Moose

In addition to being a nic-name for my sister's husband the word "moose" can bring a variety of pictures to mind. Below you'll find a couple of images that people sometimes thing of when they hear the word.

Moose can stand from 5 1/2 to 6 feet at the shoulder and weigh upwards of 1,800 pounds according to National Geographic. This makes them the largest of the variants of deer, and a real big problem if you hit them with a car.

Why do I mention moose this week? Because I saw one this weekend. 

This is not the fist moose I'm seen, nor even the biggest, but it was the only one that appeared to take an interest in my family and me. This was a little disturbing as moose can be as dangerous as bears, or indeed even more so. In fact the detailed moose attack in the book Hatchet is based on an actual attack the author was on the receiving end of. It doesn't help me that the first time I was ever in the same area as a moose, this event occurred the next day.

It is important to note that unlike bear attacks (which you play dead for), or mountain lion attacks (which you fight back against), if you see a moose start to act aggressive you should run, full speed, away from it. This is because unlike predators which have hard-wired coding that makes them chase prey, moose will generally only attack when provoked or when defending young. So if you remove yourself from the area the moose should not feel the need to remove you from the living. Run as there is very little you could do against an 1500 pound charging behemoth.

Belief in money

This week I was musing about money. I recently re-listened to Terry Pratchett's Making Money, a wonderful story about what happens when you con a conman into becoming the Master of the Mint and put him in charge of the future of the banking industry. Moist von Lipvig, our lovable rouge, introduces the idea of paper money to the city of Ankh-Morpork and we get to watch the issuing chaotic transition (among other things). In addition, a recent video on Vsauce about money explains how fiat money, the current currency in the US, works, or rather how we believe it works.

If you think about it, you have to believe that something is worth something in order for it to be worth anything. Regardless of whether the money is "backed" or not. For instance, gold, one of the more rare and stable elements, has been acknowledged around the world as an almost uniform measure of exchange. Periodic Videos got to go inside the gold vault at the Bank of England and talk about the worth of gold. However, when the zombie/alien/natural Apocalypse comes and all of society is destroyed, what good does a gold bar do you? As Moist comments to Mr. Bent the head cashier of the bank, (paraphrased) - 1 dollar worth of a potato is better than 1 dollar worth of gold when you're hungry. The same is true on a sinking ship. Gold will do you little to no good there.

So what happens if people stop believing in the system? I had to contact another source to try to figure this out. From his blog The Art of Finance and Economics BH Allred has "spent more than 20 years in public finance as an investment banker and an additional 13 years in utility and state or local government settings." He is well versed in economic theory and it wasn't until I took an economics class myself in college that I got a good chuck of the life lessons he gave me. He was able to provide me with some good information that I will use to build conclusions on.

Granted, economics is not a "hard science" no matter how badly some people want it to be. We cannot establish economic laws based upon past performances. This is one of the arguments of the problem of inductive knowledge - how do you know that past observations (economic or otherwise) of objects or events will in fact allow us to make accurate predictions about their future state or standing. BH Allred discusses this in his psudo-review / discussion of Nassim Nicholi Taleb's book The Black Swan. This means that no matter what I look at to formulate my answer it could be drastically different or wrong. BH Allred points out:

Actual events can even be so different as to be considered highly improbable by our reckoning prior to the actual event happening. This is one of the great difficulties of economics, all there really is available is past data. There are enough unknowns out there to mess up anything we may postulate, predict, envision, or propose that we regularly are thrown for a loop and the size of the loop we will likely be thrown for is also one of the many unknowns.

Back to a loss of faith in the system. What would happen if people no longer trusted the worth of their money? Like a run on a bank, they want to get out of the system. However, unlike a bank run, they can't do that simply by withdrawing their money from the system. In a review of Thomas E. Woods, Jr's book Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse David Gordon for the Ludwig von Mises Institute quotes Woods: (my comments in [brackets])

When the public realizes that the monetary authority ["the system"] intends to continue inflating the money supply and thus reducing its value [just making more money. more stuff = less worth] they scramble to unload their currency before it can lose any more purchasing poser [get out of the system]. In what is called the "flight into real values," consumers seek to abandon their currency at all costs, exchanging it for whatever goods they can find. [ditch the worthless money for worthy goods i.e. gold for potatos]. (pp.123-124)

