Miscellaneous – Page 14

Seeing things



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I sometimes suspect that I return to the same topics time and again. Not too often I hope, because that will put people off reading this blog (in case anyone does!) This is possibly a topic which I may have already addressed, but hopefully this post will be interesting anyway.

It seems obvious to me that we all see things differently, and I’m talking about vision here, not “seeing” as a philosophical point of view. Some are short sighted, some long sighted, and others have impaired vision. I see a colour as a shade of blue, while my wife sees it as a shade of green.

One could argue that the difference is merely where the line is drawn, but I think that it is more than that. Apart from the physical differences in the lenses of our our eyes, we may have differences in the physical structure of the rest of our eyes, perhaps in the rods and the cones, and it is highly likely that the physical structures of our brains are different, and our minds (which I think of as the software that runs of the hardware of the brain) are definitely different.

It’s no surprise then that my wife and I disagree on whether a colour is a shade of blue or of green. (Actually we disagree about a lot of things. I believe that it goes with being married for 40+ years!)

Plymouth Valiant 100 of some 40 years ago seen... — Plymouth Valiant 100 of some 40 years ago seen on street in New Orleans (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Googling around as I write this post I found an article about the brain’s colour processor. Interestingly it has a section entitled “Color is Personal” which is a part of my theme for this post. This section, however, is not really relevant to my theme as the author then discusses Achromatopsia, where damage to the colour processor causes all sensation of colour to disappear.

It seems that even in our own brains and thinking processes the idea of colour is not fixed. I read another article which describes our own personal perception of colours as “malleable”. The implication of this is that a person might describe a colour as “a shade of green” one day, and “a shade of blue” on another day. Is there no hope of a definitive answer?

A physicist could help us out, couldn’t he/she? He/she could measure the frequency of the light and say, definitively, that the colour is blue, or it is green, couldn’t he/she? Well, sort of. This would work for very simple colours, but real world colours are rarely made up of just one colour. The scientist’s scope would likely show a range of frequencies resembling a mountain range. That blue/green colour might have traces or red or violet, and is fairly certain to have more than one peak in the blue/green range.

Albert Einstein showed us that if a scientist was moving at a high speed relative to us, he/she would measure the frequencies in the colour differently from a scientist whose spectroscope was alongside us and not moving or moving at the same speed as us.

General Relativity (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The ambient light has an effect on the colours that we perceive. A red object in red light doesn’t look red. Other objects of different colours look different in a red light. Similarly, it is difficult to determine the colours of cars and other objects under the yellow/orange sodium lights. According to Wikipedia, the colour of a street light has effects other than simple colour perception – it appears to affect peripheral vision. New LED technology may be able to remove some of these deficiencies.

There are innumerable effects which affect or perception of colour. The most recently famous illusion is the dress which appears to people to be either black and blue or white and gold, but there are many such illusions. One which I came across a long time ago is the chessboard illusion. In this illusion, two square appear to be different colours, but are in fact the same colour. This illusion is usually shown in monochrome, but the illusion works in colour too, and depends on the shadow of the cylinder to produce the effect.



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One brain is very like any other brain. When a scientist shows someone a colour on a card, the same areas of the brain show activity in all individuals, if we exclude some cases where brain function is abnormal for some reason. We can’t delve very much deeper into this issue as we don’t know what this activity signifies, beyond the bare fact that the person was shown a card with a colour on it. We certainly can’t tell if they see it as a shade of blue or a shade of green, and we can’t tell what their subjective experience is when the brain activity occurs.

In some individuals a number or letter may invoke a sensation of colour. Such people might have the sensation of seeing something green when they think of or read the number 6. I don’t know if this imprinted behaviour because the person was presented with a green symbol when first learning their numbers or whether or not it was merely a chance association that arose at a different time, or indeed if it was because of some neurological happening or trauma that has allowed the association to happen.

Anyhow, when we see something, there are many stages to the process that starts with light leaving the object, reaching our eyes, being refracted by the lens of the eye to form an image on the retina at the back of the eye, being sensed by the rods and cone cells in the retina, and sending signals to the brain, which then processes the data.

The amazing thing here is that the image sent to the brain is pretty messy. The eye is not a perfect sphere, the retina is curved in three dimensions and the resolution is pretty rubbish. The retina has at least one major gap in it, rods and cones are not evenly distributed across the retina. Our perception however, is smooth and break free. We have our image processing hardware and software in the brain to that for that.

It means we can watch a soccer match, and we can see the black and white panels or the ball rotating as it spins across the television screen, when the unprocessed image that reaches our eyes may be quite blurred. Seeing is believing!



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Spring is in the Air

English: Graeme Crosby at Pukekohe race track ... — English: Graeme Crosby at Pukekohe race track in New Zealand on 17 April 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the race track of the year, spring is the bendy bit just before the long fast straight of summer. You have left the tedious long drag of the back straight of winter and you are looking forward to being able to blithely put the foot down before, eventually braking for the twists and turn of autumn.

Spring promises a lot, daffodils, apple and cherry blossom, even the first flush of grass that requires you to dig the mower out of the shed or garage. It carefully doesn’t promise sudden drops to what feels like arctic temperatures and gales that knock trees over! One term for spring weather is “changeable”. It doesn’t promise equinoctial gales, though apparently there is no real evidence for any such thing.

When we pass the magic date of September 1, it becomes officially spring, but no one told the weather. We try and persuade ourselves that the weather this week is better than the weather last week, and sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.

As spring wears on the signs of the approach of summer start to appear. The length of the day increases, and spring flowers start to blossom. I like to watch the deciduous trees come into leaf. First the buds swell, and then they burst into vivid green clusters of leaves, firstly quite pale as the leaf’s internal factories start manufacturing chlorophyll, and then darker green as the chlorophyll builds up in the leaves.



