Swans on Tea

In which I am haunted by Bernoulli
I’m helping to get a new building finished and operational; this has been ongoing for some time. It’s for very sensitive equipment (atomic clocks of various flavors), so there are some stringent environmental controls, and it’s taken a little while to get the spaces to meet spec. [...]

It’s not a big deal.
By that, I meant that “quantum” does not mean “big.” (This is a peeve of mine. Not so sure it’s a pet peeve. Perhaps a feral peeve?) I ran across a blog entry about the use of quantum that wasn’t wrong as it usually is. (But [...]

Who cares about gas mileage? This sucker warps time!
When relativity is discussed in popular literature it’s often couched in terms of affecting objects moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light, and that’s a true statement: kinematic time dilation cannot generally be ignored in that situation. But the implication that the [...]

There’s an old physics joke about the dairy (Motto: “Smell Our Dairy Air!”) that hires cosultant after consultant to help optimize their milk production but to no avail. Each and every time, the end result is that nothing has improved. Finally they hire a physicist, who comes in and takes all sorts of [...]

Censors wagging the dog
OK, for the Nth time in recent memory, there was a movie on cable, with which they just shouldn’t have bothered. If you’re going to show Blazing Saddles but are going to blip out every instance of words like “nigger” and “faggot,” just don’t bother. It’s a satire about bigotry. [...]

Or, the myth of “working up a good sweat”
On occasion my “private” workouts get interrupted by someone with the audacity to want to use the exercise room at the same time I do. That’s no biggie. But what bugs me is when the offendor will turn on the heat, or turn off the [...]