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Challenge Problem!

This one's from Young and Freedman, and I pick it out because it's both from the chapter I'm teaching and it's a great conceptual problem as well. (I've modified it slightly.) A shotgun fires a large number of pellets upward, with some pellets traveling vertically and some as much a 1 degree from the vertical. Ignore air resistance and assume the pellets leave the gun at 150 m/s. Within what radius from the point of firing will the pellets land? Will air resistance tend to increase or decrease this number? The book gives the range equation directly even though it can be derived easily, so…

Raw milk stings?

I like my milk pasteurized like everyone else, but the Department of Agriculture is now actually conducting raw milk stings: Last September, a man came to Stutzman's weathered, two-story farmhouse, located in a pastoral region in northeast Ohio that has the world's largest Amish settlement. The man asked for milk. Stutzman was leery, but agreed to fill up the man's plastic container from a 250-gallon stainless steel tank in the milkhouse. After the creamy white, unpasteurized milk flowed into the container, the man, an undercover agent from the Ohio Department of Agriculture, gave Stutzman…

Reduced Consumption = Better Environment (Part 2)

USA Today's Traci Watson includes a nice graphic showing reductions in CO2 emissions during the economic downturn. It's in this story, "Bad economy helps cut CO2 emissions". This trend follows and fits in line with a post a few weeks ago about landfills receiving less trash during the recession. I'll forgo duplicating my commentary here and say only to read the one at the landfill link. But here are three stats Watson offers: Carbon dioxide from U.S. power plants fell roughly 3% from 2007 to 2008, according to preliminary data from the Environmental Protection Agency analyzed by the…

Second SpaceX Falcon 1 test launch works (sort of)

This evening I watched probably one of the coolest live webcasts I've ever witnessed - the second test launch of SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket. Unfortunately, after stage separation, things went a little awry: To recap, the Falcon 1 rocket blasted off at 0110 GMT (9:10 p.m. EDT) tonight on a demonstration test flight from Omelek Island in the central Pacific Ocean. The first stage engine, which had experienced an abort on the pad earlier tonight due to low chamber pressure readings, powered the rocket skyward for nearly three minutes. The spent stage then separated for a planned parachute-aided…

Historical Heat

I always like to consider questions of the day from the perspective of deep time. How hot is it these days? Look back 1.35 million years, and you can see it's pretty hot. Here's a chart, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (free paper here). It combines historical records with geological evidence from the West Pacific to reach back 1.35 million years (kyr= thousands of years ago). The scale is telescoped near the right end, since recent warming has been so fast that it would be hard to make out its details otherwise. Two lines mark some average recent…

Ignorance For Sale, Thanks To Your Tax Dollars

David Appell points to some depressing news about how our government deals with science. In August 2003, the Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent tried to block the sale of a book in National Park Service stores. The book claims that the Grand Canyon formed in Noah's Flood. No vague ambiguity of the sort you hear from Intelligent Design folks--just hard-core young Earth creationism, claiming that the planet is only a few thousand years old. The folks at National Park Service headquarters stopped the administrator from pulling the book. Geologists cried foul, and NPS promised to review…

Komodo dragons have antibacterial blood

Picture of a komodo dragon by CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons Researchers studying komodo dragons (Varanus komodoensis) at George Mason University discovered 48 previously unknown peptides in their blood that might have antimicrobial properties. Their findings were published in the Journal of Proteome Research. For the largest lizard, these peptides may help prevent the animals from getting infections from their own saliva, which is host to at least 57 species of bacteria. With this number of bacteria, it is easy to understand why they evolved so many defense mechanisms to prevent…

Snakes and Ebola

Image from: National Geographic, photograph by Joel Sartore In 2009, scientists at the California Academy of Sciences Steinhart Aquarium discovered some of the snakes suffering from a strange illness that caused them to stare off into space, appear like they were drunk and even tie themselves into knots they could not escape. Other serious symptoms included the buildup of proteins, susceptibility to secondary bacterial infections and body wasting. This mysterious illness posed a big problem for captive snakes like boa constrictors and pythons because it can rapidly spread among animals.…

New suspect in bee colony collapse disorder

There is a new suspect thought to contribute to the demise of honeybee (Apis mellifera) colonies worldwide, termed colony collapse disorder (CCD). Until now, scientists have identified a host of potential culprits including pesticides that might weaken their immune systems, pathogens, parasites, and malnutrition from poor nutritional sources: Watch Silence of the Bees on PBS. See more from Nature. Another potential culprit is a virus found in nearly all the CCD hives examined by researchers in prior studies called Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV): Watch Silence of the Bees on…

