Engineer Zero

Here is a screen capture of the latest version of Molecule Maker. Notice the scene tabs, which facilitate zooming in and out. I had to de-select scene transitions to make it work smoother (which, I admit, seems counterintuitive).

The lines sticking out of everything are ‘scaffolding,’ a little trick I learned in Sketchup to align groups and components together. The scaffolding lines are part of a component, and once no longer needed, can be universally deleted with a few clicks of thine mouse.

So how well does the new improved and expanded Molecule Maker work? Not as well as I’d hoped. I had hoped that it would be orders of magnitude faster than the simple version, but it’s only about twice as fast. And you know, I think a physical model set would be twice as fast yet.

I expect to add some methyl group examples, and I need balls for phosphorus, iron, etc. And I think the pentagon-hexagon ‘snowman’ and related templates need to be tilted sideways, to recognize that the work space is wider than high.

My ambition — I’m not sure I want to call it a goal yet — is to do a hundred molecules and upload them to Google 3D Warehouse. That could easily be done within a month, or if I dally, a year. Because my ADD is telling me it’s about time to be distracted.

Uracil is really easy to make. All you have to do is get rid of the ‘antlers’ of the methyl group on thymine and replace with a ‘unicorn horn’ of hydrogen for uracil. Actually, scientists believe the evolutionary path was in the other direction, from Uracil in RNA to Thymine in DNA, like so:

Why did this evolutionary transition occur? My scientific theory is that originally, briefly, during the course of evolutionary history, there was a version of DNA with uracil, but one day the methyl fairy came along and blessed it, and that’s how thymine got its antlers. The End.

After burning incense in the Temple of Tesla, a few months ago I did a calculation on just how much electricity is naturally in the atmosphere. It would take an antenna one square kilometer in area suspended ten kilometers over the surface of the Earth to collect one watt of electrical power.

I believe it takes about five watts to charge a cell phone, so the antenna used in this video must have been the size of Manhattan Island:

What was the motivation in producing this video? It doesn’t seem to be promoting a commercial service or product. Maybe the ‘proof of concept’ is to demonstrate someone’s professional video production and editing techniques (the channel name ‘web19designer’ seems to hint that). Anyhow, I saw the video at a news and commentary site where apparently they were taking it seriously, so I thought I should respond seriously.

The idea of drawing electricity from the air isn’t all that flakey — you just have to put it there in the first place. There is a place in England, I believe, where people are powering electric lights with electricity drawn from the air. They just happen to be next to a very powerful radio station.

Well, there are concepts (if I may use that word) to move satellites into lower and higher orbits by extending very long tethers which draw electrodynamic drag and thrust. I don’t recall seeing any calculations for this, but the concept is taken quite seriously.

In contrast, no one with any technical knowhow in the matter seems to be taking seriously the idea of powering stuff on Earth just with an antenna drawing natural electricity from the air. Even a giant government/corporate conspiracy couldn’t stop millions of private citizens from doing it on their own if it were possible.

Yet in a sense, there is a lot of electricity in the atmosphere. It’s called sunlight. It’s over a thousand watts per square meter — so if you buy a solar charger for your cell phone, THAT will get the job done.

Lots of flaws become apparent when an image is finally exported. The biggest flaw is unseen here, however, and was my methodology. It took me more than an hour to assemble this thing. When I have a method that can plop these things out as quickly as a model can be assembled from a real-world kit, I’ll share. And then I’ll feel stupid that it took me so long to figure it out.

But at least it’s geometrically correct, and that’s something that gives me a sense of accomplishment. Dear Blog: Today I made a molecule!