Nations of the National Pastime

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Strange Maps continues to demonstrate cartographical excellence with this post on an MLB fanship map. The writer is British I believe, and therefore doesn't seem to know much about baseball in the US. As one would predict there is extensive argument in the comment thread about the validity of what it shows in various places, though I would say that it is basically right and fun to see mapped out despite some clear flaws. Jumping out at me immediately would have to be the Chicago region, New Jersey, Texas, and Connecticut, and I am sure that there is something going on with Virginia too, but I don't know enough about it to say what it ought to look like over there. As I mentioned a while ago, the NY Times had an article about Connecticut's bid to officially leave New England treasonous Yankee-supporting activity with a delineation of the border territory. It is also hard to guess what is going on in the extreme northeast, but I happen to know that the Red Sox extend up decisively into Quebec and the Maritime provinces of Canada, where they have nothing to do other than fish and watch NESN. The Rangers territory looks wrong to me as well, since the Astros seem to be considered the "state" team of Texas. Similarly how can it be that all of Colorado doesn't consider itself Rockies fans? And I know that western Ontario is Tigers owned and I can't imagine how the Pirates claim part of Virgina. I think there are two things that are actually causing problems with this map:

1. They didn't draw it transparently. In reality there is quite a bit of overlap in many of these areas. Take the LA area for instance: there are Angels fans there, but they don't own the lower part of the metropolitan area (as far as I know), rather they are right on top of the Dodgers. The same goes for Chicago, although the White Sox have a definite south-side advantage. And isn't SF basically all Giants? I think they don't want to make the Mets look bad, but in reality, they can really only claim Long Island, even if they have some stragglers in other parts of the Tri-State area. New Jersey and the rest of NYC is overwhelmingly Yankee dominated.
   
2. There is a difference between what these areas should be and what they actually are. This is especially true in Connecticut and some of those southwestern places. Conn is supposedly part of New England, but since they are all backstabbing traitors, the western part of the state has gone over to the dark side. And Nebraska and Kansas should be Royals fans, but since they are so terrible, and the people from that part of the country are so weak-minded, many of them latch onto random teams of their choice. If you are going to do that, being from the plains you should chose the Cubs, or at least the Cardinals, who are sort of the "midwestern" teams. Plus, picking the Cubs doesn't exactly impart an easy rooting assignment, so people can't really question your motives if you just want to find a team with some history. Unfortunately, both of the people I've met from there are the worst kind of Yankee fans: fair-weather ones who "like them because they win" and even admit this fact. Terrible job.

Overall I give it a B. Good effort, but a nearly impossible task to do well.

At least one thing is clear: avoid the Unincorporated Territories at all costs.

Your Astronomers Need You

This is a few weeks or months old, but better late than never. The Galaxy Zoo project is now attempting to take tedious, eye-straining work away from downtrodden graduate students. Much in the same vein as SETI@home, Folding@home, or Einstein@home, which delegate computationally-expensive but simple data-sifting work to the hard drives of people willing to keep the program running in the background, Galaxy Zoo wants to run galaxy-categorization in the background of your willing brain. The aforementioned programs search for alien broadcasts, protein assembly combinations, and pulsars respectively. Galaxy Zoo uses the power of bored people on the internet to help divide up uninspected galaxies into their morphology -- a task which can not yet be done effectively with imaging software. Since there is such now such a vast amount of data from recent galaxy surveys like the SDSS, the power of the astronomy community's usual eyeball resource, grad students, is insufficient. So sign up, and zone out looking at pretty pictures.

[via CV]

Dr. Accidental Electrocution

Speaking of Tesla coils, this guy, a physics PhD, has followed a different career path than most. Dr. Megavolt appears to put his life in hilarious, ridiculous danger by standing next to enormous coils that he builds...in his special insulating Faraday cage suit. The suit kind of reminds me of Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze, but I am betting that Dr. Megavolt makes better puns (no "Ice to meet you!"). Not many people trained as physicists ever end up performing at Burning Man or make a living standing around as the grounded end of a current arc. Although it is safe of course, you've got to love the trust this fellow has in Mr. Faraday, who was a well-known coward when it came to showy high-voltage demonstrations.



[Also check out this video of a transformer exploding, even though it has nothing to do with anything.]

Further Adventures in Eponymity

I have serious doubts that 'eponymity' is a real word. 'Eponym' is, as are 'eponymous' and '-ist' and so forth. And since 'anonymity' is a word and 'eponym-' is of the same category, it follows that the quality of being eponymous ought to be describable as 'eponymity.' That fact doesn't cause many people to use it of course, but somehow, google searches for eponymity currently turn up my post of a few months ago (among some other things). Oddly, the top result is for a similar thing, a pointer toward this article about naming-afterness in science.

Robert Bunsen, whose name we associate with the burner, was a 19th-century German chemist of some renown. He worked on explosive organic arsenic compounds--leading to the loss of one eye--and, later, on gases from volcanoes, geysers and blast furnaces. With Kirchoff he contributed to our understanding of the meaning of spectra lines. (He also gained note for not bathing--one woman of polite society remarked that Bunsen was so charming that she would like to kiss him, but she would have to wash him first.) Bunsen invented many bits of laboratory apparatus: the spectroscope, the carbon-pole battery, an ice calorimeter and vapor calorimeter, the thermopile, and the filter pump--but not, as one might imagine, the gas burner that bears his name. Rather, the "Bunsen" burner was developed by Bunsen's laboratory assistant, Peter Desdega. Desdega himself likely borrowed from earlier designs by Aim� Argand and Michael Faraday. So why does Bunsen get the implicit credit? --And why do we know so little about Desdega that we cannot add much to his story?

