Quantum Fun-Times are Very Small

It always seemed a strange idea to go and buy a non-fiction book, particularly if it doesn't contribute to your resume.  If you want to know something you can look it up on the internet.

Then one day I bought a non-fiction book and now I have to remind myself to read other things, like fiction.  Perhaps not everyone has a depraved obsession for facts, but I actually find them calming.  There's something about a stockpile of potentially worthless knowledge that makes me want to burrow inside and hide in... like an igloo.

Every now and then I read something interesting, and I thought it might be fun to pass the knowledge around.  Like an even more fun version of chlamydia.

This is a paragraph from a book called "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene, which is a layman's guide to cosmology, quantum physics and string theory.  Somehow it's an absolute joy to read; there's even a couple of quotes from The Simpsons in there :D

"Averages are useful for many purposes but, by design, they do not provide a sharp picture of underlying details.  Although the average family in the U.S. has 2.2 children, you'd be in a bind were I to ask you to visit such a family...  So, too, familiar spacetime, itself the result of an averaging process, may not describe the details of something we'd like to call fundamental.  Space and time may only be approximate, collective conceptions, extremely useful in analysing the universe on all but ultramicroscopic scales, yet as illusory as a family with 2.2 children."

It's fascinating to think how easily an averaging process can throw off our perception of fundamental reality.


I was going to end the post here, but then I realised I had not yet included a rip on God, or a fart joke, so here is a section of Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" that rectifies the situation.

The chapter is running through a series of historical arguments by Thomas Aquinas for God's existence, and showing how they can be refuted.

"4.  The argument from degree.
We notice that things in the world differ.  There are degrees of, say, goodness or perfection.  But we judge these degrees only by comparison with a maximum.  Humans can be both good and bad, so the maximum goodness cannot rest in us.  Therefore there must be some other maximum to set the standard for perfection, and we call the maximum God.

That's an argument? You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness.  Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God.  Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion."

The Sex Issue

Prostitution is often referred to as the oldest profession. 

That seems like propaganda to me.  If you’re exchanging sex for currency, surely the manufacture of currency would predate the service industry, unless the first client promised to invent money the next day.

In any case, the sex industry has been going strong since the start of civilisation. 

Now, a lot of cultures throughout history have held that prostitution is a debasement of morals, and have decreed it to be illegal.  However, making it illegal has never caused it to stop.

Prostitution exists in all human cultures; it is inextricably tied to civilisation. 

Making it illegal means that less people will participate in it, but it also means that it is not regulated.  Sex slavery, child prostitution and violence are among the most crushingly terrible things on earth, and are all more common where prostitution is illegal, and not regulated to meet industry standards.  By legalising prostitution, the state can be charged to ensure the safety of the workers.

Prostitutes exist in this world.  Legalising their profession gives them human rights.

Not to mention, tax!  When I exchange money for a potato I pay tax on that.  I give the government some money to keep society running smoothly.  There is a truckload of money flying around in the sex industry; (I can't find the actual data, but I did read that the porn industry alone makes more than Google, Apple and Microsoft combined) if it’s legal it can be taxed, and the commonwealth gets a slice of the action.

In fact, as a member of society, I believe it is your right to demand that no (non charitable) industry should be exempt from being taxed.

I hope that these points can provide some perspective that even if you disagree with the solicitation of prostitution on moral grounds, there are still a lot of good moral reasons to support the industry’s legal acknowledgment. 

But the plot thickens!

When society makes prostitution illegal, it knows that it exists and that it will continue to exist, it just doesn’t want to publicly acknowledge its existence.  Interestingly, this exact same process happens to most people as individuals.

Almost everyone has sexual desires that they don’t want to acknowledge openly to themselves.  Many people are disgusted by their own desire to do things like masturbate, and would prefer to pretend that the desire doesn’t exist. 

I believe that the legalisation of prostitution creates a healthier industry that protects the safety of the workers.  In exactly the same way, when people acknowledge their own sexual desires as normal, and potentially enjoyable aspects of being a human, the result is less embarrassment, less self-loathing, less depression; less mental health problems in general.  In other words;

By legalising your own brain’s sex industry, you will protect the safety of its workers.

There is an argument that it is the ‘naughty’ aspect of sex that makes it so appealing, and a frank acknowledgment of all aspects of sexuality will take the fun out of it.

