Coaxing bees into making honeycomb sculpture
“I knew they were ordered and regimented,” the Pennsylvania artist says about his honeybees, which built the three otherworldly sculptures on view at Eleven Rivington. “I had an intuition that I’d be able to organize that, architecturally.”
Fast Food Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck
I have no horse in this race, or a smartphone for that matter, but any explanation of “the zone of suck” using fast-food apple pies is worthwhile reading, IMO.
Monarch Burger went to the trouble of making their apple pie look like a slice of homemade apple pie. While it seems appealing in its photo on the menu, it sets up a false expectation. It may look like a slice of homemade apple pie, but it certainly doesn’t taste like one. Naturally, it flopped. Fast-food restaurants are set up to be run not by trained chefs, but by a low-wage, low-skill, disinterested staff. As a result, their food preparation procedures are designed to run on little thinking and no passion. They’re not set up to create delicious homemade apple pies.
Ames’ Window
Please listen carefully to these options, as our menu has recently changed
No it hasn’t.
I suspect this behavior shows up somewhere on the list of ways you can manipulate people, in this case, trying to get me to listen to all the options instead of choosing the first convenient (and wrong) one or hitting “0.” Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
(I haven’t read the whole list, but am confident that by mentioning and linking to it, someone will read it and confirm that the behavior is indeed there. And that there are ways to persuade people to do your research for you, too, like checking to see if an item is on a list)
Periodic table gets a new element
More than a decade after experiments first produced a single atom of the element, a team of German scientists has been credited with its discovery.
The team, led by Sigurd Hofmann at the Centre for Heavy Ion Research, must propose a name for their find, before it can be formally added to the table.
Uncertain Principles: Algebra Is Like Sunscreen
My one-word piece of advice for students planning to study physics (or any other science, really, but mostly physics): Algebra.
Since we’re on the topic of math, let’s double the fun by visiting Cocktail PArty Physics: NEW VOICES: “math sucks”
“When I write, I can say whatever I want to say, but in math there’s just one right answer.”
She had a point there. I loved mathematics for its concreteness, its lack of ambiguity. It felt to me like a solid anchor in a hostile, subjective world. But the flip side of that is you can be definitely, unambiguously, totally wrong. You can’t plead “I was robbed,” like you can when the blind umpire calls you out or your sterling essay is marked with a D minus by a demented grader.
But … if the education is bland, and
[T]he core problem she faces, as she enters middle school “hating” math, is the math teaching itself, gender neutral, uninspiring for all.
There is the open question of why Austin (a boy) loves math.
I think an underlying issue is our desire to be able to point to a single problem to fix, when in reality there are multiple reasons why it’s tough to get kids to eat their vegetables learn their algebra.
Acoustic Black Hole Created in Bose-Einstein Condensate
The result is a region within the BEC in which the atoms move at supersonic speed. This is the black hole: any phonon unlucky enough to stray into this region cannot escape.
One reason why sonic black holes are so highly prized is that they ought to produce Hawking radiation. Quantum mechanics predicts that pairs of “virtual” phonons with equal and opposite momentum ought to be constantly springing in and out of existence in BECs.
The researchers used computer simulations and analytical calculations to show that a simplified model of a protein is attracted to DNA until it gets within a half-nanometer or so. At this short range, the protein is repelled, so it can slide freely until it finds its target sequence and binds more tightly. The results provide a more complete physical picture of this critical biological process.
Relativity is not an easy concept. Special relativity is hard enough, and General relativity really ups the ante; I am not well-versed in anything beyond the basics of the latter, but one of the notions of GR is that freefall in a uniform gravitational field is actually an inertial frame, i.e. non-accelerating, which is not a concept present in Special Relativity.
Which appears to be the linchpin behind the argument presented here: In Twin Paradox Twist, the Accelerated Twin is Older
In 1905, Einstein described the ideas behind the twin paradox to demonstrate the effects of time dilation according to special relativity. In 1911, physicist Paul Langevin turned the concept into a concrete story involving two hypothetical twins. Ever since then, scientists have offered various explanations for exactly why this aging paradox occurs, and whether it is even a true paradox at all.
As Abramowicz and Bajtlik note in their study, it is often claimed that the twin paradox can be explained by the acceleration of the traveling twin that occurs when he turns around to go back to Earth. Abramowicz and Bajtlik show, however, that it is not the acceleration that causes the age difference in most cases. By presenting a scenario in which the accelerated twin is older at the reunion, the scientists show that the final time difference between the twins often depends only on their velocities as measured with respect to an absolute standard of rest, and not on acceleration.
First of all, a note that “absolute standard of rest” is not something that is part of the original twins paradox. Which is because in 1905, there was only Special Relativity. The scenario presented is of the twins near a large mass, and one of them in a Keplerian obit, and thus not accelerating according to General Relativity. The notion of absolute rest is in contrast to accelerations and rotations, which can be distinguished, while motion in special relativity cannot. The mixing of the two frameworks isn’t even an instance of the reporter mucking things up — it’s presented in the ArXiv paper that way.
It is often claim that the resolution of the classical
twin paradox should be the acceleration of the “travel-
ing” twin: he must accelerate in order to turn around and
meet his never accelerating brother. The twin who accel-
erates is younger at the reunion. Here we challenge this
notion. We start with describing a situation in which,
like in the classical version of the paradox, one of the
twins accelerates, and the other one does not accelerate.
Quite contrary to what happens in the classical version,
the accelerated twin is older at the reunion.
That’s because you have changed the parameters, and are no longer describing the classical twin paradox.
I have no complaint about the physics. I just don’t think the authors should feign surprise at the result, as if it were somehow unforeseen that changing conditions could yield a different answer. The answer should not be surprising at all, because what they describe is one twin being at rest, and the other in an orbit. Which is exactly what would be described by an observer on a non-rotating planet, and another on a satellite. Maybe a satellite which is part of a navigation platform, able to communicate with a receiver and quadrangulate position and local time, with the modification that the satellite isn’t orbiting at a different distance from the planet.
All of this is pointed out in “Relativity in the Global Positioning System” by Neil Ashby. In section 5 there’s a graph of the results of differing orbital distances, and below some threshold we see that the satellite will age more slowly than someone on the planet surface. I’m not sure how old it is, but the update posted in June 2007 says
I have updated the text in quite a few places, such as eliminating the word “recently” which is no longer really recently.
So the notion is definitely not new, nor should have been surprising.
Harry and friends, at least. oobject: 12 of the worlds most fascinating tunnel networks