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Some trees, like the cherry and apple trees seem to favour blossom over leaves at the start of the blossoming season. The little new leaves are there, on the apple trees, but they are overshadowed by the mass of blossom. Cherry trees appear to be all blossom. They are not the only ones – magnolias trees blossom before bearing leaves. The rather showy magnolia flowers appear before the leaves and quickly fall apart to carpet the ground with rapidly btowning petals.

Daffodils spring up, again promising better weather to come, and temperatures do start to slowly rise, but not without a few cooler spells as a nod back to winter. On the warmer days, I’ve seen Monarch butterflies tempted out of hibernation, but it’s a dangerous time for Monarchs. I seen those that failed because they are caught by a cold snap or because they have exhausted the reserve built up in the autumn, lying dead on the grass.

Other birds and animals become more active, like the Tuis brawling in the trees like a bunch of youths fuelled by testosterone. Moreporks become more active in the night, though their calls never really stop the whole year round. All birds ramp up their activities.

Spring is a time for lambs. Usually they will have been born for a month or more when spring starts, but late comers will still be found and the early comers are still quite small, leaving them very vulnerable to a late cold snap.

If I’ve made Spring appear bleak, it isn’t really. The lengthening of the days as well as the increases in temperature make the nicer days very pleasant, and one can slowly, layer by later, reduce the stifling amounts of winter clothing, with the prospect, round the corner, of the much lighter styles of summer.

With food being shipped around the world these days, the so-called summer vegetables can be purchased the year round, though in the depths of winter some vegetables attract premium prices, and out of season produce can be somewhat lacking in flavour. But soon enough more local vegetables come into season and prices fall and flavour improves.



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I just noticed that the Vernal (spring) Equinox is nearly here. It will be on September 23 at 8:22pm NZST. This of course means that the day and the night will be approximately the same length, 12 hours, on that day, and from then on until the Autumnal Equinox in March days will be longer than the nights. Nights will shrink to 8 hours and 50 minutes at the Summer Solstice.

We move to daylight saving time (NZDT) at the end of the month. The clocks go forward so we lose an hour in bed! Never mind, it’s another sign that summer is on its way. The dog will enjoy getting his food an hour earlier too.

In the autumn we expected the temperatures to start to fall, but if they don’t for a day or two, and summer temperatures persist, we sometimes call this an “Indian Summer”. I don’t think that there is a similar term for a late cold period except perhaps a “cold snap”. Of course, there may well be an unseasonably warm period in early spring, which causes plants to bloom or animals to come out of hibernation early. Hopefully this would not be followed by deep cold, which would spell disaster for the animals and plants.

Weather forecasting is not capable of predicting the onset of cold or warm periods, but long term trends are able to be predicted, though only in terms of probability. One such prediction involves something called the El Niño Southern Oscillation, and the effect leads to changes to the patterns of weather over the country. The western areas tend to get more rainfall and the eastern areas tend get less, to the extent that drought conditions ensue. It is likely according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology that the current El Niño effect may continue into next year.

While this promises a golden summer in the east of the country and a wetter time in the west, this is not good news for dairy farmers, who have been struggling as a result of the global downturn in dairy prices. Farmers who plant crops will also be hit, as they will need to provide water from other sources, such as bores, irrigation schemes, or they may even have to truck water in. Lack of water will also affect power generation, and also tap water.



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It seems strange writing that, since at the moment we are experiencing a period of wet weather over much of the country as a low pressure weather system has stalled over the country, becoming disconnected from the systems that move lows and highs across the country. So we are stuck with wet weather for the next few days.

Never mind. This may, hopefully, be winter’s last gasp. We are probably tracking through the first chicane of spring, and the rest of the season will see a general improvement until we turn the final corner and accelerate into summer.



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Trains, boats and planes

Refugees arrive in Travnik, central Bosnia, du... — Refugees arrive in Travnik, central Bosnia, during the Yugoslav wars, 1993. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There’s a horrifying refugee crisis going on in Europe where floods of people from the Middle East are trying to get into the richer and stabler countries like Germany and the UK. They are fleeing wars and persecutions in their own countries, and are paying ruthless individuals to transport them mainly in overloaded boats from Asia to Europe.

Tragically, people are being killed in this process, as people are stifled in trucks and drowned falling from boats or suffering similar misfortunes. I haven’t heard of cases, but it would not surprise me to learn that unscrupulous have been killing refugees and taking whatever small possessions that they have.

Children of the United Kingdom's Children's Mi... — Children of the United Kingdom’s Children’s Migrant Programme (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Whether a person is a refugee or merely a migrant, they are leaving one country for another because they believe that life will be better in a new country. Such movements are older than the human race itself. It is believed that the human race evolved in Africa and relatively quickly spread though much of the then accessible world. Members of the “Homo” family of species at that time were widely spread in Eurasia as well as the home continent of Africa.

The Homo family of species spread through much of Europe and Asia probably as a result of their intelligence and their high rate of breeding. Being hunters and gatherers and increasing population would put pressure on scarce resources, forcing families and groups to travel further for food and resulting in migrations in search of food.

This is a recreated vector image in SVG. The o... — This is a recreated vector image in SVG. The original “Human_evolution_scheme.png” was made by José-Manuel Benitos. The following was stated by the original author: “Simplified scheme of human evolution, it does not try to be trustworthy, but a symbol of this process” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course there would have been many other factors, but I’ll not go into that as I don’t know much about early human migrations. One effect of the rise and spread of humanity was the decline of the other Homo species. I assume that there is a link between the two phenomenon as they happened, apparently, at about the same time.

Maybe a cleverer Homo Sapiens stole the resources that the other Homo species needed, or maybe the other Homo species succumbed to some influence that did not affect Homo Sapiens, such as a disease or a climate change. Maybe our ancestors destroyed the other species in a pre-stone age holocaust. I’ve not studied the literature on the subject, so I’m ignorant of what was the likely cause of the decline of the other Homo species.

