Category: Out there

Posted back in 2004 about the almost inconceivably large earth muncher, Bagger 288 (technically a “bucket wheel excavator”). Here’s what happens when a stray bulldozer wanders into Bagger’s path:

No info there on whether a driver might have been in the bulldozer at the time. More pix at thrillingwonder.

Saw a pretty stunning piece on Nova recently (Monster of the Milky Way) on the absolute weirdness of black holes (they’re more surreal than you thought). Today found a New Scientist article on what happens to objects sitting at the rim of the event horizon. For 30 years, Stephen Hawking has maintained that all information was destroyed at the event horizon, even though this ran counter to one of the fundamental principles of physics. But now, after studying the work of a young theorist named Juan Maldacena, who essentially posits our universe as the holographic projection of a 5-dimensional counterpart. New Scientist:

Let’s say Alice is watching a black hole from a safe distance, and she sees an elephant foolishly headed straight into gravity’s grip. As she continues to watch, she will see it get closer and closer to the event horizon, slowing down because of the time-stretching effects of gravity in general relativity. However, she will never see it cross the horizon. Instead she sees it stop just short, where sadly Dumbo is thermalised by Hawking radiation and reduced to a pile of ashes streaming back out. From Alice’s point of view, the elephant’s information is contained in those ashes. There is a twist to the story. Little did Alice realise that her friend Bob was riding on the elephant’s back as it plunged toward the black hole. When Bob crosses the event horizon, though, he doesn’t even notice, thanks to relativity. The horizon is not a brick wall in space. It is simply the point beyond which an observer outside the black hole can’t see light escaping. To Bob, who is in free fall, it looks like any other place in the universe; even the pull of gravity won’t be noticeable for perhaps millions of years. Eventually as he nears the singularity, where the curvature of space-time runs amok, gravity will overpower Bob, and he and his elephant will be torn apart. Until then, he too sees information conserved.

Essentially, we end up with a large-scale paradox similar to the light-as-wave/particle paradox: In order to satisfy the laws of physics, objects have to simultaneously be intact inside the black hole and torn to shreds just outside of it. This bakes my noodle.

Thanks Milan

No idea where this comes from, but it kind of speaks for itself.

via Dad

Excellent documentary on the Science Channel last night about British autistic savant Daniel Tammet, who recently recited the value of Pi to 22,514 decimal places in five hours without a single mistake. After an epileptic seizure as a child, Tammet started seeing mathematics both visually and sensorily, as synesthetic forms and textures with distinctive colors, forms, and sounds.

He can raise large numbers to the power of seven in a few seconds, without calculating a thing. For him, a landscape simply unfolds in his mind. Every number from 1 to 10,000 has a distinctive shape and color, a mood, which he experiences visually. When doing math, he performs no calculations. “The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer.” And yet it’s hard to get your hands on a calculator that has enough precision to even check his work.

Unlike most autistic savants, Tammet is fairly normal in most respects, and is able to describe what he sees, how he does what he does, to the rest of us – a fact which makes him fascinating to researchers exploring the outer reaches of the mind.

His savant abilities also extend to languages – he currently speaks seven of them fluently, and can become fluent in new languages in a week. He undertook Icelandic for the documentary – one of the hardest languages to learn – and was interviewed live on Icelandic TV at the end of the week. The day before the TV appearance, his teacher thought it was going to be a disaster. Then, suddenly, he said he had grasped the “form” of the language. He then sucked up the entire Icelandic lexicon “like a vacuum” and performed flawlessly for the interview.

Stories about savants always bring me back to the same thought: If any human brain is capable of these kinds of feats, it points to the existence of mathematical and musical and linguistic structures flowing just beneath the surface of our lives that are just out of reach for the rest of us. If extreme math can be performed by any person without calculation, if savants are able to visualize and breathe musical structures in the way that they do, it’s like proof of the existence of mathematical and musical lattice-works that run through all of existence. They’re there, just waiting to be grasped by our puny minds. Knowing that those structures are there but out of reach for most of us is almost maddening. Though ironically, we’d all probably go mad if we could.

Nice profile on Tammet at The Guardian.

No more flats, air valves, repair kits, or spare tires taking up space and weight in the trunk. Michelin is working on Tweels — airless, rubbber-spoke tire/wheel combos, all intentionally deformable. Seen to the left at speed; more pix here. Law enforcement’s going to love the fact that old school back-up-spikes have no effect on them.

Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? Not in the case of the Wenger Giant Swiss Army Knife, which includes all 85 tools made by the company in a single knife. Individually, any tool on this knife could be a lifesaver. Assembled in small collections, synergy kicks in and its overall utility expands. But due to its size and extreme awkwardness, I can’t imagine it would be easy to deploy any single tool on this 9″, nearly-3-pound behemoth. Includes such invaluable assets as a golf shoe spike wrench, shortix key, bike spoke adjuster, and a “snap shackle,” whatever that is. Won’t fit in your pocket, you object? No worries – it comes with a keyring so you can attach it unobtrusively to a belt buckle. They’re practically giving this thing away at $800.