Category Archives: Satire

Teleport, Shmeleport

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Today’s xkcd is about quantum teleportation, but the problem isn’t that journalists write the “same disappointed story” whenever quantum teleportation is being reported. It’s that they still report that teleportation is somehow connected to moving matter around, whether they’ve been waved off about it or not; the latter would be because they didn’t vet their story. They are almost Pavlovian (does that name ring a bell?) in their need to include the reference to Star Trek.

That’s only a small deduction in judging the overall message, though. (Especially the title tag, where Randall zings the sensationalization of story titles)

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.

It's Like, Symmetry, Dude!

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Hubble Kaleidoscope Finds Evidence Of Space Looking All Crazy

“With their unprecedented resolution, the latest images from the new kaleidoscope reveal that space, once thought to be isotropic, is actually continuously expanding, unfolding, and rearranging in a series of freaky patterns,” said astronomer Douglas Stetler, head of the Space Kaleidoscope Science Institute in Baltimore. “It’s an exciting time for the field of astrokaleidoscopics, or anyone interested in the vast, wacked-out nature of space.”

[…]

Despite excitement over the discovery that space is all crazy-looking, a number of legislators have threatened to cut funding for NASA’s kaleidoscopic program. An outspoken critic of the agency, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said she hopes NASA scientists don’t just use the kaleidoscope a few times and then lose interest and never touch it again, like they did with the Brookhaven Neutrino Spirograph, Fermilab’s Particle Slingshot, and the Very Large Slip ‘n Slide Array in New Mexico.

However, it should be noted that they still continue to play around with the boxes those devices came in.

Random Nonphysics Link

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Son-Of-A-Bitch Mouse Solves Maze Researchers Spent Months Building

The test subject, a common house mouse, briskly traversed the complicated wooden maze in under 30 seconds or, according to the study’s final report, roughly 1/8,789,258 as long as it took the lab to secure funding for the experiment.

[…]

“Had we obtained any usable data, perhaps that information would have led to the development of a cure for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s,” said Dr. William Eng, who led the team responsible for creating the maze. “What is unclear at this time is why this particular mouse had to be such a dick and render useless all the work we had put into this controlled behavioral experiment.”