by Chris Barrus
100-Acre Wood, suburb of Distributed Republic of Blogistan…
Posted 8:55 PM by Pooh
OK, THIS is getting frightening. First, Heffalumps, now reports of Woozle tracks in the Hundred Acre Wood. Where’s the New York Times on this story? Where’s CNN? And where is Christopher Robin and his precious Department of Woodland Security? What’re we paying him for?
Remarkable bit of Photoshoping puts the famous plastic soldier in famous WWII war photos.
An automated digital camera linked by satellite to the Web is allowing researchers to keep track of conditions at the top of the world.
The New York Times tells it like it is in this editorial on the long-term ramifications of abandoning college aid programs that favor low-income students for politically popular tax credits and other programs that shift public education dollars toward the more affluent.
The problem was laid out yet again last week in two reports, one entitled “Losing Ground,” from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, and a second, from Congress, called “Slamming Shut the Doors to College.” A national policy once based primarily on need-based grants is now dominated by loan programs that often require Americans to assume unmanageable debts. Once seen as a benefit to society as a whole, a college education is now viewed as a boon to an individual, who should be forced to pay for it.
The data in the new reports shows that public colleges, which educate more than three-quarters of America’s students, are becoming unaffordable for many American families, that federal and state financial aid to students has failed to keep pace with tuition increases and that low-income families in particular are borrowing larger amounts than ever to pay for college. Both Republicans and Democrats participated in the destructive process of shifting aid that was once dispensed on the basis of need toward more politically powerful middle- and upper-income families
Really nice picture of Mt. Everest taken from the ISS crew a couple of months ago.
New York Review of Books looks at Teller’s memoirs.
The Slashdot discussion on “the most beautiful physics experiment” makes for some fun reading. My personal vote goes for Eddington’s validation of relativity, which another Slashdotter mentioned, but this passage in the ensuing discussion was just wonderful.
Ok, so this is probably apocryphal, but I was sent this a while ago:
A question in a physics degree examination at the University of Copenhagen ran thus:
“Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer.”
One student replied: “You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building.”
This highly original answer so incensed the examiner that the student was failed immediately. He appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to decide the case. The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but did not display any noticeable knowledge of physics. To resolve the problem it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to provide a verbal answer which showed at least a minimal familiarity with the basic principles of physics. For five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought. The arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied that he had several extremely relevant answers, but couldn’t make up his mind which to use. On being advised to hurry up the student replied as follows:
“Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer.
“Or if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper’s shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper.
“But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground level and then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked out by the difference in the gravitational restoring force T = 2 pi sqrroot (l / g).
“Or if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easier to walk up it and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer lengths, then add them up.
“If you merely wanted to be boring and orthodox about it, of course, you could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference in millibars into feet to give the height of the building.
But since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind and apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on the janitor’s door and say to him ‘If you would like a nice new barometer, I will give you this one if you tell me the height of this skyscraper’.”
The student was Niels Bohr.
A great example of how there are always different ways of looking at a problem, from one of the greatest scientists ever (allegedly)
There’s another apocryphal story that was kicking around during my physics undergrad days about a grad student’s Ph. D. oral exam. The anxious grad student was only asked one question: “Why is the sky blue?”
“Er, light waves are scattered by the Earth’s atmosphere”
“Could you explain that part a little bit more?
“Well, shorter wavelength light, such as blue, is more often absorbed by air particles and scattered”
“Could you explain that part a little bit more?
And so on through Rayleigh scattering down into the nuts and bolts of atomic/quantum theory. Finally after a couple hours of “could you explain that part a little bit more?” the examiners were satisfied and the grad student passed. Like I said, it’s proabably an academic legend (as opposed to an urban legend?) to scare the hell out of the undergrads, but it’s a good one.
Even the Establishment gets tired of people…
It is late at night and the rain beats down on the windshield of your patrol car. A Chevy Blazer speeds by, dousing your vehicle with a spray of fine mist. As the wipers clear your view, you notice that something is strange about that Blazer. The rear license plate had a lot of funny writing on it. They were obviously not plates from your state, but they didn’t seem to be plates from any other state you’d ever seen before, either.
Who would make up their own plates? It seems a little odd. But you pull out into the road and accelerate to catch up to the Blazer. It’s hard to see the plates because of the rain, but they are clearly not legitimate plates. In fact, you can just barely make out the wording on them: “Sovereign Private Property…Immunity Declared at Law…Non-Commercial American.” This is a little bit more exotic than a “Save our Lakes” specialty plate. You turn on your lights.
The Blazer ignores them, keeps going. Irritated, you turn on the siren. Finally, the vehicle in front of you pulls over to the side of the road. You get out of the patrol car, curse the rain, and walk up to the Blazer. The back of the vehicle is festooned with bumper stickers. “End Judicial Dictatorship.” “FREEDOM wasn’t won with a REGISTERED GUN.” “Sovereign Forever, New World Order–Never.” You’ve never seen stickers like this before. Judicial dictatorship?
As you walk past the vehicle, you see a message in vinyl letters posted on one of the side windows: “No One Is Bound to Obey an Unconstitutional Law and No Courts Are Bound To Enforce It, 16th Am Jur 2 Ed 256.” You reach the driver-side door. The window rolls down part-way and an angry face greets you. It is attached to a middle-aged man, Caucasian, scraggly hair, dressed in work clothes.
“Could you roll down your window, sir?” you ask.
“Are you arresting me?” the driver asks belligerently.
“Sir, could you please roll down your window?”
Instead of complying, the driver hands you a folded up sheet of paper. You pull out your flashlight to take a look at it, trying to protect it from the rain. It seems about as strange as the license plates and the bumper stickers.
“NOTICE TO ARRESTING OFFICER WITH MIRANDA WARNING,” it reads. It identifies the driver as a “Civil Rights Investigator.” It’s hard to read the fine print on the document, but it seems to be saying that you cannot arrest the driver without a warrant unless you immediately take him to a judge to determine if the arrest was lawful. It threatens to sue you “in your INDIVIDUAL capacity” if you improperly arrest him without a warrant. Near the bottom it states that if you ignore these warnings, “it will show bad faith on your part and prima facie evidence of your deliberate indifference to Constitutionally mandated rights.”
You shine the flashlight on the driver. He is smiling at you.
What do you do?
One man turns raving about obscure and out-of-print books into a comedic art form.