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

Update: Here are a few more for your math pleasure:

From the Designer

What is 90 degrees in radians? With this great clock, trigonometry will be a breeze! Inspired by my math teacher, Ms. Pinocci.

An alarm clock that requires you to do math:

Binary Clock:

A reminder clock for a physicist:

Outer limit clock:

We’ll let you figure out the time on this one.

Below is the Atom 561 clock:

This design marks the 80th anniversary of Atmos clocks by the Swiss maker Jaeger LeCoultre
The power source is a capsule that contains gas and ethyl chloride. When the temperature rises, the gas/chloride mix expands and compresses a spiral spring, whereas when the temperature falls, the gas condenses and loosens up the spring. Somehow that equals a constant winding of the clock, so no human intervention is necessary.

Source Technobob.

Clock that reveals time in text:

From Christiaan Postima. The starting point with this project was a personal study about form & time. I put together more than 150 individual clockworks and made them work together to become one clock. I show the progress of time by letting the numbers be written in words by the clockworks. Reading clockwise, the time being is visible through a word and readable by the completeness of the word, 12 words from “one” to “twelve”. The size of the clock is 1,4 by 1,4 meter.

Star Clock from China vision

Life Clock: not an hour clock, but a clock that tells time in years:

It is a 84 year clock. Source

And my favorite:

Source Tiktak clock by Dutch designers Niels van Eijk and Miriam van der Lubbe. Via Technobob.

Ok, one more:

Planetary orbit clock

little metal planets orbit a larger central planet at the middle of the “universe.” One planet signifies hours, another minutes, and the last tiny planet is the second hand. You can really only tell what time it is by viewing the clock from above, a small price to pay to show off your geek-power. Source Ebay and Gizmodo

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.