Physics Wins Again

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It’s all about the energy balance

Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds

His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most — not the nutritional value of the food.
The premise held up: On his “convenience store diet,” he shed 27 pounds in two months.
For a class project, Haub limited himself to less than 1,800 calories a day. A man of Haub’s pre-dieting size usually consumes about 2,600 calories daily. So he followed a basic principle of weight loss: He consumed significantly fewer calories than he burned.
His body mass index went from 28.8, considered overweight, to 24.9, which is normal. He now weighs 174 pounds.

2/3 of his calories from junk food. He improved his cholesterol, too.

Misery Loves Company

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Stanford’s once elegant, $500,000 sculpted clock/fountain sits glumly in storage

I guess I’m not the only one running into trouble with a fountain clock (and I have more on that, later).

The clock sculpture is made of a black granite turntable on an asymmetrical base that revolved once a year and was in constant motion 24 hours a day. To support it, and create a perfectly level surface for the heavy slab, Stanford sank five concrete columns deep into the earth.
Powered by electricity, it ran on a mechanical system with custom gears that were submerged in running water, according to Susan Roberts-Manganelli, manager of collections for Stanford’s Cantor Center for Visual Arts.

Wear Your Safety Goggles

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Because this story might cause something to get into your eyes

Vietnam War bracelets come full circle

Air Force Capt. James Hivner was 60 miles north of Hanoi on Oct. 5, 1965, when his F-4 fighter was hit. He dropped his bombs onto the ammunition dump he was targeting and ejected from the burning plane.

Hivner was quickly captured and endured nearly eight years of brutality. He was beaten and whipped, starved, and held in near-total isolation. In 1973, he was one of 590 American POWs in Vietnam released as part of the cease-fire agreement that ended the war.

“I was in the hospital recovering when I started getting these little packages,” Hivner said.

Inside each was a bracelet with his name etched on it and a note of thanks.

Through the years, the 79-year-old retired colonel has received scores of bracelets. The most recent came last Memorial Day. He keeps them in a shoebox.

Going Through a Phase

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A Phase Transition for Light

When a laser beam is intense enough, it can interact with the air around it in ways that lead to surprising effects. According to computer simulations to be published in the 12 November Physical Review Letters, the beam can act like a gas of quantum particles (fermions) or like a liquid droplet–and switch between the two as intensity is increased. Observing this transition in the lab would help researchers confirm that they understand the behavior of high intensity lasers in air, which they hope to use for improved transmission of signals across long distances.

It's Like Building a Bridge

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Uncertain Principles: Physics Is All About Analogies

I’ve got a little speech about this that I give when I talk about simple harmonic oscillators in the intro mechanics class, that I started giving because I got sick of the students giving me pitying looks when I went on about masses on springs. Because, really, who gives a damn about masses on springs?

Of course, any physicist knows that the reason we spend time talking about masses on springs is not because masses on springs are inherently fascinating, but because so many systems that are interesting can be made to look like masses on springs. That is, there is an analogy to be made between the behavior of a really simple system that we can solve exactly (the mass-on-a-spring problem) and much more complicated systems that we would really like to be able to solve exactly.

This goes along with Every Problem Looks Like a Nail, my link to brief comment on an xkcd cartoon: To first order, everything is an harmonic oscillator.

In science, we build models. Analogies are pre-fab models, based on an already-existing floor plan. Or, in the Feynman context of discussing magnets

I really can’t do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else that you’re more familiar with, because I don’t understand it in terms of anything else you’re more familiar with.

to put a concept in terms of concepts you do understand, and to use another analogy, it’s a bridge to a concept you understand.

Brother Maynard! Bring Up the Holy Hand Grenade!

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Radioactive rabbit trapped at Hanford

Workers first found contaminated rabbit droppings last week in the 300 Area, said Todd Nelson, spokesman for Washington Closure Hanford, the Department of Energy contractor cleaning up Hanford.

Several rabbits were trapped and the one was found to be highly contaminated with radioactive cesium.

I wonder what superpowers (of a non-breeding nature) you would get if bitten by a radioactive rabbit?

Rotten Burgers

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The Burger Lab: Revisiting the Myth of The 12-Year Old McDonald’s Burger That Just Won’t Rot (Testing Results!)

Dozens of other examples exist, and most of them come to the same conclusion: McDonald’s hamburgers don’t rot.

The problem with coming to that conclusion, of course, is that if you are a believer in science (and I certainly hope you are!), in order to make a conclusion, you must first start with a few observable premises as a starting point with which you form a theorem, followed by a reasonably rigorous experiment with controls built in place to verify the validity of that theorem.
Thus far, I haven’t located a single source that treats this McDonald’s hamburger phenomenon in this fashion. Instead, most rely on speculation, specious reasoning, and downright obtuseness to arrive at the conclusion that a McDonald’s burger “is a chemical food[, with] absolutely no nutrition.”

Let the Warm Fuzzies Begin

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In case your week wasn’t bad enough:

Money for Scientific Research May Be Scarce With a Republican-Led House

In the Republican platform, Pledge to America, the party vows to cut discretionary nonmilitary spending to 2008 levels. Under that plan, research and development at nonmilitary agencies — including those that sponsor science and health research — would fall 12.3 percent, to $57.8 billion, from the Mr. Obama’s request of $65.9 billion for fiscal year 2011.

’cause what has science ever done for us? (You know, if you squint, the elephant looks like an insane clown posse mask)

This, on top of the continuing resolution that is cramping my style at work. There are only a few things that congress has to do each year, and one of them is pass the budget. Don’t let ’em leave Washington until it gets done. Wanna go on vacation? No. Wanna campaign? No. Do your effing job first.

(at the request of J)

edit to add, since it’s sort of related: Where Drugs Come From: The Numbers

You cut government research dollars and you reduce university research, which is an important source of new drug treatments, especially novel ones.