Close-up pictures of things
Monthly Archives: August 2011
At the Late Night Double Feature Picture Show
No, this is not a fuzzy image of the screen of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Mick Jagger’s (or anyone’s) lip-print, for that matter. It’s a profile of a laser beam. A not particularly friendly laser beam. A nice beam would be round, and its profile would be a zeroeth order Gaussian, but semiconductor lasers don’t always play nice when it comes to beam profiles. The plan was to send this into a single-mode fiber, and single-mode fibers want that nice round beam, and higher-order modes don’t couple very well.
And it was doing it on purpose, just to make my life difficult.
Fun Guy Physics
Obama's Goodfellas Moment
(Sorry, foul-mouthed politics spleen-vent time. No physics here)
There’s a scene in Goodfellas where Sonny, the sniveling restaurant owner, partners up with Paul Cicero, the mob boss, to give him leverage to deal with Tommy, one of Paulie’s underlings. Sonny thinks his troubles are over. Henry, in a voiceover, explains how this is really an asymmetric arrangement:
Now the guy’s got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with the bill? He can go to Paulie. Trouble with the cops, deliveries, Tommy, he can call Paulie. But now the guy’s gotta come up with Paulie’s money every week, no matter what. Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? Fuck you, pay me.
So obviously Obama is Sonny here, having negotiated his way into a bad deal, right? No. What I hope for — what I want — is that Obama is Paulie. For some time the GOP has been maintaining that what’s been standing in between us and prosperity are low taxes for people with large incomes and the removal of “uncertainty” from the business world: Don’t raise taxes on the job creators! Give us a visit from the confidence fairy! Well, the deals have been made. Obama can now ask, “Where are my jobs?”
S&P downgrades us? Fuck you, pay me.
Stock market tanks? Fuck you, pay me.
Repubs try any kind of distraction? Fuck you, pay me.
Other excuses? Fuck you, pay me.
That’s what I want. But I don’t think it’s going to happen. Anyone paying attention to recent events will know that the democrats absolutely suck ass at controlling the message and explaining what they’re doing and intend to do. Nobody believes them anyway. There is little history to indicate that anyone is going to grow a spine and start calling the republicans out for boning 98% of us.
Several people have done a careful analysis of the debt deal and shown it’s not as horrible as the media have reported it. That Hillary would not have been treated any better and because the tea party was willing to trash the economy even worse. That Obama got about the best deal he could have because he was the only adult in the room. There’s faint hope that this is some rope-a-dope and he’ll eventually come out swinging. None of that matters. Politics is perception, and as long as the message is that Obama caved and the dems lost, that what people will come to know. The media are complicit, because they will not challenge lies and spin from the right and force people to deal in facts. The dems have to control the message, loudly and forcefully, and they aren’t doing it.
If there’s a strategy being employed, I don’t see it. Cooperating when your opponent continually stabs you in the back is a losing proposition from basic game theory. If the democrats are going to rely on voters knowing that the republicans are the worse alternative, then they have already forgotten the lesson of 2010: there is an option to not voting republican, and that is to stay home. It’s a horrible option, but it’s what happens when the leaders don’t step up and lead. The left didn’t do nearly enough to energize the voters that elected them in 2008; Obama had accomplishments before the midterm, but the democrats were too meek in proclaiming them. By not controlling the message, voters were allowed to focus on what didn’t happen, got disheartened and too many switched or stayed home on election day.
That can’t be allowed to happen again. The republicans have already shown us what their plans are for the country, and it’s ugly. Obama needs to win office again, and because congress has been an obstacle, we need a better one. To get there, this wishy-washy nonsense has got to stop. The republicans aren’t interested in cooperation, so there’s no point in pretending any longer. Denounce the people who are causing the difficulties and tell us how you are going to fix the problems. Cite chapter and verse of how the right has been an obstacle instead of thanking them for superficial cooperation. How they have not proposed any jobs legislation. How their political feet-dragging has encumbered us all. If you have to, fire your speechwriters. The right has been very good at scapegoating and laying blame for everything. They’ve been too successful at it — loudly pretending to hate socialism but loving government subsidies and ending regulation that socializes the cost of clean air and water, pretending to hate the elite while enabling the rich and powerful to have their way with the rest of us. It’s time to pound on the table and say enough is enough.
