Monthly Archives: December 2009

A Møøse Once Bit my Sister

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We apologise for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked.

Crunks 2009: The Year in Media Errors and Corrections

We reached a strange milestone this year when CNN fact checked a comedy sketch from Saturday Night Live

Which I already knew, via The Daily Show

There was one correction related to a story to which I had linked (from another source, and which is now a dead link)

Bear sighting: An item in the National Briefing in Sunday’s Section A said a bear wandered into a grocery story in Hayward, Wis., on Friday and headed for the beer cooler. It was Thursday.

I really like this one:

This article was amended on Tuesday 20 January 2009. In our entry on Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days, we referred to a Prairie Ho Companion; we meant a Prairie Home Companion. This has been corrected.

Ah, Lake Woebegone, where every Ho is above average.

Whoa, Nellie!

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Slowed light breaks record

Although this separation process involves distorting the pulse-storing BEC – and hence the nature of the revived pulse – it is completely deterministic, which means that no quantum information is lost. By doing so, the team was able to store the pulse for up to about 1.5 s, shattering the previous record of about 600 ms. Furthermore, the fidelity of the revived pulse – the ratio of output energy to input energy – was more that 100 times better than previous systems.

How to Kill Mathematicians

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Give them pizza, apparently. They’ll starve.

The perfect way to slice a pizza

They can’t think about sharing a pizza, for example, without falling headlong into the mathematics of how to slice it up. “We went to lunch together at least once a week,” says Mabry, recalling the early 1990s when they were both at Louisiana State University, Shreveport. “One of us would bring a notebook, and we’d draw pictures while our food was getting cold.”

The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-centre cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighbouring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza – and if not, who will get more?

If you really want to mess them up, serve a pizza which isn’t round, and you need to value the crust differently than the rest! That’s like the sheet cake problem — trying to fairness-optimize the volume of cake and surface area of icing. (Gee, I wonder if round food was invented to keep the peace amongst the mathematicians, and allow them to solve other problems)

Or, you could give them a ham sandwich.

(To be fair, I can easily see many scientists falling into a similar analytic trap.)

Gypsum, Tramps and Thieves

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The Deadliest place on Earth? Surviving Cueva de los Cristales – The Giant Crystal Cave

Cueva de los Cristales is the incarnation of our most awesome science fiction imaginations – Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. At about the same time as humans first ventured out of Africa, these crystals began to slowly grow. For half a million years they remained protected and nurtured by a womb of hot hydrothermal fluids rich with minerals.

Undisturbed, one can only guess how big they may have eventually grown. Yet when mining began here over a hundred years ago, the water table was lowered and the cave drained. The crystals seemingly interminable development was frozen forever leaving them as aborted relics of the deep earth. It wasn’t until 2001 that miners, searching for lead, eventually penetrated the cave wall and brought it to light. The very act of discovering and witnessing them has triggered their slow decay and now no one knows what their fate will be. Once the mine ceases to operate it could be flooded by polluted mine water and abandoned forever, and that’s if ambitious mineral sellers don’t get to them first and rip them out to sell around the world – a plight of other smaller crystal caves in the area.

The Six Degrees of Integral-Spin Particles

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Bacon number

I also checked on the spinless/spineless mixup that I got at Google, and come up with these:

skinless

stainless

(Wikipedia is great, but I do dislike that the search function has placed the emphasis on article titles, rather than content. This seems to have changed somewhat, since it now gives article links, too. I don’t recall that being the case in the past.)

h/t to baby astronaut for the bacon number

Harry Potter and the Alpha Particle Track

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Cocktail Party Physics: chamber of secrets

By 1910, Wilson had figured out he could use his cloud chamber device to detect charged particles, since they would leave a trail of ions — and water droplets — as they passed through the gas in the chamber. He took the very first photographs of the tracks left by alpha and beta rays, not to mention evidence of how individual atoms and their electrons interacted. Both alpha and beta particles have distinctive tracks: the former is broad and straight, while the latter is thinner and more easily deflected by collisions with other particles. Apply a uniform magnetic field across the cloud chamber, and positively and negatively charged particles will curve in opposite directions. Wilson chambers became all the rage in particle physics, leading to all kinds of exciting discoveries. The discovery of the positron in 1932 at Caltech occurred thanks to a Wilson chamber, garnering physicist Carl Anderson a Nobel Prize in the process. Wilson himself snagged a Nobel, too, for his invention of the cloud chamber.

Last time I visited TRIUMF I saw the cloud chamber they had added to the lobby, and I thought it would be so easy to mount a webcam to one of these and broadcast live images. As far as I know, nobody has done this.