Mundt, Gun Control, Canada and the US

Greg Booth said: A 1976 study put guns in 40% of Canadian households. An Angus Reid poll in 1991 put the number at 23%. The 1989 International Crime Survey gave 29% From Phil Ronzone's rkba.002 (US rates converted to rate per 100,000) from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1989 (109th edition.) Washington, DC, 1989. and Canadian rates from the Canadian Centre for Health Information. Year US accident rate Canadian accidental rate. 1969 1.139 0.63 1970 1.174 0.61 1971 1.136 0.66 1972 1.163 0.47 1973 1.235 0…

US Military Spied on Domestic Peace Groups

From Democracy Now: Newly declassified documents reveal that an active member of Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance in Washington state was actually an informant for the US military. The man everyone knew as "John Jacob" was in fact John Towery, a member of the Force Protection Service at Fort Lewis. The military's role in the spying raises questions about possibly illegal activity. The Posse Comitatus law bars the use of the armed forces for law enforcement inside the United States. This took place just an hour from where I live in Seattle. According to…

Fabric may make the first real power suit : Nature News

Clothes that produce power. Who ever thought? Fabric may make the first real power suit From Fabric may make the first real power suit : Nature News The fibres, covered with 'hairs' of zinc oxide, can be wired up for power.The fibres, covered with 'hairs' of zinc oxide, can be wired up for power.Z.L. Wang and X.D. Wang, Georgia Institute of Technology. Mobile phone battery running out mid-conversation? One day you might be able to make a few vigorous arm movements while wearing a nanowire electricity-generating shirt to keep the battery going. This is power-…

They're Younger Every Year...

Thanks to the Chronicle for pointing me to Beloit College's annual Mind-Set List, which reminds us just how out of touch we old fogies are with this year's crop of first-year students. As the Chronicle notes: The Mind-Set List draws much of its inspiration from the blank stares of students too young to understand popular references from an older generation, said Ron Nief, the college's public-affairs director, who co-writes the annual list with Thomas E. McBride, a professor of English. Many students associate "Here's Johnny" with "that guy breaking into the bathroom" in The Shining, Mr.…

How to review a book

From Henry Gee's blog: I had thought that people who write marketing and advertising blurb for publishers occupied a rung on the scala naturae slightly above creationists. This may be true, but whatever the height of their perch, it is still below that of estate agents, as judged from this flyer from Oxford University Press promoting James D. Watson’s latest effusion, Avoid Boring People, in which you’ll see this puff: ’...an engaging writer…’ – Dr Henry Gee, Focus Well, it’s quite true that I reviewed the book for Focus, and also true that I said Watson was ‘an engaging writer’, because…

Early vision was colourful

UPDATED: To give some of my colleagues at the University of Queensland some link love, it is being reported that they have sequenced the Queensland lungfish (currently under threat by a proposed dam) opsin genes, showing that they see in ultraviolet and visible light, as well as having the ability to see in dim and bright light. The paper is now accessible at BMC Evolutionary Biology. The conclusion drawn from this is that early land dwelling vertebrates saw in colour, which is probably true, but not, I think, because the lungfish is a "living fossil that dates back 400 million years…

New York Wrap-Up (Or, Speaking Science 2.0 Does Gotham)

The Mooney-Nisbet combo just returned from speaking in New York....and there have already been reactions to the latest talk from well-known science writer John Horgan (who was in the audience) as well as a write-up from Curtis Brainard of Columbia Journalism Review. In his article Brainard quotes celebrated NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt, of RealClimate.org, who also was kind enough to attend the talk and hang out afterwards. I'd like to convince John Horgan, if I can, that framing is not tantamount to spin. I'm going to try to do that. Meanwhile, I appreciate Gavin's view as expressed in…

HFEA set to approve use of hybrid embryos for stem cell research

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the governmental body that regulates fertility treatments in the U.K., looks set to approve the use of hybrid embryos for stem cell research at a meeting later on today. Earlier this week, the HFEA published its public consultation on the subject. This revealed that, although many people found the idea of human-animal hybrid embryos to be repugnant, most approved of it when they better understood the reasons for it. Researchers can create hybrid embryos by the transferring nuclei from human cells into animal egg cells from which…

Easier to pass through the eye of a needle

The Science and Entertainment Exchange blog has an interesting post up about artist Willard Wigan, who creates sculptures that can only be seen through a microscope. Wigan's story is touching - he started sculpting as a child, when his dyslexia made school a painful challenge. He says, "I started making houses for ants because I thought they needed somewhere to live. Then I made them shoes and hats. It was a fantasy world I escaped to." (That totally reminds me of the scene from Zoolander where the none-too-bright model played by Ben Stiller stares at a scale model of a proposed school…

Drug Rep Toys Rated!