Whatever happened in those early days appears to have left the human race the urge to keep moving on. This urge has prompted us to send people to the moon and to send spacecraft to all (local) parts of the universe. Of course refugees in general don’t have much choice in the matter. They need to move or they are dead.

There is probably a spectrum stretching from migrant to refugee that covers all people who change countries or even regions. At the one end you have the forced movement of people between countries, by the authorities or an invader, through people fleeing war or persecution, to those who flee unpopular regimes which won’t actually kill or persucute them, to those who choose to migrate for political, cultural, reasons, right through to those who like to experience a different living environment.



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I’ve changed countries myself, and though my migration was voluntary and for a better life, it was a huge upheaval to move countries. You have to leave friends and relatives, all the things that you have known, much of which you may miss, to pack up your life and relocate it to a new country, where the culture is different if not in type then in detail, and you do not know how you will cope.

Of course, voluntary migrants have it easy in comparison to the refugees. They often cannot bring any possession with them, and they may not like the culture (which may espouse a different religion of course) and the likelihood of them returning to their original homes is remote. As refugees they will almost certainly miss their countries more than a person further up the migrant-refugee spectrum would.

Nevertheless, some voluntary migrants suffer at some stage from home sickness. Perhaps when an elderly relative dies and they cannot return for the funeral, or when a sibling who has remained in the “homeland” has a child. I’ve seen home sickness triggered by a simple treat brought by a visitor from the “homeland” that is unavailable in the new country.

I’ve not suffered very much from the syndrome myself, but I’ve known people who have and it is not a trivial thing. Home sickness can make a person physically ill, and if they are frail, it can even kill them. It can seriously disturb a person’s mental health, especially if they are prone to depression or similar mental illnesses. I’d say, however, that almost every single person who leaves one country for another suffers from it, except perhaps those of a persistently roving disposition.

Some voluntary migrants cannot cope with living in a new country. These are the ones that pack up and go back “home”. It may be culture, it may be relatives, it may be what you can buy in the shops, but these people make the decision to return from whence they came. I used to wonder why they did it, until I went back for a couple of years, and found that I hated it and couldn’t wait to get back to the new country. After that I had more sympathy for those returning migrants.

This contrasts strongly with refugees, who, although they see their target countries as being better than their homelands, are going to face a hugely different culture, possible religious and racial intolerance, all without the safety net of being able to return to their homelands. Even if they are able, at some time in the future, to return, it is likely that their homelands would have become strange and alien. Likely other people will be living their, with new customs and even religions.



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We have a phrase which describes the process of settling in a new land, or adapting to local customs, to making friends and watching children forming bonds with others in the new country. It’s called “putting down roots”. Let’s hope that the refugees all find a place where they can join happily with the local society and put down some roots. Not to forget their homelands totally, but to rejoice in their new homeland. Those of us who are voluntary migrants should welcome these “involuntary migrants”.



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Early television and that mess of metal on the roof

In the beginning the consumer television set was a large box with a small blurry screen. To successfully receive one of the few channels being broadcast one needed an aerial to pick up the broadcasts. They came in two sorts. One was a huge “H” or “X” shape that was located on the roof and aligned with the signal from the broadcaster. The other was a small device consisting of a base made of plastic and two metal prongs, known as “rabbit’s ears“.

Of the two types you will only see the rabbit’s ears aerial still being used today. Since television has moved from the VHF (Very High Frequency) band to the UHF (Ultra High Frequency) band, television aerials have shrunk in size and the technology has now improved so that television aerials have become the compact roof top Yagi style aerials that are common today.

Nederlands: Schets Yagi antenne (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Although it is obvious from the shape of the Yagi aerials that they receive a directed signal, I suspect that not many people know why they are the shape that they are. There is only one element that picks up the signal and that is one of the cross bars on the main shaft of the aerial. All others elements (including the mesh element at the back if there is one) serve to concentrate and direct the incoming signal towards the main element or dipole.

This means that the aerial can pick out weaker signals from general noise but it does mean that the aerial must be aligned fairly accurately with the transmitters signal.

There is a new type of aerial that has become common in recent years and that is the dish aerial. Dish aerials are generally used to pick up signals from stationary satellites and need to detect weak signals broadcast from space. The actual dipole is in the small plastic box in front of the dish. The dish is a passive reflector and just concentrates the small signal onto the dipole in the box, much like the Yagi aerial does for UHF frequencies. Satellite signals are of even higher frequency than the UHF ones.



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In the early days of broadcasting and with the use of VHF frequencies, ghosting was a problem. Because early aerials (and “the rabbit’s ear” type of aerials) were not particularly directional they could receive signals which had bounced off various obstacles on their way from the transmitter to the receiver. The reflection from obstacles such as hills and large buildings meant that the receiver would collect signals which had travelled by different routes and hence had taken slightly different times to reach it.

The result of this was that the images on the screen either appeared to have shadows or duplicates. This phenomenon was called “ghosting” and in a bad case it might appear that in a broadcast soccer match that the match was being contested by two teams of twenty two players using two balls.



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This phenomenon is not often seen these days as UHF signals and satellite signals are much more directional and hence do not receive signals bounced from obstacles in their line of view which has a much narrower angle.

In the early days of television technology the electronic equipment in the receivers was in its infancy. The circuits leaked signals between their parts, and components were not as stable as they are today. Valves and other components had to “warm up” to operating temperature and often the oscillators and other circuits tended to “drift” away from the nominal operating frequencies.



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In real terms this meant that those watching the program would often find that the picture would appear to roll up or down the screen. Someone would have to leap up and twiddle the controls at the back of the television to try to stop the picture rolling. Very often the twiddler would adjust the control to stop the rolling, only to find that his or her very presence had affected the circuits and the screen would start to roll as soon as he or she moved away.

