Happy birthday!

It's my birthday today! I'm now 23 years old and feel no different than yesterday. However, let me not get too hung up on minor details; I love a great birthday, and love celebrating it with people I care about.

Well, enough of that. In the meantime, I've been making up for lost progress after having lost a bunch of work on photoshop. I still haven't done a picture for Layman Researcher, but the one I did for Siphil is done and ready to go. Sorry for those of you who haven't seen the movie, but this is based on "2001 A Space Odyssey". Siphil's blog is called "2011 A Space Odyssey", so I thought I would tie that into a comic for him. I am surprisingly proud of myself for the center image.

When was the last time you battled evil computers and went through crazy colored tunnels of light? Hmm?

Some of you may notice that I have an awesome new site design, this is thanks to the lovely nerdspiffy that made it for me out of the kindness of her heart. Check out her blog if you haven't already; she's got a lot of great posts and is working on a graphic novel called "Vexing".

I think that's it for tonight, I won't have a competition for this post, as I'm still behind one drawing and I have nine hours of uni tomorrow, which will surely wear me out enough as it is. So I'll leave with an opening sentence of a book that I'm never going to write (it's kind of my hobby to think of great lines in books that will never be written or great scenes in movies that will never be filmed).

"The expression on his face reflected the degree of uncertainty in the approximation he had just given."

Oh man, oh man

So, I was working on a way good comic for about two hours, and bam! Photoshop crashes and I haven't saved it once. I'm so unbelievably mad right now. There was no slowing down, or me clicking weird things, it was my in the middle of drawing a line and then "photoshop has stopped working, would you like to get mad or explode into oblivion?". So I guess I won't have a new comic for you tonight.

Regarding yesterday's winner, Siphil, I'll try and have a picture for you tomorrow, I apologize for the delay. On the topic of yesterdays competition, carbon, I just wanted to talk about it for a brief second. In atomic theory, electrons orbit the nucleus, however, they're not just orbiting all at the same level, there are shells. As you can see in my drawing of carbon, the smaller ring is the inner shell, and the bigger ring is the outer shell. Each of these shells can only hold a particular amount of electrons, for example, the first shell has a max of two, the second has a max of eight (the third gets more confusing, as it can hold 18, but not without first putting some into the fourth, but you get what I mean). 

Now, all atoms want to become stable; and if an atom has a full outer shell, it is considered to be stable. If it has only 1 electron in its second shell, it wants to lose that electron, and become stable. If it has six electrons in its outer shell, it wants to gain two and become stable. I hope this is making sense. To illustrate this principle better, I drew a picture. Here you see two atoms that have only one electron in their outer shell, therefore they're considered unstable. In between them, you see an atom with six electrons in its outer shell, again, therefore it is unstable. For all of these atoms to become happy and stable, they do what is called "covalent bonding", or electron sharing. By sharing in electrons, both of the smaller atoms (hydrogen) and the larger atom (oxygen) all have full outer electron shells. Most of you have picked up already that this is water!

Lemme at some 'dem 'lectrons.

Now, back to the reason why carbon is so special. Carbon has four of a possible eight electrons in its outer shell. This means for it to become stable, it either needs to lose four, or gain four electrons. This is exactly the reason it is so special, because it can bond so well with many different things, and is exactly why it's the basis of all life as we know it, and why we are called carbon based life forms.

I think that's enough of that for now. For our competition, I want to give science a break, and go with a movie. What movie is this screen shot from?

Probably the only movie I've seen where it looks actually like they had someone do it properly.

Enjoy your evening!

I'm up too late

No, I will not let you profit.

I really am up too late. I finished work at about 9:30 pm and it's about 1:30 am now. The silly thing is that I have to work in the morning at 8:00 am. Oh well, I really wanted to do this comic today, as this happened to me when I really needed my printer.

I found that for my physics subject, I had an assignment due at 4 pm. I only realized that I had the assignment at 1pm. So I proceeded to print out the assignment so I could do the work, scan it and send it in. However, my printer decided that I had gotten enough value out of it and wanted to reiterate the fact that while all other aspects of technology have improved in the last 30 years, printers are still archaic pieces of crap.

I made my way to the local office supply store to buy some toner. As I was walking the toner to the checkout, I spotted a pile of the exact same printer that I own for sale at $65. I found this interesting, as the toner I was holding, the very same toner inside that $65 printer, cost $129. That's not even including a replacement drum ($195) if that happened to break. So I made the easy choice and just grabbed the new printer.

