MK-54 suitcase cannon

This post is a random musing, so do not read it if you are looking for something witty or clever. I will never post something that I learned from a book or heard from a professor, but came up with on my own. I may have verified it before posting. But copying something that I got out of a book would evade the purpose of posting these random musings.

Back when Howitzer first built a cannon, the notion was, the more gun powder, the larger an object you can shoot faster. This theory still holds true, but what if our gun powder was a lot bigger?

In a Congressional hearings in 1997, Soviet General Alexander Lebed described a bomb that could fit into a suitcase with the dimensions of 24 x 16 x 8 inches. America composed a similar bomb, using the warhead of an American nuclear artillery shell, and indeed all the necessary items -- neutron generators, batteries, arming mechanism etc. -- were successfully stuffed into a cylindrical device with similar dimensions.This bomb has been named the MK-54. It can weigh as little as 51 pounds and can be fired by a soldier from a recoilless rifle.

Now for the important part. This bomb gives the same explosive force as the equivalent of 10 tons of TNT, although it can give off as much as 20 tons worth. This would be an easy explosion to contain. Although "easy" is a relative term, this is a very containable explosion, when Fat Man and Little Boy, the two devices which exploded in Japan, are considered minor to today's comparisons.

This could be constructed with fifty or sixty tons of copper or lead surrounded this divice, and a tube extruding from this vat of copper or lead, pointing in the direction of the target. The cannon ball could be a large ball of copper or any metal really. It doesn't matter what kind of metal you use so long as it turns into molton state, and doesn't evaporate. I say copper because it's boiling point is around 2567 º C, and the suitcase nuke is a low tempurature nuke. When the cannon detonates, you will have a chunk of molton copper launching several times the speed of sound, in a direction of your choice. If nothing else, anything several miles in one direction, will fall victum of airwake. You could probably shoot a house sized wad of metal several times the speed of sound with this gun.

I can't forsee anything like this being a usable gun, as setup would take too long, and reloading is not an option. IE, you would need one gun per bullet. This would be a cannon, not a gun, that would blow up every time you used it.

A cannonball fired from 20 tons of TNT, would be a very loud bang.

Radical Constructionism: transporting matter through energy

This particular post is a result of studying "Radical Constructionism." This post is a random musing, so do not read it if you are looking for something witty or clever. I will never post something that I learned from a book or heard from a professor, but came up with on my own. I may have verified it before posting. But copying something that I got out of a book would evade the purpose of posting these random musings.

If we could produce an infinite power source, or could duplicate matter atom-for-atom, we could theoreticlly transport matter over a distance. This would involve breakdown of matter to energy, and reconstruct the matter at a new location from this energy. Or maybe more accuratly, we could break down matter into information, and reconstruct matter from this information.

If this were applied to a human, we could transport the human to a new location, and the human at the new location would have the same conciousness, the same memories, and the same feelings. They will be the product of all of the original experiences. However, the person sent through this machine will have died. The resulting person feel no difference, as if they were same age, even though he is only a few seconds old.

This is because, if this technology exists, there is no reason a copy couldn't be made, where there are two indentical humans. Since both humans would not share the same existance or conciousness, one person would not control both, and two living entities would now exist. This does not take into account any sort of notion of "soul", which may or may not mean the resulting human would resume living and functioning.

Radical Constructionism

Ama told me about this crazy thing called "radical constructionism." This interested me so I researched it a bit. I am not even sure if I read the right thing, because apparently this is a small school of thought. Anyway, Wikipedia says is a school of thought introduced into sociology by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann with their 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality. The focus of social constructionism is to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the creation of their perceived reality. As an approach, it involves looking at the ways social phenomena are created, institutionalized, and made into tradition by humans. Socially constructed reality is seen as an ongoing, dynamic process; reality is re-produced by people acting on their interpretations and their knowledge of it. Social constructionism is dialectically opposed to essentialism, the belief that there are defining transhistorical essences independent of conscious beings that determine the categorical structure of reality.

Within social constructionist thought, a social construction, or social construct, is an idea which may appear to be natural and obvious to those who accept it, but in reality is an invention or artifact of a particular culture or society. The implication is that social constructs are in some sense human choices rather than laws resulting from divine will or nature. This is not usually taken to imply a radical anti-determinism, however.

Some ideas which have been famously described as social constructs include race, class, gender, sexuality, morality, and even reality. Less controversial but equally important social constructs are languages, games, money, shares, nations, governments, universities, corporations, and other institutions.

So, what I understand, is that you have a product of stimuli, being the human animal. If you put them into a very different atmosphere, you can view this product very sharply through an effect called cultural shock. This closed system product will act according to how it has developed. I am still researching this, and I may not even be looking at the right thing. Ama, please correct me if I am completly off track.

Fourth Dimension Explained

There has been question about the 4th dimension, so I will try to explain it.

Spacetime is a model that combines space and time into a single coordinate system called the space-time continuum. In our universe, this continuum has three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. Here, time is expressed in the same units as space by multiplying time measurements by the speed of light. Since the observed speed of light varies based on gravity, so does time vary.

The spacetime in which we live appears to be 5-dimensional with three spatial dimensions (i.e. width times height times depth), one of time, and infinity. From a particular point in space, the basic directions in which we can move are up/down, left/right, and forward/backward. Movement in any other direction can be expressed in terms of just these three. Moving down is the same as moving up a negative amount. Moving diagonally upward and forward is just as the name of the direction implies; i.e., moving in a linear combination of up and forward.

Time is referred to as the fourth dimension. It is how we measure physical change. It is different from the three spatial dimensions in that there is only one of it, and movement seems to be possible in only one direction. However, speed in this direction can very, because of the relation of space and time (the famous twins paradox illustrates this perfectly).

The total number of dimensions that exist has been widely debated. This is because certain obvservable data can only be explained if there are exactly, say, 9 dimensions. Another observed set of data can only be explained if there are, say, 12 dimensions. For instance, the String Theory suggests that our universe consists of at least ten spatial dimensions, of which three are the familiar spatial dimensions, six are compact dimensions curled up too small to be detected, and one (or more) are temporal dimension(s). The desire to create a "unified theory of everything" causes scientists to debate these things, as a unified theory cannot exist until a definite amount of dimensions can be determined.

However, because of obvserved empirical data, there is at least 5 dimesions. My appologies for the parts of this that were copy and pasted :-p