Posts Tagged ‘moon’

Exponential ferret

Monday, March 21st, 2011

Last night a ferret just stood idly on the floor for about half a minute just staring blankly at us. It looked a bit like she was really concentrating, so the first hypothesis to explain this strange behavior was that she was trying to create a copy of herself through agamogenesis (asexual reproduction). This naturally led to the notion of a ferret able to replicate itself once every minute, and seeing that playing with exponential growth is always fun, this scenario deserves some illustrations:

0 minutes

one ferret.

1 minute

WOW!, did you see that? That ferret just duplicated!

3 minutes

Sweet, 8 ferrets. This is awesome.

5 minutes

Ehm, I love ferrets but 32 is a bit much.. how do you stop this thing?

18 minutes

Help! 268’000 ferrets just filled and breached the entire volume of our ~200 cubic meter apartment!

23 minutes

Neighborhood overrun, time to evacuate.

35 minutes

The blue dot is me, speeding away from the 50 square kilometer sea of ferrets half a meter deep.

48 minutes

Despite speeding like crazy I was just overtaken by a huge wave of ferrets, twice the area of Rhode Island and 30 meters tall.. By now there are 281 trillion ferrets in Norway.

1 hour

The 1 billion billion ferrets now cover all of Scandinavia with a height of the Eiffel tower

1 hour 15 minutes

Ferrets now rule the earth. covering the entire surface of the planet, filling up all the oceans, in a huge ferret sea 5 times the height of mount everest.
the 37 sextillion ferrets weight about 1/3 of the moon.

1 hour 23 minutes

The ferrets now have the same mass as the earth.

1 hour 55 minutes*

The ferrets now weigh 13’000 times more than our sun, the speed at which they can expand is limited, so the pressure and heat is extreme, this makes the huge ball of ferrets shine more powerful that any star, while a black hole has formed at the center.

2 hours 23 minutes

Ferrets now weigh the same as our entire galaxy, have formed a supermassive black hole and things are starting to get nasty.

3 hours

At 30 times the mass of the observable universe, outputting extreme amounts of energy through a geometrically challenged universe, the laws of physics are probably breaking down and fusing together again for the first time since the big bang.. It’s safe to say the ferrets have ruined reality as we know it.

 

Note: What happens after about 1 hour 30 minutes gets pretty speculative, it’s hard trying to apply the laws of physics to something that is physically impossible :)

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Posted in Animals, Ferrets, General, Science | No Comments »

Supermoon terrorizes small Norwegian village!

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

It’s hard being a skeptic sometimes..
Today I saw a particularly silly story in the local Newspaper: “Supermånen Sprer frykt” or “Supermoon spreads fear”.

To sum it up, in 10 days the moon will be closer to the earth than it has been in 19 years.
The newspaper then goes on to list a bunch of conspiracy theory bullshit about several times when the moon has been at its closest to the earth, earthquakes/tsunamies/etc. occurred.

The moons orbit is not a perfect circle, so the distance from the moon to the earth varies between roughly 350’000 km and 400’000 km.

The moon’s effect on the tides is around 60-70% and the sun makes up 40-30%, so of course when the moon gets closer the tides get more extreme, and unless I made an error in the calculations below, the difference in gravitational force between the earth and the moon from when the moon is farthest away and closest should be 13.764%

= 13% difference

Update: It seems the formula I used above is the “shared” gravitational force between the earth and the moon, Phil plait comes up with a maximum 50% increase in the moons gravitational effect on the earth, which is a more useful number. Also he’s an astronomer, so I’d take his word over mine.. On anything but Star Trek trivia :)

When the moon is at it’s closest and at the same time line up with the sun, we get what’s called the Perigean spring time. In other words, a big ass tide :)

 

Earthquakes and statistics!

They also cited a professor in astronomy (they actually referred to him as professor in astrology, but later changed the article and deleted the comments pointing this out).

The paper suggests that earthquakes can be caused by the moon being to close to the earth (sounds like a 50′s sci-fi movie), but what I find quite surprising is the rather strange quote from the professor:
“I would be very surprised, if there was a really strong earthquake at this particular date”. and that while living in California, he witnessed an powerful earthquake on the day before a “supermoon”.

The USGS defines a strong earthquake as anything with a magnitude of 6.0 or above (Christchurch was 6.3). On average there 150 earthquake like this yearly.

So the chance for a strong earthquake to happen on march 19th, is 41%.

If we however include the day before and after, the chance increases to 79%.

