Silencing demonstrates the tight coupling of motion and object appearance. Simply by changing the retinotopic coordinates— moving the object or the eyes—it is possible to silence awareness of visual change, causing objects that had once been obviously dynamic to suddenly appear static.
Fluffy is Puffy, Forever
Why your IT department’s password policy is probably wrong and unnecessarily user-unfriendly.
Overheard in the Lab of the Day
A colleague was whistling the marching tune one hears in The Bridge in on the River Kwai, and after I asked him if we were suddenly in the British Army, I wondered what the name of the song was. Luckily, there’s a way to find such things out, called the internet (which is apparently a series of tubes.) Turns out it’s called The Colonel Bogey March, and the Wikipedia entry implies it has some interesting (not G-rated) lyrics, which it does.
Drop the Chalupa!
Florida Professor Arrested for Having a “Suspicious” Bagel on a Plane
A Florida professor was arrested and removed from a plane Monday after his fellow passengers alerted crew members they thought he had a suspicious package in the overhead compartment.
That “suspicious package” turned out to be keys, a bagel with cream cheese and a hat.…
Monday’s incident is another example of other passengers essentially becoming the authority on terrorist activity on planes.
Got this from Daring Fireball, not Schneier (I suspect it will be there soon*), and Gruber had a comment:
“Suspicious Bagels” would be a good name for a bagel store.
I think it would be a good name for a band.
* and he will point out that when you have amateurs doing your security, that what you get is amateur security.
Here, Fishy Fish!
Firs for the Fish (and the Fishermen)
Leftover Christmas trees used as fish habitats in lakes, somewhat like old ships being sunk and used as artificial reefs.
The trees are taken to a different lake each year, where volunteers bundle them and secure them to the lake bed. Within days, the newly denuded branches become covered with algae, which attract aquatic insects, fish and, ultimately, fishermen.
The incentive to get volunteers?
“If they help, we give them the GPS coordinates of the trees,” Mr. Mitchell said of the volunteers, many of whom are anglers. “You can go right to the spot, and it’ll be good fishing there.”
Lego Letterpress
[T]hese two graphic designers have put Lego to yet another wonderfully off-label use by constructing a working letterpress printer out of the bricks. By clicking smooth Lego tiles into place on plastic baseboards and inking the plates, they create handmade prints with an 8-bit aesthetic.
Something for the Computer Toolbox
Overheard at Lunch of the Day
We said farewell to a colleague earlier this week, a physicist who has decided to go to grad school. His boss was sorry to see him go, and not just because filling out the paperwork to hire someone new is a pain.
Anyway, the two physics PhD’s in attendance gave him some grad school advice: even if you desire to do experiments, don’t stop studying theory.
It’s common to divide physicists into two groups: theorists and experimentalists. But that’s not really true. The reality of physics research is that there are physicists who do theory, and physicists who do experiment and theory. Learning theory is unavoidable if you want to do experiments, because you have to understand what the experiment means and evaluate the data in terms of some model. I think the physicists who do experiments declare themselves as experimentalists because that’s what distinguishes them form someone who works solely on theory (and, to be fair, theory work by the theorists can go into more far depth with really hairy math and get just plain weird, as long as they don’t have to worry about how to come up with a test for it). The misconception the new student might have, that if s/he’s going to work in a lab then theory can be ignored, is a setup for difficulties down the road.
New! Diffraction-Free!
New material blocks light from exhibiting diffraction
In the new material that the researchers made, there is no mechanism by which the diffraction is compensated. Instead, the material simply doesn’t allow diffraction to occur—we will get to how this occurs later—meaning that the light field can’t expand or contract. Indeed, what you put in is exactly what you get out, independent of the light intensity, making this very different from a normal soliton.
Tweedle Beetle Battle
Last week Rhett introduced me to Hex Bugs, and I had to go out and buy a starter kit. Rhett’s thing is taking video and doing physics analysis. Mine is slow-motion:
The bugs vibrate, as you might be able to tell, and the angled legs give them a forward motion bias from the shaking. They even go up an incline of ten or 20 degrees. I tested three bugs in the hallway, where they were free to roam; one had a tracking bias clockwise, another anti-clockwise, and the third ran pretty straight. The legs appear to be silicone, so it’s not easy to change how they are bent (elastic deformation) to see if you can change that.
There are other form factors as well. More on that as my wallet is drained.