At Least it's not Rocket Science

Neutrinos are some of the more elusive subatomic particles. About a trillion neutrinos from the sun pass through your hand every second! It would take on the order of a light-year of lead shielding to stop a single neutrino!

Neutrons, on the other hand, are not slippery. They account for about half half of your mass, and the high-energy neutrons released by an atomic bomb don't pass through you. They bounce around inside you and do a lot of damage before they're eventually absorbed.

So long story short, I'd opt for the Neutrino Bomb proposed in 1961 by Ralph S. Cooper, a physicist at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, over the Neutron Bomb of the Cold War era. From Martin Gardner’s The New Ambidextrous Universe (Revised Edition) (W. H. Freeman and Company, 1990):

You may recall that in 1961 there was considerable talk of developing a “clean” neutron bomb that would have no heat or blast effects and would leave no radioactive fallout. Buildings would be left intact. The bomb, with a great burst of neutron radiation, would do no more than destroy all life within its range. In 1977 the possibility that the United States might make neutron bombs was revived, and the debate is still going on whether this would be a wise or a foolish thing to do. Cooper’s proposal was to make an even cleaner bomb that would produce a great burst of neutrino radiation. The penetrating power of neutrinos is so much greater than that of neutrons, Cooper pointed out, that they make the neutrons look like marshmallows. A neutrino bomb would, he said, be the “ultimate in clean, blastless, nuclear weapons.

Cooper’s spoof first appeared in the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory News, July 13, 1961, and was reprinted in Groff Conklin’s Great Science Fiction by Scientists (Collier Books, 1962). It is too good to pass by without giving a few more details. The bomb’s charge would consist of hydrogen, but hydrogen with its protons and electrons converted by an ingenious procedure into two new particles, the pseudo-proton and pseudo-electron. “The pseudo-electron would have no spin,” reported the New York Times, August 13, 1961, “and no strangeness (a property of elementary particles). It would be called a ‘fiction.’ The pseudo-proton would also have no spin but it would possess a strangeness of one. It would be called a ‘truth’ particle or “thruthiton,” truth being stranger than fiction. The two pseudo-particles would annihilate each other in a complicated interaction in which a new element, called truthitonium, would be formed. Each atom of truthitonium would decay radioactively into 2,000 neutrinos in a time that Dr. Cooper would call a ‘moment of truth.’”

“Once the neutrino bomb is detonated,” explained Cooper, “there is not one particle of truth left in it.” The detonation (caused by air rushing into the temporary vacuum produced by the disappearance of the hydrogen) would produce, said Cooper, “a loud bang, informing the victims in the target area that they have been had.”

(Or in… um… pirated link form… http://www.e-reading.by/djvureader.php/141468/241/Gardner_-_The_New_Ambidextrous_Universe.html )

October was kind of a lapse of a month. November too. Oh well. December is turning out to be a bit of a book-binge. I guess it evens out.

The Razor's Edge (Somerset Maugham) A Makes you want to do something drastic. Like go be a monk or just loaf or be Bill Murray or something.

Not Even Wrong (Peter Woit) A- Managed to follow the details reasonably well up until the point when it surpassed any knowledge I have of the subject. Liked it though. He's not afraid to describe the technical details as they are. I like that.

App: http://words-with-self.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ Github: https://github.com/rreusser/words-with-self

While making yet another attempt at getting through Gravity’s Rainbow, I found myself returning to the note on my iPhone with a list of about a hundred unfamiliar words I’d typed in just so I could use the iOS ‘define’ feature. It’s not bad, but it’s a little inconvenient. And I’ve had trouble with notes disappearing or not syncing between devices. So I tried copying the note into Evernote. Except the dictionary definition on my iPad ends up tiny and half-hidden behind the keyboard.

Long story short, I decided this was a nice and simple test case for these new front end tools like Parse.com, Foundation, and Yeoman. More of an exercise than a real attempt at making something useful, but I like the result.

You can test out the app at: http://words-with-self.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/

You can simply look up words, but it makes more sense if you sign up and maintain a list. I like the idea of adding categorizing and making it a tool for actually learning and finding the right words, but this is a start.

