Author: Hossein Nejad

Titanic, officially known as the RMS Titanic was a British manufactured ship which sunk while already traveling about midway the distance to New York. Its thousands of passengers consisting from people trying to immigrate in the United States to some of the most wealthy people in the world going on a holiday.

In contrast to what most people think, the Titanic had quite advanced safety measures for its time, consisting but not being limited to: watertight compartments and remotely activated watertight doors. Due to the optimistic designers and the desire to keep costs low, the Titanic carried enough life boats for half of its passengers or 48 boats. The actual number of lifeboats the Titanic carried was a mere 20 and four of them did not launch as wanted during the sinking.

At midnight a collision with a iceberg occurred and 5 of the 16 air tight vents were filled bu water as the nails in the fuselage just popped out. The ‘unsinkable’ ship had just begun to sunk and due to very poor contact with the other ships and the coast, many more people found their death in the titanic. It was a brand new and expensive ship. Is is not righteous to conclude this was just an accident because a collision with an iceberg would have inevitably happened while sailing in the northern part of the Atlantic sea. Had this ship not been collided with an iceberg on its first travel, it would have just happened a couple of journeys later, at most. It is fairly obvious that this ship could have been much safer. But how safe could the Titanic for example really have been at most? The answer is that no matter how advanced or reliable something is, from cars to refrigerators it can not be completely safe in a sense that is completely free of malfunction. A car tor example is always unsafe at any speed. A safe car never drives, a safe plane never flies and a safe boat never sails. One may ask what the point of improving it is when it is never within reach. It is like a horse that runs for the carrot in front of it, but the distance never closes. The point is that that is nor necessary nor achievable, so it should not be the goal. The goal should however be to maximize the safety level and to make the product fail safe. 

Making something fail safe means that it should be safe in case of its intended working failing. Making something fail safe is similar to having a backup or a plan B. These do not always work, and that is the reason no matter how many backups you add it is never completely safe. 

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These are the slip and fall Accident Stats. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over one million Americans suffer a slip, trip, and fall injury and over 17, 000 people die in the U.S. annually because of these injuries. It is common knowledge to know that quite some of these happen by banana peels. That is why they are also portrayed in movies and cartoons. Only, this is not true in reality. Only one person has died due to slipping on a banana peel.

It is much more common to slip in the bathroom and fall of a ladder. Another great example is the shark and the mosquito. Common sense finds sharks more terrifying. Mosquitos are seen mostly as irritating. Yet, there are lots of famous movies such as Jaws about how  dangerous they are and almost none about mosquitos. 64 unprovoked shark attacks were reported around the globe.

It might seem impossible that something so miniscule can kill so many people, but it’s true. According to the World Health Organization, mosquito bites result in the deaths of more than 1 million people. Statistically speaking, people are more than 15,000 times likely to die of a mosquito bite than to be ‘just’ attacked by a shark. By giving not enough attention to mosquitos and too much to sharks for example, really dangerous situations can occur. Often the question seems to be  what has the most priority? This is easier said than done. Many mistakes have been made because of wrongfully answering that question, even by big groups of mathematicians. This event happened in the height of the second world war. Planes that flew over the enemy’s soil were shot. The planes that came were studied and had more bullet holes per square meter in the the fuel system and wings than the engines and fuselages. There was a problem a big group of mathematicians needed to solve. A plane can only have so much armor before it becomes too heavy. It was a challenge to figure out where the optimum was. The part that the engines had less bullet holes did not make sense. This was a problem that took surprisingly long for them to find an answer too. A mathematician named Abraham Wald solved this problem by arguing that planes  that did have lots of bullet holes simply were not able to fly back. He did this by asking himself ‘what assumptions do I make?’ Often this is just extra work, but sometimes it makes a huge difference.

Low concentrations of just 15 parts per million could be a hazard to health. It likewise makes a big difference in the end, necessary for a reasonably safe product. 

Something else to take in mind is to not overestimate problems, as unnecessary resources are wasted. How natural and obvious it may feel like, reality is sometimes different. The best way to get a grasp of reality is with statistics. Note that statistics can also be misleading due to approximation, use of a smaller piece of data and overall reliability. With some basic research it is possible to get very far.