I thought this for a time, but I realise now that firstly, it would be radically difficult to take the fun out of something as enjoyable as sex/masturbation.  And secondly, that our imaginations are incredibly durable, even in the face of pure reason.

Take, for example, going to the movies:

We are all well aware that we’re not watching a window.  It’s a screen. We know this.  We know that the people on the screen aren’t regular people, going about their lives, unaware that they’re being watched by a bunch of bug-eyed strangers, grazing on popcorn.  It’s acting.  We know this.  Yet we still manage to engage with the film.  There is a side of us that we allow to believe that not only is the fantasy world real, but at some level we are the people in the film.

This is my favourite thing about being alive. 

And if the open acknowledgement that films have scripts and actors doesn’t take away the magic, then there is no chance in hell that accepting the reality and legitimacy of your own sexual desires is going to make sex mundane.

Some people feel that sex is inherently immoral, except between a man and a woman who are married to each other, and that things like masturbation are a sin.

Even people who aren’t practicing Christians often feel that masturbation is a character flaw; that it is a shameful weakness that must be kept a secret.  But why?  It’s a purely personal transaction that doesn’t involve anyone else.  How is it any different from playing a good game of pinball?

Some claim that masturbation is wrong because it is based on objectifying the sexual aspects of people, rather than being attracted to the qualities of their character.

It seems to me that society is founded on the principals of valuing selected aspects of different people.  I value police for their strength, I value primary school teachers for their patience, I value mathematicians for their calculations, parents for their compassion and writers for their insight.  Why shouldn’t I value models for their attractiveness?  Why should the system become invalid because sexiness is involved?

Porn addiction can be a problem when it negatively impacts your life, but that doesn’t mean that the existence of porn is the problem.

If someone wants to lose weight they might decide to eat nothing but lettuce.  While this diet will lose weight, it won’t make them healthy.  Your body requires small amounts of certain fats and sugars, if you completely cut out something you need, you will start to crave it.  The lettuce eater is setting themselves up to fail.  They will break their diet, and then they’ll binge because they’re unhappy and they’ll be unhappy because they binge. 

It’s the same with porn.  If you tell yourself that porn is immoral, but still desire it, then it’s likely that you’ll fall into the same shame-spiral where you will use porn because you feel bad and you feel bad because you use porn.  This causes the allure of porn to become its depravity, which naturally leads the consumer towards wanting things that also horrify them.

Dieticians recommend taking steps towards a healthy diet by acknowledging that high-fat foods are fine in moderation.

Porn is the same, moderation is the key, and the best way to achieve it is to stop beating ourselves up, for beating ourselves off.

In the spirit of acknowledgment I think it’s high time I acknowledged that when it comes to writing a new moral code based on rational values, my efforts are going to be eclipsed by the eloquence and wisdom of Stephen Fry.  This is from his autobiography Moab is My Washpot:

It is a little theory of mine that has much exercised my mind lately, that most of the problems of this silly and delightful world derive from our apologising for those things which we ought not to apologise for, and failing to apologise for those things for which apology is necessary.

For example, none of the following is shameful or deserves apology, in spite of our suicidal attempts to convince ourselves otherwise:

·         To possess a rectum, a urethra and a bladder and all that pertain thereto.

·         To cry.

·         To find anything or anyone of any gender, age or species sexually attractive.

·         To find anything or anyone of any gender, age or species sexually unattractive.

·         To insert things in one’s mouth, anus or vagina for the purpose of pleasure.

·         To masturbate as often as one wishes. Or not.

·         To swear.

·         To be filled with sexual desires that involve objects, articles or parts of the body irrelevant to procreation.

·         To fart.

·         To be sexually unattractive.

·         To love.

·         To ingest legal or illegal drugs.

·         To smell of oneself and one’s juices.

·         To pick one’s nose.

I spend a lot of time tying knots in my handkerchief reminding myself that those are things not to be ashamed of, so long as they are not performed in sight or sound of those who would be pained – which also hold true of Morris dancing, talking about Terry Pratchett and wearing velour and many other harmless human activities. Politeness is all.

But I fear I spend far too little time apologising for or feeling ashamed about things which really do merit sincere apology and outright contrition.

