aslamp.com

So, after finding and reading ALL of the xkcd comics (in a night.. or two), I’ve decided to make some. I was also influenced by my sociology class, where I had to make a comic about… Drug abuse? Or something. Anyways, I haven’t decided if I’m gonna keep it seperate or not. Oop. Just did. I’m gonna put them in here =]. I guess I can always take them out later… I think I’m going to name it asxam. The “as” coming from aslamp, and the “xam” coming from the word “xajmi” which means funny in lojban.

I have also decided to start learning lojban! =D And that’s pretty exciting in itself.

I’d also like to thank Decorum, which I am starting to read (backwards >.<). I guess I never really thanked xkcd either... So, thanks xkcd.

And now that I'm done narrating my thoughts, here's the first and original comic (for soc class):

The last few months, I’ve been debating a few different scientific and religious concepts that have somewhat challenged my faith, but in the end, turned out to strengthen it. Two sides of one topic have been Creation and Evolution. I am a Christian, and believe in Creation, as told from the bible, but when people hear that, and ask “how can you not believe in evolution because of the undisputable evidence?” While the amount of evidence is debatable, it is immaterial for me.

When I see evolution, the big bang, the human race coming from primates, I see only one thing, and that is God’s work. Ever piece of information that supports evolution, I see it supporting Creation. It doesn’t matter how it came to be, how things evolved, God still created it, and in doing so he intended it to evolve.

The miracles experience in our biblical history have been doubted by those who say, “Well, it’s only a simple chemical reaction…” (in the example of turning water into wine, perhaps one that is currently unknown). My reaction is, “Yes! But it is by God’s laws that it happens! He created them in order to perform it!” Chemistry in itself is a miracle. Who else but the Almighty could have the power to take molecules that one cannot even imagine and turn them into something else?

Humanity has always had it problems and conflicts in dealing with the church and science. I can not understand them any other way other than always aiding and supporting each other. Science exists to explain events that happen in the natural word, and religion exists to explain how the science can exist. While both can be independent, science without religion, and religion without science, I believe it is best to combine them, faith with evidence, evidence with faith.

Is America lacking enough personal responsibility that the schools should be fully responsible for the results of the education of its students? Whether it is or not, the school’s involvement in its students’ education is at a peak from what I have observed.

The following is a short list of what I have observed in one school in particular (Carroll High School):

• Study hall monitoring, no sleeping, no headphones/eletronics, must stay active.
• No more than one study hall during a semester.
• Detentions for not completing homework.
• Required classes (Literature, Social Sciences, General Math, etc.).
• School standards in general.
• Everybody Reads (ER), where everyone must be reading something
• Truancy and its punishments (unauthorized absenses).

I go to school because I want an education, not because I want uneducated and unrespected authorities to tell me what I should learn, what kind of grade I should get, what kind of person I should be, and what sort of activities I should do.

Our freedom has been limited so that we cannot be trusted to make the correct decisions. Our rights have been limited so that a criminal has more than we do. Our education is being transformed into a uniform bell-curve where the stardards are so low that 99% of our students can pass it.

Our schools are being transformed into a fascist state, and the people who care about it the most forget about it once they graduate. The students need a speaker, a representive, to let them have a voice. Give them one.

The following is a mini series that I’ve decided to start about Carroll High School. I will discuss topics that the students find somewhat “unfair” and hope to explain them, or atleast give both sides. If it seems that the reasoning for one side overrules the other, then hopefully, the administration at CHS will feel the same…

Carroll has a policy, as described on page 10 in the student handbook, that if the student is late to their first period class, they will receive a “late-to-school.” The following is a list of what happens when the student receives multiple “late-to-school”s.

• 3rd & 4th: Detention
• 5th & 6th: Saturday school, 30 day driving probation
• 7th: 1 day ISS, 60 day driving probation, request parent conference
• 8th: 3 days ISS, 60 day driving probation
• 9th: OSS, parent conference
• Habitual: Recommendation for expulsion

If the student is late to any other class period, the same punishment is provided, sans the driving probation.

The concern with this is, if the student arrives to school on time, but stays in the common area too long, perhaps working on homework, a project, reading, or just plain-out socializing, and then is late to first period, what is to differentiate between that “late-to-school” and just a regular tardy?

Well, one doesn’t really need to worry about that. As you can see, the punishment for a “late-to-school” and a tardy are exactly the same besides the driving probation for the “late-to-school”s.

In theory a student could get as many as four tardies before receiving punishment: Two “late-to-school”s and two regular tardies. However, I won’t suggest it. The administration will probably catch on…

In conclusion

It doesn’t really matter that you receive a “late-to-school” vs. a regular tardy, as long as you don’t drive to school. You still have five “late-to-school”s before you can’t drive for thirty days. The “late-to-school” really just doubles the number of tardies^[1] (to first period), and is just another name for a tardy.

As I made out my Christmas list a month or so ago, I put multiple books dealing with mathematical subjects, such as “Zero: A Dangerous Biography”, the histories of various numbers, such as e, pi, phi, and i, books by Stephen Hawking, and others dealing with physics in general. One particular book that I received was “The Fabric of the Cosmos”, by Brian Greene, the same author who wrote “The Elegant Universe”. Out of the thirteen books that I was blessed with, I decided to start with this one.

