I guess it’s a dog-day. No, not dogs as projectiles — what a horrible thought. (I used cats in my physics examples when I was teaching. Or smurfs, if I had blue chalk)
And a wiener dog, no less. Very Gary Larson.
Notice how the dog takes off as soon as the launcher draws back, making a distinctive sound. Pavlovian ballistics.
A sarcastic comment used when someone does something stupid is, “Way to go, Einstein!”
What did people say prior to 1905?
My soft drinks are trying to kill me.
Not really an experiment, just an event from a little while back. Soda (or pop, depending on where you live) bottle of the 2L variety, that was sitting on top of the fridge, where it was a few degrees above room temp. I heard a muffled “boom” from the computer room, and found this, along with most of 2L of soda all over the fridge and floor. It’s generally agreed that these bottle can usually withstand upwards of 100 psi, with some empirical data from people using such bottles for water-rocket fun. So I’m pretty sure I either had me a defective bottle, or it was rigged in a botched assassination attempt.
Today’s the day! I’m all over this one. Talk like a physicist
If anyone needs some pointers:
Use “canonical” when you mean “usual” or “standard.” As in, “the canonical example of talking like a physicist is to use the word ‘canonical.'”
Use “orthogonal” to refer to things that are mutually-exclusive or can’t coincide. “We keep playing phone tag — I think our schedules must be orthogonal”
“About” becomes “to a first-order approximation”
Things are not difficult, they are “non-trivial”
Large discrepancies are “orders of magnitude apart”
Refer to coordinates and coordinate systems. “I got shafted” becomes “I took one up the z-axis”
Any actual personal experience becomes “empirical data.” i.e. a burn on your hand is empirical data that the stove is hot.
You’re not being lazy, you are in your ground state.
A semi-educated guess is an extrapolation
You aren’t ignoring details, you are taking the ideal case
A tiny amount is “vanishingly small” or “negligible.” Really small is “infinitesimal”
You aren’t overweight, you are thermodynamically efficient
Stuck in a meeting is “trapped in a potential well,” though you hope you can “tunnel out.” Alternatively, it can be a black hole, from which there is no escape.
it’s not a wire, it’s a “conductor”
It’s not light, they are photons. Turning on the lamp becomes emitting photons.
A friend emailed me with a link about the LHC, and poses this question:
If one of their micro-black holes gets away from them, will the lab go “moob!”?
(Back when he and I were teaching nuclear stuff for the navy, it was standard practice to represent pair-production as going “foop!”)
Angular transformation of the fedora to JohnB
Over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers is complaining that all the cartoonists are making fun of him
It’s true.
Before I even knew he existed, I drew a cartoon depicting cephalopod torture. It was a promotion for a talk on superconducting quantum interference devices, or SQUIDs. (I got criticism that it’s more an octopus-looking thing in the vat, rather than a squid. They’re physicists. They don’t know any better.)
In the thank-you note for I got for this, the author encouraged me to do more cartoons on physics topics, since (he claimed) physicists generally don’t recognize themselves in cartoons.
I’m shocked, shocked, to find that I’m getting shocked. My adventures with static electricity.
It’s winter, it’s dry and that makes for pretty good sparks. I haven’t been going to the gym the last few mornings (recovering from being unwell) but have been going to work, so that means peeling off some layers of cotton clothing in the dark. And that means some static electricity. I must roll around a lot in my sleep or something, because there are a lot of sparks a-flyin’ when I take my socks off, and also my sweatshirt. I used to have a blanket (when i was about 10) that would spark nicely if I covered myself and did a bicycle motion while on my back, so my stocking feet continually rubbed on the blanket; since I was covered it was dark, and there were lots of sparks. Slippers on the carpet were always good for sister-annoyance, too, back then. Or just scuffling along holding a fluorescent bulb and watching it flash occasionally, if you could find a dark room.
At the lab, I’m the one who usually peels off the sticky mats in the lab area. (I must have the lowest threshold of being bothered by them being dirty, partially conditioned by being the one who had to clean the optics before we transitioned to semi-sealed modular systems with lots of connecting fiber). Big, big zaps with those. You can get a similar result if you ever buy plexiglass that’s encased in plastic wrap. I bought some big ones (72″ x 40″ to cover some hallway posters near my office), and there were some packing peanut scraps nearby. Once you charge those puppies up, there are some styrofoam pieces that have a huge charge/mass ratio, and simply will not leave your hands until you’ve thoroughly discharged yourself. I had one that was just on the threshold, so when I flicked it off my hand, it would separate a little bit, but not far enough for the gravitational force to be larger than the attractive electrostatic force, so it would float back. Minutes of geeky fun.
For Christmas I got a shirt that’s made of teflon. Partially, at least. The instructions say not to use a dryer sheet with it and this shirt tumbling in the hot dryness really generates the static. And boy does it cling. The first time in the dryer it picked up some serious lint, and I had trouble picking it off because of the amount of charge — I pulled a small piece of string off of it, and when I tried to drop it in the trash can, letting it go about a foot away from the shirt, it flew back to the shirt. More minutes of geeky fun with that. I hesitate to admit that recently when I was ironing and generating some static charge, I empirically reminded myself that the ironing-board pad does not cover the edge of the ironing board, which is just below waist-level. I experienced a dramatic lowering of the potential difference between the ironing board and me, via the part of me closest to the exposed metal. (If you can’t paint a mental image of this, tough. I won’t draw you a diagram).
So tachyons enter the conversation at SFN once again, and I was looking over the wikipedia article
And it says, in part, “the same formulae that apply to regular slower-than-light particles (“bradyons”) also apply to tachyons”
Bradyons? That’s a new one on me.
Obviously there are two types, or genders. They show bunching behavior. The first generation has one particle while the second generation has three. One gender has the property of brown hair, while the other is gold. The last one in the second generation in curls. And then there’s the interaction-regulator, or “housekeeper” particle, known as “Alice.” (OK, I recently saw the scene in “Hot Shots” where they are using the Brady Bunch theme as a cadence, so I still had this in the buffer somewhere)
But really, I wanted to know if I was out of the loop or if something was funny here. I know there are plenty of terms in particle physics that aren’t particularly familiar, but tachyons are recognized in a much wider circle. So why hadn’t I heard of bradyons before? (At first I thought it was a typo and bad physics, and the author meant baryon. But that was not it.) When I Googled I got about 4,200 hits for bradyon (and, while I got more than 2,000,000 for tachyon, many of the bradyon hits I saw were discussing the validity of the term or not about physics. Tachyon probably isn’t anyone’s name — though I readily admit to underestimating the “creativity” of some folks in naming their children) but there’s probably a lot of sci-fi hits. A Google scholar search shows 141 hits, spread out in time with some dating back to 1974, but about 8,500 for tachyon.
So I suspect it’s someone who keeps interjecting the term, hoping it will catch on, and the wikipedia pages are just another attempt, trying to draw attention to it.
I suspect Jan.