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Monday Links from the Bench vol. DCXIV

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    Monday Links from the Bench vol. DCXIV

    Finally made it to the end of the gig, and very much enjoying my first Monday back on the bench where I belong. It gives me more time to dig up stuff like this
    • Searching for Mr. X - ”On a summer day in 1931, a man was found wandering South State Street in Jackson, Mississippi. He appeared to be lost… What was missing were his autobiographical memories. And without them, who was he? A skilled bridge player who couldn’t remember how or when he’d learned the game; a gardener with no recollection of who’d taught him the names of flowers or which varieties grew in his mother’s yard.”
    • ‘Impossible’ Particle Discovery Adds Key Piece to the Strong Force Puzzle - ”The unexpected discovery of the double-charm tetraquark has given physicists a new tool with which to hone their understanding of the strongest of nature’s fundamental forces.” I'm beginning to wonder if these things exist first, or if the universe waits for the quantum physicists to think up something weird and then creates it when they start looking for it
    • An uncommon cold - An interesting paper on the matter of tracing current mild common cold viruses back to the pandemics they caused when they first popped up: ”There are four coronaviruses responsible for an estimated 20 to 30 per cent of colds. Only recently have virologists begun to dig into these seemingly humdrum pathogens and what they have found suggests the viruses have a far more deadly past. Researchers now believe that all four of these viruses began to infect humans in the past few centuries and, when they did, they probably sparked pandemics.”
    • Real numbers, data science and chaos: How to fit any dataset with a single parameter - You'll need to follow the link to the PDF for this one, but it should be of interest to the mathematics enthusiasts out there: ”We show how any dataset of any modality (time-series, images, sound...) can be approximated by a well-behaved (continuous, differentiable...) scalar function with a single real-valued parameter. Building upon elementary concepts from chaos theory, we adopt a pedagogical approach demonstrating how to adjust this parameter in order to achieve arbitrary precision fit to all samples of the data.”
    • In this 1975 lecture, the maglev train’s inventor deconstructs his ingenious design - ”In this lecture at Imperial College London from 1975, the British engineer and professor Eric Laithwaite (1921-97) deconstructs the fascinating physics at work behind his plans for a maglev train, which he first modelled in 1940s and perfected in the 1970s.” Good stuff if you want a bit more detail than was in his RI Christmas Lectures
    • The Planets Today - You may have seen woo adherents on social media going on about "Mercury in retrograde" recently. This interactive site lets you work out exactly what's going on with the solar system, now or at any other time
    • Cold War, Hot Mess - The scary business of managing the USA's legacy of nuclear waste. Luckily, the powers that be have come up with a solution: ”In the face of these rising costs, the DOE announced in 2019 that it would redefine what constitutes ‘high-level radioactive waste’ under federal law, which would allow it to leave additional waste in place, rather than transferring it to safer, long-term storage… When applied to Hanford, it would allow the tanks holding nuclear waste to be filled with concrete and left where they are.” I just discovered that it was exactly three years ago (give or take Mondays not being the same date from year to year) that I linked to another article about Hanford’s waste problem, which was before the relabelling as “not that bad really”
    • Mick Jagger went to a dive bar in Charlotte and literally everybody missed him - ”One of the world's most recognizable men walked into a beer joint and nobody recognized him. Here is how that happened, according to the people who were there and the owner who's mad that he wasn't.” Nice that he can get out for a drink without being hassled
    • Reverse-engineering an unusual IBM modem board from 1965 - ”The vintage IBM circuit board below has a large metal block on it that caught my attention, so I investigated it in detail. It turns out that the board is part of a modem, and the large metal box is a transformer. This blog post summarizes what I learned about this board, along with a bit of history on modems.” Another banging writeup from Ken Shirriff
    • Dasha Plesen: Portfolio - This artist, now working in Britain but having previously worked in biomedical research in Russia, photographs colourful mould: ”The artists’s practice is aimed at the studying the relationship between science, religion and art. Speaking about the trinity of these spheres, it is impossible not to notice how they complement each other, being a dominant set of modern problems. Living the experience of contrasts, the author considers such important aspects as, for example, religious practices in scientific discourse. The scientific research base of the artist includes many tools to investigate new phenomena, as well as already established paradigms. Through the form of total installation, the physics of objects and multiple symbolisms, the artist reveals to the viewer the alternative sides of the paradox.”


    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Originally posted by NickFitz View Post
    ‘Impossible’ Particle Discovery Adds Key Piece to the Strong Force Puzzle - ”The unexpected discovery of the double-charm tetraquark has given physicists a new tool with which to hone their understanding of the strongest of nature’s fundamental forces.” I'm beginning to wonder if these things exist first, or if the universe waits for the quantum physicists to think up something weird and then creates it when they start looking for it
    It would be good if doubly-charged scalars exist, because if they did and had a reasonable half-life they could be used to catalyze nuclear fusion!

    2021-09-28 Nuclear fusion catalyzed by doubly charged scalars: Implications for energy production

    A number of popular extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics predict the existence of doubly charged scalar particles X±±. Such particles may be long-lived or even stable. If exist, X could form atomic bound states with light nuclei and catalyze their fusion by essentially eliminating the Coulomb barrier between them. Such an X-catalyzed fusion (XCF) process does not require high temperatures or pressure and may have important applications for energy production. ..
    I imagine it would also be a doddle to dispose of nuclear waste with them, by transmuting radioactive elements into harmless ones (possibly via a rapid decay chain) or even useful or valuable ones!
    Work in the public sector? Read the IR35 FAQ here

    Comment


      #3
      Originally posted by NickFitz View Post
      I'm beginning to wonder if these things exist first, or if the universe waits for the quantum physicists to think up something weird and then creates it when they start looking for it
      It's yer Universal Morphic Resonance, innit.
      When the fun stops, STOP.

      Comment


        #4
        Oddly, the modulator circuit in that IBM thingie is very similar to an FM modulator used in a Philips N1500 VCR designed in about 1972, though using frequencies about 2000x greater.
        When the fun stops, STOP.

        Comment


          #5
          I'm from Charlotte and used to drink at a dive bar in the same neighbourhood as Mick's. It was really scary then, I hear it's very yuppy these days.

          Comment

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