The first time I went to SFN (Society for Neuroscience meeting), I was in awe of the "rep section" in the enormous conference center. An area the size of a football field was filled with over-educated salespeople trying to entice researchers to peruse their wares: the newest microscope, RNAi technology, custom-made antibodies. They were all set up, amidst the research posters, a veritable smorgasbord of free crap bearing company logos. Sometimes this stuff was really nice: I've acquired some decent pens, bags, single issues of journals, laser pointers, and sundry other bric-a-brac from these…

A Beautiful Example of Science for the Masses

Awesome. This is the type of video that got me hooked on biology. A Sea Biscuit's Life from Bruno Vellutini on Vimeo. From Bruno's Vimeo page: This video shows the life cycle of the sea biscuit Clypeaster subdepressus and is part of my master's thesis project at the Biosciences Institute of University of São Paulo. We collected adults from sand beds of São Sebastião Channel (São Sebastião, SP, Brazil) and induced gamete release (eggs and sperm). We did the fertilization in vitro and followed the embryonic development in the laboratory, under light microscopy. Embryos become swimming…

Earthwide Shakedown

Is the earth falling apart? Have they started using the Hadron Colider early and not mentioned it to anyone? Are we experiencing a Global Coincidence? Have science reporters suddenly gotten interested in earthquakes? There must be some explanation for the nearly simutaneious occurrence of a powerful 7.1 earthquake in the southern ocean, Hawaii's Kilauea volcano Exploding, an earthquake hitting near Rome, and unusual earthquakes off the coast Oregon all within one blogging cycle.... Details: Powerful 7.1 Quake in Southern Ocean from PhysOrg.com (AP) -- A strong earthquake hit near the…

Congressional briefing on Lancet study

Stephen Soldz has a nice summary of the congressional briefing on the Lancet study: Les Roberts again made the point that their data implies that the majority of deaths in Iraq are from violence, whereas alternative accounts from Iraq Body Count, the Brookings Institution, or the Iraq Ministry of Health imply that only a small percentage, perhaps 10%, of deaths in Iraq are from violence. He again, as he has done since the study came out in early October, has called upon the press to visit graveyards and ask if the majority of deaths is from nonviolent or violent causes. Roberts again called,…

Gore corrects Monckton

The Daily Telegraph has published a piece by Al Gore that corrects Monckton's numerous errors. An extract: Monckton goes on to level a serious accusation at the scientists involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claiming that they have "repealed a fundamental physical law" and, as a result, have misled people by exaggerating the sensitivity of the Earth's climate to extra carbon dioxide. If this were true, the entire global scientific community would owe Monckton a deep debt of gratitude for cleverly discovering a gross and elementary mistake that had somehow escaped the…

AAPOR alleges Gilbert Burnham violated AAPOR's code

The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) has put out a press release alleging that Gilbert Burnham (who is not a member of the AAPOR) violated the AAPOR's code of ethics. What did he do? Their press release states: Mary E. Losch, chair of AAPOR's Standards Committee, noted that AAPOR's investigation of Burnham began in March 2008, after receiving a complaint from a member. According to Losch, "AAPOR formally requested on more than one occasion from Dr. Burnham some basic information about his survey including, for example, the wording of the questions he used,…

McIntyre the quote mining executive

Deep Climate has been reading the stolen emails that Steve McIntyre didn't mention: Arguing from a cherrypicked selection of quotes from the "Climategate" emails, McIntyre has claimed that IPCC authors Chris Folland and Michael Mann pressured Briffa to submit a reconstruction that would not "dilute the message" by showing "inconsistency" with multi-proxy reconstructions from Mann and Briffa's CRU colleague Phil Jones. Briffa "hastily re-calculated his reconstruction", sending one with a supposedly larger post-1960 decline before. According to McIntyre, Mann resolved this new "conundrum" and…

