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Fun
Last night was the University of Waterloo's annual holiday dance. Jon Seiger, who does a mean Louis Armstrong impersonation, swung hard all night long–he is so much fun to dance to. Santa made a visit and even busted a few moves. Video evidence is below.
A big thanks to the organizers and all the volunteers.
These similes abuse the English language like dogs/ballerinas abuse a fire hydrant. My favourites include:
2. He was as tall as a 6′3″ tree.
7. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
16. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
25. She was as easy as the TV Guide crossword.
30. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.
This sounds like Jose Canseco.
47. The baseball player stepped out of the box and spit like a fountain statue of a Greek god that scratches itself a lot and spits brown, rusty tobacco water and refuses to sign autographs for all the little Greek kids unless they pay him lots of drachmas.
Jonathan Mann has been writing a song a day for over 1000 days. According to his Youtube channel he is up to 1061 songs and is still going strong.
I imagine trying to come up with an original song every day is a challenge. One technique is to sing the abstracts of physics papers. On day 264 that is exactly what Jonathan did; he turned the abstract of this paper by Daniel E. Sheehy and Leo Radzihovsky into a song (free version of the paper here).
We study a one-dimensional gas of fermionic atoms interacting via an s-wave molecular Feshbach resonance. At low energies the system is characterized by two Josephson-coupled Luttinger liquids, corresponding to paired atomic and molecular superfluids. We show that, in contrast to higher dimensions, the system exhibits a quantum phase transition from a phase in which the two superfluids are locked together to one in which, at low energies, quantum fluctuations suppress the Feshbach resonance (Josephson) coupling, effectively decoupling the molecular and atomic superfluids. Experimental signatures of this quantum transition include the appearance of an out-of-phase gapless mode (in addition to the standard gapless in-phase mode) in the spectrum of the decoupled superfluid phase and a discontinuous change in the molecular momentum distribution function.
As awesome as I find this, there is a reason the Beatles and Rolling Stones have never tried this approach.
This comic from XKCD is especially appropriate given my earlier post on Tom Lehrer. One of Lehrer's most famous songs is a satirical savaging Wernher von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist who developed the Saturn V rocket for the US after World War II. Here is Lehrer's song:
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
I think Tom Lehrer is one of the funniest people ever alive. Which is surprising given that he is a mathematician. Lehrer is known for his witty, bitingly satirical, songs. A number of videos of Lehrer performing live have surfaced on Youtube. The man is a charismatic, charming, and irreverent performer.
The first Lehrer song I encountered (introduced to me by my PhD supervisor Aephraim Steinberg) is about the great Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky:
I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics. Plagiarize!Plagiarize, Let no one else's work evade your eyes, Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, So don't shade your eyes, But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize - Only be sure always to call it please 'research'.
Tom Lehrer rapping before rapping was cool. The Elements has been covered by many people over the years. Be sure to check out this performance by Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe on the Graham Norton Show.
Poking fun at the new math approach to teaching mathematics:
Now that actually is not the answer that I had in mind, because the book that I got this problem out of wants you to do it in base eight. But don't panic. Base eight is just like base ten really - if you're missing two fingers.
There is some great footage of Lehrer performing in 1997 at Irving "Kaps" Kaplansky's 80th Birthday Celebration. Here he sings, amongst other things, about how to take a derivative. Short and sweet.
Also from the same concert is another clever math song There is a Delta for Every Epsilon.
Not a science or math song (although it does mention cyanide), but it is one of my favourites.
All the world seems in tune On a spring afternoon, When we're poisoning pigeons in the park. Ev'ry Sunday you'll see My sweetheart and me, As we poison the pigeons in the park.
With Christmas around the corner, I thought it fitting to wrap up with this final Lehrer song.
Angels we have heard on high,
Tell us to go out and buy.
Here are some other Lehrer songs I recommend checking out: - The Vatican Rag - That's Mathematics - Odepius Rex - The Decimal Money System: Song played to a British audience poking fun at their complex money system. - The Wiener Schnitzel Waltz - The Masochism Tango - Pollution - Wernher von Braun - I Can't Think Why?: Funny satire of professors. - I Got It From Agnes
Amazon is selling The Tom Lehrer Collection on both CD and DVD.