Other effects would cause other issues. Unstable circuits would cause the image to shake like a jelly, or tear completely in one or more places. It was a true art form to twiddle the available knobs (of which there were many) to produce a decent and more or less stable picture.



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Screens were small. Early sets had dimensions of perhaps 9 inches (23 cms). Today screens of 50 inches or more are common. Each screen had (in the UK at least) 405 lines all of which were scanned in one or more cycles. The early television tubes were not very accurate and each line could be clearly seen, and so sometimes could the “flyback” as the circuitry returned the beam to the top of the screen for the next scan.

The end effect was a small picture blurred by circuitry instabilities, often with artifacts like the “flyback” lines polluting the picture, and plagued by instabilities, but which showed pictures of news around the world, or educational programs or discussion panels, plays or game shows. And they even broadcast cartoons for the kids. Everyone wanted one, of course!



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Obviously things improved very quickly. Television electronics became much better, and the pictures much more stable especially when transistors were introduced. The screen increased in size, and colour television was introduced. Some would argue that the quality of the television content has dropped dramatically, but that doesn’t change the fact that most people have one or more televisions in their house and it has become the central focus of many lounges and living rooms. Many people have them in bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens these days.



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It is ironic that broadcast television may well have peaked. More and more people use their television sets to show content that has not been broadcast, but which has been obtained over the Internet. It may be that this network distributed content may totally displace the broadcast television service and that people will no longer be tied to a broadcast schedule, picking up content that they want to watch from a myriad of Internet sources.

In the Zone

(Ugh! I forgot to post this last week. My apologies)

Programming, as I’ve probably said before is a strange occupation. You start with a blank sheet, steal bits and pieces from where ever you can find them and glue them together modify them, add some bits of original (to you) code and try to think of all the possible ways your program can go wrong.

Then you try and break your code (and usually succeed at first). Programming is still very much an art form. Of course things have changed a lot over the years, and we are able to use the work of others to help us in our endeavours, but my first paragraph is still true.

In the beginning there was “Hello World”. This is probably the simplest program that does something visible. It doesn’t take any information in and its output, the words “Hello” and “World” are not very useful in themselves. Actually, I’d say that there is an even simpler program that takes no input, produces no output, and in the process changes nothing. A “null” program if you like.

A programmer writing a new program may well jump in and start coding by grabbing some other code that he or she has access to, but that stolen code was developed, ultimately, from “Hello World” or the null program.

Picture of "hello world" in C by Use... — Picture of “hello world” in C by User:aarchiba. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A good programmer is one who steals code from elsewhere and modifies it to do what he or she wants. There is no stigma of plagiarism attached to this process, and it is in fact strongly encouraged that programmers share code. A spoof news item that I came across stated that all programming courses would be replaced with a course on how to find code on “Stack Overflow“. I’ve been unable to find the link again, but I believe that the item was on “The Onion“, a well known satirical website.

Of course, such a process may propagate errors or bugs across many programs, but it is such an effective strategy that it is used more often than not. If code exists to solve a problem then it would be silly to pass it by and write it ones self, maybe introducing bugs to the code. The advantage of “borrowing” code is that while errors and bugs may be in the borrowed code, many eyes will have looked at the code and there is nothing more that programmers like than pointing out bugs in the code of other programmers.

Stack Overflow allows anyone to post code and comment (up to a point), so code posted may not be top quality, but other programmers are quick to jump if they see bugs or inefficiencies in code. Contributors will also point out code which doesn’t follow standards or conventions in the programming language being used. This is considered useful, as the code, if modified, can be accessed and understood more easily, and may often be safer and free of more bugs than unconventional code.



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When a program is written it starts out as literally a few lines of code or even an empty file. Any programmer knows that a program grows swiftly and in ways that can’t be foreseen until it may be of enormous size. It won’t be all written in one sitting but is usually written in stages. I personally like to write my programs in very small chunks, building on what has gone before. I think that many programmers use this process, though there may be others who write a sizeable chunk of code before testing it.

Ah, testing! Testing is the less enthralling parts of writing programs. Any program must be tested, to ensure that it does all that is required and nothing else. Generally the program being written doesn’t do all that is required and does things that shouldn’t happen, and initially it is likely to crash or produce cryptic error messages under some conditions.



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Testing is supposed to reduce the number of such unwanted happenings, and the programmer may do some rudimentary testing and may handle at least some errors. However the programmer will realise that users who are unfamiliar with how the program is written may well do something that he has not expected.

So clever people have developed ways of automatically testing programs. To do this they have had to write the programs that are used to test programs. And of course those testing programs may have bugs. You can see where that leads to!

Zebra (programming language) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When a programmer knows a programming language really well, he is able to literally think in that language. The word “literally” has been devalued in recent time, but I am using it in the true sense of the word. This is hard for some people to understand as they think of language as something like French or Tagalog, and they can’t understand how one can think in a programming language, which is qualitatively different from a spoken language.

An interesting thing happens when a true programmer is programming something. His thought processes become so involved in the process of programming and in thinking in the programming language that he loses track of the outside world. That’s why programmers are whimsically thought to subsist on fizzy energy drinks and dialled in pizza. It is because those things are easily acquired and the programmer can keep programming.



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A programmer “in the zone” is so embedded in the world of the program that he or she may often be reluctant to leave that world and respond to irritations like bodily needs and colleagues. I doubt that there is a real programmer who has not surfaced from a deep dive into the depths of a programming problem and realised that all his colleagues have left and it is late at night or very early in the morning. That’s the reason programmers stay after all other people have left – they know that they can slay the current bug with just a few more changes and a few more runs of the program.