Friday Fractal XLVI

I think I'm going to take this Nova Julia set home, color it with fBm noise, and call it "Find Nemo": Didn't find him? Try here: A Percula Clownfish (Amphiprion percula) swimming around in an aquarium Ok, so, this one is for the kids. (And the grownups, who, like me, couldn't resist watching Finding Nemo once or twice... or a dozen times.) As any child who has seen the movie knows, clown fish live with poisonous sea anemones, which protect them from predators. In the movie, Nemo's father says he "gets stung all the time" and so he's "used to it". However, real clownfish (often known as…

US & Brazilian students arrested doing paleoclimate research in Brazil; need help

Five students (three from the US, two from Brazil) were arrested last month while doing paleoclimate research in Brazil. They were collecting sediment cores from lakes and wetlands, in order to understand past climate change in western Brazil. The charges were based on Brazilian laws dealing with unauthorized extraction of mineral resources. (The group had research permits which they believed to be valid, but apparently they did not cover all members of the group.) The students have been released on bail, but the American students have to stay in Brazil until the legal process is complete -…

Good Podcasts

This post is a followup on Podcasts good and bad, to which some of you responded with excellent suggestions for podcasts. I want to say that the criticisms I leveled in the previous post apply mainly to video podcasts in technolology that I've seen via the Roku on TWiT TV and other places, and really, on only a few of those. The following list is compiled from your comments but including only science and skepticism podcasts. I've added a few that you'all didn't happen to mention. Please suggest what is missing and I'll add that in a future update. Actually Speaking podcast. Brain Science…

Burning Proteins to Save Water

Image Source: http://www.ontfin.com/Word/marwick-head/ Migratory birds utilize significant amounts of protein during their long distance flights. Researchers Schwilch et al., have studied this process in migratory passerines, or perching songbirds. What they found was that most of the protein is derived from breast muscles with some proteins from coming from organs. Until now, researchers had assumed the birds were using proteins as a preferred source of energy after their fat stores had been depleted. However, muscles are comprised of 70-75% water making this tissue a potential source of…

Live fast, die young

One theory of aging holds that accumulation of reactive oxygen species from aerobic metabolism damages nucleotides, proteins and lipids. Therefore, animals with a higher metabolism (poor mice) would be expected to produce more reactive oxygen species and age at a faster rate than animals with a slower metabolism (go sloths!). In a healthy individual, antioxidants help to protect from such increases in oxidative stress. However, this antioxidant capacity declines as we age. You may be aware that bees transition from working around the hive to foraging at about 3 weeks of age. Foraging is much…

Update on Web2.0 and disaster management

So I gave that talk yesterday at the Great Lakes Homeland Security Expo. It went better than I had expected, as the audience was willing to be interactive and ask tough questions. The audience was a mixed group of health care professionals, first responders, communications directors, and disaster planners. Most had facebook accounts, and many read blogs at least a few times a month. A few were familiar with twitter. I incorporated some of the ideas you folks sent my way, including issues of Twitter hashtag integrity, etc. Participants helped identify some interesting questions.…

Writer's block open thread

Holiday weekends are supposed to be quiet around here. People head up north for the last long weekend of the summer, eat ripe cherries, melon, and peaches, go to street fairs. Apparently they also go to doctors. But I have a brief lull before the next onslaught of twisted ankles, hand-foot-mouth disease, flu, strep throat, chest pain, back pain, or whatever other common medical complaints walk in the door attached to a person. There's a little cemetery up the street from me. This isn't New England, and old cemeteries aren't the norm, but this one look interesting from the car window. So…

Morgellons---what fibers?

People who identify themselves as having "morgellons" syndrome claim to have fibers and parasites emerging from their skin. As my commenters have pointed out, it's a rather simple task to evaluate such samples in a laboratory. If "morgellons" "researchers" wish to illuminated this "novel" "disease" (I just wanted to see how many scare quotes I could squeeze in), then where are the case series or other published data? A PubMed search reveals no published research on the topic---not even case studies. The Morgellons Research Foundation website, however, has a "research" section. Of what…

Sea level rise acceleration

You only have to look at the graph below showing sea level rise since 1880 to see that it has accelerated from about 1mm/year at the end of the 19th century to about 3mm/year at present.(from CSIRO). If you take a closer look at recent sea level rise you’ll see that it has been very consistent, only deviating from the trend line by about 10mm at any time.   So if you were unscrupulous, and wanted to try to make it look like sea level rise had decelerated what could you do? You could split the series at a point where sea level was above the trend line and compare trends before and after. …