Kent: Mike, can you factor 25?
Mike: No. I'm not a quantum computer.
Vampires seem to be everywhere in the media. Not even New Scientist is safe.
The Twilight Zone: where consciousness goes while you are under the knife.
A little poster I made about Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC). When steam turns to water or water turns to ice it is known as a phase-transition. If you were to keep cooling ice it will undergo a number of other transitions into new states of matter.
But how cold can you go?
Using some special techniques, it is possible to cool a cloud of dilute atoms down to a a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. When these temperatures are reached, the atoms all suddenly enter their lowest energy state (known as the ground state). When this happens, the atoms begin to act collectively. It is even possible to create a laser made out of atoms in a BEC.
In 2001 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle for their work creating the first BECs. I recently came across the Nobel lecture given by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman; a fascinating read about the history behind the making of the first BEC.
(Image Credit: NIST)
This video from Open University covers Zeno's paradox, the grandfather paradox, the Chinese room, Hilbert's infinite hotel, the twin paradox, and Schrödinger's cat.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zVaFjSxAZs
A great line from the twin paradox segment:
Time might fly when you are having fun, but when clocks fly they run more slowly in relativity.
This is one of my favourite TED talks. John Bohannon completely blew my mind. In the space of eleven minutes using dancers he talks about laser cooling, super fluids, slow light, and cellular biology. This talk, especially the first half, is a synthesis of all the things I have come to believe about science communication. Incredible choreography and timing.
John also runs the popular Dance your PH.d contest I entered a couple years back. My favourite line from the talk:
I think that bad Powerpoint presentations are a serious threat to the global economy.
My only criticism is that during the second half, when he is making his point about Powerpoint and arts funding, the dancers were distracting. The attention should have been solely on John and what he was saying, not the lazy boy the dancers formed. I think it would have been more powerful to have the dancers leave the stage and then rush back in for the finale. The absence of the dancers would have fit nicely with his point about what would happen if arts funding is cut. Still, this is a very minor quibble. I loved this talk and will be watching it over and over again.
(via Madhur Anand)
Another great example of using typography to powerfully convey an idea.
(via Design Your Way)
If anyone is wondering what to buy me for Christmas, this shirt in either navy, black, or forest green (size=L) is a good place to start.
Quantum Mechanic: Tweaking your reality one atom at a time.
I would also accept a shirt with the Schrödinger cat dead and alive design as well.
This has been going around Facebook. A great use of negative space to convey a deep concept in physics. Kudos to the artist who designed this (I have not been able to track down the original yet).
The Economist reviews the new 3D movie “Arthur Christmas”:
The screenplay, written by Aardman’s Peter Baynham and Sarah Smith, makes a serious stab at the mathematics. Some 23% of the world’s seven billion people were assumed to be under age eight—which is probably not far off the mark. So, with 1m elves working in teams of three, each team rappelling down ropes from Santa’s hovering stealth-ship has to deliver presents to 4,760 children during the 24 hours of Christmas Eve. Hence the 18 seconds or so the movie allows for each stocking to be filled.
A nice post that goes into some more detail on the aforementioned Futurama video.
This is why I love Futurama. In less than two minutes they cite Lorentz invariance, refraction, and Schrödinger's cat. It should come as no surprise how science savvy this show is; the writing staff is stacked with scientists and David Cohen, one of the co-developers, has degrees in physics and computer science. From this 2007 Wired piece:
Futurama was geek-friendly to begin with: Episodes are built around sci-fi staples like parallel universes, spaceship battles, and time travel. But look more closely and you'll spot fleeting jokes that are geekier than a Slashdot comments thread, gags about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, particle physics, and the P=NP problem.
There is also this excellent interview by SEED magazine with the writers of the show.
This is easily my favourite version of the Muppet Show's theme song. OK GO is one of the most creative bands out there and the Muppets have been taking Youtube by storm. It was inevitable that they would eventually meet up.
In a similar vein, here is a great interview Kermit did for the opening of the latest instalment of Pirates of the Caribbean. I am glad to see Kermit has still got it after all these years. Has there ever been a reporter who performed at the top of his or her game for so long?