The quote is addressing inflation and is describing the results of hyperinflation - a fact that is not just limited to real world economies - but I believe it also makes a good demonstration of a cause of losing faith in a the system and what might result. According to the basic concepts of supply and demand, the more there is of something the less use there will be for it. We see that with inflation the more money there is -> the less worth it is -> the more needed to buy = price increases beyond what people can earn. We can use these same supply and demand to show distrust. The less people distrust money, the lower the demand  -> the less they want of it -> the more of it there is for others -> the more money there is ->..... and the cause of inflation is now the result of distrust.

Distrust for the system could start in any number of places, the biggest probably being by distrusting the government in general. Because of the system of fiat money that we use, the inherent worth of the money is in that the government tells you that it is worth $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, or $100 dollars. It is not backed by anything, just a statement from the government. Even if it was gold backed, that only goes to limit the amount of money in the system - generally a good thing - but you wouldn't see any of that gold. Like Mr Bent, our banker from Making Money points out, "It is the promise of gold, assuming that no one actually ask for any." Pratchett captures the unspoken fact of a gold based system. In the event of a "run on the bank" do you think the government would really allow people to show up at Fort Knox and turn in their dollars for gold bricks? So whether the system is fiat or otherwise, if people stop believing in money, the money becomes rather worthless. And if enough of them stop believing, it becomes worthless for everybody.

So, do you believe in your money? 

Terminating Acceleration

For my birthday, my wife got me a great gift - memories. She wanted to give me the chance to do something I had never done before. That something turned out to be indoor skydiving. Sadly I do not have pictures from the event, but I've been thinking about it and how it works.

I remember in high school physics doing all of our assignments in a friction-less environment. This was always a little frustrating to me because physics is applied mathematics that demonstrate how the world works and the world does not exist in a friction-less state. I understand the reason for this - high school students are probably not prepared for the calculations necessary to compute those numbers and high school teachers may what to stay as far away from fluid dynamics as possible.

Anyway, I bring that up because as I was doing research on this, I realized how important it is. First - let me lay out a misconception that I've been operating under, that terminal velocity (TV) is a constant, given value. I figured that the whole idea of terminal velocity - the point when a falling object no longer accelerates and thus maintains a constant velocity - was that it was an absolute. I didn't know why people stopped accelerating I just figured it was one of those points attached to the law of gravity. That doesn't make any sense, but there it is.

As it turns out TV is a function of several factors, many you could probably suspect: the objects mass, acceleration due to gravity (9.8 m/s/s), density of the fluid (in this case air), the drag coefficient based on the fluid in question, and the projected area of the object. That last factor is the most variable when it comes to skydiving. This is because terminal velocity is the point where the resistance of the air is pushing against you (i.e. up) at the same rate that gravity is accelerating you (i.e. down). So the very force that causes reentering space craft, meteorites, and steaks to heat up is also the one that limits how fast you can fall.

According the the terminal velocity Wikipedia article, the common TV for skydivers is about 122 mph or 54
meters per second. This is with the belly down, arms and legs out, commonly seen pose. Head down, skydivers may go as fast as 200 mph or "almost the terminal velocity of the Peregrine Falcon diving down on its prey." The world record is 843.6 mph held by Felix Baumgartner when he bailed out of a helium balloon on the edge of space last year. Up that high he was able to increase his speed because the air density was much less then closer to the surface. All in all, quite impressive.

I looked up all this because the certificate they gave us after our "jump" said that we had reached terminal velocity. I thought about how that works if we weren't really falling. But again, TV can be manipulated if you can control the different factors. In a vertical wind tunnel you can control the amount of air resistance. Simply pump enough upward force to counter gravity and your downward velocity is neutralized. When you enter the camber, they have you put your hands on your chest and fall into the wind. Even if you fell for a full two seconds, you would only be going about 19.6 meters/second (~1.1 kilometers/hour) so from what I can see, you would indeed reach terminal velocity it would just be a very slow one. Because of the controlled environment they can really whip the air resistance up to where your body does not need to be in the standard pose to remain afloat.

