Scans of the cross-sections of sandwiches.
There’s also Food Art
Monthly Archives: March 2009
New Ultra Toy
A UV LED flashlight. Just checking on what fluoresces. Among the more interesting, we have the security stripe of a $20 bill
A Mr. Clean bottle shows both the label and the cleaner fluorescing
and some vitamin B complex (I think the B-12 is the main culprit here), dissolved in some vinegar, and spilled on the counter in the shape of a guitar. Worship the fluorescent guitar!
(I’ve previously noticed that vitamin B gives the appearance of remaining fluorescent even after digestion. Not that I’ve checked this with the flashlight. )
Never Underestimate the Power of Termites
A Primary School teacher had twenty-six children in her class. She presented each child in her classroom the 1st half of a well-known proverb and asked them to come up with the remainder of the proverb. It’s hard to believe these were actually done by Primary School children. Their insight may surprise you.
(There’s also the Random proverb generator)
Bring a Stranger to Work Day
U.S. Naval Observatory IYA 2009 Open House
In celebration of the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of the telescope, the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO have declared 2009 to be the International Year of Astronomy (IYA 2009). As part of a world-wide celebration of this event, the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) will be sponsoring a free-admission Open House on Saturday, 4 April, from 3:00 pm to 10:00 pm. During that time the Observatory’s telescopes will be open for inspection, scientists will explain the mission of USNO’s Master Clock, exhibits will display the Observatory’s history and present work, and local amateur astronomers will share views through their telescopes.
The event is planned regardless of weather, although predominantly cloudy conditions may limit observing activities. Additionally, heavy or persistent rain may result in cancellation. Be sure to watch the website for updates.
More details in the press release
I’ll be there, helping out, meetin’ and greetin’. I announced this on the local geocaching bulletin board, since USNO time supports GPS, so I hope to hang out with fellow geocachers for a while (there’s actually a geocache at the Observatory, which normally requires you to take the public tour), and then I’ll probably be helping out with the Time Service display. If you’re in the area, come on by. If you can’t make it, you can still commemorate your nonvisit with a Navel Observatory shirt
Go Fish
Panoramic view of the Amedee coral reef off New Caledonia
(I think it would be better if, after you panned around through pi or so, you saw a huge shark, but that’s just me)
If you scroll and look straight up, you’ll see Snell’s Window
Constructing the Coherent Canine
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Coming This Christmas
Release date is December 22 and is available for pre-ordering at Amazon
Anyone who follows Uncertain Principles knows how well Chad writes and has seen some excerpts already.
Speak the Geek!
It’s Talk Like a Physicist Day!
I gave a rather extended vocabulary list last year, and used a lot of those terms. A few more that I’ve used in the last year:
I mentioned a quantum, to mean a small amount, as in “take that with a quantum of salt”
I used “collapse the wave function” to denote resolving something, as in “the election collapsed the presidential race wave function”
resonated — already in common use
a short amount of time became “a small delta-t”
a wide variety of something I called a spectrum
I refer to a rumor (aka nebulous information) as “Nth-hand information”
I didn’t forget, I “expunged this from the buffer”
An either/or situation is a Boolean state
Happy New Year’s Day was “Happy return to an arbitrarily chosen starting point in the orbit about our gravitational enslaver”
When something came close to me, it was at perigee
And of course, the blogging community is called the blogohedron
I also like making up measuring devices, like the cringe-o-meter to measure how painful something looks, or the Geekmeter. “Pegging the Geekmeter” is a large signal, and means you’re in a maximal “Talk Like a Physicist” state.
Made-up “elements” I’ve used in the last year
Politicium
Grinchonium
Quiltonium
Elephantium
Nerdonium
And some new vocabulary and ways to use it:
Incompatible things are “out of phase.” “Pi out of phase” is the ultimate in being out-of-step, which leads to destructive interference.
Something that is close is “within epsilon”
We physicists quantify relationships — something that is complicated is “nonlinear,” or even “highly nonlinear.” Opposites are “inversely proportional”
Two different things happening at once can be said to be in a superposition (That’s a superposition of painful and funny!)
If something doesn’t happen, you can say the wave functions just didn’t overlap
It’s not unclear, it’s opaque
A situation that’s impossible to resolve has overconstrained boundary conditions
It’s not a hill/ditch, it’s local maximum/minimum
Did You Know 3.0
Can’t vouch for all the statistics, but if they’re accurate, they represent some things to consider. I like the point about how we’re preparing students today for jobs they will eventually get but that don’t yet exist. However, the point
The amount of technical information is doubling every two years …
For students starting a 4 year technical degree this means that … half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study
is wrong.
First of all, it makes the mistake of equating technical study with simply learning facts, and that’s not accurate. Second, it implies that new information makes old information obsolete. While that may be true in some cases — technology often makes old technology obsolete — it doesn’t really happen that way. Sometimes new information is really new information, i.e. something we didn’t know before, and not “just” a better way of doing something. Relativity, quantum mechanics — these represented completely new areas of physics, but did not make the kinematics equations of a macroscopic object obsolete. Science doesn’t really devour itself that way; more often it expands. Third, it implies that students learn cutting-edge material in their first year, and that just isn’t widely the case, if at all. You start with the basics, and that never becomes outdated unless it was wrong to begin with. The cutting-edge material is more likely learned in advanced study, and at the end.
h/t to the Mom
Stealing A Girl's Best Friend
Most real crime stories are about how stupid most criminals are. Occasionally, though, you get the ingenious ones, though even here you see lapses — they got caught, after all.
The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist
The Genius pulled a custom-made slab of rigid aluminum out of his bag and affixed heavy-duty double-sided tape to one side. He stuck it on the two plates that regulated the magnetic field on the right side of the vault door and unscrewed their bolts. The magnetic plates were now loose, but the sticky aluminum held them together, allowing the Genius to pivot them out of the way and tape them to the antechamber wall. The plates were still side by side and active—the magnetic field never wavered—but they no longer monitored the door. Some 30 hours later, the authorities would marvel at the ingenuity.
Sounds like a movie plot (Schneier agrees), and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes one. Maybe Hollywood can even do that without wrecking the story.
A Devious Attempt to Exploit Memories of my Youth
Ah, sweet nostalgia. Space Invaders, Missile Command and especially Asteroids were the favorites we played at the Ground Round.