Bonus Tab-Clearing Post: Physics and AI

Article over at Quanta.  Impossible to describe, go read the whole thing.

And yes, Demers' take is pretty close to mine too.

In My Former Professional Life

However, not by choice, and certainly not for fun.  These awkward units are always an easy route to unforced errors.

<permalink to xkcd>  click through for mouse-over bonus punchline

A PDF of Allied's Radio-Formula and Data Book (1953)

Dan Romanchik found a physical copy of this slim book at a thrift sale last week, then scan & posted downloadable copies here.  In these days of science & engineering calculators, perhaps the log and trig tables are not needed as often as in the days of slide rules (but they're still good to have!).  Rather, it's the formulae for, say, calculating the characteristic impedance of twin-lead transmission lines, or resistor color codes that are good to have ready at hand.

Can't Wait Until Next Christmas...

... when this book comes out.  Here are a couple of teasers:

• A New Christmas Fable
• Joyous Noel!

Because this is how you get new scientists, engineers, and innovators.

Just Some Random Stuff

Random numbers have figured highly in my work for decades, but I've never had a really great random number generator at hand.  Oh, the ones out of Numerical Recipes have usually been more than adequate, but not provably adequate.  Now however, there's this...

• CURBy – the University of Colorado Randomness Beacon project
• Abstract on Bell-certified quantum random number generation

Probably more random than you bargained for!

Un-Sticking Physics

A modest proposal at SMBC.

Personally I find bike rides better than long country hikes, but whatever floats your boat.

Blogging's been light lately, but it's been a busy week.  Making good progress on the SSTV project with the new laptop in and 90% configured.  Lots going on at FCEM this week: replacing the lock on the Carrabelle tower (grumble), tuning another volunteer's car antenna, sorting out the pile of FRS radios at the EOC (two dozen and counting), and cleaning out the radio desk there as well.

Dance the Night Away

From over at today's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal,

Yeah, just makes you want boogie all night long.  Especially when finals week was coming up and you're behind two weeks on homework assignments.

Something for an Easy Day

Of course, I have engineer friends who would further approximate a cow-sphere with a cube.  Hey, whatever works man.  Just don't press it too far.

How Much Radioactive Material is Missing in New Jersey?

Bottom Line Up Front: Imagine a hardware store with a large-ish display of smoke detectors on a shelf, somewhere around fifteen hundred of them.  That's ballpark what was lost.  (And no, positrons are not alphas, and the shelf of smoke detectors would be a distributed source and not a small point-like source, but close enough for this grapefruits-to-tangerines comparison to give some idea of the magnitude involved here.)  It's enough to warrant some paperwork, but not any cause for real concern.

Finally, no, you're not going to spot it from a flock of drones flying randomly around NJ airspace.

Links:

• NJ mayor links drone sightings to missing radioactive material  And mayor's off the cuff remarks link him to missing cranial material.  Still, the article does give the name of the radioactive source:
• General Electric Medical Source HEGL-0132 (inset pic), a 55MBq calibration device.  What's a MBq?  How does this compare with a smoke detector's source?  How's it work?
• Becquerel, the SI unit of radioactivity, article a Wikipedia.
• A smoke detector has about 37kBq, according to this source.  (a surprisingly difficult number to find in a pile of "This Is Completely Safe!!!  Do Not Ask Further!!!" search results)  55x10^6/37x10^3 = 1486.  Think of it as a 12 wide by 11 high by 11 deep display stack of smoke alarms.
• How Germanium-68/Gallium-68 generators work, also at you-know-where.
• Just for completeness, here's the NRC's "uh, we lost something" paperwork on the incident.
• Finally, a J-school article Missing Radioactive Material in New Jersey Not as Bad as It Sounds.

Were I going to New Jersey, I'd worry more about New Jersey than I'd worry about this radioactive source.

Academic Translator

Dead-on.

The Keys

But you're probably not going to like 'em all that much.  Behold:

From SMBC sometime last week.  Link here.  Be sure to click through for the mouse-over & big red button.

This Needs Widest Dissemination

From today's xkcd:

As usual, click through to the original for the mouse-over gag.

The Fastest Rubic's Cube Solution

Christmas my college freshman year was The Christmas of the Rubik's Cube, and being a primarily science and engineering school, everyone came back to the dorms in January having received a half-dozen or so of these time-wasters.  Staring down the triple barrels of Phys II, Calc II, and Intro to Programming, there was simply no time to waste, so they languished in piles at the edges of our desks in a multi-colored scramble.

Then one day my roommate walked in, and was surprised to see that all but one in our room had been solved.  I'm sure this has been done many times before, but I'd simply used my pocket knife to pop all the face-blocks off each cube, then re-attached them in the correct order.  It's not a particularly new or clever solution – Alexander the Great did something similar millennia ago – but hey, it works.

As for that one cube I hadn't solved, the attachments for its blocks were barbed and they wouldn't pop off without breaking.  I saved it to challenge budding mathematicians, "Here, let's race.  You solve this one, I'll solve that one.  Go!"  "Wait, you didn't do it right."  "Solution's a solution.  Look, I've got to get back to my E&M homework.  We're doing method of images this week."

