Monthly Archives: September 2010

Silhouette

Posted on by

The Big Picture: In silhouette

A photography technique that frequently catches my eye is the use of silhouette – placing a subject directly between a primary light source and the camera. The effect can be painterly or haunting or evocative. It can break a subject down to basic ideas conveyed only by line and shape, where an individual might appear iconic. Collected here are a handful of recent photographs from around the world, where we can only see the outlines of the subject, our minds (and the captions) are left to fill in any details in the darkness.

Mailing It In

Posted on by

I ordered something online, and expected it to be delivered at the end of this past week. I thought that it was going to ship via the postal service, but then got a tracking number from FedEx. Here’s why.

That’s right. (Pardon my use of the vernacular, but) FedEx got the package and then fucking mailed it. Apparently this is a new “service” called SmartPost, and if you Google on that term, you will find complaints all over the place. The skinny is that the SmartPost service waits until they have a critical mass of deliveries, and then they turn them over to the Post office, so “at the Postal Facility” might not be the truth. If it is, then they’ve been hanging on to my package for 4 days, not the 1 or 2 advertised. And based on the complaints I’ve read, if it actually gets delivered on Tuesday, I will be getting off easy. There are horror stories of deliveries taking weeks and packages just disappearing.

Magnus-ificient

Posted on by

Carlos ’97 free kick no fluke, say French physicists

While their research quickly confirmed the long-known Magnus effect, which gives a spinning ball a curved trajectory, their research revealed fresh insight for spinning balls that are shot over a distance equivalent to Roberto Carlos’ free kick.

The friction exerted on a ball by its surrounding atmosphere slows it down enough for the spin to take on a greater role in directing the ball’s trajectory, thereby allowing the last moment change in direction, which in the case of Carlos’ kick left Barthez defenceless.
The researchers refer to their discovery as the ‘spinning ball spiral,’ comparing the spiralling effects of Roberto Carlos’s kick with the shorter-distance (20-25 m) ‘circular’ free kicks shot by the likes of Beckham and Platini.

…

‘People often noticed that Carlos’ free kick had been shot from a remarkably long distance; we show in our paper that this is not a coincidence, but a necessary condition for generating a spiral trajectory.’

Here’s the kick in question:

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Turns Out There's a Third Option

Posted on by

Taking The Temperature Of A Dinosaur

A team of researchers led by Robert Eagle, a biologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, found that rare, heavy isotopes of carbon-13 and oxygen-18 clump together differently depending on temperature.

“It’s basic thermodynamics: At warmer temperatures, you get a more random distribution of these isotopes with less clumping,” Eagle said. “As temperature decreases things slow down and you begin to see more bonding.”

When this bonding takes place within an organism, such as in the formation of the mineral apatite to form tooth enamel, the pattern of bonds preserves a record of the animal’s body temperature, within a few degrees.

Jokes

Posted on by

Helium walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Sorry, we don’t serve noble gases here.”
Helium doesn’t react.

The bartender tries to take one of Helium’s electrons, but fails.
The Helium is nonplussed.

A superconductor walks into a bar. The bartender says “we don’t serve superconductors here.”
The superconductor leaves without putting up any resistance.

To get to the other side.
Why did the tachyon cross the road?

Schrödinger’s cat walks into the lab and says, “This experiment scares me half to death.”

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first orders one beer. The second orders half of a beer. The third orders a quarter of a beer. The fourth orders an eighth of a beer.
The bartender says, “Screw you!” and pours two beers.

A termite walks into a bar, looks around, and asks, “Is the bartender here?”

It's Hoaxariffic

Posted on by

If It’s On The Internet, It Must Be True

This past week, formerly unknown actress Elyse Porterfield fooled millions playing Jenny, the Dry Erase girl, who quit in a clever hoax. Right now, I guarantee other pranksters are dreaming up new schemes to fool you again. And journalists, who at one time were tasked with protecting the public from such lies, no longer have the same power to block them.

The media has reporters and editors in place to prevent hoaxes from going public. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Some truth, some crap. I think the author goes too far in painting traditional media as all sweetness and light, full of ethical virtue, and Keepers of the Integrity™. The issue with news is that it takes time to gather the often fragmented bits of information, makes sense of it and check that it’s correct. Even though the transmission of information is much faster these days, the old restrictions on gathering still pretty much apply. So in the days before 24/7 news and online reporting, sitting on a story and letting people confirm the information didn’t have the same implications as it does today. So I think there’s a little bit of confusing this inaction with virtue — they were rarely tempted. The Dry-Erase hoax did get Tech Crunch to bite, after all — they ran the story concurrent with reporters following up, not after.

The snippet about Dan Rather “buil[ding] a career after being first to report on the Kennedy assassination” conveniently ignores that his career at CBS ended after a story turned out to be based on fabricated evidence. And it’s not like the mainstream media never reports erroneous information, and worse, repeats it without checking. Al Gore invented the internet, right?

The speed of the internet helps hoaxes spread more rapidly, but it also lets us check with trusted sources faster as well. In the early days of email we had hoaxes, which continue today, but now there are places to check, like Snopes. And Twitter may be a way that a hoax spreads, but it was also an important conduit for information during and after the attack on Mumbai on 2008. The advantage of places with editors, I think, is that there are resources for multiple channels of information, allowing them to cross-check. The real question is the extent to which they will continue to be tempted to break a story without confirming it, knowing that the rest of internet is out there.

We're Gonna Need a Bigger Monitor

Posted on by

Solar System to scale

This page shows a scale model of the solar system, shrunken down to the point where the Sun, normally more than eight hundred thousand miles across, is the size you see it here. The planets are shown in corresponding scale. Unlike most models, which are compressed for viewing convenience, the planets here are also shown at their true-to-scale average distances from the Sun. That makes this page rather large – on an ordinary 72 dpi monitor it’s just over half a mile wide, making it possibly one of the largest pages on the web.

Oblogligation

Posted on by

sciencegeekgirl: The Magic of the Middle Division: Changing classroom norms (#aaptsm10)

There’s just one more talk that I wanted to share with any of you who couldn’t be there – another delightful presentation from Corinne Manogue of Oregon State University. Corinne is a colleague, we’ve both been working on creating new activities for use in physics courses beyond the introductory courses, though I’ve been focusing on the junior years and she’s firmly planted in the sophomore level. Still, I’ve used many of her activities from the sophomore level to enhance our junior course, and I just find her approach inspiring.

I took a “math methods of physics” class from Corinne (er, Prof. Manogue) back in the day, hence my feeling of oblogligation to link to a post about her.