It’s not quite “then a miracle occurs,” but there’s a bit of a gap between “blue light stimulates brain Gamma waves” and “people with autism and schizophrenia often lack gamma waves.” So to say that Blue Laser Could Lead to Autism Cure carries with it a disclaimer that this purported cure is in no way imminent.
Big Silicon Balls
Backreaction: Counting Atoms in a Sphere
An overview of the projects that are trying to redefine the kilogram to come up with a better standard.
Related: Round as a Baby’s . . . Nodule
What You're Missing
Flickr: Light pollution: It’s not pretty
The preceding is sarcasm. Orem, UT is hardly a large city. This is intended to highlight the fact that light pollution is a problem everywhere, not just in cities with tens of millions of inhabitants.
Unlike some other forms of pollution, you can’t just pick up your photons when you’re done with them.
Upcoming Events
Act like a T-Rex: eat a lawyer.
May 8th is Act Like a T-Rex Day, legal issues permitting.
They have trademarked the word “T-REX”. Any merchandise with the word “T-REX” anywhere on it according to their Opposition, “is likely to cause confusion as to the source or origin” and “mislead consumers” doing damage to their business
I have a meager, lay understanding of copyright law (because I’ve registered a copyright and have a book listing in the copyright office database, so I’ve read a little on the topic), but I don’t understand trademark law at all. You can trademark a term that’s already in public use (T-Rex) and then keep other people from using it. I want to trademark “The” and watch the royalties flood in.
May 8th is also another holiday, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
The Rogue Nano Rumba-Line Dancer
Nobody can see the one at the end of the line, and (s)he’s doing something different.
Nanophysicists find unexpected magnetic effect
In new research appearing this week in the journal Nature, physicists at Spain’s University of Alicante and at Rice University in Houston have found that single-atom contacts made of ferromagnetic metals like iron, cobalt and nickel behave very differently than do slightly larger versions that are on the order of the devices used in today’s electronic gadgets.
“We’ve found that the last atom in the line, the one out there on the very end, doesn’t want to align itself and behave like we expect it to,” said study co-author Doug Natelson, associate professor of physics and astronomy at Rice. “What this shows is that you can really alter what you think of as a defining property of these metals just by reducing their size.”
Doug tells the story of the collaboration and promises a post on the science.
Update: And has posted it
Hail to the Chief
Click and hold the mouse to create an updraft. Hail becomes larger the longer it is kept in the air. Large hail causes massive damage.
The Man Across the Hall
Every so often the powers that be™ decide that a reorganization would be a good idea, and that some people should change offices. A few years back this was stimulated by one group of people vacating some desirable office space in the main building (they were ordered to relocate to Crystal City by even higher powers that be™) and the decision to occupy that space set off a domino effect wherein our group made a “land grab” for some extra space, in which we secured offices with windows (yay!) while hanging on to the offices we we already occupying.
We needed the space, too, because, we were getting set to hire two new employees and were also running out of storage space. But storage space is a low priority in the eyes of the beancounters, so you can’t use that need to justify being assigned new space, and can’t fully depend on it to defend space you already have, especially when it’s empty space, for equipment you are planning to buy (logic is a puny weapon against Bureaucracy-Man, and the future is a myth, since it can’t be documented). And since we knew that somebody would do the math (X number of people left, so there must be some empty office space around here) we had to protect and defend the extra space somehow. That’s where Tuttle came in. The empty office would belong to Tuttle.
Jonathan Tuttle is from an episode of M*A*S*H, and is doubly fictitious — within the TV story, he’s also a made-up character, which was a criterion I used in selecting the name. (Another name that would fit this requirement was George Kaplan, from North by Northwest, but we already had someone with that name at work!) Much like the TV episode, the idea was that if anyone asked, one could always come up with an excuse for Tuttle not being around (“He’s in the lab,” “He’s gone up to Building 1,” or even “He’s at a conference/on vacation this week.”)
Tuttle’s office started out as a spare office, complete with a desk and computer and our networked printer, with office supplies and some other minor items on the shelves but the furniture was eventually moved out for someone to use and was replaced with heavy-duty shelving. To keep up appearances, I took a picture of the office and edited it so I could place it in the door’s window and have it look like it was still an office when the door was closed.
And that’s what you see here — a photo in the window. That’s a printer and an old iMac on a table, but what’s really in the office is a bunch of shelving with equipment and supplies. And the printer — we still use it for that. A number of people have been fooled into thinking it’s an office. That red dot on the door trim was a mark left by some beancounter marking it as occupied office space. The equipment staging area (we don’t call it storage) next door, which was never camouflaged, lacks that mark.
Forty Winks
What is How to Measure Sleep?
As we sleep, our brains pass through a series of stages, like shifting between gears in a car. The most famous is REM sleep, characterized by fluttering eye movements. But other categories include light sleep (stage S1), stable sleep (S2), slow-wave sleep (SS), and even being awake (W), each identified by a signature from polysomnography (PSG), in which electrodes record from the scalp, eyelids, and heart.
Curiously, Not From The Onion
Cruise Ship Hero Fought Off Pirates With Deck Chair
Wyn Rowlands was celebrating his 62nd birthday with a dream cruise onboard the MSC Melody near the Seychelle Islands when he spotted armed pirates in a speedboat trying to clamber on to the vessel.
Quick-thinking Wyn, a retired engineer from Bangor-on-Dee, picked up a deck-chair and flung it down at the gang before raising the alarm.
In unrelated news, the TSA has outlawed deck chairs and strollers from airplane flights, if they are larger than a 3 oz bottle.
It's Always Better with Lasers
Fastest Camera Ever Built Uses Lasers
Spoiler
The camera works by illuminating objects with a laser that emits a different infrared frequency for every single pixel, allowing them to custom-amplify a signal that would otherwise be too dim to see.