Daily Archives: July 2, 2008

Fruit Flies Like a Banana

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The Quantum Pontiff on Occupational Arrows of Time

Time goes up, damnit, and that’s all there is to it. Or so say the physicists writing on their blackboards.
Oh I hear you. Yes there are physicists for which time doesn’t always go up, but which can also go up but also in a circle. Yes, Virginia, general relativity allows those crazy solutions (nevermind that they might not be stable.) But those are really loopy physicists who believe in closed-time-like curves. I mean, that sect of the physicists is always going on and on and on about killing their grandfather. Sheesh they’re enough to make Oedipus jealous (and why is that they kill grandfathers all the time and not their fathers?)

I think the kerfuffle is about grandfathers and their pair o’ ducks, but you get the idea.

Keeping Up With the Chemists

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In silliness.

Now it’s the biologists’ turn. Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature

An, um, taste of the offerings

Dorcus titanus Boisduval, 1835 (stag beetle)
Doryctes fartus Provancher, 1880 (braconid)
Enema pan (Fabricius), 1775 (rhinoceros beetle)
Eremobates inyoanus Muma and Brookhart, 1988 (solpugid) Inyo is the county where it was first found.
Fartulum Carpenter, 1857 (tiny caecid gastropod) It is rather like a turd in shape and color, too.

Round as a Baby's . . . Nodule

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Roundest objects in the world created

[A]n international group of engineers and craftsmen has . . . built a pair of nearly perfect spheres that are thought to be the roundest objects in the world.

The unusual balls, discussed last week at the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference in France, were created as an answer to the “kilogram problem”.

High purity Si-28, and they hope to count the number of atoms to define the kilogram. With no danger to the pergium miners on Janus VI.

But even if all of the Avogadro Project’s research teams arrive at the same number of silicon atoms in each sphere, it’s far from clear that the International Committee for Weights and Measures will take up their definition.
[…]
These million-dollar spheres may be the roundest in the world, but will they be round enough?

One of the issues with international standards is that individual standards labs each want to be able to realize the standard. It’s not only a matter of having the absolute best measurement. If you make it too technologically advanced or involved, so it’s only within the grasp of a few labs, it’s not likely to be adopted.