Category Archives: Science
There are things you can’t unsee. I don’t mean the walking in on your parents kind of sights. And I also don’t mean certain movies, such as Cop Out or MacGruber (two movies I had to stop watching after about 15-20 minutes least my brain melt; oh, Bruce, what were you thinking).
I mean things that, once you know they’re there, you can’t look at that same context ever again without seeing it.
This post was triggered by a, what I believe was a tongue-in-cheek, post on (if I recall correctly) io9. [The qualifications here come from not being able to find said post anywhere, even though I know I saw it this year. Even paging deep into Google results digs up nothing.]
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3 Comments | tags: Betelgeuse, big dipper, little dipper, M42, NGC 1976, orion constellation, United States | posted in Life, Science
I’m torn over today’s topic. I’m tired (for the moment) of nattering about work (got some thanks, but no thanks messages today, and that makes me disinclined to discuss the distress; nepenthe beckons, I’ll answer the call, now 94 bottles of beer on the wall).
And I’ve spent some time in the blogsphere, which is endlessly fascinating, but time-consuming and a bit draining. After reading about the struggles of others, mine own seem pale and pointless.
So it’s time for something light and refreshing. I realized I haven’t bored anyone with science recently, so, as the good The Doctor would say, “Run!”
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Leave a comment | tags: CERN, Einstein, neutrinos, OPERA, particles, quarks | posted in Physics, Writing
Saturn V
Kudos and congratulations to Curiosity! The Mars Space Laboratory — the “rover” — is safely down on Mars. Other blogs have covered it in great detail, so I won’t go into it. The Bad Astronomer is a great place to start with anything space-related; here’s a good one, and here’s another. Maki, over at sci-ənce, has a really cute comic. And you can always count on Randall Monroe, over at xkcd, for a good take on it. (And speaking of xkcd and Mars, I’ve always loved this one.)
But I do just want to say, “Wow! This is really cool!”
And isn’t Curiosity an apt name for a mission designed to slake ours.
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Leave a comment | tags: Curiousity, Mars, MSL, NASA, Project Gemini, Project Mercury, Redstone rocket, Saturn V rocket, Titan rocket | posted in Life, Science
I felt a spark while shaking hands with someone tonight, and that [obvious pun]ed the thought that, “Oh, gee, here we go: The Season of the Spark.”
Now I do mean a literal spark, as in zap, as in ouch, and that ouch-rageous zap signals (again, in the very literal sense of exchanging a very readable, very detectable, signal) the Season of the Spark.
And that means two things.
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2 Comments | tags: lightning, neon bulb, spark, static electricity | posted in Life, Science
I suppose a “golden” date could refer to a really good time out with the perfect someone. Or it could refer to a couple of hot oldsters, past their silver years, tearing up the town.
I suppose the oldsters could double the value of their gold by being with that perfect someone. It doesn’t matter; I mean neither perfect occasions nor advanced years. I speak, literally, of the date.
It’s 11-11-11, and that’s slightly fun and slightly rare. It’s a bit like your Golden Birthday, when your age matches the date (for example, when you turn 19 on the 19th of whatever month). Today we match on the date, month and year; trifecta gold! And of course, double bonus points just before lunch at 11:11:11!!
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4 Comments | tags: 11, binary, date, golden | posted in Life, Math
I was trying to keep up with the physics4me feed when I came across an article that made me sad: Higgs boson signals fade at Large Hadron Collider. It’s not unexpected, but for a while there the news was pretty exciting. It seemed like maybe we’d finally found the Higgs.
That I felt sad made me realize hope much I was hoping for a Higgs. A Higgs Contact.
I said a while ago that I wanted Alien Contact. Of course, that does have the potential to go badly for us… but it might not. It would be one of those life is never the same again major events. Not that plenty of major events haven’t happened in our various lifetimes. We’ve walked on the moon, knocked down the Berlin wall and invented reality TV (and the iPhone).
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Leave a comment | tags: higgs boson, quantum physics | posted in Physics, Science
I recently mentioned a parable about grains of rice and a chessboard. If you were industrious enough to try your own interweb search for [parable 64 squares grains] you might be ahead of me. Or you may have known the parable already. For the rest of you, here’s the deal.
Stripped of the narrative, it’s about taking a chessboard and placing a single grain of rice in the first square (in some versions, it’s a grain of wheat). In the second square, place two grains of rice—double the amount in the first square. In the third square use double the grains of the second square. For each square on the chessboard, use twice as many grains of rice as used for the previous square.
I’ll come back to the punchline, but I stripped the narrative. Let me fix that.
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Leave a comment | tags: exabyte | posted in Math, Sideband
I had a small dinner party last night so that some friends could come over for some ‘za and beer and catch up on the latest antics of Nancy Botwin and company on Weeds. Per the old saying, “A good time was had by all.” Or to put it less passively, “As usual, we had a blast! (And that Nancy… craaaaaaa-zy!!)”
However, in the course of conversation I realized not everyone knows about the magic behind our north star (Polaris by name) and found myself taking the virtual podium to explain. It’s one of those things that’s common knowledge to many but may come as a complete surprise to others.
So, for those of you not familiar with the navigational magic behind the north star, here’s the deal.
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7 Comments | tags: astronomy, beer, big dipper, celestial navigation, dinner party, latitude, little dipper, Nancy Botwin, north star, pizza, polaris, stars, Weeds | posted in Basics, Science, Sideband
My recent post about how the Big Bang and “Let there be Light” seem equally fantastic to me triggered an interesting comment from a reader. A detailed response requires more elbow room than a comment allows, so here’s a follow-up article instead.
One of the points involved that our scientific ideas, no matter how inaccurate they may turn out to be, are at least based on evidence. And to the credit of science, when we recognize errors in our interpretation of the evidence, science changes to accommodate the new interpretation.
This has been, as I mentioned in that post, hugely successful. One of the failures of our spiritual metaphysics is that it clings to frameworks defined thousands of years ago and often stubbornly refuses to accommodate new information.
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7 Comments | tags: atheism, big bang, brain mind problem, Gandhi, Kurt Gödel, Lee Smolin, Max Planck, quantum physics, Roger Penrose, Sheldon Glashow, spacetime, spirituality, String theory, theism, Theory of Consciousness, Yin and Yang | posted in Philosophy, Physics, Religion, Science
I’d planned to do this later, probably for Sideband #64, but in honor of my parents 64th wedding anniversary (2 parents, 64 years, okay!) this numerical rumination gets queue-bumped to now.
Just recently I wrote about 64-bit numbers and how 64 bits allows you to count to the (small, compared to where we’re going) number:
264 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616
That’s 18 exabytes (or 18 giga-gigabyes). Just to put it into perspective, if we were counting seconds, it amounts to 584,942,417,355 years; more than 500 billion years! (That’s the American, short-scale billion.)
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Leave a comment | tags: 64-bit, 64K, 8-bit, big numbers, binary, bits, exabyte, powers of two | posted in Computers, Math, Sideband
Logos con carne 