Move Along at c; Nothing to See Here

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MINOS reports new measurement of neutrino velocity

[T]he new MINOS study significantly reduces the systematic errors of its earlier work with detailed measurements of the behavior of the experiment’s GPS timing system, improved understanding of the delays of electronic components at every stage of the MINOS detectors and the use of upgraded timing equipment, designed and implemented with the assistance of the National Institute of Science and Technology and the United States Naval Observatory.

Applying these improved understandings, the MINOS collaboration measures a neutrino arrival time for travel between Fermilab and Soudan, Minn., that is consistent with the expected travel time at the speed of light. The difference between the measured and calculated times is -15 ± 31 nanoseconds, indicating no observable effect.

Gotta include the plug for the home team.

From The Far Side to Jurassic Park to Reality

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Driving without a Blind Spot May Be Closer Than It Appears

It’s not hard to make a curved mirror that gives a wider field of view – no blind spot – but at the cost of visual distortion and making objects appear smaller and farther away.

Hicks’s driver’s side mirror has a field of view of about 45 degrees, compared to 15 to 17 degrees of view in a flat driver’s side mirror. Unlike in simple curved mirrors that can squash the perceived shape of objects and make straight lines appear curved, in Hicks’s mirror the visual distortions of shapes and straight lines are barely detectable.

(Yeah, I know that the “objects are closer than they appear” gags were on the passenger side, which does have a curved mirror)

Reminiscing About Dialup

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The Mechanics and Meaning of That Ol’ Dial-Up Modem Sound

Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It’s the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part of the beginning of the Internet.
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This is a choreographed sequence that allowed these digital devices to piggyback on an analog telephone network. “A phone line carries only the small range of frequencies in which most human conversation takes place: about 300 to 3,300 hertz,” Glenn Fleishman explained in the Times back in 1998. “The modem works within these limits in creating sound waves to carry data across phone lines.” What you’re hearing is the way 20th century technology tunneled through a 19th century network; what you’re hearing is how a network designed to send the noises made by your muscles as they pushed around air came to transmit anything, or the almost-anything that can be coded in 0s and 1s.

Kind of a Drag

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Cloudy, with almost no chance of Venus, ended up being the weather yesterday. I did manage a glimpse through a telescope, during one of the brief interludes when the clouds thinned. I also snapped this, with my transit/eclipse glasses covering my iPad camera lens

A somewhat pixelated Venus might be that dark blotch in the upper left, just inside the rim. Maybe. It was taken about the right time for it to be there, I think. But it might just be part of the cloud.

We had an OK turnout and it was fun talking to people, play with some of the other kids and I even got a chance to tour our 26″ telescope, which I had not previously visited.

The Twinkie Offense and Defense

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Meet the Twinkie of particle physics: the muon.

The muon is the sponge cake of elementary particles. It’s plump, basic, easy to mass-produce and disappears quickly—much like a Twinkie.

The rebuttal

Second, despite our relatively long lifespan, we are nothing like a Twinkie, which seems to have an infinite shelf life.

Much like Wonder Bread, the Twinkie’s expiration date is “You should live so long”

I Only Saw Her Shadow

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What did the 1882 Transit of Venus look like?

The last [transit] before 2004 was in 1882, recent enough that photography was being used in astronomy. And it so happens that astronomers at Mt. Hamilton in California were able to take a series of 147 (!) images of the transit, 140 of which were used to make this amazing video

Today’s the day! Hoping it’s clear in the late afternoon, because we’re having a family and friends shindig at work, and we don’t want to disappoint.

The Secret Lives of Cats and Dogs and Their Relatives

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You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Motion-activated cameras at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve provide scientists a window into the secret lives of the animals there. Some, like the hummingbirds, flit about during the day. Others come out at night. Among the cast are mountain lions, bobcats, deer, coyotes, foxes and skunks.

Don’t go there at night. All of the nocturnal animals are demonically possessed — you can see their eyes glowing!

These Are Rights, not Commandments

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The Physicists’ Bill of Rights

We hold these postulates to be intuitively obvious, that all physicists are born equal, to a first approximation, and are endowed by their creator with certain discrete privileges, among them a mean rest life, n degrees of freedom, and the following rights which are invariant under all linear transformations

There’s actually a few of these “rights” that I think should earn a slap to anyone exercising them, but I’m just going to assume the author was thinking of string theorists and not worry too much.