I’m a bit absent minded. This morning in the kitchen, I absentmindedly grabbed with my bare hands a cake pan that had been heated in the oven to 450F(232C). I had forgotten that I had taken off my oven mitt. I grabbed the pan firmly and picked it up on one side. I should have been severely burned but I escaped because of the Leidenfrost effect.
Science
Thanks Foster. Science & Ploughboys
I want to thank David Foster for putting up his post and thus allowing me to comment in a rambling manner. I’m one of those people who doesn’t know what I think until I say it – and having a forum is better than daily analysis. (Indeed, given the results from Woody Allen’s intensive time on the couch, Jonathan is probably more justified in charging a fee to posters & commentors than are some highly paid analysts.)
Some comments assume those in the hard sciences, engineering and business are likely to be conservatives/Republicans. Since, of course, I agree on their broad picture, I haven’t nit picked. Their position echoes Horowitz’s opponents, who also assume business & engineering departments are conservative. Liberal arts & social science colleges are more heavily weighted (in some, I’m sure, Nader got more votes than Bush). But I’ve seen studies finding most colleges within universities (business, engineering, hard sciences) lean left – just not as far. Shannon notes that they are more centrist and that is probably true. And, practicing engineers and scientists may well move right. Academia attracts leftish sympathies and peer pressure is a factor.
Nonetheless, the only college likely to be majority Republican is the same that probably would do such projects as those cited by Chel and Anonymous – Ag schools. They are also often geographically separated from the university because of the land-consuming nature of their research. I support funding that research and many who share my general political positions would. I came out of one of the great American institutions – the land grant college – and respect that history.
Cold, Kryptonite, and Ice Cube
Over the last few years I have whipped myself into pretty decent shape for an almost forty something. From my heaviest point, I have lost somewhere between twenty and twenty five percent of my body weight, and in the meantime transformed what is left into solid muscle. Out of curiosity I should book an appointment with a trainer for an hour and on top of getting some more tips, I should get measured for a body fat percentage. But enough of that.
Where I am going with the description of my physical condition is that cold weather is absolutely my kryptonite now. I also shaved my head in the meantime, so any temps below, say, 50 F require coat, skullcap and gloves. Before, when I was heavier and had hair, 50 F was no issue in a t-shirt for me.
As I type this in my office, I have a small portable heater running under my desk. The winters here in the upper Midwest are very tough on me. Our winter is just beginning, and I am already suffering – the real cold stuff is yet to come. But so it goes.
On occasion, some interesting individuals come into my store from the UW. Well, I get people in the store from the UW all the time, but these individuals from a certain department are different. They work on the Ice Cube project. From their website, here is what the project is involved in:
The IceCube Neutrino Detector is a neutrino telescope currently under construction at the South Pole. Like its predecessor, the Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA), IceCube is being constructed in deep Antarctic ice by deploying thousands of spherical optical sensors (photomultiplier tubes, or PMTs) at depths between 1,450 and 2,450 meters. The sensors are deployed on “strings” of sixty modules each, into holes in the ice melted using a hot water drill.
The main goal of the experiment is to detect neutrinos in the high energy range, spanning from 1011eV to about 1021 eV. The neutrinos are not detected themselves. Instead, the rare instance of a collision between a neutrino and an atom within the ice is used to deduce the kinematical parameters of the incoming neutrino. Current estimates predict the detection of about one thousand such events per day in the fully constructed IceCube detector. Due to the high density of the ice, almost all detected products of the initial collision will be muons. Therefore the experiment is most sensitive to the flux of muon neutrinos through its volume. Most of these neutrinos will come from “cascades” in Earth’s atmosphere caused by cosmic rays, but some unknown fraction may come from astronomical sources. To distinguish these two sources statistically, the direction and angle of the incoming neutrino is estimated from its collision by-products. One can generally say, that a neutrino coming from above “down” into the detector is most likely stemming from an atmospheric shower, and a neutrino traveling “up” from below is more likely from a different source.
The sources of those neutrinos coming “up” from below could be black holes, gamma ray bursters, or supernova remnants. The data that IceCube will collect will also contribute to our understanding of cosmic rays, supersymmetry, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS), and other aspects of nuclear and particle physics.
Uh, yea. Maybe some of my readers with a more scientific background can decipher what they are after. I sure can’t make heads or tails of it.
You should hear the questions the Ice Cube guys ask us about simple parts. We usually stand there and stare at them like they have an arm growing out of their head.
This is a pump for a fuel oil furnace. There are millions of them all across the United States. There are several of these in the Antarctic right now that are in use that were purchased from me, having been modified by the Ice Cube team. They have to pretty much buy all standard items for use down there and modify them since there really isn’t any industry that creates items for use in that environment.
Speaking of that environment, I would last about three minutes down there. Seven degrees F is the recorded HIGH for the South Pole. This article appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal yesterday and literally sent shivers down my spine. I didn’t know the conditions that these scientists put themselves through. Their lips and fingers crack, they get nosebleeds, snow blindness, etc. In the article, it is stated that the participants in the program have to go through a rigorous physical and seminars explaining to them what will happen to their bodies as they dry out in the worlds largest desert – the Antarctic.
They repair their cracked skin with superglue. Superglue!
It might be cold down there, but it would be hell for me.
Cross posted at LITGM.
Elevator Music to the Stars
I’m a kinda-sorta advocate of space exploration because I realize that the technology goes far beyond the intended purpose. Figure out a way to send a robot probe to a distant planet and you also have come up with hundreds of new applications that can be used right here on the Big Blue Marble. It is in this that people dedicated to space travel and myself agree.
True blue space enthusiasts lose me when they try to make the case for a permanent human presence in space. It would cost far too much with the technology we have available, and they have never been able to come up with any benefit to justify the effort that makes any sense to me. A lot of them insist that it is something we have to do, though.
One of our fellow Boyz, Steven den Beste of Chizumatic fame, gave me some insight into their motivation.
Why Socialism Will Not Die: Meat!
Despite all the death, misery and poverty that socialism has wreaked over the past century on all scales from Stalin to Detroit, one would think that a species capable of learning would figure out that socialism’s negatives eventually outweigh its positives. Worse, looking back across the history of humanity, we see the core socialist idea of forced redistribution occurring again and again across culture after culture.
Why do humans seem to have an in-built urge for socialism? Why won’t it die? I think socialism will not die because primitive humans lacked refrigerators.