8 Apr 2011 dangermaus   » (Journeyer)

There is an interplanetary internet, and there may exist an internet between civilizations running at tachyonic speed. This time I ventured into

Another Internet

It starts with configuring the DNS servers with ones published at the OpenNIC project. You need to configure both primary and secondary DNS. Configuring only the primary DNS does not work, as the algorithm always chooses the DNS entry with lower network latency. After configuration, you still are able to surf on the usual Internet, but you also opened a little door to domains like .geek, .bbs and .telnet.

On the wiki of OpenNiC there are very few links, and in the beginning I was disappointed of such few links. Then I learnt of the specular search engine http://grep.geek. By searching for keywords like Blog or Chat you get to view some of the most accurate blogs and interesting chatrooms, especially for people who like to code.

Pioneer Anomaly solved with heat model

Pioneer space probes are the farthest human made objects from the Earth. In a previous post I explained how to connect to the JPL server via telnet and get their current distance from Earth.

Pioneer space probes feel an additional force towards the sun in the order of magnitude of about a_pioneer ~= H*c, which is also the one predicted by Modified Newton Dynamics theories to empirically explain the flat shape of radial velocity curves observed in galaxies. Currently, the the best theories to explain the galactic radial velocity anomaly are ones that look at the Universe at as inhomogeneous sponge. I hope the dark matters theories will be then finally wiped out, as to me they look as a revival of the theories on ether used before Einstein to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment. Also to have so much dark and heavy things passing through my body without interfering with it does not make me feel confortable at all. Springtime is time to give a compete cleanup to the Universe, it's needed once in a while :-)

The GPU project was looking for a solution of the Pioneer Anomaly. It ported source code from the Orsa Project made by Pasquale Tricarico from C to Delphi and experimented a bit with special physics without further success. It was not possible to replicate the linear shift of the signal received from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory dued to the pioneer anomalous acceleration towards the sun.

There is now an article here, that explains how the anomaly can be explained with 1970s computer graphics (basically a more advanced heat model as the one presented in the original Anderson et al. paper about the anomaly). The paper with the heat model explanation is on Arxiv and awaits confirmation from other scientific teams.

How seismic waves tell us about the inner Earth core

The GPU project was also experimenting with seismic sensors. Nanobit built one (picture) and I also built one with a 3D accelerometer on top of a coil. This series of 6 videos on seismic waves by Khan Academy explain very well the types of seismic waves, why Secondary waves travel only into solids (and in pudding :-), the curved path of refracted waves due to the density differences, the S-Wave shadow zone beginning from 105 degrees, and the P-Wave shadow zones. The seismic waves indirectly tell us how the inner Earth core is made, even if none of us digged that deep. Humankind only scratched the surface of Earth!

Learning the periodic table of the elements

The Fukushima accident made me courious of chemistry, and I sorted out an old periodic table of the chemical elements I was using in school. It has a list of the radioctive elements and their half decay time. I then realized that I did not understand anymore why the table was organized in this way. To be honest, I never understood it! I then took time to watch the introductory course on Chemistry by Khan Academy. The first ten videos explained me much more in detail how the periodic table works. In particular, I can do electronic configurations which was never taught in my chemistry course, and I understand a bit why metals are placed in the 'd' configuration. Metals and salts I already knew from before. And the f configuration at the bottom is for the heavier elements, which in principle should be moved between earth alcali and transitive metals, for the electronic configuration process.

IRC chat primer

I use on Gentoo weechat-curses as IRC chat terminal (emerge -av weechat-curses to install it).

  • Connecting to an IRC server: /connect irc.oftc.net
  • Connecting to an IRC server without certificate: /connect pari.para.net:9999 -ssl -ssl_verify=false -password=****
  • List available chat channels: /msg ChatServ list *
  • Join a channel: /join Debian
  • Leave a channel: /leave
  • Change nickname: /nick dangermouse
  • Register nickname: /msg NickServ register yourpasswd your@email.com then follow instructions on email you receive on how to authenticate
  • Bind nickname once registered: /msg NickServ identify yourpasswd
  • Exit weechat-curses: /leave or /exit

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