We fill the sky

A video on how many planes fill the sky over the course of a day. How I love well represented graphical data.

E8 Theory of Everything conclusively disproved

Elegant but unfortunately inaccurate, Garett Lisi's E8 Theory of Everything sought to map out all particle (known and yet to be discovered: see Higgs Boson among many others) interactions in physics in a Grand Unified Theory (GUT). The E8, for those of us who are not mathematicians, is a complex member of the Lie Group of mathematical structures of dimension 248. As an individual with a profound interest in physics, it's a relief to conclude that there is an exceptional amount of work to be done (who would have thought?).

Lisi's Theory has in criticized by a number of experts of both mathematics and physics, including Dr. Skip Garibaldi, of Emory University. According to a recent article on Physorg, Garibaldi collaborated with University of Texas Physicist Jacques Distler to conclusively debunk the Lisi's Theory of Everything by proving some formula's in Lisi's E8 paper simply do not work.

In Garibaldi's words,

"You can think of E8 as a room, and the four subgroups related to the four fundamental forces of nature as furniture, let's say chairs," Garibaldi explains. "It's pretty easy to see that the room is big enough that you can put all four of the chairs inside it. The problem with 'the theory of everything' is that the way it arranges the chairs in the room makes them non-functional."

If you're interested, you can read Garibaldi's paper here.

Source: PhysOrg

Fairing Earthquakes: Haiti vs. Chile

First of all, let me state that in no way am I an expert in either building technology nor natural disasters. As a student though, I am surrounded by academia that deal with these situations in an idealistic way and shoot for perfection. Therefore, they present ideas that in reality would save lives, if not for the shackles of bureaucracy and money.

Also, before you read this post, I urge you to give whatever you can to the relief effort in Haiti; namely, NGOs organized to respond to physical and economic infrastructure reconfiguration (the people trying to get kids back into schools, hospitals functioning, and roofs over heads).

Everyone has seen the images and heard the statistics. The Haiti earthquake was one of the worst disasters most of us have seen in our lifetimes in terms of actual destruction and death rates. Many people wonder, though, what the difference was between Haiti and Chile, and why a more powerful earthquake in Chile caused astoundingly less destruction.

The answer falls on how we construct our built environment. As John D Sutter explained in his article for CNN In Search of an Earthquake Proof Building, "The technology exists to make buildings nearly earthquake-proof today. However, installing those safer buildings all over the world isn't so simple. Neither is figuring out who will pay."

In my Urban Policy class this week, I was given a first hand account of the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake from a Haitian-American city planning professor, Harley Etienne, who was asked to travel to Haiti and assess both physical and social damage caused by the quake. Aside from an insurmountable assemblage of horror stories and tough-to-look-at pictures, he gave us the straightforward answer as to why this happened.

The answer falls on the fact that Haiti has no building codes to speak of. Though it falls directly on a major fault line that lies under various Caribbean islands, it had no earthquake ready buildings aside from a few major projects built recently by outside developers. The two most hurtful problems came down to two things that fit in your hand: sand and steel.

The concrete that Haiti has been using for years is filled with sand. Sand, while a cheap way to supplant the aggregate material needed to make concrete, has a high concentration of salt, and therefore erodes the rebar laid within it over time.

Secondly, the steel rebar that was used in many of these buildings was smooth. The standard in the US, and the general standard across the globe, logically, is to use ribbed rebar instead of smooth; ribbed performs much better under stress the same way a screw performs much betters than a nail.

Unfortunately, Professor Etienne showed pictures of piles of sand on the side of the road, ready to be filled into more concrete; pictures of men hitting rubble laid with steel with sledgehammers, trying to remove the smooth rebar and sell it to reconstruction efforts. To prepare for the next earthquake, as Etienne and his colleagues show, Haiti must understand the importance of building codes and earthquake proof building technologies. These, of course, cost money and manpower, both of which Haiti is unreasonably short on.

In the US, we have a greater knowledge and appreciation for these types of technologies. Many buildings in earthquake prone zones, San Francisco for example, are built on a sort of rubber pad that takes most of the lateral forces jabbed at the building from the earthquake. The Golden Gate Bridge even is taking in these technologies. The earthquake shakes the foundation of the building, jiggles a rubbery plinth under the building, and the building feels little to nothing but a shake from the rubber.

Haiti is at a tipping point; unfortunately, it had to come at the price of their largest city and many of its inhabitants. Without a doubt, Haiti will reform its building policies and codes requirements to adapt their building practices to their environment. Hopefully it will come faster than the next quake.

Transonic Combustion Revitalizes Engine Output

Teaching an old dog new tricks seems to be the way we are approaching energy consumption; the Transonic Combustion engine is a new trick for a nearly dead dog. The new combustion style uses supercritical fluids that ignite when in contact with air, exactly timed to the piston's most efficient position. This way, no energy is wasted in combustion that is not used in the piston movement. Experts say that the expected out put on the engine will be somewhere around 98 mpg Highway, twice that of the best hybrids on the road today. Transonic says that the technology will be hitting the pavement somewhere between 2013-2014.

Via Inhabitat.

More Awesome Statistics

(TED)

Google's New Public Data Explorer

As great as WolframAlpha is for data search, I have to say that as a designer, I am partial to visual representations and graphs. Google recently released its visual data representation labs that track the rates of everything from birth rate to retail sales rates on an interactive graph. Of course it's Google, and of course it's free.

Check some of them out here:

International Fertility Rates vs. Death Rates

Link to explore

Unemployment Rate By State

Link to explore

Reported STD Cases in the US by State

Link to explore

Khaled Al-Saai, Arabic Graffiti

Known artist Khaled Al-Saai composes atmospheric artworks out of Arabic calligraphy. The changing opacities of the different strokes create fantastic compositions that dive into the wall and change the viewers perspective. A few examples below. Really great work.

Porsche Gives the Hybrid-Class Some Biceps.

Porsche has unveiled its newest addition to the hybrid movement, the 918 Spyder. It stands right now as the first plug-in hybrid ever. Along with this: 0-60 in 3.2 Seconds, can go 16 miles on electricity alone, and achieves 78 mpg. The way it achieves these in parallel is a combination of two motors: a 500 hp V8 and a set of electric motors that add another 218 hp. While it is still a concept car, Porsche is well known for fulfilling their concepts into realities.

Via Inhabitat.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale

Life beyond our universe

This is the kind of thing that we just can't understand. The scope of our own universe is beyond what is imaginable. I think the extent to which we can know and study the existence of multiple universes is knowing that we can't know. In an article posted on Physorg, some MIT physicists explore the aforementioned possibility.

If you're brave enough, catch the article here.