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, 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”.

Eventually I learned how to deal with this.  My typing was slower, but I very seldom made mistakes with the 2 letters.  When I wanted to type out a text in German, I now had to UN-relearn what I just taught myself.  That is where the problems really began to set in.  When I wanted to type a ‘z’, my first instinct was to use my right pointer finger to hit the American ‘y’ key.  However, because I had gotten myself used to pausing, thinking a second, and then doing the opposite of what I was used to, I instead hit the American ‘z’ key, thus producing a completely unexpected and very unwanted ‘y’.  Example: “Hey, hast du morgen Zeit?” is what I want to type.  What comes out, however, is this mess: “Hez, hast du morgen YeitÄ”.

As this whole issue went on, however, it did nothing but continue to deteriorate.  It got to the point where I had basically unlearned the location of the 2 keys.  On my brain’s version of the keyboard, there were 24 letters and 2 empty spaces, y and z, and those 2 were, in an amazingly Schrödinger-esque sense, on both keys at once.  In my entire career as a typist, I’ve learned the rules: one key makes one character, another key makes a different character, there are no duplicates, and there are no changing keys (except through the use of alt, control, etc.).  But then one of my basic rules of life was changed. Sometimes a key does produce a different character, and although this is theoretically done in a predictable manner, the human brain is horribly equipped to always remember this.

And so every single time I wrote either of those letters, I had to pause a second, think about which language I was typing in, think about which letter I wanted, and then hit the key.  But even after doing this, I still produced the wrong letter about half of the time.  After a few weeks of this, I was literally going crazy.  You have no idea how often y and z really occur in German and English until you notice how often you have to pause to fix your damn mistakes.

To this day I still do not have this issue sorted out completely.  I have since gotten an American keyboard, and even when typing in the American layout, once in a while a ‘z’ will pop up in place of a ‘y’ completely at random.  I have permanently altered my brain by learning to use a German keyboard.  Crazy.

So just what the heck is happening here?  Basically my conjecture is that we never learn the layout of the keyboard.  The only thing we know is the muscle movement for a letter.  When I learned to type, I looked at my fingers, found a key, and then pressed it; I learned the motion, but as I improved, I completely forgot what letter was actually printed on the key I just hit.  Think about it: look at a blank wall and try to picture all 26 letters on the keyboard.  Most likely the only ones you’ll get will be the home keys (ASDF, JKL; ) and maybe also QWERTY, since that is the term used to describe this type of keyboard. Now hold your hands up in front of you and start “typing” a sentence.  You have no clue where the keys are, but you can still type out an imaginary sentence with ease.

So, moving on.  There is another thing that complicates this even further.  We don’t type individual letters, we type words.  Anyone who has ever entered a CD authenticity verification key has experienced this; typing random strings of characters that don’t form a word is very challenging.  Try this exercise: hold your hands out in front of you and imagine you are typing on an imaginary keyboard (visualize the keyboard out in front of you).  With some concentration, you can type individual letters.  But now type out a word.  FAR easier!  Every time we type out a word, we are using not just a series of single keystrokes, but a general motion to type a word.  After picking the next word out, the brain doesn’t simply start naming off individual letters to be typed; rather it says, “Hands, go type the word “word”.  And they do it.

Let’s go with this a little further.  When typing out ‘word’, I have an idea of what my hands should do.  The one finger does a motion up to the left (w), then to the top right of the keyboard (o), then top left and somewhat in the center (r), but then something freaky happened to me.  I hesitated before hitting the ‘d’ key.  So I looked down at my keyboard to see what was up, and I noticed that not only was my left middle finger raised up to hit the ‘d’ key, but my right middle finger was also raised, ready to type ‘k’, the final letter of the word the right hand is used to typing, ‘work’.  The same thing happened a paragraph ago when I wanted to type ‘complicates.’  I typed out ‘comp,’ paused a tiny moment (my brain had to decide what should come after the ‘comp’ unit, (complete, complicated, computer, etc.) then continued on without even a second thought, finished it to form ‘complicated,’ a word which I probably use much more often. My brain had already decided to type ‘complicated’ clear back at ‘comp.’

So what is all this then?  Well, basically I’d argue that the brain thinks in much larger units than we are consciously aware of.  In typing the word ‘complicated’, my right hand is already moving to type the ‘o’ before I’ve even hit the ‘c’ key, and ultimately has prepared the entire unit of information to type before even starting the unit.  In that sense, I’d say that my brain has a certain set of deeply ingrained units with which I type; not letters or syllables, but sort of a short-list of word roots that I often use.  My previous example taught me that one of these units is ‘wor,’ and these units aren’t typed as individual letters, but are a single, fluid motion to produce a word.

Ahh, how I love using really mundane examples to get all psychoanalytical.  Science: It works, bitches!

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/

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.

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! )

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.

So now let’s flip this around– what are the chances that a person from France, Germany, Spain, etc. (any of the larger European countries) could try that in America and have it work? Not that great, except in the case of Spanish, since approx. 12% of people living in the US can speak Spanish (reference). Of course it doesn’t really seem reasonable to make this comparison since Europe has such a large number of different languages–it simply isn’t feasible to expect an American to speak every (or even many) European languages (just as I wouldn’t expect a European or anyone else to know 4+ languages).

What percent of American college students (with English as their first language) can speak Spanish, and what percent of German college students (with German as their first language) can speak English? I don’t know the answer to the first question, but the second one I do know: a lot. 51% of the population can speak English, with many of those people concentrated in the younger age groups.

So what’s my point? Basically, I would argue that Americans need to start learning foreign languages to a greater extent. Just because you can usually get by with English shouldn’t mean that you only need English. We’re starting to see this already, since a pretty good portion of college students in the US can speak a second language to some extent. What we don’t have yet is the prevalence of second language instruction starting early in life, when it is far more effective.

And I’ll finish up with one more story; In December I went to a Couch Surfing meetup in Strasbourg. The theme was a “Three Country Meetup” – Switzerland, Germany, and France. The most prevalent language was by far French, since it was hosted in France, in a location also near to the French-speaking section of Switzerland. However, there were some cases such as follows:

Person 1: (in French) Hey I’m Person 1, how are you?
Person 2: /Blank stare
Person 1: (in French) Oh, no French. Ok.
Person 2: (in German) You speak German?
Person 1: /Blank stare (in French, of course)
Person 2: (in English) Let’s just speak English then, eh?
Person 1: (also in English) Yeah, would make sense.
Person 3 (me): lol

There were quite a few people there who couldn’t have talked to each other had they not known English. In that regard, I think it is really quite wonderful that one language has taken on the roll of a unifying language. If you want to talk to people in other places and want to have the best chances of communicating with the greatest number of people, English is arguably the way to go. I don’t think that this is necessarily a good or bad thing, simply the result of the past couple hundred years of history (not to say that we haven’t done some bad stuff in those couple hundred years).

Final note: the American xenophobes who fear a bilingual or multilingual America have no idea what it’s like to live in a nation with this level of prevalence of an outside language. Pretty much the only reason we have gotten by with such a mono-language culture is because everyone else has adopted English as an international language and because of our geographically isolated location. More on that later.

Off to go cook myself some Merguez with Tabasco and a baguette and some Laphroaig I bought today (on sale, only 22 euro!)

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Now playing: Various Artists – The Flir – Lick
via FoxyTunes

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

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