The zone has similarities to the state of meditation. While meditation is passive though, programming is an active state. In both cases the person basically disconnects from the world, so far as he or she can, and the concentration is directed internally. Now that I think about it, any deep thought, be it meditation, programming, or philosophising, even playing a sport at a very high level, needs such concentration that much of the world is disregarded and the exponent enters the zone.



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Weather, seasons and Christmas

At this time of the year, we are looking forward to spring, even though spring is officially about a month and a half away, which puts us slap in the middle of winter. There are signs, though, that spring is around the corner. Plants which bloom early in the year are starting to show signs of life, and the buds on some trees are showing some green as they prepare to burst into green bunches of leaves.

Every burst of clear weather seems to produce both warmth during the days and frostiness during the night. It seems that each cycle is slightly warmer than the last but that might just be me wishing an end to winter! The wetter times don’t seem to be bringing the freezing cold wintry blasts, though there is the occasional shower of hail or sleet mixed in.

English: Snow pellet/Graupel Français : Grain ... — English: Snow pellet/Graupel Français : Grain de neige roulée (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The main reason for the hope that winter is drawing to a close is the now noticeable lengthening of the days. The day length is up from 9 hours and 12 minutes or so at the solstice to 10 hours and 12 minutes or so today. The day is lengthening at a rate of more than 2 minutes per day at the moment.

I don’t mind the cold as such. It’s the constant shrugging on and off of clothes as one transitions between indoors and outdoors that bugs me, and the necessity of keeping the house warm, which in itself means going outdoors to fetch fuel, which of course involves donning extra clothing and all the annoyances which go with that.

There is a sort of seasonal drag in the clothing department, incidentally. I’ve noticed that I tend to resist slinging on the extra clothing in autumn and early winter and I’m likewise reluctant to take it off as the weather and temperatures improve.

Of course, July and August are the warmer months in the Northern hemisphere and northerners will be experiencing shorter days and colder weather. As we track in to spring you Northerners will be heading towards autumn and eventually winter. We will be looking forward to spring and summer, which pretty much bracket Christmas for us.



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Of course, since I originate from the Northern hemisphere myself I have had to become accustomed to having Christmas in summer and I personally think it’s great. With Christmas at the start of summer we can enjoy it without the hassle of keeping warm. It does make the traditional northern Christian festival meal seem a bit heavy though and who want to roast a turkey for hours in warm weather?

It does conflate two events however – the Christmas holiday period and the traditional summer holidays which seem to merge seamlessly into one another. One effect of this is that people seem to be unavailable from Christmas Eve through to the beginning of February, which was something that I had trouble adjusting to when I moved here.

Tradesmen tend to be unavailable from the start of the Christmas period well into the New Year and some smaller shops also close for an extra week or two. Obviously this has its advantages for the shop keepers, but I still feel disappointed when my favourite barber is closed until mid-January!

We have a Public Holiday for the Queen’s Birthday in June (June 1 this year) and the next Public Holiday is on October 26, which means that there is almost 5 months of the year without a Public Holiday during the darkest part of the year. One advantage of having Christmas in mid-winter is that it gives one something to look forward to as the days close in.

Winter is cold, obviously, but that in itself is bearable (up to a point). But there’s a phenomenon called the “chill factor” which makes windy winter days seem much colder. My weather app on my phone tells me that the temperature outside is 6.9 degrees centigrade, but the it “feels like: 4 degrees centigrade. It recommends 3 – 4 layers of clothing and a windproof layer. Brrrrr! Fortunately it doesn’t seem too wet out so walking the dog should not be too arduous.

In this season of the year we tend to get low pressure system after low pressure system forming in the Tasman Sea which bring cold fronts across the country with associated fronts bringing storms and rains. Sometimes they come down from the tropics and hit us from the north, usually bringing warmer but wetter weather from the north. We tend to get better more settled weather when a high pressure system comes to us, spun off from a high pressure system over Australia.

(I took a break and walked the dog. While we out we were hit by what you could euphemistically call a “wintry shower”. In other words, wind, hail and rain!)

Many people from the Northern hemisphere tend to find Christmas in summer unsettling, but I quite like it. I’m not a barbecue person, but the occasional meal taken outside is very pleasant, and it is becoming more usual over here to have a barbecue on Christmas Day. Another advantage is that when one is Christmas shopping one doesn’t have to dodge the weather as one dashes between shops and fights one’s way through the crowds of late shoppers, all after that elusive and critical last gift.

However, although I think that mulled wine is an abomination, there is something pleasant about sipping your favourite alcoholic tipple in front of a roaring fire. Maybe while doing something traditional, like listening to a CD of carols carefully enunciated by Korean choirs who have no word of the English language and who have little to no idea about the traditions involved.

One thing about having winter at this time of the year, it means that I can tease relatives who live in the Northern hemisphere as we climb up towards warmer weather while they slide down to autumn and winter. However I have to acknowledge that they can get their revenge in six months later as the cycle of the seasons continues to repeat. I’ll be looking out the thermal undies when they start talking about snowdrops and crocuses.



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Time and time again



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Well, this will be my third post in a row about time. I think I’ll discuss something else next week!

As I’ve said before, the path of a particle as it travels through space in the usual way can be represented as a line in a four-dimensional space-time system. There will be one and one line only that represents the history of the particle from the time it is created until the moment that it is annihilated. If we decide to plot only this particle’s location over time there will be no others lines in this space.

Diagram showing phase space plot of particle u... — Diagram showing phase space plot of particle undergoing betatron motion (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The path will twist and turn as the particle is affected by fields and other particles. It may take a sudden turn when our particle collides with another particle. This interaction can be visualised by adding the data about the other particle to the same space-time graphs. However, since the particle is constantly jostled by other particles the diagram would quickly become crowded so to keep it simple let’s drop out the lines of all the other particles.

