Vernacularisms

In a high school English class we had a midterm where we were told one of the long essay questions in advance and allowed to bring a sheet of notes into the exam with us. Being the typical literature-class-disrespecter and smart-alack that I am was, I decided that I didn't need to outline my exam. How complicated could an exam essay possibly be to require a whole page of notes? I figured that I could put that sheet to much better use.

I don't recall all the details, but I think I must have had English after my other tests, and with this ridiculous note page edict, I was casting about for ways to spend my study time productively. On some whim I picked up my dad's old dictionary and started leafing through it absentmindedly. Of course! I could put anything on this page -- how about a bunch of rare and unusual words? I mean, it is English, it doesn't matter which kind of words I use as long as they make sense. They want pointless verbiage? I'll give it to them! On what basis would my English teacher penalize me for using strange but correct English words?!

So I spent a day or two building up a giant document that cataloged everything weird that I found in the dictionary, then I selected the 50 or so with relatively common meanings that could conceivably be used in regular writing, (if one was inclined toward being pretentious and misunderstood), to put in my "notes." And of course, when the test rolled around I crammed about 20 in there with no shame whatsoever. When I handed it in I even asked the teacher "if he had a dictionary nearby." Such was my adolescent hubris.

If this was an 'excellent' story instead of a 'mildly amusing' story, I would have failed the test*. I actually did well. It helped that my teacher was the type of guy who would get a kick out it. He said that it took him about 20 minutes to grade my several page essay because he had to stop every sentence or so to look something up. That'll show him for trying to teach me.

Though he doesn't realize it, he managed to get me back 5 years later. But that is a tale for another day.

[*If it was a Tim O'Brien story I definitely would have failed, even if I didn't, because that makes it 'more true.']

Google (book) maps

Speaking of representations of the planet, this clever fellow at the Google booksearch blog decided to compile the geographical settings of books for the past 200 years (or at least the place names mentioned in them). Decade-by-decade maps also show the western migration in the early 19th century.

Mostly these points trace where people live, but there are so many cool things you could do with this data. I would like to see the difference between novel settings and actual population density. Britain especially, seems pretty over-represented. Different maps for different genres would be fairly interesting as well. Get on it google!

Saturn: it was real after all

Here is one of those lousy diluted posts I was just promising.

-I seem to have beat the actual physics bloggers to the punch with that Jim Carey-Conan O'Brien Quantum physics video...by about a week. I also managed to figure out (and get confirmation) that the paper they discussed was Phys. Rev Lett. 83 (1999) by L. J. Lapidus, D. Enzer, and G. Gabrielse: "Stochastic Phase Switching of a Parametrically Driven Electron in a Penning Trap." To summarize: I'm amazing.

-Obligatory shot of the sixth planet recently captured by Cassini. Two observations:
1. I have recently been teaching assisting an intro astronomy course that involves looking at Saturn through a telescope. A partially mechanized and difficult to align telescope in an awesome 19th century shed with a roof that opens by a crank on the wall. A lot of the students first react when looking through the eyepiece by saying something like "it looks so real!" I can partially understand this impulse; when first visiting famous locations or monuments I have usually had a similar reaction, where I'm not really astonished by the sight itself, but primarily at the familiarity of it and the novelty of beholding say, the Lincoln Memorial, in person. It must be some kind of side-effect of being extremely familiar with things that ought to impress us that makes this the first thought to come to our minds in these situations--still, people should try not to vocalize their bewilderment at the existence of well-known objects. You just sound retarded.
2. Cassini may be the only NASA mission which is way more famous than its namesake. Think about it, you have Galileo, Apollo, Ulysses, Hubble, Chandra, and so forth. Chandrasekhar may not be known to the general public, but the kind of people who are aware of the telescope certainly know who he is. All I ever knew about Cassini was that he discovered the gap in Saturn's rings, and some further research shows that he discovered of Jupiter's Great Red Spot as well. Let's face it Cassini fans, they would have found those sooner or later anyway.
(Credit goes here)
(Updata: Astronomy Picture of the Day is riding my coattails--as usual)

-Some clever cognitionists have determined that 17 is the most random number. Inspired initially by the good folks at Cosmic Variance they set out to compile poll data confirming the original suspicion that given a choice from 1 to 20, 17 is the most frequently picked "random" integer. It is indeed so, with roughly four times the popularity expected in a truly random distribution. Even numbers and multiples of 5 scored poorly, and similarly prime numbers like 7, 13 and 19 were the runners-up. They were able to get around ~350 responses from people who were presumably not aware of the hypothesis being tested (they put a poll on their site without explaining why--hopefully they weren't biased CV readers). They also found some other effects like a preference for primes and little preference for odds. I would like to see more data though, I am betting that the primes thing is only true for these low numbers and that with a larger range you would see significantly more odds than evens as well as a severe allergy to multiples of 10. They do a round up here.

