Topic Tuesday #168 2015/10/06 "Groupthink"

Topic Tuesday #168 2015/10/06 "Groupthink"

Groupthink? You mean something like double-think from George Orwell's 1984? Though I enjoy the fascinating and terrible implications behind some "Orwellian" revelations, groupthink is a real concept in modern psychology. According to PsychologyToday.com:

Groupthink occurs when a group values harmony and coherence over accurate analysis and critical evaluation. It causes individual members of the group to unquestioningly follow the word of the leader and it strongly discourages any disagreement with the consensus.

Why is this important enough to be a Topic Tuesday? Well, we are entering election season in the United States and there are fewer groups more polarized by ideology than those of the two main parties here in the states. Groupthink essentially explains why certain ideologies like political leanings, religious tradition, and even gender identity become an intrinsic part of a person's identity. In the case of politics a person may become very offended if their chosen candidate or pet cause is undermined and attacked. In gender you get the "Boy's Club" or the "Sewing Circle" where the other gender has no place at all. Religious people tend to be very attached to their group even if they claim a personal relationship, they will still naturally ally with those of like mind and are typically unable to separate themselves from the concepts of their faith; this can be seen when they are confronted about an inconsistency or contradiction in their doctrine. They will almost universally take it as a personal affront to them and they will respond as if they are under attack, even if it was the idea and not them personally. 

Groupthink represents the exchange of personal identity. The ego of the group is overlayed on the ego of the individual group member and is adopted as being at least as important as their own identity. You may even hear people identify so closely with group as to announce they ARE the group/thing/idea. This can be a dangerous place to tread. 

View fullsize

This is a cautionary tale. We are all susceptible to the power of groupthink and should remain vigilant in our own self awareness and hold all ideas to rigorous scrutiny, especially the concepts we hold most dear. 

Topic Tuesday #154 2015/06/30 "Leap Second"

Topic Tuesday #154 2015/06/30 "Leap Second"

Long ago, I wrote about the origins of the calendar. #24 http://www.orlyradio.com/canwefixitorg/2013/01/topic-tuesday-24-20130101-happy-new-year.html

But what I didn't discuss was corrections to timekeeping.
See the calendar that we eventually landed on is not perfect, by a long shot. This is why every 4 years we add a day (24 hours) to February. This keeps the calendar in sync with the planet's seasons. Today, June 30th, the last minute of the day has 61 seconds as we add a leap second in order to keep the time of day close to the mean solar time, or UT1. Without such a correction, time reckoned by Earth's rotation drifts away from atomic time because of irregularities in the Earth's rotation. Since this system of correction was implemented in 1972, 26 leap seconds have been inserted, including today's. Ideal implementation adds a positive leap second between "second 23:59:59" of a chosen UTC calendar date (the last day of a month, usually June 30 or December 31) and "second 00:00:00" of the following date. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second

Peter Whibberley, senior research scientist at the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL), said: "Because they depend on measurements of the Earth's rotation, which varies unpredictably, leap seconds occur at irregular intervals. Leap seconds are announced only six months in advance. This means computers and software cannot be supplied with leap seconds programmed in, and they must be inserted manually," he explained. "Getting leap seconds wrong can cause loss of synchronisation in communication networks, financial systems and many other applications which rely on precise timing. Whenever a leap second occurs, some computer systems encounter problems due to glitches in the code written to handle them. The consequences are particularly severe in the Asia-Pacific region, where leap seconds occur during normal working hours."

Due to these complications many would like to do away with the practice of adding leap seconds. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is set to discuss the topic at the World Radiocommunication Conference in Geneva this November.

There was some jargon in there, like "Mean Solar Day" and "UT1". Let me do the work for you and tell you what those are.

The duration of daylight varies during the year but the length of a mean solar day is nearly constant, unlike that of an apparent solar day. An apparent solar day can be 20 seconds shorter or 30 seconds longer than a mean solar day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_solar_day

UT1 is the principal form of Universal Time. While conceptually it is mean solar time at 0° longitude, precise measurements of the Sun are difficult. Hence, it is computed from observations of distant quasars using long baseline interferometry, laser ranging of the Moon and artificial satellites, as well as the determination of GPS satellite orbits. UT1 is the same everywhere on Earth, and is proportional to the rotation angle of the Earth with respect to distant quasars, specifically, the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF), neglecting some small adjustments. The observations allow the determination of a measure of the Earth's angle with respect to the ICRF, called the Earth Rotation Angle (ERA, which serves as a modern replacement for Greenwich Mean Sidereal Time). UT1 is required to follow the relationship
ERA = 2π(0.7790572732640 + 1.00273781191135448Tu) radians
where Tu = (Julian UT1 date - 2451545.0)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UT1

Around the world, we try to use UTC, (oddly acronymed for Coordinated Universal Time, because French.)
UTC is an atomic timescale that approximates UT1. It is the international standard on which civil time is based. It ticks SI seconds, in step with TAI. It usually has 86,400 SI seconds per day but is kept within 0.9 seconds of UT1 by the introduction of occasional intercalary leap seconds. As of 2015, these leaps have always been positive (the days which contained a leap second were 86,401 seconds long). Whenever a level of accuracy better than one second is not required, UTC can be used as an approximation of UT1. The difference between UT1 and UTC is known as UT1. 
For most purposes, UTC is considered interchangeable with GMT, but GMT is no longer precisely defined by the scientific community. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time

Topic Tuesday #153 2015/06/23 "A Climate for Writing"

Topic Tuesday #153 2015/06/23 "A Climate for Writing"

Ladies and Gentlemen of my readership, we have had quite the week since I have conversed with you on topical matters. The news has been rather heavy, week over week and it has taken its eventual toll on me, thus I am unable to fully articulate the gravity of the activity on the world stage. I am not silent on it, as you can tell by my other posts and the continued activities of the ORly Radio Podcast. The news has hurt me and has moved me to alternative action. In as much as we have seen through time - adversity, even if it seems tangential to this writer, fosters creativity. This last week it was not the news of the Charleston murders that hit me the hardest. Though they are certainly shocking and deplorable, I have been desensitized to the bigotry and violence to those of color by those with a far paler character. No, what has moved me to some sort of action and kept me awake is the future.

