Posts

Showing posts from September, 2014

SANITATION FEVER HITS GHANA - EVEN THE PRESIDENT HAS JOINED IN!

Image
#WASH #Sanitation http://tinyurl.com/no9gw7b

THE CHOLERA OUTBREAK IN GHANA MEANS THAT GHANAIANS ARE EATING EACH OTHER'S SH*T

Image
Did you know? If you get #cholera, it means "you've eaten faeces" (Dr Hagan, Ghana, via @InformGhana). A lot of the sicknesses in Ghana are due to us not getting rid of our 'private' properly. The contents of 'private' include: parasites, viruses, bacteria and worm eggs - all can cause severe disease in humans. Make your own toilet:   http://momwithaprep.com/potty/ http://humanurehandbook.com/humanure_toilet.html http://tinyurl.com/lctmgwm http://sunnyscope.com/diy-camping-toilet/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3ioycfDNJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOOUxa4_K1g Deuteronomy 23:12-1412 "Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. 13 As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement. 14 For the Lord your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you. Your camp must be holy, so that he will n

The World Is An Amazing Place

Image
Continued from:  Which One Are You? If we are in a pool of water and there is a floating (object) very close by, we can move it “directly” by pushing the water with another (object ). If you looked only at the two ( objects) , all you would see would be that one moved immediately in response to the motion of the other—there is some kind of “ interaction ” between them. Of course, what we really do is to disturb the  water ; the  water  then disturbs the other  (object).   We could make up a “law” that if you pushed the water a little bit, an object close by in the water would move. If it were farther away, of course, the second  (object)  would scarcely move, for we move the water  locally . On the other hand, if we jiggle the  (object)  a new phenomenon is involved, in which the motion of the water moves the water there, etc., and  waves  travel away, so that by jiggling, there is an influence  very much farther out , an oscillatory influence, that cannot be understood fr

Which One Are You?

Image
Continued from:  Let's Stay Together? What  kinds  of particles are there? There were considered to be  92  at that time (1920s):  92  different kinds of atoms were ultimately discovered. They had different names associated with their chemical properties. credit:   http://feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_02.html#Ch1-S1

Let's Stay Together

Image
Continued from:   Divide. Conquer Some historic examples of  (joining up of things in the field of science) are the following: First, take  heat  and  mechanics . When atoms are in motion, the more motion, the more heat the system contains, and so  heat and all temperature effects can be represented by the laws of mechanics . Another tremendous  (joining up of things in the field of science)  was the discovery of the relation between electricity, magnetism, and light, which were found to be different aspects of the same thing, which we call today the  electromagnetic field . Another  (joining up of things in the field of science)  is the unification of chemical phenomena, the various properties of various substances, and the behavior of atomic particles, which is in the  quantum mechanics of chemistry . credit:  http://feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_02.html#Ch1-S1

DIVIDE and CONQUER.

Image
Continued from:  Stop Playing The Game Without Knowing The Rules At first the phenomena of nature were roughly divided into classes, like heat, electricity, mechanics, magnetism, properties of substances, chemical phenomena, light or optics , x-rays, nuclear physics, gravitation, meson phenomena, etc . Read   more:  Continue Reading

Stop Playing The Game Without Knowing The Rules

Image
photo credit:   http://tinyurl.com/l5v3lx9 Continued from:  What Keeps You Up at Night? What do we mean by “understanding” something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to  watch  the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules.  The rules of the game  are what we mean by  fundamental physics . credit:  http://feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_02.html#Ch1-

What keeps you up at night?

Image
Continued from:  Everything is made out of this. Everything The things with which we concern ourselves in science appear in (many) forms, and with a multitude of attributes. For example, if we stand on the shore and look at the sea, we see the water , the waves breaking , the foam , the sloshing motion of the water , the sound , the air , the winds and the clouds , the sun and the blue sky , and light ; there is sand and there are rocks of various hardness and permanence, color and texture. There are animals and seaweed , hunger and disease , and the observer on the beach; there may be even happiness and thought . Any other spot in nature has a similar variety of things and influences. It is always as complicated as that, no matter where it is. Curiosity demands that we ask questions, that we try to put things together and try to understand this multitude of aspects as perhaps resulting from the action of a relatively small number of elemental things and forces acting in an

Stop Playing The Game Without Knowing The Rules

Image
photo credit:   http://tinyurl.com/l5v3lx9 Continued from:  Those Scientists - they think they know everything! What do we mean by “understanding” something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to  watch  the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules.  The rules of the game  are what we mean by  fundamental physics . credit:  http://feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_02.html#Ch1-

Those scientists - they think they know everything!

