombs
We're talkin' about brunettes not fighter jets
Oooh Oooh it's got to be Sweet 16's not M-16's
When will the governments realize it's got to be funky sexy ladies?"

"Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah"

"You can take me out to dinner that might be quite nice
you could buy me a burrito and some beans and rice
but that won't get you into pants paradise
They call it a fly because it takes you up to heaven oh oh

A kiss is not a contract but it's very
nice. It's very very nice."

Check these out too, if you missed my last post on Flight of the Conchords.

Real X-Wing

Side note: I have temporarily removed all the posts about the details of my auto trading software (ATS) in light of the coming competition. I realize that people found this information helpful, and that was part of the reason I originally posted it. Other traders and I got ideas from the software's trades last year and it was nice to have a record of the program's successes and failures.

At any rate, my goal was not to make things hard on myself in future competitions and right now people are starting to write software for the 2008 IB Olympiad. So I'm sorry if you didn't get a chance to read as much about my software as you would like, it will be back up after the 2008 competition is over. I will likely start posting about the most updated version of my auto trading software when the competition gets underway.

If people have questions you may continue to email me about the competition and I will try and get back to you. But I plan on doing better next year and I don't particularly want to make that goal any harder to achieve than it already is. Good luck to this years contestants!

Eternity

As you might have guessed, I have been contemplating an eternal universe lately. I have a nagging feeling that big bang theory is bogus and it comes back to haunt me every few years. Hopefully, one day I'll publish a paper on why big bang theory is fundamentally flawed. Until then, I'll continue to think about other ways to explain the "evidence" for the big bang. I'm not a specialist in the field, but it seems to me that you have to be pretty close minded to buy into big bang theory.

More on Infinity

Thanks to BBC, the source.
Thursday, 25 April, 2002, 22:13 GMT 23:13 UK

Universe in 'endless cycle'

The current expansion will go on for trillions of years

Get your head around this: the Universe had no beginning and it will have no end.

Two scientists have put forward a new model to explain how the cosmos is and where it might be going.

They say it is necessary to take account of startling recent discoveries such as the observation that everything in the Universe is moving apart at an accelerating rate.

Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok propose that the cosmos goes through an endless cycle - of Big Bang, expansion and stagnation - driven by an as yet unexplained "dark energy".

They have put forward their views in the journal Science.

Star surprise

The current model of the Universe starts with a Big Bang, a mighty explosion of space, matter and time about 14 billion years ago.

This model accounts for several important features we see in the Universe - such as why everything looks the same in all directions and the fact that the cosmos appears "flat" (parallel lines would never meet however long).

But the model has several shortcomings, Steinhardt and Turok say.

It cannot tell us what happened before the Big Bang or explain the eventual fate of the Universe. Will it expand forever or stop and contract?

Problems with these futures became apparent in 1998, when studies of distant, exploding stars showed the Universe was expanding at an accelerating rate. It was a big surprise for some astronomers who thought everything might eventually come back together in a "Big Crunch".

Empty and flat

The apparent acceleration has since been checked and shown to be real.

It led cosmologists to revive an old idea that some "dark energy" is at work in the cosmos, pushing everything apart.

Steinhardt and Turok put this energy - a scalar field as they mathematically describe it - right at the centre of their new model.

They think the dark energy drives a cycle of activity that includes a big bang and a subsequent period of expansion that leaves the Universe smooth, empty and flat.

"The scalar field changes its character over time," Paul Steinhardt told the BBC. "Finally, the field begins to build up energy to a point where it suddenly becomes unstable and bursts into matter and radiation, filling the Universe, and driving the next period of expansion."

'Hardest science'

He added: "In the standard picture, it's presumed that the Big Bang is actually a beginning of space and time; that there was nothingness, and then suddenly out of nothingness there sprang space, time, matter, radiation, etcetera.

"What we're proposing in this new picture is that the Big Bang is not a beginning of time but really just the latest in an infinite series of cycles, in which the Universe has gone through periods of heating, expanding, cooling, stagnating, emptying, and then re-expanding again."

Steinhardt and Turok have discussed their ideas with peers and have received a positive, but "cautious", response. "The ultimate arbiter will be Nature," they write in the journal Science.

