Category: At the seaside
-
Why SETI will have missed any cost conscious ET civilizations
If we want to contact any of those other civilizations out there, we’ll need a beacon to send messages with. But what to build? Gregory Benford at the University of California Irvine and family (?) have done a cost/benefit analysis on the types of microwave generators out there that can produce the 10^17 W necessary…
-
Frustration with fluid dynamics
There is no shortage of fascinating videos for the Gallery of Fluid Motion at the upcoming meeting of the American Physical Society Fluid Dynamics division. At least they sound interesting. We’ll never know because they’re practically impossible to download from eCommons library at Cornell University. That’s not good enough. Surely YouTube (or one of its…
-
The neglected puzzle of low energy nuclear reactions
Cold fusion won’t go away and perhaps rightly so. Numerous groups have reported idiosyncratic behaviour of palladium hydrides sitting in heavy water when a current passes through them. Many of these experiments are said to be repeatable. Of course, serious questions remain over what exactly is going on in these experiements. They may or may…
-
The remarkable language of Vai
Vai is a language spoken by 150,000 people in western Africa, specifically in Liberia and Sierra Leone. The language is noteworthy because its uses a remarkable system of sounds. Speakers must be able to pronounce seven oral vowels, five nasal vowels and 31 consonants all of which come in various combinations. In its written form,…
-
Forget black holes, could the LHC trigger a “Bose supernova”?
The fellas at CERN have gone to great lengths to reassure us all that they won’t destroy the planet (who says physicists are cold hearted?). The worry was that the collision of particles at the LHC’s high energies could create a black hole that would swallow the planet. We appear to be safe on that…
-
Why spontaneous traffic jams are like detonation waves
We’re all familiar with phantom jams, traffic blockages that arise with no apparent cause and that melt away for no discernible reason. Today Ruben Rosales and pals at MIT and the University of Alberta in Canada coin a new term for the waves that cause these hold ups: they call them jamitons. And jamitons turn…
-
A short history of computer art in Soviet bloc countries
Many of us think of little else than the history of computer art in former Soviet bloc countries and today our prayers are answered in the form of a curious paper that examines just this topic. The paper says that the Soviet bloc country most advanced in this respect appears to have been Yugoslavia. The…
-
The sound of a bouncing basketball
“A basketball bounced on a stiff surface produces a characteristic loud thump, followed by high pitched ringing,” says Joanthan Katz at Washington University in St Louis. The question is why and, conveniently, Katz provides the answer on the arXiv today. He assumes first that a basketball is an inextensible but perfectly flexible hollow sphere. From…
-
The puzzling beauty of Abelian sandpiles
Pour real sand, a grain at a time, onto a flat surface and the result is a rather dull pyramidal shape. but in the mathematical world, the result is a little different. The image above is produced using a theoretical model called an Abelian sandpile model. It is produced by dropping some 200,000 grains onto…
-
Deconstructing DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak
“The incredible record of Joe DiMaggio in the summer of 1941 is unparalleled. No one has come close—before or since—to equaling his streak of hitting safely in 56 games in a row.” So begin Steve Strogatz and Sam Arbesman from Cornell University in their paper discussing the likelihood of DiMaggio’s record. “People have…stated that it…