·         Failing to imagine what it is like to be someone else.

·         Pissing my life away.

·         Dishonesty with self and others.

·         Neglecting to pick up the phone or write letters.

·         Not connecting made or processed objects with their provenance.

·         Judging without facts.

·         Using influence over others for my own ends.

·         Causing pain.

I will apologise for faithlessness, neglect, deceit, cruelty, unkindness, vanity and meanness, but I will not apologise for the urgings of my genitals nor, most certainly, will I ever apologise for the urgings of my heart.

Doing It With an Alien Babe, and Other Things that Will Not Occur

I recently accessed my brain, and looked up whether aliens exist.

The answer is that aliens do exist, but human beings will never come into contact with them.

The Brainster and I felt that this was fairly interesting, and decided to elaborate with the following explanation.

Just one example of an alien babe you will not be doing.

The processes that led to reproducing organisms (‘life’) on earth were fairly remarkable, but by all accounts the universe is quite large.

At last count there are about 300 sextillion (believe it or not I didn’t make up that number!  It’s 3 with 23 zeros after it) stars in the universe, and most stars have planets orbiting them.

Not all planets are capable of creating or even sustaining life, but if just 1 in every 100 billion planets has the right conditions to create life, that could leave us with more than 3 trillion viable planets in the universe.

If you consider that that our sun has about 8 planets and at least 20 moons, the number of planets in the universe might be 10 times as high as the number of stars. 

In any case, there’s a butt-load of systems out there and it’s very likely that some of them have life forms.

However, the likelihood that humans will make contact with another species of intelligent, alien life is, in my humble opinion, exceptionally slim.

The first problem is attitude.

If you think aliens look like this, you are a moron.

As a species, over many years, we have come to accept that an alien probably won’t speak English.

Some of us have even been able to make the mental leap that aliens are not likely to look exactly like a human with large eyes and Michael Jackson's nose.

Take moss; the kind that grows on rocks.

Humans and moss come from the same planet, they live in the same environment, breathe the same air, live off very similar nutrients.  They’re made of almost exactly the same materials and have very similar blueprints, yet we tend to think of ourselves as massively different to moss.

It was only within the last 200 years that humans have been able to accept that we’re actually part of the animal kingdom.

An alien won’t live in our environment, breathe our air or eat our food.  It probably won’t be constructed from a base of carbon by a DNA blueprint. 

So we can reasonably expect that the minute differences between humans and moss will be as nothing compared to the vast differences between ourselves and alien life.

It’s easy to ridicule outdated perceptions that ‘little green men’ are the most outrageous alien life we can expect from the universe, but there may be other ways in which we are just as impaired (the technical term is chauvinistic) in our understanding.

Why are these aliens just standing around?

As far as I know, everyone who believes in the existence of aliens automatically makes the assumption that aliens will wish to make some kind of contact with us. 

We cannot seem to imagine a universe where we aren’t the coolest kids on the block.

This is what I disagree with.

Humans look for aliens because we want to understand and have knowledge of the universe, but is this a natural condition of intelligent life? 

Can we expect aliens to act in this way?

We want to know things so that we can feel like we’re in control, because we fear the unknown. 

For millennia our ancestors have gained knowledge to help them overcome problems of survival.  We thirst for knowledge in order to get fed, get sheltered and get laid.  It’s the fear of not being able to meet these needs that drives us towards discovery.  But what happens when survival is assured? Or more likely, what happens a thousand generations after all the needs of humanity are automatically met?

Searching for life in the universe requires a lot of effort, and the reason that we undertake it is because of our fear and our malcontent for our current level of power.  When intelligent life does not need to fight to survive, it will no longer yearn for greater power.  It will no longer need to encapsulate the universe in its understanding before it can stop worrying.

I believe that our current level of curiosity is not an inevitable product of intelligence, and nor is it an end point in the evolution of life on our planet.  I think that an advanced form of intelligent life would be more likely to display a contented disinterest in the rest of the universe, than a driving thirst for more knowledge.

But what if there were a species that were keen to make contact with us?  The next big problem would be in communication.

We seem to think that our senses are fundamental; that aliens are bound to see, hear, smell, taste or touch.  All of our communication between each other is based, at some level, on our senses and the data that they send to our brain.

