Archive for the ‘Physics’ Category

The Nerdiest Marriage Proposal. Ever.

Saturday, July 16th, 2011

Yesterday, months of planning culminated into the world’s nerdiest marriage proposal.

I asked Kendra Snyder to marry me in the opened-up guts of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. (Where Kendra works as a science writer/communicator/public information officer-type.)

More specifically, I asked her on scaffolding below the center of RHIC’s 1,200-ton STAR detector. This house-sized machine examines the hot soup of energy present just moments after the Big Bang, which physicists recreate by colliding gold ions near the speed of light.

Make as many symbolic interpretations as you’d like — I chose the location for a lot of reasons! — but the truth is I wanted us to have a great story to tell. A ridiculously nerdy, epic and smile-prompting story.

So how did things go down? Here’s the skinny from each of our perspectives.

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Not by a Longshot?

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Longshot magazine (formerly 48 HR magazine*) screamed onto the internet/magazine/media experimentation scene in May, and went for round two this past weekend. Never heard of it? The magazine’s maxim is as follows: Produce a full, glossy and finished issue in 48 hours or less(!).

The editors pull it off by decreeing a theme, then granting hopeful contributors 24 hours** to submit their text, photos, illustrations and other content. In the following 24 hours, the mag’s staff selects, arranges, generates art, edits, fact-checks, copyedits, designs and posts a final product to an on-demand magazine publisher called MagCloud.

I didn’t make the cut in issue “zero” (as I lament in another post), themed hustle, nor did I make it this time around in issue one, themed comeback.

But I’m not too bummed about it, seeing as there were hundreds of submissions, many by writers I hold immense respect for. I can also see many reasons why my submission wasn’t published — in a way, I’m glad. To name a couple shortcomings, the piece had at least one three errors (fixed in this version), weird structure (not fixed) and lacked enough context/explanation (not fixed).

In my defense, I hope Longshot manages to launch an issue when I:

a) am not moving at a high rate of speed

b) have a reliable (or any) internet connection

and

c) can commit my full, undivided attention for more than a few minutes at a time

Even if that day never arrives, I’ll still crank out content for them in a frenzied, disorderly way. In the meantime, constructive criticism is welcome:

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F***ing magnets, how do they work?

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

One curse of having a brain comprised of 20ish billion neurons (and 7,000 times as many synaptic connections*) is that music can get seriously stuck in it.

Awful, terrible, mind-numbingly stupid music.

Case in point, the Insane Clown Posse’s tune “Miracles”:

If you haven’t listened to this addictive form of brain corrosion closely, here’s a sample of the lyrics:

The sun and the moon, and even Mars
The Milky Way and fucking shooting stars
UFOs, a river flows
Plant a little seed and nature grows
Niagara falls and the pyramids
Everything you believed in as kids
Fucking rainbows after it rains
There’s enough miracles here to blow your brains

It gets better. Better being worse, of course.

About halfway through, ICP tells its juggalo followers that magnets are magical and all scientists are liars: (more…)

What does it look like inside of a black hole?

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

According to Andrew Hamilton, an astrophysicist who presented at the World Science Festival’s (WSF) “Black Holes and Holographic Worlds” event, it looks a bit like this:

inside of a black hole at the World Science Festival

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Honoring Stephen Hawking at the World Science Festival

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

I feel like the luckiest nerd boy in the world.

Wednesday night Kendra and I got to see Stephen Hawking — theoretical physicist extraordinaire — be honored at the World Science Festival* by a star-studded (hyuck hyuck) ensemble at Lincoln Center.

I’ll try to make this quick, because I need to blog about some black holes and holographic worlds, but the amazing performances/acts/etc. we saw included: (more…)

The most amazing thing about the universe

Monday, April 12th, 2010

Kepler's supernova remnantLast weekend, Kendra and I had dinner and drinks with some friends. Put two nerds together, and we eventually get to talking about science…

One of my particular guilty pleasures is waxing poetic about our astoundingly meager place in the universe. It reliably makes my skin crawl. (Think that’s weird? Please subtract some points from your nerd score.)

So we somehow managed to corner our helpless guests with tall tales about what is known about space. Where spacecraft have visited and what they’ve observed; if we think life is out there, and where; when we’ll get to Mars, if ever; if any habitable planets are nearby; how large the universe is thought to be; where does matter come from; and so on.

As we threw back our beers at the local pub, one friend dropped the question any science enthusiast salivates over:

“What do you think is the most amazing thing about the universe?” (more…)