Inspired by Elke Stangl, whose idea this was (see here for an explanation of the canonical rules), I hereby give my first attempt at Google poetry:
Life is just…life.
OK, so, never mind.
It doesn’t matter.
Therein lies a tale.
It’s winter because we’re far from the Sun.
There’s no place for you in such a conformist world.
Am I doomed?
Insert your own joke here.
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
2 aspects of a Christ.
1.
The hand goes hand in how? Exacto.
An eye for an E, for E, five thoughts (but only with an app-le.)
And He asks: is your life limned or dimmed?
Hand in—hand in your chits held up in a metal sandbox.
Enumerate your friends? pain? fossils? eyeteeth?
breakfast? not-in-a-drop? spankers?
cask binders? 1-benzylhydryl-4-methyl-piperazine?
Two slashes to the banishment room!
Here sits my sphinx in desert sands and androids, lampreys, chitinous destinies, going:
Redacted. Redacted. Redacted.
2.
No.
Posted in Poem | Tagged cell phones, Christ | 6 Comments »
[Reposted from Dec. 4, 2012]
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night…
’til is not a word.
Please, use either until, or till. Some people think that ’til is an abbreviation of until, but this is folk etymology. “Till” is the older word by far, going back to at least Shakespeare’s day. For example:
John 21:22 (KJV) Jesus saith unto him, If I will that he tarry till I come, what to thee? Follow thou me.
Romeo and Juliet: I, v For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.
Also note that “Till death us depart”, from the marriage liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer, dates back to 1549! It became “Till death us do part” in 1662.
Seeing advertisements for the old Fox show ’til Death always grated on me like fingernails on a blackboard. Luckily, like most Fox sitcoms, that show departed quite a while ago.
Posted in Rant | Tagged grammar, Shakespeare, till | 3 Comments »
You probably learned about projectile motion in introductory physics class. If you throw something (a baseball, say) then its horizontal motion will remain constant, whereas its vertical motion will change under the influence of Earth’s gravitational pull. The result is a parabolic arc, right?
Well, no. Saying that projectile motion is parabolic is only an approximation.
In class, I “prove” that the motion of the baseball is a parabola, but in order to do so, I make the (reasonable) assumption that the effect of gravity is a constant. That is, I assume that the vector g (the acceleration due to gravity) always points in the same direction all along the trajectory.
This is actually not quite true, however. I’ve neglected the curvature of the Earth.
Now, this isn’t really a big deal when throwing baseballs. Suppose you toss a ball to your friend 50 m away. The vector g for you does point in a slightly different direction then g for your friend, but the angular difference is miniscule…it’s about 50/637,000,000 radians, or 0.00045 degrees. This is so small that I am comfortable pretending that the two g’s are actually parallel, and the derivation thereby leads to a parabolic arc.
But what if you don’t make that approximation? What answer do you get?
You get an ellipse. You get an orbit. And here’s the point of my post:
Every time you throw an object, the object is (temporarily) in orbit until it hits the ground.
Here’s the orbit of a thrown baseball (not to scale):
Now suppose the Earth had the same mass, but was the size of the Little Prince’s home asteroid B-612, which is as big as a house. The orbit is the same, but this time the baseball doesn’t strike the surface:
The takeaway is that all projectile motion is really orbital motion. I find this fascinating: you don’t need a fancy rocket to launch something into orbit. Your arm will suffice. It’s just that you need the Earth to not be in the way.
Posted in Physics | Tagged orbits, Physics, projectile motion | 1 Comment »
I am a huge supporter of free speech. I also support the right to make pariahs out of any bozo who still thinks the Confederate flag is not about racism. And so, as a society, my proposal is simple:
If enough people make fun of these asshats, peer pressure will kick in eventually. They’ll see themselves as the losers we know they are.
Posted in Rant | Tagged Confederate flag, flip off the flag, give 'em the bird, peer pressure, racism | 2 Comments »
On Monday, Republican presidential wannabe Rick Santorum said that the Pope should “leave science to the scientists”.
Sigh.
What that hell does that even mean?
What the hell?
If taken literally, it would mean that Santorum defers to scientists, and so if a policy issue concerning climate change were to arise, he would trust in the scientists’ collective judgment. That collective judgment is overwhelmingly unanimous; the fact that 97% of scientists in a particular field agree on a particular something is well-nigh miraculous.
But of course Santorum doesn’t mean that.
It could also mean that he thinks no one should talk about anything unless they’re an expert in the field. But that’s absurd, right? If a tornado approaches, would Santorum say that only meteorologists should talk about it? Surely not. [See my last post.]
In point of fact, “leave science to the scientists” is a kind of code these days among many Republican politicians. Here’s my rough translation:
“Despite what I may personally believe, my voting base is generally against human-caused climate change, and many of these voters even deny that climate change is occurring at all. On the other hand, if I personally deny climate change, I will look like an idiot to the something like 71% of the general public who agree that climate change is happening. So I will obfuscate: by punting to unnamed scientists, I can deflect the question; I can make my voting base happy while at the same time not actually saying I’m against climate change per se.”
