mspringer | November 8, 2008Another grad student potluck today! Not sure what I'm going to make, as I'm writing this yesterday (relative to you reading it on Saturday). Last time I posted my recipe for praline bacon, so continuing the tradition today I'm going to post a cocktail of my own invention:
The Pearl Harbor
1 part vodka
1 part blue curacao
6 parts lemonade, frozen into cubes
Combine in blender, blend to a slush. Enjoy.
The curacao and the lemonade combine to form a nice sea blue color. This is essentially a more tropical variation of the Kamikaze, thus inspiring the name.
Now, some news.
This has been…
mspringer | November 7, 2008William Gibson revolutionized the world of science fiction with his dark and gritty but somehow impossibly cool cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. Dystopias have always been a staple of science fiction, but in this case the dystopia didn't seem too horribly dystopic. Sure some computer might try to take over the world or some vat-grown ninja might shiv you in a space station, but it would sure be an interesting life even if it was short and weird. Gibson's skill with language helped. The first line of the novel resonates in fiction circles to this day:
The sky above the port was the color of…
mspringer | November 6, 2008I promise this is not a politics post. It just uses some vote totals for some fun math!
The Minnesota senate race has so far a total of 2,422,811 votes between the two leading candidates. The margin separating them is 477. It's about as close to a 50:50 split as we've seen this cycle. Probably in the last several cycles.
Now let's say you have a perfectly fair coin that has a probability of 1/2 of landing heads and 1/2 of landing tails. For any given string of coin tosses you won't expect to have an exactly even number of heads and tails. flip the coin 10 times and you wouldn't be…
mspringer | November 5, 2008The following is reprinted verbatim from my old Livejournal. The entry was written January 26, 2007.
In 2000, the news media called the presidential vote in the state of Florida for Gore before the voting had ended. This caused enormous controversy, because both sides claimed that this discouraged remaining Bush/Gore supporters who would have voted late to stay home believing the election was over.
In 2004, the news media was extremely cautious, and refrained from calling the election until the outcome was a certainty. It was thoroughly obvious that Bush won hours before the media in general…
mspringer | November 4, 2008This election day post is going to be continuously updated until the winner becomes more-or-less official. Tomorrow we'll have one more politics post as something of a benediction, and then mercifully back to the physics. Updates will appear at the top of the post, so feel free to refresh throughout the night. I'm writing in the central time zone, so timestamps on this post will reflect such.
11:39 Well, the Minnesota mess is still a mess though Coleman has pulled ahead by a hair. Looks like the result will be Obama without a filibuster-proof majority. As such, I'm going to bed. Good…
mspringer | November 3, 2008As you might have heard, the presidential election is tomorrow. As I've said, I believe I'm alone on ScienceBlogs as supporting anyone but Obama. But this is Built on Facts, not Built on Wishful Thinking, and so let's have our official quadrennial Election Prediction Contest!
Here's the plan. We're predicting three quantities of interest.
1. Electoral Vote
2. Senate Seats
3. Popular Vote (in percent)
We're not going to bother with the house, since raw numbers aren't as important. A house with 59% Democrats is only marginally different than one with 61% Democrats. In the senate on the…
mspringer | November 2, 2008You know about the tangent function, tan(x). If you draw a right triangle, the tangent is the ratio of the two sides which comprise the right angle. If the angle between the long sides and each of the short sides is 45 degrees, then clearly the two short sides have the same length. That means the tangent of 45 degrees is 1.
Now the tangent function has an inverse, which we call the arctangent. It's our Sunday Function, and it looks like this:
In mathematics we never use degrees as a measurement of angle, we use radians. There's 2π radians per 360 degrees, and so a 45 degree angle is…
mspringer | November 1, 2008I wasn't sure I was doing anything for Halloween this year, so I didn't have any costume plans. But then today it turned that in fact I was going to a party, and so I needed a costume with only a few hours notice. The costume stores were completely picked-over. What to do? I put on a suit, strapped a katana to the belt, and bought a pirate eyepatch. Bam, corporate raider. And pretty awesome looking too. Cost about a dollar for the eyepatch; I already had the sword.
Some physics? Sure, why not.
Here's Wired on doing some acoustical science to figure out an impossible Beatles chord on "…
mspringer | October 31, 2008
See these guys? They're racewalking. It's like running in that you do it as fast as possible, but you're not allowed to have both feet off the ground at any time. One foot has to be planted on the track at all times. The guy to the far right is slightly cheating - both his feet are off the ground.
But take a closer look at the foreground guy in the red, white, and blue. He illustrates the proper form very well. Think a little abstractly and imagine how the leg moves. The foot is planted and so the leg forms the radius of a circle. The hip therefore traces out part of that circular…
mspringer | October 30, 2008So Seed magazine has endorsed Obama. Quelle surprise! I suppose I shouldn't bite the hand that feeds me, but of course I'm on record as supporting the "anyone else" ticket. I am under no illusion that it will be anything but a lost cause.
One of the things that leads me to believe this is poll data. Poll data is sort of the sociological version of many-body theory.
