A Venn diagram of the etymology of baseball team names
San Diego Padres
…
Named after the earlier Pacific Coast League team, which in turn was named for the term for Spanish missionaries in the area. Only team with an entirely non-English name.
No Waffling
Pancake sorter
Recipe Substitution
If you have no cat, use a virus instead. probably not said by Erwin Schrödinger
Schrödinger’s intention was to illuminate the paradoxes of the quantum world. But superposition (the existence of a thing in two or more quantum states simultaneously) is real and is, for example, the basis of quantum computing. A pair of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, now propose to do what Schrödinger could not, and put a living organism into a state of quantum superposition.
Note that they are not attempting to put the virus in an alive/dead superposition.
Be a Choosy Mother
Choose to give to Donor’s Choice.
Two physics-y blogs that have set up links are Cosmic Variance and Uncertain Principles
Last year Chad collected more than a monkeydance worth of donations, and he is once again offering various kickbacks for donations exceeding a certain threshold. Cosmic Variance will put your name in lights, if the coin is big enough.
If any other physics blogger has their chapeau in the torus, let me know and I’ll add the link, or you can do so in the comments.
Snap, snap, grin, grin, wink, wink.
Say no more.
Gedanken
Morning Coffee Physics: The Physicist’s Toolbox: Thought Experiments
Physics is an empirical science which means that you can do all the thinking and theorising you want, but at the end of the day, if it doesn’t match the real world experimental results, it’s wrong.
I’ve harped on this before. If you manage an unphysical result or contradiction in your thought experiment, it means your thought is wrong.
See also The Physicist’s Toolbox: Symmetry
In the US, We Pronounce it 'WAAS'
EGNOS ‘Open Service’ available
EGNOS is the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service, which looks to be the European equivalent of WAAS, the Wide-Area Augmentation Service. Ground stations and geostationary satellites give corrections to GPS satellite position, timing and atmospheric time delay, which improves the positioning … if your receiver is compatible.
Satellite positioning and timing errors correspond pretty directly to positioning errors, so constant updating reduces errors. The atmospheric delay is a variable; if you have two frequencies you can figure out the ionosphere delay (it’s dispersive, so having two frequencies give two delays) but commercial GPS units only currently use 1 frequency; this will change with GPS III.
DIY GPS Satellite
It’s only a model.
Found one of these in our group’s mailbox one recent morning.
Building a Model Block IIR(M) Satellite
Best result with titanium and space-hardened electronics heavy card stock.
Bridling the Breeze
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Persistence, Jury-Rigging, and Ingenuity Against All Odds
A Malawian youth, whose family could not afford his school tuition, learns some physics and builds a windmill to generate electricity for his village.
William scoured trash bins and junkyards for materials he could use to build his windmill. With only a couple of wrenches at his disposal, and unable to afford even nuts and bolts, he collected things that most people would consider garbage-slime-clogged plastic pipes, a broken bicycle, a discarded tractor fan-and assembled them into a wind-powered dynamo. For a soldering iron, he used a stiff piece of wire heated in a fire. A bent bicycle spoke served as a size adapter for his wrenches.
Urine Trouble Now
sciencegeekgirl: If a boy pees on the floor and there’s nobody there to see it
The boys’ urinals were often surrounded by a puddle of “liquid.” Were the urinals weeping water? Or were the boys purposely urinating on the floor (as the janitor believed)? And, most importantly, how can we use our good friend SCIENCE to solve this mystery, the teacher asked?
Is there a powder I can sprinkle on the floor that will turn a particular color?
A UV light to shine on the puddles that will fluoresce?It turns out that, yes, there is such a device!
Note that I have not deigned to confirm this effect with my own UV light.
However, I had read about the etched fly “targeting system” discussed; I had charged a friend of my brother’s with the task of finding one of these when he was in Europe. I had read they had been installed in the Amsterdam airport, but he didn’t see any there. This was taken at a restaurant in Berlin
