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Script Evolution Explanation

I've been asked why I haven't continued with the script evolution project. Well, I have, but I just haven't been writing posts about it.

Until I can figure out the "diagram problem" I can't find a good way to post the iterations, and without that the posts would be meaningless.

I'll post all of the ones I've made as soon as I get the images working, though. Sorry.

A Musical Challenge

This post deviates quite a bit from my usual ones. Rather than researching a topic, this time I'm asking you to do the work. ; )

Bach's Two-Part Invention #1, the first few bars.

As some of you probably know, the Urbana Pops Orchestra just announced that they're holding a composition contest. Anyone in the East-Central Illinois area can write and orchestrate a piece for them, based on the theme "Space: A Musical Frontier." The winning over-18 entry and the winning 18-and-under entry will be performed at the concert next summer.

I've been working hard on my composition, and as such have been thinking a lot more about musical theory lately. This is an idea I had a while back, and I realized that this blog would be a good format for it.

So here's my mini-composition challenge.

Come up with a short melody based on the following chords, preferably in 4/4 time, with one bar per chord. Then I'll fit them all together and post the results.

C F G C C F G G7 Am F G C

These chords aren't very interesting, but I figured a simple example would be best to start off. I-IV-V-I and variations thereof are used for all sorts of different pieces, same with replacing an I with a vi.

If you come up with a melody from these, for whatever instrument, post it in the comments below. It'll be interesting to see what everyone comes up with!

On the Non-Existance of Diagrams

Sorry, everyone, I know my images haven't been showing up in posts recently. I think I've found the problem, it seems to be a certain type of PNG file that Blogger chokes on, and I'm going to try re-exporting everything with different settings. If that doesn't work I'll *shudder* save the images as JPEGs, which I know will show up.

On the Existence of Dragons, Part II

Yet again I have more information on this, and I don't want to turn the original post into one big wall of text. So here's the third post in the "series," enjoy.

Here was my original idea for how a dragon's respiratory system could work:

[Diagram]

Rather than having one pair of lungs exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen in the blood, the dragon has two. Blood first passes through the second pair of lungs, which contain the triethylaluminum or similar, to release the carbon dioxide. Then oxygen is picked up in the first pair of lungs, as usual.

We're assuming that this blood contains a special type of hemoglobin that is unusually effective in picking up oxygen, or that the dragon continues to hold oxygen-rich air in its lungs before exhaling until all the oxygen is gone. Otherwise there might be problems.

Then, when the dragon breathes out, the CO₂ and triethylaluminum come into contact with the air, and ignite. As long as the dragon doesn't breathe in until the fire's gone, it isn't at risk of burning itself.

One other problem that comes up is how the dragon can keep the two pairs of lungs separate, when they're both connected to its trachea (windpipe).

Well, humans have this problem as well, in a way. Both the lungs and the stomach are connected to the back of the throat, but are kept separate by a flap called the epiglottis. We can assume that this would work for the dragons as well, although setting yourself on fire from the inside is rather more unpleasant than coughing if something goes wrong.

Now, could we extend this to other things as well? Apparently, many folktales involve dragons that breathe out ice or poison instead of fire.

Poison is easy, many different types of animals already can create poisons and toxins.

Ice is a bit more interesting, though.

There are several types of chemical reactions that are extremely endothermic--they take energy out of their surroundings when they react, so everything nearby becomes colder. This is how cold-packs work. The best one I found is 85 grams magnesium chloride hexahydrate, MgCl₂(H2O)₆ (commonly used to de-ice roads) and 100 grams ice. According to one source, this reaction can bring the solution to -94 degrees Celsius (-137.2 degrees Fahrenheit)!

So rather than the modified respiratory system, this frost-breathing dragon might have a structure in its mouth in which the magnesium chloride is created, and then it could trigger the reaction by chewing on a piece of ice or snow. Hopefully it could avoid frostbite in its mouth while breathing out. But at least keeping cool wouldn't be a problem.

On the Existence of Dragons, Part 1.5

Just a bit more explanation, since I don't like making big changes to previous posts...

