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Also the cockfighting!
- me: shit is fucked up sometimes, I won't lie. totally hide in a cave time.
- LT: yep
- hide in a chocolate marijuana cave
- vibrating with multiple asymetrical overtones and pulsing colors
- or what ever
- me: Wow, the phrase chocolate marijuana cave gave me a little chub.
- Just a little one, though. Don't get excited.
- LT: ;-) its a lifestyle choice
- me: Yeah, well, I choose chocolate marijuana.
- Pokemon name: Chocosmoke!
- Chocosmoke! I choose you!
- LT: oh shit this chat just got deep
- me: [weird Pokemon battle where my monster's attacks basically get all other monsters stoned]
- LT: and they stop wanting to fight
- lots of cuddling and bad jokes ensue
- me: And a few existential crises.
- And lots of snacking.
- LT: plus the music gets super weird
- me: Shit gets real when Chocosmoke gets played.
- Motherfuckers unionize and shit.
- LT: oh now you are going too far... weed and unionization?
- me: Pardon me, motherfuckers unionize. I suppose they shit on their own time in those weird poke-balls.
- Ok, ok...they think about unionizing.
- LT: more like it
- me: while bake off their poke-faces.
- and eating their trainers.
- (not their shoes)
- LT: plus they speculate that you could unionize non sentient beings and then shit gets really abstract
- me: bake = baked
- The Singularity for Pokemon happens.
- LT: that works too.. I was thinking they remove their faces and cook them but
- whatevs
- its pokemon weird shit happens
- me: Leaving Poke-Earth with a whole lot of kids minus their electric cockfighting pets.
- Poke-Earth becomes Face-Eater Earth.
- LT: baked-face-eater
- me: Oh, god, now I need to get stoned to smudge that image.
- Baked Alaskan-face Eater.
- Now I'm wondering: if you discovered a cave made of chocolate weed, would you leave? Would you remember how to leave?
- LT: pokemon as face eating, trancendental, unionizing, animist, space shaman
- me: with cockfighting! don't forget the cockfighting!
- LT: in a vibrating pulsing cave of weed chocolate
- me: sounds...vaginal.
- LT: fuck... why was i born in this reality?
- me: so you could imagine the wonder of the Chocosmoke Pokemon universe.
- Also, you parents.
- You = your
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Quantum physics is a branch of science that deals with discrete, indivisible units of energy called quanta as described by the Quantum Theory. There are five main ideas represented in Quantum Theory:
- Energy is not continuous, but comes in small but discrete units.
- The elementary particles behave both like particles and like waves.
- The movement of these particles is inherently random.
- It is physically impossible to know both the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time. The more precisely one is known, the less precise the measurement of the other is
- The atomic world is nothing like the world we live in.
While at a glance this may seem like just another strange theory, it contains many clues as to the fundamental nature of the universe and is more important then even relativity in the grand scheme of things (if any one thing at that level could be said to be more important then anything else). Furthermore, it describes the nature of the universe as being much different then the world we see. As Niels Bohr said, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.”
(via fuckyeahquantummechanics)
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Our Annual Personal Report
All floundering and spotty internet access makes a blog slow down.
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Late, but still relevant.
Higgs boson-like particle discovery claimed at LHC
Cern scientists reporting from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have claimed the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.
The particle has been the subject of a 45-year hunt to explain how matter attains its mass.
Both of the Higgs boson-hunting experiments at the LHC see a level of certainty in their data worthy of a “discovery”.
More work will be needed to be certain that what they see is a Higgs, however. -
Proposed experiment would prove that quantum jumps are not objective events
The famous physicist Niels Bohr first conceived of the notion of quantum jumps, or quantum leaps, in 1913. Bohr understood quantum jumps as objective events in which an atom emits or absorbs a photon, causing an electron to jump from one energy level – or quantum state – to another inside the atom. But a few decades later, when physicists began to understand how the act of measuring can affect the result in quantum mechanics, the assumed objectivity of quantum jumps required a second look.
