Links for 2009-12-19

“I’ve heard this sort of story many times before, and this is where it usually ends. Blogosaurus slinks back to his office and sulks.

But today the story has another ending. Wedel now reports that someone from the Discovery Channel called him up and is going to make things right. I can only guess that blogs do actually make a difference some of the time. Or maybe just this once.”

“So, a bad year for people hoping to make gravitational history by discovering the nature of the missing matter or finding deviations from the laws of gravity established by Newton and Einstein. (Yes, Newton and Einstein can co-exist in the solar system, with Newton’s theory providing most of the prediction and Einstein’s theory adding small corrections in most cases.) But I’m sure that people will continue to explore these “weighty” matters in the coming year.”

“In a recent conversation I had with some other professional authors, one of them related an exchange she’d once had with a professor of creative writing. On learning that she didn’t have an MFA, this person asked, “But how did you learn to write, then? Who taught you?” This is not meant to be a commentary on academic elitism, note — I’ve gotten similar questions from family, friends, and random acquaintances, when they learn I’m a writer. It’s one of those questions writers get all the time at parties, right up there with “Would you like to write my book?” and “So what do you think of Stephen King?””

“I was flipping through the TV channels on a late Friday morning. On ESPN, the anchorman was discussing the latest developments in the sudden fall of the fast-curtaining decade’s top American athlete. Then, three stations over on The View, the ladies were in the middle of a roundtable discussion… about the very same story.

The channel for 18-35 men, and the show for 25-39 women, overlapping. Both were talking about the same soap opera. That’s when I realized I was witnessing a historic moment, and that the pussification of the American male “sports guy” was complete and capstoned. This had been in the works for years — bedroom anxiety, metrosexuality, body wash (and then man-loofas), and now this. The Sports Bubble has been stealing penises away slowly and softly, all the while whispering doublespeak about what real men we are. Now, many guys are as insecure and confused as teenage girls, obsessing over gossip.”

“The amount of results that the collaborations have managed to produce in such a small time frame, and from a relatively small amount of collisions, is really astonishing. Of course most of them have no real scientific value, if as a yardstick you use the advancement of our knowledge of particle physics. Yet everybody was eager to know how well the performance of the detectors matches the expectations from computer simulations, and the answer is that all experiments are performing impressively, and that almost everything is understood to a level of detail I myself would have thought improbable to achieve in such a short time frame, just a few weeks ago.”

“The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) laboratory, buried half a mile underground in an iron mine, announced last night that they had found traces of the weakly-interacting massive particles (or WIMPs) that are thought to make up dark matter.

Instead, they had actually detected a dirty poorly-sprung mattress, left in the cave by a weakly-inebriated, noxious old-timer (or WINO). “

“[W]hile I agree that people should stop bothering Scott about D-wave (I mean the dudes an assistant professor at an institution known for devouring these beasts for breakfast), I personally think the question of whether or not D-wave will succeed is one of the most important and interesting questions in quantum computing. The fact that we interface with this black box of a company via press releases, an occasional paper, and blog posts at rose blog, for me, makes it all the funner! Plus my father was a lawyer, so if you can’t argue the other side of the argument, well you’re not having any fun! So, in defense of D-wave…”

BEC’s– is there anything they can’t do?

“A stable magnetic quadrupole trap for neutral atoms on a superconducting Nb thin-film disc is demonstrated. The quadrupole field is composed of the magnetic field that is generated by vortices on the disc introduced by cooling the disc across the transition temperature with a finite field and an oppositely directed uniform field applied after cooling. The trap is stable when all trapping processes are performed above the dendritic instability temperature Ta. When the field intensity is changed below this temperature, the quadrupole field collapses and the trap disappears. The initial vortex density decreases even when the external field is changed at a temperature T>Ta. However, the vortex density is stabilized at an equilibrium density, whereas at T<Ta, it almost completely disappears. A stable trap can be formed, even when the initial vortices are introduced through a dendritic avalanche.”