Image
How do we  know  that there are atoms? By one of the tricks mentioned earlier: we make the  hypothesis  that there are atoms , and one after the other results come out the way we predict, as they ought to if things  are  made of atoms. There is also somewhat more direct evidence, a good example of which is the following: The atoms are so small that you cannot see them with a light microscope—in fact, not even with an  electron  microscope. (With a light microscope you can only see things which are much bigger.) Now if the atoms are always in motion , say in water, and we put a big ball of something in the water, a ball much bigger than the atoms, the ball will jiggle around —much as in a push ball game, where a great big ball is pushed around by a lot of people. The people are pushing in various directions, and the ball moves around the field in an irregular fashion. So, in the same way, the “large ball” will move because of the inequalities of the collisions on one side to t

What your name really says about you!

One problem of chemistry is to name a substance , so that we will know what it is. Find a name for this shape! Not only must t he name tell the shape, but it must also tell that here is an oxygen atom, there a hydrogen —exactly what and where each atom is. So we can appreciate that the chemical names must be complex in order to be complete. You see that the name of this thing in the more complete form that will tell you the structure of it is 4-(2, 2, 3, 6 tetramethyl-5-cyclohexenyl)-3-buten-2-one, and that tells you that this is the arrangement . We can appreciate the difficulties that the chemists have, and also appreciate the reason for such long names . It is not that they wish to be obscure, but they have an extremely difficult problem in trying to describe the molecules in words! cred it:   http://feynmanlectures.caltech.edu

Do you want my picture or my formula?

Image
A chemical  formula   is merely a picture of  a molecule. When the chemist writes such a thing on the blackboard, he is trying to “draw,” roughly speaking, in two dimensions. How does the chemist find what the arrangement is? He mixes bottles full of stuff together, and if it turns red , it tells him that it consists of one hydrogen and two carbons tied on here; if it turns blue , on the other hand, that is not the way it is at all. This is one of the most fantastic pieces of detective work that has ever been done—organic chemistry. Read more:  http://feynmanlectures.caltech.edu

What's that scent?

Image
Continued from:  Ha! Why partner swapping can be a good thing! C hemists can take special molecules like the ( scent) of (frangipanis (in Gh, called forget-me-nots) , and analyze them and tell us the  exact arrangement  of the atoms in space. How cool is that? Read more :  http://feynmanlectures.caltech.edu

Ha! Why partner swapping can be a good thing!

Continued from:  http://tinyurl.com/k77wdml In all of the processes which have been described so far, the atoms and the ions have not changed partners, but of course there are circumstances in which the atoms do change combinations, forming new molecules. This is illustrated in Fig.  1–8 . A process in which the rearrangement of the atomic partners occurs is what we call a  chemical reaction . The other processes so far described are called physical processes, but there is no sharp distinction between the two. (Nature does not care what we call it, she just keeps on doing it.) This figure is supposed to represent carbon burning in oxygen. In the case of oxygen,  two  oxygen atoms stick together very strongly. (Why do not  three  or even  four  stick together? That is one of the very peculiar characteristics of such atomic processes. Atoms are very special: they like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on. It is the job of physics to analyze why each o

What You Are Really Breathing

Continued from:  What are you really breathing? Air consists almost entirely of nitrogen, oxygen, some water vapor, and lesser amounts of carbon dioxide, argon, and other things.  Read more: Feynman lectures, vol. 1, ch. 1

This Is Hot Like Ice!

Image
credit:  http://tinyurl.com/kpuzuuy Continued from:  http://tinyurl.com/nwydwz3 We now return to our drop of water and look in another direction. Suppose that we decrease the temperature of our drop of water. Suppose that the jiggling of the molecules of the atoms in the water is steadily decreasing. We know that there are forces of attraction between the atoms, so that after a while they will not be able to jiggle so well. What will happen at very low temperatures is indicated in Fig.  1–4 : the molecules lock into a new pattern which is  ice . This particular schematic diagram of ice is wrong because it is in two dimensions, but it is right qualitatively. The interesting point is that the material has a  definite place for every atom , and you can easily appreciate that if somehow or other we were to hold all the atoms at one end of the drop in a certain arrangement, each atom in a certain place, then because of the structure of interconnections, which is rigid, the other