From Turing to Transistors

Hello once again my fellow science nerds and/or people who clicked on this by accident. I want to start off by apologising for not posting in ages, but between adjusting to A levels, applying for university and writing an EPQ I haven't had a lot of time, which I really regret (although I already have offers from Warwick and Liverpool so yay).

I was about to sit down and work on my EPQ when I realised that a good way to kill two birds with one stone would be to write about some stuff I've been researching, as a blog post! Solidify my own understanding while getting to talk to you guys again :).

So here it is, this week I'll be using my newfound understanding to explain how the hell your computer is working, and your phone, and your tablet, and any microwaves, dishwashers, televisions or video game consoles you happen to have hanging around all work (wow we are pretty dependent aren't we?) because frankly we all take computers for granted and use them constantly, even being arrogant enough to complain when they don't function perfectly and sometimes treat them like crap, without realising that what we are using is truly a miracle of human engineering.

Quick poll now, raise your hand if you've seen the imitation game. If your hands are not currently in the air and you aren't remembering what a brilliant film it is then I suggest that that is the first thing you do after you finish reading this. However the gist of it is that a top lad known as Alan Turing invents a computer, saves everyone in WW2 and turns the world on its head because he just designed a bloody computer and its 1940 when they still have teams of people instead of a pocket calculator.

Now Britain, being all secretive and such decide to keep all this hidden to the extent that the story did not emerge properly until around the 1970s and Turing never got the thanks that he truly deserved for shortening a world war by a year. So in this time America decided to build their own computers (not knowing what had happened in Britain) and eventually came up with the electronic numerical integrator and calculator (ENIAC) A.K.A this monster 

Over time thanks to the work of Von Neumann and other scientists, computing science flourished in America, who remained astounded at the equally impressive work occurring in the UK who they thought had no experience with this sort of stuff before.

As always the technology just got better and better and found its way into everything and now we rely on digital computers and their many uses to get us through most days. but enough history, I said I'd explain how they work and now I'll give it a shot.

All computers can be linked all the way back to Alan Turing because frankly the man was brilliant. In 1936, Alan Turing wrote a truly incredible paper known as "On Computable Numbers" which laid out the ideas for a perfect computer (basically a theoretical one that was created using maths). the idea was that any problem could be written as binary code, and by applying the appropriate transformation to this binary code you will get the answer to this problem. This also means that any program can be executed so long as you can represent it purely as maths, which is why coders have to use specific codes and convert it to binary code after. For example when a computer multiplies 2 and 3 it will multiply 01 and 11 to get 011 (six) because it can only work in binary code. Without looking into too much detail, it can be said that by performing a number of simple logical operations on a number you can get the answer, which is where algorithms come in.

An algorithm is a mathematical step by step recipe, much like a lego instruction booklet or a recipe for a cake, you put in stuff (numbers) follow it step by step and get an output. But the important thing is that you can do complex mathematical sums by doing several simple stages, for example to multiply a number by n you simply add the number (n-1) times or in a sightly more complex algorithm here's the one for the square root of a number.

As you can see they only get more complex, with many rearranging an equation to find x in terms of guesses for value of x like a sequence, instead of the output in a method known as iteration.

And now the clever ones among you will be wondering how does a machine known what to do, and the short answer is that it doesn't, the computer doesn't actually know anything, that's the beauty of it, it is just a machine which feeds this data into a bunch of microscopic switches known as transistors.

These transistors may or may not change depending on the value which flows through them as an electrical impulse which is key, as this means that they can be arranged in little patterns known as logic gates. When data passes through these they will do a very specific function, such as changing the ones and zeroes to the opposite, only changing the ones, or only changing the zeroes, or doing all kinds of crazy little things. But the gist of it is that after doing a lot of these little things, they will eventually form a pattern which will cause a big change to the output number and will give you your answer.

