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April 18 2012
The Laws of Physics, Officer, Outrank the Laws of California
I think this picture says it all, officer. Clear as day!
To all those police officers out there on traffic duty: Be real careful about ticketing physicists. You might be proven wrong in elaborate mathematical detail.
Dmitri Krioukov, a physicist at UC San Diego, was pulled over for running a stop sign. However, he had not in fact run it, and his sense of injustice was apparently so inflamed that he undertook a rigorous mathematical explanation of what had happened, eventually posting a paper on the ArXiv showing that the police officer had fallen prey to a perceptual illusion (although the paper was posted on April 1, if it’s a joke, Krioukov is sticking to his guns; he’s spoken to PhysicsCentral about the work). At the stop sign, he had seen Krioukov’s car, a Toyota Yaris, disappear on the far side of a station wagon in the lane closest to the officer and subsequently accelerate away, but he mistakenly concluded that Krioukov had not stopped during that moment, because—this is the clincher—he had been visually measuring not the linear but the angular speed of the car! To put it in Krioukov’s own words:
“Police officer O ...
September 09 2010
Science Sing-Alongs: Higg Boson vs Google Periodic Table
If the 2008 Large Hadron Collider rap didn’t appeal to your musical sensibilities, you might try two science songs now making the internets rounds.
The first isn’t really new at all: Joe Sabia has employed Google Instant for a pastiche based on Tom Lehrer’s 1959 Elements Song, which in turn parodied Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 Major General’s Song.
[via Boing Boing]
Returning to the Large Hadron Collider, CERN’s control center has hosted a sing-along. What’s especially enjoyable about this parody of Flanders and Swann’s The Hippopotamus Song are the physicists working in the background. See twelve second in–when one guy appears to do a face plant onto his desk.
[via The Inverse Square]
Not satisfied? Stay tuned for a hip-hop neuro-rap and Dr. Dre’s forthcoming space-themed album, called The Planets.
Related content:
Discoblog: I Swear: Subatomic Particles Are Singing to Me!
Discoblog: The Mother of all Rube Goldberg Machines!
Discoblog: The OK Go Video: Playing With the Speed of Time
Discoblog: Higgs Physicists’ Plan for Winning a Nobel Prize, Step 1: Stay Alive
June 10 2010
Hunting Sharks Are the Mathematicians of the Seas
Sure, when blood hits the water, sharks know exactly where to go. But how do they hunt for less-obvious meals? New research says they use math.
How exactly the sharks move seems to vary with how much food is around.
Imagine yourself in a Walgreens, picking up a few necessities on your way home from work. You might make short movements, darting between aisles, crossing and recrossing your path as you debate between generic and name-brand. Apparently, sharks do the same thing when they have a lot of food in one area. Scientists even suggest their pattern is Brownian, no more intelligent than the aimless sway of microscopic particles buffeted by water molecules.
But in the vast expanses of a Walmart on a Saturday afternoon, your hunt might look a little different. After picking up a few items in one section of the store, you make a long traverse to another section, rolling your blue cart ahead of you. In food-sparse environments, the researchers argue that sharks also seem to make these long journeys. Here, the sharks appear to use Lévy flight search patterns, long suspected by mathematicians as the most effective way to hunt, but never before successfully traced to an animal’s actual search patterns.
The research team, including David W. Sims of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, used radio tags to study the hunting patterns of fourteen species of open-ocean predatory fish, including sharks, tuna, billfish, and ocean sunfish.
Though other studies have been quick to call animals’ motions Lévy-like, such as an investigation of albatross travels in 1996, previous scientists didn’t have enough data to fit the motion with the mathematical pattern. Sims’ team gathered more than 12 million data points over 5,700 days. He told Science News that this research is “the strongest evidence yet that these Lévy patterns are exhibited by wild animals.”
Related content:
Discoblog: Sea Section: Shark Bites Shark & 4 Babies Pop Out
Discoblog: New Shark Has “Retractable Sex Appendage” on Its Forehead
80beats: Rare Discovery About Mysterious, Giant-Mouthed Shark: Where It Winters
80beats: Female Shark Gets Pregnant on Her Own, No Male Required
80beats: Ancient “Big Tooth” Shark Had the Mightiest Bite in History
Image: Wikimedia / Levy Flight / flickr / Jeff Kubina
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