Two things eating my mind at the moment:

1. Graham’s number - Author David Wells wrote “”If all the material in the universe was turned into pen and ink it would not be enough to write the number down.” So, yeah, using some unconventional notation, Graham’s number can be written, but in anything approximating normal notation: there are not enough atoms in the universe to denote it.
2. Fifth and sixth derivatives - The first and second derivatives (velocity and acceleration, respectively) are easy enough to grasp, but the third and fourth take a bit more thought. Change in position through time? Velocity. Change in velocity through time? Acceleration. Change in acceleration through time? Jerk. But, uh, the fifth and sixth derivatives? Crackle and pop, respectively.

That is all. I am going to see about having my mind vomited back up.

Molecule of the Day presents: L-Methamphetamine.

L-methamphetamine…is found in Vicks Vapor Inhalers. … This is the mirror image of D-methamphetamine - the street drug.

The thing is, L-methamphetamine isn’t really anything like the D-methamphetamine isomer that is found in street drugs. D-methamphetamine is psychoactive, while L-methamphetamine isn’t very psychoactive at all. In certain receptor and enzyme pockets where D-methamphetamine fits, L-methamphetamine fits like a left foot in a right shoe.

This is a post from 2006! That is to say: fromthearchives. Get used to it, the internet is being boring.

DC Comics released Final Crisis #1 last week, its latest continuation of the past year’s bid to completely ruin the franchise by chronicling the “epic” threat to the Multiverse, boring story after boring story. In Final Crisis, writer Grant Morrison has a throwaway line I was willing to ignore at the time (read: skipped reading it because of its absurdity), until Lev Grossman geeked out over it.

The setup is that a couple of Green Lanterns get summoned to a crime scene, some superbeing’s corpse that turned up in a dumpster. Morrison plays it noir — the Lanterns jaw at each other like beat cops. The crime is a 1011: deicide. The victim: Orion, the soldier god of New Genesis. “A-number one, cosmic hard-ass.”

The guy from the head office back on Oa weighs in: “Seal the crime scene out to the planet’s Lagrange point. No one must enter or leave the gravity well.”

Sure, I’ll keep reading that.

Lagrange point??? Gravity well? What are these awesome bits of astrophysics jargon? I bet the Lanterns have to seal off, like, a basjisoegjillion miles of space, from here to the next frikkin galaxy.

Oh, wait, the jargon is useless? Yeahbuhwhat?

The Lagrangian point(s) “are the five positions in an orbital configuration where a small object affected only by gravity can theoretically be stationary relative to two larger objects.” So what’s that mean for Final Crisis? Short story: absolutely nothing. Without saying what the two larger objects are, Morrison is just spewing bullshit.

And Earth’s gravity well? That is more-or-less the gravity field around Earth, which is not very big. The corps is effectively sealing off Earth and a little bit of empty space around it.

Astounding!

On May 25, 2008, the Phoenix Mars Lander will attempt its 7-minute descent onto the North Pole of Mars. Launched in August, the eight month trip thus far will look like a breeze compared to the tricky maneuvering necessary to land on another planet.

Phoenix will enter the top of the Martian atmosphere at almost 21,000 kilometers per hour (almost 13,000 mph). In seven minutes, the spacecraft must complete a challenging sequence of events to slow to about 8 kilometers per hour (5 mph) before its three legs reach the ground.

And this all must be done entirely autonomously. While the descent itself takes seven minutes, any information traveling to or from Mars will take ten minutes. So by the time NASA hears about the descent beginning, it will already be over.

Cynics may scoff at the difficulty, noting it’s been done, but you should also note that only half of international attempts to land on Mars have been successful. Here’s hoping this $325 million mission is in the “success” half.

The Phoenix website has an completely over-the-top video of the EDL (entry, descent, landing) process. Visit http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix for more information, including when and how to watch live coverage of the descent.

UPDATE: Catch up-to-the-minute updates on the MarsPhoenix Twitter page.

