CMB Beach Ball Liberated!

In August 2006 I made a solemn vow:

This is the cosmic microwave background presented in the best known way of conveying scientific information: printed on a beach ball. Talk about an inflationary universe!

...A few years ago WMAP secretly distributed them to cosmologists. Needless to say, the early universe printed on a inflatable ball is something that I have decided I must have. For some reason, despite not being for sale, the ball seems to have its own web site...I pledge now to the internet, ultimate keeper of pledges made to no one in particular, that I will acquire this ball. I am not sure how yet, but I swear to do whatever it takes--breaking into someone's office, posing as an elementary school, sending threatening letters to beach ball manufacturers. whatever.

I am now free to disclose that I have triumphed over the forces allied against me-- the beach ball website that mysteriously refuses to sell it, the people who said I would never amount to anything, the journals that keep rejecting my groundbreaking work on the anisotropy of CMB beach ball distribution, everyone. I have, indeed, obtained the ball:


I can't go into the specifics of where it came from, but let's just say that a certain physics department who could never appreciate it as much as I do had a habit of carelessly leaving it in a usually unlocked room full of other neglected items, which I thoughtfully did them the favor of not stealing. And that I have waited until now to announce to the world because the institution that department belongs to, due to some bureaucratic stuff, took until a year after I had finished to send me my master's degree. Having gotten it in the mail a couple of months ago, I am now free, statute-of-limitations-wise, to reveal the success of Operation CMB Ball Freedom. It is hanging from the ceiling of my apartment, daily inspiring me to contemplate the mysteries of the cosmos. Mission accomplished.

Now a beach ball of the Neutrino Background pattern, that would be something...

Please Just Stop

I have no desire to comment on the turn-on of the LHC and the "controversy" over whether we are all going to die. But to fulfil my community service as a guy who occasionally writes about science, I am honor-bound to do so. Plus I need to vent my frustration at basically anyone acting as though it is somehow an unsettled question. My buddy Dave put it best when mock-reporting that the LHC had, as feared, created a dragon. Depending on your tolerance for watching dead-horse beatings I have given you 3 options, reader.

Long Attention Span: If you are interested in a description of why anyone who seriously thinks there is some danger in turning on the collider, or that doing so somehow amounts to "recreating the big bang," is a complete moron read Backreaction's smack-down.

Medium Attention Span: This is one is just me yelling at you: Black holes would only be created in the case that an extrodinarily unlikely theory, that the universe has LARGE extra-dimensions turns out to be true. Something that is totally speculative and which we have NEVER seen any evidence for. On top of this, the particulars of this theory would have to be just right, which, as far as we can tell from other types of measurements, they are not. If all of this extremely disfavored junk turned out to be true, EVEN THEN they would evaporate in a femptosecond due to Hawking radiation. If they didn't, WHICH THEY WOULD SO THERE IS NO POINT IN EVEN WRITING THIS PART, they would be smaller than the nucleus of an atom and travelling at almost the speed of light, so they would never even interact with any normal particles to swallow them up, and would simply fly off into space never to return. And if any of this were possible, it would be happening all the time ALREADY because the cosmic rays bombarding the Earth are equivilent to the collisions that are going to take place, as far as this black hole nonsense is concerned. See how every part of that explaination is rendered moot by the preceding section? Ignoring that many layers of unequivical denounciation for this retarded black hole catastrophe concept means that you should lose the right to ever benefit from science in any way. And if anyone even thinks about uttering the phrase "but anything can happen" I will personally reach through your computer screen and punch you in the eye.

Low Attention Span: Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the Earth Yet?

This might be mildly chauvinistic

From McSweeney's:

Physical Theories as Women

0. Newtonian gravity is your high-school girlfriend. As your first encounter with physics, she's amazing. You will never forget Newtonian gravity, even if you're not in touch very much anymore.

1. Electrodynamics is your college girlfriend. Pretty complex, you probably won't date long enough to really understand her.

2. Special relativity is the girl you meet at the dorm party while you're dating electrodynamics. You make out. It's not really cheating because it's not like you call her back. But you have a sneaking suspicion she knows electrodynamics and told her everything.

3. Quantum mechanics is the girl you meet at the poetry reading. Everyone thinks she's really interesting and people you don't know are obsessed about her. You go out. It turns out that she's pretty complicated and has some issues. Later, after you've broken up, you wonder if her aura of mystery is actually just confusion.
...

6. Cosmology is the girl that doesn't really date, but has lots of hot friends. Some people date cosmology just to hang out with her friends.
...

Soil physics is the lady you meet at the bus station. She's 45 with dingy teeth, glue-on nails, and 3 kids. She yells at one of them not to turn over the trash can, but he does it anyway. As you pass by, she asks if you know how to get gum out of hair. You keep walking.

Science Tabloids

A harrowing vision of a very different world...where scientists are treated like celebrities.


Still, I would watch it if I were these people. Witten can be pretty sensitive about his shoes, they don't want to get a smack down in his next single PhysRev Letter: E. Witten, T. Shakur, "Hyperdimensional manifold collapse of motherfuckers who talk shit about my footwear" PRL 101 (2008)

Yes, not only is Tupak coming out with new albums every few months, he is also publishing. People are pretty much just remixing his old papers at this point, but that "Feat. T. Shakur" byline in your list of authors still helps you get played. I hear his next article is going to drop in ApJ this winter.