Lobstermen & Fishermen Dance and Sing

Prologue: The act begins with the gang leitmotifs established musically. The curtain rises. A conflict between two rival gangs, the Lobstermen and the Fishermen , is enacted through dance. The tension between the gangs is quite visible. The men are struggling for control of selling lobster.  When you are a Jet, your Jet! Seriously, some turf wars are occuring in Maine over whether fisherman can sell their lobster bycatch from trawling for cod, haddock, and other groundfish.  Things are not going to be pretty next week when all this goes before the Maine Legislature.  The current law…

Proboscidean jaw found on Peruvian bus

According to a Daily Mail article released yesterday, a 19 lb. jawbone from an extinct elephant relative was found in an unmarked package in a bus compartment. There isn't much else to the story, except that the mandible was misidentified by the "expert" called to look at photos of the fossil (and hence the error was repeated in the newspaper). According to the report, the jaws were from a Triceratops; Pablo de la Vera Cruz, an archeologist at the National University in Arequipa, said examined police photos of the fossil. He said: "The jawbone that was found could be from a triceratops, even…

Hey, look kids! There's Big Ben.

And there's parliament. Ok - sorry, I had to make a "Tom (Swans on Tea)" title for this one. Tom, forgive me. Here are two great circular motion videos. First, this one is from Dale Basler. He made himself a fine little floater-type accelerometer. Better than just make it, he made a video of the accelerometer in his car going around a round about. Check it out. Bobber Meets Roundabout from Dale Basler on Vimeo. So, if he is driving at a constant 10 mph, how big is the round about (traffic circle)? Next video - more silly kids First, I saw this one on ZapperZ's Physics and Physicists who…

Phelps

The thrill I get from watching Michael Phelps swim is the same thrill I get from watching Tiger Woods put for birdie on the 18th hole or from reading 1930's Auden: the impossible isn't just made possible: these guys make the impossible look easy. So I was struck by this paragraph in an old profile of Phelps: In testing conducted by physiologists from USA Swimming, Phelps scored as one of the weakest elite swimmers they had ever measured, but that was on such traditional tests as the bench press and how much weight he can lift with his legs. ''He's fine on land,'' Heinlein says. ''He can walk…

Monday Musings: Ash from Soufriere Hills and lingering danger at Mayon

A couple bits of news: The ash plume from the February 11, 2010 eruption of Soufriere Hills taken by theAqua MODIS camera. Image courtesy of the NASA Earth Observatory. Flights have been disrupted in the West Indies since last week with the large dome-collapse eruptions of Soufriere Hills on Montserrat. The 10 km / ~35,000 foot ash plume is apparently lingering in the air at commercial flight levels, meaning delays, cancellations or long detours for many flights in the area. Flights in and out of Dominica, Guadelope, Montserrat, Anguilla, St. Kitts and Nevis have all been effected by the…

Some new NASA Earth Observatory Images

In case you don't frequent the NASA Earth Observatory, I thought I'd call your attention to some images they recently posted that are, again, excellent shots of volcanism captured from space. The current plume from Tavurvur Crater at Rabaul was shot by the MODIS imager on Terra in early August. The plume is mostly made of volcanic gases and steam, but minor amounts of ash are also found - and remember, even small concentrations of ash in the air can be hazardous to aircraft. Shiveluch has been having a busy summer, with moderate-to-large plinian eruptions produced by the emplacement (and…

Sarychev Peak eruption update for 6/17/2009

Flight path for Continental Flight 009 from Newark to Tokyo, diverted back to Newark due to the threat of ash from Sarychev Peak. Image courtesy of Flight Aware. The eruption at Sarychev Peak is continuing to disrupt all sorts of flights that head towards Asia. There are lots of unhappy travelers who have had to "enjoy" a 12 hour flight that took them from Newark, NJ to ... Newark, NJ (see yesterday's Continental Flight 009 above). There have been a multitude of flights affected by the ash, many reported here on Eruptions by travelers or relatives (keep them coming!) It will be interesting…

Comments of the Week #154: from Earth as seen from the Moon to the Universe at its birth

"What I find cool about being a banned author is this: I'm writing books that evoke a reaction, books that, if dropped in a lake, go down not with a whimper but a splash." -Lauren Myracle It's been an interesting week unlike any other. Sure, we've had our usual slew of daily, fascinating articles here at Starts With A Bang, and like always, you've had a lot to say about them. Here's everything that's gone down: How bright is the Earth as seen from the Moon? (for Ask Ethan), Ten incredible pictures that showcase astronomy's future (for Mostly Mute Monday), Does dark matter exist, or is…

REPRISE: How I Hosted the Tangled Bank ..

