Turn your sound up. Draw lines on the black screen to bounce the balls. Enjoy the music.
Monthly Archives: April 2009
The Candy Cummings Effect
The fastball can’t get any faster, we’ve seen a changeup (slow light) and a knuckleball (aberration from atmospheric turbulence), so now High-Intensity Lasers Throw Scientists a Curve
OK, let’s start with the bad:
Researchers defy the laws of physics by making a laser beam bend
I really dislike that phrase, and whenever it’s used invariably the story goes on to explain how the phenomenon follows the laws of physics and it’s really just the researchers being clever in how they can manipulate one of the variables. As they did here — they reshaped the beam profile of the laser.
The researchers reshaped the profile of these pulses into that of an Airy beam using a thin plate of glass with a particular variation of thickness across the plate. “The phase shifts introduced by this plate turn the bullets from round in shape to the Airy beam that looks more like a triangle,” Polynkin says.
The beam ionizes the air along its path, which shifts the trajectory of the beam. Within limits.
Overall, the self-bending beam does have its limits—the bullets do not deviate from a straight line by more than the beam’s diameter. “If the beam is one centimeter [in diameter],” Polynkin says, “it won’t curve more than one centimeter.”
(Candy Cummings is the purported inventor of the curveball)
One Big Assumption
This basically assumes you have traveled through time because George Carlin handed you a time machine and you’re almost too stupid to breathe, or you went through a time rift, or some topologically similar scenario. Because if you invented a #@&^! time machine, you should know most of what’s there.
A moving electric field produces magnetism, and vice versa. Wrap copper around an iron core and run electricity through it, and you’ve got an electromagnet
What I’d want is an old chemistry book that included descriptions of how to obtain and purify chemicals, because that’s knowledge that’s been outsourced.
Start Making Sense
Click the cartoon to go to XKCD. The hover tag is worthwhile, as usual.
You Killed My Mascot!
Sometimes I think my students lack a sense of humor
It turns out that thousands of years before the falls retreated to their current position, a big chunk of that upper layer of rock fell on top of a giant beaver who was unfortunate enough to be building a dam in the vicinity. (When they say giant, they aren’t kidding. Those suckers are apparently about 300 pounds full grown. One of my students, who is a football player, said that it’s too bad they’re extinct as they might be useful on the football team.) The skeleton of the beaver, which is on display at the Science Museum of Minnesota, was radiocarbon dated to determine how long ago it died. The students use this age to determine the overall rate of retreat for the falls.
I’m not sure if the giant beaver is the actual mascot of Oregon State, but it should be. Some of the iterations they used when I was there looked too much like Chip ‘n Dale
Everybody's Doing It
C’mon baby, do the polar motion!
I mentioned that I printed out several posters for some colleagues for our Open House. Since they were displayed to the public and not copyrightable (work of the US government), I feel free to share.
Earth rotates about an axis, but this axis does not always coincide with the (geographic) North Pole.
The plot shows the location of Earth’s spin axis over the past few years. The center of the spiral is not at the geographic North Pole: it’s about 9 meters (~ 27 feet) away.
Why: early-20th-century geodesists adopted the rotation axis position of 1900 as the geographic North Pole; the rotation (spin) axis has migrated to its current position since then.
Knowing the true location of Earth’s spin axis is important when using star locations for navigation and timing, because the true spin axis determines where the stars will appear in the sky (as opposed to where one would expect them to be, were the spin axis at the North Pole).
“Polar motion” – the difference between Earth’s true spin axis and geographic north – is computed by combining measurements from radio astronomy, GPS and satellite ranging.
Important Physics Public Service Announcement
Ten things to do In the Event That You Have Accidentally Swallowed the Higgs Boson
6. If the Higgs boson begins creating mass in your esophagus or stomach before you reach a hospital, you will need to perform an immediate bosonectomy on yourself. Luckily, surgical knowledge is not necessary. Just choose from the array of probable outcomes that will manifest themselves upon your decision to perform surgery, and make the one most favourable to yourself into reality. Be sensible—do not wait for the outcome in which you successfully remove the boson and win the lottery and grow wings.
Bosonectomies aren’t nearly as complicated as the corresponding operation, a Fermiplasty. The Pauli exclusion principle applies to the latter, so a hospital can only treat one patient at a time.
Colour My World
All 120 Crayon Names, Color Codes and Fun Facts
Crayola crayons currently come in 120 colors including 23 reds, 20 greens, 19 blues, 16 purples, 14 oranges, 11 browns, 8 yellows, 2 grays, 2 coppers, 2 blacks, 1 white, 1 gold and 1 silver. Although Crayola crayons come in 120 different colors, the labels are only made in 18, which cover the full color spectrum. Nearly 3 billion crayons are made each year, an average of 12 million daily. That’s enough to circle the globe 6 times with color!
Also, the Hex and RGB values of the crayons.
Seeing in the Dark
On Saturday after the Open House, I stopped off at the Marine Corps memorial (depicting the flag-raising at Iwo Jima) to take some long-exposure photos. (“Long” in this case is ~5 seconds) I pass by it every day going to and from work, but had never actually stopped. Lots of tourists there, even at 10 PM on a Saturday.
From that area there’s a view of the Capitol almost lined up with the Lincoln memorial and Washington monument.
Paul Simon Never Sang About This
There must be 50 ways to leave your lover — Paul Simon
There must be 50 ways to leave your louver — How to Build a Good Louver
There must be 50 ways to leave the Louvre — design guidelines for the Louvre
38 Ways To Win An Argument—Arthur Schopenhauer
Really a list of dishonest ways to appear to win an argument, because they virtually all involve using logical fallacies to distort the opponent’s position or distract from what’s really going on. See how often they are used in politics, though.
h/t to ecoli