The WorldWide Telescope has been released.

First mentioned on TEDBlog, the WorldWide Telescope builds a “seamless” view of the universe with images taken from telescopes and satellites all over the world and sky. The software is pretty amazing, but the WWT website is unfortunately a cesspool of terrible promotional videos, so I recommend just heading over to the download page.

In many ways, the WWT is simply a desktop version of Google Sky. It’s just…a lot more robust, detailed, and inspiring to behold.

googleDrive - Drive around Google Maps!

About 13.7 billion years ago, our universe was born, and like some acne-ridden teenager going through puberty, it quickly expanded in size. Within hardly any time at all, the universe had gone from a little speck of nothingness to a vast wasteland of galaxies and Scientologists not much smaller than the universe today. (See Big Bang and cosmic inflation, respectively.)

Once we figured out the beginning, it wasn’t hard to guess the end. Inflation was done with, so it was all up to gravity. Basically, if the universe is dense enough (a lot of stuff in not too much space), then it should eventually collapse in a reversal of the Big Bang. Otherwise, space would continue expanding slowly into infinity and beyond. Or, if you’re an obsessive Albert Einstein, magical new quantities pop into existence and the universe, in turn, neither expands nor collapses.

(Un)fortunately(?), reality seems to be a little different. Instead of business as usual, or the universe heading toward the Big Crunch, expansion is accelerating. And eventually far-enough objects will be moving away from us faster than the speed of light. Ultimately, stars and galaxies will be moving away from us so quickly that light from them will never reach our eyes, as if they were never there to begin with.

Sad.

This places current scientists in a very interesting position:

Scientists in the far future, on some other planet without the benefit of our current knowledge, will see no evidence from their observations that the universe is expanding. After all, the only way that we know about it is by looking out at distant galaxies and tracing their motion. If they are out of sight, there will be no such tracers.

In other words, right now is the only time when both the expansion of the universe and its cause (dark energy) can be inferred. As the New Scientist article states, dark energy could not have been measured in the past, and the expansion will not be measurable in the future. And if we can predict that the sky will be a lot less informative for future scientists, what about today’s cosmologists?

We may never know if other fascinating and important aspects of our universe are hidden from us today, yet would have been visible had we been smart enough to evolve 5 billion years earlier.

Time travel never seemed more urgent.

There is little I enjoy more than good science writing. And as with nonfiction writing in general, I will easily expand “good” to include not just good writing, but any writing that succeeds in conveying the author’s genuine enthusiasm for the topic. The elegantly titled symmetry: dimensions of particle physics has its share of the former, but is filled to the brim with the latter.

Published 10 times per year by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, symmetry is, as professed in the magazine’s first letter from the editor states, “a magazine about particle physics and its connections to other aspects of life and science, from interdisciplinary collaborations to policy to culture.” Science has rapidly evolved into a profoundly robust and complex model of ourselves and the universe, and symmetry’s aim is to cover the role of particle physics in that evolution.

More central to my love for the magazine, though, is something touched upon in the latest issue’s editorial:

This issue of symmetry is dedicated to the imminent switch-on of the Large Hadron Collider. It can only skim the surface but presents views of the science, technology, international collaboration, and humanity of the LHC.

More than anything, symmetry manages to pull back the boring, stale, stereotypical image of science to present its warm, entertaining, and deeply rewarding reality. Shown is not, to be honest, “interdisciplinary collaboration”, but “international collaboration”; globetrotting theorists, country-spanning particle accelerators, frisbee-playing post-docs.

And did I mention subscriptions are free?

All in all, the articles may amount to little more than dressed-up press releases, but that just means the writing is clear and poppy. The level of physics, and enthusiasm, makes symmetry a perfect fit for a high school physics classroom (at only a few dozen pages, the magazine “can only skim the surface” as it tries to be somewhat extensive). I don’t know if every field has a magazine like this out there, but they should if they do not. We need to get rid of the stuffy lab rat stereotype, and focus on portraying and defending the humanity of science.

