Preparing to rescue Hubble at The Big Picture (23 photos)
Monthly Archives: September 2008
Bwahahahaha
CBS sues NFL Players over fantasy football
CBS has filed a federal lawsuit in Minneapolis to clarify who can use the statistics that underlie fantasy football leagues.
The lawsuit filed earlier this week claims the NFL Players Association has threatened to sue the company if it does not pay licensing fees for the statistics.
CBS Interactive seeks a ruling saying that the players cannot control use of the publicly available numbers and cannot demand that CBS pays for their use.
Baseball has already lost a suit in which they wanted leagues to pay for the right to use players’ names. How freaking greedy can these millionaires get? One can argue that fantasy leagues promote more viewership — especially of otherwise uninteresting games, where you have a stake in the performance of a player or two but care not a whit for either team.
I Put a Hex on You
Spatial relations flash game. Hexagonal pieces; rearrange to make all the colored bars line up.
via Neatorama
Hi, I'm Quiz Time!
Drinking Games: Physics vs. Aesthetics
Swissmiss asks, hey, what’s that in your drink?
Not recommended for those suffering from pica or ice-chewers who are absent-minded.
However, this is almost all marketing and little (ahem) solid physics.
Nordic Rock is mined from ancient Swedish pollution-free base rock. It is the purest way of cooling your drink – literally ‘on the rocks’. Stone does not melt, which means no unclean water in your glass. They are also reusable making them very eco-friendly. To use, simply place the stone ice cubes in the freezer for approximately one hour before use. For a normal glass, two or three Nordic Rocks will be fine. They give off their cold gradually and equally.
Not diluting the drink is a valid claim (technically chemistry, though). Cleanly or not, though — don’t you use clean water in ice cubes? Ewww.
“Eco-friendly?” How much water does it take to clean these, as compared to the amount of water in an ice cube?
“They give off their cold gradually and equally.” Reasonable claim, once you get past “cold” being a substance. But the advantage of water is that, because of the latent heat of fusion (334 J/g), your drink will stay at 0 ºC until the ice melts, while the drink with the stone cubes will warm up continually. And what’s the heat capacity? I’m not sure exactly what these are (don’t recall “base rock” being a designation), but I’ll assume they are similar to granite, whose heat capacity is about 2 J/cm3 K (helped by its higher density), similar to ice, while water is 4.18 J/cm3 K, and again there’s that huge amount of energy from the latent heat. Let’s say you have 10 cm3 of these stones at 0 ºC and an identical amount of ice. The stones will absorb just 400 or so J of energy in warming to 20ºC, while the ice will absorb 3000 J just in melting, and then 750 more in warming up. Thermodynamically, ice wins.
If you don’t like the dilution of ice cubes, you’re better off using water frozen inside of another container, as in the trick I offered a little while back.
Oh, And Do You Have Prince Albert in a Can?
McCain’s Voice Mail to Palin Leaked to Press
(To aide) I can’t hear you. Will you grow a pair?
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!