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For centuries there have been epidemics. These viral or bacterial outbreaks killed massive chunks of the world population. The first ever epidemic started in 1890, the flu outbreak. Just some time after the Second World War there was a very deadly outbreak. The name of the illness that caused it was the Spanish Flu. Things like hygiene, management and knowledge were so poor, that although many people got infected practically everywhere, nobody knew where it originated from. Its name is not called the ‘Spanish’ because it is from Spain, but rather because Spain was the first country to talk openly about it. Some people predicted that there will be epidemics in the future including Bill Gates. Since Januari a new virus has been breaking news. It is spreading to other countries from the infected countries the whole time. It is also known as the
mysterious coronavirus. Its real name is not the coronavirus, but N-COVID 2019. It is part of the many coronaviruses that exist everywhere. The other coronaviruses are mainly not harmful and only cause coughing. This new kind of coronavirus is very much lethal, but as almost all of the fatalities caused by the virus are to elderly or people that already were sick or had weak immune systems to protect them, statistically it is not that dangerous. It is more deadly than the flu, but really not as deadly as Ebola, the Spanish Flu or smallpox for the people infected. As of February 2020 almost 80,000 people are infected. Mainly in Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus and Hubei. The exact place where the virus had first emerged is unclear, but most sources say it started all on a market in Wuhan because of infected bats. This is not for sure, but it is not impossible. Bats are known to be carriers of illnesses for a very long time. Apparently, the sick Chinese do not stay home when they are sick because they spread The virus to lots of countries like America, Australia, Iran, Turkey, Belgium, Germany, Japan, South Korea and more countries. When that one ill person does after all decide to go a country after being sick and the person infects people there, that person is eligible. There is also the fact that many people do not even know that they have the coronavirus and those people are the most dangerous. Why? Because they do not take extra hygiene precautions, travel unrestrictedly and can come in contact with lost of people in a very short period, practically everywhere. The first case is known since at least 31 December 2019. In only a couple of days has the number of infected people grown exponentially. The government of China could have taken lots of very simple and cheap measures in the begin of the outbreak to completely isolate the first few people that got contaminated. The problem is that they did not do that on time resulting in a quick spread of the virus that is expected to contaminate billions of people. New viruses do not just pop into existence, they have evolved from bits of DNA or RNA that “escaped” from the genes of a larger organism. The escaped DNA could have been originated from plasm these pieces of DNA that can move between cells or molecules of DNA that replicate and move around to different positions within the genes of the cell. This happens all the time and most of the times the result is genetic trash. Sometimes, this shuffle causes the virus to be very contagious and deadly under humans. So by definition, there are no truly new viruses, there are only evolved ones. Preventing new viruses from being made is very much impossible right now and it probably will stay like that in the future. That should not be the goal, the goal should instead be to prevent further spread. If the prevention system fails in the future and there is a dangerous germ, then due to the large population and the big overall population density the earth would see the biggest epidemic ever with lots of casualties. After all, prevention is better than cure.

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These are some of the sources I have been using to write this post:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/world/asia/china-coronavirus.amp.html?0p19G=0038

There are many people that come together and watch fireworks from a distance in great shows by professionals. Those shows take place in Sydney, Poland and everything in between. The people who work with these beautiful fireworks are trained and many times the ignition of the fuses is not even done by hand, but electrically. It is safe to say that that is safe, although it does go wrong once in a while. The professionals do not use illegal fireworks, but individuals in The Netherlands do sometimes.

It is remarkable that in a small country with high punishments for owning or igniting illegal fireworks there is much illegal fireworks.
Just some decades ago there was no habit of igniting fireworks yourself in The Netherlands, but as the prosperity increased it became popular, but nobody knew that the tradition was going to last so long and have big consequences. Some people think the legal stuff is too boring and buy the illegal stuff. The illegal stuff is illegal for a reason, a good reason. Illegal fireworks often contain too large amounts of explosive powder and have too short fuses. People have lost limbs and even their lives because of that. What is even more interesting is that a quarter of all firework accidents are caused by the illegal stuff. Some people would think that they are really expensive, but that is really not true, it is a misunderstanding. In really they are even cheaper than legal fireworks. Most of the times they just make noise, they explode. It is because of that more a ‘explosive’ than a ‘firework’. There are people that know this and buy it to explode things and there are people that do not know the line. Buying those dangerous rubbish is apparently very easy and cheap if you are a criminal. Although it is cheap, buying and selling it is very lucrative because it is produced so widely and close. Buying lots of them is possible with easily forge able documents for a really low price in Italy, where it is produced legally by a company named Di Blasio. It is intended for professional use only, but the majority of the produced fireworks is going to be ignited by amateurs. Often these explosives are imported through drug channels, which are ideal to import them illegally.

The problem with illegal fireworks is easily solvable by banning all fireworks ignited by amateurs and organizing firework shows. That in combination with more police surveillance should really decrease the amount of illegal fireworks by destroying the demand for them and making trade harder.

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Here are some links I used to write this post:

      Politie: illegaal vuurwerk komt Nederland binnen via drugslijnen


        https://nos.nl/op3/artikel/2315616-de-route-van-illegaal-vuurwerk-van-fabriek-tot-garagebox.html

Nowadays antimatter is defined as a material with weight made of the anti-version of the corresponding particle. That means that dor a proton is an anti-proton for example. Although it is made each day, it is made in minuscule amounts. If you would add up all the antimatter produced and somehow weighed it, it would only be a few nanograms. Each day it is made at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for example. It is very expensive; scientists claim that antimatter is the costliest material to make. In 2006, Gerald Smith estimated $250 million could produce 10 milligrams of positrons (equivalent to $25 billion per gram); in 1999, Nasa gave a figure of $62.5 trillion per gram of antihydrogen. Of course these figures are theoretical because if there was a way to create so much the price would drop probably. It is so costly because making it is slow and it takes a lot of energy. In addition storing antimatter is extremely difficult because when it comes in contact with matter both disappear leaving only leaving lots and lots of energy. All the energy is released. One gram of antimatter with 1 gram of matter produces almost the same amount of energy as 43,000 kilograms of TNT exploding. Right now antimatter is far too expensive and inefficient to produce, but in the future it may be a widely used energy source because it is so high in energy/mass. I think that at the end of the 21st century we will at least be using antimatter as some kind of space travel fuel because especially in space it has many advantages.