But even in our own animal kingdom there is a myriad of senses that we have no experience of.

Dolphins, whales and bats visualise by using sonar.  Turtles ‘see’ earth’s magnetic field.  Snakes see infrared.  Bees see ultraviolet light.  Fish feel water pressure and some even see with an electrical field.

Those are all examples of animals that are more closely related to us than moss is!

Why should we believe that we will have any comprehension of the senses, let alone the thought processes, of alien life?

In fact humans are fantastically inept at interspecies communication.  Whales and humans are so closely related that they’re both mammals.  Whales are intelligent and use vocal language to communicate, yet how many of us can speak Whale?

We are remarkably uninterested in communicating with species less intelligent than our own, yet we believe that a highly developed alien species is going to be super-keen to have a chat with us.  There are probably intelligences out there that make our intellects look like that of an ant.  How many times a day do you attempt to pass your knowledge onto an ant? 

And you’re often pretty close to an ant. 

Aliens coming to earth to pass on their wisdom would be like me walking across the Sahara in order to communicate with an ant mound.

People just aren’t into that sort of thing, so I see no reason why aliens should be.

In fact, why should aliens need to use senses in the first place? 

If humans developed their mental presence, rather than focusing entirely on their physical presence, they could get to the point where their minds could create a perfectly functioning dreamworld.  Perhaps they would be interconnected, perhaps they wouldn’t need to be.  They could get rid of the clumsy, inefficient human body and live forever in their thoughts.

Why should an alien bother with the hassle of interstellar travel when it could access a universe in its own mind?  The very idea that aliens would require any sort of physical presence might be completely misguided.

Okay, so it’s unlikely that we’d be able to understand any alien communication, and even more unlikely that they would attempt communication in the first place, but what if they were inclined and we could understand them?

The last problem is time.

The universe is about 13 billion years old.  The earth is about 4 billion years old.  Humans are about 200,000 years old.  And only in the last 4000 years or so have we been interested in communicating with aliens. 

It’s wrong to imagine that the human race has reached the end of its development.  No eco system or species could stop developing unless it reached an unbelievable level of balance and contentment, and the first thing that this would exclude is any interest in alien life.  After all, how could you stop changing whilst continuing to search the heavens for new and exciting things?  Humanity a hundred generations from now will be unrecognisably different from the lives we currently lead, and there’s no indication that we, let alone our curiosity would continue on forever.

Say we survive and continue to care about space exploration for the next 8000 years.  That’s a pretty optimistic extent of time, particularly as the robots (with or without the human brain being involved) are already poised to take the reigns.

Say, also, that there’s an identical species of humans somewhere in our galaxy, and not only that, but our worlds are so close together that they are within 1% of our galaxy. 

I'd be sad too if I looked exaclty like a human with a small neck.

The first problem is that we’d probably miss each other.  If we live out the next 8000 years that would still mean that we’ve only been searching for aliens for 0.0003% of the history of our planet, and 0.00009% of the history of the universe.

Even if their society lasted a million years, the chances that our lifetimes would coincide are similar to the chances that you will give me $10,000.  (Just try and prove me wrong.)

But what if we did happen to hear from them tomorrow?

1% of the galaxy is at least 500 light years across (see previous post for what a light year is, or just google it, you dork).  So if we received a transmission today we could broadcast one back tomorrow, then 500 years later they’ll actually receive that transmission.  If they immediately reply, then that’ll be another 500 years to get the pleasantries out of the road.  By the time we got a dialogue going our 8000 years will be well over.  If they set out to reach us as soon as they got our message then that’s still an absolute minimum round trip of 1000 years. 

Humanity 1000 years from now will be so different that they might as well be aliens to us at this point.

Even in the best circumstances, communicating across the vastness of space would be like stretching a single conversation over the course of your life.  You’d start out with a gurgle, mention Ninja Turtles, then boobs, then government equities, then couches, then young people on your lawn, then you die. 

Even if the responses were unbelievably interesting, it’s easier just to talk to whatever dork you happen to live next to.

So that’s my thoughts on aliens; there’s probably a bunch of them out there but there’s too much time and space in the way and they probably couldn’t give a toss about us anyway.

If you’re interested in this stuff you should look out for books by Carl Sagan, Arthur C Clark, Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking and Isaac Asimov.