Those Evil Things
I think the analogous topic for physics is radiation: that all radiation is a bad, evil, dangerous thing, when radiation is all around us. Visible light is radiation, as are radio waves, and all objects emit radiation in the context of blackbody radiation — the most common experience being that moderately hot things radiate noticeably in the infrared and sometimes in the visible part of the spectrum.
There are other basic, common misconceptions, like things needing an impetus to keep moving, and some more targeted ones, like insulation heats things up. But I think the connection here is in the “it’s evil” misunderstanding.
The Wise Gyroscope
Abstract: Owls have a curious variability in the postrotatory head nystagmus following abrupt angular deceleration. Owls can exhibit a remarkable head stability during angular movement of the body about any axis passing through the skull. The vestibular apparatus in the owl is bigger than in man, and a prominent crista neglecta is present. The tectorial membrane, the cupula, and the otolithic membranes of the utricle, saccule and lagena are all “attached” to surfaces in addition to the surfaces bearing hair cells; these attachments are very substantial in the utricular otolithic membrane and in the cupula.
I want to say side-fumbling is almost completely eliminated, but I will link to the story instead.
Previously we have seen chicken-head stability.
Bonus: slo-mo landing
The Problem with Not Physics
Even something as fundamental as Newton’s law of gravity is ultimately an approximation. Textbook authors dutifully write down the famous law without remarking that it results in infinite forces when the two attracting objects get infinitely close together. Never mind that infinite forces are a sure sign that your theory has gone up in smoke: in the current crop of textbooks sitting on my desk, not one mentions the obvious pathology.
To quote the fake president from Dave: Okay, let’s get right to the guts of it: every one of these accusations is absolutely true.
I can’t find fault with them, at least.
Sure, Edison (and perhaps as or more importantly, his staff) knew Ohm’s law and that hot things glowed (which is blackbody radiation). The details of why were far less important than those two models. It’s true that probing the question of Mach’s principle (at what does a gyroscope point?) led to general relativity, but we have that model without the answer to the question.
Physics, like all of science, tries to make models to explain how the universe behaves. It’s not a quest for the true nature of things — that’s metaphysics (and in case this gets translated into hipster, no, that’s not ironic). It may be a shortcoming that this isn;t driven home more forcefully, but it’s not an inherent flaw of science.
So I contend that it doesn’t matter. What he’s complaining about isn’t inherently a problem with physics or with physics education. But the author then acknowledges this, which leaves one to scratch their head and wonder what the point of the article is.
After decades — indeed, centuries — of employing such tricks, physicists have forgotten that they are modelling phenomena, not necessarily uncovering Divine Truth.
No Cats Were Harmed in the Making of this Animation
Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity Rover) Mission Animation
Some Esplainin'
“Lucy” look-alikes honour Lucille Ball’s 100th birthday
Sporting upswept hairdos and blue and white polka dot dresses, the crowd of 915 Lucy Ricardos set to establish the first Guinness world record in her honour. It was all part of the annual Lucy Fest in Jamestown, which drew fans from as far away as Australia to the normally sleepy town of 30,000 people in upstate New York.
My folks grew up near Jamestown and I’ve got plenty of relatives in the area. I’ve gone there for numerous family reunions/vacation but skipped this year; the nieces have outgrown the charm of a sleepy town and even sleepier smaller towns around the lake. Reunion is in July so we miss Lucy-fest anyway. Not sure I’d want to cope with that.
But the kicker here is “upstate New York.” “Upstate” as used by many is not a geographical term. It means “not in NY City.” Otherwise you might think of “upstate” as being up — or north— of NY city. And some distance north, too, so it’s not “just outside of the city.” Like the capitol district, Albany/Schenectady/Troy, and points north. You can include areas to the west, like Utica and Syracuse. But Jamestown? It’s at the south end of Lake Chautauqua, southwest of Buffalo and just east of Erie, PA (about about a 45-minute drive) and not even a half-hour drive into Pennsylvania when going south. You’ve really conveyed no information by geographically dividing the state into “the city” and the other 99% of the area that comprises it.
Gulp
‘Gulp’ is a short film created by Sumo Science at Aardman, depicting a fisherman going about his daily catch. Shot on location at Pendine Beach in South Wales, every frame of this stop-motion animation was shot using a Nokia N8, with its 12 megapixel camera and Carl Zeiss optics. The film has broken a world record for the ‘largest stop-motion animation set’, with the largest scene stretching over 11,000 square feet.