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Biofuel is a relatively cheap energy source. It is not that hard to produce and burning it produces less carbon dioxide than burning coal or oil. But to make biofuel land for the sugarcane is needed. To make that space, trees and forests are often cut down. Because trees need to be cut, the homes of the animals that live there are destroyed.    
Orangutans are already losing their homes because of the palm oil plantations.

Economically it is very beneficial.  For nature is it highly damaging. To get a full picture of what is going on you need to look at things differently. Of course there are situations where this is true, but that it is much more complicated.

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The water crisis. That’s what the newspapers everybody and newspapers like BBC and CNN call it. Right now people in all over the world are pumping water from deep ground aquifers, from Yemen to Australia. Water covers more than two thirds of our planet, and it is easy to think that it will always be enough, cheap and accessible, but unfortunately the world does not work like that. The water we need, freshwater is incredibly rare if you compare it to saline water, which accounts for 97 percent of all water on earth. That means that a mere  3% of the world’s water is fresh water, and two-thirds of that is tucked away in frozen glaciers or otherwise unavailable for use. 

I think it  is clear that we need fresh water. There are several ingenious ways to create it. Way #1, using its formula. It is possible to make water the same way someone makes a peanut jelly sandwich. Only the formula for a peanut jelly sandwich is: bread + jelly + peanut butter whereas the formula for water is: 2 hydrogen atoms + 1 oxygen atom. Extracting hydrogen is relatively easy, hydrogen can be produced from natural gas, coal, biomass and oil. And it can be produced from renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, geothermal and hydroelectric power. Hydrogen can even be captured from waste from industrial processes. More than enough ways to get hydrogen. With so much options it should not be that expensive. After collecting the hydrogen, it is possible to create water by burning it. The only things that burning hydrogen creates are water and heat. Both very needed now. In addition, hydrogen with enough oxygen  catches fire very easily. One spark is more than enough to make the hydrogen explode. Almost all of our current fuels, ethanol, methanol, benzene, methane, propanol and more consist partly of hydrogen atoms. The sun also uses hydrogen for energy. Burning hydrogen could be done in a controlled environment, but there have been accidents in which hydrogen ignited without people wanting it to do so. A famous example is the Hindenburg disaster, a tragedy in which 36 people died.

It happened on May the sixth 1937, 2 years before the Second World War began. That explains why there are Nazi swastikas on the airship that was flying in American airspace.  A great tragedy, but on the bright side lots of water was produced that people now may be using to drink or to flush their toilet.

Because burning hydrogen is clean and it only produces water which is predicted to going to be a shortage of in the future, I believe burning hydrogen for energy is truly the future. Homes can be provided with hydrogen instead of gas and that also can produce their water need. Adding minerals like sodium, magnesium and calcium is needed though. But that should be very cheap because  in one liter of water there is very little of those things. One cheap and safe way to add them is through replacing one piece of the pipe by a special one with magnesium, sodium, calcium and more minerals needed in little stones. A fine filter to both sides should ensure no big pieces leave. Water will corrode those stones resulting in tap water with minerals. After years a sensor can warn the user so they user replaces the stones by throwing  a special pack in it by opening the lid on the pipe. By doing that people are left with very safe water without any toxins like lead and antimony. It even does not need to contain any chlorine. Way #2 is to use reverse osmosis. Reverse osmosis is actually filtering the water. It is easy and relatively cheap. 

I think the first way is better because it just solves more of our problems.

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Here are some some of the sources that I have used in order to write this:

 Hindenburg disaster – Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Hindenburg_disaster

The definition of failure according to Oxford Dictionary is to ‘not succeed’ and the antonym of ‘failure’ is success. But when are you successful? When you have good marks? If yes, then how high should your marks be? Is someone from the middle class successful in money? Someone poor may think so, but all of the or at least the vast majority of billionaires will say no.

So because succes is sometimes pure opinion really does not mean it is always and that means failure is not always opinion, although sometimes it is. Here are some examples to clarify: example #1, you do not learn for your driving test and you do not pass, then you fail. Example #2, you have a small test next month and you are learning and doing extra research 5 hours a day. When you make the test you realize it is simpler than you thought. The next day after your teacher checked it, your teacher says you have a nine, while everybody else has a 7.5. They didn’t learn at all. Most people in that situation would consider the test a failure, they wouldn’t be satisfied.

In my point of view obvious and factual lacking, causing a consequence is failure. For example when a plane loses its wings and crashes because of that and kills all of its passengers because the maintenance was not done properly, is definitely a failure.

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