Links for 2010-04-10

"Would a Lava Lamp work in a high-gravity environment such as Jupiter? Would the wax still rise to the surface? Would the blobs be smaller and faster? With broad disagreement on the answers, I built a large centrifuge to find out."

"All too often a great dance party is ruined because the stereo is far off over yonder. Well never let that happen to you again. We at LaserFest present you with SpectraSound -the device that uses laser modulation to transmit your music across the dance floor... or all the way to NGC 5194. SpectraSound is perfect for the home, classroom, lab and parties!"

"Republicans have no greater ally in this fight than leukemia," said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who was flanked by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), and the abnormal increase in white blood cells. "Denying insurance to Americans with preexisting conditions and ensuring that low-income Americans stand no chance of receiving quality health care are just a few of the core beliefs that the GOP and leukemia share."

""Basically, if he sees someone in the crowd he wants to rub up against or something, he just tells me how much he wants to do it, we breathe together, and then we move on to the next shot," Gilecki said before Woods could stop his sponsor from talking to members of the media. "That's called speak and release. They teach us that.""

Heralded as "millions of ultra-stable lasers in one," ultrafast optical frequency combs--the subject of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics--have become a ubiquitous tool in precision metrology labs. [...] In a new twist to the many applications of optical frequency combs, the possibility of using them to control the spin state of ion qubits is becoming highly attractive in the field of quantum information processing. Writing in Physical Review Letters, David Hayes and colleagues at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland in the US, demonstrate a technique that gives optical frequency combs the flexibility to rotate and entangle ion-spin qubits over a wide frequency range [2].

"In every cop drama there's a scene where a suspect is being questioned in an interrogation room. The room contains a large mirror, and behind that mirror the detectives and district attorneys are observing and arguing about the progress of the case. The mirror is a two-way mirror.

These kinds of mirrors aren't complicated. Light shines on them, and some fraction is reflected back while some fraction passes through. The suspect in the brightly lit room can't see the dark room beyond the mirror because the bright room light washes out the much smaller amount coming from the adjacent dark room.

We use the same concept in the lab. A device called a beam splitter is essentially a one-way mirror."

"Book publishing was never a heaven "run by editors", and it is by no means today a hell "run by accountants." If our "sole interest" was "instant profit," not only would we never do any number of the things we actually do every day, we probably wouldn't be in book publishing at all. Just thinking about what I did in the office yesterday, about a third of my time was devoted to putting together deals that will immediately put non-trivial sums of money into the hands of writers in exchange for books that we will publish months and years from now, realizing "profit" (if any) only after even more months and years have elapsed after that. In addition, I also spent over $2,000 on a piece of short fiction which will be given away for free on Tor.com, making us no immediate "profit" whatsoever. This was not an atypical day. And I'm quite certain this is true of my colleagues all over town. "

Awesome video of air currents from a variety of sources.