Don't Waste Your Money

Sunny Kalara at “Talk Like a Physicist” wants a 576 MegaPixel camera, and while the post talks the physicist talk, it doesn’t walk the physicist walk (if there is such a thing).

And the gauntlet has been thrown down —

Next time a person tells me that I don’t need a digital camera with more than 6-10 mega pixel resolution, I am going to hit him/her on the head with the sharp corner of my camera

it appears I am risking photogricide by saying, “But that might actually be true. More pixels do not necessarily make a better picture.”

A further claim is:

Apparently, if you converted the resolution of what an eye can perceive in to mega pixel, it turns out that an eye can see at 576 Mega pixel. So, I want my camera to be at least 576MP camera; is that too much to ask?

When I look out, I see in stereo; with full depth – is it too much to expect that my camera does the same?

I want to take pictures for the unknown technology that will be available to me in 20 years, not for the 3×4 print that can be printed now!

Both the 6-10 MP claim and the 576 MP claim are based on a few assumptions, and as any good physicist knows, you have to make sure these assumptions are not violated in your analysis. So let’s put the Pentax down and talk about this.
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The Matter with Antimatter

One of the big mysteries of cosmology is the dominance of matter over antimatter (or vice-versa, if you’re left-handed. However, like Inigo and Westley, I am not left-handed). Some weak interactions allow a CP violation that converts antimatter to matter, but the magnitude of this violation isn’t enough to explain the dominance. Well, some reactions have apparently been observed at Fermilab that have exceeded the predictions of the Standard Model.

Story 1 and Story 2

The Ralph Mellish Effect

Scarcely able to believe his eyes, Ralph Mellish looked down. But one glance confirmed his suspicions. Behind a bush, on the side of the road, there was *no* severed arm. No dismembered trunk of a man in his late fifties. No head in a bag. Nothing. Not a sausage.

And now for something completely different: a water balloon not exploding in high-speed

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via Talk Like a Physicist

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Lightning and the Runaway Breakdown Theory at the At the Speed of Light! blog.

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Oh, and here’s another link, in case you were thinking the title was a reference to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

“The Barents sea heaved and churned like a tortured animal in pain, the howling wind tearing packets of icy green water from the shuddering crests of the waves, atomizing it into mist that was again laid flat by the growing fury of the storm as Kevin Tucker switched off the bedside light in his Tuba City, Arizona, single-wide trailer and by the time the phone woke him at 7:38, had pretty much blown itself out with no damage.”

Googling for "Oops"

Google “turned the lights out” for earth hour.

googledark.jpg

But if you have an LCD screen, a black pixel draws more current than a white one, because you have to energize the pixel. The low-energy state is “clear,” which lets the backlight through, and gives you white. So this thinking is very CRT, very yesterday. Not Google-y at all.

Carly Simon Physics

I was poking around the blogdom — with the rise of science-y, i.e. non-diary (and, I suppose non-dairy) blogs, surfing the web has become interesting again — and ran across a link to How to Build a Cloud Chamber, and that reminded of the person that built the cloud chamber using a Starbucks cup. (Not sure if he was so vain, however.)

And that reminded me of the question I had back then — TRIUMF had a large, continuously-running chamber in the lobby of the visitors’ entrance last time I was there, and though nobody does it better, I’m sure there are other facilities with similar setups. Why not run a webcam showing it? I haven’t found one.

Second-best is video. Here’s one that shows the construction steps of a good one, and some tracks. That’s at the end, so there will be some anticipation.

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