Onion-like headlines in Real-Life
Monthly Archives: June 2011
A Science-is-not-Religion Post. Praise Maxwell!
And another thing… : Science is not my god
Faith in science does tend to be a good deal more practical than faith in many other things. For example, I have faith that, should I jump off a bridge, gravity will ensure my speedy reunion with the ground. I have faith that if I combine hydrogen with oxygen, I will have water. Why? Because these things have been proven, demonstrably, to be true. Theories in science are rarely just flights of fancy – they are usually based on existing principles which have been proven to be correct. Additionally, a key difference between “science” and “blind faith” is that, while “blind faith” refuses to change, “science” redevelops its theories when new, more accurate evidence comes to light, even if that means contradicting something which was earlier thought to be true. For example, should there prove to be no higgs boson particle, scientists will not continue irrationally believing in it, but will instead accept that the hypothesis has been dis-proven, and move on.
Either Luke Skywalker's or Marty McFly's Australian Cousin
Australian built Hoverbike prepares for takeoff
Australian guy builds himself a hoverbike. A hoverbike!
Chris Malloy’s prototype hoverbike has so far not done anything but hover while tied to the ground, but that is in no way stopping its designer from making all kinds of wildly optimistic projections about its performance and availability.
I worry about stability. Primarily of the hoverbike, but also of the users if this thing goes into production. I don’t see a lot of resistance to rolling (rotation around the longitudinal axis), though there is mention of gyros in it. I’m guessing that the optimism of going to production soon, is going to meet up with harsh reality once he is able to do some actual flight tests.
The only video on their web page is a smoke test
Six Thousand Degrees of Separation
Dot Physics: What are the Sources of the Energy Sources
The main sources all trace back to the sun (which has a surface temperature near 6000 ºC)
The interior of the Earth is warm mostly due to gravitational potential energy. Basically, the stuff that formed the Earth was gravitationally attracted and kind of “fell” together. When they collided, they got warmer. There are other contributing factors to the interior temperature of the Earth, but I think this is the biggest one.
Rhett glosses over something here (and admits it in the comment section); radioactive decay is an important process in heating the interior. Early determinations of the age of the earth include a calculation from Lord Kelvin, who assumed cooling of a molten mass and came up with an age of several tens of millions years. Much older than the creationists/Biblical literalists, but not young enough according to the newly minted theory of evolution. Kelvin was unaware of radioactive decay, which keeps the interior warm.
I have one other nit with an otherwise fine post
[W]hy does burning fossil fuels give you energy? How about I say that in the burning process, chemical bonds are broken in such a way that you get energy.
This is a pet peeve of mine. Energy is released in forming bonds. Burning fuels give you energy because you break the existing bonds and form stronger ones.
More Tubespawn
Another Twitter-cartoon marriage made possible by dem tubes: @Peanutweeter
@Peanutweeter matches kinda random Twitter posts with somewhat less than random Peanuts® comic strips by Charles Schulz.
Genius. 140 characters fits nicely into a cartoon balloon. While
I want to carry Stephen Hawking on my back, like “Master Blaster”. He’s the brains, and I’m the brawn until I get tired or he pees on me.
is funny, it’s even better when Linus says it, gesturing maniacally.
MIT Tea
No joke: This is the biggest battery breakthrough ever
The key to this new technology is that the metals that would normally be solids in a conventional battery have been broken into nano-size particles that are suspended in a liquid. The batteries, known as “semi-solid flow cells,” store their power in a black gunk that looks like motor oil, which has earned it the nickname “Cambridge Crude.” Because charge is stored in this liquid, it would be possible to “fuel up” an electric car with charged liquid electrolyte, just like fueling up at a conventional gas pump.
That’s pretty neat.
Shrinking Bob's Head
I posted a pendulum video a while back, right about the same time another movie was getting some exposure, and the latter has gotten a lot of attention on the blogohedron because it’s like, all professionally done, if you like that sort of thing. And my pocket-camera-video tryingtodoitallonmyownwithoutatripod effort came up a bit short (by a factor of about 20,000 so far)
Anyway, I see that some math has appeared: Wave Pendulum Analysis
Igor, Bring Me a Flat, Horizontal Surface
Carts always seem to be at a premium in the lab. They are supposed to be used to transport equipment — the whole reason there are wheels involved — but they often turn into squatters. They take up residence next to an experiment for an extended period of time, often hosting some equipment that’s also supposed to be temporary, such as an oscilloscope, and become the equivalent of a mobile home in a trailer park: Mobile only in name.
Which is why we got a couple of new carts. I assembled them and took the opportunity to give them the equivalent of vanity license plates:
The two numbers are the hyperfine frequency splittings of Cesium (on the left) and Rubidium. To four digits, at least.
The bulkiness of our electric drill/screwdriver meant that the casters blocked access to the screw-holes. I’m not sure who originally said If necessity is the mother of invention, then laziness must be its father, but I didn’t see any reason to tighten 32 big screws by hand, so I kludged this together with help from a few pieces from our socket-wrench set
Now we can race the carts around the hallway, until someone loads them up. Oops, too late.
Doc Obvious Wonders Why This is News
Texas authorities find no bodies after psychic tip
A false tip from a psychic prompted Texas authorities to swarm a rural home searching for a nonexistent mass grave and up to 30 bodies, including those of dismembered children.
(Update) From this report
“We have to take tips like this very seriously,” McNair said.
No, you don’t. The only redeeming part I can see is that the search warrant was not issued based on the tip. That would have been truly scary.
A Headline Query Whose Answer Might Be "Yes"
Could Liquid Nitrogen Help Build Tasty Burgers?
“The freezing followed by the burst of high heat lets you brown the outside without overcooking the inside,” Dr. Myhrvold said. And the deep-frying is supposed to be a technological improvement over the classic White Castle spatula-on-a-griddle technique.
“On a griddle,” he explained, “even when you press a burger with a spatula, you can’t make all of it contact the surface because the edge of the burger is crenellated, with all these nooks and crannies formed by the cylinders of raw meat. But if you put it in hot fat, that fat penetrates and you get a super-thin layer of crispy Maillard browning all the way around those meat fibers.”