Cycle Quark

I went to see the new Pixar movie, WALL-E, last night. I throughly enjoyed it. The villan of the movie was a corporation, Buy N Large, which makes Walmart look like a boutique shop. It is abbrievated all throughout the movie as BNL. I hope my friends from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) don’t take it personally.

XKCD got written up in the NY Times. I discovered from the article that the author is a physics major. I knew he had to be a geek, but physics is as good as it gets.

Normally I would not mention xkcd again since my last post is about it. However, the Large Hadron Collider gets mentioned on xkcd, so I had to link to it. If he mentioned blackholes, it would have been really topical.

Mythbusters, Zombie Feynman and a meditation on the meaning of science. What more can you ask for?

Joel Achenbach’s Sunday Washington Post Magazine column discusses his visit to Fermilab and how much he learned. I felt compelled to post two comments, including one on an attempt to build a cloud chamber at CERN.

The mention of the cloud chamber required me to tell this story. I did my Ph.D research at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. We used a bubble chamber which is much the same idea as a cloud chamber but used cryogenic liquids instead of humid air. There were only a small number of American graduate students at CERN in those days, and we tended to hang out together when we weren’t working. One day we decided to build a cloud chamber. One of the key components of a cloud chamber is dry ice. Well, it turns out that modern particle physics labs do not stock dry ice. You can get liquid nitrogen by the ton or liquid helium, but no dry ice. We took a bus all the way across Geneva to find dry ice. The cloud chamber worked and we saw particles in real time.

Friday bunny blogging was delayed this week, but I will be making amends for that faux pas. Due to demand from my many readers (You know who you are.), I will be dropping all science blogging, book reviews, technology tidbits, and insightful observations on the world and switching to all bunny blogging all the time. Pictures of bunnies will be featured everyday and not just Friday.

To start of the the new theme of the blog, here is Bquark. He is one fat bunny, although I did see him hop yesterday and successfully get all four paws off the floor at once. Bquark is a mixed breed, half Holland lop and half hippopotamus.

The folks at Cosmic Variance are telling physics jokes. Check them out. I left this one.

Physicist: We have learned that neutrinos have mass.
Student: I did not even know that they were Catholic.

Techorati tags: physics

I really enjoyed this piece on cartoons insulting Vince Lombardi causing riots in Wisconsin. The satire is a very indirect comment on the Danish cartoon controversy, and part of my enjoyment is that I went to school in Wisconsin and the author seems to really know the area.

Protestors demonstrated against the images throughout the Badger State yesterday, with violent egging and cow-tipping incidents reported in Oconomowac, Pewaukee, Sheboygan, Ozaukee, Antigo, Oshkosh, Waubeno, Wauwautosa, Waunewoc, Wyocena, Waubeka, and Washawonamowackapeepee.

I actually recognize some of those towns. I can vouch that Oconomowac and Wauwautosa are real places. I suspect that Washawonamowackapeepee is just humorous exaggeration, but you never know with Wisconsin.

I also really enjoyed casting a Dallas Cowboy fan as the villian.

In November, Davidson — a self-described diehard Dallas Cowboys fan –
made a fateful decision that would alter his life and whose reverberations are currently shaking the foundations of two societies. “The Appleby’s in Frisco has two big screens, and I liked going there Sunday for the Cowboy games,” Davidson explained. “But one weekend there was this annoying bunch of Wisconsin immigrant idiots with foam rubber cheese wedge hats, screaming for the Packers on the
other screen.”

Technorati Tags: humor

The Colbert Report had several bits about science, including Stephen settling the debate between science and religion once and for all with a coin toss. He also interviewed the string theorist Brian Greene, the author of the Elegant Universe.

Greene tried to explain what strings are in his five minute segment, but he has some trouble doing so, and Colbert commented that strings make intelligent design seem appealing. There is a lot less thought involved in “God did it.”

The show will be on again on Tuesday at 8:30 PM Eastern time.