The Republican Party is looking for direction. They want ideas about policy, and in particular, about how to react to the Obama administration’s positions on a number of issues.
You can help them. This may take a few minutes of time but you may find it …. interesting.
Maddow on torture. “I make up stories.”
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
We need to just get these documents out now, in full.
Deborah Halber, News Office Correspondent
April 11, 2007The public persona of the Atom is mild-mannered physics professor Ray Palmer, who fashioned a lens that enabled him to shrink any object to any degree he wished. The lens’s secret ingredient is a chunk of a white dwarf star, and a 1960s version of the Atom comic book shows the professor in a grassy field, huffing and puffing as he carries a grapefruit-sized piece of the star (which has miraculously fallen to Earth) to his car.
Palmer seems undaunted by the fact that a sphere of white dwarf star that size would weigh 500,000 tons.
Jim Kakalios, a real-life physics professor from the University of Minnesota who spoke April 5 on “The Uncanny Physics of Superhero Comic Books” as part of the MIT Physics Colloquium Series, said that although a plethora of scientific bloopers could be found on the pages of comic books, Palmer carrying the star was completely believable. “We physics professors are just that strong,” he wisecracked.
Kakalios’s receptive audience couldn’t get enough of his brand of one-liners: Supervillain Electro’s pointy yellow lightning bolt mask would not be Kakalios’s choice of attire if he was transformed into a living electrical capacitor; each superhero has a “one-time exemption from the laws of nature” for his or her powers; and when Superman says he got permission to carry two skyscrapers over his shoulders the way a waiter might carry trays, Kakalios exclaimed, “Who would you ask?”
Kakalios, who studies disordered systems as a condensed matter experimentalist in his day job, achieved fame if not fortune in May 2002, when “Spider-Man” opened in theaters. Kakalios, who uses examples from comic books to keep his students engaged, thought it might be nice to get “a little physics into the newspaper.” The University of Minnesota put out a news release. The next thing Kakalios knew, a picture of him holding plastic action figures was zooming around the world faster than a speeding bullet.
Kakalios finds that students in his introductory physics classes are much more willing to learn about Newton’s laws when they are calculating the force needed to leap over tall buildings in a single bound (Superman would need 140 mph of liftoff velocity and his legs would have to exert 6,000 pounds of force, in case you were wondering). From how air bags save lives to how cell phones work, Kakalios covers serious physics with the “silly premises” found in comic books. Comic books “actually get their science right more often than you think,” said Kakalios, who wrote a book, “The Physics of Superheroes,” in 2005.
In one comic book, an evil character proposes finding the location of the Bat Cave by burying sticks of dynamite and detecting the differences in the resulting sound waves. It’s true that the waves would travel at different speeds depending on the material they encountered. Superman, carrying a terrified bad guy over electrical wires, says correctly that electrocution shouldn’t be a problem unless they are grounded by the wooden pole. It would be difficult, but you could potentially make a locomotive into a giant electromagnet. A superhero capable of traveling at super speed catching a bullet in his hand is a “beautiful illustration of relativity,” according to Kakalios.
Just the idea of learning math and science from a comic book is disarming enough to make even the most math-phobic willing to give it a try. And while not all Kakalios’s students will become physicists, he pointed out that as future voters, they should have the background to make better decisions about funding for science and technology.
When the Green Goblin kidnapped Spiderman’s girlfriend, Gwen Stacey, and pushed her from the George Washington Bridge to her death, the debate raged in comic book circles for years: Was it the fall that killed her or Spidey’s attempt to save her by catching her in webbing mid-fall, causing her neck to snap?
If Gwen has a mass of 50 kilograms, falls 300 feet and acquires a velocity of 95 mph, there would be 10g of force on her body, which she could potentially survive. But stopping short against all that force in half a second would certainly break her neck, as the Green Goblin declared in a later issue after Kakalios was widely quoted making the same calculation. “If I can teach a homicidal maniac like the Green Goblin about forces and motion, I’m making a difference,” he said.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on April 11, 2007
For those of you interested in Super Heroes, check this out:
Superhero alter-ego Steve Rogers – the original Captain America – is to come back from the dead in a new five-part Marvel Comic series.
The first part of Captain America Reborn will be out in the US on 1 July, but its makers will not say how Rogers will come back to life.
