Comparison of atropine and other heterocyclic compounds with one methylated nitrogen

Of the molecules shown below, atropine is the only one where nitrogen does not lie in the same plane as the other atoms of its ring. I don't know what the significance of that is. 

Regolith Elegy - poem #3

Hard landing 

Lunar module damaged

My radio still crackles

I call Houston

No answer

I find Billy in the wreckage

I try to wake him

He's dead

I go out, plant the flag, and salute it

No one else will ever see that moment

I take Billy out and lay him down next to the flag

He would have wanted that

I survey the module from the outside

No way to take off again

Just enough oxygen left

To enjoy the view 

And write this poem

Goodbye, Earth

God bless America

My Old House in Tanzania

 

My house is the one on the left. I liked it. It had a concrete floor, metal roof, three bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen. I had running water and electricity most of the time. Otherwise, I had candles and a few buckets of water I filled at a nearby pump.

Below are some pics of the chicken coop I built. I sawed all the planks myself. I also tried my hand at banana farming. I had better luck with that than raising chickens. 

Ending World Hunger with Pasta, Ugali, or Sadza made from Jerusalem Artichoke Flour? Also, Atomic Survival Bread!

First, a recipe for bread from a survivor of the Yugoslav Wars. She calls it atomic bread. Easy to make and stays edible for a long time. 

Bing says

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The cost of ending world hunger is a complex issue and depends on various factors. According to a study backed by the German government, ending hunger by 2030 would come with a price tag of $330 billion. The study suggests that by targeting enhanced aid money more effectively and with greater innovation, a solution is possible. International donors would need to add another $14 billion a year to their spending on food security and nutrition over the next 10 years; more than twice their current contribution. Low and middle-income countries would also have to give another $19 billion a year, potentially through taxation.

However, the United Nations has suggested that just $160 per year for each person living in extreme poverty would eradicate world hunger by 2030. The money should be delivered through both cash transfers and “pro-poor” investments

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GlobalGiving says:

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Estimates of how much money it would take to end world hunger range from $7 billion to $265 billion per year.  

Why such a big range? Because experts disagree about how to end world hunger. Hunger has many causes:

Bad weather

Disease outbreaks

Pests

War

Falling prices for crops

Rising prices for food

Low wages or unemployment 

No single solution can address them all. 

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Greater cultivation of the Jerusalem artichoke could help:

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The tubers can be eaten raw, cooked, or pickled.[9]

Before the arrival of Europeans, indigenous peoples cultivated H. tuberosus as a food source. The tubers persist for years after being planted, so the species expanded its range from central North America to the eastern and western regions.[citation needed] Early European colonists learned of this and sent tubers back to Europe, where they became a popular crop and naturalized there. It later gradually fell into obscurity in North America, but attempts to market it commercially were successful in the late 1900s and early 2000s.[7][10]

The tuber contains about 2% protein, no oil, and little starch.

...

Jerusalem artichokes have 650 mg potassium per 1 cup (150 g) serving. They are also high in iron and contain 10–12% of the USRDA of fiber, niacin, thiamine, phosphorus, and copper.[53]

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It's tolerant of a wide range of conditions, easy to grow, and nutritious. It can also be preserved for long periods. 

The different types of hunger need to be considered. Is it being caused by a lack of calories, a lack of nutrients, or both?

WHO says:

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Iodine, vitamin A, and iron are the most important in global public health terms; their deficiency represents a major threat to the health and development of populations worldwide, particularly children and pregnant women in low-income countries.

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Vitamins D and B12 are also noteworthy in this category.

Ugali, also called sadza and many other names, is a corn porridge eaten in many countries afflicted by chronic hunger. While it is cheap and filling, it is somewhat low in calories and nutrients. It is usually eaten with beans or vegetables. 

It is possible to make flour with Jerusalem artichokes. That flour could be used to make ugali or sadza. I've also seen recipes where it is used to make pasta. I've never eaten Jerusalem artichokes myself, though it seems they taste like potatoes. 

On the other hand, the inulin in Jerusalem artichokes can cause flatulence. That's not really any worse than what happens with various beans though. 

Overclocking, Beowulf Clusters, Transformers, and Mineral Oil Cooling

Overclocking, cluster computing, and mineral oil cooling are not new ideas, yet they rarely have been combined. Let's look at some examples:

This is the top result on YouTube for the search "world's cheapest supercomputer":

It's an air-cooled GPU cluster in Japan. It had a lot of bang for the buck at the time, but there was no attempt to overclock it or use mineral oil cooling.