You don’t need to read them; just put them in your house.  Their presence will make you feel wise.

SuperCollider? I just met her.

I like Science Fiction.  It’s fun to read, write, watch and wear, particularly in hat format.

This impartiality has led me to conduct various sessions of low-quality research on the subject of cool space facts. 

Here’s some stuff I’ve picked up; hopefully there’s a thing or two in there that you didn’t know.

Part 1. Space n’stuff.

So space is curved.  huh?

It’s like this: If I throw a ball up in the air, it goes up for a while and then curves back down towards the earth.  The ball doesn’t turn a corner in the air; it travels in a straight line within curved space.

The gravity of the earth curves the space around it.

Everything that has mass (weight) has its own gravity.  You and I have our own gravity.  But the more mass you have the more gravity you have.  So our own gravity is completely overpowered by the earth. 

Imagine you had a big squashy floor, (like a really fat sheet of rubber or something) and you put a bunch of rocks on it.  Heavy rocks would make big depressions in the floor, while smaller rocks would make smaller dents.  This is a bit like space.  Heavy planets have more gravity.

Now imagine that you rolled a marble across the floor.  It would roll down the depressions and kind of get sucked towards the rocks.  This is how moving through space works; it’s just like a curved surface, except in three dimensions.

Another part of curved space is the concept of spacetime. 

Imagine we’re standing a short distance apart and I throw a ball to you.  If I lob it up in the air it might take two seconds to reach you, and if I throw it straight at you it might take half a second. 

What I can’t do is lob it up in the air in such a way that it only takes half a second to reach you, and equally I can’t throw it straight at you and make it take two seconds. 

This is because time is all wrapped up with the geometry of space.

Now, if we go back to rolling the marble across the bumpy floor, not only does the intrepid marble get sucked towards a heavy object, as it gets closer it also increases velocity (speed).  It’s like if you roll a marble down the side of a bowl, it picks up speed as it gets closer to the centre, and there’s a weird thing about this force.

If you’re in a car and you accelerate you feel g-force.  The car starts travelling faster than you, so it presses into your back which presses into your front and you get slightly compressed.  This is fairly mild in a car, but a car doesn’t travel that quickly. 

Too much g-force is bad.  This is the force that makes crashing your car unpleasant.  If it wasn’t for the g-forces involved you would just immediately come to a complete stop.

This was taken by Voyager.  The dot is Earth.

The satellite known as ‘Voyager’ is currently leaving the solar system at 61,200km per hour.  If you wanted to accelerate to that speed without suffering greater g-forces than what you experience normally in your car it would take about 50 minutes of accelerating.  But there’s a way to reach that speed almost instantly without any kind of g-force.

If you’re in an elevator and it suddenly goes upwards at 10 times the normal speed it would probably injure your legs.  But if the elevator suddenly falls downwards you immediately start accelerating towards the earth at high speed, but you don’t feel any g-force, in fact you’d be weightless.  That is, until it lands.

The reason that falling doesn’t involve g-force is that nothing is being compressed.  Gravity is pulling the elevator and all the different parts of your body downwards at the same speed. 

Now the earth isn’t that heavy, so its gravity is not that strong.  If you were free-falling on Jupiter you’d be accelerating 2.5 times as fast as you were on earth, but it would feel exactly the same. 

This is how Voyager came to be travelling at 61,200 km/h.  It travelled close by to Jupiter (the largest planet in our Solar System), it started falling down towards the planet and accelerating, then it just missed hitting the planet and got slingshot out the other side.

This is a good way to accelerate in space, but you have to already be going fairly fast if you want to avoid crashing into the planet.  It’s like skating on a half pipe.  If you want to fly off into the air you can’t just stand on the edge and roll down, you have to create some momentum that will fling you out the other side.

So how do you initially accelerate in space?

If you’re swimming in water you can accelerate by kicking your legs.  In effect you push against the water and that propels you forward.  But how do you accelerate in a vacuum? There’s nothing to push against.

The only current technique we have is by using rockets, which basically are forced to push off against their own exhaust.  The down side is that you have to be carrying enough fuel to leave a big trail of exhaust through space.  The up side is there’s very little resistance in space, so once you’ve accelerated you can just coast forever.

