Category Archives: Humor
Archimedes is All Wet
It's One or the Other
Optipessimism
Solar Sails and Squirrels
Over at the XKCD blag, Randall discusses solar sails and levitating squirrels. And he’s absolutely right — the Back-to-the-Futuresque 1.21 Gigawatts will levitate about a kg, assuming perfect reflection. Assuming absorption, you vaporize the squirrel in a couple of milliseconds.
(1 kg of water requires about 2.5 million Joules to boil away, starting at body temperature. Or not — the latent heat of vaporization is the dominant term)
I think the XKCD cartoons are often quite funny, BTW. A link, if by some odd chance you were unaware of them. I just got a new light box to replace my broken one. Must find time to draw cartoons.
Let's Geek It UP!
Mar 14th is “Talk like a physicist day,” and there’s a blog dedicated to it. Of course, I’ll be doing so anyway, because that’s what I do. My suggestion is to get familiar with some jargon, and substitute it for smaller words whenever and wherever possible. That’s what we do.
(Of course Mar 14th is also Einstein’s birthday and “Pi day” in the US)
Nutating After Dark
Science After Sunclipse has some links to Conan O’Brien spinning his wedding ring and getting help from an MIT professor to maximize the spin time.
(BTW, I have colleagues who use the term “nutate” on a regular basis.)
Ethical Dilemmas
A man is content. Is it justifiable to pose an ethical dilemma that gives him a miserable headache?
Ran across The allegory of the trolley problem paradox
(via Uncertain Principles)
This Never Happens
Only because talks never finish early.