Rogers was apparently shot and killed in 2007 on the steps of a courthouse.
Since then, the 68-year-old series has continued with Rogers’ sidekick Bucky Barnes taking on the superhero mantle.
Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to repost my old post on Jim’s superhero book…
Here is the Guinea Worm Movie, and for more information and additional links, click here.
Minor Africa Story hidden below the fold.
Continue reading Guinea Worm Disease
This visual representation of the inside of a Linux Kernel build clearly had an image of Jesus Christ hidden in it.
[On June 19th] we’ll be talking about Astronomy with popular author and super-blogger Phil Plait!
And, as usual, we have a lot of questions.
Like, why is Pluto now not a planet? What’s NASA up to lately? And what’s the deal with the Hubble Telescope? How do we know we really landed on the moon? Is it likely that the world will be destroyed by asteroids, comets, black holes, or supernovae?
Ooh! Like in the Star Trek movie! When Spock is mind-melding with Kirk? He talks about a supernova that “threatened the galaxy”! Can that happen?
Um… the supernova part, not the mind meld.
Ask away on the next Skeptically Speaking, every Friday at 6pm MDT, on CJSR 88.5 FM or live on cjsr.com.
And as always, if you have a question and can’t/don’t want to be live on the show, email us right now and we’ll ask it for you.
is now available here, at Mauka to Makai. It is a great edition, plus the Mauka to Makai site itself is worth a look for a number of reasons. So go there.
Then, later, when you have a chance, go here and submit a post for the next Scientia Pro Publica, which will be hosted HERE at this blog. This one, here, the one you are reading right now. Use this handy dandy submission form.
Thank you very much.
Imagine my surprise when I try to print a document, and nothing comes out of the printer. The printer isn’t claiming it’s processing the document – and in one instance, while waiting for my document, I saw the printer fire up and spit out someone else’s document. On these occasions, if I go back to my desk and flip back to the Office application that was trying to print, only then does the document print. In fact, I can see Word finally display the status message “Printing page 1 of …” at the bottom of the window.
Read the rest of the horror story here at Linux in Exile.
My own worst nightmare story with Windows: This was Windows 95, IIRC. The printer driver did two things: 1: It converted a document (or received a document so converted from some other Microsoft app) such that all byte values were being interpreted as control codes (a sort of frame shift, in DNA language). This happens now and then in Windows. This is when the printer spits out several pieces of paper and most of them have one symbol …. like a happy face or a club (as in the card suit) or five or six random sensless blobs … on each page.
The other thing the printer driver did was to become unattached to the system, but still live. So, it could not be reached, even on the command line. The printer driver survived reboots as well. It could not be killed.
And the document sent to it was a 200 page manuscript.
Solution: Reinstall Windows.
Reason why this is bad: I was printing out a document that needed to be produced some time within the next couple of hours.
Actual solution: Find a different computer, print the document out there, return to original computer, and install Linux on it.
This is one of those science stories that is on one hand fairly simple, and on the other hand fairly complex, where the interface between simplicity and complexity causes little balls of misunderstanding to come flying out of the mix like pieces of raw pizza dough if the guy making the pizza was the Tasmanian Devil from the cartoons.
What is true: A scientist named Ryskin proposes that decadal or century scale minor wiggling in the measured Earth’s magnetic field is influenced by changes in ocean currents. Plausible. Interesting. Could explain some things. Not earthshaking.
What is not true: The earth’s magnetic field is caused by ocean currents. The earth’s magnetic field’s long term variations, like reversals in field orientation, are caused by ocean current changes. The Earth’s magnetic field causes oceanic current changes or the currents are the sole cause of secular variation. The cause of the earth’s magnetic field is not, as previously thought, the molten dynamo thingie inside the earth.
Let me explain.
Continue reading New theory on Earth’s Magnetic Field: Theory interesting, reporting botched
Republicans in congress bought and paid for by Big Pharma and the other nefarious elements of the health care industry are going to kill any attempts at reform.
Unless….
Continue reading Time to get organized on health care.
This just in from NASA:
PASADENA, Calif. — Astronomers have at last uncovered newborn stars at the frenzied center of our Milky Way galaxy. The discovery was made using the infrared vision of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
Continue reading Baby stars, expected but heretofore unseen, seen.