Every now and I come across something especially cool (read: nerdy) on the internet. Not necessarily something major, influential, or newsworthy, but cool nonetheless. For these precious moments of geekdom, I give you nerd alert!

I begin with this nerd alert’s namesake: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The SEP is a free, online collection of peer reviewed articles on philosophy. Their publishing model is as stringent as any encyclopedia’s or journal’s (plus it’s Stanford), so there’s no question of quality. This is all well and good, but it’s not what I’m geeking out over. I have known about the SEP for awhile, but just noticed that they have static, quarterly archives so you can cite an article without worrying about it changing. How cool is that!

Of course, the idea of an open online repository of philosophy is pretty cool on its own. Wikipedia is certainly more extensive, but the SEP (and the more comprehensive Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) is absolutely more informative and scholarly. Plus, the information from the SEP is a lot more trustworthy (for those looking to be certain of their sources).

Other similar collections exist for other topics (Internet Medieval Handbook anyone?), but how many? Someone needs to find them all and create a huge, searchable directory. Hmm….

A 16-year-old boy being sued by five record companies accusing him of online music piracy accused the recording industry on Tuesday of violating antitrust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats. This kid RAWKS.

Outrage of Texas college Martin Luther King, Jr. party. Event featured Aunt Jemima, gang apparel, fried chicken, malt liquor. [Tarleston student Jeremy Pelz] noted that the party was started a few years earlier “because one of my best friends is black or African American, whichever you deem politically correct, to be his day not to dishonor him.”

Nerd Alert! Tupper’s Self-Referential Formula, a formula which graphs itself within the correct constraints. When graphed, a black pixel is plotted at every point where the inequality is true. Sigh, I love math.

In a very special edition of Undressing the Internet, age old questions are finally answered. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Is global warming a serious matter? Can anything be geekier than using a MacBook Pro as a lightsaber?

This just in, the egg came before the chicken! In a debate put together by Disney (to promote the release of Chicken Little on DVD), experts decided that it is indeed the egg which came first. Now we can finally lay that conundrum to rest, thanks Disney.

Coney Island (see: Requiem for a Dream) has long been a not-so-nice place in New York. I’ve grown to love it, if only because it is the host of Village Voice’s Siren Music Festival. Still, love or not, its economic decline is true enough. Luckily, city officials and builders are hoping to revive the once vital area. A $1 billion amusement park renovation is planned, as well as other fixes. Hooray!

In light of recent scientific agreeance (and perhaps Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth), New York Times columnist Gregg Easterbrook finally sees the light about global warming. If you’re not as convinced as he is, Newsvine has a thread about why no one takes global warming seriously.

In lighter news, a fun article from BBC News about a nude sunbather. Nothing beats the line, “She walked back and fore completely naked - I went to get my video camera to record the incident.”

Anyone interested in skulking around at night (or day) in full invisibility will their wishes granted in no time at all. MSNBC reports on new material that will render objects completely invisible, currently in development. For the near future, invisibility will be confined to the spectrum of light used for radar. Optical invisibility, on the other hand, should be ready sometime within the millenium.

Also on the science front, Duke University Medical Center researchers have found that “people may permanently store memories in their brains, even if they cannot consciously recall them”.

And if all that wasn’t nerdy enough for you, Metamath Music Page! The sound of mathematical proofs. Lovely.

From nerd to geek: Two interesting applications were released for the new MacBook line of laptops. The first, a program which lets you turn your MacBook into a lightsaber. The second, the aptly named SmackBook Pro, which lets you change desktops by hitting your MacBook.

If you’re in the market for a new SUV, and live in California or Florida, check out the new offer by GM. Buy your SUV before July 5 (with OnStar), and you’ll never pay more than $1.99/gallon for gas.

A perfect end to a perfectly nerdy Undressing the Internet: Cracking WEP and WPA Wireless Networks. If you live in a sufficiently dense area, consider that a How-To on getting free internet access.

Later!

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