Hello Internet. I’m back.
This is the first time in 4 months that I’ve been home without having something gobbling up most of my time and attention.
It started in late March when Will and his girlfriend visited, and then my nephew and his parents came up to Perth too. I don’t care what other people do, but when there’s a family gathering going on, I try to spend as much time with everyone as possible. If there’s a book I really want to read or a game I really want to play, I’ll wait until a less antisocial time to play it, especially if I won’t see this sibling again for another 8 months.
The problem is that I have five siblings. I can be waiting a long time.
After that, it was my 19th birthday and I thought: “Fuck it. If I don’t plan something for my gap year then I’m never going to do anything.” So I did. I booked my plane and Eurostar tickets for a month exploring France by train. I spent the next couple of weeks planning it all, which was way more stressful than I had imagined it would be. Maybe that’s why I’d been putting it off for so long. But I did a good job, and I learned a few things when doing it, too – most memorably the reason why travel agents still exist.
I even got an extra day to plan, thanks to the ever-giving Iceland, which just happened to be (perhaps) the worst day of my conscious life. I did get to France, eventually, and only two days late, then I spent a month having a really good time – albeit without home comforts and regular internet access. It was an epic adventure, with plenty of stress. More on that another time.
I got back to Perth a month later (after a couple of nights in London) but after watching the Perth Airshow and then walking my Aunt & Uncle’s dogs for a couple of days, June turned into one long family gathering. There was a big birthday as the main event, and throughout the month I saw pretty much all of my family. Meanwhile, towards the end of the month I was faced with the hell of having to pick my perfectly ripe strawberries every day, and I even had to squeeze in a barbecue with that twat Ruairidh.
Two days after all the visitors had left… I was off, too. This time I went to London to stay with Will and then I went to stay with my Dad for a few weeks. These were times to be making the most of the long summer days, visiting places and getting out on our bikes as a family. But again, not much time alone and very limited internet access.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining; I’ve had a really good time and I’d much rather have the year as all summer (when my time seems to be spent like this) than all winter (when I have much more time to myself to follow my selfish whims as much as I want to) if I had to choose. In these last few months, I’ve had more moments of amazement than ever before. All I’m trying to say is that my life has been different for a while, but now I’m happy to back home to enjoy the end of the summer a bit more quietly.
Well, what have I been missing out on?
- Gaming. I don’t remember the last time I seriously played a game. It definitely wasn’t this year. When I’ve got a few minutes with nothing to do, I’ll whip out my iPod and have a go on Tetris, Bejeweled 2, Angry Birds or whatever, but that’s in no way a replacement for proper gaming. I’ve got piles of games in Steam that I’ve bought and never even downloaded, including Left 4 Dead 1 & 2. You’d think with a gap year and no job, that all I’d've been doing was gaming. Nope. Fuck. What have I been doing?
- By the way, I still find it hard to believe how much my iPod touch has changed my life and the extent to which I rely on it to connect with the world. Without it or a similar device, my times away from the internet would be far less rich. Notwithstanding its offline use, it’s so refreshing to be able to use it with an internet connection now that I’m back home. The internet rocks. I can follow links, update Facebook, send emails, even check the weather forecast whenever the hell I want. It’s nice to be home.
- Books? No. One thing that I’ve not missed out on is reading. As you can see, I’ve been managing to read (or listen to) a few books a month, much like I always do. It’s easy to find the time and the space to read a book, and hell, what else are you going to do when you’re alone in France walking around all day? Talk to yourself? Eat your arm? I listened to a load of podcasts there, too.
- Blogging. I actually quite enjoy writing, and not for any egotistic reason. It’s theraputic.
- Photos. I’ve taken thousands of photos whilst I’ve been doing all this stuff, but a lot of the stuff I’ve not even looked at. I’m not pretentious about it, but I take some good photos. I like looking through them, putting them into albums, adjusting them, getting a few nice ones printed and uploading some good’uns to Flickr. That’s something I’ve not done for a while, and I look forward to doing it again.