Whew that was a lot of intense knowledge. I hope I managed to find a balance these as its hard to give a good explanation without going into too much boring mathsy detail, but if I tell you that a high end mobile phone's processor actually has 1 billion transistors ticking away in its processor and the Xbox one in my room actually had 5 billion on own its processor, maybe it'll help you to appreciate what geniuses humans are.

Once again sorry for the lack of posts, I actually have started drafts for posts on castles, insanity and "The Martian" which I am still trying to think of a subject for but I just haven't had the time to finish them all, however I'll soon have a lot more free time and hopefully be able to start churning out science to my hearts content once more.

As always thanks for reading and I hope this has peaked your interest in how complex even the stuff that has been made by people can be. Maybe if we keep doing science, one day a human will be able to point at something and say truthfully "I understand that completely" but frankly thats a long way off yet. I shall leave you with my personal favorite quot from a robot.

"Bleepity Bloop Bloop" - R2D2

Peace out homies :)

Shut up and Dance!

Who doesn't love music? Everyone, extrovert or introvert, from Europe to the Amazon rain forest, likes music, and why wouldn't we? Music can inspire us, excite us, effect our emotions and importantly, make us dance! But what is dancing? And why have cultures that all developed separately around the world all developed both music and dance? Read on a bit and I'll tell you why.

So if we're asking why do we dance, we pretty obviously need to know why we make music? As music and dance go hand in hand and with music being the world's leading cause of dance, it's a pretty integral factor.

Music is a funny thing, if you think about it, it is a bunch of pretty unusual sounds, all in the same key (the soundwaves are oscillating harmonically), in set predictable patterns, with the optional addition of one or more humans singing along to words that convey a message when listened to.

Maybe a better way to understand the purpose of music is to understand where it came from. Nowadays music seems to be all about love and largely promiscuity, with a nice sprinkling of depression and general emotional turmoil mixed in for some variety. But at heart, it is still telling a story, and as we go backwards in time this trend becomes stronger and stronger. Even if we look back to the 60s and 50s we see an ever increasing amount of sings following a lyrical pattern with more story than nowadays and where the repeated section (or chorus) is more used for conveying one particular part of the story or as emphasis for effect in a similar manner to writers.

Rewind even further to the dark ages and nearly all of the songs were of great deeds or kings and nights and notable battles of the time, probably one of the more interesting things for people of those times and in an extremely similar manner to the songs in Game of Thrones (other than the awesome theme song) like "The rains of Castamere" which depicts a small war an annihilation of a lesser house.

At this point it is blindingly obvious that music did not evolve as a few humans passed the time by making weird noises, but as people telling stories, and people adding emphasis to certain parts, and making the stories more exciting with sounds until eventually, much like how we evolved from our bacterial buddies, music evolved to the incredible phenomena that it is today, a sort of inevitable branch of the art of language developed by our ancient ancestors.

And NOW we can have a bit of a clue as to what dancing really is, because much like how music has aspects of its original purpose - storytelling, still around today, so does dancing. Lets give it a thought, what do we do when we dance? We move right? But for a lot of songs those movements aren't random, but particular movements associated with that song (Notable mentions are "Twist and Shout", "Gangam Style", "Cha Cha Slide" and the last song in dirty dancing with the really cool dance to it.) Remind you of anything? Dancing may very well be the result of reenactments of stories, and visual aids to storytellers, evolving over time in a similar manner to music.

And as if we needed any more evidence we need look no further than South Africa, a land rich in culture, where many ancient tribes of people still thrive to this day, and The Zulu and the Ndebele tell stories of their history of war victories through tribal dances. 

So there we have it, dancing has evolved from an aid to storytelling, similar to pantomime, to the eventual, wonderful thing that it is today. Our world today is generally extremely divided but there are some things we cannot escape, our basic human needs, our desire to be around other people, and our love of both music and dance. So in summary, we need to remember the seeds that our ancestors planted tens of thousands of years ago and recall our similarities instead of our differences as our world becomes divided by class, religion and frankly unjustifiable wars. Also, SHUT UP AND DANCE.