"Measurements of gravitational waves and the properties of dark energy can provide decisive ways to discriminate between the two pictures observationally."

Cosmology writer Marcus Chown concedes it will be extremely difficult to finally prove any model of the Universe.

"The history of cosmology is the history of us being completely wrong," he told the BBC. "I mean, cosmology is the hardest of all sciences; we sit on this tiny planet in the middle of this vast Universe, we can't go anywhere and do any experiments - all we can do is pick up the light that happens to fall on us and deduce some things about the Universe."

Paul Steinhardt is at Princeton University, US, and Neil Turok is at Cambridge University, UK.

In the begining... was an end?

Courtesy of BBC News:
Friday, 26 April, 2002, 14:10 GMT 15:10 UK

Q&A: The 'cyclic' Universe

Two researchers have proposed an alternative model to explain the Universe - one which has no "beginning" and no "end". BBC News Online Science Editor, Dr David Whitehouse, answers some basic questions on cosmology.

If the Universe never began, how come it exists?

It is not a flippant answer to say that just because the Universe exists (as it obviously does because you are reading this), it had to have a beginning. It might have always existed.

Right, so if it had no beginning, how come I've read another story on your site saying the universe is 14 billion years old?

The best explanation for the history of the Universe is the Big Bang idea. Because we can see the galaxies receding from each other, most astronomers believe that these star groupings were closer together in the past.

If you "run the film backwards" then all matter, space and time would have erupted from a point in a Big Bang about 14 billion years ago .

Questions about what happened "before" the Big Bang are difficult because there may have been "no" before - because there was no time.

Those astronomers unhappy with the Big Bang theory because it suggests a beginning have put forward the idea that our Big Bang was just one of an endless cycle.

The problem is that science can never prove anything about a previous Big Bang or subsequent Big Crunch (in which all matter comes back together) or can they?

In recent years, so-called M-theory has suggested that our Big Bang may be the result of the collision of two "proto-universes" floating in an abyss of such universes. Some researchers have even suggested that we may be able to obtain evidence for the existence of these proto-universes by studying gravity.

What's this "dark energy" about?

A few years ago astronomers realised that not only were the galaxies receding from each other, the recession was actually speeding up. It was quite a surprise as most researchers believed that either the Universe would expand forever at the same rate or else slow down and contract.

To explain this acceleration, astronomers invoked the idea that space contains a so-called dark energy that is pushing the galaxies apart.

What's the cosmos?

Cosmos is a Greek word that means whole and order, the opposite of chaos. It is used to describe everything that has been, is and ever will be. The term Universe refers to everything that is, atoms, stars, galaxies, space and time.

OK, so if there are Big Bangs, and they are part of an endless cycle, when is the next one?

If the Universe is indeed accelerating, there won't be another one, unless Steinhardt and Turok are correct. Then eventually the dark energy will change its nature, cause the Universe to become empty and then allow another Big Bang to take place.

So, if everything in the Universe is moving apart at an accelerating rate, will we get further away from the Sun and freeze to death?

In the Universe everything is moving apart due to the cosmic expansion, but the effect is only detectable over very large distances. It is insignificant to us and our Solar System because the Universe is so vast.

Astronomers say the Universe looks the same in all directions? That can't be right - if I look up in the sky, I can only see Orion in one place.

The exact arrangement of nearby stars that comprise the constellation of Orion is a matter of chance and of no importance. Whatever direction in space you look (once you remove local things such as our galaxy and the cluster of galaxies of which it is a member), the Universe is the same in all directions.

And are we in the only universe? If not, where are the others?

Some researchers believe that there are other dimensions that we cannot experience because these dimensions are "folded". Some theorists believe that our Universe was spawned from a proto-Universe that exists inside the very fabric of space.

If so, then the Universe next door is closer to you than the clothes you are wearing.

Why do any of these findings matter, and when will scientists know they have the definitive answer?

It matters that we understand the Universe from which we spring. These are deep and fundamental questions at the heart of the most profound of mysteries: why are things the way they are?

Mankind is what he is because we ask questions and they don't come any bigger than this. We should take pride that with just the view from planet Earth to help us we have discovered so much.