Twin Mirror

Improv Everywhere, is the group that brought you such stunts as a bunch of people freezing in place at Grand Central Station, creating a time loop in a Starbucks, and my personal favorite: getting 80 folks to dress up in Best Buy employee outfits and swarm a Best Buy. Their most recent mission was getting identically dressed identical twins to fill a subway car, symmetrically. I knew twins were good for something.

Human Mirror - Improv Everywhere

Note to self: All sets of identical twins seem to own matching pairs of clothes. How sneaky...

Barackyogenesis

Slate has a series of Obamisms that is about as good a lexiconographical study of our next president's neologisms as you will find anywhere on the internet. The widget here is quite a thing to behold. And this may be the best one yet -- combining cosmology, linguistic humor, and Change We Can Believe In™:

Barackyogenesis (buh-RAK-ee-oh-JEN-uh-sis) n. An attempt to explain why there were more Barackyons than anti-Barackyons in the Democratic Party, a condition necessary for the formation of heavier election matters.

Example: There must be some initial perturbation to explain the Barackyogenesis problem. Many political scientists have suggested that an imbalanced density of subatomic particles known as "charm quarks" in the candidates led to the dominance of Barackyons over anti-Barackyons.

Little boxes

For some reason, the genre of physics flash games resembling crayon sketches has exploded recently. Meaning that there are now at least two. I will keep you posted of others as I become aware of them.

This is a bit simpler than "CPD" you just stack little boxes on top of something precarious. It is also extremely difficult. I can't tell whether that means there is more strategy or less.

Poiser Hand Drawn Physics Puzzle Game

I Am Dartmouth! (and so can you)

This is very weird. My alumni magazine has fictional alumnus Stephen Colbert on the cover this month. Maybe I'll bother reading it for once. The article is an account of his time at the school he claims to have graduated from, hanging out with that shady crowd of Reviewers like Laura Ingram and Dinesh D'Souza, running from bears and so forth.

Like Dartmouth itself, the magazine is pretty traditional (read: lazy), so it doesn't have a website, I had to scan the cover. (This also explains why they call or write at least once a week asking for donations -- people who knew that I was grad student who was on full financial aid during my time there wouldn't bother.) Anyhow, since they don't seem to have computers, maybe I'll scan the story as well, I just don't want to get in trouble with a school I have no intension of ever giving money to.

Update: These people have the full article.

George Carlin

George Carlin died yesterday. A very sad thing. I found this clip of my favorite of his routines on Cosmic Variance.



I have never believed in God, but it took me a while before I knew that I outright disbelieved in the whole concept. The first half of that was realizing that religious people were not just kidding themselves "emperor has no clothes" style (which I had always just assumed), and the second half was seeing that other people found it just as absurd as I did. And when you're on the fence about how strongly you feel, doubting that you should be presumptuous enough, as a fairly young person, to completely dismiss this entire philosophy that 90% of people take really seriously, it helps to hear someone like George Carlin. Someone who is just blunt and witty and brutally honest, who has no problem saying the kind of stuff that is so far off the radar of Acceptable, Serious Discourse, helps you see that yes, all those contradictions you noticed about christianity when you were 8 were perfectly valid. And yes, the pat, trite answers that you got in Sunday school when you asked about them were just as silly as you thought. And no, ridiculing people's seriously held beliefs is not wrong when they are completely full of shit...as long as you can be funny about it. So thank you George Carlin, for showing us that bluntness and honesty (occasionally tempered by humor) can go a long way. Joe bless you!

Look at Me!

Through some internet miracle I scored absurdly good tickets to today's rout of the Seattles. Like best seats in my life tickets. Last week. For face value through the team website. Which is supposedly impossible...except that it actually isn't, as this grainy screenshot (that you'll have to trust is me on television) demonstrates.

Ticket resellers are a drain on society. At least the part of society that likes going to baseball games.

New Math

Ordinarily, I would post something like this and say "hey look at this video that humorously acknowledges science/math concepts!" This really contains no actual information, but is so clever and vulgar that it just doesn't matter. Plus I've got the same shirt as that kid, so you know, excellent work.

Cancer!

(Thanks to Jenn)

Martian Sunset

From NASA's Image of the Day, an artistic shot of the sun going down on Mars. In addition to being really beautiful, it certainly raises some important questions, such as: there's an alternative to the reviled (by me) Astronomy Picture of the Day?

NASA - Sunset on Mars

Hobo Matters

To apologize for my absence I bring you this audio essay on the role of Hobos in the Great Depression from John Hodgman's Areas of My Expertise. The visuals aren't good for much, other than pointing out that the only way John Hodgman could be funnier is if a PBS documentary gave him the veneer of boring credibility as counterpoint to his deadpan absurdity. People forget the other than the bit about "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" the rest of FDR's 1933 inauguration speech is pretty inspirational, particularly this passage:

"The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. And so I will kill all the hobos, and together we will knaw on their bones." It was time for a comprehensive hobo eradication program the president called "a new deal."

No wonder he's on the dime.