On the Periodic Table, that is. Fun with the alkali metals.
I’ve witnessed a pretty nice Rubidium reaction, when I was cleaning out the oven we used to make an atomic beam. The oven was little more than a pipe with a hole in it, along with a removable plug for refilling/cleaning access, and heater wire wrapped around the outside. A little squirt of water into the tube, and BOOM! Turns out there was a macroscopic bit of unoxidized Rb left inside. Good times.
It’s that point on the orbit again: Talk like a physicist day. In case you need to brush up on your vocabulary, you can refer to my original post and its follow-up.
It’s getting much harder to come up with new examples, which means in physics-talk I’m approaching a local maximum in entropy.
Today was chosen as Talk Like a Physicist Day because it’s Einstein’s birthday, as well as Pi day in the US date format: 3/14 (Just wait 5 years and it will be precision Pi day: 3/14/15). So here’s some Einstein.
The New Yorker: Time Bandits
What were Einstein and Gödel talking about?
Bonus Einstein: at National Geographic
Brooklyn Dem Felix Ortiz wants to ban use of salt in New York restaurants
“No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of any food,” the bill reads.
Now, I know I’ve tried to make the case that food preparation, as practiced by most people, is not science, this does not change the fact that what happens in the preparation of food is actual chemistry. And that if you change the ingredients, you change the food. Note that “no salt” is not the same as “no sodium.” Potassium chloride is still a salt, it’s just not table salt. And the bill says “salt in any form.”
I understand the intent is probably to eliminate the excess salt in some foods, but the choice of adding salt, or not, to a food after it has been prepared is not the same as eliminating it during the preparation. In bread, for example, it plays a chemical role”
By mixing with salt, wheat flour produced gluten from gliadin and glutenin whose elastic property is characteristic in bread and noodles.
and it has more roles, too, other than taste. (Hmmm, there’s a salt manufacturer’s association. Of course there is.)
Add to this the fact there is salt already present in many foods. Can you add eggs to a recipe without running afoul of the law? Cheese has salt in it, too. Remember, it’s “salt in any form.” What a stupid proposal.
Maps as metaphors.
He was on the other night, but you can travel through time (or not) and see the video: The Colbert Report and Sean’s post on the experience
Abstruse Goose: Reasonable Expectation
I’ve heard there are groups that get together to swap shopper cards on occasion, just to stick it to the corporate man.
Four Bronx buddies facing year in jail after ‘hitting’ off-duty transit cop – with a snowball!
I don’t want any long-lost friends from grade school deciding to have me arrested for hitting them with a snowball.
Lindsay Lohan wants $100M over E-Trade ad
Lohan’s lawyer, Stephanie Ovadia, said the actress has the same single-name recognition as Oprah or Madonna.
…
“They used the name Lindsay,” Ovadia said. “They’re using her name as a parody of her life. Why didn’t they use the name Susan? This is a subliminal message. Everybody’s talking about it and saying it’s Lindsay Lohan.”
Yeah, right. I’m barely aware of who Lindsay Lohan is, and I’m more than happy to testify that I did not think of her when I saw the commercial. I didn’t associate her with the commercial until now; besides, they said ‘milkaholic,’ not ‘attention whore.’
A really funny thing is that because I’m a geek, and since Lindsay/Lindsey is a fairly common name, I actually checked a baby-name database (requires java to be enabled) and Lindsay and Lindsey are much more popular names than Susan these days and have been for a while now. As far as single-name recognition goes, Oprah doesn’t crack the top 1000 and Madonna never got used on more than a few dozen babies a year and dropped off the radar by the ’70s. i.e. those are recognized single names because the people a) have unusual names and are b) actually quite famous
(As an aside, especially to Johnny Cash fans, if you check the stats for the names, you can restrict them to one gender or the other. There actually have been boys named Sue.)