So we are back to the original single line we started out with. If we assume that it can’t time travel, there will be no loops and gaps in the line. In other words, for every time between its creation and destruction there will be one and only one set of three space coordinates. Of course the line will have curves and kinks as the particle interacts with other particles and fields.

English: The Markov chain for the drunkard’s walk (a type of random walk) on the real line starting at 0 with a range of two in both directions. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Suppose we allow choice into our system. Suppose we have two choices A and B. At the point that the choice is made (at a macro level), there are two possibilities for the space-time position of the particle. From that point on the particles history could be represented by an A line and a B line, which at first glance appears to contravene the single point rule. However by making a choice we are saying that either A will occur, OR B will occur, but not both, so we really have only one line.

A choice is not the same as travelling in time though, so let’s plot A AND B, and we will get a multiply branching tree of lines as the time line splits on every point where a choice is made.

The question arises as to which of these lines is the “real” life line of the particle. This we don’t know in advance because we don’t know what the choice will be, which leaves us in the uncomfortable situation of having something unpredictable happening and physics deals in things that can be predicted.

When a choice is made by someone, it is highly likely that one option is much more likely than the other. Maybe the probability is 0.8 to 0.2 (80:20 in percentage terms). Another way of looking at it is to say that, all other things being equal, if the choice were to come up 100 times, A would be chosen 80 times and B would be chosen 20 times. Of course in a 100 tests, it could be that the actual figures might be 79 and 21.

It would be highly unlikely that A would be chosen once and B chosen 99 times in 100 trials of course, but it remains possible. (We have to remember that the circumstances of the choice must be identical, that is, all other things being equal)

We could incorporate this into our system by adding a “probability” axis (running from 0 to 1, or equivalently to 0 to 100). A point on this axis would represent the probability of the choice that was made and the whole sheet represents the life of the particle.



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It appears that two points on the line are axis, the ones at 0.8 and 0.2 are “special”. In the stated situation those at two probabilities of the outcomes A and B. The probability of any other outcome say Z are zero and effectively outcome Z does not exist.

All things being equal there appears to be no physical reason why someone would choose one option over another. It may be that, all things being equal, that one option gets chosen more often than the other, but the sum of all the probabilities is one – in other words it is absolutely certain that one of the options is chosen. I find this totally mysterious. A choice is an event where the outcome is not dictated by the prior history of the event and is decided by the person making the choice.

English: Figure 1. Demonstration of the decisi... — English: Figure 1. Demonstration of the decision space (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However the person’s mind is making the decision, and the person’s mind is equivalent to the state of his/her brain and the state of his/her brain is determined by physics, chemistry and biology. I see no “wriggle room” to allow for a person to make a choice.

Can we solve this dilemma by introspection? Descartes looked within himself and concluded that “I think therefore I am“. I don’t know if Descartes intended or realised it, but the implication is that thinking, which happens in the mind/brain, occurs before consciousness. In other words, consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the mind, just as the mind is an epiphenomenon of the brain.



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Why then do we think that we make choices and decide things? Well, by introspection I can look at any decision that I have made and I can always point at reasons why I made the choice. Well, of course this may be simple rationalisation. We look at the decision that we made we look at the reasons that might explain why we chose that course and we pick and choose the ones that we like.

While that may be the reasons that we give, and some of them may be true, I do believe that we have reasons for what we do, but those reasons are physical – the configuration of our brains, as a result of past events and happenings, results in a foregone conclusion – we perform an action which looks to the outside world like a decision.

For instance, if we are filling in a form and we are required to check a box, we “choose” the box depending completely on what has gone before. If the boxes are “Male” or “Female” we know what sex we are so naturally we would choose the correct box. No real decision is made. If we are annoyed at the form or we are in a joking mood we might tick the wrong box. It depends on our state of mind before making the decision what we do, and it depends only on that.

English: checkbox, check box, tickbox, tick bo... — English: checkbox, check box, tickbox, tick box Italiano: checkbox, check box, tickbox, tick box (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Time Travelling

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Time stories have been around for years, and yet we have seen no time travellers. If there are time travellers, then they are hiding from us. That would be pretty hard, since society and language are changing all the time, and they would most likely look out of place.

If they came from the past, their mannerisms, clothing and use of language would likely give them away. Imagine someone from the time of Sir Francis Drake appearing in the current era. He would quickly be spotted.



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For someone travelling from the past, the issue is that he or she would not know what to expect as the present is the future of times past, so they would not be able to prepare themselves for the future, as they would consider it.

If a citizen of the future where to travel to the current time, he or she could presumably prepare his/herself for what would be the past to him/her. The time traveller could learn about our era and equip him/herself with clothes, money and other things from our era and would be able to learn the idioms of the language of the current time, as well as the ethics and morals of the era.

There are web sites on the Internet which claim to have proof of time travel (I’m not going to link to one – a Google search will bring up many of them). In most cases the evidence is far from compelling, relying on blurry photographs and dubious eye witness accounts.

I’ve recently been scanning my old photographic slides and in one of them, from the early 1980s or late 1970s, the person in the picture appears to be holding an iPad! What in fact she is holding is a place mat, with a cream coloured border and relatively dark picture on it. This demonstrates how easily “evidence” of time travel can be found if you look hard, and if you strongly believe that time travel is possible.

Every person, every object, even every elementary particle has position which can be measured (leaving aside the issue of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Quantum Physics for now) at any moment in time. The four dimensions, three of space and one of time uniquely identify an event in the life of the person, object or particle.

These four coordinates represent a single point in a four dimensional space. Since we find four dimensions hard to visualise, this space/time is usually represent by a depiction of a three dimensional space of two space and one time coordinate axes. The path of a person, object or particle through life consists of a single unbroken line in the four dimensional space.

