Hard to resist…

I’ve been in a bit of a funk — my tv and computer broke last month, we don’t have cable/internet in our temporary apartment, and I’ve been swamped with work — but I simply cannot resist posting this video:

[Today's Big Thing]

One of the things I always liked about our work with force chains was how much they seemed like lightning. Even in slow motion that seems to be the case. Compare, for instance, with the distribution of force during a simulated meteor impact:

Burgers, not just for grillin’

In th early 20th century J.M. Burgers’ attempted to model fluid flow by adding a nonlinear term to the linear diffusion equation. The idea never panned out for modeling fluids, but the nonlinear diffusion equation, now known as Burgers’ Equation has been studied quite a bit nonetheless. More recently (1988, 1992, and 2002) a form of the Burgers’ Equation was derived for the twist dynamics of twisted scroll waves. Scroll waves are the 3D analog to spiral waves (think of a scrolled up piece of paper). Scrolls are found in many types of excitable media and a number of experts believe they play a role in cardiac arrhythmia.

Until this week there had not been good experimental evidence published for scroll wave twist behaving according to Burgers’ Equation. But now you can read all about in in Europhysics Letters, “Evidence for Burgers’ equation describing the untwisting of scroll rings” (volume 83, article number 30010).

Oh, and I’m still waiting to hear about Entropy Maximization from one of my esteemed colleagues in blogging. And is each of us publishing in a journal on the other ones current continent of residence something Alanis Morisette would call “ironic”?

How many data do you have?

There are some people who will correct the phrase “the data is” to “the data are” claiming that the word data is plural. The basis of the claim is that in Latin the word data is the plural of the unit datum and that our English word is derived from the Latin. You may guess that I don’t buy this or I wouldn’t be writing this post.

It pained me so much to write the phrase “the data are” that I did a little bit of research. And by research I mean that I googled it, found some people that agreed with me, and quit looking. Despite my biased approach to research I do believe there is a logical argument for “the data is”.

Physics so old I forgot what it was about

I’m going to follow in John and Mary’s footsteps and give a brief description of some work of mine that was published a little while ago by PRE. At 18 months after my defense, this allows me to squeak past John’s recent publication, which came a mere 17 months post-defense. I won’t get too comfortable, though, as John already has another one in the hopper (pun intended). Plus there’s the mysterious Wambaugh scaling paper, on which I’m rumored to be a co-author. I believe it’s something like the “true” director’s cut of Blade Runner: no one is really sure if it exists.

BBQ ‘em if you’ve got ‘em…

Today is Memorial Day, where we honor our military casualties by not working and (hopefully) barbecuing. For every Memorial Day weekend that I can remember my grandmother has traveled to her family’s old stomping grounds in Indiana to place flowers on the graves of all of her deceased family members, military or not.

For many of us, the day is more leisurely, and so I thought it would be worthwhile to recommend Chronotron — a time-themed distraction that I have found to be quite enjoyable. In the game you use a time machine to create multiple instances of yourself in order to solve a puzzle.

First Principles

Tomorrow in class, I plan to utter the words, “This is the most basic, fundamental concept in all of Nature.” I wonder if you’d agree. What would you call the most basic, fundamental concept in all of Nature? (Other than the Pirates will have a losing season, of course.)

The Physics Arxiv Blog

In the physics community it is common practice to submit “finished,” but not yet peer-reviewed, research papers to a preprint server so that they become time-stamped (useful for establishing credit) and freely available to the public. Often, once a paper is revised in response to peer-review and published, a “preprint” copy of the final version is placed on the server so that copies can easily be obtained without tracking down whatever journal it was published in (something that has gotten vastly easier thanks to Google Scholar). The arXiv preprint server started in 1991 at Los Alamos (where it had the dubious-sounding address of xxx.lanl.gov since the Web was not yet especially World-Wide) and now hosts papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, and quantitative biology. Anyone who wants may subscribe to have a listing of all the new and updated papers on a given topic regularly sent via e-mail. For me, at least, scanning through the daily cond-mat listing is one of the main ways I try to stay current in my field.

The newest addition to our blogroll is a very cool idea — The Physics Arxiv blog. The author combs through the daily update emails and writes about the interesting papers they see and you’ll never guess how I stumbled across it. Sometimes papers on arXiv are kinda crazy and take a long time to get published (if ever). Sometimes research is happening so quickly that entire research groups dictate what they do in response to the latest preprint (right Joe?). No matter what it’s a neat blog and a good way to stay current in physics.

Innotech, er… EniTech

I spent Saturday through Friday last week in Seattle at the Society of Toxicology annual meeting. Seattle is awesome and I had a lot more time to explore than my previous, three day trip. The weather was actually pretty decent — it was often rainy but not raining. In fact, it only rained the two times I didn’t take my umbrella with me.

Anyhow, I need to get back into the blogging habit, and as a big Terminator fan (apparently one of the few that prefers the original) I think that the website for Enitech is pretty entertaining.

My New Hero

A quick drive-by post: Priest-slash-cosmologist Michal Heller has won the Templeton Prize. As a very religious scientist, I love reading about the interplay between faith and science, especially when used cooperatively.

Water Water Everywhere

Think about how much water you think is on Earth. If you were to take it all and form it into a sphere, how big do you think it would be? Now do the same with all the air on Earth.

Dan Phiffer has a picture of what that would look like, courtesy of the Science Photo Library.