The 9 kinds of physics seminar
I know this is humor, but I have to say that I’ve attended talks by Nobel prize-winners that were quite good. It probably helped that they were atomic physics prize-winners, though.
A Wildcat on the Streets …
NASA is Special (But Not Because of This)
Two of the many stories about the shutdown I’ve run across mention NASA (because several of the people on my twitter and RSS feeds are in astronomy-related fields), so that’s a common thread, and makes the stories slightly more aligned with my own, as opposed to the people working at e.g. NIH.
I cannot volunteer my time to work on NASA business during the furlough
What may come as a surprise to many is the following statement from the letter I received informing me of what I can and cannot do during the furlough: “During the furlough, you will be in a nonpay, nonduty status. During this time, you will not be permitted to serve NASA as an unpaid volunteer.”
How many federal agencies, for that matter, how many employers have to tell their employees “I’m sending you home without pay for an indefinite period of time and you are strictly prohibited from doing any work for the company/organization on your own time and without compensation?”
History Repeats Itself, and NASA Bears the Brunt of It
Before the actual shutdown, the threat of a furlough was a dank, dark cloud hanging over that work. It was hard to be hopeful about the future, knowing that at any minute we might all have to drop what we were doing and go home, for an unknown length of time. That hit a lot of folks very hard; they wanted to do their jobs. It wasn’t just worrying over paying the bills, it was actually not doing the work that had so many people upset.
The people at NASA are not alone in this, in terms of these circumstances and how they feel about it. Not that the articles are claiming this, mind you, but just in case one reads such stories and is tempted to think it’s an isolated case. Phil hits the nail on the head when he speaks of the dank, dark cloud, and how people really want to get the job done. Les mentions it in terms of unpaid time, and I have long suspected that many of my scientist, engineer and technician (and support staff) colleagues have worked more hours than went on the timecard, just because getting the job done, and done right, is important to them. I know scientists in other parts of the government who feel the same way. NASA may have some different rules in place, but there are parts of government where this rule about not volunteering your time is not limited to the shutdown — unpaid overtime is a no-no. I hope Les doesn’t get in trouble for admitting to doing it. I will neither confirm nor deny the fact that I’ve done so.
The admonition against volunteering your time, AFAIK, was boilerplate wording that would have gone to all workers. NASA wasn’t singled out for this. I’ve mentioned how the scientists want to work, but I see dedication with non-scientists as well, and that means when I see comments to the effect that we government workers are overpaid and pampered (hey, we already have healthcare! Luxury!), and so staying home “on vacation” is no big deal, it really chafes. Morale-killing moves like this will drive good people out of government service, sooner or later, especially younger workers who are not as invested in it. Professionals (i.e. those who have degrees beyond undergraduate work) typically can make more in the private sector, and why stick around (or join) with all this BS? The right complains the government is incompetent and this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy if their antics succeed in driving the top talent out.
Argent Physics
Intricate Gizmos That Do Nothing but Hold Themselves Up
In 2004, Grayber began a several-year inquiry into mechanisms that clung to walls in one way or another–contraptions that used springs and weights and counterweights to claw their way into gallery drywall. In 2008, he built a spring-loaded gizmo that wedged itself inside a glass vitrine. That one felt right, and he’s been doing variations on the theme ever since.
N is for Neville Who Died of Ennui
As regular readers know, I work for the US government. I discovered over the summer that even though being furloughed affords me extra time, it’s not time where I’m generally in a mood to blog. The pointlessness and selfishness of this government shutdown has absolutely killed my enthusiasm. To paraphrase a colleague, they have dug another morale hole for us to fall into.
We’ll see what happens.
De-Mag-Ni-Tize! De-Mag-Ni-Tize!
(I’m picturing a dalek-like voice saying this, instead of ex-term-in-ate!)
Mechanical shock also tends to lessen the magnetization of a ferromagnet, and you can also scramble it with a strong oscillating external field. That will at least wound it, if not not kill it.
Captcha
This is pretty cool.
J002E3 is a object that was discovered in Earth orbit in 2002. It was initially thought to be an asteroid, but turns out that it was probably the S-IVB third stage of Apollo 12.
It was off in a heliocentric orbit for 31 years, made a brief 6-orbit visit home, and now it’s off galavanting around the sun again. May get captured temporarily again in 2040
It looks like “chasing the moon” on the last orbit is what gets it kicked out of earth orbit.
