Category Archives: Other science

aka stamp collecting

If You Build It, They Will Come

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Cities play hardball to host biodefence lab

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) disregarded the advice of carefully selected experts to put a Flora, Mississippi, site on the shortlist of candidates, the Associated Press said Monday.
[…]
Now, other applicants are crying foul. “It is very suspicious,” said Irwin Goldman, whose Madison, Wisconsin, site failed to make the cut. State representative Marti Crow (D) of Leavenworth, Kansas, was angry that Flora’s score of 81 beat out Leavenworth’s 92 for a spot on the shortlist.

Wait, what? Biodefence lab? Mississippi? Kansas? How about a rule that any state that’s recently tried to derail the teaching of evolution or promote creationism/intelligent design doesn’t get a frikkin’ federally-funded biology lab in their state.

Your Horoscope

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ARES — Perseverance is your word today. You will not become frustrated at your continued inability to separate quarks from each other.

TAURUS — You will suspect that the force pushing you away from the center of a circle is in fact a figment of your imagination, and would not be there if you were to analyze your motion in an inertial reference frame.

GEMINI — Don’t let your curiosity get the better of you. Checking which path the particles are taking will destroy the interference pattern of that double-slit experiment, and you will be found out.

CANCER — The positions of the stars and planets will have no effect on your daily existence.

LEO — All around you, elementary particles and antiparticles will pop into existence and then wink out, but you will remain calm and blissfully unaware of them.

VIRGO — Weigh your choices carefully: your decision to flap your arms or not will affect the weather far away. Breaking that high-level encryption will be easier once you finish that quantum computer you’ve been working on.

LIBRA — Despite your best efforts, you will increase entropy when converting thermal energy to mechanical work. You will strive to conserve energy, and succeed.

SCORPIO — You are a cold-blooded mass-murderer and “Dirty Harry” Callahan will make sure you get what’s coming to you. The number “five” figures prominently in your day.

SAGITTARIUS — You will be unable to simultaneously determine the position and momentum of any objects today, nor place two fermions in the same quantum state. Not a good time to start a new relationship with another spin 1/2 particle.

CAPRICORN — Ennui sets in: you continue to be affected by the same physics, unchanged, no matter which inertial reference frame you find yourself in.

AQUARIUS — Despite your best attempt to be in two places at once, quantum superposition eludes your grasp, partly because the creep in accounting keeps trying to “measure” you.

PISCES — You notice that your buoyancy is equal to the weight of water that you displace. Resist the urge to announce this fact overzealously.

Live Fast, Die Young, Leave a Good-Looking Corpse

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. . . does not apparently apply to the male anglerfishes of the superfamily Ceratiidae

When he finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then atrophies into nothing more than a pair of gonads, which release sperm in response to hormones in the female’s bloodstream indicating egg release.

Pick, Pick, Pick

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I spied a nit at which I must pick. This is something that’s become ingrained in certain science discussions, one of those innocent things that may or may not propagate a misconception and I’m sure it rarely causes an eyebrow to be raised, but, dammit, someone’s wrong on the internet.

Someone will tell me that energy is obtained because you’ve broken a chemical bond. It happens often enough that it’s not worth mentioning where I saw it (OK, OK, I’ll talk. It was Schwartz Matt) But seriously, it’s something you’ll run across a lot if you read stories about chemical processes and energy.

It’s one of those things that can be true but isn’t generally true. And the overall implication — that there is energy stored in the bonds which is released when you break them — is flat-out wrong.

Forming a bound state releases energy. Breaking apart that bound state requires the addition of energy. We can quantify the tightness of the bond by how much energy is involved, and that’s what we do with the enthalpy of formation: you have a baseline system — the free gases and atoms with which you start — which has (what we define as) zero energy. If you want to go from one bound system to another, you will release the difference in the enthalpies, because energy is conserved. (And if you look at more complex systems you involve the more and more complicated energies you find in thermodynamics) But the release of energy is in the formation of new, tighter bonds that are present in the products — that’s where the energy comes from. Burning those hydrocarbons is releasing energy not because you are breaking the bonds with the carbon and hydrogen, but because the bonds with the oxygen are stronger, and forming them releases the energy.

Coffeeonium

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The Periodic Coffee Table

By embedding all element samples in clear acrylic, they are beautifully presented and also protected from tarnishing. This format also helps to addresses health and safety issues, as all potentially toxic or corrosive substances are permanently encased in a thick layer of robust resin. Argon gas and mineral oil is further used to ampoule reactive samples and preserve their freshly cut appearance.

And even though it’s a noble gas and not reactive, the Ar sample is sealed in Argon, too.

via way of the woo

Gettin' Plushy

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What’s with the plush toys? John at Cosmic Variance displays “The Particle Zoo” and then Chad at Uncertain Principles goes all squishy with some animal toys, presumably for futurebaby.

I gotta say, the fundamental particles creep me out a little — x-ed out eyes signifies “dead” in cartooning, and it upsets my sensibilities that you can purchase individual quarks, and in any color. What kind of message is that to send to a young physicist, getting asymptotic freedom and color charge wrong right out of the gate?

Random Nonphysics Post

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Extraordinary Tongues and the Animals That Use Them

The tube-lipped nectar bat from Ecquador has a tongue one and a half times its own body length. It shoots it out with amazing accuracy while feeding at night. This huge tongue (in proportion to the 5.5cm bat) is not stored in the mouth. It is attached to the back of the mouth but stored inside the rib cage. The bat in the picture is drinking a sweet drink left outside to attract it.

All of the sudden I feel the need to call someone a tube-lipped nectar bat.
Next time someone mooches off of me . . .