This kind of obfuscation is odious to me. Slimy. Maybe it’s par for the course; maybe that’s how the game is played; maybe that’s just realpolitik. But I don’t have to like it. Someone needs to take Santorum (or any other Republican who spouts such nonsense) to task, and ask the following hard questions:
Imagine Santorum is sitting beneath a mountain, and there are 100 volcanologists around him. 97 of the volcanologists say that the mountain is about to explode; 3 of them have doubts. But Santorum doesn’t listen to any of the scientists; he’s got Rush Limbaugh whispering in his ear, telling him “it’s all bullshit.” So Santorum says: “Leave volcanology to the volcanologists. Let’s do nothing.” His fan-base cheers—at least until the pyroclastic flow hits them all at 450 mph.
Posted in Rant | Tagged Climate change, global warming, Santorum | 7 Comments »
Posted in Comix | Tagged Climate change, Politicians who should be disqualified from public office because they lack even the most basic knowledge of science, Santorum, Twister | 4 Comments »
Today is Memorial Day, and while my father did not die in the service of his country, he did serve his country: as both a submarine officer, and later as an engineer working for the DoD. And he did die, eight months ago. He didn’t fall to an enemy bullet, or go down with his ship. He died of ALS.
I am 46 years old. When my father died last September, on my mother’s birthday, it was the first time I had ever experienced the loss of an immediate family member. I feel lucky that I made it that far…46 years…before having such an experience. On this Memorial Day I feel a need to share what I’ve learned, if anything. Maybe I’ve learned nothing at all.
The pain is less than I thought. Maybe it’s because of how he died…helpless with ALS…but when I first heard the news, my initial reaction was relief. I thought, It’s over. It’s finally over. I didn’t cry, I didn’t break down; I moved on like the doctors in that Robert Frost poem: “And they, since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” All the crying was done months earlier: when I saw him gradually lose the use of his legs; when I learned he really had ALS; when I heard he probably wouldn’t make it to Christmas. Death is not always an evil, and my dad was finally at peace.
There is guilt. I have guilt at how much relief I felt. What right do I have for relief? My sister and my nephew took care of my father for over a year before he passed. They are the ones who should feel relief. Relief, for me, doesn’t seem fitting. I don’t think I did enough. I don’t think I visited enough. I sometimes think I failed my family or my father somehow. On a rational level, I don’t think guilt is a particularly useful emotion, unless it spurs you to change your behavior in some way. But I don’t know if there’s anything I would have done differently. And so the guilt remains.
The pain is more than I thought. Sometimes, at odd moments, I will think of something that I want to share with my father: a good book, an incredible play in football or basketball, an amazing place I have visited. It takes a second to remember that my father is gone. And then that something that I wanted to share dies, too; falls away, like ashes, like dust. It’s bitter. It’s cold. Whatever it was that I was going to share, I don’t share with anyone.
I can handle grief. When you’re a kid, you may imagine one of your parents dying. In your mind, it’s devastating. If you’ve never grieved before, you will look to TV, books, movies…anything to give you some context, some framework, some way to imagine what such grief is like. The lesson is always: grief is an unbearable, unimaginable pain. It will devastate you. It’s an abyss. And yet…I’m 46. A parent dying when you’re 46 is natural. It seems like an expected thing. There is pain, but the world moves on. A week later, the adoption of my son became official. Circle of life.
There is no Hallmark moment. I never had a last talk with my dad. No secrets were revealed. I don’t recall the last thing I said to him, or the last thing he said to me. Life is just…life. And sometimes, it just…ends. I do remember the last thing I did with my father: we watched the movie Zoolander together. I challenge anyone to find meaningful allegory in that.
I sense that my father lives on. I don’t believe in any afterlife. But that doesn’t mean that my father is gone forever. On the contrary, there are memories and ideas and connections and neural pathways and patterns and dreams and software, inside my own mind, that I would definitely attribute to my father. He’s not inside my head, like Baron Harkonnen haunting Alia in Dune Messiah. But there is something in me attributable to him. That’s not a bad thing, or even necessarily a good thing. But it is continuity. And it is fitting.
OBITUARY
James Anthony Rave, 73, of Beaufort, died peacefully Thursday, Sept. 18, 2014, at home. No service will be held. Jim was from Cincinnati, Ohio, and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1963. After six years as a submarine officer, he continued to serve our nation as a federal employee with the Department of the Navy, finally retiring after a full career from Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point. During his final years he kept active working as a contracting engineer and avidly reading science fiction and military history. He is survived by his wife of 51 years; four children; four brothers, two sisters; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ALS, grief, Zoolander | 5 Comments »
I suspect there are hundreds of physics classrooms across the country that have the following poster:
This is the CENCO (Central Scientific Company) poster of the famous 1927 Solvay Conference. I’ve been to at least three universities that have this thing on the wall, including my own institution, Western Carolina University, and my alma mater, Wake Forest University. Strangely, I can’t date the poster, although if you read the descriptions of the 1927 Solvay attendees, the poster lists Dirac as being dead and De Broglie as being alive. Ergo, the posters were printed some time between 1984 and 1987. I suppose CENCO gave the posters away for free as a promotional during the Reagan administration, and I’d guess most of those freebies are still hanging on the wall today. (Physicists don’t update their décor very often.)