As I put it down on the checkout counter, the lady went on and on about the three year warranty. "What if it breaks" she said, which I replied "my last one ran out of toner in six months, and here I am buying a new one, because it's cheaper than the toner". For whatever reason, she replied "well, do you print a lot? You never know when the it's going to break", I tried to show her the error of her ways by saying "it doesn't matter if it breaks; if it breaks in the next year, I'll be covered by the manufacturer's warranty, if it lasts that long, I'll surely have run out of toner by then, in which case, I'll simply buy a new printer". She still gave me that "whatever, you stupid idiot" look, the sale was then finished and I walked away feeling vastly superior.

It really gets to me how much people don't listen to the things that you're saying when you're talking to them. I suppose I can't blame her though, she probably deals with a lot of customers every day and the employees more than likely have a competition going for how many people they can screw over with their warranties. 

And to wrap things up for the night, we have our competition for the day. This one should be fairly easy to some of you, but you're going to answer a few questions about it.

1. What element is this?

2. There is a rare material made entirely of this element, what is it?

3. What about this element's chemical properties makes it so notable/significant to our everyday lives?

And just to mention it again, the winner of the daily comp will receive an image, drawn by me, to them, in recognition of their abilities. For examples of past winners, look at my last few posts.

Thanks for reading guys, I hope you're all enjoying this as much as I am.

Winner from yesterday

Yesterday I had a competition for whomever could guess the physiological cycle the quickest. Broda correctly guessed the citric acid cycle.

The citric acid cycle, or more commonly known as the Krebs cycle (after Hans Krebs) is the process is which the cells' mitochondria make energy in the form of ATP (adenosine triphosphate). It is the most common cycle in which your body produces energy, as it is the most efficient. The process involves glucose that has been broken down into Acetyl-CoA going through a number of chemical reactions that finally net an end result of about 30 molecules of ATP per each molecule of glucose. Far more efficient than the two molecules of ATP per glucose molecule that anaerobic glycolysis produces. 

So why do we have different cycles for producing energy if one is far more efficient, you ask? Well let me tell you my little sasquatches; it's because the Krebs cycle must have oxygen to function. This makes it an aerobic energy production method. Anaerobic glycolysis is as it's name implies, it uses no oxygen. This is the cycle you use when you're exercising heavily and not enough oxygen is getting to your muscles. This process also produces lactic acid, which is why your muscles burn after such exercises.

Well, enough of that, we must get to the prize. As promised a personalized drawing by me, to you for your profound knowledge in the field of basic physiology.

What? The man's a programmer, I'm sure he'll like it. 

Maybe.

In other news, I had uni today, and we were in the nursing labs. I have no idea why (especially because this is the first time I've met this teacher), but we had to practice palpating (feeling) a patients chest, stomach et cetera, and she just looked at me and said "you're the patient". So I had to remove my shirt and lay on a bed while students poked and prodded my bare body. It was definitely an experience I won't forget, especially because I'm not what you'd call slender.

Anywho, just another experience under the belt.

Time for something different

Well, I didn't have uni today, so there's not much to say on that front. However I did work today. I awoke at 6am (after stupidly going to sleep at about 1am), got all ready to go to work and bam! I realized I didn't start until 1pm. The morning was then spent browsing the interwebs and reading about upcoming technology, which brings me to my next point.

 Also exciting; my new found ability to draw things with photoshop.

With the impending release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim late this year (November) I've been thinking that I'm definitely going to need a new PC to play it. I was reading around on some tech sites and came across the AMD Fusion generation of chips. I've always thought that it would be a good idea to incorporate the GPU right onto the same piece of silicon as the CPU and just be gone with the south-bridge entirely, and that's what AMD have done. Firstly, this is a good idea because you remove the bottleneck that the south-bridge causes between the GPU and CPU. Secondly, you go from having to cool three chips to just having to cool one. Thirdly, you get a GPU specifically matched to the performance of your CPU (it was always funny to see my friends by a ridiculously fast GPU, only to have it bottlenecked by a crappy CPU). And finally, it drastically reduces the real-estate needed by the motherboard, something specifically useful in laptop applications.

AMD Fusion test rig. 

"Umm sir, we've been having some negative feedback 

about the appearance of the new system".

I'm not sure if I'll end up getting one though, as I'm after a desktop, and the Fusion processors aren't quite as fast as current CPU+Discreet GPU set ups (although significantly faster than comparable on-board GPU laptops). I wonder if any of my followers have been looking into them at all and if they think they'll become significantly competitive in the desktop market?

Let me guys know what you think. Also, feel free to use that comic I made anywhere you want, I would however, appreciate a mention as the author or even a link back to my blog if it all possible.

To finish up, we'll play another game! This time we'll be doing guess the physiological cycle!

Those of you that have studied physiology should get this pretty easily (I would hope). Others may have more trouble getting it. And remember, you're playing for your own personalized drawing by me!