Link.

This comic might save me some work

I am behind the times due to extensive internetless travel. If I had bothered to check Friday's xkcd I wouldn't have bothered reading about electron-neutrino scattering over the weekend. Of course, if the comic was right, my plane might have had some trouble lifting off earlier. Then again, we did sit on the runway for like, half an hour...

Statetris

Statetris allows you to combine your geography skills with your tetris skills. What took so long?

Wikipedia does it better

A few months ago I wrote an award-winning post called Eponymity in Physics, where I listed as many different 'types of things' you could have named in your honor as I could think of. It appears that the wikipedia has something like this itself called "Scientific Phenomena named after People." They've got a few that I missed (but only because they're stupid), like 'index,' 'reaction,' and 'fusor.' Hmm, I don't know how I missed those.

Kansas: As Dumb As You Think

This Kansan version of the periodic table from the re-Discovery Institute says it all. It's called 'flyover country' for a reason.

[h/t Primate Journal]

Sleepy colonist

Last year I took a ton of photos at my town's 'nation's oldest' 4th of July parade (on steroids). This year? Not so much. In addition to the tuckered out revolutionary above I didn't get too much. Just this outstanding tricycle with speakers, and remarkably unnecessary open tent exit sign. The parade was pretty standard but included a few oddities. Usually all the major office-holders march together in the parade, but this year we had the Governor, Senators, one Congressman, and then about 15 minutes later the other one, Congressman Patches, all by himself. Without a beanie, he just looks wrong. But my favorite was a float where they seemed to have soldiers dressed in the uniforms of different eras, WWII, WWI, Civil War, Revolutionary, and then, inexplicably thrown in there, a pirate.

Amusement park photos

Amusement parks are great places to take pictures. There is gaudy, interesting signage everywhere, and brightly colored inhuman machines full of screaming children. Unfortunately, since I was with somebody and spent most of my time there in various lines, I wasn't able to wander the place aimlessly looking for things to photograph.

A dramatically positioned, rickety roller-coaster.

Some ridiculous guitar-playing balloon.

What is that? Some kind of industrial hydraulic pump?

No! It is part of a gigantic flyswatter!

Twisty, orange ride.

The sun setting somewhere in relation to this roller-coaster.

A Great Time to be and Inanimate Object

This chip clip has an optimist bit of profoundity. Apparently, IT'S A GREAT TIME TO BE ALIVE™.

I don't know whether this comes from the cardiovascular therapy company or the financial company, and I don't want to. All I want to know is what makes this plastic trinket so happy about our present era. Not that I disagree, despite the more stylish architecture and fancier clothing of past decades, I certainly appreciate the technology, science, and antibiotics of the early 21st century. In fact, the mere existence of chip clips connotes a certain amount of progress in taking care of life's more essential demands. What about the future though? Does this clip have some kind of prophetic ability? Is it implying that civilization is soon to collapse? What does the chip clip know that we don't?

More importantly, how would a non-living object know how great it is to be alive, at this or any other time?

Biophysics: always coming in handy

The Providence Journal has an article about the current brainiac of the Sox farm system. Despite the reporter being impressed by his use of his word 'elucidate' it is fairly encouraging. Craig Breslow is a Yale Biophysics and Biochem major currently titrating* himself up the pitching ranks.

“In molecular biophysics,” he said, “you deal with methods of elucidating structures of proteins through such means as x-ray crystallography and spectroscopy. In biochemistry, I studied organic processes on a molecular level — things like DNA replication and genetics.”

Um, OK, Craig.

What say we talk about what pitches you throw.

“I have a ‘slurvy’-type slider I throw to lefties,” he said, “and a cut fastball I throw to righties. I have a big overhand curve I use to try to steal strikes. My best pitch is my changeup.”

So far this season, Breslow’s array of pitches has been almost as baffling to batters as molecular biophysics.

Going into last night’s game, the 26-year-old lefty had an earned-run average of 1.59 in 25 relief appearances covering 39 2/3 innings. He had given up just 30 hits while striking out 48 and walking only 9. He had a record of 1-1, with one save, and hitters were batting a mere .208 against him.

...
“For four years,” he said, “I studied with some of the most brilliant minds in the world. Now, I’m having fun playing baseball. When I get here (to the ballpark), I’m all baseball. If I keep pitching well, I’ll have a job in baseball.”

And if he doesn’t, he can put that Yale degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry to good use.

Wow! That's my plan too. Hey Red Sox organization, I'll be a few miles from Pawtucket next year, and I've got at least a foot on Pedroia!

Bonus Biophysics Joke: Why is this guy such a good pitcher? Well imagine a tiny spherical cow...

*This is definitely the wrong use of this word, but we don't have to know about such things in cosmology.

Blog not dead

I've been traveling all over the place. Baseball games, parades, amusement parks. Not a lot of time or fodder for blogging. I will give you this however -- a video of some kids igniting 10,000 match heads in a bucket. The result? Mushroom cloud.


Kids Ignite A Matchstick Bomb