I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking at this poster (sometimes, the life of a lab instructor is dreary). And, in all my time staring at these giants of modern physics, I’ve formulated one burning question:
Which of these people was the dumbest?
[Note: I used this site for a listing of the attendees in the famous photo]
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not claiming anyone in the poster is dumb per se. And I would never compare myself to anyone on the list. But logic dictates that one of the people here was literally the dumbest attendee; I feel a moral obligation to identify this person for posterity.
Most of the names on the poster are familiar to physicists, and most of the attendees are therefore out of the running. No one would ever seriously consider Einstein, Curie, Dirac, Bohr, etc. as being the “dumbest.” On the other hand, some of the physicists aren’t so familiar, but they were obviously talented: Guye wrote over 200 papers; Knudsen had a bunch of crap named after him (Knudsen cell, Knudsen flow, Knudsen number, Knudsen layer and Knudsen gases). Piccard and Langmuir fall into this category as well.
And then there are the scrubs flanking Ehrenfest,
Henriot, Ehrenfest, and Herzen
and the scrubs flanking Schrödinger,
de Donder, Schrödinger, and Verschaffelt
These scrubs are so scrubby that the CENCO poster doesn’t even talk about them.
Surely one of these fools was the dumbest?
Let’s take them in order. Henriot was a chemist, so that’s a strike against him; he discovered that potassium is naturally radioactive, which is cool I guess, and figured out a way to make tops spin at high speeds. Woop-de-do. Herzen was a friend of Ernest Solvay, but didn’t really do anything else of note; I think we know how Herzen got an invite to the conference, don’t we?
Being a mathematician, de Donder probably gets a pass: he also wrote a shitload of books. The final scrub, Verschaffelt, is notable as having the shortest Wikipedia article of any Solvay attendee. Basically, all I can find out about him was that he was a physicist. Period.
Before we decide between Herzen and Verschaffelt, we should mention two other physicists in the poster. Compton once said, “the supernatural is as real as the natural world of Science,” so I’m tempted to list Compton amongst the scrubs. Anyone with so much woo in his veins can’t be listed amongst the top tier of physicists. Compton did win a Nobel prize though, and he was American…we have to disqualify him, then. America, fuck yeah! That leaves Ehrenfest, who was by all accounts a clever guy. But come on, the guy shot his own son and then killed himself. That’s hard to get past. I guess we’ll chalk that up to mental illness, not stupidity, but no one is ever going to make an Ehrenfest action figure.
None of these for Ehrenfest.
So who was dumber, Herzen or Verschaffelt?
Herzen wrote a book or two, and supposedly played a “leading role” in physics and chemistry. So I’ll give him the nod over Verschaffelt. Thus we can tentatively say:
Verschaffelt was the dumbest attendee of the 1927 Solvay Conference.
“I’m still smarter than you.”
You’re welcome.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Physicist, Physics, Solvay conference, Verschaffelt | 24 Comments »
In the film Amadeus, Salieri wonders what Mozart looks like. He knows Mozart by reputation, but has never met the man. He says:
“As I went through the salon, I played a game with myself. This man had written his first concerto at the age of four; his first symphony at seven; a full-scale opera at twelve. Did it show? Is talent like that written on the face?”
Good question. Decide for yourself:
Which brings me to a game we can play: Physicist or not a physicist?
Look at the following portraits, and see if you can see the spark of genius in them. Which ones are as smart as Einstein? And which ones are merely composers, economists, or chess players? [Answers follow at the end of the post.]
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7
#8
#9
#10
#11
#12
[A quick note on the formatting of this post. Yes, I know it sucks. And it took me 2.5 hours to get to this level of suckiness. Thanks, WordPress, for forcing the broken Beep Boop Boop editor on me, and disabling classic mode! In the Beep Boop mode, not only is everything slower, but (1) you can’t center text in picture captions, (2) the visual editor doesn’t accurately display what’s in the HTML editor, (3) the visual editor doesn’t accurately display what’s in preview mode, (4) if text is left justified, then it wraps around automatically, even if you didn’t choose this option, (5) you can’t change font size of the text, or caption, (6) you can’t even change the fucking FONT, (7) tags are now buried under several levels of drop-down menus, slowing things down immensely, and (8) there’s an annoying pop-up asking me after every edit if Hey! Do I want to Preview? No, I don’t want a preview, WordPress, and your removing the “switch to classic mode” button was frankly just malicious.]
Answers [highlight to reveal]: #1 Physicist Emmy Noether. #2 Composer Bela Bartok. #3 Chess champion Mikhail Tal. #4 Economist John Maynard Keynes. #5 Physicist Shirley Jackson. #6 Physicist Lise Meitner. #7 President John Tyler. #8 Physicist Chen Ning Yang. #9 Physicist Michael Faraday. #10 Physicist Emilie du Chatelet. #11 Swordsman Miyamoto Musashi. #12 Physicist Michael Binger.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Physics | 6 Comments »
Many Worlds Theory 
