Making interesting pancakes for his 3 year-old daughter.
Monthly Archives: June 2010
Not Affiliated With Fraggle Rock
Yosemite Nature Notes – Episode 9 – Frazil Ice
Beautiful Plumage
Apparently the Norweian Blue isn’t the only bird who prefers kippin’ on its back.
Behind the scenes at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. flickr: The Order of Things
Survivor Skills
This may prove useful in in the event you absolutely must open a bottle of wine but have no corkscrew.
How to open a wine bottle with a shoe.
Technically a shoe and a wall. My French is pretty much limited* to Je ne parle pas Français (and croissant, so I would never say Je ne parle pas croissant) so I assume the narrator is telling you that pressure is force/area, and so any force you exert on the liquid at the base by whacking the bottom of the bottle will result in a much larger force being transmitted to the cork owing to the reduction in area.
What he is probably not telling you is that this is a poor technique for ketchup, and not because French cuisine and ketchup are incompatible or that it won’t work on screw tops (both true) but that ketchup is a non-Newtonian fluid, and when the ketchup clogs the neck of the bottle it prevents air from entering, which is necessary to let the ketchup flow. Don’t invert and bang on the bottom (this holds true for more than ketchup, but I digress). Hold it with the open end down at 45º and tap the neck to induce the shear-thinning.
(*My limited vocabulary also allows me to get the following joke: Why do French omelettes have only one egg? Because in France one egg is un oeuf.)
Violating the Violation
Cosmic Variance: Marketing CP Violation
Sean discusses the recent CP violation results, and how they were reported.
The point is that the conclusion doesn’t hold — not everything about CP violation is necessarily related to baryogenesis. We don’t know how baryogenesis actually happened — there are many theories on the market, and any of them or none of them may be right. Therefore, there’s no way of knowing whether any particular manifestation of CP violation is in any way related to baryogenesis. There could be lots of different ways in which CP is violated. In particular, there’s no compelling theoretical reason why the CP violation being studied in the decays of B mesons has anything at all to do with baryogenesis. It’s possible — lots of things are possible. But what’s being studied isn’t baryogenesis; it’s CP violation.
Mea culpa. Ten 3-loop Feynman diagrams as penance.
Pick Your Poison
(Update: link dead. Try this one instead, seems to be the same list)
The 20 worst drinks, along with a food equivalent.
5. Worst Frozen Fruit Drink
Krispy Kreme Lemon Sherbet Chiller (20 fl oz)980 calories
40 g fat (36 g saturated)
115 g sugarsSugar Equivalent: 16 medium-size chocolate eclairs
Imagine taking a regular can of soda, pouring in 18 extra teaspoons of sugar, and then swirling in half a cup of heavy cream. Nutritionally speaking, that’s exactly what this is, which is how it manages to marry nearly 2 days’ worth of saturated fat with enough sugar to leave you with a serious sucrose hangover. Do your heart a favor and avoid any of Krispy Kreme’s “Kremey” beverages. The basic Chillers aren’t the safest of sippables either, but they’ll save you up to 880 calories.
Don't Drop any Mentos in it
The Strangest Disaster of the 20th Century.
A recounting of the Lake Nyos CO2 eruption in Camaroon.
There is a physical limit to how much CO2 water can absorb, even under the tremendous pressured that exist at the bottom of a 690 foot deep lake. As the bottom layers become saturated, the CO2 is pushed up to where the pressure is low enough for it to start coming out of solution. At this point any little disturbance—a landslide, stormy weather, or even high winds or just a cold snap—can cause the CO2 to begin bubbling to the surface. And when the bubbles start rising, they can cause a siphoning or “chimney” effect, triggering a chain reaction that in one giant upheaval can cause the lake to disgorge CO2 that has been accumulating in the lake for decades.
Mock 1
Which is, of course, the speed of sarcasm
Can you guess which is the real article title? arXiv vs snarXive
I converged to 63% after 30 guesses
The snarXiv is a random high-energy theory paper generator incorporating all the latest trends, entropic reasoning, and exciting moduli spaces. The arXiv is similar, but occasionally less random.
Google in Freefall
This apparently does not work in IE, though finding that some functionality doesn’t work in IE is not all that surprising.
Even after the gravity kicks in, you can still type in the search window.
Next Up, the Behemyth
I think a larger version of this should be called the Leviatron
Neat, even with the overindulgence of “let’s enclose this in a tube to prove there are no wires.” Two things, though. 1) It’s not antigravity 2) The blurb about torque isn’t right — it’s not that the spinning exerts a torque, it’s that the spinning means there is angular momentum. You need a torque to change angular momentum, and the torque present because of the same-facing poles is not enough to flip the top. Just like gravity exerts a torque, but cannot flip the spinning top, either.