For some people clothing is just a formality (where's all the nudist laboratories at?). For others people clothing is an expression of ones individuality. For me it's just a clever way to draw attention away from my hideous face.

Goblin face or not, even I acknowledge that some garments are just off limits. For example, I can understand how designer sunglasses and a purple fur scarf aren't acceptable in the lab because it literally becomes a safety issue when you are that hot. Thankfully, I've prepared a list below of stylish clothing alternatives with much more nerd credibility.

We just have to accept the fact that not all of us can dress like Nobel prize winners.
 

If you play any video games from racing to first person shooters to plain old pinball, you'll appreciate realistic physics simulation. "Serious business" gamers often fork out wads of cash for top of the line video cards for their PCs, but would it be worth it to fork out a few more Benjamin's for improved game physics? Graphics card developers aren't afraid to take the chance that people will...

Last year, Intel decided to acquire Havok, the developer of a toolkit called Havok FX which designed to make special use of ATI and NVDIA graphics processing units for optimizing physics. Not to mention, Intel is rumored to be moving into the graphics card business in 2008.

Last February, NVIDA decided to acquire Ageia Technologies, the developer of PhysX physics acceleration cards, to incorporate their technology with GeForce graphics cards. Simply put, the standalone PhysX cards act as a dedicated physics processor for computer games which are intensive on all the things we love about games, like realistic explosions, pretty looking water, and precise car crumpling as you collide at 160 into a road divider. To add to the excitement, NVIDIA recently opened its PhysX platform to all graphics card developers! Sweet, sweet physics for all.

As processing power increases, it makes sense that as games develop richer lighting and textures that the physics should also have improved realism. I believe that it's only a matter of time until similar attention will be given to calculations for simulating complex chemical and biological systems.

It is bound to happen with games like Spore on the cusp of release, which incorporates at least some form of evolution from multicellular organism to land creature. The educational merit of such games has been noticed by NASA who is exploring the possibility of a massively multiplayer online game where:

Virtual worlds with scientifically accurate simulations could permit learners to tinker with chemical reactions in living cells, practice operating and repairing expensive equipment, and experience microgravity.

I can't wait for some sweet science games to play, because Peggle is only fun for so long...

Photoshop CS3 Extended is a powerhouse. Beside the usual support for making fake celebrity nudes and airbrushing out your blemishes for Facebook profile pictures, did you know it has support for a wide selection of image measurements?

Simple image processing can be fun and easy with Photoshop. Various books have even been published on the use of Photoshop in forensic science!

I recently watched a Lynda.com tutorial on using Photoshop for Biomedical research and Photoshop for Research Methods and Workflows. The latter included a step-by-step guide for image processing techniques from analyzing protein expression in microarrays to obtaining penetration data in tissue sample. But I think it's safe to assume that most reader's aren't concerned with biomedical research, so I decided to take the measurement idea and run with it.

In this post I'll outline some applications of Photoshop's measurement tools which should not be missed! Note that this tutorial assumes you already have basic knowledge of opening images, working with layers, and making selections.

Read the rest of this entry »

We've all experienced those slow motion moments. Shooting for the winning basket at the buzzer, the loss of steering control on black ice, the taste of Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie, et cetera. All three of which are all amazing experiences to be felt at some point in life, yet film directors go ahead and cheapen these glorious moments by recording (or post-processing) them in slow motion. It's kinda too bad!

It wasn't always like that:

Did you know (I didn't until very recently) that slow motion was an invention—patented, in fact? Who knew time could be patented? Back in 1904, an Austrian priest-turned-physicist named August Musger obtained a patent for a process by which he modified film projectors to produce slo-mo on screen. The irony was that August Musger (named after the slowest month?) was slo-pay, too. He lost his patent in 1914 because he failed to pay the fees for its renewal on time.

-Errol Morris and the Strange Power of Slo-mo, Ron Rosenbaum

At least we can be thankful that not everything is filmed in slow motion. Normal movies are filmed at 30 frames per second and that's about my brains limit for number of frames of Tom Cruise's face I can process and forget every second. But be careful! Dangerous new thousand/million fps high-speed cameras exist that use wild rotating prisms instead of shutters to capture frightening detail in even most tolerable celebrities.

Although, these "super slow motion" cameras are not always used for evil. If anything, they can help us appreciate the beauty of physics in every day life. For example, observe these youtube compilations from the latest season of Brainiac:

Weren't those cool? To help clear up my position on speeds of motion I've summarized my feelings in this graph: 

At the graph's y-intercept, we observe the finite value of coolness that represents the regular speed of life. When one records life at 30 fps it just seems less cool, even though its meant to be at the same speed. Coolness decreases linearly as as you continue into slow motion-ness. But here is where the graph gets interesting. From this point, as frames per second increase (speed of video decreases), coolness approaches infinity, a value infinitely cooler than the speed of normal life. Moving past this discontinuity, boringness surpasses coolness and we observe exponential decay as speed of time approaches a state of Walt Disney.

This singularity of coolness occurs at a very precise frame per second which may never be measured experimentally. Although, under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, this state my be experienced cognitively, possibly by making a free-throw at the NCAA finals before the buzzer from a car skidding out of control while consuming Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream.

In closing, if Einstein's relativity teaches us anything, it's that we're always cool relative to someone else. Thank you.

I don't know about you, but I always start my day off with a bowl of knowledge from the Journal of Cereal Science with a healthy splash from the International Dairy Journal. But damn, it's hard to keep up with advances in breakfast science, I mean DIAMOND SHREDDIES!?

