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This Dilbert cartoon really hits home, because I am both a physicist and an attorney!
So anybody want to incorporate in another universe? Want to buy some real estate in another dimension? Want to find a loophole using a worm-hole, I can help you with that! Trust me, I wrote a book about it.
I would have expected a cartoon like this from XKCD, not from Dilbert!
The Vocabulary column in NY Times had an interesting question:
This weekend, co-vocabularists are invited to submit novel nouns of assemblage for modern phenomena. A bucket of Wiis? A swamp of blogs? A murder of crowds?
So what would you call a crowd of physicists? Here are my suggestions:
A quantum of physicists
A current of physicists
A plasma of physicists
A horizon of physicists
A resistance of Physicists
An einstien of physicists / A bohr of physicists / A hawking of physicists
An inertia of physicists
A sigma of physicists
Of course, a crowd of string theorists will be called:
A string of Physicists
A knot of Physicists
A manifold of Physicists
A dimension of physicists
I am sure you can come up with something better. Leave a note in the comment.
Path Integral Formulation of your life. I know that if I were to draw my life, it will have so many kinks, and loops and several places where there are discontinuities. And oh, yah, I also have a couple of year where I have no idea what I was doing, and a few twists and turns making it unintegrable!
Sunny is applying irresistible force to an immovable object.
Sunny is Blue shifted
Sunny believes in emergent gravity
Sunny believes that ice cream is responsible for emergent gravity
Sunny is exploring Short Range Correlations
Sunny is going through a phase transition
Sunny is tunneling through a high potential barrier
Sunny is guilty of pseudo random number sampling
Sunny was responsible for the supernova event that happened 630M years after the big bang.
Sunny is looking for the breaks to stop cosmic acceleration.
Sunny likes his coffee super heated and his milkshake super cooled
Sunny has neutrino vision, no wonder he can’t sleep at night.
Sunny is self diffused.
Sunny calculates everything from first principles.
The old ones are here.
Click on the above to see a lot more interesting details.
Not sure about you, but I think I would think better and more clearly, if I were surrounded by 50,000 volts, displayed as beautiful dancing arcs, streaming out of my hat and my shirt and my sneaker; sort of a visual representation of the various thought processes running in my head.
Who needs Twitter when you can have TeslaArctr visually showing off and thought-casting in real time; thought-casting with arcs or arc-casting your thoughts.
My hats off to Peter Terren, who is bringing the Tesla coil to a new level of science, art and fun. He is an inspiration to all thoughtful-tinkerers in the world.
Peter Terren has created a shocking new image of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ - by shooting 500,000 volts of electricity down his body as he sat in the pose.
Using a home-built Tesla coil pieced together from junk and bits from hardware stores, Peter Terren risked his life to make the electrifying image.
He was also only protected from painful death by electrocution by a layer of cheap builders’ foil.
Terren, from Bunbury, Western Australia,said: ‘I wanted to convey the concept of the modern electrical age with the barrage of electrical interference in our lives. So much is happening and demanding our attention that it is difficult to “think”.
‘I decided upon a real life posture like the thinker with a lot of electrical activity around me with sparks onto my body.’
Source Tesla Down Under
[UPDATE] Note from Peter Terren:
Ahem.. (clears throat ready to talk-like-a-physicist).
It is remarkable how the magnitude of voltage has reduced by one - 50,000 volts in this article, 500,000 in the Daily Mail article versus the 200,000 mentioned on my site.
In fact we are all wrong. The peak voltage generated from a Tesl coil can be predicted by the ratio of inductances in a linked resonant system multiplied by the primary coil peak voltage. This is provided there is no load. Once the sparks start breaking out and a load develops in a chaotic manner, then there is no fixed value in what is a highly chaotic waveform which is modulated by the mains 50Hz, spark gap of 1400 BPS and system resonance of around 100kHz. The peak voltage may be considerably lower and depends in all likelihood on cosmic ray ionisation locally as a significant influence on spark directions and initiation.
But lets not bring celectial muons into the equation, lets just call it 200kV.(Oh and by the way, that’s me)
A lolcat is an image combining a photograph, most frequently of a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in (often) broken English—a dialect which is known as “lolspeak”.
Physics isn’t immune to LOLcats either.
antigravity Lolcats
Around the World in 80 Telescopes: I am eagerly awaiting the start of the webcast of around the world in 80 telescope. It starts on 4/3/09 at 9.00 UT; so about an hour from now for me.
The 24-hour long webcast is organized by the European Southern Observatory for the International Year of Astronomy cornerstone project 100 Hours of Astronomy.
The webcast event follows night and day around the globe to visit some of the most advanced observatories on Earth and in space, exploring the universe in visible light and beyond.
The Gemini North Telescope (Hawaii, USA) and the large observatories at the summit of volcanic Mauna Kea are scheduled for the first stops in the program beginning April 3 at 1 Am PST.