Then in the early 1990s, physicists developed quantum trajectory theory, showing that quantum jumps are not caused by the emission of a photon, but by the detection of a photon. If an emitted photon is not detected, then there is no quantum jump. In other words, quantum jumps are detector-dependent, which is in marked contrast to Bohr’s objective emission events.
Despite the wide acceptance of the assertion that there can be no detector-independent quantum jumps, no experiment has ever been performed to rigorously test this claim.
Now in a new study, physicists Howard M. Wiseman at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, and Jay M. Gambetta at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, have proposed experimental tests to prove that all quantum jumps must be detector-dependent. Their work is published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.
“Our work relates to something everyone has heard of (quantum jumps) but says that their fundamental nature has still not been established experimentally,” Wiseman told Phys.org. “By proposing actual experiments, it gives experimentalists a real motivation to try to increase their collection and detection efficiency.”
The proposed tests would rule out not just certain specific detector-independent models of quantum jumps, but all models that could conceivably describe quantum jumps as detector-independent.(more at phys.org)
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Note to self: Feel free to talk mad smack on your high school, beginning now.
Late one night two years ago, Adam Munich found himself talking with two new acquaintances in a chatroom. One, a Pakistani guy, was complaining about rolling electricity blackouts in his country. The other had broken his leg in a motocross accident in Mexico and said his local hospital couldn’t find a working x-ray machine. The two situations fused in Munich’s mind; he wondered if a cheap, reliable, battery-powered x-ray machine existed—something that could be used in remote areas and function without being plugged in during blackouts. After discovering that the answer was no, he spent two years building one himself out of Nixie tubes, old art suitcases, chainsaw oil, and electronics from across the globe. It was an incredibly ambitious project for anyone, let alone a 15-year-old.
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Damn, this has been a decent week for the sciences:
Members of the CMS collaboration announced the experiment’s first discovery of a new particle today.
In a paper submitted to Physical Review Letters, the CMS collaboration described the first observation of an excited, neutral Xi_b baryon, a particle made up of three quarks, including one beauty quark.
The new baryon is one of many particles made up of quarks predicted by the theory of quantum chromodynamics. -
This is very, very exciting.
Planetary Resources, Inc. is not your average startup: its mission is to investigate and eventually mine asteroids in space!
Last week, the company issued a somewhat cryptic announcement saying they “will overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP”. I predicted this meant they wanted to mine asteroids, and yes, I will toot my own horn: I was right. They’re holding a press conference Tuesday morning to officially announce they’re going asteroid hunting.
The company had a pretty fierce amount of credibility right off the bat, with several ex-NASA engineers, an astronaut, and planetary scientists involved, as well as the backing of not one but several billionaires, including a few from Google… not to mention James Cameron. The co-founders of Planetary Resources are Peter Diamandis — he created the highly-successful X-Prize Foundation, to give cash awards to incremental accomplishments that will help achieve technological breakthroughs, including those for space travel — and Eric Anderson, X-Prize board member and Chairman of the Board of the Space Spaceflight Federation.
These are very, very heavy hitters. Clearly, they’re not screwing around.(via Breaking: Private company does indeed plan to mine asteroids… and I think they can do it)
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Man Jumps from 71,580 feet (21,818 m)
On March 15th, 2012, Austrian Felix Baumgartner jumped from a space capsule at an altitude of appxoaimtely 21,818 meters - as a part of the Red Bull Stratos project. Baumgartner rode a 42-year-old space capsule attached to a giant helium balloon.
“The goal of this expedition towards the edge of space was to fly over the so-called “Armstrong Line” and to do tests under real conditions for the first time. That is the area in aerospace where earthly boundaries and laws disappear. It is an inhospitable region for humans where liquids begin to vaporize and temperatures plunge to minus 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Humans could not survive in this zone without a spacesuit to protect them from the forces of depressurization and lack of oxygen. To get there, Baumgartner first had to make it through another “death zone” closer to earth. During the first 1,000 feet of his ascent there would be no chance of escape in the event of a crash because there would be no time to get out of the capsule or open the parachute.”
