On NUMB3RS the other night, Charlie and Larry run over a pool of a non-Newtonian fluid, comprised of cornstarch and water. (Larry sinks in the teaser segment, but is successful at the closing). Non-Newtonian fluids are those that have a viscosity that changes when you apply a force. In this case it is shear-thickening, so it behaves much like a solid when pressure is quickly applied.
Here’s a video of a quite similar scene
OK, it’s technically sportswomanship.
Pop quiz, hotshot: What do you do when a senior who has hit the only home run of her career gets injured — she was so excited she missed first base, and when she turned to tag it, messes up her knee to the point she can’t complete the circuit?
Umpires confirmed that the only option available under the rules was to replace Tucholsky at first base with a pinch runner and have the hit recorded as a two-run single instead of a three-run home run. Any assistance from coaches or trainers while she was an active runner would result in an out. So without any choice, Knox prepared to make the substitution, taking both the run and the memory from Tucholsky.
What do you do? What … do … you … do?
Well, if you’re the other team, you aren’t forbidden from assisting her. So you carry her around and let her touch all of the bases. ‘Cause you’ve got loads of class.
Holtman and shortstop Liz Wallace lifted Tucholsky off the ground and supported her weight between them as they began a slow trip around the bases, stopping at each one so Tucholsky’s left foot could secure her passage onward. Even with Tucholsky feeling the pain of what trainers subsequently came to believe was a torn ACL (she was scheduled for tests to confirm the injury on Monday), the surreal quality of perhaps the longest and most crowded home run trot in the game’s history hit all three players.
OK, it’s a little bit slanted toward the computer nerd, but many things apply to general geekage.
Your nerd might come off as not liking people. Small talk. Those first awkward five minutes when two people are forced to interact. Small talk is the bane of the nerd’s existence because small talk is a combination of aspects of the world that your nerd hates. When your nerd is staring at a stranger, all he’s thinking is, “I have no system for understanding this messy person in front of me”. This is where the shy comes from. This is why nerds hate presenting to crowds.
The skills to interact with other people are there. They just lack a well-defined system.
Mechanical squirrels, robot lizards jump into research
In Indiana, for instance, a fake lizard shows off its machismo as researchers assess which actions intimidate and which attract real lizards. Pheromone-soaked cockroach counterfeits in Brussels, meanwhile, exert peer pressure on real roaches to move out of protective darkness. In California, a tiny video camera inside a fake female sage grouse records close-up details as it’s wooed – and more – by the breed’s unusually promiscuous males.
And here’s a short video of said sage grouse, deemed the fembot (oh, behave!). It’s a preview that’s G-rated (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) though check out the soundtrack. I fully expected Mrs. Krabappel to pop up and proclaim, “She’s faking it.”
Long but interesting NSA article: Solving the Enigma, including the American contribution of solving the Navy four-rotor Enigma codes.
(And recall a previous post about making a paper Enigma machine)
Or so I gather from The Five Forces Circles of Hell
A discussion of some of those “five forces” (Supplier Power, Customer Power, Threat of New Entrants, Threat of Substitute Products, Industry Rivalry) with a couple of examples of exploiting them, offensively (good) and defensively (bad). i.e. pleasing the customer is an aggressive and good exploitation of some of these forces, while defensive implementation to protect your business model often ignores the satisfaction of the customer (which is, for sake of argument, a bad thing™).
All Blockbuster does today is provide, at great expense, an elaborate distribution channel to deliver very cheap plastic discs with expensive data on them to every neighborhood in every major city and town in the country. As soon as DVDs became the predominant data format, Blockbuster became nothing more than a highly expensive, slow, ultra-high latency internet with a data warehouse limited by inventory practicalities. Of course, DVDs did eliminate the hated “rewind charge,” but that’s another story. All Blockbuster is really doing is delivering digital data. Poorly.
Which is, of course, followed by “Enter Netflix, stage left,” followed by “Enter high-speed, high bandwidth internet, stage right.”
and
The success of the iPod and iTunes is based more on breaking arbitrary restrictions on consumers than anything else. Jobs has almost done for music what Netflix did for video rental. The process is simple. Admit that commodity pricing is on the horizon and, rather than cling to old models, simply implement it. We aren’t quite at the point where iTunes is a flat-fee per month for unlimited downloads, but a fixed per-song price is an amazing advance considering the artificial technical restrictions the music industry has imposed. And at least here we are paying for content, not for distribution.
via Daring Fireball
The Red Baron’s streak was partly skill but mostly luck. “Theory of aces: high score by skill or luck?” by Simkin and Roychowdhury, from the arxiv blog
We find that the variance of this skill distribution is not very large, and that the top aces achieved their victory scores mostly by luck. For example, the ace of aces, Manfred von Richthofen, most likely had a skill in the top quarter of the active WWI German fighter pilots, and was no more special than that.
And while I’m on the topic, there’s an issue with the Royal Guardsmen’s “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron”
Eighty men died tryin’ to end that spree
It wasn’t a spree until after several, or at the very least two, men had died. OK, I’ll accept artistic license.
(and since the Germans required that “The opponent aircraft had to be either destroyed or forced to lend [sic] on German territory and its crew taken prisoners.” in order to be a victory, so when Snoopy was shot down part way through the song, that wasn’t one of the 80.)
The Physics of Chocolate over at Cosmic Variance.
13 Crazy Examples of Why English is the Most Hilarious Language to Learn
And don’t fall for the con man selling you the sham poo.