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...