- But the main thing that I’ve been missing out on? Films. Before returning to Perth last week, and excluding the 8 or so James Bonds that I watched with my Dad, the last proper film I watched was Lars and the Real Girl on 23rd March. And I didn’t even like that film. Yes, I had time when I could have watched some films, but there’s been so much good TV (particularly season finales) to catch up on that I just didn’t get round to it. Anyway, I have time now so I’m trying to rectify this situation: in the last 3 days I’ve watch Kick-Ass, Juno, and Synecdoche, New York. I’ll watch another tonight, too.
Of course, in less than 2 months I’m going to university, and then everything could change. But I don’t think it will change that much: as long as I can cope with the work and am not spending all my time out getting drunk, I’ll have plenty of time to play all the games, read all the books and watch all the films I want. Or maybe I won’t even want to.
Before that, I have this time at home to enjoy. My time is not entirely without demand – there’s quite a bit that I have to do regarding university (mainly money stuff) and my nephew is visiting again at the end of August. Once I’m at university and my sister finishes maternity leave, I’ll hardly see him. I’ll make the most of it all.
Before I go, one thing I’ve noticed:
- I love reading old blog posts and seeing all of my broken promises (example: “I’ll say more about that walk in a blog post in the near future.”). I promise not to do that in the future.
Alright, I’m off to make a cheesecake. With raspberries.
Notes:
I love information like this, and I love to see it manifested in the real world, right above my head.
Dundee is just about on the same latitude as Perth, so this table is good enough for me. Check it out, and have a look at the data for where you live at various months.
Today (as this is posted) in Perth, we will have 17 hours, 44 minutes and 36 seconds of day time. And for all of June, the sky will never be dark (at its darkest, we will be in nautical twilight).
It’s a fascinating time of year.
Notes:
Go and read today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. It’s one of my favourites.
So that seems to work – I tried it out with 6 and 8 and I got 48. That’s right. When I got down to the section “see if you can figure it out before moving on”, I thought about it, but I couldn’t intuitively come up with a reason why it worked. So I did the only thing I knew: I proved it that it worked.
Once I finished my proof I was satisfied that the trick did indeed work. I scrolled down with a naïve expectation to find out why it worked… to be met with the same proof that I had come up with.
Huh. That’s all I’ve got, for now: huh.
It’s June and we’re already more than half-way through the month.
The summer solstice always makes me a bit sad. It’s the longest day of the year, the height of astronomical summer, but it also marks the start of a relentless decline. Every day will surely be dimmer than the last, until the end of the year. I hope life’s not like that. I hope I’ll always have a longer day to look forward to. Perhaps that hope is enough.
I’ve decided that May is my favourite month. I always suspected it was but now I’m sure. The weather’s a large part of it: the winter months are far too cold and dark, and I end up staying inside far too much. April can be pleasant, but it’s still just a slightly warmer and brighter winter month. Autumn is nice for its colours… but that’s about it. That leaves the months without an ‘r’ in them. When they aren’t masquerading as winter months, they’re the most pleasant to live in: warm enough to go out and light enough to stay there all evening. Of them all, I like May the best: the Sun is nearest its hottest (but the air isn’t) and the weather is surprisingly pleasant and an extremely welcome change from winter. I like the relaxed pace of May: for the last few years, May has been exam time for me, also known as holiday time. The perfect opportunity to climb a Munro. But what I like best about May is its flora. The green vegetation everywhere after months of brown and yellow crap. It’s so refreshing and I love it all. Especially the trees.
I was disappointed that I missed May this year. I left Britain on the 6th May (rather than on the 5th as planned), and when I returned it was June. I don’t think France has May, or if they do it’s actually disguised as April. I spent most of my time in France in a Mediterranean climate anyway – I’m not sure how seasons function in such places. Do they even have a brown/yellow/grey winter like they do here?