Currently, I’m about one-fifth the way through it, and my mind is well near boggled. I’m quite ashamed of it, but I didn’t know that much about quantum before starting the book. Now, as Greene describes the non-locality (which is the main subject of this post, that I will get to in a second), I’m really starting to understand how deep all of this is.

Non-locality

Greene describes a scenario where two similar particles are ejected dually from a single origin, and because they (let’s call them photons) both came from the same point, the two photons both have similar position, and similar velocity. However, in order to measure the velocity of the two particles, you would have to compromise the knowledge of its velocity for its position, and its position for its velocity, at that particular instance of time. This is so because when measuring one attribute, the particle is changed so that the other changes.

Now, say that you decide to measure the velocity of one particle, and the position of the other! Ingenious! Neither the velocity or the position will be compromised because they are two different particles!

Surprisingly, each time the experiment was performed (and cutting to the chase), each particle was affected by the others actions. When the machines detected the velocity and the position of each, the waves that were bounced off of the photons affected not only the particle it hit, but the pair of them.

When I read this, I was pretty amazed. Einstein and a number of other physicists had thought that this non-locality was impossible, and they were proven wrong! And not even by theory, or math, or logic, it was by experiment!

This brings a whole new world into our dimension. The principles of locality do not allow interference between particles (or anything for that matter) across space. There must be some sort of physical contact between them, and this proves that otherwise. The possibilities of the future technology that this could bring is unfathomable: Data transfer faster than the speed of light, mapping out of universe, no longer having to the travel across light-years of stars; We, as humans traveling faster than the speed of light, perhaps even teleporting, not caring what is traveled through.

I plan on continuing to write about this book and the amazing physics in it, as I read, so please, stay in tune!

It seems its been over a hundred days since my last post, and I apollogize for that… I’ve been busy with quite a lot of things, from starting to play World of Warcraft, to Dagorhir stuff, through a relationship (both entering and leaving), and of course, all things related to school. I’ll being trying to write more, now that I’m not as busy, and I have a computer in my room, after recieving 1GB of RAM, and a wireless ethernet adapter =].

My current project is a number of essays I plan to assemble to ressemble a book of sorts. All will be about the current “flaws” of Carroll High School, as I see quite a few. I will try to be as modest and understanding as possible, displaying both the student’s and the administrator’s point of view (if possible).

Meanwhile, elsewhere on my server, over at adjacentreality.com, I’ve given Noga author privledges. So be watching out for new posts over there. Both of us will try to keep a conversation between each other’s posts, which should be most interesting.

That’s all for now, hopefully you’ll hearing from me shortly about one of a number of things.

For the past six months, I’ve been listening to a lot of Maynard Keenan’s work, such as Tool, A Perfect Circle, and some of his other not-so-popular music. The symbology that he uses in his music and lyrics in pretty amazing. One particular instance is the use of Fibonacci numbers in the song “Lateralus.” The intro is as follows:

Black
And
White are
All I see
In my infancy
Red and yellow then came to be
Reaching out to me
Lets me see
There is
So
Much
More and
Beckons me
To look through to these
Infinite possibilities
As below so above and beyond I imagine
Drawn beyond the lines of reason
Push the envelope
Watch it bend

The lines portray the syllable count of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 the first six numbers of Fibonacci’s sequence, and the reverse, indicating the “spiral” that is talked about in the song. This, along with several other instances of Fibonacci numbers and calculations, interested me in the sequence and numerology in general.

While in study hall one day, I got bored, and wrote out the sequence. I thought to myself, “There must be some sort of pattern or formula to this.” So I sat there and started dividing each of the numbers by its term, then divided each of those numbers by the previous set, and found that the number, as I continued to calculate, increased by very small amounts, those decreasing each increment. Getting bored with doing each by hand, I created a program to calculate this approaching number for me, and named it “FIB.”

Surprisingly, my calculator got to the point where the numbers were so large that the calculations weren’t being executed correctly. I thought about why this would happen, and came to the conclusion that it was the terms by which I was dividing that elongated this number-finding process.

I made another program called “FI,” taking off the “B” from the last one, and took out the term divisibility section, and executed the program. I got this number, 1.618… And didn’t really know what it meant. I messed around with it a bit, trying to figure out if it was a square root of a number, or something similar, but when I squared it, I got 2.618… the remaining decimals staying there. It was pretty amazing, a number, if squared, was the same as adding one to it.

x² = x + 1

This inspired me to start doing other calculations that don’t pertain to this topic. I did a bit of messing around, and remembered the number Phi, from Dan Brown’s books, and my previous math classes. I have no idea why it took me this long to realize it… I feel kinda ashamed about it.

But the whole concept of the Golden Ratio, Phi, is pretty amazing. I’ve read a few articles relating Phi to the human body, and other natural occurrences. Now it is one of my obsessions in the mathematics world, and an object of my boredom being turned into something productive.