New Digs

It seems that all four of the most regular contributors to this site have moved recently. After getting hired on permanently, I moved back in with my parents over the summer. I finally sold my house on the last day in July, but took a pretty brutal beating financially. That forced me to continue to rent in Myrtle Beach until I can afford to buy a new house.

The place I chose is a guest house, quite small compared with what I’m used to. It is about halfway between the school and the beach, and is right on the Intracoastal Waterway. A major advantage is that all utilities are included, and I can rent month-to-month. So as soon as I’m able to buy, I can move out immediately.

As you probably know, Hurricane Hanna is headed straight for the Georgia/South Carolina coast. I’ve only technically ever been through one hurricane. In 1989, Hugo hit the South Carolina coast and was still a hurricane when it hit our house 200 miles inland. Based on where my house is, I’ll be the first that will be forced to evacuate. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get a renter’s insurance policy.

Bunton’s Winter CD: Track 3

Every so often I make up a mix CD of my favorite songs at the moment; mostly new songs, but with some old songs sprinkled in for flavor. I thought it’d be a neat feature of this new blog to go through, song-by-song, and explain a little about why it appeals to me.

As I mentioned on the Summer CD, Bloc Party’s A Weekend in the City was my favorite album of 2007. Here I include “I Still Remember”, and all I really have to say about the song itself was already covered in that earlier post on “The Prayer”. So here I’ll talk about why I think I like the band so much.

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.

How much fossil fuel does it take to make gas?

Before I changed it, Wikipedia’s entry on Cellulosic ethanol (which is as likely a technology to save the world as there is) claimed that:

It takes 1.2 gallons of fossil fuel to produce 1 gallon of ethanol from corn. This total includes the use of fossil fuels used for fertilizer, tractor fuel, ethanol plant operation, etc.

This turns out to be incorrect (see below) and I have heard variations on the argument that “more than a gallon of fossil fuels are used to make the equivalent to a gallon of gasoline out of ethanol” in conversation and on television. It seems like they appear all over the web. While I find it to be a little surprising, at first glance it at least seems plausible. However, it begs the question — how much fossil fuel does it take to make a gallon of gasoline? That turns out to be an extremely tough question to answer. (Don’t get me started on how hard it is to try to figure out how much it costs to make gasoline — although this info from the DOE helps a little.)

If we are going to consider how much petroleum is used to make chemical fertilizer, transport the corn and ethanol, and even feed the workers involved shouldn’t we do the same for gasoline? After all, we have to dredge the oil up from the ground, often ship it halfway around the world in supertankers (anyone know know the fuel economy for a Suezmax tanker?), before refining it into gasoline.

20 foods that are good for you and 10 that are just horrible

Brian’s new picture at the top of the blog (from a sequence entitled “Eating Turkey Legs at the 2007 NC State Fair with Brian and John”) got me thinking about a cool story I found on Digg last month.  In the vein of Deep Fried Atrocities, Divine Caroline has Ten Foods You’ll Find, Eat, and Regret at the State Fair.  It’s a pretty good list, including deep-fried spaghetti and meatballs (pictured) and a new offering from the man who brought us deep-fried Coke — deep-fried chocolate chip cookie dough.  No doubt that he’s a cardiologist.

At the same time, the Digg gods have also brought us 20 Common Cooking Ingredients that Act Like Medicines.  Many of my favorites were on the list, but it looks like I’ll have to find a way to include more ginger, rosemary, cloves, and kale in my diet.  Either that or write a funk sequel to a certain Simon and Garfunkle album.  My favorite on the list was good old horseradish which, given my love of rare steak, I rely on heavily for its antibiotic properties.  I have been known to talk a certain (then) girlfriend into trying horseradish on crackers for severe congestion.

Carolina “Classic”

There are some things about North Carolina almost everyone knows, such as tobacco, basketball, and NASCAR. Then there are things that you only learn if you live here for a while; e.g. coleslaw is a condiment.

That’s right, any self-respecting North Carolinian restaurant serves a tiny cup of coleslaw on the side with every sandwich (and many other orders) so that you can put it on your sandwich if you care to. It actually works quite well because the cole slaw here is the best I’ve ever had: unlike its Midwestern brethren it contains only a bit of mayonnaise, and unlike the local barbecue it’s light on the vinegar.

Coleslaw features prominently in Carolina-style burgers, which also have chili, chopped onion, and mustard. Even Wendy’s has a fast-food version that is sold regionally. Apparently there is some sort of difference between coleslaw and “slaw,” but either way I find them to be delicious.

Another, more interesting North Carolina “quirk” has to do with how I’ve used quotation marks in these last two sentences.

Football in April

The blog has been quiet lately… too quiet.

It’s understandable. There are exams to be graded, weddings to be planned, and research papers to be written. I just realized I have seven different papers in various stages of completion (six of them are thankfully nearly done). I’ve been pretty stressed and the EPA is about the nicest, lowest stress research environment I can imagine. All the same, it’s time for distraction. Thus, I present the April football round-up:

First off, offensive lineman Justin Boren — whose right to do as he saw fit I defended not long ago — has indeed decided to transfer from Michigan to “the” Ohio State to play with his brother. I wish him well, but if he’s playing offensive line for this year’s match-up, I think we may see the OSU quarterback sacked a dozen times. A cocaine-fueled Jeff Smoker (who to his great credit has recovered) took that many sacks and still won the second-most-recent “Greatest Michigan-Michigan state game ever”

State of Fear

It probably didn’t make national news, but there was a fatal shooting near campus yesterday. A flash email was sent out as I sat in my office preparing lecture notes, advising everyone to stay where they were as the shooter had not been caught. Details were scarce in the beginning, but it turned out that it had nothing to do with the school (no students or employees were involved). Still, for precautionary (and legal, I’m sure) purposes, classes were cancelled all day today. For me, that aspect of it was a minor inconvenience to my class.

But it brought up a bigger debate that happened to be the lead story on CNN at the time: should students be allowed to carry guns to class? Should teachers? What are the limits to security in schools? I’m sure the timing of the story is intimately linked to tomorrow’s anniversary of the Virginia Tech disaster.

Michigan’s Robotic War Bat vs. Georgia Tech’s Cyborg Moths

In an article that is somehow evocative of a certain movie franchise (whose bloggers unfortunately met a grisly, Cloverfield-esque end late last February), the University of Michigan has received $10 million from the army for a “Center for Objective Microelectronics and Biomimetic Advanced Technology, or COM-BAT.” The robotic bat produced by this group apparently will have a “gargoyle mode” that involves perching on a building and lurking. Since there already is a Michigan Gargoyle, I suggest changing the name to “hunter-killer” mode (good luck with James Cameron’s lawyers). Even worse (or better!), another article in The Register speculates that the RADAR of the Michigan war bat would allow it to easily destroy Georgia Tech’s “cyborg infiltrator machines [that wear] living creatures like fleshy cloaks.” Apparently Prof. Robert Michelson’s group plans to scoop out the entrails of moths and replace them with remote-controls and sensors.

Also in the article, The Register describes DARPA as “the Pentagon asylum for usefully-insane scientists” which can’t be entirely true since our own Andy (who is still pretty sane despite his defense coming up this Friday) was partly funded by DARPA.

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.