... and what I did to make it a success.. NOTE: this is reposted here from my original blogger site at the urging of my friend and colleague, Bora. Thanks Bora for noticing and remembering this piece! When I hosted the 23rd issue of the Tangled Bank (TB23) on 9 March 2005, I didn't know what to expect because I had never hosted a blog carnival before and in fact, I had only recently figured out what a blog carnival actually is. Nevertheless, my primary goals were to have fun and to avoid the pitfalls experienced by previous hosts. One of the worst problems that recent issues of TB…

A destructive executive action for global health

President Trump’s callous and short-sighted executive order restricting US entry for refugees and travelers from certain countries is rightfully getting a lot of attention, but it risks overshadowing another destructive thing he did for global health during his first week in office: reinstating and expanding the Mexico City Policy, also known more descriptively as the global gag rule. Trump’s adoption of this policy is even more reprehensible than it was for his Republican predecessors, for two reasons: First, he has broadened its scope so it appears to cripple not only family planning, but…

What does the Universe look like as seen from its most distant galaxy?

"One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range." -Victor Hugo A couple of weeks ago we took a look at the most distant galaxy (so far) in the known Universe, a galaxy so far away that it takes exclusively infrared observations from our most power space telescopes (Hubble and Spitzer) in order to detect it. What's perhaps even more remarkable is that the light we do detect from it -- the light we detected in the infrared -- was actually emitted in the Ultraviolet part of the spectrum! Image credit: NASA, ESA, Garth Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Rychard…

The Fate of the Universe

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. -Robert Frost Sure, if all we're talking about is the Earth, that one's a no-brainer. It's fire. Our Sun, very slowly, is burning up its Hydrogen fuel into Helium, through the process of nuclear fusion. But over the course of billions of years, it starts to burn its remaining fuel at an ever increasing rate. Over the next billion or two years, the…

Higgs at the LHC: Rumors and Getting it Right

"Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it -- and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvelous discovery and an artist making a painting." -Carlo Rubbia, famous and infamous Nobel Prize-winning physicist Unless you've been living under a rock for the last few years, you're aware that the largest, most powerful physics experiment in the history of the world is currently going on at CERN: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Image credit: CERN. Colliding protons with other…

US House Votes Against Clean Water, Gives Big Oil Big Gift

Congressional Republicans, voting party line, will end an important provision protecting streams and rivers from coal waste, and a requirement that oil companies report payments to Foreign Governments. The former is blatant hippie punching anti environmental evil. The latter is a fully expected out come if you elect a Russian puppet president, and appoint a Secretary of state whose main job will be to exploit Russian oil fields. So, if that happened, and this happened, then everything is falling nicely into place for the oligarchs, both American and otherwise. The House has already voted…

Atlantic Hurricane Season 2017 (frequently updated)

UPDATE (Aug 30th) Irma is a new named storm in the Eastern Atlantic. See this post for details, eventually. UPDATE (Aug 29th) There is a system currently raining on Cabo Verde, off the West Coast of Africa (nee Cape Verde) that is expected to develop. It is on the verge of becoming a tropical depression. The National Hurricane Center has estimated that there is a high probability of this stormy feature becoming a tropical storm in a couple of days or so. If it gets a name, it will be Irma, unless some other large rotating wet object takes that name first. UPDATE (Aug 29th) How is the…

Bunches and Antibunches of Atoms: Hanbury Brown and Twiss Effects in Ultracold Atoms

Two papers in one post this time out. One of these was brought to my attention by Joerg Heber, the other I was reminded of when checking some information for last week's mathematical post on photons. They fit extremely well together though, and both relate to the photon correlation stuff I was talking about last week. OK, what's the deal with these? These are two papers, one recent Optics Express paper from a week or so ago, the other a Nature article from a few years back. The Nature paper includes the graph you see at right, which is a really nice dataset demonstrating the Hanbury Brown and…