Missing May was unavoidable, though. When I decided to book my trip, that I would actually go away somewhere on my gap year, I didn’t have much choice. I knew I wanted to travel to France when the weather would be reliably pleasant (May to August), and I wanted to go for a month. July is always family time for me, June is also fully booked this year too. August: no way. Not for that long in those temperatures travelling by train. That left May: cool but with a hot Sun, and not too busy either. In hindsight, yes, it was the best option available.
Now I’m home, and I’ve been home for nearly two weeks. Yet such is the busy-ness of this June that I’ve barely looked at the 4,000 photos that I took whilst away. I’m neglecting various computery things, and I’m not seeing my friends enough.
There’s been a special birthday in the family, so it’s a been a time of celebration, reunion, and fun. And fireworks. I’ve probably drunk more in the last week than I did over Christmas and New Year. I’m not complaining, it’s been great, but there’s a lot of us: I have five siblings, for starters. There’s only so much waiting for the shower than I can take.
And just as things are starting to calm down, I’m off to London next Friday (1st class train ticket!) to stay with my older brother and his girlfriend for a few days, and I won’t be returning to Perth for another 3 weeks after that.
The biggest casualty is that I’ve not been thinking about much recently, not as much as usual anyway. There’s something new happening every day and so much going on that I don’t have time to abstract myself from the real world in order to think and reflect deeply.
It’s OK, I can wait. Especially when the waiting is as fun as it is.
Notes:
N.B. I could be completely misunderstanding this, and I could be completely wrong. I was drinking, after all.
Mythbusters has frustrated me again. A few months ago I pointed out an inaccuracy in a previous episode. If my post was not sufficiently clear, my point was that a single car going 100 mph has double the total energy of 2 cars going at 50 mph, and not the same, as Jamie Hyneman had asserted.
In an episode which I watched a few days ago, “Mythssion Control“, I was delighted and rather pleased with myself when the program mentioned that ‘the fans’ had objected to the same statement that I did. Sadly, the feeling lasted perhaps only 2 seconds.
As I saw it, the original Compact Compact myth was seeing whether a head-on collision between two lorries would crush and fuse a small car at the point of impact. Clearly, when Jamie came out with his statement, he was talking about how much damage would be done to the car in the centre: after all, seeing how much damage was done to the car was the aim of the myth. When Jamie took his statement as justification to test the myth with the easier double-speed single lorry, this shows he considered them equal in terms of how much damage they will cause the impacted car.
- Therefore, it makes sense to assume that he was saying: ‘2 lorries would cause the same damage to the compact car (when placed between them) at 50 mph as would 1 lorry smashing into that car (when placed against a wall) at 100 mph‘.
Right? Is that what you thought he meant?
Yet, when the Mythbusters came to verify Jamie’s statement, they approached the myth in a way that, in my opinion, seems completely removed from the original scenario. They completely changed the perspective of the myth to something like: “Two cars colliding head-on at 50 mph will each receive the same damage as if each car were independently crashing into a wall at 50 mph, rather than at 100 mph as Jamie said”.
OK, so the inclusion of a correction complicates things a bit more, so a simplified version would suit my desires: “Two cars colliding head-on at 50 mph will receive less damage than if each car were independently crashing into a wall at 100 mph”.
Do you see what’s changed? The original myth and Jamie’s statement was about how much damage was caused to a car which was being crushed by lorries on both sides, but in this revisitation, the situation is now in terms of how much damage is caused to the lorries themselves.
- The physics involved is the same, and I’m not arguing with the accuracy of the Mythbusters’ results. My problem is that the new investigation bears no pratical resemblance to the original myth, and no explanation of why the physics is the same in both cases, justifying the change in perspective. The object of the damage has been completely changed!
