Supreme Rule

I was using Stumbleupon and it referred me to this page, containing an argument that relies on the premise “Nothing is heavier than lead”. Immediately my mind went to work. These are the refutations I’ve come up with so far (and yes, there is a logical one, but who cares about THAT?).

• Two pounds of feathers are heavier than one pound of lead.
• The following elements are denser than lead (at standard temperature and pressure): Technetium, Thorium, Thallium, Palladium, Ruthenium, Rhodium, Hafnium, Curium, Mercury, Americium, Berkelium, Californium, Protactinium, Tantalum, Uranium, Gold, Tungsten, Plutonium, Neptunium, Rhenium, Platinum, Iridium and Osmium.
• Anything can be made denser than solid lead by compressing it, although some would take incredible amounts of energy to do so.
• Conversely, you could always you could always vaporize lead, and then any solid or liquid (or gas at a lower pressure) would be denser.
• Certain materials only exist in super-dense forms, and would therefore be denser than lead (black holes, neutronium).

And of course, as something approaches the speed of light, its apparent mass increases from the perspective of an observer “at rest”. So, a material accelerated to a sufficient proportion of the speed of light would be more dense than a given amount of lead (from the perspective of the lead at least).

For example, 1 mole of hydrogen (~1 gram) at 299,788.9 km/s (99.997% of the speed of light) has the same apparent mass as 1 mole  (~207 grams) of lead at rest.

And just to prove that anything with mass can weigh more than any amount of lead, 1 electron travelling at ~299792.457999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999997 km/s weighs the same as 1 mole of lead. (The reason this number has so many 9’s is because the speed of light is approximately 299792.4578 km/s)

The factor of relativistic changes (mass increase, time dilation, Lorentz contraction) is given by:

This last one is a bit of a stretch because it’s only observed mass, but if my understanding of relativity is correct, then there’s really no such thing as “objective mass” anyway; everything is relative.

Recently I haven’t had much money to spend on exciting foods, so I’ve been making cheap things like stir fry. Tonight I wanted to make something different, so I did fry bread, hummus and fried okra. It’s all relatively easy and cheap. Don’t spend too much time trying to make your measurements exact, because I certainly wasn’t when I made these.

About half of the frybread was left when I took this

Fry Bread

Modified from RecipeZaar’s “Quick and Easy Fry Bread”

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup white flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 cup warm water

Instructions:

Mix the dry things together, add the water and mix it for a while. Wait 5 minutes, then deep fry it until it puffs up. It takes a VERY short time.

Slightly boring looking hummus, but still delicious. If I had olives, I would've added them.

Hummus

Ingredients:

• 1 can garbanzo beans (chickpeas)
• 1 tsp salt (or however much you want)
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp tahini (sesame seed paste)
• 4 tbsp lemon juice
• 2-4 cloves garlic

Instructions:

Drain the can of beans, then put everything in a food processor and blend it until it’s the consistency you want. Tahini is similar to peanut butter, except more bitter.

If you want to make it more exciting, try adding things like olives, jalapenos, or caramelized onion.

You could probably use peanut butter if you don’t want to get tahini, but I make no promises.

With two cloves of garlic, this recipe is pretty generic. With four, some people probably won’t like it.

Fried okra. This used to be my favorite food.

Fried Okra is just okra coated with flour and corn meal, then deep fried. If you need a recipe, there’s a billion online (because the proportions don’t really matter at all).

So I finally got around to learning GTK+, and it seemed like a decent time to start documenting it. The documentation for it isn’t very helpful, but I figured it out eventually. Here’s my first practice program. It shows a text entry box, and if you try an integer into it and click “Go”, it will open a dialogue with the answer squared in it. If it’s not an integer, it will complain that it’s not an integer.

A screenshot of the program

The hardest part of writing this was figuring out what “m_button.signal_clicked().connect(sigc::mem_fun(*this, &MainWindow::on_button_clicked));” means — it makes it so when you click on m_button (a Gtk::Button), it calls MainWindow::on_button_clicked().

The next hardest part was figuring out how to convert a ustring(what Gtk::Entry gives me) to an int. The answer was to convert it to a char* then use atoi() to convert that to an int.

So here it is:

square.tar.gz – The source and compiled version. It requires gtkmm-2.4 to compile, and should run on any platform that supports GTK+. The compiled version will only run on x86 with GTK+.