Garaphernalia 7.5

• In one moment, Brokeback Mountain went from being handed the Oscar because its a gay cowboy movie, to losing the Oscar because its a gay cowboy movie.
• I’m off to Disney World on Saturday. Expect lots of updates even though they charge through the nose for Internet access.
• Go and download the 2006 SXSW collection of music trailers. Its close to 1000 songs from the artists appearing at this yeasr SXSW festival in Austin. You need Bittorrent, which you should have if you don’t already. Last year’s collection was probably the best source of new music I had last year. Its all 100% legit too. You’re not stealing anything.

I’ve been lax. I now make amends:

• A public act of civil obedience. AKA, what would happen if everyone drove the speed limit? I don’t think it would come as a suprise to anyone that the main reason for speed limits is revenue generation, not saftey.
• Wired addresses a subject that you pretty much have to confront when your my age and single. Sasha Cagen wrote a book on the subject titled “Quirkyalone”. Her definition: Quirkyalone (adj): a person who enjoys being single (but is not opposed to being in a relationship) and generally prefers to be alone rather than date for the sake of being in a couple. That pretty much is me to a T.
• This might just be the feel good story of the year.
• There is no science and engineering shortfall in the US.
• My gut reaction about the traffic that MySpace generates was correct. There is no way in hell they do more than Google.
• and removing one last myth, the trade deficit isn’t a big deal.

I thought I had lost my USB drive today. I was in a panic. I went back to the place I had lunch and it was sitting there on the chair. It must have fallen out when I went into my pocket. I know I’ll lose the rubber cap on my drive eventually, but I wasn’t thinking I’d lose the whole thing.

I’ve been pretty good about not losing small stuff, although I’ve had a few scares with my iPod and my cell phone.

The USB drive is a whole different level of small. You know if your iPod or cell phone isn’t in your pocket, but you can’t feel a USB drive. I think I’m going to have to resort to wearing it on a laynard or something so I can keep track of it.

On a totally unrelated note….

A Canadian university has banned the use of WiFi on their campus for health reasons. Reason? Possible health risks. Evidence? none. We just don’t know.

Problem is, we can’t prove a negative. We can never show that there is no harm to radio waves. However, we haven’t found any link between radio waves and anything. To quote the University President, Fred Gilbert

“All I’m saying is while the jury’s out on this one, I’m not going to put in place what is potential chronic exposure for our students. Admittedly that’s highest around the locations of the antenna sites and the wireless hot spots, but those are the places people tend to gravitate to because they get the best reception,”

Lets look at the wireless internet for a moment. WiFi inhabirts the 2.4ghz part of the spectrum. Its shared with microwave ovens, amateur radio, and other public airwave things like baby monitors. Most WiFi acess points operate at less than 1 watt of power. Often, significantly less than 1 Watt. 100mW is common (0.1 Watt). To put this in perspective, standard incandescent bulbs can use 50-125 W of power. EM radiation also behaves according to the inverse square law. That means that the intensity of the EM radiation decreases by a factor of 4 every time you double the distance between you and the object.

Most computer users are easily several meters from a wireless access point (but very close to their computer, which produces EM radiation anyhow. If you are reading this on a CRT your standing next to an emitter of EM radiation which is probably more powerful than a wireless access point.) You are usually in closer contact with a cell phone, which will expose you to more effective EM radiation than a wireless device if only due to proximity)

There is dangerous EM radiation. In particular gamma rays and x-rays. However they have frequencies well above that of visible light, and 2.4ghz is well below that. NOTHING has shown a link between incidental exposure to radio waves and any detrimental health consequences. If such a link exists, it probably should be considered so small as to be swamped by the benefits that wireless Internet access brings. It it were large, it should be obvious.

Having a college campus without wireless internet is in the year 2006, like having a college without a library.

Last week I posted about testing milkshakes or salt in the X-Ray Diffraction machine here in the geology dept. Depite the allure of milkshakes, I went with salt just because it was so much easier.

Salt, and by that I mean table salt, is just NaCl. Sodium Choloride. Halite. The salt I tested was sea salt which was created from the evaporation of sea water. The stuff I purchased was made in France on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. I fully expected the vast majority of what was in the salt to be halite, but I also assumed there were to be some other bits of stuff in it as well. The dissolved components of sea water are mostly sodium and chlorine, but there are lots of other trace things as well (Mg, SO-, Ca, K, etc). As the water evaported, I assumed other minerals would grow in the evaporate, and was what I wanted to determine.

I started with some very coarse sea salt. I had to choose coarse sea salt, because the finer salt has an additive to prevent caking. The additive might have screwed up the reading, so I got the coarse grain salt and ground it up with a mortar and pestle.

The powder is then placed on a special slide with an indentation on it to hold the powder.

Making the powder is important because our XRD machine is a powder XRD not a crystal XRD. With powder XRD is much easier to prepare samples.

The actual XRD unit itself is pretty small, considering how big they used to be:

The slide with the powder is placed in the machine. The machine then shoots a beam of X-Rays at the powder (created from copper) and rotates the slide with respect to the beam over a set angle (in my case 2θ was from 15 to 60….its 2θ, not θ. See Bragg equation.)

The end result, is a series of measurements taken at different angles which measure the intensity of the diffration of the sample. I ended up with a graph that looked like this:

What is interesting about this a) there were no other trace minerals, and b) the peaks were uniformly off from the peaks which were expected from Halite. The current guess is that the other elements or at least some of them, rather than forming new minerals were substituted into the Halite. This increased the spacing in the crystal lattice and increased uniformly the angle at which diffraction occured.

The problem is, if that is the case, that should be the case with most all Halite which is almost always created from evaporating sea water.

I might run some more tests on other samples to try and find out what the deal is.

I now have rotating images at the top of the site. They are all original photos taken by me. I may put up some more if I can find photos worth putting up. Some of them have some minor flaws, but I’ll try to correct that soon.