Drunk People Like To Have Sex At Holiday Parties, Says Science
[S]everal doctors report that people like to get drunk at office holiday parties and have casual sex.
The hell you say.
As You Like It
How to Reheat Soggy Leftover Pizza
There are so many advantages to using this method. There’s no insufferable wait for an oven to preheat (10 minutes in real time is 45 minutes in “I have the munchies” time); you don’t waste all that extra energy (you’re welcome, Planet Earth); and most important of all, you get perfectly crisp crust. In fact, you’ll get a crust that’s hotter and crispier than it was when it was first served.
I personally don’t have a problem with cold pizza, but I’ve been repeatedly told that I’m weird and this could be one of the reasons. I’m also a Gemini, so I never know what to expect.
US Road Fatality Map
US road accident casualties: every one mapped across America
369,629 people died on America’s roads between 2001 and 2009.
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You can zoom around the map using the controls on the left or search for your town using the box on the right – and the key is on the top left. Each dot represents a life
Just Don't Do It
How to not get caught plagiarizing
Teachers hate plagiarism more than they hate stepping on puppies and kittens. If there are two students in a class, and one has plagiarized an assignment and one has crushed some puppies and kittens, and the teacher only has time to turn one of them it to the administration, they’ll turn in the plagiarizer.
Yes and No
Physicists find charge separation in a molecule consisting of two identical atoms
Physicists from the University of Stuttgart show the first experimental proof of a molecule consisting of two identical atoms that exhibits a permanent electric dipole moment. This observation contradicts the classical opinion described in many physics and chemistry textbooks.
This statement bugs me for two reasons. One is the “contradicts classical opinion” statement, because statements like this usually are a matter of context, and the contradiction occurs when you strip the context. In physics, most equations come with caveats. There are few that apply universally; most are derived under a set of assumptions or meant to apply under specific conditions. However, there are some who try to apply the equations under conditions that violate the assumptions and should not be surprised when the equation fails. And I think this is one of those cases. The “no permanent electric dipole moment” argument is one of symmetry. As long as the symmetry is maintained, there is no EDM, and electrons distributions a these cases should ensure that symmetry. But what happened in this research is a way was found to violate that symmetry — by putting one of the pair of atoms into a Rydberg state (high energy level, maximum angular momentum for the state, which makes the atom physically large). The electron is far from the nucleus and the other electrons can’t compensate. That’s pretty neat, and I think we should celebrate that, rather than the sensationalistic “They said it couldn’t be done!” half-truth.
The other part is the use of “permanent”. This is an excited state. It’s not permanent, though Rydberg states tend to be long-lived. Though that may also be a terminology issue, with permanent simply meaning lives long enough to be measured.
Here’s a better (IMO) write-up on the phenomenon.
I Can't Believe it's not CSI!
A New Perspective on Crime Scenes
Moving in the direction of what we see in fictional shows.
In 2009, to better record crime scenes, the New York City Police Department began using the Panoscan, a camera that creates high-resolution, 360-degree panoramic images. Each panorama takes between 3 to 30 minutes to produce, depending on the available light, and is added to a database where detectives can access it. Before the switch to the Panoscan, crime scene images sometimes took days to process. Now, soon after the photos are posted, investigators can point and click over evidence from a scene that they might have missed in the hectic hours after the crime.
Warning: graphic images
'Tis the Season
The Bohring Part of Physics is Wrong
Overall I agree — there are a lot of people who seem to remember the Bohr atom but not that it’s wrong. Unfortunately, some of them seem to want to build their own personal physics theories on it. I understand the motivation to teach it — there is an historical context, and it’s an opportunity to dip one’s toe into some quantum theory rather than jumping into the deep end.
One nit, though. Even thinking of electrons as “buzzing around the nucleus” still implies a trajectory and motion, and you get into trouble trying to reconcile those classical notions with angular momentum, which is one of the failures of the Bohr model: the S orbital has no orbital angular momentum.
I do like the orbital ballon animals, but I don’t recommend a science clown doing them for kids’ parties.
Slingshots and Arrows of Outrageous Video
What happens when you take the slingshot guy and add in a high speed camera? You get an awesome video.
Shouldn't this be Stereoscopic?
This is a piece created to question whether it was possible to film animation in realtime. Part of my CSM 3rd year disseration project I was looking at proto animation (really early basic animation) in contemporary design.