Ummmm… wow

I didn’t know it, but apparently dolphins are starting to form ‘super pods’:

The nature of reality

as defined by a Science Fiction author.

 

Warning: have time and an open mind when sitting down to read this.

(via)

Cursing? HArdly!

Every morning I find myself sitting in a coffee shop for an hour. Always with me is either my journal or whatever book currently catches my fancy.

 

When you go to the coffee shop EVERY weekday, eventually you start to notice the other regulars, give out tentative hello’s, and get to know one another. And so it was that I found myself one morning talking to a terribly interesting gentleman who has been around the block a time or two, and who had some reading recommendations for me based on what he saw me bring in with me.

 

One of those recommendations came with a warning that I would probably want read it on the side, put it down when it got to be too much, maybe even skip chapters if the frustration reached too high. He also mentioned that there would most likely be some cursing on my part as I tried to come to terms with the concepts of the book.

 

That book is The Dancing Wu Li Masters, which I bought a week later and just started reading on Monday. Cursing? HA! The only thing that has escaped my lips for the past three mornings has been giggles!

 

The book is a layman’s guide to Quantum Mechanics, which honestly? Sounds way brainier than it really is. The book doesn’t necessarily dumb things down but instead chooses to focus on the principles underlying this branch of science rather than the math involved. And I am LOVING it!

 

Granted, I’m only in chapter two so the cursing could be coming, but thus far it has nicely filled some voids in my understanding of subatomic particles. It has also provided a fair bit of philosophical fat for me to chew on, which is always nice. I have trouble putting it down in the mornings to go to work.

 

So, assuming the book remains true to the form of the first few chapters, I would recommend it to anybody interested in what the heck quantum mechanics really is, without actually learning quantum mechanics. :)

For the science geeks:

Wired has a great article about how scientists are going to try to ignite an artificial star, using frikken’ laser beams.

 

They are hoping to excite some radioactive hydrogen particles and get their nuclei to say hello to one another. If it happens, then they have some nuclear fusion on their hands, and could potentially create a whole lot of power with it.

The LHC to be turned on… again

Yep, after months of repair to the Large Hadron Collider due to some leaking helium (used to cool parts of the machine) the machine will be turned back on sometime in June.

 

So we are getting another chance to destroy the world, hooray! And if that happens, it will all be Tom Hanks’ fault.

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Dreaming in North

Very cool article about the brain’s ability to accept simulated stimulus.

Friday Morning Geekiness

(image by Glenn Broadway)

It might be a bit too early for my brain to fully digest this article, but I tried anyway. It involves a gravitational wave detector (the GEO 600), which detects tiny changes in the curve of spacetime (gravity as defined in Einstein’s theory of general relativity). It does this (in Tombo terms) by splitting a laser beam, shooting both of the split beams down a long tube, reflecting them back to the source, and then looking at where the two beams fluctuate nearer and farther from each other.

 

Still here? Okay. So apparently the scientists running this detector have been getting a surprising amount of noise and haven’t been able to find a probable culprit to account for all of it. Well a guy named Craig Hogan has an idea of where the noise is coming from. In fact, he predicted noise would appear even before he knew about the GEO 600 experiment.

 

He says it is because we live in a hologram… Yeah, for real.  Nothing’s definite yet, as more testing is necessary, but it sure is a damned interesting idea. Read the article to find out more.

 

(thanks Presurfer!)

Ummm... AWESOME!

Inventor's 2020 vision: to help 1bn of the world's poorest see better | Society | The Guardian via kwout

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Bucky Paper!

Apparently buckypaper could be all sorts of awesome for building everything from televisions to space shuttles.

It has a potential of being 500 times stronger than steel, at only 1/10th of the weight. It is built off a platform of aligned carbon nanotubes.

 

See the ABC news story here.

10 Facts about black holes

A very informative article at the Bad Astronomy blog.

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James Nachtwey's message

Remember this post a few days ago?

James' message is all about stopping the spread of XDR-TB (eXtremely Drug Resistant TuBerculosis), which has now been reported in 49 countries.

 

A slideshow of the photos he has taken:

 

More information at xdrtb.org

As well as the Time Magazine article, found here.

Some randomness

- Snow is falling on Mars! (via)

 

- The first wave farm (for harnessing electricity from the motion of waves) has opened near Portugal. (via)

 

-Light Piano Player (via):

It's the end of the world as we know it

Or, maybe not as it turns out.

 

They turned on the Large Hadron Collider today. No black holes. But then again they haven't really started colliding anything yet, just shooting a beam of particles in a circle to verify the machine works. Here's hoping all goes according to plan. :)

 

To find out if the large hadron collider has destroyed the world, check here.