(From a problem set my students just handed in…)
The amount of energy it takes to bring water from room temperature to a boil is enough to launch it 34km straight up. The amount of energy it would take to boil it down all the way – until it all evaporated – would launch it 270km.
Compare this to a typical altitude for a 747, about 11km, or for a space shuttle, about 150km.
Damn. Water has a very high heat capacity.
And the idea of launching a liter of water 34km into the air is pretty cool.
I didn’t realize this until the end of class today. Today was my last class to teach at Stanford, and the last one I’m going to teach in the foreseeable future.
It’s pretty hard to describe my current emotional state. I really hope my kids turn out well. I’m not sure how I’m going to function without teaching more of them.
But it’s an immense change. I didn’t really expect that today. It’s like signing off, turning off the lights, and heading off – but more so. In some ways I’m feeling accomplished, that I’ve done fairly well as a teacher, and my students (7 years’ worth of them now! Some of my students’ students are graduate students already) have done well; I’m immensely proud of all of them, and I can still remember them in ridiculous levels of detail, what each one was good at, and so on. So in that sense, it’s a bit like getting promoted to a new and very different rank; I’ve successfully done these things, left a real impression, and am going on to something new.
But mostly, it’s just an incomprehensible shift. I’ve been a teacher for a long time now, and stopping that is really difficult to fathom.
I need to get some new students, of some sort or another.
Sorry, I’m rambling at this point. I can’t really write a coherent sentence right now. But… um… wow.
[politics filter]
News story here.
I am seriously approaching a loss for words. I’m increasingly of the opinion that the Bush administration has lost their collective marbles completely, is engrossed in some pseudo-messianic or pseudo-cold-war scheme to try to conquer the Middle East, and is actually being run by people stupid or delusional enough to believe that the fact that we have entirely failed to establish any sort of stable beachhead, much less stable local regime or civil society, in either Iraq or Afghanistan, might not merit a little bit more attention before we rush off on the latest half-baked scheme.
Has it seriously failed to occur to anyone that the situations in both of those countries are teetering continuously on the brink of explosive chaos, of the sort most damaging to us, and that without an immediate and large-scale deployment of resources towards nation-building — that hated word that suggests long-term investment that doesn’t return instant profitability — we’re risking dumping all of Central Asia into anarchy, leaving behind wastelands to be partitioned between fundamentalist tribesmen (Pashtuns, Kurds, Arabs both Shi’ite and Sunni, Turkmen, Chechen, etc etc – all the core of the support of the Taliban, al Qaeda, and all the rest of our primary enemies) and possibly China, India, Pakistan, and all the other local countries who are just together enough to be able to make a control grab in a power vacuum? Has it seriously failed to occur to our government that this might be a really bad thing?
I’m just losing all faith in them. I would have thought that cynical self-interest would be enough to keep this administration from the most obviously stupid moves, but apparently there is some sort of scheme of grandiose ambition at play here which outdoes even the survival instinct.
I really, really hope these latest news reports are wrong.
I should probably put this up every so often: I’ve got a “politics” filter where I tend to put things like interesting news items, political analysis-type stuff, and occasional “incoming trouble” warnings. It’s filtered since many people prefer not to have to get this in their LJ.
So if you’d like to be on this filter and aren’t already (if you are, you’ve seen several “politics” posts from me, marked as such, in the past few days), comment or e-mail me and I’ll add you to that filter.
[politics filter]
Well, it looks like at least one major terror strike – another one using aircraft as weapons – was narrowly averted. This report from debka:
May 22 Update: Further to the report below, DEBKAfile’s counter terror sources have more exclusive revelations: The three men detained at Jeddah airport Monday May 19 were not Moroccans but Saudi nationals married to Moroccan women and using false passports. The Saudi government is anxious to remove the stigma of aircraft hijackers attached to Saudis since 9/11 – hence the obfuscation over the detainees’ nationality. Final identification of all the remains found on the sites of the May 12 bombings Riyadh jumps the death toll to 60. Nonetheless, the Saudis refuse to budge from the figure of 34.
May 21: The terrorist mega-attack against which security – like the US, Britain, Australia and other western powers – has been on high alert since Tuesday, May 20, almost happened this week.
On Monday, May 19, Saudi authorities detained three Moroccan al Qaeda suspects at Jeddah international airport just as they were preparing to board a Saudi national airlines plane bound for Sudan. While “Saudi security sources” claimed the next day that the men planned to hijack the Saudi plane and crash it over Jeddah, DEBKAfile’s exclusive counter-terror sources reveal that, under interrogation, the suspected al Qaeda terrorists admitted they had intended flying the captive Saudi airliner over Israel and crashing it over an Israeli city.
That first Saudi announcement claimed the suspects carried knives and their last testaments. The Saudis make it a habit never to mention Israel in the context of al Qaeda’s attacks – even one which they thwarted. Then, Wednesday evening, May 21, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef denied there had been any hijack plot. He said two not three Moroccans had been detained in connection with “previous security cases”.
According to DEBKAfile’s sources, neither Saudi version is correct. The terrorists were not just armed with knives but were loaded with explosives, and there were three of them, not two.
The high alert declared in Israel Tuesday also placed the Israeli Air Force on round–the-clock patrol to guard against hijackers reaching Israeli skies to attack Israeli towns.
I’d say that was a close one – and it may be the only major strike that was in the works, so the angel of death may have passed us over this time. (Knock on wood)
Still, keep your eyes open the next few days – there may still be a nasty surprise or two left in the works.
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were gunned down in Texas. News story courtesy of the New York Times.
This bit of work avoidance has been brought to you by the letters ‘t,’ ‘h,’ ‘e,’ ‘s,’ ‘i,’ and ‘s.’
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 