So that’s the basics of geometry in space.  Here’s where things start getting really strange.

Part 2.  Time is not constant.

Acceleration makes several strange things happen.

If I throw a ruler like a javelin, it will actually be slightly shorter while it’s accelerating.

Not only that but it will have slightly more mass (weight).

And here’s the weird one, it will experience slightly less time passing.

You heard me.

If I have two clocks set to exactly the same time and I throw one of them to you, the one that has travelled faster will be slightly behind the other one.

Of course at such low speeds the difference is almost completely negligible, but the effect becomes much more noticeable at high speeds.

If you have two twins and one of them gets in a spacecraft and travels at high speed for a while, when they get back to earth they will be younger than their twin.  Less time will have passed for them.

There is a limit to how fast you can go.  Light travels at about 1billion km per hour, and nothing that has mass can travel faster than that.  This was explained by Einstein with the famous equation E=MC^2. 

Basically as you go faster you gain more mass, and as you approach the speed of light the amount of mass shoots sharply upwards.  To be at the speed of light you need to have either no mass (like light) or infinite mass (which as far as I’m aware is not possible).

1b km/h is still pretty fast, but the universe is quite large.  The nearest star to earth (aside from the sun, obviously) is called Alpha Proxima, and it’s about 4 light years away.  (One light year is the distance that light travels in one year – roughly 10 trillion kilometres.)

This means that no matter how fast you go, it will always take more than 4 years to reach this star from earth.  To reach the centre of our galaxy (The Milky Way) will always take more than 27,000 years.  To get to the nearest galaxy will take more than 250,000 years.

So you see that there’s a bit of a problem getting around the cosmos, but fascinatingly you could still get there within a lifetime.

When you travel quickly, your time passes more slowly.  If you travel at just under the speed of light you could actually circumnavigate the entire observable universe (some 46 billion light years) in under, say, 30 years.

The only problem is that when you got back to earth you’d find that more than 92 billion years had passed there, and it would no longer exist. 

If you did go on this journey I wonder what you would see if you looked out your window.  I assume you would see the universe sped up 1.5 billion times its normal speed. 

Part 3.  Gone fission.

It’s currently believed that the universe began with a Big Bang.  The bang spread out a vast cloud of hydrogen.  Under the forces of gravity, portions of hydrogen started to coalesce into dense clouds, and then into blobs.  As there was so much gas in these blobs their combined weight was massive, which means that they had an equally massive amount of gravity which pulled them ever denser.  The pressures inside rose so high that they became extremely hot and bright.  They were the first stars. 

Inside the stars the heat and pressure were high enough for the hydrogen to undergo nuclear fission, turning into helium.  This is what our sun does.

In the biggest stars the pressures and heat would grow even higher, causing the helium to form into heavier elements like iron and carbon.

When a star runs out of fuel it sort of collapses in on itself and then explodes away most of its matter.  The iron and carbon that got sprayed out would sometimes form into big rocks that would get caught in orbit around another star.  This is what happened to the earth.

Sometimes after a star explodes away a bunch of its matter the heaviest elements remain.  Their gravity is so high that the elements keep compacting and their gravity becomes more concentrated until you have a sphere that is close to infinitely dense. 

This would be like compacting the entire earth down to the size of a grain of sand.

Strangely enough, light is affected by gravity.  Light is pulled towards heavy objects in the same way that matter is.  When a star has compacted enough, its gravity reaches a point where it is so strong that light can’t escape from it, forming what we call a black hole.

Light is bent by the gravity of a black hole

I’d always assumed that this compacted sphere known as a black hole would be very dark, but in fact it would probably be sending off an incredible amount of light, except that as soon as the light was expelled it would bend around and fall backwards.

Some people believe that a black hole curves space so much that it tears, meaning that you could pass through the tear into some other place or time.  The biggest problem is that there would inevitably be another black hole on the other side of the tear and you would then have to escape from the gravity, which is something that not even light can do. 

You’d also have to deal with the inconvenience of being instantly compacted into a microscopic point.

If you’ve read this far than my hat’s off to you.  Hopefully there was something in there that caused you a micron of interest.

If you noticed anything grievously erroneous in the above generalisations please leave a correctional comment.

I think next time I’ll write about aliens.  Stay tuned.