Look, life is hard.  Sometimes it's OK to take shortcuts.  Only be careful not to get cut in the short taking.  If it's a triviality to get something working (Rubik's cube, a balky diff pump, etc.) or a matter of safety (flat tire on a lonesome highway at midnight), just get the damn job done already.  For more knotty issues such as the method of images, it's good to understand the uniqueness theorem for Poisson's equation.  Once you understand the required preliminaries, then (and only then) you can go get the damn job done already, and with confidence in the result.

Richard Feynman's Six Easy Pieces

Didn't really need to (it's already burned into my brain), but it was a fun read anyway.  Here's a quick summary at Wikipedia.  Lecture notes from the early 60s, there are a handful of topics he touches on as current puzzles, but for which there were fruitful investigations right around the corner.  Specifically:

• some time spent on puzzling out the developing periodic chart of mesons, largely answered via quark theory beginning in 1964.
• a good discussion of quantum weirdness, followed by some mention of hidden variables.  The hidden variable hypothesis has largely been discarded, stating with Bell's theorem circa 1964 and follow-on experiments.
• the Higgs mechanism as a way to explain mass, also initially published in 1964.

Just noticing it, 1964 was a pretty hot year for physics.  I was busy discovering that food would fall if I dropped it off my high-chair tray.

Anyway, highly recommended.  If you read the book, be sure to skim the above Wikipedia links to see where some of the then-puzzling topics finally led.

The Uncertainty Principle Well Explained

If it has waves, you can be 100% confident that it has uncertainty in one form or another.  If the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics seems at all strange to you, then watch this video.  TLDW: It simply falls out of the math, and is about as unexpected as 1 + 1 = 2.

We see the same effect with light, sound, ocean waves, etc.  Nothing weird going on here.  It is admittedly a little outside of our everyday experience, but then so were pens that didn't inconveniently leak ink in our pockets just a few decades ago.

Pretty Much How It Is

xkcd 2662.  You should go there now to read the mouse-over text.

Pics from weekend adventures coming soon, but I'm too lazy to post just now.  Stay tuned.

Expand Into What?

 The simplest, most concise non-technical explanation I've ever heard for the statement "the universe is expanding."  It addresses frequently asked questions in an understandable manner, without the all too common handwaving.  Here, go watch, it's only ten minutes.

Whenever a scientist, in any field, makes an honest effort to understand and answer questions that genuinely baffle people, science advances.

Don't Try This One At Home, Kids

What really happens when you stick your head into a nuclear accelerator's beam.  You can safely skip the first half of the 'article,' it's just j-school boilerplate about what physicists do.  Search down to '1978' and start from there.

Never tried this one personally, still I don't recommend it.

Another Book: Energy for Future Presidents

Written by the same Richard Muller who wrote Physics for Future Presidents, this 2012 book takes a deeper dive into energy issues: catastrophes (primarily the Fukushima meltdown and the Deepwater Horizon blowout), the bird's-eye view of the energy landscape, alternative energy sources, an optional side-bar chapter on "what the heck is energy anyway?", and a closing summary to bring it all together.

As to be expected in a popular work, Muller uses just enough numbers to tether things to reality.  For example, he spells out why hybrid cars are a pretty good idea, but why full-electrics don't pencil out.  (it mostly has to do with the cost of periodically replacing the batteries)  Particularly interesting was the section on nuclear waste storage.  Also, it was good to have a concise and coherent explanation of how "clean coal" can be made to work seamlessly with CO2 sequestration.  Just hard, practical, facts-based advice, and I love it.

Even though it was published in 2012, it remains remarkably up to date.  Muller recognizes that battery and solar technology will continue to improve, and works this into his back-of-envelope calculations.  Consequently, eight years later things still make sense.  His predictions for petroleum fracking turned out to be on the low side of where production actually zoomed to in early 2020, but were nevertheless substantially correct.

If you've been reading too much from Kunstler, Tverberg or other peak-oil believers lately, this is a good tonic.  According to the numbers Muller gives, yes, oil may peak, and probably fairly soon.  However, there are many, many other energy sources to fill in the gaps.  The net result is that, while there may be some depletions, shortages, and market dislocations, substitutions and solid engineering will ultimately keep things going, and overall we have a reasonably bright energy future.

Finally, a note on the structure of the book, and perhaps the order in which it should be read.  I'll recommend skipping ahead to the summary Chapter V, Advice for Future Presidents first, just to get the framework for the rest of the book in mind.  Then go back to the beginning and read it from the top, finishing by reading back through the summary chapter again.  It'll be easier to keep the key topics in mind this way, a la the old maxim "tell'em what you're gonna tell'em, then tell'em, then tell'em what you just told'em."  Things tend to stick better that way.

Anyway, this is an excellent book giving a constructive overview of energy policy that all voters should read.  Even though it is eight years old, it is still current (enough), and well worth your time.

And as always, consult your nearby cat-friendly bookstore (adjust for your local conditions) before reaching for the online retailers.

A Good Way to Beat the Isolation Blues

Watch The PhD Movies 1 and 2 over at PhD Comics.

There, something to cheer you all up this weekend.