The Square-Cube Law is based on the fact that a cubic function (based on x³) will always overtake a quadratic (based on x²) function. No matter what. Even if you compare 0.01x³ and 999x², the cubic will always "win". And they'll keep getting further and further apart the higher you go. There's no way to make them stay close together for very long.

The Square-Cube Law, then, brings this from algebra to geometry. It says that, as you scale something up, its volume increases by a cube, and its surface area by a square.

I just took this from Google Images for now, I'll make a better version of it later. Sorry.

This is relevant in all sorts of different fields. For example, let's say you are designing a ship. If you take, say, a small sailboat and scale it up to the right size, it won't work at all. It might not even float, and it certainly won't be able to sail. The mass of the boat increased by the cube of the scaling factor, but the size of the sails only increased by the square.

And, as the previous post stated, this is why an elephant looks nothing like a scaled-up mouse. Strength is based on the cross-section of the muscle, which increases by a square. But mass and weight are based on the volume, which increases by a cube. As an animal is scaled up, its muscles need to be larger and larger compared to its size.

Another biological problem with this that I didn't mention is overheating. Small animals have a lot of surface area compared to volume, so they can lose heat easily through their skin. But large animals have a harder and harder time doing this. (Especially if they breathe fire.) Our dragon would at the very least have to be able to sweat to remove heat, bringing in yet another non-reptilian characteristic. But I suppose it's more likely than fire breathing at any rate.

On the Existence of Dragons

Here you go, Ruth. I'm actually writing about it.

A statue of two dragons in Varna.

In our world, it seems that dragons shouldn't be able to exist. Reptiles don't fly, don't breathe fire, and don't grow to the size of buildings.

Some of these could possibly have evolved. Dragons might have descended from the same common ancestor as bird and reptiles, and diverged at the same time; it wouldn't be impossible for them to have some features similar to modern birds and others similar to modern reptiles.

Organisms have also developed many kinds of chemicals and poisons for defense...why not something similar to triethylaluminum, which ignites upon contact with oxygen? It can be synthesized from hydrogen, aluminum, and methane, none of which is too hard to find. And maybe dragons have a way to extract more oxygen from the air in their respiratory system, so they breathe out almost pure carbon dioxide (which would prevent them setting themselves on fire).

But there's one big problem: the square-cube law.

Edit: I've made a new post about the square-cube law, look here.

The square-cube law states that, as you scale something up, the volume changes faster than the surface area. The surface area increases as the square of the length, and the volume as the cube.

If you look at a graph of the two, you can see that they keep getting further and further apart.

And this applies to biology, because strength is proportional to the cross-section of the muscle, which is an area, while mass is proportional to the volume of the animal. This is why ants can lift such heavy weights compared to their own, but we can't. If you scaled an ant up to the size of a person, its legs would snap under the weight of its own body.

This is even more of a problem for things that fly. If you scaled up an airplane to double its size, it would weigh 2³=8 times as much, but it would only get 2²=4 times the lift of the smaller plane. It wouldn't even be able to take off.

So let's imagine we have a very small, fire-breathing dragon, a bit smaller than a Komodo monitor. Its bones could be hollow, like a bird's, to make it lighter. It could presumably be able to fly--after all, we've seen birds approximately that size that can fly perfectly fine.

Our small dragon is about two meters long. We want the full-sized dragon to be, say, 64 meters long, 32 times longer. Its new surface area will be 1024 times its original, but its new volume will be 32,768 times larger!

So there's no way it could fly, although with enough muscle it might be able to support itself. Possibly.

Or are we missing something?

Now I'm going to deviate completely from reality, so you might want to read the previous two posts first.

Imagine that we have a fold in the world, but not a complete one like in the previous posts. Only a partial one. This dragon could essentially create a little "ledge" for itself, in which gravity would be reduced or even negated.

Now it would have no problems! There are animals larger than it on Earth which survive just fine--blue whales, because they live in the water. The buoyant force essentially weakens gravity, so they can move however they want in three dimensions.

Let's assume, however, that our dragon is purely three-dimensional. I don't even want to try analyzing the "cube-tesseract law."

TL;DR: It's perfectly possible that dragons exist, even though the square-cube law still holds. They could even fly and breathe fire.