Let us celebrate the return to an arbitrarily chosen starting point in the orbit about our gravitational enslaver.
Category Archives: Physics
It's Report Card Time
Bad Movie Physics: A Report Card
How movies stack up in the physics (and other science)-violation department, such as sounds in the vacuum of space and easy human-alien interbreeding.
To some extent, it’s understandable that space adventures play fast and loose with physics. After all, who wants to watch Han Solo spend years on the journey to Alderaan, only to find that the planet has twice Earth gravity and he can barely stand up, much less swagger?
Not too surprising that the two movies that got a clean bill of health were nonfiction (Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff)
It's Not the Worlds Smallest Violin Playing the World's Saddest Song?
Buckets of Watch
Quartz of them, at least.
Back from vacation, delayed a little by Snowpocalypse 2010 II: The Wrath of James Caan (It’s NOT Snowpocalypse 2010; that was the storm in February). I didn’t know how much snow the DC area would get and it seemed foolish to drive in during the storm or just as the cleanup were to begin. (And the part of abandoning my mom with whatever snowfall was there. That would have been bad). Turns out that DC got almost nothing — it had all melted by Wednesday evening — and Niskayuna got around 6″ (an amount easily handled), though you didn’t have to travel too far to find pockets which had gotten a foot or more, especially up in the hills. Further south and east got dumped upon. My route back, which was inland (Rt 88 to 81 to 15 to the beltway), was all clear.
So here’s a video about how a quartz watch works, which I found via fine structure
Physics Super Fun Time
Japanese reality TV is so much better than US reality TV.
Now, would a model airplane be able to take off?
Navy Drops 18th Century Technology in Favor of 19th Century Technology
It’s not just the guns that are going electromagnetic.
Full Electromagnetics Ahead! EM Naval Launcher Test Successful, Will Replace Steam
Propelling a 5 ton jet to liftoff speed over short distances has been the key to US Naval success for 50 years and the reason why their aircraft carriers are unique. Their steam “catapults” allowed fast enough acceleration for launch.
It was a good run, but it’s time to run out of steam.
The Navy made history Saturday when it launched the first aircraft using the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, technology.
There’s a video at the link, but it’s anticlimactic; acceleration is acceleration. If you watch, I recommend skipping the first 1:50; it’s all boring character development and plot dead-ends that have no bearing on the story line.
Physics May Succeed Where Regulation Fails
When The Speed Of Light Is Too Slow: Trading at the Edge
The limit to signal delay imposed by the speed of light is starting to affect how well companies can do arbitrage trading.
Typically, the latency for HFT trades is now below 500 microseconds. Traders in the same city can achieve that by optimizing their computers, network hardware, and software for speed. But when it comes to trading between cities — or worse, between continents — the speed of light, not routing or traffic delays, actually becomes the limiting factor. (It takes at least 66.8 milliseconds, more than 100 times longer than 500 microseconds, for light to travel between two points located at opposite sides of the Earth, for example. This doesn’t include delays from the electronics and the fiber itself.)
Which means where you locate your trading office can affect how well you do business. Not surprisingly, the first-order solution would be to place your office at the midpoint between the two offices where the trades will occur. It will be interesting to see if people actually start doing this.
Snow Under Microscope, Claims Innocence
Welcome to winter in the northern hemisphere.
Available For a Limited Time Only
North America gets the best show.
Top Science of 2010
Science: The Breakthroughs of 2010 and Insights of the Decade
Until this year, all human-made objects have moved according to the laws of classical mechanics. Back in March, however, a group of researchers designed a gadget that moves in ways that can only be described by quantum mechanics—the set of rules that governs the behavior of tiny things like molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. In recognition of the conceptual ground this experiment breaks, the ingenuity behind it, and its many potential applications, Science has called this discovery the most significant scientific advance of 2010.