Final picture in a long and detailed analysis of how to build a scale model of the Death Star out of Lego. Having concluded that in order to build a Lego ball with a diameter of 3.52 km you’d have to do so in space the author works out what this would look like from Earth.
I’d say it’s worth the estimated $10 Trillion (for the bricks alone. Shipping it up there is extra).
via Kottke
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, a pioneer in computer science, shows David Letterman how she illustrates nanoseconds in this highly enjoyable interview.
From her Wikipedia page:
Grace Hopper is famous for her nanoseconds visual aid. People (such as generals and admirals) used to ask her why satellite communication took so long. She started handing out pieces of wire which were just under one foot long, which is the distance that light travels in one nanosecond. [...] At many of her talks and visits, she handed out “nanoseconds” to everyone in the audience, contrasting them with a coil of wire nearly a thousand feet long, representing a microsecond. Later [...] she passed out packets of pepper which she called picoseconds.
Darryl’s book, which he’s been serialising as a work-in-progress on his blog over the last year, is out in April. You can pre-order the UK edition from The Amazon from today.
Darryl Cunningham turns his questioning mind and sharp intelligence to de-coding the myths and lies that have shaped some of the most fiercely-debated issues of the past fifty years. A graphic milestone of investigative reporting, Science Tales takes on controversies surrounding climate change, electro-convulsive therapy, the moon landing, the MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) vaccine, homeopathy, evolution, the tobacco industry and science denialism.
A blog “celebrating pornographers who go the extra mile when set dressing classroom porn and actually write something on the blackboard. What do they write, and is it correct?”
The graph is roughly the correct shape, but is not positioned correctly: it clearly intersects with the vertical axis at A=4. Even allowing for other drawing errors, this is a function more like A=bS2+4. It would also have been useful to extend the graph to S<0.
What is going on on the right-hand blackboard is less clear. There is a drawing of a trapezium, and also the equation 100=S=A, which is hopefully not meant to be related to the function A=S2.
via Waxy
Tonight I watched two excellent science documentaries on the BBC. This demands noting as the standard of factual television documentaries has declined immeasurably over the last couple of decades.
The first was The Secret Life of Chaos which for the first time since I came across the concept in the early 1990s, explained to me in clear and comprehendible terms, what Chaos Theory actually is and what it means. I realised that I know it was important and amazing and that a butterfly can cause a storm but I’d never really appreciated it fully. I now have a better handle on it.
The second was The Big Bang Machine a Brian Cox piece about the LHC which, again for the first time, properly explained to me why the LHC exists and what it’s looking for.
In both of these cases I could probably have found it out for myself by reading books, but for whatever reasons I never did. These programs filled that gap. I frequently deride broadcast television for infantalizing our culture so it’s only right I give credit where it’s due.
That said, these two come under the BBC4 budget which is threatened with reduction, so maybe they’re aberrations, not representations of the system at work.
Richard Feynman is so much better at explaining this stuff that the likes of Dawkins.
This is taken from a BBC Horizon program from 1981, The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out, in which Feynman pretty much talks to the camera for 50 minutes. It’s one of the best pieces of television ever. You can watch it in full here.
Back in 1936, renowned sculptor Isamu Noguchi was in Mexico working on a 72-ft-long public mural when he hit a snag: for some reason, he couldn’t precisely recall the famous formula, E=mc². Rather than risk a mistake, he decided to seek advice and wired his good friend, Buckminster Fuller — a famed architect and great admirer of Einstein — for clarification.
Fuller’s response [..] is a work of art in itself: Einstein’s equation somehow explained on a single telegram.
There’s a transcript at the source too. (The original photo is private on Flickr but this looks to be the largest scan available.)
via Andrew Hickey
A decade or so ago Jim Ottaviani published an anthology of comics strips about great scientists, the highlight of which were stories about Richard P Feynman. It looks like he’s finally made good on the implicit promise to expand on those and the full biography is out in September.
Here’s one of those comic book trailer videos publishers like to do:
via Hark and Vagrant where it’s a guest strip.
Posted primarily for Jeremy’s comment:
This is the before scene for all those hungover owls pictures. “I remember going home with this guy…”
Have taken my eye off the quest for the Higgs boson but it appears they’re getting close.
On Friday, the Atlas and CMS teams reported finding what physicists call an “excess” of interesting particle events at a mass of between 140 and 145 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).
The excess seen by the Atlas team has reached a 2.8 sigma level of certainty. A three-sigma result means there is roughly a one in 1,000 chance that the result is attributable to some statistical quirk in the data.
Now, the US DZero and CDF experiments have also seen hints of something at about 140GeV.
Professor Stefan Soldner-Rembold, spokesperson for the DZero detector team, told BBC News: “There are some intriguing things going on around a mass of 140GeV.
I love getting excited about things I have absolutely no hope in hell of fully understanding.
via Dunc
