Jsalt's Let's Talk Science

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Interstellar Travel? NOW?

Maybe you saw, maybe you haven't yet, but Stephen Hawking and other scientists have recently been talking in the media about travelling to another star system. That's fancy talk for another solar system! Like ours, but, different, and very, VERY far away. But how is it that we are planning to send space crafts out that far into deep space when we can't even get humans out of Earth's own orbit? How are we able to send something that far and be alive to witness it, if it took us over 20 years to just get a spacecraft past Pluto? And this star system is way, way farther than Pluto relative to us. Like, unfathomably far. Well, as interesting as it seems, you're probably overthinking it. If I make a rocket and launch it into space, it will take A LOT of energy to get that rocket out of our atmosphere and into space, because it weighs a lot and gravity is a bitch. Well, and a blessing so we don't float away, but in this case, it's a bitch. Then, to make such...

You're Always Halfway There

The word half is weird. Think about it, if I have a long rope, say 10 feet long, and want to cut it in half as many times as I can, what would be the length of that rope when I'm finished? Sounds like one of those math problems you got in school that seemed easy and then ended up being a "What the #%!& is going on?" question. Because it is . If I cut the 10 foot rope in half, I'll have two 5 foot ropes. If I cut one of them in half, well, I'll have two 2.5 foot ropes. If I cut one of those in half 10 more times, I'll have two 0.0024 foot ropes. That's about 0.03 inches or about 0.7 mm. That's about half the thickness of a dime. Pretty thin, but if you see where I'm going, theoretically you can cut that in half again and do so for infinity. In real life, well.. I would have stopped cutting that rope a while ago since it's quite difficult to cut a half inch rope, never mind one that's less than 0.1 inches. Regardless of the fact th...

Does it make a sound?

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody's around to hear it, does it make a sound? This is a fairly popular phrase and I think there is more to it than what you get at first glance. Practically speaking, why wouldn't it make noise? Physics doesn't happen when we are watching, it happens all the time. That's why we call them the Laws of Physics. They are always true. But, how can we be sure? We can't observe something we don't see, so how can we pass judgment on it? If we think about what sound is, it is what our ears hear after some physical event. So if our ears aren't there to hear the sound, is it still sound? Or is it just a vibration of air that may or may not be heard, depending on if there is someone or something there to hear it? Kind of a mind numbing thought, but the fact is we can't really prove it, can we? If I placed a recording device in a forest that had unlimited memory and waited until a tree fell down, or maybe helped a tree begi...

Why do we struggle with AI?

Yes, AI, as in Artificial Intelligence. Is it or can it be as bad as we think? Or are our negative thoughts toward it simply biased from science fiction? I mean, the ability for a computer to accept 1's and 0's in the form of programming code and turn that into a self-learning, better yet, a self-thinking machine is fantastic to me. But are we wrong in assuming it's potential? Great minds like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have publically said that we need to be particularly careful with AI. But have we even achieved true AI yet? To answer that, let's look at what we have right now, at least as public information. I'll focus on the biggies, the first being Google's DeepMind. They were in the news recently because of a software they call AlphaGo, which was tasked with playing the world's greatest Go player in a series to see if machine can beat man. And crazily enough, it did! It did lose as well, to be fair. If you don't know what Go is, it's an ...

The Concept of Concepts

I had a friend ask me about concept cars, along the lines of why make a concept? Do they even drive? I want to explore the many reasons why concepts are great things, even if they never come to light. First, what is a concept? Let's use the example of cars. BMW just showed off their new concept car, the Vision Next 100, at a show in Europe, maybe Geneva? It doesn't matter, but it was pretty fantastic. The steering was re-imagined completely. The materials used for the car body were unseen before. Here's a GIF of the car . So assuming you watched the GIF in the link, it's impressive. The body of the car adjusts itself as the wheel is turned. The steering wheel (thing?) retracts itself after you pet it (I assume turn it off) but all of this still begs the question, why? The point isn't to see this car driving on the road in a few years. It's fairly likely this car will never see the inside of your average person's, or local millionaire's garage. T...

New blog!

Hello fellow humans! I have decided to keep my brain segregated into my two trains of thought for these blog posts. Let's face it, you're going to read both because I'm an excellent writer (note the exuding of confidence through the computer) but for those who don't care about what I have to say on day to day topics, and only enjoy my magnificent opinions on science-related topics, this page is for you! I even have a cool new URL.. I think. I'm no pro at this (ask the $0.05 I've earned from these posts). I realize one of you probably accidentally clicked on the ad and BAM, I earned half a penny (which only exists in the meta-world now a days, at least in Canada). So thanks for helping feed a starving student kind patron! Unfortunately, it's way too much work to transfer the science posts from "NOT A JOURNAL", my other fantastic blog, to this one, so, guess I'm starting fresh. If you'd like any explanations of specific topics in science-re...