Microscope

Thanks to my friend Linda Vu's recommendation, I recently bought a pocket microscope from the Exploratorium's store. It was not very expensive, and it actually is a lot of fun to use. There is something very satisfying about actually seeing the warp and woof of the thread in your shirt, or the individual grains of dirt and rock in a clump of soil. Maybe I will change my vice from Facebook to simply looking at things closely.

Timex Ironman

Another good aspect of training for a 5K run is that I get to buy a watch! I just bought a Timex Ironman 10-Lap, and am excited.

Rods and Mods

The Exploratorium is hosting an event in February of 2010 that will showcase hot-rodded computers and modified computers cases. It should be a fantastic event: I am especially hoping to see a steampunk computer in the mix.

http://press.exploratorium.edu/rods-and-mods-february-2010/

(The image to the left shows a computer created by Jake Von Slatt. Wow.)

GRE is Done!

I took the GRE on Monday, so it is done! To celebrate, I had bacon waffles at It's Tops, a diner in San Francisco. So good...

After the GRE...

I may have to celebrate by getting a new fountain pen. Lamy Studio, here I come!

Refracted Light

The Exploratorium has mounted large prism filters over some of its skylights, and, late in the day, sun shining through those filters creates very large rainbows on the Exploratorium walls. There is something very satisfying about seeing a spectrum four feet wide and one foot tall splashed on a wall. It's nothing like the pipsqueak spectra that anyone can produce using the standard prism sold in most museums stores. When looking at a very large spectrum, one can clearly see all of the colors, and how they fade into each other. Sometimes, scaling something up can have a huge difference.

Time Travel and Sabotage

Recently, I have been hearing about a curious physics paper written about the new Large Hadron Collider, a massive particle accelerator located in Switzerland. The authors -- Holger Bech Nielsen, from the Niels Bohr Institute, and Masao Ninomiya, from Japan's Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics -- argue that, as the New York Times' Dennis Overbye puts it, "the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."

Overbye then writes two of the most astonishing paragraphs I have ever read:

" 'It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,' Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, 'Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.' It is their guess, he went on, 'that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.'

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an 'anti-miracle.' "

When I read those paragraphs, I had to pick my jaw off the floor.