Category Archives: Wednesday Wow
It’s no secret; I’m hard to impress. I’ve seen a lot, done a lot, been places, learned stuff, bought the tee-shirts. I’m not willfully hard to impress; I don’t resist being impressed. It’s just that after all these years it takes something genuinely impressive.
Like volcanoes. They’re impressive. Something about lava really grabs me. Rock running like molasses; I want to play in it. Yet somehow there is only one volcano in my heart: Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawai’i. I’m so impressed I did two Wednesday Wow posts about it.
And this baby makes three…
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11 Comments | tags: Hawaii, Kilauea, lava, magma, Pele, USGS, volcano | posted in Wednesday Wow
Lately I’ve been playing a little game of What’s the Wavelength? The question is certainly a bit evocative. Wavelength could refer to many things: a favorite radio station or, metaphorically extended, a favorite anything. It might even evoke an old news meme, although the supposed question posed that time was about frequency (which is just the inverse of wavelength).
Wavelength might even apply to one’s political, social, sexual, musical, or whatever, alignment, but in this case I mean it literally and physically. Under quantum mechanics — our best description of small-scale physical reality — everything manifests as a wave. That means everything has a wavelength — the de Broglie wavelength.
I’ve been curious about it for a couple of reasons.
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11 Comments | tags: de Broglie wavelength, matter wave, wave-particle duality | posted in Physics, Wednesday Wow
The Wednesday Wow posts have been a bit off the beam recently. Four weeks ago, we were wowed (but not in a good way) by an incited insurrection by an incompetent imbecile. Two weeks ago, we were wowed (in a great way) by the inclusive Inauguration of the incoming Individual.
With all that more or less behind us, I have time to be wowed by interesting (and depressing) information about the insidious infection infesting the country and the world. I mention both because I became intrigued by difference between them.
It all started when I noticed the COVID-19 graphic on CNN.
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9 Comments | tags: charts, COVID-19, graphs | posted in Politics, Society, Wednesday Wow
Today the sun simultaneously set and rose. We had our own democratic version of: “The King is dead! Long live the King!” (An old phrase apt given the deposed would-be kinglet.)
I imagine many of us will go to sleep happier tonight than we have in years.
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17 Comments | tags: Amanda Gorman, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, President Biden, Presidential Inauguration, Vice-President Harris | posted in Politics, Wednesday Wow
I’ve been in a state of anticipation over the state of Georgia. I wondered if I might possibly wake up to a Democratic Senate this morning. As of last night, the Blues were trailing slightly behind. This morning I find they’ve called for Raphael Warnock (“Ding Dong, the witch is dead”), and it’s looking good for Jon Ossoff.
Today is also the day Congress meets, presided over by the VP, to officially count the electoral votes. It’s the last hurdle in an election badly polluted by bald lies and Constitutional sedition. The corruption and filth of the GOP is far beyond the pale.
Hell of a Wednesday. We could probably use a distraction…
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17 Comments | tags: Ames room, Ames window, optical illusion, Saturn, Stephen Wolfram, Uranus, Veritasium | posted in Wednesday Wow
It’s been a few minutes since the last Wednesday Wow post, and I’ve got two recent videos that definitely made me go “Wow!”
I have a third that is cute and interesting as well as a fourth that’s kind of math-y but lighthearted and certainly relevant (and which will introduce you to Benford’s Law if you haven’t heard of it).
The first video involves a tragic disaster that occurred on the first of this month down in Puerto Rico when the Arecibo radio astronomy telescope collapsed.
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4 Comments | tags: AI, Arecibo Observatory, Arecibo Telescope, asteroid, Benford's Law, Matt Parker, space exploration | posted in Wednesday Wow
It’s been a while since the last Wednesday Wow. Life got strange the last several months; every day had some sort of real-life wow. (Not that we’re out of these weird woods by any stretch.) It made ephemera like this fall by the wayside.
But we must soldier on, one foot in front of the other. Speaking of which, on this morning’s walk, at 6:30 (AM, of course), it was 59° (Fahrenheit, of course). We had a heat advisory Saturday — temps in the high 90s with equally high dew points.
That’s one beauty (and insanity) of Minnesota: the weather!
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10 Comments | tags: lightning, Mike Olbinski, rain storm, The Slo Mo Guys, thunder, weather, YouTube | posted in Wednesday Wow
Quantum Corral
There’s an old saying (attributed to Stanislavski) that, “There are no small roles, only small actors.” (One might argue that writers do sometimes create small roles, but that’s another blog post and not really what Stranislavski was getting at. He meant actors must take any role seriously, no matter its size.)
What I have today approaches the smallest possible actor in the smallest possible role. Despite this being seven years old, I think it still holds the title of “World’s Smallest Movie” — at least until we can make one starring nucleons or quarks. (I especially like the electron banding; that’s quantum mechanics in action.)
For a Wednesday Wow, a movie starring a single atom.
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2 Comments | tags: animation, atoms, IBM, making movies, stop-motion animation | posted in Movies, Science, Wednesday Wow
Back when I posted about Delores, the Westworld robot, I mentioned a question that once came up in a science fiction fan forum: What’s the collective noun for robots? A mechanation of robots? A clank of robots? I suggested an Asimov of robots, but maybe the best suggestion was an uprising of robots.
An uprising of robots could refer to the scary Terminator scenario but could also be taken as just meaning the rising up of (non-killer, useful) robots. That latter interpretation being not just factual, but quite operative already.
So, for this Wednesday Wow, an uprising of robots…
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13 Comments | tags: Atlas (the robot), Boston Dynamics, robot dog, robotics, robots | posted in Science, Society, Wednesday Wow
Wow. April First, but it’s no joke how much — and how quickly — life changed. March 2020 changed the world. Now we’ll see if we survive it.
Spirits seem high around here. On my morning walk, in the park I saw that someone had used colored chalk to write good thoughts on the asphalt path: “Stay Positive!” “Nature!” “Yay! Vit. D.” “Family Time” “Exercise!” (Maybe others will join in. I think I have some colored chalk…)
It’s hard to top the real-life wows, but I do have a few interesting items that might at least offer something of a distraction.
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9 Comments | tags: coronavirus, geometry, Platonic solids, quantum physics, simulations, virtual reality, X17 particle | posted in Life, Wednesday Wow
Logos con carne 