This Raspberry Pi cluster by Oracle only needs oil cooling and overclocking to be a real mean machine:

Mineral oil is cheap, non-toxic, non-conducting, and does not evaporate. It also has much better heat transfer properties. It's been used for a long time to cool high voltage transformers. Here is a brief history from: Mineral oils | Transformers Magazine (transformers-magazine.com)

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Before Elihu Thomson, an electrical engineer working for Westinghouse in the US, patented the use of mineral oil in transformers in 1887, the burgeoning transformer industry had a major problem to solve. As transformers operate, energy losses occur, generating heat. As higher loads are applied, losses increase exponentially, rapidly raising temperatures in a transformer’s core and windings. Without adequate cooling, this heat prematurely ages the transformer, ultimately leading to equipment failure. At the time, the only insulating material used was air, but because these first transformers generated high amounts of losses, they were quickly limited in size by the rapid generation of heat that air failed to properly dissipate. Any attempts at larger devices would fail. Once Elihu Thomson identified oil as a readily available solution, the history of oil as an insulating medium began. Today, several billion liters of mineral oil are used in electrical equipment worldwide.

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I used mineral oil to cool the overclocked computer I built two years ago. 

The white mineral oil jug is visible in the background. The copper BBs and pennies in the oil pan act as heat sinks. In retrospect, I could have gotten even better cooling by lifting up the corners of the pan a few inches to get airflow under it. An even better set-up would have been to put a layer of aluminum foil on the table, set a damp towel on that, and then put the oil pan on top of the towel. That would have gotten me cooling from radiation and evaporation. 

NSA has a water-cooled computer complex in Utah. Yes, the best idea their engineers had was to use evaporation cooling in a desert. That's a poor design to say the least.

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The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center,[1] is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger.[2]

...

The completed facility is expected to require 65 megawatts of electricity, costing about $40 million per year.[6][19] Given its open-evaporation-based cooling system, the facility is expected to use 1.7 million US gal (6,400 m3) of water per day.[24]

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There's potential to save enormous amounts of power by overclocking. When one CPU can do the work of hundreds or thousands, computers became vastly smaller, cheaper, and more powerful. Computers are about as small and cheap as they're ever going to be, and advances in software are few and far between. Thus, the only avenue of improvement left is heat transfer. 

There is a Japanese supercomputer called Tsubame KFC. The KFC part stands for Kepler Fluid Cooling. Like the computer I built, the nodes of the supercomputer are immersed in mineral oil. 

Early efforts at liquid-cooled computers had mixed results:

Liquid Immersion Cooling From Green Revolution Cooling Helps Tokyo Institute of Technology Achieve Top Honors at Green500 Three Years in a Row | Newswire

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Ahead of overview of TSUBAME-KFC's cooling technology with warm liquid (oil) submersion, we discuss the cooling methodologies; While submersion cooling has been deployed in the past in machines such as the Cray-2, the Florinate coolant utilized was extremely expensive, and moreover evaporated at low temperature of 56 degrees Celsius, and in fact the vapor was collected to be re-condensed, requiring airtight packaging

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My oil-cooled computer never got above 40 degrees C even during a CPU stress test. Also, one gallon of the mineral oil I used costs about $29. 

These guys broke the record for overclocking this year. They used liquid nitrogen as a coolant. Liquid nitrogen is dangerous, expensive, and while it is very cold, its heat transfer properties are poor because it evaporates so quickly. 9 GHz is impressive, but they could have gotten even better performance with mineral oil. I overclocked my oil-cooled computer to 5 GHz. That was the maximum I found. Higher than that, and I'd get a kernel panic when trying to boot up. 

I mention all this because rather than spend hundreds of dollars on a computer I don't need to test a concept that's already been proven, I thought it would be better to simply write an article about how to build a machine that combined all these useful ideas.

So here's how it should be done: Make a cluster of the desired size using Intel 13900K chips. Submerge the CPUs in mineral oil. Overclock the chips in 1 GHz implements until 90% of the available power supply is used. A regular US household outlet offers about 1500 W. That's enough power to get to at least 90 GHz. The 9 GHz crew above used 125 W to get there, so 90 GHz would need about 1250 W.

