Daily Archives: May 18, 2010

What's Love Got to Do With It?

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Mathematical model explains marital breakups

Rey developed an equation based on the “second thermodynamic law for sentimental interaction,” which states a relationship will disintegrate unless “energy” (effort) is fed into it.

Hmmm. I guess emotional baggage is now relationship entropy. I don’t think has changed the age-old problem that investigating the three-body problem tends to create a lot of relationship entropy.

The mathematical model also implies that when no effort is put in the relationship can easily deteriorate.

Ah, yes. This is based on the work of Dr. Obvious, no doubt.

The Toe of God

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A New Clue to Explain Existence

More data concerning the matter/antimatter abundance conundrum.

Sifting data from collisions of protons and antiprotons at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.

Not Particularly Unflappable

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Please excuse the funkiness of the first couple of seconds. I don’t know what caused that.

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I don’t know what species this is, but it’s pretty much the perfect slo-mo subject: flapping furiously but the center-of-mass is not moving very much, and didn’t fly away at my approach. I missed an even better shot while I was unslinging my camera; two of these butterflies were doing some sort of aerial ballet — either a mating ritual or fighting (or maybe both), but separated just as I got set to shoot.

Taken at Conway Robinson Memorial State Forest in Virginia.