Monthly Archives: July 2008

Coffeeonium

Posted on by

The Periodic Coffee Table

By embedding all element samples in clear acrylic, they are beautifully presented and also protected from tarnishing. This format also helps to addresses health and safety issues, as all potentially toxic or corrosive substances are permanently encased in a thick layer of robust resin. Argon gas and mineral oil is further used to ampoule reactive samples and preserve their freshly cut appearance.

And even though it’s a noble gas and not reactive, the Ar sample is sealed in Argon, too.

via way of the woo

Cool Things, Small Packages

Posted on by

DelFly Micro Air Vehicle Weighs Just Three Grams

The ‘dragonfly’ has a tiny camera (about 0.5 grams) on board that transmits its signals to a ground station. With software developed by TU Delft itself, objects can then be recognised independently. The camera transmits TV quality images, and therefore allows the DelFly II to be operated from the computer. It can be manoeuvred using a joystick as if the operator was actually in the cockpit of the aircraft. The aim is to be able to do this with the DelFly Micro too.

Here’s the DelFly II

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

And the Micro, which can be hard to follow

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Schrodinger's Cat's Exam Score

Posted on by

I was attempting to collapse a wave function Thursday — the A/C for the office has been taking much of the past week off, with promises of its imminent repair since Monday. The one working chiller has the capacity to cool the building only a few degrees below ambient, which was nowhere near adequate with the thermometer reading in the mid-90s (ºF). So rather than continue to self-baste at my desk, I wore shorts, hoping that this action would induce the chiller to be fixed, via a combination of superposition, Murphy’s law and passive resistance: a working chiller makes shorts both superfluous and marginally inappropriate, and all will subjected to my pasty-white legs until the system is fixed (and they are quite distracting, though I am informed that “running away screaming” does not count as swooning). Alas, the wave function did not collapse to the desired state, though it was a much more pleasant day yesterday, so my office was more-or-less tolerable.

But the thought of collapsing wave functions reminded me of a phenomenon I observed many times during the years I spent as an undergrad and grad student: the student who doesn’t show up to class when the exams are handed out. The professor will usually tell the class when the exams will be returned, and it’s often delayed one or two class sessions. In a small school, that’s because the professor is grading them him- or herself, and it takes time, and in a large university it’s often because they will be graded by the TAs, and most of them won’t do it until the night before (or wee hours of the morning of) the deadline. But there’s always that handful of students who don’t go to pick up the bad news, and it’s almost always bad news — from what I observed, the correlation is pretty strong between poor performance and not showing up to face the reality. For a long while I did not understand this, as it required going to the professor directly and asking for the exam, rather than being a momentary “Bueller” on the lips, though the propensity for the student to sit in the back of the class would add some time and attention to this evolution. Still, I don’t see that comparing to the one-on-one in the professor’s office.

But then I learned of coherent superpositions in quantum mechanics and it all began to make sense. One has not failed (or done poorly) on an exam until one has been handed the papers with all the red marks. Aha! By failing to retrieve the exam, all grades are still possible, and a poor one has not yet been earned. (Though that’s not quite right, either. Good grades are earned, poor grades are given. i.e. “I earned a ‘A,'” as opposed to ” the teacher gave me a ‘D'”).

(Update: Paraphrase: “Tom, it’s fixed. Put your damn pants back on”)

Spooky Science

Posted on by

Labs at night

Images of what some labs look like when nobody is around. I’m a little surprised at the SLAC control room picture; I would have thought they would be manned 24/7 when they were running, so perhaps this is “at night while not running.” Many optics/atomic physics labs look pretty much the same, since you often do your work with the lights out (it’s a relatively recent development that the systems I’m working on have been made “light tight” so that we don’t have to stumble around in the dark)

Cross-Training

Posted on by

If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone

A clearinghouse, of sorts, for unsolved problems, open to anyone who wants to try and solve them.

The idea that solutions can come from anywhere, and from people with seemingly unrelated work, is another key. Dr. Lakhani said his study of InnoCentive found that “the further the problem was from the solver’s expertise, the more likely they were to solve it,” often by applying specialized knowledge or instruments developed for another purpose.

For example, he said, the brain might be thought of as a biological system, but “certain brain problems may not be solvable by taking a biological approach. You may want to cast it as an electrical engineering approach. An electrical engineer will come in and say, ‘Oh, here’s the answer for you.’ They have not thought of themselves as being neuroscientists but now they can approach the problem from the point of view of electrical engineering.”

I’ve seen this, in my own limited experience, and even within different branches of physics. There are different mindsets and approaches to problems; getting experience in different fields often pays dividends.

Offering prizes for scientific achievements is hardly new. “It has been around for centuries,” said Karim R. Lakhani, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied InnoCentive. One early example was the work of John Harrison, the 18th-century clockmaker who, in response to a prize offered by the British Parliament, solved the problem of determining longitude at sea by inventing a clock that would keep good time even in heavy weather.

Good and bad example — Harrison solved the problem, but the government kept changing the rules on him and it took a decree from the king to get the balance of the prize paid out.

Physics at the Beach

Posted on by

Sandcastle Science via physics and physicists

“[W]et sand’s strength is more or less constant for anywhere between one and 30 per cent water.” That’s because there’s a trade-off between the strength of each bond between the grains – which lessens as the sand gets wetter – and the number of bonds, which increases as the sand becomes more saturated.