If we where to include 2 days before and after, we’re up to 92%.

So it’s pretty certain that a big earthquake will take place on or around march 19th, and it’s pretty certain crazy doomsday nuts will say there is a connection between that statistically predicted earthquake and the evil moon. The chance of the quake hitting a densely populated area however is much smaller, so maybe the nuts won’t notice it

update 11.03.2011: As statistics predicted a large earthquake did occur. It did hit a densely populated area, and caused a huge tsunami that hit the northwestern coast of Japan causing massive damages and deaths :(

The newspaper actually takes this flawed thinking to a whole new level, posting a picture from a earthquake/tsunami in Indonesia, making the point that it “happened only 2 weeks before a supermoon” (oooouh spooky!!).

This is just moronic.. the chance of a strong earthquake being 2 weeks before or after a certain date is 99.999977369 %

Note: all my calculations are based upon dates of earthquakes being relatively evenly distributed through the year, as confirmed by USGS

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Posted in Science, Skepticism | No Comments »

Sailing in Croatia

Sunday, October 12th, 2008

I got back from Croatia over a month ago just haven’t gotten around to completing this post until now :)

Me, Stacy and 2 other couples we know went to Croatia the 15th of August, and stayed there for a week.

We rented a Bavaria 36 sailboat that we lived on and used to sail around the Adriatic coast.

day 1

We started in Trogir, and after a pretty long and boring checkout from Ecos Yachting, / Nautilus Yachting,  we where on the way at around 17-18 o’clock. We had 2-3 hours of sun and made it to outside  maslinca before night came. Luckily we decided to not stop there, but sail straight for the island of Vis. There was actually a full moon when we started, but during our 7-8 hour trip there was actually a lunar eclipse :)


And while in the middle of the ocean in them middle between Maslinca and Vis, we saw the most spectacular clear sky with thousands of stars incredibly bright. None of us had ever seen the stars so clear and bright before, and it was quite the sight :)

We arrived sometime after midnight, and anchored up in a cove, right outside the small town of Komiza.

day 2
We started pretty early and headed out to the island of Bisevo, which is around 1 hour away from where we spent the night. There we anchored up outside ‘the blue cave’ where we all went inside with the dinghy to see the cave light up with blue light, reflected from the bottom of the cave trough a submarine opening in the mountain.


We then sailed to Vela Luca, where we anchored up inside the harbor, and went into town in the dinghy (special thanks to our dinghy-pilot Andreas) :)

While in Vela Luca the dingy once ran out of fuel, and once got a plastic bag stuck in the propeller, and waves made sure nobody got ashore dry :D

day 3
We started out pretty late (which in retrospect we should not have done), and set sail for Hvar..
“The sea was angry that day”, 24 m/s wind, and some waves. This of course led to the dingy tearing away (damn you, cheap Croatian rope!!). Anyway, we got a hold of it after a while and could sail onwards to Hvar.

When we got to Hvar the damn harbor was filled up, so we had to anchor up somewhere. We tried one place but had to move to a better place, it was extremely dark, so judging distance was really hard.
Also the navigation lights where out (the light bulb was toast, as water seemed to have found it’s way into the lamp), but we finally found a place to anchor up.

Seeing that we’re in a 150’000$ boat and sharp rocks where around 50 meters away. We found it best to play safe and have someone on guard in the night. I remember being a bit tired, playing Mahjong on the Nintendo DS and bats where flying around the boat… (It turns out they were actually swallows, but they sounded like bats! I should have asked about their unladen airspeed velocity)

day 4

We went into the ACI marina outside Hvar pretty early, We did some bathing on a exceptional clear beach on the same island, and got some snorkeling done. We took the taxiboat in to Hvar town and I have absolutely no recollection of what we did there. I do remember that a bunch of noisy swedes had a hell of a party in the marina that night.

day 5

We went to Split, and having learned from previous mistakes we hit the harbor pretty early and got a nice spot. We went bathing and then went into Split for some shopping.

day 6
We sailed from Split and went back to Trogir where we started the trip.

day 7

We sailed out from trogir and anchored up, on the northern shore about 30 minutes out from Trogir. Here we did lots of bathing, played miniature golf (I won :D ) drove water jets and a banana boat (warning climbing up on a banana boat after you’ve been swimming alot and got tired arms sucks).

We then filled up the boat with disel, went back to the harbour for checkout. And took a cab to the airport for the flight back to Trondheim.

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Posted in Boating, General, Traveling | No Comments »