My first reaction was “Photoshop,” because it’s just too good. But there are other pictures taken by many people. So I discard that hypothesis.
Monthly Archives: December 2009
Hard to Avoid
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Tiger Woods has gotten himself into a little trouble the past week or so. But, no matter what Tiger has done in regard to fidelity of marriage, it has absolutely no bearing on whether or not he won the 1997 Masters, or 2000 U.S. Open, or any of the 70-odd PGA events he’s won. Yes, his indiscretions are a blow to his image and may affect his endorsement deals, but golf history is unaffected, and (psychology aside) his status as a golfer is unchanged. How he is perceived by the public is what has changed, because he has tarnished his clean-cut image. His golf swing is unaffected. The people that didn’t like him before have one more reason not to like him, but rooting for or against someone on the tube doesn’t affect the outcome of the match.
And so it is with climategate. Public perception is affected, because of the political aspects of the scientists’ words and actions, but not so much the science. But it matters, because it’s one more excuse to cast aspersions, regardless of the validity of the claims. The ones making the most noise about this aren’t the type who let facts get in their way. The asymmetry of the situation is very striking: the publicly active climate change deniers have been shown to be wrong many times in the past, on a variety of points, and yet none of them seem to have folded their tents. The problem is that with any complex problem, it’s fairly easy to make an incorrect statement that sounds plausible, and yet it takes far longer to set the record straight than it does to misinform. And yet the act of misinforming doesn’t seem to damage the credibility of the denialists, which is probably one of the reasons scientists in general don’t wish to engage them. This isn’t a clash between scientific views, it’s science vs propaganda, and that’s not a level playing field.
(h/t to the infinite one for the vid)
I Do Appreciate You Being Round
The Circular Logic of the Universe
A sphere is also tough. For a given surface area, it’s stronger than virtually any other shape. If you want to make a secure container using the least amount of material, Dr. Liebovitch said, make that container round. “That’s why, when you cook a frankfurter, it always splits in the long direction,” he said, rather than along its circumference. The curved part has the tensile strength of a sphere, the long axis that of a rectangle: no contest.
There's an Obscure Jim Otto Joke in Here Somewhere
Lightweight “triple-zero” house produces more energy than it uses
Built in 2000, it was the first in a series of buildings that are “triple-zero,” a concept developed by German architect and engineer Werner Sobek, which signifies that the building is energy self-sufficient (zero energy consumed), produces zero emissions, and is made entirely of recyclable materials (zero waste).
(Jim Otto. I’m guessing he wasn’t zero-emission.)
Take a Trip
Examine the vast distances between planets in the solar system
This animation simulates a voyage from the sun past all nine planets. For convenience, the planets are lined up in the same direction. The animation shows each planet’s average distance from the sun.
At the speed of today’s fastest spacecraft (~20 km/second), it would take almost ten years to travel this distance. Even at the speed of light, the trip would last 5 1/2 hours. In this animation, the apparent speed of the viewer is over 300 times the speed of light.
No Boy Scout, He
Science After Sunclipse: In Which I Am Less Than Courteous
[Chopra’s] latest whine is typical of what passes for respectable commentary in less-than-critical quarters. Phil Plait aptly characterized it as “almost a bullet-pointed list of logical fallacies”; if you wanted examples to fill out your Baloney Detection Kit trading cards, Chopra would be a great place to start. Be the first on your block to collect the whole woo-ful set!
Gammas are Busting Out All Over
NASA’s Search for New Laws of Physics
Looking at gamma-ray bursts and gamma-ray burst explosions.
These events are so mind-bogglingly intense that they can be detected from billions of light years away (and so billions of years in the past). Which is good, because you really don’t want one to get any closer than that. One popular “sudden extinction” theory is that such a burst has happened within range of our own galaxy, but because the lethal gamma radiation moves at the speed of light, the first evidence we could ‘detect’ would be everybody and everything dropping dead. The only people who could investigate it are those who evolve from particularly hardy bacteria hidden deep in a rock somewhere, evolving for billions of years then looking at fossils full of iPhones and saying “Hmm, I wonder why everybody fell over all of a sudden”.
Tinny the Snowman
Scientists create the world’s smallest ‘snowman’
The snowman is made of two tiny tin beads, normally used to calibrate electron microscope lenses, which were welded together with platinum.
A focused ion beam was used to carve the snowman’s eyes and smile, and to deposit a tiny blob of platinum for the nose
Adultery is Good for Physics
An unexpected result of Tiger practicing his putting on someone else’s green.
Tiger Woods drives sales of physics book sky-high
A photograph showing a copy of Get A Grip On Physics by John Gribbin on the floor of Tiger Woods’s wrecked SUV has seen the book rocket up Amazon’s bestseller chart
Pop! Goes the Frozen Weasel
We recently got a delivery of some electronics (OK, it was a bunch of lasers. You can’t build a death ray without lasers. Oh, wait, did I say death ray? Forget that. I meant clock), and the packaging for each had both a shock sensor and a freeze sensor.
Naturally, I had to take the freeze sensor apart. It’s a bimetal disc that’s either concave or convex, depending on how you look at it. The two metals have different coefficients of thermal expansion, and if you form them in a strip, this will cause them to bend like a springboard as one expands or contracts faster than the other. This is useful for thermostats and indicators.
In this case, the original shape is concave (let’s pick a convention) at room temperature, and that’s the minimum energy configuration. To change it to a concave shape by cooling, the metal on the outside has to contract faster, but it won’t do this continually, as happens with curve changes of flat strips — the other metal is at a low energy, and will have internal forces trying to keep it there. It’s only after the second metal can overcome those forces that the disc changes to convex. By that point, though, there’s a bit of energy stored up in the system, and as the disc pops into its convex shape, it pushes a red indicator button out to show that it has fired. You can calibrate this type of device, and by choosing the right manufacturing conditions, have different indicators fire at different temperatures — many are set to be triggered when the temperature drops below freezing, or thereabouts.
Here’s what it looks like once you’ve taken it apart.
The disc is covered by the white holder with the red plunger, and is covered by the paper mask and plastic container. The plunger pops out when the disc is thermally triggered.
Here’s what it looks like firing in slow motion. I discarded the container and paper mask, and put the disc directly on a cooler freeze-pak, with the holder and plunger resting on it.