Extraordinary Video

Fish comes back

Last night I changed the water in my fish tank. The tank has a capacity of 10-gallons and holds a single goldfish. Once I had cleaned the tank, I put the fish in it. This sort of goldfish does not require a heater and the fresh water was quite cold. So the little fellow was fine at first (say, for three seconds!) and then sunk to the bottom where he pooped just a bit from stress I guess (see the photo) and where he stayed all night.

He wasn't dead, his gills were working, but he sure looked bad. Then, tonight he is miraculously transformed anew and is swimming about happily! It just goes to show, the fish is cold-blooded and once the water warmed, the fish came back to life. No miraculous really, but kind of cool.

A quote on string theorists

It's rare for a scientist---even a string theorist, beholden neither to instruments nor to data--to submit 7 articles in an entire year, let alone one month.

David Kaiser's review of Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World by Eugenie Samuel Reich in American Scientist, Nov.--Dec. 2009,

On the book: I haven't read the book (only this review) but this quote summarizes a large part of physics today.

They knew more than we think

X-rays and advanced photography have uncovered the true complexity of the mysterious Antikythera mechanism, a device so astonishing that its discovery is like finding a functional Buick in medieval Europe.

In 1900, some divers found the wreck of a Roman vessel off the Greek island of Antikythera. Among the other treasures remanded to the Greek government was an unassuming corroded lump. Some time later, the lump fell apart, revealing a damaged machine of unknown purpose, with some large gears and many smaller cogs, plus a few engraved words in Greek. Early studies suggested it was some type of astronomical time-keeping device – researcher Derek J. de Solla Price laid the groundwork by establishing initial tooth counts and suggesting that the device followed the Metonic cycle, a 235-month pattern commonly used to predict eclipses in the ancient world.

It took X-ray imaging and specialized processing techniques to uncover what was inside a barnacle encrusted and corroded container. Yet, what was left inside lent deep insight into advancements long ago.

The findings, published in Nature, are probably best described as "mind blowing." Devices with this level of complexity were not seen again for almost 1,500 years, and the Antikythera mechanism's compactness actually bests the later designs. Probably built around 150 B.C., the Antikythera mechanism can perform a number of functions just by turning a crank on the side.

Here's a device that "could be used to predict the month, day and hour of an eclipse, and even accounted for leap years. It could also predict the positions of the sun and moon against the zodiac, and has a gear train that turns a black and white stone to show the moon's phase on a given date. It is possible that it could also show the astronomical positions of the planets known to the ancients: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn."

You can see a video here.

The ancients were neither primative nor ignorant. I am reminded of Doron Zeilberger's quote (somewhere on his site) to the effect that our ancestors were much wiser than we know. This is more evidence of that.

(hat tip: andy i.)

Snowflakes or fakes?

During the holiday season we see images of lots of stuff not found in nature: flying reindeer, sugarplum fairies, and geometrically incorrect snowflakes. Now, Thomas Koop, a chemist, is trying to fix the snowflake problem.

Koop thinks ice crystals are masterpieces of natural beauty. Unfortunately, he says, "This beauty is sometimes corrupted."

The quest for accuracy in advertising. An exercise in futility if ever there were one!

Santa Physics: His existence is a miracle!

Santa has 31 hours to visit 378 million Christian children; at the rate of 3.5 children per household, and assuming at least one good child per home, this comes to 108 million homes; if each child receives no more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh would be carrying more than 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself; Santa would thus need at least 360,000 Reindeer to pull the sleigh; since Santa must visit 108 homes in 31 hours, he will have to travel at 650 miles per second -- 3,000 times the speed of sound; at that speed, the lead pair of Reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each and vaporize – indeed, the entire Reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second; Santa himself would be subjected to forces of 17,500 G's; a 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, and be crushed.

This just shows that there's a miracle for Santa to exist!

A reason NOT to go into law

From Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia (and I don't think he's talking about engineers):

I mean there’d be a, you know, a defense or public defender from Podunk, you know, and this woman is really brilliant, you know. Why isn’t she out inventing the automobile or, you know, doing something productive for this society?

I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That’s important, but it doesn’t put food on the table and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise.

And they appear here in the Court, I mean, even the ones who will only argue here once and will never come again. I’m usually impressed with how good they are. Sometimes you get one who’s not so good. But, no, by and large I don’t have any complaint about the quality of counsel, except maybe we’re wasting some of our best minds.

The Family Guy does physics

From Hulu.com, we have the Family Guy (Fox TV) and the multiverse.

The show is fun to watch, a bit raunchy, but the physics aspect is horrible. Still, one wouldn't watch the show to learn physics.