Microsoft did something similar a few years back when then submerged a data center in a waterproof shipping container:

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Back in 2018, Microsoft sunk an entire data center to the bottom of the Scottish sea, plunging 864 servers and 27.6 petabytes of storage 117 feet deep in the ocean. Today, the company has reported that its latest experiment was a success, revealing findings that show that the idea of an underwater data center is actually a pretty good one.

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Microsoft’s underwater server experiment resurfaces after two years - The Verge

Good job, Microsoft. Next time, fill the container with mineral oil and then partially submerge it in cold water. Lake Michigan would be best as it has the coldest water in the lower 48. Mount the shipping container vertically in water, like the one on the left in the pic below:

The Mpemba Effect - A Salute to an Unsung Tanzanian Scientist

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Erasto Bartholomeo Mpemba (1950–2023)[note 1] was a Tanzanian game warden who, as a schoolboy, discovered the eponymously named Mpemba effect, a paradoxical phenomenon in which hot water freezes faster than cold water under certain conditions; this effect had been observed previously by Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and René Descartes.

He discovered the phenomenon at Magamba Secondary School in 1963 while preparing ice cream to earn pocket-money.[3] Due to lack of time, he skipped the cooling phase when preparing the ice cream and immediately put it into the freezer; unexpectedly, his milk mixture froze faster than that of his classmates.[2] His physics teacher at the time told him that his observation was clearly not possible.[2] A few years later, the head of Mpemba's school invited British physicist Denis Osborne (1932-2014) from the University of Dar es Salaam to give a guest lecture on his work.[4] At the end of the presentation, Mpemba asked the question that had been bothering him for so long: “If you take two beakers with equal volumes of water, one at 35°C and the other at 100°C, and put them into a refrigerator, the one that started at 100°C freezes first. Why?”[2] Teachers and classmates present thought the claim absurd and mocked Mpemba for the question. Osborne was also caught off guard, but was later able to prove experimentally the correctness of Mpemba's observations.[2][4] In 1969, during Mpemba's studies at the College of African Wildlife Management near Moshi, a paper that he and Osborne had written on the phenomenon was published.[5]

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A lovely story that shows the importance of perseverance and having an open mind. Everyone who pays attention and asks questions can make a scientific discovery. 

Proof of the Existence of One-Way Functions and a True Random Number Generator (Solution to P versus NP problem)

Here is probably the smartest idea I'll ever have. 

First, take some time to watch this video (skip to the 15:10 mark):

Now look at this graph:

It's an asymmetric oscillation with one hump. If you iterate it, you get random numbers in the range of 100 to 200. It's a true random number generator and thus a one-way function. Furthermore, it describes a family of one-way functions. Any composite of trigonometric, logarithmic, and exponential functions will produce something similar. Of course, the initial value must be in the domain of ln(x) and produce an f(x) > 1. Else, the function approaches zero upon iteration. 

Thus, a general equation for one-way functions and random number generators is:

f(x) = a*(b*sin(c*x) + d*ln(e*x))^f

Where a, b, c, d, e, and f are real numbers. 

Note that when f(x) = r*(1-x) is iterated, chaos occurs when r = 3.759816

https://youtu.be/ovJcsL7vyrk?si=y8JO21psWtpq2TYS&t=312

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In computer science, a one-way function is a function that is easy to compute on every input, but hard to invert given the image of a random input. Here, "easy" and "hard" are to be understood in the sense of computational complexity theory, specifically the theory of polynomial time problems.

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The existence of such one-way functions is still an open conjecture. Their existence would prove that the complexity classes P and NP are not equal, thus resolving the foremost unsolved question of theoretical computer science.[1]: ex. 2.2, page 70  The converse is not known to be true, i.e. the existence of a proof that P≠NP would not directly imply the existence of one-way functions.[2]

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Cool. I solved the P = NP problem too. You're terminated, fucker.

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Although the P versus NP problem was formally defined in 1971, there were previous inklings of the problems involved, the difficulty of proof, and the potential consequences. In 1955, mathematician John Nash wrote a letter to the NSA, in which he speculated that cracking a sufficiently complex code would require time exponential in the length of the key.[5] If proved (and Nash was suitably skeptical), this would imply what is now called P ≠ NP, since a proposed key can easily be verified in polynomial time. Another mention of the underlying problem occurred in a 1956 letter written by Kurt Gödel to John von Neumann. Gödel asked whether theorem-proving (now known to be co-NP-complete) could be solved in quadratic or linear time,[6] and pointed out one of the most important consequences—that if so, then the discovery of mathematical proofs could be automated.

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