Funny story, eh?

So the other day I got pissed off and thought to myself, Man, I should start a blog and yell about shit.

Then I realized, dang dude, I already have a blog!

Then I realized I haven’t posted anything in just about forever.

Then I realized why I don’t like it. It’s always there.  There’s always crap to write about.

So yeah. I’ll be back in a month and I might post something useful.

One small update, I am now much better at motorcycling.  Haven’t dropped my bike yet, haven’t had any accidents yet, and I haven’t stalled it in at least a week. Go me?

So I got a motorcycle

This whole clutch thing is a bit new still.  I never have problems shifting except starting out, where I tend to stall the thing about 25% of the time.  I guess that’s pretty good for my first day on a cycle (and I’ve never driven a stick), but I’m still kind of impatient.  It seems like such a noob mistake, and is also kind of an all or nothing deal.  I can’t handle traffic until my chances of stalling it are only a few percent.  I really can’t be stalling as I’m entering an intersection, since that would be….well, shitty.  So I’m relegated to the neighborhood for the moment.  Perhaps tomorrow I’ll figure out how to do it right.

Descent into Insanitz Because of a Kezboard

So, zou maz notice that something about this looks a little bit different.  When I first got to Germanz, I bought a cheap kezboard because I find it reallz uncomfortable to use mz laptop’s kezboard.  Being in Germanz, I naturallz bought one with a German lazout. Although the German kezboard shares manz commonalities with the American lazout, it definitelz has its differences, one of which is that the z and y kezs are swapped in position.  To avoid annozing us all too badlz, Iäm (ä is also where ‘ is on an American kezboard) going to go ahead and switch back into the American lazout. Just an editorial note for those not in the know: the layout of a keyboard can be changed in Windows to match that of whatever language you want.  The letters on the face of the keys are obviously not different, but what comes out when you hit the key is changed according to what language you have selected.

I learned most of the differences between the two pretty easily, since my brain interpreted so many of them as “new”, meaning I didn’t have to first unlearn and then relearn things, just acquire new things.  What has driven me to madness though, is this whole y and z thing.  When trying to type in English with a German keyboard, I constantly had to go back and replace the z with a y in pretty much every case.  For example, I want to type the sentence “Hey what are you doing?”  In the German layout, it comes out like this, “Hez what are zou doingÄ”.

Why catalytically splitting water doesn’t work

Suppose we wanted to develop a new catalyst to solve our energy problems. All it needs to do is take water and split it into hydrogen and oxygen, then we can burn those products and use it to power things. This process is endothermic, so the energy will have to come from *somewhere*. Well, why can’t it come from the air around our system, for example? We just make the air colder, and with global warming, that is something we don’t mind at all!

Energy + 2 H₂O_(g) –> 2 H₂ +O₂

The reason for this ultimately doesn’t have anything to do with catalysis. A catalyst reduces the activation energy of the process, but it *cannot* make any non-spontaneous process into a spontaneous one, meaning a catalyst cannot affect the value of the equilibrium constant of a system. Catalysis affects nothing but the RATE of how quickly a system reaches equilibrium. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activation_energy for details)

Based on the concept of Gibbs free energy, the splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen at 298K is a non-spontaneous process because the ΔG_rxn is positive.

2 H₂O_{(g) –>} 2 H₂ + O₂

The Gibbs equation:

ΔG_rxn = ΔH_rxn – TΔS_rxn

ΔH_f for water = -241.8 kJ/mol

ΔH_f for H₂ = 0 kJ/mol

ΔH_f for O₂ = 0 kJ/mol

ΔSfor water = 188.7 J/mol·K

ΔS for H₂ = 130.6J/mol·K

ΔS for O₂ = 205J/mol·K

ΔG_rxn = ΔH_rxn – TΔS_rxn

ΔG_rxn = ((0+0)-(-483.6kJ/mol)) –298K·((205+2·130.6)-(188.7))J/mol·K

ΔG_rxn = 400.9kJ/mol

Since ΔG_rxn is positive, the reaction is not spontaneous under those conditions, meaning energy must be forced into the system. However, since the ΔS_rxn component is positive, increasing the temperature will eventually cause the process to become spontaneous as the entropic effects become dominant over the enthalpic effects. For this process, one could expect to see that occur at around a temperature of 1740K. So, if we made an oven that hot, we could do this process, theoretically. The problem, however, is that we have to heat the oven, something which requires a lot of energy. At best, the efficiency of the process breaks even exactly (speaking theoretically, within the bounds of thermodynamics). Realistically, this would be insanely useless.

