Bear.

Welcome to this blog, again! I'm amazed that you're actually reading this blog again, or perhaps, until this post. For this post, I'm going to tell few things about bear you probably never heard of.

Do you know? Bears are pretty good at dueling. Despite that, you won't really be seeing they duel anywhere, because they're in fact very low profile and non-braggart. However, someone managed to got their hand on a picture of a bear kicking someone in the crotch for telling bulb jokes, because the bear finds bulb jokes are pretty much cliche and boring.

Doing the world a favor to stop the viral of bulb jokes

In addition, bears are actually one smart creature. After several years of watching humans, they learned that people would open their door if someone gave a knock on their door. Surely enough, if bear gives a knock, it wasn't knocking for trick-or-treats.

"Sweetie, I'm home!" was one of their favorite line.

Bears also have few sets of nice skills, like chasing down their food, making scratch arts on the wall as well as riding the motorcycle. They love riding motorcycle as much as Malaysian loves eating rice.

The bears apparently consider it as a sports. One extreme sports.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading.

Game: "Miami Shark!"

If you enjoy destroying constructions, devouring humans and ruthlessly pulling down airplanes into the sea, then this game is pretty much for you!

Shark - 1 Sheriff - 0

Anyhow, here's the synopsis of the game. This game is about a shark. Which the shark is you. And just like any other ordinary shark, you're doing your usual daily routine; bullying other fishes and eating penguins and fisherman, sleeping in abandoned wrecked ships and submarines when suddenly, you realized that you need to start to live to your fullest! Not enjoying aloha dance in Hawaii kind of fullest, but by destroying and wiping out human race from the face of earth!

The good feeling of destroying things that worth million of dollars single-handedly,

especially when someone is taking world records out of it.

Miami shark game is straight-forward and entertaining. The goal of this game is to wreck havoc throughout the city while devouring any living things you can find by all means possible! The game's control is very simple. The whole game only requires you to use arrow keys and control key. That's all!

The controls! Super easy!

Pure classic feeling!

Nothing our Shark couldn't take down.

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and play it!

Nuclear plant - part 2

This post will be mostly on the energy harvesting component that helps turning energy (in form of heat) into electricity. In order to fully understood the process, one needs to see the big picture.

Image: A simple chematic diagram of a nuclear plant

1. The chain-reaction of uranium isotope occurs in the reactor, where heat will be released due to the fission / splitting process.

Control rods are made of materials like cadium and boron which are used to control the speed of atom fission process.

2. Heat is being transfered into heat exchanger, where water is being turned into steam. All these process occurs inside a reinforced concrete containment structure to as a safety precaution to prevent any spills of uranium or explosion to ever coming outside.

3. As water being turned into steam, it will be flowed to the turbine where it will moves the turbine, where the generator will produces electricity to power up the city.

4. As the steam returned, it will pass through a condenser where the steam will be cooled down using the cooling tower, turning the steam into water and sent back to the heat exchanger to be heated by the energy produced by the reactor.

All this process helps to turn the energy produced by the atom fission of uranium into electricity that can power up almost a million houses. It is said that nuclear power plants is quite environmental friendly and stable. This is due the fact that it only requires little amount of fuel to produces a huge amount of energy while it doesn't emits CO2.

Image: Lifecycle of CO2 emissions, source hitachi.com

Nuclear plant - part 1

How does a nuclear power plant works?

Power plants mainly have two main component. They are:

1. Energy producing component

2. Energy harvesting component that will turn it into electricity.

In this post, we'll be talking about nuclear power plant, the energy producing component part. Energy producing component is also considered the heart of the reactor. We'll get onto the next part in another post on energy turns into electricity part.

First of all, the energy producing component. Nuclear power plant obtains energy from the heat released during chain reaction of atom-splitting process. The science term for atom splitting process is called fission. In order to obtain an atom with huge amount of atoms, uranium is used. Uranium contains 235 atoms; each atom has a nucleus of 92-protons and 143-neutrons.

Anyway, how do we obtain energy from these atoms? Before that, we'll go back to a chemistry lesson.

First, fires up a neutron to the stable Uranium-235 and it will become Uranium-236, an unstable version of Uranium, called isotope.

The fission process of Uranium

Since uranium-236 is unstable, so it will try to become stable by splitting into smaller atoms such as barium and krypton. Now onto the awesome part of that process; as it splits, it will also neutrons. Two of them in fact. These two neutron will fire up another two stable uranium-235 atoms in that area. The uranium will become uranium-236 isotope, that is unstable. The process will repeat on and on as long as we desire, which is called chain-reaction.

