Reenigne blog

Last weekend, one of my car's dashboard warning lights came on. I cursed slightly, because that usually means a fair bit of expense and inconvenience. This proved to be the case this time too - so far its cost $500, the car has been at the menders for 3 days and the light is still on.

One up side is that this has caused me to do some research on the parts of my car that went wrong, and they were two parts that I had no idea even existed.

One is the Exhaust Gas Recirculation Valve. This pumps a small amount of exhaust gas back into the cylinder towards the end of the ignition cycle to cool the reaction and inhibit the oxidation of nitrogen. I knew about NOx pollution from secondary school chemistry but didn't know this was how it was fixed in modern cars.

The other is the carbon canister, which adsorbs vapors from the fuel tank, preventing these vapors from leaking out into the environment while allowing the pressure in the tank to equalize with the external pressure.

Fascinating stuff.

My favourite of the Star Trek serieses has to be The Next Generation. The Original Series was groundbreaking for its time but I don't think it has aged well and now looks very silly and dated. The more recent series never quite recaptured the spirit and originality of TNG. There were some truly marvellous pieces of TV in that series, such as:

• The outwitting of Moriarty in "Ship in a bottle"
• The entire episode "The Inner Light" (I was so engrossed that I had forgotten I was watching TV by the end)

And, of course, there is the episode "Hide and Q" where Picard (surely one of the greatest characters in all of TV) defeats an immortial, omnipresent, omniscient alien by quoting Shakespeare at him! What could possibly be more awesome than that?

I enjoy a good conspiracy theory, be it about Roswell aliens in Area 51, Princess Diana being killed by a hitman working for the Queen, or Elvis being alive and well and living in Norway/Dunedin/North Moravia. I guess it's because I'd love to believe that there are secrets which, if widely known, would turn the entire world on its head.

So it was with some delight that I found the 9/11 research site. It does actually stop short of saying "we think that George W. Bush and his cronies organized the whole thing and that the WTC towers were destroyed by explosives", but only just. I'm not completely convinced by their arguments. For one thing, I can't imagine how anyone could have wired up the towers with demolition explosives without enough people finding out about it that someone would have spilt the beans. For all their secrecy, the Bush administration leaks information like a sieve, and I very much doubt all of those leaks are on purpose.

However, it is interesting to read all the unanswered questions about that day, like:

1. What was up with all the airline stock shorts, unusual credit-card transactions and warned government officials/business leaders before the attacks?
2. Why were the hijacked flights not intercepted?
3. How did a jet-fuel fuelled fire get hot enough to melt steel supporting columns?
4. Why did the towers collapse vertically and at almost free-fall speeds?
5. How come the surveillance video of the plane hitting the Pentagon has never been released?
6. Why does the Bin Laden look nothing like himself in the video purporting to show him confessing to the attacks?

The other day, I got into a loop trying to find a conference room on the first floor of the building where I work. Normally there is a fairly simple algorithm for finding a conference room in a Microsoft building:

1. Wander about
2. Stop when you find the room, or when you find a sign. If you found a sign,
3. Find the line of the sign which has a range of room numbers including the number you want
4. Go in the direction of the arrow on that line of the sign, and back to step 2.

However, I was foiled on this particular morning as sign A pointed in the direction of sign B, and sign B pointed in the direction of sign A, but the conference room in question was not in between the two signs! Fortunately, I realized the problem after only 3 or 4 iterations, and was not late to my meeting.

According to the Guinness book of World Records, the shortest adult human ever recorded was 57cm (1 foot 10.4 inches) tall, and the tallest was 272cm (8 feet 11.1 inches) tall. But these are extremes. 95% of human heights fall within a range of about one foot.

This is roughly what it would look like if a 272cm tall man stood next to a 57cm tall man. Similarly with the largest and smallest recorded dogs:

I wonder what life would be like for a population of people whose sizes varied much more widely, for example if individuals as tall as 100m and as short as 10cm were not uncommon (but in which the total volume of the people whose size lies in some interval would be roughly proportional to the size of the interval, so there would be a lot more small people than large people). I imagine that such a population would have incredible architecture, as their buildings would have be extremely large (for the tallest people) yet extremely detailed (to be useful for the smallest people).

Nobody has the right to not be offended. Discuss.

Why is it that one's own dreams are absolutely fascinating, but the dreams of others are generally quite dull to read? I guess dreams tend only to make sense to their owners. Looking back at my "ideas for blog posts" file, I found the following idea which I wrote down after dreaming it. At the time it seemed like a fantastic idea for a slightly surreal sci-fi story. Now it is just hilariously ridiculous:

Aliens taking the form of sticky spots invade dinner parties across Earth. Attracted to cheese sauce stains and killed by Martinis. They form geometric patterns on surfaces, as each needs to be the correct distance from its neighbours and must be next to an even number of other live aliens. So by killing or removing one alien one can cause a chain reaction leading to all but one alien disappearing. Trying to find a way to eliminate them once and for all.

Between late 1999 and early 2001 I wrote down all the dreams I could remember. In the process of writing this post I went back and re-read them all (something I haven't done since I wrote them down in the first place). Most are completely meaningless drivel like the above, but there are a few I do still remember, years later. For some of them it's just a particular colour or smell or feeling that I remember, for others it's all sorts of minute details. I wonder why some dreams I remember well and others have completely vanished from my memory. I suspect that it is something to do with how many times you recall the dream after waking, but I haven't done any experiments to verify this.