Tag: science

What’s the most intellectual joke you know?

What’s the most intellectual joke you know?

This Reddit discussion is golden.  Not only you get the collection of rather specifically humored jokes, but also for those that you don’t get there is always an explanation.  Here are a few that I liked:

Q: What does the “B” in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for?
A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot.

Entropy isn’t what it used to be

A good variation on the 10 kinds of people – those who understand binary and those who don’t:

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

Something in the Louis C.K. style:

They used to laugh when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well they’re not laughing now!

A couple Freudian ones:

How may Freudians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Two; One to screw in the lightbulb and one to hold the penis… I mean ladder.

and

according to Sigmund Freud, what comes between fear and sex?
Fünf.

Mac’s UFO News – Citizen Hearing on Disclosure

Of course we are not alone! Just look up at the night sky – there are thousands of stars you can see with a naked eye.  There are billions that you can see with some telescopes and space travel.   How many of these have planetary systems – we don’t even know well enough yet (we’ve found 133 with more than one planet, but our tools still suck).  Among all of that, what are the chances that Earth is the only one that has arguably intelligent life? I am no mathematician (or statistician), but I won’t be betting any money on us being alone.

Drilling Square Holes

Drilling Square Holes

WOW!

A bit that drills square holes … it defies common sense. How can a revolving edge cut anything but a circular hole? Not only do such bits exist (as well as bits for pentagonal, hexagonal and octagonal holes), but they derive their shape from a simple geometric construction known as a Reuleaux triangle (after Franz Reuleaux, 1829-1905).

Wikipedia has some more info on Reuleaux triangle.

Inside an atom

Imagine a chamber.  Now flip on the switch that creates a strong electrical field inside that chamber.  Now imagine not one, but two laser guns mounted inside that chamber.  Flip the switch that activates both of these guns and their targeting system.  It does sound a bit scary already, doesn’t?  Well, all we need know is a target.  Imagine that.  A moving one, inside the chamber. BZZZT!  Laser guns zap the target, which now rips apart and hangs in the middle of the air, because of the magnetic forces of the electrical field.  Snap the picture!

sn-hydrogen

Cool, isn’t it?  Well, now do a bit of scaling.  The target that you just zapped in the chamber is the size of the hydrogen atom.  It’s not tiny.  It’s beyond tiny.  You probably will need an industrial size telescope to even see the chamber!  Slashdot points to the story that covers the experiment.

But, maybe, I’m just way out of sync.  According to one of the Slashdot comments, it’s not as exciting as I picture it:

Now this would have been a fundamental breakthrough if it would have been done many decades ago. These days, we have extremely high confidence in our theoretical/computational models of the wavefunction of atoms and molecules. “Just as valuable for developing quantum intuition in the next generation of physicists?” Naah, this stuff has been well-known since before most of us were born.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to belittle this accomplishment – it’s all kinds of cool that they pulled off this experiment in the first place, and notwithstanding the huge body of other experimental evidence, it’s a beautiful direct confirmation of longstanding quantum mechanics theory. And as mentioned in TFA, provided they can scale this up to larger and less well-understood systems than the hydrogen atom, it might make it possible to obtain unique data on nontrivial materials like molecular wires. The only problem I have is that the Science editor is overselling it a bit; at the end of the day, it’s not going to change our quantum mechanical worldview the slightest.