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LHC has generated:
339,000 instances of Blackhole fear episodes
104,000 instances of "destroy earth" fear episodes
24,200 instances of "destroy universe" fear episodes
but did you know that:
Since its approval in 1994, the Large Hadron Collider has generated over 1.36×10^16 jokes?
Here is one more: How many LHC physicists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer is 252.
Source & Google searches.
Happy first marriage anniversary to Jennifer (Cocktail Physics) and Sean (Cosmic Variance).
May your love be as true
and
your life be as interesting
as
the Euler’s Identity.
Secret of not just a happy, but a spectacularly joyful and meaningful marriage is to follow 4 Bs.
Separate Bedrooms
Separate Bathrooms
Separate Bank Accounts and
Separate Blogs
I don’t know about the other elements, but at least they have the separate Blog part covered!
Happy Anniversary Jennifer and Sean!
-*-
As many of you know, this website “Talk Like a Physicist” was started with Jennifer’s musings about how Physicists are cooler than pirates and we should have our own day to celebrate.
A heart shaped Pi tattoo : "Unleash the Pi"
Scuffinator’s Photostream on Flickr
This is so remarkable and I am not going to ruin it by adding some other lame picture of an unimaginative pi tattoo.
It is very easy to have Pi on your mind, but it is very hard to get Pi in your heart!
Click for a better view. Appropriately referred to as N3rd Clock.
Do you understand all the numbers here? Explanation of the numbers is left as an exercise to the reader.
Too complicated for you? How about this one?
Of course, there is an error in it. 3(pi-.14) does not equal 9; but that is close enough.
Can you feel your heart beat faster? Are your hands sweaty? Relax! This is just a clock! This lovely new timepiece appears to have been hand-written by that evil math teacher we all had to endure. Each hour is marked by a simple math problem. Solve it and solve the riddle of time. Or, you can just know that “52 - x2 + x = 10″ happens to live in the “7 o’clock” position and be done with it.
If you don’t like this one, you can get a Pi clock
And a bonus triple 9 clock:
Every hour in this clock is represented by three nines. Care to calculate?
Not sure if I like 7, which is 6.99999999 [Please no "proofs" that .999... is same as 1.0]
Triple 9 clock Via Astropixie and Bad Astronomy and Triple Nine Society.
Source of Physics Clock Hepcecob’s photostream
Math Clock can be purchased from ThinkGeek
And the Pi Clock is here. Source
Recently I was listening to the news and the broadcaster was giving numbers on the price of a barrel of oil and and an oz of gold.
Oil is very often referred to as “black gold”, so I started to ponder about the price of a barrel of gold.
You might think that this is a simple multiplication problem, and you are right, it is. But without using a calculator and without searching google, can you do this? Can you come up with an approximate number?
We are just looking for an order of magnitude calculations.
Make a guess, is it $1M, $10M, or $100M?
So with an able 9 year old assistant, who likes to do multiplications, this is what we came up with.
For starters, the broadcaster told us that the gold is at $1,000 per oz.
A barrel is 42 US gallons; but approximate it to 40 gallons.
1 oz is about 31 grams, but approximate it to 30 grams.
The price of gold is given in terms of the weight but the problem asks for the value based on volume, so one needs to do a conversion.
Sigh.. we will have to do this in metric units!
40 gallons is about 150 liters.
Density of gold is about 20 g/cc
So 30 grams of gold is 1.5 cc.
1 liter is 1000 cc
150 liters is 150,000 cc and 1.5 cc of gold costs $1000.
Hence the total cost of a barrel of gold is
(150,000/1.5)* $1000 = 100,000x$1000 = $100M
Really? $100M? that doesn’t sound right. That’s way too high.
Did we miss any zeros?
Let us double check. How much does a gold bar in Fort Knox cost?
gold bars are about 400 oz. So each gold bar costs about $400k. If you just do a visual comparison, can a barrel accommodate 250 bars?
A typical bar at Fort Knox is 7″x3.5″x1.75″, lets call it 7″x4″x1.5″ approximately.
Barrel is about 30 inches in height and 20 inches in diameter.
So if you try to visualize it, you can put a stack of 20 gold bars and can fit about 10 to 12 of those stacks in a barrel, so it sounds right.
So a barrel of gold costs $100M! Vow.
I know it is right, but I still can’t believe it.
Corollary: If you see a movie of thieves carrying bars of gold, you know that they are faking it. A person can typically carry about 50 -70 lbs. Each bar weighs about 25 lbs. So a person can carry at most 2-3 of the standard size bars. A cubic foot of gold will weigh more than 1000 lbs.
Rob’s Mobius strip tattoo. Inked 2/1/08 at Passage Tattoo in Toranto.
Star and mobius strip tattoo. From Juhyon
What is a wordle? Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.
Cosmic microwave background:
LHC:
Both of them by Claire at Wordle
Physics by Jeremy at Worldle
Click for a better view.
All three of them try to capture more then just collection of words.
Did you get it?
It stands for “All values (from zero to infinity) are less than Love.”
this video is done by Chris Mann,
CERN- european organization for nuclear research
And the LHC game, which is very rich with the physics of how to make particles go faster and faster.
A watch belonging to Einstein will be auctioned at the Auktionshuset Antiquorum and is estimated to bring up to $35,000. The watch that bears Einstein’s name, and the date and place of manufacturing will be available for bidding on the 16th of October.
Longines slogan states “Elegance is an attitude” but one might want to add ”and so is intelligence”!
Source Pleasure.dk
This watch is not to be confused with another Einstein watch
The watch’s hands actually remain completely static as the numbers themselves rotate around the watch’s face to convey the current time.
I wanted to follow the “first beam” live on the LHC webcast but the only thing I could see was the black screen…Could it be .. blackholes on the other side.. NO….
OK, I just found out that the webcast capability was limited to 2,000 streams.. I guess $12B doesn’t buy you much these days.
Its 12.30 pm and I still don’t know if everything went/is going OK or not. USLHC blog has no info, except that “everything is green!” BBC 4 radio has no info either. A bit under whelming! Looks like Sean at Cosmic Variance is following the beam octant by octant.
A great physics marketing opportunity not fully exploited.
Well, welcome to the post LHC world, which will look like:
Please rate the questions and answers and also submit new questions and comments for inclusion in the FAQ.