See you all again soon and once more, thank you so much for reading :)

Its a Small World

Hello all. Who's ever felt alone? Most of you I guess. As the fantastic TV show known as scrubs states, humans aren't meant to be alone. But are we alone really? Through social networks, interpersonal connections and families we are all connected to one vast web of humanity, all 7 billion of us!

But the shocking part about this is how close you are in this web to everyone else, you are most likely only a couple of people apart from a scrap dealer in Beijing, or a banker in Vermont.

There was a massive hype about this a while back, during which it became known as the "six degrees of separation" or the idea that any two people on this planet, statistically should be able to be connected through a maximum of 6 different people.

But how accurate is this? How about we think about Twitter, if on twitter we assume that every person followed by someone has at least 50 people that the person looking does not have, then after 6 people we would arrive at 50 to the power of 6 people which is in fact 15625000000 people! Or to put in simpler terms, 15.625 Billion people!!! Which is double the number of people on Earth at this moment. Even if we settled for 45 we would still arrive at over 8 Billion, and still more than today.

Now I know what you're thinking, this is a bit far fetched, not every person has 50 people I don't know and there's no way that it could be that simple, besides this is a bit groundless so far. Well back in May of 2011 Facebook studied this phenomenon itself and what they found is pretty damn remarkable. On Facebook back in 2011 there is an average of 3.74 degrees of separation between 2 people! So not only is there solid evidence for this theory, there is solid evidence that it is in fact, decreasing and that the world is becoming more connected.

What Facebook did not account for however is that not everyone has Facebook and that people also use different means of communication. One person is increasingly likely to be signed up to different social networks and are likely to have different friends who are different types of people on these social networks. Although I could not find any research that managed to incorporate this effect, and the effect of our real life friends and family aswell, the only possible effect would be that it would further decrease the degrees of separation.

So there you all have it. Not only are we never truly alone, we are never truly disconnected, so next time you feel alone or insignificant just remember that you're most likely only a few people away from your hero, the person you might marry, the creator of pikachu and myself!

This world is full of wonders, one of them is you, and the others are a lot closer than you realise.

(also shoutout to Amy)

For any of you who are interested I'll post the link to the video I watched below, as well as a website which allows you to map degrees of separation specifically from Kevin Bacon's acting career. and as always, thanks for reading guys :)

http://9gag.com/tv/p/aM8jxR/the-science-of-six-degrees-of-separation

https://oracleofbacon.org/

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Solar System

Hi Guys, I'm sorry I haven't posted in a while but I'm hoping that this will make up for it. In the time that I wasn't posting, I was on Tumblr writing a mini series about the solar system, which I hope will entertain and inform you all on the wonders of our planetary neighbors, I would also like to add that as it was inspired by the photos of Pluto, I started at the outside and worked inwards, meaning that after the Mars Post, there is a significant drop in quantity. Anyways I guess I should include my outro here as I already uploaded them all in order. The Solar system is massively more magnificent than any human can truly comprehend. One day it may be possible for our descendants to go swimming in the mists of Saturn or to dive deeply under the seas of Ganymede. However at the end of the day we're in the best age of humanity, because what they may take for granted, we have the unrivalled satisfaction of discovering. And with that enjoy my friends, see you soon :)

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Solar System - Mercury

Here we have Mercury. This is the smallest planet to our solar system and yet is one of the most interesting, purely because being so close to the sun has made it so unique. its slow rotation and fast orbit means that the side facing the sun doesn’t change much (about 3 every 2 orbits) and as a result, the one side can be 427 degrees, while the other can be a, substantially cooler, -173 degrees!

It also has a unique kind of atmosphere, where although solar winds are always blowing it away, they are also constantly replenishing it, through radioactive decay and micrometeors causing dust. It is also very closely the second densest planet with about 5.4g per cubic centimeter.