The ultimate answer to this question is then, there cannot be a catalyst which simply “makes” water turn into hydrogen and oxygen under these conditions because that process is thermodynamically unfavorable. The equilibrium is the controlling factor, not catalysis. It is this reason why the process cannot simply draw energy from the air to make it happen. In short, the answer for this question is basically the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics.

After writing this post, I feel it is safe to say: Science. It works, bitches.

Note: for any of you who don’t find your way here from Reddit, here is why I wrote this post: http://www.reddit.com/info/6nct8/comments/

Not dead…

…just haven’t felt like writing recently.

One delicious tidbit of info I’ll allow you: I’ve 69ed the plans for an English degree and am going to stay 2 more years at school and finish my chemistry degree.  It is what I have wanted ever since I dropped it as my major.  The word regret comes to mind, in some senses.  Starting Fall 2008 I will be back at it full force, though.

One of those days….

….when it’s painfully obvious that you are not from Germany.  At the end of a guest lecture, when the rest of the class starts knocking on their desks as one would knock on a door, you’re the only one clapping. /facepalm

The Ultimate in IMS music

I have found the ultimate in music suited to the Insufferable Music Snob (IMS): Icelandic indie post-electrorock. I think….I think I can stop looking for new bands now.

h/t to whomever coined the phrase IMS, btw. Amanda Marcotte, maybe?

And WCF! WOOT!

Toothpaste for Dinner: National Organization for Men

See, Drew gets it.

(also, I’d embed it, but it’s too wide. Curse you, narrow theme! )

English as a Unifying Language

So I’m back to Germany today (technically yesterday, but I was too tired to do anything but flop over and sleep), and after going to the supermarket, I sort of re-realized just how much American language and culture permeate Germany (and Europe in general). A large percentage of packing cartons for products in supermarkets have English instructions or shipping labels, “look” and “image” have both entered the standard German vocabulary (mostly in ads), C&A sells a shirt with “Eat me, baby” on it (with pictures of apples on it, too), and a large number of “hip” businesses have English words in their slogans and in many cases consist entirely of English. Examples: Forever19, Terracotta-arts and pots, and my favorite brand of peanut butter, “Real American Crunchy Style Peanut Butter” or something. Sadly I don’t have any of it at the moment, so I can’t be sure of the actual exact name.

On a cold morning in February, while waiting for the bus to the train station at about 6am, a man with luggage came up next to me, out of breath, sort of looked at me a for a bit, then looked at the schedules for a while, then back at me again. He began to speak, hesitated, then went on in very excellent English, “Have I missed the bus to the train station already?” I started laughing, simply because I hadn’t at all expected it to be English. Turns out he was a researcher from Puerto Rico working at the Max Planck Institut and was going to a conference of some sort. I find it, however, very interesting that his chances of finding a person who could speak English were really quite high. In my experience so far, I have not met even a single student (German student, I should clarify) at Universität des Saarlandes who could not speak at least reasonably good English.

Jim Cramer….oh the agony

Jon Stewart on Jim Cramer (and other stuff)

4:40 to 6:00 pretty much proves to me what I’ve long thought: most people on TV are not that well-informed.

Webcomic Friday!

To commemorate the passing of Gary Gygax, co-creator of D and D, this week will feature my favorite tribute comic, courtesy of xkcd. I was never a D and D guy, but I appreciate what he did for geekery.

And on a separate note, I’ve recently been seeing even more misogyny in WoW than normal, with the brunt of it from a particular incident in one of the world’s top raiding guilds. With a post on the website of the guild Death and Taxes titled “The cunt that broke the web,” you know this is gonna be a bad.

Additionally, I have bonus comics this week:

This beauty from Such Rubbish and another gem from Penny Arcade.

Also, actual content is in the works…I have about 5 partway finished posts, none very close to completion, sadly.

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Now playing: Múm – Faraway Swimmingpool
via FoxyTunes