The way I thought about the situation was this: damage in a collision is caused by energy being transformed from kinetic energy into energy used to deform a material. The more energy, the more damage: simple. As I showed in my previous post, the single vehicle travelling at 100 mph has twice the total energy as two vehicles travelling at 50 mph. Therefore, there is twice as much energy available to cause damage with the single vehicle, so damage will be much greater.
So what does that mean? Firstly, the way I see the original myth, there is 2 times as much energy to cause damage with a single lorry at 100 mph crashing into a car as two cars at 50 mph crashing into it: that is, they can not be considered equivalent. Furthermore, I calculated that the single car would need to be going 71 mph to have the same amount of energy as the two cars at 50 mph.
However, the way that the Mythbusters changed the perspective, it is now about damage to the lorries (now cars) themselves. But the energy involved is still the same: at 100 mph, the single car has twice as much energy to damage itself as the 2 cars at 50 mph have in total. Therefore, the 50 mph cars will sustain much less damage: Jamie was indeed wrong. How much less? Well, the 2 cars at 50 mph have the energy of 1 car at 50 mph plus the energy of the other car at 50 mph. This is shared equally between the two cars at the collision, meaning that each car receives half of this, or the energy of 1 car at 50 mph. That is: each of the 2 cars at 50 mph crashing head-on will have the same energy available to damage it as would a single car crashing into a brick wall at 50 mph. The fans were indeed right.
The Mythbusters did not present the case like this. Whilst I prefer working through the equations, they instead couched it in generalities in terms of Newton’s third law of motion: every action has an equal an opposite reaction.
Well. I thought about this and it did eventually make sense, but that was a while ago and I can’t think of a way to explain it now. Think of it like this: as car A hits car B, you could imagine that all of car A’s energy is transferred to car B, causing it a single-car-going-at-50-mph’s worth of damage. However, due to Newton’s third law of motion, all of this force is resisted by car B, which transfers all of its energy to car A in return, similarly causing it a single-car-going-at-50-mph’s worth of damage. There is no energy left now: that is, both cars are at rest, though each car has only been damaged as much as it would have if it had crashed into a brick wall.
Or think of it this way: it is equivalent to crashing into a brick wall, as the point of collision stays in the same place. When the bumpers meet, they crush equally, until, at the same point, the bonnets touch, crush, then the windscreens, roof etc. It’s like pushing two marshmallows together: the point where the meet stays in the same place even as you push, just like with a brick wall. The cars wouldn’t know the difference. (Yes, that’s not at all scientific, but it lets you visualise what’s going on).
But I like the numbers. The maths is simpler:
The total energy is 2 x 1/2mv2. However, this is distributed over 2 cars worth of mass, meaning each car is only damaged by the amount of energy equivalent to that which it possesses as kinetic energy: exactly what happens in a wall-crash at the same speed. This is the physics that the show displayed into the closing seconds to explain what had happened. It makes sense to me.
- Mythbusters is not a technical show; that is, they’re not going to sit down and just work something to test a myth, even if that would be by far the easiest method. I actually don’t have a problem with that: the hands-on approach is generally much more amusing, if less accurate. But if they feel they do have to bring physics equations into it, as they did in this episode (explaining in 10 seconds mathematically what they had spent 20 minutes showing by crashing cars together), they should do it properly: do the theory first, and then spend your time confirming it through experimentation. An explanation of the physics largely composed of hand waving is worse than nothing, in my opinion.
In conclusion, although the Mythbusters were accurate, I believe they were approaching the issue the wrong way. These should have tested: “does a single lorry crashing into a car at 100 mph cause as much damage to the car as 2 lorries each going at 50 mph crashing into that car head on?”. The answer to that, as I spelled out in my previous post, is no – the single car would only need to go about 71 mph – although it would have been much more difficult to gauge the damage in that case. Sadly, the Mythbusters presented Jamie’s error in a confusing way that, without an explanation of why they changed perspective, made the argument harder to follow.
P.S. I don’t know why I just wrote this.
Notes:
