McCain’s Voice Mail to Palin Leaked to Press
(To aide) I can’t hear you. Will you grow a pair?
Daily Archives: September 4, 2008
My New Best Friend
Maps showing what games are scheduled to be televised in that area.
What do the grey areas mean?
Welcome to the world of blackout rules. The short answer is: no game at all. This can be due to one of two rules: a) no games can air at the same time as a local team’s home game on another network, or b) if a game is blacked out because it doesn’t sell out, the network with the doubleheader can only show one game. Don’t shoot the messenger, I think the rules are stupid too.
Preach it, brother. I’m glad the Redskins have improved to the point that they will have some prime-time games, because that means no blackout on Sunday.
via Daring Fireball
This New Learning Amazes Me, Sir Bedevere
Air Speed Velocity of Various Objects According to Monty Python
Conspicuously absent is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow (African and European both missing). Fortunately, that can be found here.
Focus, People
This month’s Physical Review Focus: Nanoparticles Stick a Perfect Landing
They found that for speeds less than 1.2 kilometers per second, the nanoparticle bounces off the surface like a basketball. But at higher speeds, some of the nanoparticle undergoes a phase transition to a compressed state called β-tin, where each atom bonds to six neighbors. This transition is surprising, Dumitrică says, because the collision energy is not high enough to induce a phase transition in a macroscopic object. However, the impact force is applied over a few square nanometers, so the pressure inside the nanoparticle is extremely large–around 200,000 atmospheres, which is more than enough to cause the phase transition.
The β-tin state only lasts a few picoseconds, though. As the nanoparticle begins to bounce back, there is a second phase transition to an amorphous, or disordered, state. The combination of the two phase transitions, plus some heat generation, takes up all of the kinetic energy, and the particle remains on the surface. After all of this action, “the recoil is too weak to beat the adhesion forces between the nanoparticle and the substrate,” Dumitrică says.
However
A silicon nanoparticle flying at 8 times the speed of sound can slam into a surface and stick, but it bounces off if colliding at half that speed.
The speed of sound in what, pray tell? I wish journalists would remember (learn?) that the speed of sound is not a constant of nature.
Bringing Home the Gold
From Google Maps to Gold Medal
Kristin Armstrong, who won gold in the Women’s Individual Time Trial in Road Cycling, got a GPS track when she rode the Beijing Olympic course in December of 2007
After returning home to Boise, Idaho, I exported the GPS data to several different formats, one of which I was able to launch with Google Earth. I was then able to trace the entire course from the comfort of my home half a world away and find a similar route to train on back in Boise. This capability along with having the elevation profile proved invaluable in my preparation for my Gold Medal race.
GPS relies on precise time, provided by some colleagues of mine, and knowing where the satellites are relative to the earth, which is aided by some other colleagues of mine. Woohoo! We won gold!
Physics: Don't Wine About It
You can use NMR to tell you if it’s still good, and now you can tell how old the bottles are by hitting them with an ion beam.
Nuclear Physicists Fight Wine Fraud
The beams, which are directed at the glass, not the wine, can distinguish how old the bottles are and where they might originate.
[…]
To prevent counterfeiters from filling authentic old bottles with ordinary wine, Williams intends to combine the ion beam test with another established method that checks for levels of a radioactive isotope, Caesium 137, in the wine itself.
This technique, however, is only effective in identifying wines made in the era of heavy atomic weapons testing in the latter half of the 20th century.
Mmmmm. Cs-137. I know that’s what gave last year’s Beaujolais Nouveau such a perky flavor.
Update: Jennifer Ouellette has a rather extensive post about wine fraud over at Cocktail Party Physics (though this is wine, and technically not a cocktail. But it’s some interesting history and more information. The New Yorker article she mentions is quite interesting)