In physics, "many" often has a particular meaning. According to a guest lecturer we had today who works with semiconductor lasers, "many" means "more than two". He's working with the difficult problem of theoretically…
mspringer | October 29, 2008#4 - Michael Faraday
One day sir, you may tax it.
- Michael Faraday, asked by the British Minister of Finance about the practical value of electricity
With Michael Faraday we begin to reach the most rarified heights of physics achievement. Faraday worked largely in the first half of the 19th century when the lines between physics and the other sciences were not as clearly drawn. Faraday blazed a trail of glory through the rapidly developing sciences of physics and chemistry.
In his early years as a scientist he built the first primitive electric motor, discovered electromagnetic induction…
mspringer | October 28, 2008In the United States, there are about 4 million 8-year-old children. To the extent that statistical averages hold true, around 640 of them will die this year. The largest single cause is motor vehicle accidents, killing a quarter. Cancer will kill another sixth, heart disease around fifteen percent, drowning will kill four percent, fires will kill about the same, and so it goes. Fewer than one percent will die of accidental discharge of firearms, about the same as inadvertently poison themselves with household cleaners. This year, one of them was named Christopher Bizilj, and he lived in…
mspringer | October 28, 2008Let's say we want to know how big the earth would be if it were compressed down so far that it became a black hole. We don't really know much about black holes, but we do know something about escape velocity. Stand on the surface of the earth (which had radius r) and fire a projectile upward, and it will escape if the kinetic energy we gave it at launch is equal or greater than the gravitational potential energy. But at a black hole surface, we the escape velocity is the speed of light. Why not plug that fact into the equation and see what we get?
We start off with the potential energy on…
mspringer | October 27, 2008Hey, sorry for having no Sunday Function yesterday. Life and travel conspired in such a way as to prevent it. Well, there's always next week! But hey, at we have a post for today.
In physics, as in all mathematical disciplines, we have a lot of need for equations. Those equations contain letters which represent various numbers or quantities. We have plenty to choose from, with the letters both Latin-derived and Greek-derived. Even so that's only a couple dozen letters, and there's a lot of things to represent. E might be energy, or electric field. C might be the speed of light, or…
mspringer | October 25, 2008This weekend finds me on the road again, and driving a few hundred miles across rural Texas and Louisiana puts one in the mind to contemplate the expanse above. You're only about an hour's drive from space right now, if you can find a car that will go straight up. But for now we have to settle for looking.
The sky of the fall has much to offer. Pegasus is right above you, and just to its edge in Andromeda is the Andromeda galaxy. With a suitably dark sky and knowledge of where to look you can see it with the naked eye. As far as I know, it's the most distant thing in the universe which…
mspringer | October 24, 2008A space shuttle launch is pretty expensive. Exactly how expensive depends on who you ask, but if you divide the yearly cost of the program by the number of launches you get something in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars. That's actually pretty trivial by federal budget standards, but it's still not chump change. It's a measure of just how difficult it is to get to space. Let's try to put that number in perspective by running a few numbers describing the cost of energy. Think of it as a Fermi problem.
An orbiting shuttle has potential energy by virtue of its height above the…
mspringer | October 23, 2008#5 - Richard Feynman
I'm probably going to take some flack for this one. Feynman was and is so popular as a scientific writer, raconteur, and honest-to-goodness celebrity that his staggering scientific accomplishments are sometimes lost in the shadow of his own popular legend. But if we want to try to make a more-or-less honest ranking of the top ten, we have to give him the vast credit he deserves.
Feynman got his start as a physicist in roughly the most dramatic way possible. Pulled fresh out of Princeton in the middle of the Second World War, he was assigned as one of the thousands of…
mspringer | October 22, 2008You know what irritates me? NCIS. Not the Navy's law enforcement agency, the TV show about that organization. I'm generally a fan of Law and Order style police procedurals, but that one just rubs me the wrong way. Why? The fetishize law breaking. Not the law breaking of the criminals they investigate, they themselves go out of their way to break the law. Need a DMV record? Hack their computers, don't bother to actually call and ask them or get a warrant. Suspect not talking? Give the Mossad officer on loan to NCIS fifteen minutes alone with the suspect. A relative accused of murder…
mspringer | October 21, 2008From the always good Ph.D. comics, we have this comic, which I saw pointed out at Pure Pedantry.
I'll defend this, a little. Football coaches are in large part responsible for the success or failure of a football team. In the grand scheme of things the position of a pigskin on a field is not exactly earth-shattering, but there's more too it than that. Football is popular. Tremendously, staggeringly popular. At LSU, my undergraduate university, every single home game saw 96,000 people in the stadium. Expensive merchandising with the LSU logo sells by the truckload with royalties going…
mspringer | October 21, 2008Last Saturday I penned a snarky comment about the philosophy of science, and within a week I read something that's particularly interesting from that very perspective. Well, might as well use it when it has its uses. Some preliminary:
It is certainly either true or false that Julius Caesar's paternal grandfather sneezed on his tenth birthday. Can we figure out which using science? Let's review what has to be available in order to do science. While there's always debate at the margins as to what constitutes science, virtually any working scientist will tell you that the main issue is…