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Neutrino evidence against “faster-than-light” claim
Neutrinos do not go faster than light, according to new measurements made by an experiment called ICARUS at the Gran Sasso Laboratory using a new measuring technique, called a liquid argon time projection chamber and working independently from the OPERA scientists who had made the tentative but extremely controversial claim about “faster-than-light” particles. Particles that travel faster than light would unravel Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, a cornerstone of modern physics.
Their findings “indicate the neutrinos do not exceed the speed of light,” the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) said, ading that there may have been technical hitches that had skewed the initial measurements, something that skeptics of the findings said they had always suspected.The controversy began last September, when CERN’s so-called OPERA team cautiously announced that sub-atomic particles called neutrinos had travelled some six kilometres (nearly four ) per second faster than the velocity of light, described by Einstein as the maximum speed in the cosmos.
The neutrinos were timed at their departure from CERN’s giant underground lab near Geneva and again, after travelling 732 km (454 miles) through the Earth’s crust, at their arrival at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy.
To complete the trip, the neutrinos should have taken 0.0024 seconds. Instead, the particles were recorded as hitting the detectors in Italy 0.00000006 seconds sooner than expected.Knowing their findings would create a global controversy, the OPERA team urged other physicists to carry out their own checks to corroborate or refute what had been seen.
“ICARUS measures the neutrino’s velocity to be no faster than the speed of light,” said Carlo Rubbia, a Nobel winner and spokesperson for the ICARUS project..”Whatever the result, the OPERA experiment has behaved with perfect scientific integrity in opening their measurement to broad scrutiny and inviting independent measurements. This is how science works,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci, who added that further verifications were being made, including new experiments with particle beams in May, “to give us the final verdict.”
In February, CERN said that the OPERA team were verifying a cable connection and a timing instrument called an oscillator that may have flawed measurements of the neutrinos’ flight time.Strengthening this scenario, Bertolucci said on Friday “the evidence is beginning to point towards the OPERA result being an artifact of the measurement.”
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BBC News: Alan Moore “Greatest Living Englishman” and “Knows The Score”
(via LinkMachineGo)
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Famous Physicists as Children
From left to right:
Stephen Hawking (b. 1942) - Most well known for Hawking radiation and theorems involving gravitational singularities. He suffers from ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease - and is one of the most well known scientists of our time.
Neil deGrasse Tyson (b. 1958) - Currently the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, Tyson is one of the leading science advocates in the world - and was one of the men who supported the demotion of Pluto.
Carl Sagan (1934-1996) - One of the most successful science popularizers of all time, Sagan was also the bestselling author of Cosmos, one of the most popular science books of all time. He was the first to propose that Jupiter’s moons Titan and Europa may hold liquid components of water on them.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) - The most well known genius in history, Albert Einstein was a boss. During his career, he revolutionized almost every area of Physics, including quantum mechanics and he effectively founded the study of Cosmology. His theory of general relativity has been wildly successful, despite ‘attacks’ by neutrinos.
Richard Feynman (1918-1988) - His most important contributions came via his path integral formulation of quantum mechanics and development of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). Plus, he was a total badass.
(via proofmathisbeautiful)
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Darwinism
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By combining massive amounts of diverse data, scientists from NASA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a beautiful high-resolution model of the Earth’s ocean currents.
The project, called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO), uses observational data—including ocean surface topography, surface wind stress, temperature, salinity profiles and velocity data—collected between June 2005 and December 2007. By incorporating these data into an M.I.T. model, the result is “realistic descriptions of how ocean circulation evolves over time,” according to the press release. “These model-data syntheses are among the largest computations of their kind ever undertaken.”
I’m mesmerized! :O
