I had a nice/brief stay in Toronto last weekend at the Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference 2008. I was trying to kill 2 birds with 1 stone and catch Madlib DJing at wrongbar too, but he cancelled. However, it turned out for the best because I met many fellow nerds. I even unknowingly stumbled upon another physics blogger! Keep up the good work Jasper, consider yourself blogrolled.

I’m not 100% sure why I went to CUPC because I presented research I did at University of Notre Dame last summer in Computational Chemistry. But some good old fashioned American chemistry never hurt anyone.

Highlights of the weekend include my museum/pub crawl attempt with some Manitobian physics students. I tried to explain that Einstein‘s, despite the name, was a pretty weak bar but I feel like failed to impress them with my Toronto-skillz as I led them on a lackluster College St. journey. Where is your cheap drinks + live music when you need it?

The next day I presented my talk “The Counterintuitive Intermolecular Interactions of Hydroxyl Radical In Silico” which was probably a counterintuitive title since it had nothing to do with Silicon. Poster presentations were at the same time as my talk, so I tried to do a little PR and told as many people as I could when my talk would be, and how mind-blowing it would be. Where is your publicist when you need him?

I missed most of the events but had the pleasure of hearing how John Polanyi (pictured above courtesy of Alan Robinson) uses a web of deception to get funding for his fundamental science research (and he’s surely not the only one). Where is your funding when you need it?

I also managed to award “Best Sneakers at CUPC” to Evan Rand from University of Guelph who presented the poster “GEANT4 Simulations of the GRIFFIN Spectrometer“. He was wearing some nice brown AF1′s which I should have got a picture of.

The “Best Illustration” award went to Todd Sierens from University of Manitoba who presented “Electron Scattering: One-Loop Contributions to Parity Violation in QED“.  The picture on his poster was of a skiing Feynman Diagram in a santa hat.

Where is your camera when you need it!?

The Nobel prizes were awarded last week. I say prizes in reference to the ever-important Ig Nobel prizes in addition to the normal boring prizes. I say ever-important because the Ig Nobel prizes always have a direct impact on the common man! This year, the Ig Nobel for chemistry was awarded to a group of researchers for discovering that Coca-Cola could be an effective spermicide, where the vanilla Nobel was awarded for discovering some glowing jellyfish protein. Which research truly has more important to the common cola-guzzling man?

The Annals of Improbable Research are always a great source of laughs. Most of which are comedic in a sad way because somehow scientists are getting research grants for absurd things like pouring out caffienated beverages on stuff when you are a poor student surviving mostly on a diet of caffienated beverages.

However, there exists another rare specimen of comedy in scientific literature: unintentional innuendo. To appreciate this low-brow/high-brow LOL-mashup, it helps to fall into a sweet spot of ignorance wherein you don’t quite know the definition of a particular term in the given context, but you confide in the fact that the research is peer-reviewed so you know it can’t be as it sounds!

I’ve included a list of some of my favorites as an example, in a handy semi-correct citation format.

1. A N Oraevsky, Spontaneous emission in a cavity, PHYS-USP, 37 (4), 393-405 (1994)
2. D Kleppner, Uninhibited Spontaneous Emission, Phys. Rev. Lett. 47, 233 – 236 (1981)
3. D. Vlassopoulos, et al. From hairy balls to hairy rods : Using macromolecular chemistry to bridge the gap between polymers and colloids,  The Journal of Rheology (2000)
4. W. Simon, Nuts Have No Hair, Class. Quant. Grav. 12, L125-L130 (1995)
5. S. Tanveer, Surprises in Viscous Fingering, J. Fluid Mech. vol. 409, pp. 273–308 (2000)
6. C. Glocker, F. Pfeiffer, Multiple impacts with friction in rigid multibody systems, Nonlinear Dynamics, Vol. 7 Number 4, 471-497 (1995)
7. U. Andreaus, P. Casini. Friction oscillator excited by moving base and colliding with a rigid or deformable obstacle. Int. Journal of Non-Linear Mech. Vol. 37, Issue 1 117-133 (2002)
8. W. Likos, N. Lu. Automated Measurement of Total Suction Characteristics in High-Suction Range: Application to Assessment of Swelling Potential, Journal of the Transportation Research Board, Vol. 1755 119-128 (2001)
9. W. Zhong, M. Zhang, Jet penetration depth in a two-dimensional spout–fluid bed. Chemical Eng. Science. Volume 60, Issue 2, Pages 315-327 (2005)
10. X. He, M. Dembo, Numerical Simulation of Oil-Droplet Cleavage by Surfactant, J. Biomech. Eng., Volume 118,  Issue 2, 201 (1996)
11. R. Wozniak, M. Rout, J. Aitchison. Karyopherins and kissing cousins. Trends in Cell Biology, Vol. 8 Issue 5 184-188 (1998)