Its extreme closeness to our sun also makes this planet extremely challenging to study, however two probes have managed to visit mercury, including messenger (a nice reminder of the god for which mercury was named) and together those two probes have mapped out the surface.

It is also the most cratered planet in our solar system, the rocky planets that can suffer craters from meteors usually self heal through geological processes but due to its geological quirkyness, mercury does not. Many of its craters are named after famous humans such as authors and scientists. As well as this, unusual readings mean that it is thought to have a molten core which is extremely unusual for a rocky planet of any size.

This extremely small, fast moving planet is by far one of the more interesting as it has preserved the history of our solar system in its craters where various information on impacts may be found. It is also an oddity as planets go, even in our solar system. Making it seem all the truer that great things come in small packages.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Solar System - Venus

Next up we have our closest planetary neighbor, Venus. The acidic, boiling hot, toxic, generally deadly planet sized wasteland which was ironically named after the goddess of love (nice going Romans). It is often referred to as the sister planet of Earth, as they are incredibly similar in size (only 638 km in difference) and they are both very close together. Because of this it is also the second brightest object in the night sky after the moon and can even be seen in the day on occasion. Its usefulness, in ancient times earned it the names morning star and evening star, as it could sometimes be seen before sunrise, and sometimes just after sunset.

As romantic as all of the names and coincidences may sound it doesn’t change the fact that Venus is effectively a planet sized death trap. The atmospheric pressure on Venus is equivalent to 92 times that on earth which is the same as in the deep sea. This means that any humans on the surface would simply be squished and that is if the rest of it didn’t kill them first.

Venus is a fair amount closer to the sun than Earth, however it experiences unexpectedly high surface temperatures due to its thick atmosphere of sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide.This is an example of a runaway greenhouse effect where more and more heat is trapped by the sun, which means that the surface temperature of Venus is a cosy 462 degrees and the fact that there is no seasonal variation really does not help.

Despite this (and by the power of human stubbornness) various probes have actually been sent to Venus and several Russian landers actually landed on the planet (where each of them have been promptly destroyed). The most successful mission to date has been Venera 13 which managed to survive 2 hours on the surface of the planet, despite being designed to last 30 minutes) and has also sent back colour photographs of the surface of the planet.

This sister to Earth is fascinatingly deadly, and due to its unique atmosphere and composition, gives extremely interesting data for our scientists to study. However it is also a sharp reminded of how dangerous our solar system is, that even our own “sister planet” would kill us in only a matter of seconds.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Solar System - Earth

Look where we’ve finally arrived. I’ll admit that ever since I started writing these posts I have both been excited to write this part, but baffled as to what I should include. Our planet is one which is truly unique to us, even with the discovery of a new “superearth” (otherwise known as kepler 452b), our planet remains unique because of one simple factor. Us, the birds outside, the earthworms beneath your feet. Life.

Earth is the largest rocky planet in our solar system. It is also the densest with a Deity of about 5.5 grams per cubic centimeter approximately. Surprisingly it rotates exactly once a day and shockingly it orbits our sun exactly once per year. Although the rotation is currently in the process of slowing down which means that it adds an extra 17 milliseconds per day per 100 years.

Our moon is also pretty special as it is the largest in relation to its planet out of any in our solar system and it is also Earth’s only moon. It is thought to have been created when a few billion years ago, a younger earth collided with a planet about the size of Mars. The debris formed the current Earth and our beloved moon.

But what makes Earth really unique is the sheer amount of life that has flourished there. We have studies thousands of exo planets and have yet to find one where life is likely to be as abundant as Earth. Because not only has life formed on Earth, but life has thrived, for millions and millions of years life has prevailed, our delicate complex carbon structures refusing to be destroyed by meteorites, volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts and while our Earth has grown mountains and created whole continents since the first slimy little thing crawled out of the sea there has always been life. And likely as not there will always be life, until the planet itself dies.

If that doesn’t make it the most incredible place we know then I don’t know what does.