Note that in time dimension, if time travel is not possible, for every value of the time coordinate there will only be one point of the person’s life line. In other words, while the person could visit and revisit the same three dimension spot in space many time, they will only pass through a particular time once and once only. A person’s now is unique.

Time travel means that a person could pass through the same moment in time multiple times, and the possibility arises of loops in time. It seems obvious that the same event could not appear on the time traveller’s life line. In other words the loops in a life line would not cross.

To get from one event in space/time to an earlier event in space/time, the person could either travel through the intervening times or just jump from the first event to the second. In other words time travel if it is possible would be represented by a line going backwards in time or it could be discontinuous, with a break the in the person’s time line.

From the point of view of an observer, a discontinuous time line for the time traveller would be seen as a sudden appearances from nowhere and a later sudden disappearance. If the time line is contiguous, the observer would again see a sudden appearance of the time traveller, and then two instances of the time traveller both apparently travelling into the future at one second per second.



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One will be the time traveller doing just that, and the other will be the observer’s view of the time traveller as he travels backwards in time. Eventually the observer will see one of the instances (people!) merge with another instance of the time traveller and disappear. Since we don’t normally observe such sudden appearances and disappearances it’s very tempting to say that time travel does not happen.

To see what I mean, take a piece of paper and draw a line from top to bottom with a look in it. Now horizontal lines across the page represent time as seen by the observer. If you move a ruler down the page, at first there is a single line, the time line of time traveller. But at the point that the time travellers has travelled back to, suddenly there are (apparently) three lines travelling down the page. At the point that the time traveller travels from, two of the lines merge and disappear.

English: Meter stamp catalog image, three stac... — English: Meter stamp catalog image, three stacked horizontal lines (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If time travel is discontinuous the observer would first see one instance of the traveller, and then another instance would pop into existence. The two would coexist for a time, and then one instance (the original one) would disappear, with the second continuing to exist.

As I said, it’s tempting to say that this proves that time travel is not possible. Certainly, a macro level we don’t see people appearing and disappearing so it is definitely very unlikely, though reasons for this not to be noticed can be constructed.

At an atomic level though, we do see spontaneous generation of particles, into a particle and its anti-particle. If the anti-particle the meet another particle and they annihilate one another, this could be construed to be a single particle with the anti-particle being the particle travelling back in time.

This is bad news for time travellers. To travel back in time by this method, the time traveller would have to be zapped into a burst of energy and an anti-traveller who would then travel back in time to the earlier time when a burst of anti-energy would be required to zap the anti-traveller into another instance of the time traveller. These occurrences would be likely to destroy the integrity of the time traveller’s body. That is it would destroy it.

Cold

At the time that I write this the temperature at this desk is 12.7 degrees Centigrade. Of course it will warm up soon, but overnight the temperature drops dramatically at this time of year. I hate the cold. As the saying goes it makes your bones ache.

The climate here is “cool to warm temperate”. This means that places in the south see low temperatures which drop to zero degrees Centigrade or a few degrees below, with occasional falls to lower temperatures in some places. Snow rarely lasts long except of course in the mountains and hills.

A powder snow avalanche (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the north, places like Auckland rarely drop to zero, remaining a few degrees above zero in most winters. Auckland and further north rarely experience snow, and a flurry of sleet in Auckland would usually gets a mention on the television news.

While snow rarely lasts long at low altitudes, it tends to come in quantity when it does, closing hill roads and even sometimes brings southern cities to a halt. Dumps at higher altitudes can of course cause severe issues to farmers. The farmers’ worst nightmare is a dry summer and autumn resulting in low yields from pastures followed by an early heavy fall of snow.

Of course the skiers rejoice when there is a snow dump and they head for the many ski fields in their hundreds sometimes causing traffic jams on the access roads! Snow for skiing can be undependable so most major ski fields have snow generating machinery as a backup.

When the snow melts the rivers rise of course. New Zealand rivers can be chillingly cold as a result. Many parts of the country have what is know as braided rivers, which appear to be mostly boulder filled for much of the time. Sometimes during a dry spell it may be possible to cross the river from bank to bank without getting one’s feet wet, while a surprising amount of water travels below the surfaces between the boulders.

When there is a thaw or after heavy rain such rivers rapidly fill and the water rises to the surface, creating a broad and sometimes heavy flow filling the river bed from bank to bank. The flow can be impressive, carrying large trees and other debris from the higher altitudes down to the lower altitudes.

Consequently there are long bridges on these braided rivers that seem to mostly traverse an expanse of rocks and boulders with maybe a relatively small looking river, possibly split into several channels.

Sometimes the boulder banks are populated by Russell lupins, which can block and change the nature of these braided rivers. While picturesque, the lupins are an introduced species and can damage the river’s ecosystem.

The water in the rivers is cold and can be bone-achingly cold as the water is mainly melted snow from the Southern Alps and other mountain ranges. Consequently swimming in such rivers can be challenging. I have swum in a river in the United Kingdom, wearing a wetsuit, with chunk of ice floating down the river, and that was an experience that I will not forget. The rivers here are likely to be at least as cold.

Ice is a strange substance. Well, perhaps that should be water is a strange substance. As water is cooled its volume reduces, like other substances. When it reaches four degrees Centigrade however it reaches a maximum density and then starts to expand again, which is counter intuitive. The reason for this behaviour is related to the way that water molecules link weakly to one another, as a result of the polar nature of the water molecule.

So water at 3 degrees Centigrade is lighter than water at 4 degrees Centigrade and so tends to move to the surface of the water. At 0 degrees Centigrade the water turns to ice, which floats on top of the liquid. This allows all sorts of things and protects fish and other aquatic organisms from the elements and from freezing solid, up to a point. It also allows us to skate on the surface of frozen bodies of water since the slight pressure of the blades causes the ice to temporarily melt.

