I'm going

I'll be away from the internet all week so I thought I would add some links.

Molly's back.
Some stories are just plain fucked up
yes there are some stupid physists

I'm out.

Physics topics for beginners part 1: Entropy

I've decided that lots of people don't really understand some commonly used concepts in physics, and I should try to spread information about their true meanings. The two I'll do first are entropy and energy, because those are the two most misused.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to those who don't understand entropy because it is a pretty strange concept. It's usually described as the disorder in a system, and although that is true, that can be misleading unless you know what entropy really is. Entropy, most fundamentally, can be said to be a measure of the homogeneity of the system. In everyday language that means how mixed together things are: the entropy is at maximum when the system is totally mixed together and is identical everywhere. How do I come to this conclusion? For this we need to use a little simplified quantum mechanics.

Let's say you have a switch: it can be either on or off. If you have two switches they can be either all on, all off, or one on and one off. Let us say that we can't tell the switches apart, then any combination of one on and one off is identical. So there are two ways of getting one on and one off, but only one way of getting both on or both off. As you keep adding switches there are more and more ways of arranging things so that they all look the same. The entropy of one of these combinations is defined as being proportional to (actually the logarithm of) the number of ways of arranging it without changing how it looks.

From that it is easy to see that the highest entropy will be when exactly half of the switches are on and half are off. The second law of thermodynamics (entropy of a closed system never decreases) is easy to see as probabilities: the most likely combination is the highest entropy one, so with large numbers of switches you are extremely unlikely to go from higher to lower entropy.

Now how does this discussion of switches relate to reality? In quantum mechanics things (for example atoms or molecules) have distinct states, some times two or three (or another whole number), but usually an infinite amount, making the math much more difficult, but the parallels to the switches example are obvious.

If you have any questions leave comments.

ps. The reason I did the entropy one first is that creationists are always misusing the second law of thermodynamics to try to refute evolution. The part the forget of course is the "closed system" part (hmm... could there be a massive heat source not too far from the earth?), but their objections are based on a misunderstanding of what entropy is. Life creates entropy, usually by changing chemical energy to heat energy when we metabolize food (this creates entropy because there are more ways of arranging heat energy without changing the total amount then with chemical energy). Entropy has nothing to do with complexity of structure (until you get to really high levels of entropy: at the so called heat death of the universe).

Anyways I don't expect this to stop most creationists from using the second law of thermodynamics as an argument, but at least it gives reasonable people the knowledge to call bullshit on bullshit.

I'm stirring up trouble

So I was over at Bitch Ph.D where she's having a big sex talk. I didn't have much to add, but to discuss the reasons why men are less likely to have serious sex talks with other men. My thought (among other things) is that men are usually homophobic (in that they never want to be thought of as gay), and that in general men are taught not to consider their bodies attractive. This kicked off a big discussion (probably not helped by my initial wording on my comment), so I thought I would put here my full thoughts on male body image.

Basically I know that I don't really consider myself attractive, and I know that many guys that are don't either, however it is more than that (and here is where it differs from women's body image problems), men don't usually think that the male body can be considered attractive (probably as a result of the earlier mentioned homophobia). The end result tends to be misogyny: basically the guy wonders how women can be attracted to men, and decides that they aren't really, they just use sex as a way to get what they want, thus leading to the "all women are whores" sentiment. The solution seems to be convincing men that they too can be attractive, and/or using imagination to imagine that someone can be attracted to something you don't consider attractive.

However most people are products of their environment, and don't have a great amount of imagination, so until society changes there seems to be not much to do. On the other hand society does seem to be changing, and increasing number of men don't follow traditional gender rolls (although metrosexuality doesn't seem like a great thing to aspire to).

anyways, enough on this.

Local music

So on Wednesday I went to a free concert at The Strathmore. There were two bands, one was a sort of art-rock band called Cascade in Blue, and another whose name I forget (a more sort of countryish band). Cascade was pretty good, so I got a CD for $5. I think this underplays the problems with popular music. Most people (in my experience at least) are happy buying CD's, the only problem is that they're all overpriced in stores. When the music is overpriced one of two things will happen: 1. No one will try new music bcause there is too much of an investment involved, 2. People who do want to try new music will do so illigally.

I think this is a large part of the reason why mainstream music has been stagnating in America.

I'm baaack

ok, so I've been back, but I've also been busy, and lacking in computerness (I just built one).

let's see, Belgium is cool, and I wish America was a lot more like Europe. I turned 21 on the 9th, but had been in europe for the month previous, and so was used to legally purchasing booze. umm... yeah that's about it.

Goin' on a plane ride...

On Sunday I go to Belgium for a month (for business, not pleasure... well there may be some pleasure involved ;) so I have a good excuse not to post.

So anyways... Apparently the pope is considering allowing married couples to use condoms to prevent the spread of HIV if one spouse is infect. A tiny, baby step out of the dark ages, that nonetheless is generating a huge controversy. I never got the argument against birth control, the arguments seem to come down to two things 1. that people will have more sex if birth control is allowed (oh, horrors of horrors, people having sex!), which is a stupid argument because people have sex anyways, and birth control at least reduces the chance of pregnancy and, with some kinds of birth control, STDs. Argument 2 is that no birth control is 100% effective, no, but compared to the rhythm method they work pretty damn good. So I guess that it all comes down to the catholic church (and all opponents of birth control) are against people enjoying sex, something that seems pretty self-defeating, since if people didn't like sex none of us would be here.

I'm tempted to go on a long rant about how religion is the root of all evil, but that would be exaggerating, the better way of saying it already has, too bad I forgot who said it:

In a world without gods good men would do good, and evil men would do evil, but for good men to do evil, that takes religion

A Busy Weekend

So I went to the Pi Nu Convention over the weekend. It was held at Millersville, PA, which is a dying chapter, there is like one active member, so attendance was a bit slim. After the convention there was the banquet, complete with a DJ. DJs always make me nervous because I fear that they will only play music that I don't like, but this guy took requests, and one thing that happens when you fill a room with musicians is that good music gets chosen. After that I drove to Philly and visited friends and went to the Pi Nu bid acceptance dinner and then returned home.

To top all that off my car was towed sometime between 10:00 Sunday and 7:00 Monday and I had to spend a large part of the day getting it back.

Anyways interesting. I'll try to post something of substance at some point.