So how do we obtain energy from these reactions? Super easy. As the atom splits/fissions occur, it also releases energy. The amount of the energy is really massive that it is said, a single nuclear power plant can power up to a million houses. [McGuire, N.Carolina]

Biofuel

The oil price rise entanglement have cause many people went to look for car fuel for a cheaper price. One of the alternative can be obtained from ethanol, grown on palm oil tree or corn field. In order to obtain them cheaply, the oil gas companies found the solution; by buying them from poor countries. The high market demands for corn oil and palm oil had caused many farmers racing against time to start growing them.

Here's a catch, is there any side effect on this?

Do you know? Country like Mexico depends on corn breads to make their staple food: tortillas. Tortillas to them is like white rice to us Malaysian, if we don't eat them for a week or two, we'll start become crazy, like suicidal case for some.

Image: Mexicans stage tortilla protest

The rise price of corn which now used for the biofuel had caused the poor to rally since they couldn't buy their staple food, which costed them 1/3 of their paycheck. Imagine what will happen if Malaysian couldn't eat white rice anymore?

However, in countries like Indonesia where the palm oil aren't the major problem if the price risen up, have started to grow palm oil in large scale. Studies shown that it caused some effects to the environment. The deforestation caused by burning them down to create space to plant oil palm trees caused CO2 being released. In addition, many wildlife are wiped out due to deforestation as well as weaken the soil. Some survey shows that Indonesia emits the highest amount of CO2 after America and China for deforestation to expand the plantation of palm oil.

Image: Orang utan finds his home destroyed to make palm oil plantation

The use of biofuel certainly caused a number of negative environmental effects as well as indirectly caused the food price rice.

Places we could go!

Welcome back to the awesome blog of 15nautica.

There are some places that you could go for the mid-semester break. (or a possible trip organized by Miss Syerina if we all fix our grammatical errors in our blog entries, which I hope the trip will come true)

1. Amazon river

It is filled with inhabitants of many awesome creatures. The fish there are known to take great pleasure meeting inhabitants of the land. For example, the piranhas over there are so thrilled with meeting people that they brought all their brother and sisters to welcome people that came. Of course, it always ends up bloody joy kind of excitement.

2. Tornado Alley

Since most of us took Chemical Engineering course, learning about how heat is being transfered, the diffusion of hot and pressure related drive forces are certainly one of the prerequisite before becoming of heck of a great white collar technologist/engineer. During the year of studies, why not go over there, where you all can learn and see for yourself the result of heat and cold air movements from great countries from far like told in the books? I reckon it will be so fun that you'll be screaming at the top of your lungs playing tag-you-re-it with the 240mph tornadoes.

3. Alaska

Who doesn't love the white fluffy bears? One of the places that you can go is probably Alaska. Over there, lived the so-called polar bears. I bet many of us never seen a polar bear real life in front of us. Therefore, why not we all take this chance and go see them? It's really cold out there and living like an outcast from the city really makes them lonely. When you meet them, remember to give them hugs. Remember to make it long lasting since living in a tundra certainly helps if they could get all the body heat they could get! Don't worry about their screaming, it is probably they're calling their friends so they too could get your free hugs, or share you as their early meal, I'm not sure which one.

So here are the places you could go during mid-semester break! There are more, but if I were to put so many awesome places, I bet everybody will be fighting over where the trip would be.

Greener grass

Human nature

There is one old saying, the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. The saying goes that, whatever we have in our life, be it home, vehicle, job and even sweetheart- there is always someone out there who would obtain better one than us.

As a human, we're susceptible to the sort of thinking that there are better things out there. However, we're not at fault. In fact, it is normal to be curious about other things and wanting to possess it, especially from the hearsay of the sugarcoated lips. Though, this kind of thinking will induce the uneasy feeling because we're worrying about what we could have.

Why is it bad?

The worries of wanting to possess other things that we don't have at the other side of the greener grass fence is actually very bad. Keep worrying about it won't get us anywhere. These are few reasons out of hundreds out there why the chase of the greener grass isn't encouraged at all:

• Whatever someone possesses something, there are always someone else out there with better toys, bigger car, hotter wife and more luxurious home. If that person chasing to own better, then there are someone else that already owned the better of it. In short, it is a never ending chase.
• During the chase, we'll use up our energy. It can be the sacrificial of our time, our money and perhaps our family. For the next chase, more energy will be required. What's next? We might not even have the energy to enjoy things that we already have.
• Sometimes, the reason why we're chasing for a greener side is because that we haven't spent enough time to develop enough time to see the good side of it. It is a problem; Seeing other things that we don't have with a rose colored glasses and being cynical about things that we already have.

What should we do?

Be grateful of what we already have and give time for it to develop and shine. Reflects upon what it have that other thing won't achieve. In addition, giving the best effort to make it the best would be really good. It also helps to develop the understanding and attachment more of the things that we already have.