Lethargic Time Flies
With Earth spinning more slowly, time isn’t flying as fast as before
CHalk this up as another example of an article title not really matching up with what the article concludes. It’s misleading — as the story eventually alludes — because we now use atomic time, so there is no slowing of time. The rate is the same. The explanations of the variability of earth rotation rates have implications on leap seconds, which we add to keep earth rotation time (terrestrial time) in synch with atomic time. We can’t adjust the earth, so we adjust the clocks.
GPS figures prominently in the discussion of technology enabled by atomic time, but there’s an omission in the discussion:
“If we relied on the Earth’s length of day, we could not have any of this,” says O’Brian, whose group at NIST develops, maintains and improves the supremely regular atomic clocks on which all other timekeeping ultimately is based.
GPS is actually synched with Naval Observatory time, and while USNO time and NIST’s time agree to great precision, to say “on which all other timekeeping ultimately is based” is a bit of hyperbole — it makes it sound as if others are adopting technology only after they develop it, and that the international time standard follows NIST, instead of the other way around. Timing labs around the world follow the international standard from BIPM, to whom we all contribute data. (Some of us contribute more than others. And some of us are closer in realizing the international standard.) /ChestThumping
“We have come full circle,” O’Brian says. The rotation of the Earth had long been the most accurate measure of time for humanity, but now such technologies as atomic clocks and GPS devices make it possible to measure tiny variations in Earth’s rotation. And the scientific reverberations are not just for space junkies. In a July paper in the journal Nature, for instance, researchers in England and France argued that sub-millisecond-scale variations in Earth’s rotation that occur on a 5.9-year cycle are probably linked to motions and interactions within the planet’s molten core where no one has ever been to take a look.
I think it’s pretty cool that our timekeeping is such that we can uncover evidence of processes that are redistributing mass inside the earth.
We Don't Talk About What We Know, We Talk About What We Don't Know
Stuart Firestein: The pursuit of ignorance
I really liked this talk. The post title is from his discussion of what scientists do at the end of the day at a conference, when they get together for a beer — they ask questions, and discuss the unknown.
Another paraphrase — Knowing a lot of stuff doesn’t make you a scientist. The purpose of knowing stuff is so you can ask questions. IOW, the whole purpose of learning a body of knowledge is to be able to define what isn’t known. Then you can go off and investigate that.
I also liked that even though he’s in a different field, the talk addressed general issues. There was nothing specific to neuroscience or the life sciences; even though he used examples from neuroscience, the concepts applied to physics (and, I imagine, chemistry). That doesn’t always happen
Messin' With Sasquatch
Sasquatch here being wall-plug (mains) electricity
The initial inquiry at work was innocent enough, I think — a colleague asked what the voltage limit of a BNC connector is. Wikipedia (linking back through a vendor’s spec sheet) says 500 V, and one also has to worry about the coaxial cable, which was the discussion until another colleague popped out of an office with “Two-and-a-half kiloVolts”. Complete with a description of the apparatus where that appeared in the experiment.
That led into a discussion of some of the crazy things we had done in the lab when we occasionally (or not so occasionally) didn’t have a strong grasp of what was going on. Two of the items that came up (and I had heard the story before, but it had been a few years) were The Cord of Death™, and Son of the Cord of Death™.
The Cord of Death™ sounds scary enough: it was a standard 3-prong power plug, i.e. with a ground pin (NEMA 5-15) … on both ends. Which is not advisable under almost any conditions. Apparently it was used to power a power strip whose power cord connection was bad and could not be fixed, but the rest of the strip was fine. And since all of the connections are in parallel, if you supply power to any outlet in it, the rest will have the juice. And in a grad school situation, I can see how such a kludge would be done instead of spending money on a new power strip.
The Son of the Cord of Death™ was a power cord, with the ground pin snipped off, and a BNC connector on the far end. I’m sure there are several applications for a connection where you want and AC signal at 60 Hz and around 120V, so why not skip the middle-man and avoid a power supply that’s just going to give you what the mains is supplying (oh, safety. Well, there is that, I suppose…)
All reminiscent of connecting two forks or metal rods onto a power cord to cook a hot dog or make a pickle glow.
I didn’t have any contributions quite so reckless. I blew several things up in the lab in grad school — I don’t think any of our laser diodes died of old age — but I stayed away from deliberately messing with wall socket electricity as much as possible.