I’m sure it happens to all of us… We sit down to do something but we easily get distracted. We can blame modern technology - mobile phones, the internet, MySpace…

Science Daily reports about a study which found the formula for procrastination. Of course, it only took him ten years to work it out.

Steel has also come up with the E=mc² of procrastination, a formula he’s dubbed Temporal Motivational Theory, which takes into account factors such as the expectancy a person has of succeeding with a given task (E), the value of completing the task (V), the desirability of the task (Utility), its immediacy or availability (Γ) and the person’s sensitivity to delay (D).

It looks like this and uses the Greek letter Γ (capital gamma): Utility = E x V / ΓD

The Toronto Star has a bit more analysis and information on the effects of procrastination.

"That stupid game Minesweeper – that probably has cost billions of dollars for the whole society," he said.

The U.S. gross national product would probably rise by $50 billion if the icon and sound that notifies people of new email suddenly disappear, he added.

…

"People who procrastinate tend to be less healthy, less wealthy and less happy," Steel said Wednesday. "You can reduce it, but I don’t think you can eliminate it.”

I did read an article in The Economist reviewing a book which suggested that procrastination and being messy is actually a good thing.

Procrastination makes sense too. America’s Marine Corps, the authors repeat (several times), never make detailed plans in advance. Leaving important things to the last minute reduces the risk of wasting time on things that may ultimately prove not important at all.

I will agree with the fact that tidying up your desk and re-organizing everything doesn’t improve your productivity, but I don’t think I’d go as far as to say that procrastination is a good thing.

Does anyone suffer from any big procrastination issues, and how have you tackled them? 

I wrote an article on the simulation argument which puts forward the view that we’re living inside a computer and that we may indeed have a God/creator. The article explores various elements of astrophysics, life and xenobiology, history of computing, gaming and looks at various thought experiments such as "brain in a vat".

Read the article.

It was, of course, the lunar eclipse last night. I took some pictures at 5 minute intervals and created an animated gif out of them.

See larger version of animation. 

The first frame was taken at 9:53 PM GMT and the last at 10:33 PM GMT.

Taken using a handheld "point and shoot" Canon camera at 4x optical zoom so the quality isn’t too good, but I still think it’s pretty cool nonetheless.

I’m not sure why but the moon actually appeared blue around 10:18. The animation actually shows the moon becomes yellow, then blue, followed by red. Images were taken on a 1/350 exposure. 

Anyone else go out to see the eclipse? 

A little post about Einstein’s theories of relativity.

Special Relativity

With Special Relativity, Einstein updated the laws for motion which were set out by Newton, the laws that we learn today in maths lessons.

Einstein’s special relativity said that we are all moving at the speed of light, all of the time. There are of course the 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time. At the moment you’re probably sitting on a chair in front of a computer, and unless you are one of those people who swing your chair from side to side, you’ll be stationary.

Time Travel is possible!

According to Einstein, that means you are moving through time, at the speed of light. It’s difficult to imagine that because we don’t experience the dimension of time like we do with space.

Imagine you were moving at half the speed of light - your speed of movement through the dimension of time will actually be the remaining half the speed of light. Time is not a constant!

An real-world analogy with a bike

We can try to explain the above behaviour using some trigonometry - imagine somebody on their bike, riding northwards at 5mph. If we resolve their motion in the northerly direction, they move at 5mph; in the easterly direction they move at 0mph.

Now imagine they were moving North East at 5mph. If we resolve their movement in the North direction, it could be 3mph, in the East Direction it could be 4mph. The bike still moves at 5mph, but because some of the motion is now directed in the East direction, it moves more slowly through the North direction.

General Relativity

A few years after his theory of special relativity, Einstein came up with general relativity. This was a theory of relativity which also took gravity into account.

Imagine you are sitting on a Boeing 747, cruising at 570mph. Aside from looking through the windows and occasionally feeling turbulence, you can’t actually tell that you’re moving. I suppose what Einstein said was that you could claim that actually the whole world was revolving around you, and that would be a perfectly valid thing to say.

But when you feel turbulence, you know your definitely moving. You can feel it. Similarly when your taking off - you couldn’t claim that you were stationary. You feel the g-forces pushing you into the back of the seat.

You can feel accelerated motion and accelerated motion will influence the laws of physics and the behaviour around you. However, once you are moving at a constant speed, the laws of physics are exactly identical to if you were totally stationary.

Gravity

With general relativity, Einstein combined gravity and relativity. He said that gravity is the exact same thing as accelerated motion. We feel our weight on the ground is because gravity is pulling us towards the Earth. That’s the same thing as acceleration, thus why we can have zero-g flights in the sky.

When a plane is in freefall and moving at it’s terminal velocity, air resistance upwards is equal to gravity downwards. The resultant force is zero, so you feel weightless.

Newton and the Apple

We have already said that anybody moving at a constant velocity can claim they are stationary, and the laws of physics will back them up.

Objects which are accelerating or under the influence of gravity cannot.

With general relativity, Einstein dismissed the idea of an absolute space or absolute time. They’re both relative. We can move through space at different velocities or through time at a different speed, and observe that everybody else is moving relative to us.

However, he also introduced absolute spacetime. If an object moves at constant velocity without acceleration or gravity, that object can claim that it is stationary.

So lets go back to Newton, and the infamous apple which struck him on the head. Newton feels the force of gravity, so he cannot claim that he is stationary. The apple, however, is in freefall. Assuming it reaches terminal velocity, the apple can claim it is stationary.

What does this mean? No, the apple did not fall and hit Newton on his head. In fact, it was Newton’s head which rose and struck the apple!