When a human body gets cold, the body has various defences. As warm blooded animals we need to maintain our body temperature and if we don’t we die. So, when we get cold, blood flows to the centres of our bodies to maintain our core temperature, which means that our hands and feet become significantly colder than the rest of our bodies.

If the cold reaches into our core bodies, things start to shut down and hypothermia sets in. Brain function is hit hard and we start to behave irrationally and we would be in danger of dying. Fortunately as humans we have invented things like fire, houses, and clothing to keep us warm when the weather is cold. I personally have problems with maintaining heat as I do not like to wear gloves and I don’t like any form of headgear!

Another thing that I find in cold weather is that my breath passes over my moustache and beard so in colder weather the moisture in my breath condenses on my moustache and beard making them wet, and if it is cold enough the condensed moisture will freeze. My moustache and beard develop icicles.

On cold days everyone likes to sit beside the fire. An open fire, though, is horrendously inefficient! Even a free-standing stove, which radiates heat into the room, sends much of the heat directly up the chimney or flue. Even the radiant heat quickly rises to warm the air in the ceiling of the room. To add insult to injury, the air that keeps the fire burning is drawn from other places in the house, and has to be replaced by cold, cold air drawn into the house making these other places even colder.

I’ll conclude by noting that the days are becoming longer and while we are still in the depths of winter, spring is around the corner. Indeed, some early blooming plants are already showing signs of life, although they won’t amount to much until later in the year. The day length here will increase by one minute and 11 seconds tomorrow, and this rate of increase will grow rapidly until the equinox (around 21 September) by which time we should be much more cosy. However due to seasonal lag, we may still have the coldest times for this year ahead of us.

Rising San Bernard River causes flooding in Fort Bend County neighborhood

Teamwork and sport

First soccer team of Bagé, called Sport Club B... — First soccer team of Bagé, called Sport Club Bagé, in 1906. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A team is an interesting thing – a group of people all with the same aim, working together to some sort of objective. Individually each person knows his role in the team and relies on others in the team to achieve the desired objective. There is a great deal of trust in such a group relationship, as one under performing member can result in the team as a whole reaching their goal.

This interdependence of the team members can lead to strong bonds outside of the group project – the members of a successful team are frequently close friends outside of the team environment. This can make it difficult for a new team member to fit in initially.

There may be personality clashes within a team, leading perhaps to physical interactions between team players. The scuffles and fights may well “clear the air”, and allow the team to function better in the team environment with most of the interpersonal tensions resolved or reduced. A divided team will never perform as well as a united team.

A team will have its support staff – in a sports context it will have the manager, the coach, the medical staff, the team drivers and so on. They are so important that they could be considered to be a part of the team, even though they don’t actually play the games themselves in the most part.

This inclusiveness can of course be expanded out as far as the supporters of the team, but this is not usually done. In amateur sport there is more reason to include the supporters as they are usually mothers or fathers of team player and often fill the roles of coaches and managers and provide transport to match for the players.



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Supporters of a professional sports team do have a large role to fulfil though, that of providing the revenue for the team, the support staff, the stadium, and other ongoing expenses.

They also provide support on the game day, but I wonder how much that has an effect. Obviously the crowd will make a noise when the teams first come out onto the field, but when the game is being played it is likely that the players will be concentrating on the game and the crowd noise will just be a background noise.



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Nevertheless, the crowd does have an effect. When the teams come on to the field the players have the leisure to hear them and respond to them and when the team is pressing for a score, the sound level from the supporters is going to increase and be noticeable to the players. However the intensity of play of the attacking team is liable to be higher at those times anyway.

There have been times when matches have been played to empty stadiums, either for safety reasons or if it is expected that friction between the fans would cause violence. Sometimes I, seem to remember, teams can be penalised for some off field offence committed by the fans, the management or the players.

It would be interesting to get the teams view of what it is like to play to an empty stadium, but I don’t know if the players have been seriously asked to report what it is like. It’s unlikely to have no effect!

In sport at the grass roots level players are unlikely to specialise over much. They all may take turns at being goalie for example and every kid wants to score goals or touchdowns. Coaches at this level often enforce substitutions and switches so that every kid gets a go and enjoys himself/herself. That’s what sport is about at that level.



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But even at a quite low level player start to specialise, fulfilling a specialist role in the team as defender, or attacker, or bowler or batsman. One player will also be called on to be captain, and read the run of the game and set the strategy. Sometimes the strategic role will not be on the field as in American Football where the coach may make the strategic calls. In this case the captain’s role is much reduced.

Sports, especially the contact sports, can be considered to be ritualised warfare or at least ritualised conflict. It can possibly reduce tensions between different nations or rival groups, but is rarely specifically undertaken to do so, and indeed supporters sometimes come to blows during tense matches. Sportsmen who through personality or skill have an impact on the course of the game are treated like heroes.

Sport sometimes makes the players very rich. At the top levels of basketball and in English soccer, for example, players may make millions of dollars or pounds during a relatively short career. Other may only earn relatively little. In order to try to prevent this becoming out of hand some sports use a “salary cap” to restrict excessive salaries and allow relatively poor clubs to compete on a more level basis with the richer clubs.

Fairness is considered to be obligatory in sport, at all levels. If a player is considered to have behaved unfairly he or she will be punished according to the laws of the sport. He or she may be ejected from the field of play or even the game. His or her team may have points deducted or the other team may be given a temporary advantage. The overall intent is to allow the team who are best on merit to win the match.

It is a fact of life that, especially in contact sports, that players get injured. This may be in accidental incidents on the field of play, such as a collision between two players or they may occur as a result of stress as the player exerts himself or herself in playing the game.

New players may temporarily or permanently replace injured players, and old players may “retire” from the game. The team will be constantly changing and the skill of the captain and the other players in supporting players leaving or joining the team can go along way to ensuring that the team relationships are harmonious and the team melds into an efficient unit.



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