Spring is here, sa-pring is here
Life is skittles and life is beer
I think the loveliest time of the year
Is the spring, I do, don’t you? ‘course you do
Where Does The Spring Potential Energy Come From?
I dare you to find a physics textbook that doesn’t talk about springs. They are everywhere.
Not quite there yet. But we have chocolate printing, and now 3D printing can make moving parts.
3D printing is a form of additive manufacturing technology where a three dimensional object is created by laying down successive layers of material. 3D printers are generally faster, more affordable and easier to use than other additive manufacturing technologies.
Swing for the Fences. A discussion of Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won
What is the source of home field advantage? Is it one of the usual suspects, or an influence of the crowds on referees?
Take any European football league in which all the teams play each other twice in a season, once at home and once away. Add up the total number of home victories and compare it to the total number of away victories. The ratio will be at least 60:40 in favour of the home sides (often it’s more: in the English Premier League home advantage currently runs at around 63 per cent, in Spain’s La Liga it’s 65 and Italy’s Serie A it’s 67). The advantage holds across almost every major sport, though exactly how big it is tends to vary. Fans are so used to this that they take it for granted their team is much more likely to win on its own turf. They also take it for granted that they know why – it’s because the home crowd is cheering the team on. But there is no evidence for this. In fact, despite a fair amount of research in the top sports science journals, there is no conclusive explanation of what makes teams play better at home. This is the real puzzle about home advantage: everyone knows it exists but no one knows why.
A few days ago I posted a link to a US Flickr and Tweet map. There is now a large set of regions and cities with this information.
Red dots are locations of Flickr pictures. Blue dots are locations of Twitter tweets. White dots are locations that have been posted to both.
A particle physics private eye takes on the great interaction caper
MINERvA was starting to lose her cool. Of all the detectors in all the world, this proton walked into her’s.
After 23 hours of interrogating this proton about what he was doing at the time of the boson exchange, he wasn’t revealing sign one The had detector picked up the proton in the vicinity of the incident. His usual accomplice, the muon, was seen fleeing north, where he was apprehended by MINOS, the adjacent detector. Even with the proton refusing to talk, the greenest rookie could spot a muon and a proton in the final state and tell you this was a case of charged-current quasi-elastic neutrino scattering.
h/t to mooey
You may have read about photographer David Slater, and the tale of some monkey taking a self-potrait with a camera he left unattended. Techdirt wondered who owned the copyright. Monkey Business: Can A Monkey License Its Copyrights To A News Agency?
Technically, in most cases, whoever makes the actual work gets the copyright. That is, if you hand your camera to a stranger to take your photo, technically that stranger holds the copyright on the photo, though no one ever enforces this.
I pointed out the work-for-hire loophole in a tweet, but seriously doubt the macaque was in anyone’s employ. It gets better, though, because Techdirt got a takedown request, and inquired about the reason, given the questionable copyright claim.
Monkeys Don’t Do Fair Use; News Agency Tells Techdirt To Remove Photos
[W]e stand by our original analysis. We do not believe Caters News Agency has a legitimate copyright interest in the photo, and the company is in no position to issue a takedown of the images. Furthermore, even if it does turn out, through some convoluted process, that Caters does have a legitimate copyright interest in the photo, we believe that our use falls squarely into the classical confines of fair use under US copyright law. Thus, we have no plans to remove the photos or make any changes, barring Caters providing us with a sound basis for doing so.
Fukushima: Nuclear power’s VHS relic?
A brief history of nuclear power and the politics that goes along with it, in an attempt to determine whether we opted for designs we use because they were the best, i.e. did the US opt for light water reactors just because we had developed enrichment technology.
There is at least one omission, though.
The top US priority was to develop a reactor capable of powering submarines. A naval officer with a reputation for getting things done, Hyman Rickover, was appointed to lead the task.
Submarine reactors need to be small and compact, and avoid the use of materials such as hot sodium that could prove an explosive hazard.
The light water reactor, with the water under pressure to prevent it from boiling and turning to steam, was Rickover’s choice. It quickly entered service powering the Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine.
The article fails to mention that the USS Sea Wolf (SSN-575), the second nuclear submarine in the US navy, had a sodium-cooled reactor. This kind of reactor has to have a secondary loop to make steam, and that means you run the risk of a primary-to-secondary leak. Sodium + water. As pointed out, and as any chemist or physicist who hangs out with those liberal alkali metals (way over on the left of the periodic table), or anyone who has seen a video knows, bad things™ can happen when you mix them. But the technology wasn’t simply ignored, which puts this account on a bit of shaky ground.