Are there any papers of this nature I am missing? Sometimes the titles of papers just aren’t as lude as I hope. I searched through TATA box papers for hours the other day…

I heard Sir Roger Penrose give a talk at the Perimeter Institute, Grand Opening 4 years ago. Finally, just last week, the esteemed Oxford physicist and I were re-united at last. Free tickets sold out almost instantly, but there’s no chance I could let such a celebrity parade across my front lawn without witnessing it first hand. Especially since it’s good blog material, and Jacks of Science is essentially the Perez Hilton of Science (slogan trademark pending).

Penrose spoke overtime on the nature of our universe before the Big Bang. I like to think of the lecture as an hour and a half of supplementary material to Leon Lederman’s 10 second hand-wavey answer to the very same question in Street Corner Science Part 1.

The National Post does a great job of treading past the physics into theological no-man’s land. Thankfully, to help clear up some of the physics details, I jotted down some key quotes from the lecture:

• “General Relativity makes light cones ‘Higgily-Piggily’
• “Unpleasant tiny black-hole explosions”
• “Rogue electrons, I hope they dissapear”
• “Universe loses track of time”

Yeah, the notes were pretty brief.. but the whole talk should be available online at some point. It was a great lecture. Penrose’s colorful overhead transparencies have already inspired some sort of grassroots movement among my classmates.

Personally, I found that I could appreciate a lot more of the mathematical details this time around. You see, I’ve learned a lot in the past 4 years. I am much wiser. This time around I didn’t forget to get an autograph!

If Penrose wins a Nobel Prize today, I’ll be rich!

I’m basically the worst science blogger! I went to a week of great lectures at the Science in the 21st Century conference last month and Jacks of Science has been in complete silence for weeks. How embarrassing!

Unfortunately, I had an unhealthy amount of class/general burdens of life during the week of the conference so I had to keep a low profile. I mostly just snuck around when people weren’t looking and ate unhealthy amounts of snacks/nanaimo bars in between the lectures.

However, just a few days ago, I was recently reminded of the rapidly approaching future of science when I read the syllabus of Quantum Theory (AM473) taught by Robin Blume-Kohout at U. Waterloo this semester. I’m not currently enrolled in it, but simply hearing about it from my classmates, I could tell it was dripping with the 21st century:

1. The course web-page makes use of Garrett Lisi’s LaTeX hacked TiddlyWiki (downloadable here). Lecture notes are included, so there is a whole lot of potential for adding depth to lectures.
2. The mark breakdown for the course includes 10% for participation, which specifically encourages wiki contributions! You can either add to the course wiki or submit improvements to the math and quantum physics articles on Wikipedia.
3. Class projects suggest critically analyizing open-access papers on arXiv and presenting them to the class.
4. Assignments must be submitted electronically and LaTex typeset assignments receive 10% extra credit. Environmentally friendly!

As an aside, I have heard that the workload of the class is far too heavy, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction. I have never heard of an undergraduate course which is so integrated with online resources. Even in Waterloo’s prestigeous Computer Science department…

Death to the “PDF repository” course webpage!