The Stars Fell on Abe and Frederick

The 1833 Leonids (Source: Wikipedia)

Word on the street is there's a meteor shower set for late Tuesday night, peaking at 2 am EST on January 4th [1].  The meteors in question are the Quadrantids, which often go unnoticed for two good reasons.  Reason the first:  apparently [2], they are usually pretty awful.  Unlike the "good" meteor showers, the Quadrantids are bright and pretty for only a few hours (instead of a few days). This means that a lot of the time, we just miss them.  Reason the second: they have a lame name [3]. But this year, they should be pretty good if the weather is right.

Now, there's lots of neat physics to talk about with meteors, but that's not why I bring it up. This has all just been flimsy pretext so I could share a historical anecdote about a meteor shower. Trickery, indeed.  Those who feel cheated are free to leave now with heads held high.

Those still around (Hi, Mom!) will hear about the night in 1833 when the stars fell on Alabama (and the rest of the country, too).

How Long Will a Bootprint Last on the Moon?

Buzz Aldrin's bootprint (source: Wikipedia)

A couple of months ago, I stumbled across a bunch of pictures of Apollo landing sites taken by one of the cameras onboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The images have a resolution high enough that you can resolve features on the surface down to about a meter. Looking at the Apollo 17 landing site, you can see the trails of both astronauts and a moon buggy. It's pretty cool.

It also got me thinking about how long the landing sites would be preserved. More specifically, I want to know how long Buzz Aldrin's right bootprint (shown, incidentally, to the left) will last on the Moon.  Since the Moon has no atmosphere, the wind and rain that would weather away a similar bootprint here on Earth are not present and it seems as though the print would last a really long time. But how long? Let's try to quantify it [1].

Report from the Trenches: A CMS Grad Student's Take on the Higgs

Hi folks. It's been an embarrassingly long time since I last posted, but today's news on the Higgs boson has brought me out of hiding. I want to share my thoughts on today's announcement from the CMS and ATLAS collaborations on their searches for the Higgs boson. I'm a member of the CMS collaboration, but these are my views and don't represent those of the collaboration.

Physics Challenge Award Show II

Not a DeLorean.  You're doing it wrong.

[Update:  Prize Update / Added link to full solutions]

Welcome to the second Physics Challenge Award show!

[APPLAUSE]

Our judges have deliberated for several units of time and I now have in my hands the envelope holding our list of winners.  I could easily just tell you who won right now and save everyone some time, but award shows need some suspense to work effectively, so let's first give some tedious background information!

[APPLAUSE]

Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse!

A very cold person points out Betelgeuse

Betelgeuse is a massive star at the very end of its life and could explode any second now!  Every time I hear that I get really really excited.  Like a kid in a candy store that's about to see a star blow up like nobody's business.  This giddiness will last for a solid minute before I realize that "any second now" is taken on astronomical timescales and roughly translates to "sometime in the next million years maybe possibly."  Then I feel sad.

But you know what always cheers me up?  Calculating things!  Hooray!  So let's take a look at the ways Betelgeuse could end its life (even if it's not going to happen tomorrow) and how these would affect Earth.

Physics Challenge Update

Marty McFly realizes he is running out
of time to submit his solution

Did you know that our Physics Challenge problem contest thingy is still up and going?  It is!  The contest will be open until the end of the day this Friday, November 4th.  And, unlike last time, the winning solution will be chosen and posted by the end of the weekend.  So even if you don't submit your own solution (though you totally should), check back here Monday morning for the winning entry.

Why should you submit a solution to our problem?  Lots of reasons!  The top ten reasons as decided by a random sample of me are given below the break.

The Linear Theory of Battleship

Recently I set out to hold a Battleship programming tournament here among some of the undergraduates. Naturally, I myself wanted to win. So, I got to thinking about the game, and developed what I like to call "the linear theory of battleship".

A demonstration of the fruits of my efforts can be found here. Below, my aim is to guide you through how I developed this theory, as an exercise in using physics to solve an interesting unknown problem.

Physics Challenge II: Marty McPhysics

Doc Brown didn't have a time-travel backup plan.

In light of the incredible success of our last Physics Challenge Problem (we received several responses), we here at the Virtuosi have decided to reinstate what was nominally a "monthly" contest. In addition to a brand-spankin'-new problem (with "prizes", see [1]), we have also tried to make a nice collaborative environment for discussing interesting physics problems and posting your own solutions. So I will discuss our new problem and then I'll throw it over to Alemi to discuss the goal of our new Physics Challenge webpage.

A Tweet is Worth (at least) 140 Words

So, I recently read An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise.

It is a very nice popular introduction to Information Theory, a modern scientific pursuit to quantify information started by Claude Shannon in 1948.

This got me thinking. Increasingly, people try to hold conversations on Twitter, where posts are limited to 140 characters. Just how much information could you convey in 140 characters?

After some coding and investigation, I created this, an experimental twitter English compression algorithm capable of compressing around 140 words into 140 characters.

So, what's the story? Warning: It's a bit of a story, the juicy bits are at the end.

UPDATE: Tomo in the comments below made a chrome extension for the algorithm

Futurama Physics

The rotting corpses of sunbeams cause global warming.

Good news, everyone!  While rummaging through all my old stuff at home, I found my long-lost copy of Toto IV.  Huzzah for me!  This is entirely unrelated to what I wanted to talk about, but I have it on good authority that Toto's Africa syncs up really well with this post [1].  I'll tell you when to press play.

Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about was a fairly well-posed problem in Futurama.  In the episode "Crimes of the Hot," all of the Earth's robots vent their various "exhausts" into the sky at the same time, using the thrust to push the Earth into an orbit slightly further away from the sun.  As a result of this new orbit, the year is made longer by "exactly one week."  Anything that quantitative is pretty much asking to be analyzed.  Let's explore this problem a bit more then, why not?