Links for 2009-10-31

"Beer and wine are not in competition. Yet people in the wine business, who I assure you drink an awful lot of beer, don't often take it seriously as a beverage. And people in the beer business, perhaps in reaction to not-so-imaginary slights, rarely even acknowledge the existence of wine, much less deem it worthy of drinking."

"Kevin [Drum] suggested that someone do a study to see if some people flip-flop no matter what question is asked. If some people will always flip-flop, then that suggests poll questions about flip-flops aren't very helpful in determining what the "true" public opinion is. We decided to take him up on the suggestion. Last week we created a set of six opinion questions about issues we felt our readers were likely to disagree on. 491 people responded. For each question, we came up with two different follow-ups. "

"If there's one holiday that seems tailor made for the physics enthusiast (besides Pi Day), it's Halloween. You can trick out your home or Halloween party with spooky effects and decorations, courtesy of science and a few readily-available ingredients. "

"I'm probably not the only one who's had nightmares about physics tests or felt trepidation at the thought of approaching a particularly thorny professor during office hours. But physics itself is rife with terms that sound menacing. I mean, just look at the Large Hadron Collider--all they did was name it literally after what it does, yet the name couldn't be more ominous. So in the spirit of Halloween, let's take a look at some of the seemingly nefarious terms found in physics and see if the fright is real or just in the name. "

"Isolated attosecond pulses are powerful tools for exploring electron dynamics in matter. So far, such extreme ultraviolet pulses have only been generated using high power, few-cycle lasers, which are very difficult to construct and operate. We propose and demonstrate a technique called generalized double optical gating for generating isolated attosecond pulses with 20 fs lasers from a hollow-core fiber and 28 fs lasers directly from an amplifier. These pulses, generated from argon gas, are measured to be 260 and 148 as by reconstructing the streaked photoelectron spectrograms. This scheme, with a relaxed requirement on laser pulse duration, makes attophysics more accessible to many laboratories that are capable of producing such multicycle laser pulses."

"Since words are numbers, it makes sense to divide them into the usual number categories: primes, composites, squares, perfect numbers... This is a collection of prime words (that is each of these words is a prime when viewed as a number base 36). "