I would consider myself a rational person and a man of facts and perspective. I have grown to trust the scientists that work in their chosen fields and have come to know many of them. They value the same things I do. Facts and the truths that they describe. The recent news that the figures were wrong and corrected on the so called pause in global warming was a hammer blow. I didn’t expect it to be so, as I had a feeling that this sign of climate change was not up for taking a vacation, but still, I had hoped that nature had a trick or two that would explain it and it would not be a miscalculation. Sadly, the results indicate that we were incorrect with initial findings and that the world may have warmed much more than was anticipated in other models and it was not getting any better.

Credit: NASA.

The data that they used to make these statements came from a big data project, NASA Earth Exchange (NEX). It’s data is available to the public. http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2293/

“The NASA climate projections provide a detailed view of future temperature and precipitation patterns around the world at a 15.5 mile (25 kilometer) resolution, covering the time period from 1950 to 2100. The 11-terabyte dataset provides daily estimates of maximum and minimum temperatures and precipitation over the entire globe.”

I have concerns. I am a future minded person and they are painting a rather hot picture of the future, a future that if I am not a part of, surely my offspring will be. So I have to prepare them for the reality of climate change, rising oceans, hotter summers, colder winters, floods and droughts, and the people that deny it could happen. This is the tall order that keeps me up at night, and I figure if I am going to be kept up, I might as well be creative and productive with it.
This is the inspiration for a story I am going to write. It may be horrible and completely un-entertaining and worthless to some, but I will learn a lot along the way about how to write and communicate a narrative of discovery and adventure - one of surviving a changing world.
National Novel Writing Month is approaching you know.

Time to get to it. Let me know what you think.

Topic Tuesday #132 2015/01/27 - "The Fermi Paradox - Where is Everybody?"

Topic Tuesday #132 2015/01/27 - "The Fermi Paradox - Where is Everybody?"

Once upon a time, man looked up at the Sun and felt the Earth beneath them as unmovable. We thought that we were the center of everything and that we were special because of it. Time passed, stories told, and the world explored. We now see deep into distance and time with our telescopes and know that we are not the center of the solar system, the galaxy, and certainly not the universe.

Enrico Fermi

Mathematics combined with cosmology leads there are an estimated 200–400 billion (2–4 ×1011) stars in the Milky Way and 70 sextillion (7×1022) in the visible universe. Even if intelligent life occurs on only a minuscule percentage of planets around these stars, there might still be a great number of civilizations extant in the Milky Way galaxy alone. The math says that someone should have been noticed by now. Pondering this one day, as the story goes, Enrico Fermi asked his pals from the Los Alamos National Laboratory "Where is everybody?" 

This is a good question. It also creates other questions...

As we continue to peer into the abyss, we have found planets that orbit stars, not unlike our own. The most recent of those (at the time of this writing) is Kepler-444. Kepler-444 hosts five Earth-sized planets in very compact orbits. It is also 11.2 billion years old; the oldest star with earth-sized planets ever found. This is proof that such planets have formed throughout the history of the Universe. This star could be gone now. The planets engulfed by an expanding star, as ours is likely to do in another 5 or 6 billion years. If… If there were intelligent life in the Kepler-444 system, did they escape their planets demise? Will we? 

Arthur C. Clarke

I am reminded strongly of a statement made by one of my favorite science fiction authors; it made my brain hurt.

“Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” - Arthur C. Clarke

What do you think?

Topic Tuesday #97 2014/05/27 "Solar Roads?"

Topic Tuesday #97 2014/05/27 "Solar Roads?"

It sounds like something from a sci-fi. "Solar Roads" where you ride the light or something fantastic. The reality is more down to earth, and more nuanced than the headlines hyperbole suggests. 

It comes as no surprise with all that asphalt out there, baking in the sun and hazing the air, that someone would think that if they could harness that energy in a meaningful way that they could really make a difference. It is a lot of surface area, and would have a lot of issues making a change. Let's get real for a second, it's unlikely, even in the best case scenario, that a solar panel roadway is going to be around any time soon. As a friend of mine put it, "pie in the sky"...

I suggested that if it was only a solar panel you could drive on, it would not be as compelling as the actual proposition. It would end up as only a headline garnering bullet point. Like this:

• Solar energy collection
• LED lighting for lines and text for driver information. Imagine a road that can alert you of issues up ahead or route you on a different course, or tell your car it is out of its lane.
• Active feedback to authorities of traffic speed and road conditions.
• Segmented structure will allow easy "patching" by replacing the damaged sections.
• Heating elements to melt snow and ice buildup.
• Communications cables like phone, TV, and internet. 
• Municipal potable water.
• Natural Gas.
• Sanitary sewers.
• Stormwater runoff.
• And future technology, that will all be easily deployed under our roadways, sidewalks, and parking lots.

In closing, yes... It's expensive, but as with many things, it would be a long term investment that has the potential to save time and resources far into the future. It would be best to use this in highly planned developments first, to thoroughly prove its usefulness while understanding that as demand increases, so will availability as cost decreases. This will not solve the energy issues until it is widely adopted and retrofit into communities and freeways, so more conventional approaches are more possible at this time. Especially if you just want the promise of limitless energy from the solar roads of tomorrow land.