Swans on Tea

In my brief time in the blog-o-truncated-icosahedron (I’m not convinced it’s a sphere), I’ve gotten to know and be indifferent to the automatic pingback. The strange and wonderful spiders/bots that crawl the web and look for keywords, and link to your blog post. Much of the time, it happens because of some innocuous term you’ve included — just yesterday, I wrote about some non-hoops player being officially included in the NBA draft, and made mention of the NFL, and got a pingback from somebody’s NFL-themed blog. I mentioned taxes the weekend before April 15th, and got three tax-related pingbacks. They obviously were not from people who had read the post.

So I got to thinking, (always a dangerous thing)
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Come to think of it, I meant option C: “Planck’s constant”

(the actual issue was that this was a copy-and-paste of a longer expression, and there is an almost indistinguishable fraction of an extra space after the apostrophe)

Well, Art is busy, so life imitates a cartoon instead.

The other night on the Colbert Report, he interviewed George Johnson, author of The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (which I’ve mentioned before), and the idea for which was stolen from Chad. The interview was standard Colbert schtick, and Johnson doesn’t really explain what’s going on with the physics, but the last 30-45 seconds is great, and becomes the XKCD cartoon “The Difference,” about science and pain.

UPDATE: if you are getting frustrated with the Comedy Central player, there’s an embedded link here that seem worked better for me. (I can’t embed the video myself, alas)

Make Ethanol in Your Own Backyard

A Silicon Valley start-up called E-Fuel is showing exactly how ethanol can live up to its name as “the people´s fuel.” The company recently announced that it will soon start selling a home ethanol system, the E-Fuel 100 MicoFueler, which will allow anyone to make ethanol from sugar, water, yeast, and electricity in their own backyard.

Still, they didn’t claim this was a new idea.

“What, you can run a car on that, too?”

(Reminds me of the story about someone who sold bricks of dehydrated grapes during prohibition, which included step-by-step of instructions of what not to do, lest you end up making some illegal alcohol)

YES

Zach Feinstein declares for the NBA draft. It’s free. The deadline for “early entry” declarations is 60 days prior to the draft (which is June 26), so if anyone desires to go this route, it’s too late for this year. (One has to wonder if it will remain free once this gets into the wind. OTOH, how can they charge more than a few bucks? College players don’t have jobs.)

The short story is that I, Zachary Feinstein, have declared for the 2008 NBA Draft. As a 5′8″ 130 pound Caucasian, I am the perfect candidate for professional basketball. Also, I do not play basketball.

You see, I am not currently on my college’s basketball team (Division 3 just for reference) nor did I try out to be. I was at no point on my high school’s basketball team nor did I try out to be. I was at no point on my middle school’s basketball team nor did I try out to be. The last time I was on a basketball team was before Bill Clinton got caught with his pants down.

So there you have it, I, Zach Feinstein, am in the 2008 NBA Draft.

Make sure to check out the scouting report, too.

Now, I wonder: what about the NFL?

A while back I bought a radio-controlled helicopter to fly around the apartment — it isn’t something designed to withstand much more than the gentlest of breezes — and broke it in almost record time. A harsh learning curve. I strayed into enemy airspace smashed into the lights above the dining-area table and snapped one of the rotor spokes. Oh, well. I suppose it’s fixable, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Add it to the list.

Now arXiv tells me why tiny helicopters are so hard to fly

[M]oments of inertia drop in proportion to the fifth power of vehicle size. This gives small helicopters quicker response times, making them more agile. But the real killer is that the main rotor tip speed in a small helicopter is the about the same as it is for a large helicopter. So the ratio of the rotor moments to the moments of inertia can become huge and unmanageable.

So it’s all because of scaling. Curse you, scaling laws! A disproportionately large curse!

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Joan Jett’s “Do You Wanna Touch Me” came up on the exercise playlist this afternoon, and it reminded me of this quote about music:

“All pop music is about sex. Rock is about wanting to do it, jazz is about doing it, and country and western is about feeling guilty after you’ve done it.” - Robert Waldo Brunelle, Jr.

(which also reminds me that playing country music backwards is uplifting, because they guy gets his house back, his pickup back, his girlfriend back, his dog back, his job back and stops his excessive drinking.)

Wikipedia T-shirt

The topic comes up, as it sometimes does, of the mass-energy equivalence from relativity. There are different tangents to this — what does the equivalence really mean, can you really turn energy into mass, does a photon have rest mass, what is the difference between relativistic mass and rest mass, and is the use of relativistic mass grounds for justifiable homicide, or is one compelled to stop at maiming?

E = mc² is the equation everyone knows, but what many don’t know is that the equation already assumes one is at rest. The actual equation is E² = p²c² + m²c⁴, which reduces to the more familiar form when the object is at rest. The implications of this are that photons have no mass, the mass term for massive particles doesn’t change when you move — that energy is in the kinetic term, (which renders relativistic mass moot) and also that the mass will increase if you add energy that does not appear in the kinetic term, i.e. extra energy in the center-of-momentum frame appears as mass.

The last concept showed up at Cosmic Variance recently, in the context of the mass of a spinning top

The spinning gyroscope has more energy than the non-spinning one. As a test, we can imagine extracting work from the spinning gyroscope — for example, by hooking it up to a generator — in ways that we couldn’t extract work from the stationary gyroscope. And since it has more energy, it has more mass. And the weight is just the acceleration due to gravity times the mass — so, as long as we weigh our spinning and non-spinning gyroscopes in the same gravitational field, the spinning one will indeed weigh more.

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Dance Boff to the muuuusic.

It’s May 8th, which is National Outdoor Fornication Day.

Don’t listen to any of the schism-mongers who tell you it’s May 1st. I know there are those lyrics that might suggest otherwise

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