Others on the schedule include the Swift Satellite and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Himalayan Chandra Telescope (Hanle, India), and the 10-meter South Pole Telescope and IceCube Neutrino Telescope (South Pole, Antarctica).
This is a remarkable tattoo of the Basel equation and Pi.
I wanted to post this tattoo in the Pi edition to show that the magical number Pi appears at the strangest of places. One would not have expected the summation of inverse squares of integers to add up to some combination related to Pi, but here it is.
This little baby is also due to Euler. In 1644 Mengoli asked if anyone could find a closed-form value (and prove it rigorously) for the infinite sum of the reciprocals of the squares. So, what is 1+1/4+1/9+1/16……. and so forth off to infinity. Contrary to intuition this series does not diverge to infinity. Although we are adding infinitely-many positive amounts together we still get a finite number. This is because the positive amounts that we are adding are getting smaller sufficiently fast. It was known that this sum was approximately 1.644. However, when Mengoli asked for a closed-form value he was looking for an EXACT expression, not a decimal approximation. In 1735 Euler found the closed-form solution. If you continue to Tattoo Number 4 part 2 you will see the sum.
More about Basel Function here.
Talking about the strangest places Pi appears, I wasn’t thinking of Pi being on PeppermintStripe’s lips. I bet she can recite 100 digits of Pi, easy! This is really cool.
Source: PeppermintStrips’s Deviant Art.
Bozone: noun, The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating.
Egoravity: noun, the physical force identified in Newton’s (unpublished) fourth law of physics– that everything revolves around me.
From Addictionary.
‘Live from Mars’ layer to view the latest images from NASA’s THEMIS camera on board the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, sometimes just hours after NASA receives them. You can also see live satellite orbital tracks, or check out where the HiRISE camera plans to image next.
Another interesting feature added to Google Earth is the ‘Guided Tours’ feature. If you’re not sure where to go on Mars, Google lets Bill Nye and Public Radio’s Ira Flatow, host of Science Friday show you around. You can go to the Mars Gallery layer, and double-click either of their tours for a narrated trip around the Martian surface. Google claims that this is a great way to introduce oneself to some of the most interesting spots on the planet - just sit back, and enjoy the ride. If something catches your eye, you can pause these tours at any time and explore on your own, then hit play to resume your journey.
Apart from these features, there’s a browseable layer of Google’s favorite satellite images, visible and infrared global views, geo-located excerpts from A Traveler’s Guide to Mars, and others. Google has also included 3D models of NASA rovers. Also, you can use the search box to locate famous sites like the ‘face on Mars’, just like surfing Earth.
Some of the hi-res images are absolutely stunning.
Washington politicians took time from bailouts and earmark-laden spending packages on Wednesday for what might seem like an unusual act: officially designating a National Pi Day.
The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a resolution introduced two days earlier that designates March 14, 2009 (3/14, get it?) as National Pi Day. It urges schools to take the opportunity to teach their students about Pi and “engage them about the study of mathematics.”
Zuck called them “lighthearted reminders about the importance of math and science education,” adding “this year we decided to put together an effort to see if we could use this as a mechanism to increase awareness for math and science education.”
All the arguments in favor of Pi Day also apply equally to Physics Day.
The text of the resolution is here;
Whereas the Greek letter (Pi) is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter;
Whereas the ratio Pi is an irrational number, which will continue infinitely without repeating, and has been calculated to over one trillion digits;
Whereas Pi is a recurring constant that has been studied throughout history and is central in mathematics as well as science and engineering;
Whereas mathematics and science are a critical part of our children’s education, and children who perform better in math and science have higher graduation and college attendance rates;
Whereas aptitude in mathematics, science, and engineering is essential for a knowledge-based society;
Whereas, according to the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) survey done by the National Center for Education Statistics, American children in the 4th and 8th grade were outperformed by students in other countries including Taiwan, Singapore, Russia, England, South Korea, Latvia, and Japan;
Whereas since 1995 the United States has shown only minimal improvement in math and science test scores;
Whereas by the 8th grade, American males outperform females on the science portion of the TIMSS survey, especially in Biology, Physics, and Earth Science, and the lowest American scores in math and science are found in minority and impoverished school districts;
Whereas America needs to reinforce mathematics and science education for all students in order to better prepare our children for the future and in order to compete in a 21st Century economy;
Whereas the National Science Foundation has been driving innovation in math and science education at all levels from elementary through graduate education since its creation 59 years ago;
Whereas mathematics and science can be a fun and interesting part of a child’s education, and learning about Pi can be an engaging way to teach children about geometry and attract them to study science and mathematics; and
Whereas Pi can be approximated as 3.14, and thus March 14, 2009, is an appropriate day for `National Pi Day’: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the House of Representatives–
(1) supports the designation of a `Pi Day’ and its celebration around the world;
(2) recognizes the continuing importance of National Science Foundation’s math and science education programs; and
(3) encourages schools and educators to observe the day with appropriate activities that teach students about Pi and engage them about the study of mathematics.
Attest:
Clerk.
Track the legislation here.