The only caveat to the ‘static site’ claim is that I had to add a proxy endpoint for the Merriam-Webster dictionary API since, as far as I understand, it’s not possible to work around the same-origin policy. I can imagine this sort of problem (as well as hiding API keys) becoming a bottleneck in the sort of situation that makes static pages the most useful, but on the plus side, this case just requires stupid-simple server-side API request (+ caching to reduce requests). The most difficult part of the whole thing: the XML responses from Merriam-Webster don’t actually reflect the hierarchical structure of the definitions. Roughly speaking, the xml format is like a nested list with all the closing tags removed. The XML parsing still needs cleanup. Ugh.

Progress on app: Satisfactory

Fluid simulation!

One of my first fluid simulations from long ago using the technique from the Visual Simulation of Smoke paper. This stuff was a big deal back then.

Barnes-Hut N-body Gravitational Simulation!

Digging up an old project! This is an n-body gravitational simulation using the Barnes Hut approximation. In short, \(n^2\) interactions between \(n\) particles is prohibitively expensive, but if you start lumping particles together into larger groups that attract a given particle, you can reduce the number of operations to \(O(n\\log(n))\). You have to go down the Fast Multiple road for it to approach 'correct', but at least it looks great!

Also interesting: setting up initial conditions that produce a stable galaxy is surprisingly difficult! You need lots of dark matter!

Here's a screenshot of the OpenGL interface with the octree nodes influencing a single particle superimposed:

A random tumble of heads and dangled limbs. In those soft warm faces was a quality of trust so absolute and pure that I did not want to think it might be misplaced. There must be something, somewhere, large and grand and redoubtable enough to justify this shining reliance and implicit belief. A feeling of desperate piety swept over me. It was cosmic in nature, full of yearnings and reachings. It spoke of vast distances, awesome but subtle forces. These sleeping children were like figures in an ad for the Rosicrucians, drawing a powerful beam of light from somewhere off the page. Steffie turned slightly, then uttered something in her sleep. It seemed important that I know what it was. In my current state, bearing the death impression of the Nyodene cloud, I was ready to search anywhere for signs and hints, intimations of odd comfort. I pulled my chair up closer. Her face in punchy sleep might have been a structure designed solely to protect the eyes, those great, large, and apprehensive things, prone to color phases and darting alertness, to a perception of distress in others. I sat there watching her. Moments later she spoke again. Distinct syllables this time, not some dreamy murmur—but a language not quite of this world. I struggled to understand. I was convinced she was saying something, fitting together units of stable meaning. I watched her face, waited. Ten minutes passed. She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant.

Toyota Celica.

No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (Mark Twain) B- Pretty disappointing. It works so, so much better as a medium-length story. That one remains one of my favorites. Unlike the long one.

Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks) B Kind of a compendium of random anecdotes. Interesting.

In Praise of Shadows (Jun'ichirō Tanizaki) B+ I definitely don't understand the traditional Japanese aesthetic. Joe and I had a good talk about this. Does the darkness of lacquerware really make soup a transcendent experience? The author says yes. I'd say no.

Population: The First Essay (Thomas Malthus) B Pretty much what you'd expect, really. Some entertaining parts. Some long-winded parts.

My first Feynman diagram! Actually excited! (And momentarily not even wondering why I’m doing this.)

I’m just gonna be honest. That was pretty freakin complicated. Turns out these things are just abstract pictorial representations of the terms you get when you approximate a big integral equation that tells how a wave equation will evolve. I suspect though that we’re headed in the direction of just taking the little arrows and calling them particles.

Solaris (Stanisław Lem) A+ Everything I hoped it would be.

The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx, Frederich Engels) A- HOW.

Introduction to Modern Climate Change (Andrew Dessler) B+ In which our collective lack of knowledge of middle school science is painfully exposed. Favorite rule of thumb: Anyone advocating legislation for improved efficiency standards or whatever else but not agreeing that the price of carbon needs to be established, either through carbon taxation or carbon credits or something equivalent, is interested only in political maneuvering and doesn’t take climate change seriously.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne) B+ There’s something enchanting about outdated sci-fi. ("OMG watch out it's a ball of ELECTRICITY!")

The Dwarf (Pär Lagerkvist) A This book makes me very uncomfortable. I think it’s supposed to make me very uncomfortable. It makes me very uncomfortable.