Monthly Archives: November 2009
Training to Be an Amish Mechanic
Vet School 2.0: Stick Your Hand Up a Virtual Cow Butt
(the title is based on a Robin Williams Joke)
There’s nothing tidy about sticking your arm deep into a cow’s backside, getting up to your elbows in warm and gooey bovine innards.
But for new vet students, there’s no avoiding the procedure: To diagnose pregnancy or check for infection, you’ve got to reach into a cow’s rectum and feel for the uterus, ovaries and stomach. Unfortunately, proper palpation is a tough skill to teach, because once your arm is buried inside a cow butt, no one can see what you’re doing.
No one can see what you’re doing? Nothing like a little animal “husbandry” until they catch you at it.
(now I’m stealing from Tom Lehrer)
As long as I’m this low in the pasture, I’ll complete the trilogy. A few weeks ago, we were doing some mundane inventory-task, and one the guys said, “Hand me the scissors,” and was corrected by another of us — they were shears, not scissors. This prompted him to say, on the topic of shears, “I can tell you that the act of shearing takes all the romance out of sheep farming.”
Pause for effect.
I then said something like, “I’m not really sure I want to hear the details about the romance you found in sheep farming. That’s between you and the sheep.”
Four-er Flat Hinge-y Bits
A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families
Thousands of different Lego exist, yet when your seven-year-old asks for “a clippy bit,” you know exactly what to hand him. GILES TURNBULL surveys a caucus of children and determines a common nomenclature.
Back when I was a youngster, many of these pieces did not exist in our LEGO™ collection. (Can I have my curmudgeon certificate now?) Mainly it was the single- and double-wide pieces, of standard thickness and the thin plate pieces, and 4×4 roof pieces: angled, and interior and exterior corners. Not much more than that. I think I noticed the explosion of newer pieces with the introduction of the spaceship sets my brother got: hinged and rotating pieces, non-rectangular plates and real windows.
Call it …
There is no crime greater than calling Shotgun on Monday in reference to the ride to the concert on Friday. Some people choose to play this way, and they are fools.
Boy Scouts or the Army?
Letters of Note: Prepare For Contact
1924 telegram from then Chief of U.S. Naval Operations, Edward W. Eberle, instructing all Naval stations to monitor the airwaves for any unusual transmissions due to anticipated contact from Martians. August 22nd of that year was witness to the closest Mars opposition since 1804
Wait! That's Not All!
Rhett’s got a post up on parallax, and how you can use this effect to measure distance: Parallax, what is it good for? He’s got some pictures showing the effect of viewing from different vantage points.
The other thing you can do with such photos is to make stereograms, and I’ve taken the liberty of doing so with Rhett’s image, though I didn’t try and take out the dotted lines.
Cross your eyes and you can make the image take on depth. In case you want more, here’s the optics layout stereogram I posted a while back.
It's Been Real. Hasn't It?
“What do we really describe in physics?” he [Zeilinger] asked. “Do we describe reality? Is it out there?”
Classical physicists would have said yes, resoundingly. Studying physics reveals nature’s workings, providing an explicit map of reality’s subtleties. Those subtleties would be there whether we figured out how to question and extract them.
But in the early part of this century, quantum mechanics put that happy belief on the chopping block. Quantum mechanics, for all its ability to describe the atomic and subatomic world, blurs the distinction between the observer and the observed. As a result, it calls into question the essence of scientific curiosity and inquiry.
Let the Chips Fall Where They May
Slow motion machining. (of nothing in particular — just a scrap piece of aluminum being trimmed). Spindle speed is 7500 rpm, film speed is 420 fps.
Faking It
Discussion of journalistic guidelines for physics articles (mostly), some more tongue-in-cheek than others.
I think you have to start with avoiding the phrases that should be tossed over the event horizon.
Name that Fractal
This is an open question: What is this fractal? It’s a method for filling a 2D plane with circles in an orderly way – circles made of circles, all the way down. There are published examples of similar systems, like the Apollonian Gasket, the Kleinian Groups, Indra’s Pearls, but I’ve never seen this particular arrangement before, and I’ve been looking for over ten years. Is this a trivial variation on something already known? Or a new and undiscovered thing? I have no idea. I found it while doodling in math class.
Update: It’s an “orbit of a circle under a Kleinian group generated by two Mobius transformations (one elliptic of order 4, one parabolic)” explanation (PDF)