Bartender, Gimme a Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster

Exploring Liquids: An Experiment

Fun, and physics, with fluids

Here’s a fun experiment you can try using the contents of your kitchen cupboard. Explore the effects of different densities and learn about refraction, viscosity and the planet Jupiter. You’ll need five different liquids; I used golden syrup, dishwashing liquid, water, alcohol and vegetable oil. I also used some food colouring to make it easier to see what was going on (and because the alcohol I use is Tequila which looks just like water). If you have a chopstick around that will also be handy – but any stirring implement will do.

People with Too Much Time on Their Hands: Toast Art

People with Too Much Time on Their Hands: Toast Art

It would never occur to me to take a picture of my toast. Unless it had an image of the Virgin Mary on it or something. Then I would make sure to capture just the right image for my posting on Ebay. Seriously, though, it’s amazing what kinds of creative uses people have put their toasters and minds to. I love it when bored people take a few steps outside of the box. Sometimes it’s a few steps too many. You be the judge.

Phenomenal Flickr Fun

The Shape of Alpha

Using Where-On-Earth geotagged photos uploaded to Flickr, one is often able to reverse-engineer maps, sometimes even at the neighborhood level.

Over time this got us wondering: If we plotted all the geotagged photos associated with a particular WOE ID, would we have enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out we can.

via Kottke

Career Advice

Career Advice from Dr. Pion

Engineering and physics and programming are all hard work. Hard work can be fun, or it can be a drag. Money can make up for it being a drag, but many students who are just in it for the money will struggle with motivation when faced with the years of hard work that must be put in before you get that first internship, let alone a job.

There’s a good example that goes with this (posed as an exchange between a student and advisor) of why salary should not be the primary reason you choose a career.

So my advice is to learn everything you can from your classes, find what you like, find what you are good at, and pursue a career that requires skills that you have and enjoy doing for 10 or so hours a day. All technical careers are hard work for the money, so you better like what you are doing.

Gettin' Wired: Your Civic Duty

Voting-day giveaways. Krispy Kreme giving away free donuts. Ben & Jerry’s giving away free ice cream (between 5 and 8 p.m.) and Starbucks giving out free coffee. Ostensibly to those sporting “I voted” stickers.

However

Handy said there is a federal statute that prohibits any reward for voting.
Starbucks’ good deed can be perceived as paying someone to vote, and that’s illegal, Handy said.
“The way it is written, it expressly prohibits giving any kind of gift,” Handy said.
Handy said the intent of the statute is aimed at special interest groups trying to influence who and how people vote.
To fix the situation, Starbucks had agreed to give a tall cup of coffee to anyone who asks on Election Day.

But how is a Starbucks to know that you’ve already gotten a free coffee at another location? Or a donut, or ice cream? Shoot, a feller could have a pretty good time in Vegas with all that stuff! Just stay below the lethal dose.

Belated Conference Greetings

I’ve been seemingly running in quicksand ever since returning from the 7th Symposium on Frequency Standards and Metrology, what with the pileup of work while I was away (and everything seemingly breaking during that period of time) and getting ready for our clocks to leave the nest. But now, as I’m burning up my comp time from all that, I’ve had a chance to look back.

The conference was really good, as conferences go. A little over 100 people attended, from labs around the world. I knew perhaps a third of them already (though a few probably did not remember me) and met a few more. I didn’t see any glitches except for one or two instances of technical difficulties, which speaks volumes for the organizers and support staff, because you just know there were issues, and since they didn’t become visible it means they were solved quickly. The accommodations were very nice and the food was decent as far as dining hall food goes. The whole thing came in under the government-rate per diem, and the government is actually pretty stingy about such things.

Many of the talks encompassed the recent push into optical transitions for timekeeping; the microwave transitions used in the established clocks of today run at something a little less than 1010 cycles per second, but an optical transition will be about 4 orders of magnitude higher in frequency. Even if your detection can’t be done to the same level of precision, owing to lower light levels and fewer atoms, the higher frequency represents 2 or 3 orders of magnitude improvement in the overall measurement. The enabling technology for this has been the octave-spanning optical frequency comb, made by pulsed lasers in some nonlinear medium. If you consider the time width of the pulses Fourier-transformed in the frequency domain, you see a whole bunch of laser frequencies separated by the pulse repetition rate, so it looks like a comb. As I’ve mentioned before, you can use these individual frequencies to interrogate atoms, meaning you can measure some narrow clock transition. This becomes really useful when the comb spans an octave, so the low-frequency end can be frequency-doubled and referenced to the high-frequency end, making the comb stable. The repetition rate can be tied into some stable RF or microwave source, and now you know what each frequency is to a very high level of precision. A lot of labs are now doing this.
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