Monthly Archives: May 2011

Title Research Could Someday Lead to Article Titles Which Do Not Make Misleading Dramatic Claims!

Posted on by

… but this would violate the second law of journalism (sensationalism can never spontaneously decrease), so it will probably never happen.

Antihydrogen could lead to antigravity

Scientist also want to find out if the anti-atoms exhibit antigravity effects. This would mean the atoms would fall up instead of down. Since this would be a violation of the law of conservation of energy it is unlikely, however many scientist still find the idea worth exploring.

IOW, antihydrogen could lead to antigravity if some well-established physical principle turns out to be wrong. It hasn’t been ruled out, so it’s technically not a lie, but amore accurate title like “Gravity properties of antihydrogen to be tested” is way too boring for an article that’s not about bat-boy or some new diet. Which it could be — they could have gone with “Shed ten pounds with new antihydrogen diet!” Boy did they ever blow it on this one.

Pair of Ducks? No, it's a Buttered Cat!

Posted on by

The Buttered Cat Paradox

Those who have tackled the problem as a thought experiment (meaning, no cats were harmed) have come to the conclusion that the buttered cat would stop falling at some point above the floor. Then, as the cat tries to orient its feet against the attraction of the butter to the floor, the cat would begin spinning -and never stop. The result could be called a true perpetual motion machine.

The claim is that the kinetic energy of the buttered (or jellied) cat is converted into rotational energy as the cat hovers; in that sense it is not necessarily an over-unity device since the cat could then slow down as you tapped into that energy.

Score…a Direct Hit!

Posted on by

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

Comet hits and there is a coronal mass ejection. Acausal, though.

NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spotted the ill-fated comet diving toward the sun between Tuesday and Wednesday (May 10 and 11), never to be seen again.

By coincidence, a massive explosion on the sun called a coronal mass ejection also erupted at about the same time.

See Sack

Posted on by

Not sure why the Chip-Scale Atomic Clock (CSAC) is making news again; this seems to be a rehash of news from January, but it’s an opportunity to make a few comments.

One of the sessions I attended at the recent timing conference discussed some of the pros and cons of the new competitors to the traditional quartz oscillator, one being the CSAC and the other being microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). CSACs have a niche because of the desire to optimize on several variables such as cost, power, stability, and startup requirements. A good quartz oscillator, for example, needs a relatively long warmup time, and the ones with good stability are expensive and tend to drift a bit. So there’s room to beat it on some variables, depending on what the user needs vs. what s/he doesn’t care about, e.g. power and size are variables that matter for a portable system but not for a server rack.

One of the observation is that CSACs could soon find their way into computers tied into ultra-high speed networks, because the clock performance becomes a limiting factor in data transfer — you can send data at a higher frequency and you spend less time re-synchronizing the clocks.

Another observation was a reminder that DARPA is currently funding another program to drive the size and power down even further.

Hotels are Going All Hitchhiker

Posted on by

They want to know where their towel is. All of their towels.

RFID Tags Protecting Hotel Towels

A more recent system, still not widespread, is to embed washable RFID chips into the towels and track them that way. The one data point I have for this is an anonymous Hawaii hotel that claims they’ve reduced towel theft from 4,000 a month to 750, saving $16,000 in replacement costs monthly.

Don’t steal any more Beverly Palm Hotel robes, Axel Foley.

Like a Frightened Turtle

Posted on by

Skulls in the Stars: It’s not shrinkage — it’s relativity! (1889)

Einstein’s revelations were preceded by some twenty years of gradual progress, during which time researchers put forth tantalizing hypotheses that came closer and closer to the truth.

One such discovery was made in 1889 by George FitzGerald. To explain a seemingly incomprehensible experimental result, he suggested that objects in motion shrink along their direction of travel. In this post, we will discuss what is now known as the FitzGerald-Lorentz length contraction and explain how FitzGerald fell short of the astonishing ideas that would be conceived by Einstein.

Booby Cam!

Posted on by

I hear they’re think of doing this for tits as well.

Booby Cams Capture Young Seabird Social Lives

Miniature video cameras strapped to the backs of young brown boobies allow researchers to watch how they learn from other seabirds.

The video cameras captured footage of them chasing other juveniles and following adults to feeding areas. The juvenile boobies also mingled with other seabird species, like brown noddies, streaked shearwaters and black-naped terns.

Not to be Confused with that Pullman/Stiller Movie

Posted on by

Uncertain Principles: The Real Point of Zero Point (and not The Point of The Zero Effect)

Zero-point energy is the energy associated with a particle in the lowest possible energy state. Since momentum is related to energy (for particles moving at speeds well below that of light, the kinetic energy of a moving particle is approximately one-half the momentum squared divided by the mass), low energy means low momentum, which means long wavelength. So if we want the lowest-energy state for a particle, we’re looking for the longest wavelength possible.

So what determines the longest wavelength possible?