So, once again I feel vindicated in my believe that the more you know about something the more you can exploit it. By learning more about the relationship between gravity and air resistance (which resulted in a discussion of terminal velocity) we can see how they can be controlled. I've always said that until the force that holds things down was understood we could never fly. Now, I can actually say that I have flown. And it was pretty cool.

Get Lost

Every summer for many years my father and I would go backpacking with a couple of friends. Every year we would get lost for about an hour or so. Didn't matter that Dad had a GPS and that we all carried maps and compasses and had been over them many times. After the first couple of times, we just came to expect it and were able to enjoy ourselves knowing that we would find ourselves soon enough. I am happy to report that no harm ever came to us and we always made it out (eventually).

Because of this long tradition of getting lost, I was quite pleased when I read this KXCD comic.

I've tried it a couple of times since then and it was entertaining to try to find civilization after landing myself in what turned out to be the middle of Nevada. I'm getting lost tomorrow for a variety of reasons. Go ahead and try the Google maps for some random fun. 

Real vs. digital

One of the most commonly watched movies in my family as I grew up was The Great Muppet Caper. My family enjoyed other Muppet productions, although I didn't see an actual episode of the original Muppet show until I was married. My family now owns the first season on DVD and my children enjoy watching them. I find it entertaining trying to figure out how they manipulate the different muppets, particularly the big ones. Like any performance media their are mistakes made and you occasionally see someones head or hand. In the original pilot episode An End to Sex and Violence they zoom out during the credits so you can see what a filming actually looks like.

The Jim Hanson Company has been used by film, TV, and independent producers for the last 55 years. They work in both physical and digital effects, but I would say that they may be well known for their physical creations. Many people may ask how they are able to stay in business with the advent of CGI and the advanced images that can be produced now. Why create something physically when you can do it digitally without physical limitations?

I remember when the George Lucas digitally remastered the original Star Wars trilogy and they included a scene with Jabba the Hutt. However, many fans were up in arms about how Jabba was done digitally as opposed to with a physical creation. The original Jabba was done by the Jim Hanson Company and, as I understand, took about at least three people to work. The picture to the right shows the digital Jabba on the left and the "real" one on the right. On a side note, "jabba" is an English pronunciation of the Russian word (written in transcription as) "zhabba" which means toad. Another fun note. Chewbacca sounds like two Russian words, "chelavec" and "sabaca" which translate as "man" and "dog" respectively. I heard Lucas wanted to use foreign sounding words.

While I can't say that I was "up in arms" I was rather disappointed about the digital Jabba. Mostly because of the continuity. Jabba looked different. I can understand the reason for digitizing him - the biggest is that the scene with Jabba had been shot as part of the original filming, but they had a human actor playing Jabba (as Lucas wasn't sure what Jabba should look like. Even if they had used a physical Jabba they would have had to put the image in digitally anyway. It certainly made sense to just do it digitally.

The biggest reason I was disappointed about them doing Jabba digitally was because no matter how well the CGI is done, you can often see that it isn't real. Or instance, in the latest version of Alice in Wonderland a lot of it was shot with CGI. If you watch the Knave of Hearts when he walks, you can see a bounce in his step that isn't really natural. Like he's wearing drywall stilts, which is exactly what he is doing. I really enjoy that film and love the imagery they use, yet every time I see the Knave it pulls me out and wrinkles the illusion for me.

I could go through all kinds of examples of good and bad, but I there isn't enough time or space for that discussion. Physical models are not perfect either. But the thing is that such a creation is actually real and in the world, no matter how odd it is. In the behind the scenes of the movie Zathura the director explains that they used physical creations (people in suits) in place of digital images as they wanted to give the children actors something to react to. It is not everyone that can make a CG image look real. Again, in the behind the scenes for Who Framed Roger Rabbit they explain that Bob Hoskins (the actor for Eddie Valiant) was hired because he acted like there was a real cartoon rabbit in his world as opposed to nothing that was filled in later.

In the end, I can't complain too much as both mediums have their faults. Sometimes they are well done and many times they are not. Granted, if they are bad enough the film because a cult classic. Like the original Doctor Who - which I do love dearly. I guess that means that I just have to take them as they come.