That being said, I rarely have time to sift through journal RSS feeds and papers I can't understand to actually find the gems. Wouldn't it be great if you could get a computer algorithm to recommend you scientific literature tailored to your interests and skill level? What if you took it one step further, wouldn't it be nice if you could get a computer to recommend you an interesting paper to write?

If you've ever been to Amazon, you'd know that algorithms are always at work tracking your incriminating purchases. This is pretty easy for Amazon, especially when you have keyworded items to purchase and review which are all on one site. Online scientific literature should be no exception. When you download a paper, or comment on it, blog about it, or cite/bookmark it, you should be building a unique profile.

But the current model of scientific publishing is closed-access, people are having a hard time. While it's easy to index papers based on name, authors, and abstract, building a significant body of published literature is basically impossible. Although, research is being done.

Personally, I can't wait until the subscription-based model of scientific publishing is finally abolished. Then scientists, journalists, policy-makers, and laymen of all nations could join hands and finally get down to business.

But finding cool papers is just the tip of the iceberg. With an open access model we'll also be able to use algorithms to extract new and exciting conclusions from pools of existing data, find emerging fields of research, and publish fuzzy journals based on clustering algorithms (PDF) of relevant research.

It's not out of our reach either, we have the technology! This post was inspired by a paper, published almost 20 years ago, Medical literature as a potential source of new knowledge, which was recently posted on Michael Nielsen's blog.

The long and short of it: science, I'm talking to you, get up to speed, because it's the 21st century!

My bro Kevin hollered this track at me a little while ago and I just recently re-discovered it on the 'tube. I'll admit, I'm a little disappointed that no one is paying attention to the physics prof and that the song implies that he's so boring you need to drink cappuccino to stay awake. But I see where the prof went wrong... when they dropped the beat he should have gone Michelle Pfeiffer-style on them and started rapping about the big bang. Hmm, that gives me an idea...

As my 3rd year curtains draw to a close, I thought it would be a fine time to reflect on some of the most interesting theorems derivations examples doodles of the term. Even in my mathiest courses I find it irresistible to doodle in the margins of my notes. I like to think of it as balancing the left and right sides of my brain but that's just sugar coating my short attention span.

So, check out my Flickr gallery of this terms highlights. I may even scan my previous years of doodles so you can see how much I've improved as an artist by studying Physics!

My torpid blogmate Kieran and I often partake in the act of blowing our feeble minds with science. You too can share in this simple pleasure as I touch on one of life's under appreciated wonders: the reflection of light.

Here's la grande illusion: light doesn't actually "bounce" off mirrors like a ball bounces off a wall. The incident light that hits the mirror is actually completely different than the reflected light that you see!

People gaze upon their mirrored visage at least once a day but are too self-centered to notice anything but themselves. The mirror is a glorious example of photon and electron interaction but everyone seems to be concerned with trivial matters such as make-up, pimples and facial hair.

Thanks to advances in internet technology we now know how mirrors are created. (Pro tip: It's just a sheet of aluminum/silver with glass in front).

To effectively blow your mind, you need to know the following:

• light is made of photons
• photons vibrate at different frequencies
• stuff, such as sheets of aluminum, are made of atoms
• atoms have electrons
• electrons absorb or emit photons

You can sort of guess where I'm going with this. Glazing over some quantum-level details, here's a finer description of what's going on while you're busy poppin' zits in the mirror.

You start out by flipping on the bathroom light. Photons leave the bulb and hit your face. Your skin cells, which are made of various organic compounds, which have electrons, absorb most of the light and your face heats up slightly. The portion of the light not absorbed causes the electrons to move to an excited state. The excited state causes the electron to eventually "get tired" and fall back to normal energy state but in the process it releases a brand new photon of the skin-tone variety.

The photon flies out of your face at 300 000 km/sec at the aluminum in your mirror. Aluminum was a good choice because, as most metals, it doesn't absorb very many of the frequencies of light we care about, like skin-tone photons. In a process exactly like I described in your face, the electrons in the aluminum get excited and vibrate. Who wouldn't be excited after meeting a photon that got to touch your beautiful face? They eventually drop back to normal energy levels and emit a new photon based on the vibration caused by the skin-tone photon.

Thus, the brand new photon created by the electrons in the aluminum leaves the mirror at an angle equal to the angle of incidence. The photon flies through the air avoiding dangerous dust particles and gets absorbed by photo receptors in the back of your eye which register as an image in your brain. Now repeat this process for as long as necessary, for every single photon in your field of view, and congratulate yourself on successfully popping your zit.

Tell me your mind isn't blown!

Of course, there are many unanswered questions. Like, where did the photon actually come from? If it's a brand new photon then why does it have to come out exactly at the angle it came in as? Why is it that some photons can pass through glass and some can't? What about those pretty multicolored reflections I get off the pools of gasoline on my driveway?

There could be serious zombie consequences if I attempted to answer any of the questions posed above. If you're at all interested, I highly recommend you go directly to the source and read Feynman's QED which was written for the general audience!

Also, most of what I said above is outlined in greater detail here.

Oh wow, does it ever take those LHC scientists a long time to get their particle collider up and running. Even after months of data crunching on my part, last April 1st I heard that the project was going to be delayed for 3 years! What can one do?

Well, it's easy to see how logic and reason have their place in massive engineering feats like the LHC, but sometimes all a scientist needs is a bit of luck. Help the LHC scientists get a healthy serving of lucky charms by finding 11 rowdy leprechauns causing a ruckus in the ATLAS detector! 

(Click to enlarge) 

The first to find them all wins a shiny new god particle.