Monthly Archives: May 2009

The Inside Job

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Scott Adams (fellow Hartwick alum) continually tells people, “No, I don’t work at your company,” because the problems he lampoons are so widespread.

Allyson points out a problem that is less so, that of purchasing within government regulations, in the shoe bomber theory of purchasing regulations. So in this case she does work at my company, in a sense. I feel her pain. And this is exactly right.

In 2001, a jackhole named Richard Reid got on a plane and attempted to make it go ‘splody by lighting a bomb in his shoes.

Now we all have to suffer the indignity of standing barefoot in line at the airport while the security goons X-ray my Hello Kitty flip flops. An appropriate punishment for Mr. Reid would be to chain him to the metal detector at various airports and then we could all smack him in the chops with our shoes before boarding the plane.

Likewise, somewhere out there, some jackass probably used his government p-card to buy a hooker, forty-eight pounds of veal, a case of absinthe, and a weed whacker for a groovy night of debauchery at a conference in Madrid.

Then some bored reporter showed up to blow the lid off this travesty as if s/he had discovered a Woodward and Bernsteinesque plot, it all ended up on the evening news, and suddenly I need to get sixty-eight approvals from the head of NASA all the way to my mom (hi mom!) to order a box of Kim Wipes. I hate waiting for stuff.

Most of the “solutions” with which we purchase card holders are burdened are the result of poor oversight. The probably-not-so-farfetched scenario Allyson describes would normally be caught in the routine audit when the jackass submitted his statement, and it was reviewed by the next person up the chain — no need for any additional regulations at all, if the reviewing official was doing the job properly. But somehow lapdances and sushi are purchased and not discovered until much later, and the solution is to add more rules to the mix. The problem is that it doesn’t really do any good — incompetent review hasn’t changed, and if someone is hell-bent on defrauding the government, they (by definition) don’t follow the rules, so a new layer of them won’t matter. Especially if the new rule has huge loopholes in it, as it usually does.

So I heartily endorse the solution

Whenever a new control is put in place that causes me to wait additional time for an approval, I believe that the new approval process should be named after the jerk who caused the problem to begin with.

Those Who Can, Do.

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The Breakdown: Defying Death at the Gym

Neat little gymnastics demonstration that you will never catch me attempting, because it looks like an engraved invitation to a serious injury. The physics is much less strenuous, being an exercise in conservation of linear and angular momentum. If you read through the comments you’ll find someone who insists the explanation is wrong, because kinetic energy isn’t conserved in inelastic collisions. But kinetic energy isn’t mentioned in the explanation, so file that under “W” for “WTF?” The same poster returns to dig his hole even deeper by insisting that momentum isn’t conserved, either. It’s scary if they are indeed a teacher of statics and dynamics.

Fuelish

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World’s first battery fuelled by air

I don’t think so. No more than your car is fueled by air when you have combustion. The difference is between carrying around oxygen in the cell, and drawing some oxygen in from the air in order to complete the reaction and release energy.

If you go to the group’s website, they explain the basic process:

On discharge, Li+ from the electrolyte and e- from the external circuit combine with O2 from the air, the process is reversible.

The big win is not carrying around Oxygen, which is more than twice as massive as Lithium. There’s also carbon and a catalyst involved, but of course a catalyst gets reused, and so you don’t need a stoichiometric fraction of that present. In the article at Green Car Congress it’s mentioned that the catalyst is Mn.

The Guardian article also claims

And as the cycle of air helps re-charge the battery as it is used, it has a greater storage capacity than other similar-sized cells and can emit power up to 10 times longer.

I see nothing supporting the claim that any kind of recharging is going on.

Every Dog Bowl Has its Day

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I’m way behind in my blog reading. Here’s a little optics something from ZapperZ:
Can a dog bowl start a fire? Test shows idea does hold water

A Bellevue Fire Department investigator said earlier this week that he suspects a house fire started when a partially filled glass bowl, resting in a wire stand on the home’s deck, concentrated the sun’s rays like a magnifying glass.

Reminiscent of the snow globes that were recalled for their similar qualities of refraction.

DAMOP Summary

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OK, last things first. The UVa campus gets an overall grade of gorgeous, allowing for the construction that was going on. (There was a very New England “you can’t get there from here” theme that pretty much mandated that any travel between buildings required a detour of some sort) The weather was great; pretty much the rest of the month in Virginia has been cool and wet, but it was sunny and warm the whole week. I had tried to stay at one of the motels within walking distance, but they were all full when I called, so I ended up at the not-so-super-8 (or, from after Clark Kent went into the molecule chamber) and driving in each morning.

There was an announced crowd of over 1,000 registered participants, which explains the occasional SRO crowds for some of the talks. Holding a conference of this size in a University setting forces a certain spatial distribution of the talks, so there were six parallel session in four different buildings. Add to that the talks being located along the southern part of the campus, while the parking garage and closest concentration of restaurants along the northern part, it made for a bit of walking. Which is a good thing, because the snacks that were provided was not exactly in the health-food category. One morning there was the matrix of donuts, including chocolate-covered ones covered with mini M&Ms (yes, it was tasty). There was also free beer at all of the poster sessions. Not surprisingly, these were well-attended. Too well, perhaps — the cacophony made it hard to hold a conversation at times, and it was tough to navigate the aisles.

Since I hadn’t been to this meeting since 2000, I’ve missed out on some of the incremental progress in many of the fields, so a lot was brand-new. The hot topics of today seem to include investigations into condensed-matter physics, with experiments using paired Fermions to form Bosons, and looking at the transition between Bose-Einstein Condensates and Cooper-Pair BCS superfluids. And a lot of talks about optical lattices, which now always seem to be far off-resonant traps.

Other than the Thesis Prize session, which included an atomic clock talk, and the optical frequency comb session, there weren’t a lot of talks that held any particular work-related interest for me, so I mostly stuck to a basic strategy of attending sessions that had invited talks; the speakers tend to give a bit of an overview which provides some context for the rest of the talk. That only failed me for last session, where five minutes of prep on cold molecule formation was not going to help me decipher what was going on.

Between my long absence, and that almost all of the atomic physics people I know being in the atomic clock field and not in attendance, I didn’t really know too many people at the meeting. I did re-introduce myself to a few people whom I know I had met, and I also waylaid a fellow blogger (one guess who that was) but, in turn, I was recognized by Arjendu. And I met people giving posters and at the banquet.

I had decided that driving back on Saturday afternoon was probably a Bad Idea™ and had arranged my motel accordingly. I ended up going to a local park on Saturday afternoon, surrounding a lake near the airport, and after clearing out the four geocaches, I spent a while filming wildlife in slow-motion.

Doctor Obvious Strikes Again

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Brain research shows past experience is invaluable for complex decision making

Still, it’s good to get scientific results to corroborate this, because “conventional” wisdom isn’t always right, and then there’s the benefit of discovering details of the mechanism.

What we have found is that learning from past experience actually rewires our brains so that we can categorise the things we are looking at, and respond appropriately to them in any context.

Tracking the Roomba

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Tracking that oh-so-elusive beast, the Roomba. Roomba’s Path Revealed

I set up a photo camera in my room, turned out all the lights and took a long-exposure shot of my roomba doing it’s thing for about 30 minutes. The result is a picture that shows the path of the roomba through it’s cleaning cycle, it looks like a flight map or something. It really hits every spot!