At first I thought the World Cup had been overrun by swarms of bees, and we had solved the colony collapse conundrum. (and just didn’t notice the tiny Gone to the World Cup signs)
Option B: Call Customer Service
The Oatmeal: Why I’d rather be punched in the testicles than call customer service.
AFAICT, the only step missing is where the disembodied voice tells you to key in your account number, and then when you eventually get a live person, they immediately ask you for your account number. Because the squirrels in the pneumatic-tube message delivery system have delayed the information.
I Get No Kick from Champagne
Or did you mean a real song, like the Camptown Ladies?
Two black holes that are close enough will mutually orbit and eventually spiral inward toward each other, sending off ever-stronger gravitational waves (ripples in spacetime), until they collide and merge into a larger black hole. If the gravitational waves radiate mostly in one direction at the time of the merger, they “kick” the new black hole in the opposite direction. But some simulations have shown an “anti-kick” following the initial kick–the new black hole shoots away but soon slows down. Researchers haven’t had a clear physical explanation for the anti-kick.
Daffy Physics
Skulls in the Stars: You could learn a lot from a ducky: the van Cittert-Zernike theorem
Early this year, some colleagues of mine published a short note pointing out that one can visualize a fundamental result from optical coherence theory, the van Cittert-Zernike theorem, by watching the waves a group of ducks generate when they splash into a pond!
Building Illusions
Amazing 3D Projections on Buildings
NuFormer is a company in the Netherlands that specializes in outdoor advertising of a very peculiar sort — done on the faces of buildings. Real buildings are mapped and modeled in 3D, and then animations are created using those models and projected back onto the building. The result is incredibly lifelike — it nearly fools the eye — and whoever designs these animations does an amazing job of taking advantage the buildings’ nooks and crannies to make things look like they’re really happening in 3D space.
The N States of America
If Puerto Rico were to become the 51st state—and granted, that’s at least four ifs away—federal law requires that a new star be added to the American flag. One can’t help but wonder: Where would we put it?
There’s a flag generator which allows you to vary the number of stars from 1 to 100. There is no “valid pattern” for 29, 69 or 87 stars — none of the desired symmetries are possible — and a few of the other patterns look like “why don’t you admit two states at a time” (like 79, 89 and 92)
Solving the Resolving
Bad Astronomy: Resolving the iPhone resolution
In other words, at 12 inches from the eye, Jobs claims, the pixels on the new iPhone are so small that they exceed your eye’s ability to detect them. Pictures at that resolution are smooth and continuous, and not pixellated.
However, a display expert has disputed this. Raymond Soneira of DisplayMate Industries, was quoted both in that Wired article and on PC Mag (and other sites as well) saying that the claims by Jobs are something of an exaggeration: “It is reasonably close to being a perfect display, but Steve pushed it a little too far”.
This prompted the Wired article editors to give it the headline “iPhone 4’s ‘Retina’ Display Claims Are False Marketing”. As it happens, I know a thing or two about resolution as well, having spent a few years calibrating a camera on board Hubble. Having looked this over, I disagree with the Wired headline strongly, and disagree (mildly in one case and strongly in another) with Soneira. Here’s why.
Jobs’s claim is 300 dpi at 12 inches. I remember this as 600 dpi at the nearpoint of ~6 inches (15 cm), which is the same angular resolution. Closer than this and most adults can’t focus; your nearpoint is generally larger if you are older. Which is the same claim, and an explanation as to why 300-600 dpi is generally considered photo quality for images that are printed, and 1200 dpi is the highest resolution you’d ever need.
The Greens of Summer
Using geotagging to determine what tourists photograph vs what the locals photograph.
Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).
Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).
Yellow points are pictures where it can’t be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven’t taken pictures anywhere for over a month). They are probably tourists but might just not post many pictures at all.
Go IIIIth and Multiply
How to multiply, Roman-numeral style. A Different Kind of Multiplication
It is often said that an important advantage of the decimal notation over the Roman one is that makes multiplication of numbers much easier. Adding CLXXVII to XXIII may be relatively straightforward–but how about multiplying the two?
What Superman Sees
This is me (female subject) saying “både” (“both”). The sequence is an excerpt from a 20 second X-Ray film registred at the Danderyd Hospital in Stockholm in March 1997.
In this sequence I noticed that the lips form an interesting image as the mouth opens; I assume it’s from lipstick of uneven thickness and application, which can be seen when the mouth is fully open. I wonder what kind of heavy elements are in there that help screen higher-energy photons. The effect is absent for the male subject (and apparently “pion” in Swedish means “peony” rather than “meson made of up and down quarks.” Silly Swedes.)