Panoramic view of the Amedee coral reef off New Caledonia
(I think it would be better if, after you panned around through pi or so, you saw a huge shark, but that’s just me)
If you scroll and look straight up, you’ll see Snell’s Window
Constructing the Coherent Canine
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Coming This Christmas
Release date is December 22 and is available for pre-ordering at Amazon
Anyone who follows Uncertain Principles knows how well Chad writes and has seen some excerpts already.
Speak the Geek!
It’s Talk Like a Physicist Day!
I gave a rather extended vocabulary list last year, and used a lot of those terms. A few more that I’ve used in the last year:
I mentioned a quantum, to mean a small amount, as in “take that with a quantum of salt”
I used “collapse the wave function” to denote resolving something, as in “the election collapsed the presidential race wave function”
resonated — already in common use
a short amount of time became “a small delta-t”
a wide variety of something I called a spectrum
I refer to a rumor (aka nebulous information) as “Nth-hand information”
I didn’t forget, I “expunged this from the buffer”
An either/or situation is a Boolean state
Happy New Year’s Day was “Happy return to an arbitrarily chosen starting point in the orbit about our gravitational enslaver”
When something came close to me, it was at perigee
And of course, the blogging community is called the blogohedron
I also like making up measuring devices, like the cringe-o-meter to measure how painful something looks, or the Geekmeter. “Pegging the Geekmeter” is a large signal, and means you’re in a maximal “Talk Like a Physicist” state.
Made-up “elements” I’ve used in the last year
Politicium
Grinchonium
Quiltonium
Elephantium
Nerdonium
And some new vocabulary and ways to use it:
Incompatible things are “out of phase.” “Pi out of phase” is the ultimate in being out-of-step, which leads to destructive interference.
Something that is close is “within epsilon”
We physicists quantify relationships — something that is complicated is “nonlinear,” or even “highly nonlinear.” Opposites are “inversely proportional”
Two different things happening at once can be said to be in a superposition (That’s a superposition of painful and funny!)
If something doesn’t happen, you can say the wave functions just didn’t overlap
It’s not unclear, it’s opaque
A situation that’s impossible to resolve has overconstrained boundary conditions
It’s not a hill/ditch, it’s local maximum/minimum
Did You Know 3.0
Can’t vouch for all the statistics, but if they’re accurate, they represent some things to consider. I like the point about how we’re preparing students today for jobs they will eventually get but that don’t yet exist. However, the point
The amount of technical information is doubling every two years …
For students starting a 4 year technical degree this means that … half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study
is wrong.
First of all, it makes the mistake of equating technical study with simply learning facts, and that’s not accurate. Second, it implies that new information makes old information obsolete. While that may be true in some cases — technology often makes old technology obsolete — it doesn’t really happen that way. Sometimes new information is really new information, i.e. something we didn’t know before, and not “just” a better way of doing something. Relativity, quantum mechanics — these represented completely new areas of physics, but did not make the kinematics equations of a macroscopic object obsolete. Science doesn’t really devour itself that way; more often it expands. Third, it implies that students learn cutting-edge material in their first year, and that just isn’t widely the case, if at all. You start with the basics, and that never becomes outdated unless it was wrong to begin with. The cutting-edge material is more likely learned in advanced study, and at the end.
h/t to the Mom
Stealing A Girl's Best Friend
Most real crime stories are about how stupid most criminals are. Occasionally, though, you get the ingenious ones, though even here you see lapses — they got caught, after all.
The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist
The Genius pulled a custom-made slab of rigid aluminum out of his bag and affixed heavy-duty double-sided tape to one side. He stuck it on the two plates that regulated the magnetic field on the right side of the vault door and unscrewed their bolts. The magnetic plates were now loose, but the sticky aluminum held them together, allowing the Genius to pivot them out of the way and tape them to the antechamber wall. The plates were still side by side and active—the magnetic field never wavered—but they no longer monitored the door. Some 30 hours later, the authorities would marvel at the ingenuity.
Sounds like a movie plot (Schneier agrees), and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes one. Maybe Hollywood can even do that without wrecking the story.
A Devious Attempt to Exploit Memories of my Youth
Ah, sweet nostalgia. Space Invaders, Missile Command and especially Asteroids were the favorites we played at the Ground Round.
Fastest Battery in the West
New Battery Could Recharge in Seconds
In energy storage, there has always been a trade-off between the amount of energy a material could store and how quickly you could discharge it. Batteries were pretty good at storing energy (although not nearly as good as oil), but getting energy into and out of them was tough. Ultracapacitors, and their cousins, supercapacitors, can deliver a lot of charge really quickly, but it takes 20 times more of their materials to store the same energy as a comparable battery.
The new battery material appears to solve that problem by creating a “fast-lane” for ions to move around the lithium iron phosphate material. By applying a special surface coating to the old material, they allow the ions to speed around the battery at rates that are nearly unimaginable.
Gripping Stories
As I’ve observed, they’re rarely the right tool for the job, but here are some vice grip tales, and the three finalists in the contest for best tale.
And Now, a Word from our Sponsor
Presidential Memorandum on Scientific Integrity, March 9, 2009
The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public. To the extent permitted by law, there should be transparency in the preparation, identification, and use of scientific and technological information in policymaking. The selection of scientists and technology professionals for positions in the executive branch should be based on their scientific and technological knowledge, credentials, experience, and integrity.
Aw crap. You can do that? (Oh, yes we can)
Ideologyspotting
How to spot a hidden religious agenda
Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience, usually of the New Age variety, but some religious groups are now appealing to aspects of quantum weirdness to account for free will. Beware: this is nonsense.
UPDATE: As the comment below indicates, the article was pulled. PZ points out that there is an archived copy of the article
I think it’s sad that NS would cave to complaints, rather than having some intellectual integrity. There was no malice in the story. Occasionally the truth is going to force some people to open their eyes a little, and that can sometimes be painful.