Let’s talk about quarks, shall we?

No, not the guy with the big ears from Star Trek, either — quarks, as in the really, really tiny particles that make up things like electrons, neutrons, and protons.    Did you know that?   Each of those things are made up of a lot smaller things called, “quarks”.   Now you know; go tell your mommy.

Here’s the really Fun Fact™ for today that I wanted to share with you, though, about quarks.   If you don’t think anything is amazing in the world, get this one:

Quarks always exist in pairs (at least) — a regular quark and an anti-quark.    The “anti” partner is exactly the same as the quark, just an opposite charge, so kind of like how you have yin and yang, right?    This partner arrangement is called a, “hadron”.   A hadron’s quarks are always stuck together like that couple in high school that moved as single unit and used up the four minutes of passing time between every class to exchange oral flora.   A quark pair is held together with a sort of stringy stuff/force called, “gluons”.     (The physicist who thought up that one was freaking sharp.) It takes a whole heaping lot of force to even try to pull them apart.

However, if you beef up and try to separate a pair of quarks, which you can only do in experimental arenas like particle accelerators, a funny thing happens.      The gluons stretch, forming stringy “tubes” between the quarks, somewhat like a rubber band.     If you could actually see it (nobody has), it might look something like this:

But a funny thing happens when you get the quarks too far apart and you push them even further away from each other.     Instead of the gluon tube breaking and letting the quarks fly free, the tube splits in the center and a new quark-antiquark pair appears at the ends of the split out of absolutely nothing.

Did you read that?   The new pair of particles appears out of thin air.    Actually, it’s not even air, it’s a complete vacuum. There’s nothing around them as far as we know, yet these two particles “BOING!” into existence.     It might look something like this:

If you are really being destructive, you can keep trying to break them apart and you end up with a generational photo like this next one.   It creates what is called a, “hadron jet”, or a shower of particles that were all generated from the original quark/anti-quark pair:

Click for Larger

How wild is that?    And you thought science wasn’t fun.    Shame on you.

You can read up more on quarks, color confinement, hadron jets, gluons, and so forth by going to the Wikipedia article on it here:    quark

If you have ever sat through a computer installation or waited for the seemingly endless years while a hard drive ground itself into a neat little pile of shavings and your shiny new program installed itself only to promptly screw up your entire computer and launch the equivalent of a digital turd on your desktop, then you know what it’s like to be sucked down to a crusty, dry shell by the technology time leech (technologicus lifewastus incredibilus).

It is an experience that few of us care to admit to and fewer still would willingly repeat on any idle sunny day, but we’ve all lost precious moments of our lives by spending them slack-jawed, staring at the glowing screen and that insidiously, slow-moving progress bar of torture.    The drool frighteningly puddles on our keyboards while the pixels bore holes into our cerebrum and whip our neurons into a thick, creamy paté suitable for filling nail holes and sealing rusty bumpers.

The leech hath struck again.

For those not in the IT industry, it may not immediately occur to you the sheer number of hours we geeks can spend simply waiting — for the server to reboot, the installation to finish, the driver to load, the device to be recognized, the drives to stop spinning, the batteries to charge, the file to download, the page to render, the code to compile, the bug to show up, the printer to spit out exactly the one thing we did not want to be printed.   Sure, we get paid a decent wage but, unlike other professions (sans the D.O.T.), we spend an awful lot of it simply…doing nothing.    A whole lot of nothing waiting nothing.

“Well,” says my healthy and happy reader from behind their keyboard, “I realize that might not be entertaining, but I wouldn’t mind someone paying me to sit around.”    And in many cases, I would agree with that assessment if it weren’t for the fact that this time spent is anything BUT pleasant.    In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s a good case to prove the activity itself is banned by the Geneva convention and pooh-poohed in all civilized countries and 49 states (we’re still not sure about Utah, but then again — nobody is.)