-Far, far overdue acknowledgement of "How to Tell a True Lab Story," a parody of this Tim O'Brien vignette that I only today encountered. Anyone who, like me, has ingrained high school memories of the disjointed Vietnam stories in The Things They Carried will recognize and appreciate these paragraphs.

A true lab story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper scientific practice, nor restrain graduate students from doing the things that graduate students have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a lab story, you feel uplifted, or if you feel that you have learned some useful fact about science, you have been made the victim of an old and terrible lie...

You can tell a true lab story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, and afterwards you ask "Can you really destroy a bathroom with liquid nitrogen in a soda bottle?" and if the answer matters, you've got your answer

a spoonful weighs a ton

as previously mentioned, i am always on the lookout for trite physics allusions in places that they don't belong. particularly the ones that physicists themselves take notice of (often to the point of overuse, see "fire and ice"). here are a few more i've stumbled across recently. in terms of irrelevant or meaningless quotation, no one has been more abused than shakespeare. so it was nice to find this surprisingly apt (and vaguely self-referential) winter's tale passage in the opening of ryder's quantum field theory:

yet nature is made better by no mean
but nature makes that mean: so, over that art
which you say adds to nature, is an art
that nature makes

what a feynmanesque thing for shakespeare to come up with! better yet, listening to the flaming lips' soft bulletin yesterday i noticed that the lyrics seem to contain some kind of ode to the fusion reactions in the stellar core:

and though they were sad
they rescued everyone
they lifted up the sun
a spoonful weighs a ton
giving more than they had
the process had begun
a million came from one

i cannot say for sure whether they are singing about high energy photons, the nuclei, or the reactions themselves, but i know that i definitely prefer these to those irrelevant, out-of-context quotes from alice in wonderland that everyone seems so fond of. not to mention this abomination.

neutrinos, they are very small

every subdivision of physics and astronomy has a little poem or literary verse with which it is always accompanied. in cosmology, the chapter about the eventual fate of the universe always starts off with "fire and ice" by robert frost:

some say the world will end in fire,
some say in ice.
from what i’ve tasted of desire
i hold with those who favor fire.
but if it had to perish twice,
i think i know enough of hate
to know that for destruction ice
is also great
and would suffice.

you see, the friedmann equation predicts that either the universe will expand forever and get really cold, or it will recollapse on itself, heating up as it does so. well gee golly, using this poem is so clever! because it happens to be just like what might happen in the real world, so let’s put it in every single astronomy textbook from now on!

and how could we learn relativity without this quasi-accurate gem from h. g. wells' the time machine?:
"there are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of space, and a fourth, time. there is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives."

"that," said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his cigar over the lamp; "that..very clear indeed."

then there is neutrino physics, and, of course, "cosmic gall" by john updike:

neutrinos, they are very small.
they have no charge and have no mass
and do not interact at all.
the earth is just a silly ball
to them, through which they simply pass,
like dustmaids down a drafty hall
or photons through a sheet of glass.
they snub the most exquisite gas,
ignore the most substantial wall,
cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,
insult the stallion in his stall,
and, scorning barriers of class,
infiltrate you and me. like tall
and painless guillotines they fall
down through our heads into the grass.
at night, they enter at nepal
and pierce the lover and his lass
from underneath the bed—you call
it wonderful; i call it crass.

this one is actually my favorite because updike wrote it about the neutrino, not about something that just happened to vaguely apply to the neutrino. plus, neutrinos are not the most famous, showiest particle. they don't get the big sneaker-endorsement deals, and that's ok with them. they're the "just happy to be here" particle. not showing off, not falling behind. not interacting with anything. it makes me happy that he noticed.

which brings me to my point, aspiring writers take notice: compose a verse about an obscure area of physics and the world shall be yours. your name will live on as a footnote under the chapter titles in countless textbooks; and your work repeated in lectures by an even larger number of goofy professors who think they are being clever. it doesn't even have to be a poem, it might just be a snappy saying, like "you can never step in the same river twice" (time direction) or "abandon all hope ye who enter here" (black holes). why shouldn't there be poems about neutrinos anyway? there are billions of them flying through your body at this very instant, and only if you live to be 80 is it likely that a single neutrino will interact with one of your atoms! there are doubtless hundreds of similes and metaphors and stuff that you can make about this. i don't know what they are, because i'm not arty or creative, but i know that they must exist.