You see, the keyboard cowboys — we of the wires, the flashing lights, the whirring drives, and the data whipping to-and-fro across the network in an orgasmic frenzy of processing — are very much used to things moving ungodly quick.    We cackle with excitement as the new processor crunches the data eight times faster than before or our Internet connection is large enough to download an entire DVD in a few seconds.   The fans spin faster, the drives whine higher, the processor burns brighter, the printer chucks paper further, and we count ourselves lucky if the damned thing doesn’t take off and establish low-Earth orbit.

To have a daily occurrance of our job be to sit and wait for technology, which in 2009 is light-years ahead of yesterday, to grind, chitter, think, process, download, or calculate is mind-boggingly numbing.    We are, essentially, pulling down hazard pay because — who willingly exposes their brain to this en masse?   Geeks, that’s who, the very ones that are ensuring that when we’re done with our work, you will be able to draw pictures, play solitaire, and watch free girl-on-girl action all night long while we enjoy an ever-so-satisfying bowl of instant noodles and ketchup packets.

So, the next time you find yourself ripping out your hair by the roots in frustration at a computer that appears to be either thinking hard on a problem or attempting to launch a sewer pickle, think of us geeks who, on a daily basis, willingly put ourselves between you and certain traumatic brain liquifaction, all in the name of your productivity and well-being.   And, if you’re so inclined, a kiss on the cheek and a pound of chocolate is an appropriate gesture that goes a long way to ensuring your data is backed up nightly.

You keep computing, we’ll keep drooling.    We’re your friendly, neighborhood geeks — protecting you from the technological time leech since 1936.

Bow Before the Sacred Cow (moo.)

There is a term used in businesses and other organizations to indicate those things that are traditionally regarded as “untouchable” in terms of their being questioned or modified — the so-called, “sacred cows”.    (Borrowed from the Hindu religion.)  These have long been hindrances in business practices because people fail to explore why a particular practice or system is being used the way it is — they just assume that it’s The Way Things Must Be Done™.     However, it occurs to me that this isn’t only applicable to the working world, we have many steers and heifers wandering through our lives that we fail to examine or pay attention to, and we need to be willing to slaughter them in the name of progress, new ideas, and better wisdom if that is what’s required.

Think about your own life — what cows do you hold near and dear to your heart?    Here’s some areas where I see them in both my life and others:

Religion — Big one!   You knew it was going to be in here, didn’t you?    Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I’m a huge fan of questioning one’s religion and figuring out for yourself what really matters and what is simply bogus.    Holy cows roam free in the religious world where some practices and ideas stay the same for centuries or longer without any in-depth exploration.    Even simple things like, “What hymnal should we use?” can spark the, “Don’t kill my cow!” argument with great swaths of people popping up complaining about the possible change, citing history as a precedent.    “It worked for my grandmother, why should we change?”

Traditions — We all have family traditions and most of us enjoy them to one extent or another, but when was the last time that you challenged one of them as being irrelevant or misplaced?    In some families, that’s nothing less than treason, but why should it be irreverant to probe into the meaning and applicability of the things you do year in and year out?

Business — Time and time again it’s been shown that good business is a balance between doing things in ways that work and doing things in new ways that may or may not work better.     As a younger person in business, one of the hardest things I have to face is convincing the older staff that systems can be changed without sacrificing the stability they’ve enjoyed so far and, given the chance, can even be improved upon.  Fear is the glue that holds sacred cows in place and keeps them from being herded in another direction.   (Gives some interesting visions of incredibly sticky cows, now, doesn’t it?)

Your Halo is Slipping

Life Philosophies — Many people, including myself, find it hard to break out of the typical “normal” life that has been prescribed by society and to choose a unique and interesting path.   The cow becomes sacred because it’s a societal pressure and deviating outside of that not only brings you problems in terms of diapproval but issues with the economics of the situation.    As much as I’d love to be in school longer, economically, I had to do my 4 years and get out to a job.   I would love to stay home and write or do something else, but the bills wouldn’t get paid.    Becoming a bum would be fun, but it would be frowned upon.   The cows become sacred as a standard that we are all expected to follow, even if someone could deviate without becoming a liability on the system.

There are many other places where this crops up — how we live, how we work, how we act, how we love.    What are some holy bovines in your life, and what are you doing to try to negate them, or do you simply embrace them wholesale because — that’s what you do?