Ace of Clubs: The Bravest
Posted by Angela Brett in Kennedy Space Center, The Best of Switzerland, Vienna, Writing Cards and Letters on November 11, 2012
Whenever, on my personal adventure quest
I come across two paths, I know that I’ll
Inevitably find the biggest treasure chest
along the road that’s scares me wordless, worldless and worthwhile.
Now sometimes I can feel which one’s the bravest way,
like: do I vaunt my head or write my heart?
Outcome, I’m gearing up to tell you this today:
I don’t know which is bravest: leave home, leave job, or restart?
Continue as things are, I’ll have to transfer, flee
the only home I’ve made; time, brain, backbone
gone into now-familiar things that anchor me
weigh anchor, sail away to sunsets, fun fêtes and unknown.
Or change things, follow heroes who have dared to quit,
start new in the surroundings I’ve enjoyed,
arrange things so this country lets me stay a bit
for study? One more contract, endless? Centless? Self-employed?
I’ve hemmed and hawed and ranked and scored and felt and thought and swung my sword, delayed, ignored, gone back and forward, and this is all it’s led me toward:
Whichever path is scary (therefore good)
The bravest cut their own paths through the wood.
King of Diamonds: **** FLASH **** National Treasure Stolen From San Francisco
Posted by Angela Brett in Alcatraz Rules and Regulations, Golden Gate Bridge, Writing Cards and Letters on November 4, 2012
Lady Agatha Wayland fingered her diamond ring nervously. The engraving on it was barely noticeable next to the grapefruit-sized diamond, but never failed to help her: WWBD. What Would Buffy Do?
Buffy would be confident. Buffy wouldn’t act suspicious. Buffy would walk around with her head high despite the weight of the Golden Gate Bridge in a secret compartment in her brassiere. Buffy would not call attention to herself. Carmen “Buffy” Sandiego would ask a perfectly normal question, and fly as if on a perfectly normal holiday.
Agatha walked into the nearest store. “Excuse me, I’m looking for some travel advice.”
“Ma’am, I’m a butcher. I’m afraid I can’t help you with that. Can I interest you in a sirloin steak?”
Agatha touched her ring, and stuck out her chest as if it didn’t weigh 887 000 tons. “I’m planning a taco party. I’ll just take a few pounds of ground beef.” She took the beef and ran out of the shop before her confidence dissolved, not so much forgetting to pay as reverting to an old habit. Okay, new tactic.
She sped away in her Denghby speedster convertible, hoping the butcher wouldn’t call the police over a bit of beef. She tried to think of the least-obvious city to escape to. With any luck, ACME Detective Agency’s headquarters were on the other side of the now-bridgeless Bay, so their super sleuths would take some time to get to her, but she still had to get out of San Francisco quickly.
What would Buffy do? She’d get rid of the loot, that’s what she’d do. Agatha tried to think of places with bays or rivers in need of bridges. Hudson Bay had already been stolen by Fast Eddie B. a few years before, so that was out. Where were there rivers? Didn’t ‘Rio’ mean river? Perfect. She called a henchman to arrange a plane ticket to Rio de Janeiro and a fake passport.
Half an hour later, Agatha was browsing mystery novels in a bookstore when she caught a henchman’s eye between the shelves. He passed her a book titled ‘1001 Perfectly Legal Ways to Make $35 Million’ and shuffled off. She put the book into her secret coat pocket, and went to the counter with a novel, and a Portuguese phrasebook to help her out in Rio.
Her speedster was gone by the time Agatha left the bookstore. Surely taken away by the henchman and prepared for smuggling to Brazil. Agatha opened the book the henchman had given her, and found it had been hollowed out to make room for a passport, a plane ticket, and a pair of disguise glasses. V.I.L.E. never let her down.
*
Lady Agatha Wayland felt good. She had a destination. She had a plane ticket. She had a fake passport. She had the bridge hidden in her bosoms, where nobody would dare search. She had a safe way out of this place, and the police probably didn’t even have a warrant for her arrest. Compared with the native San Franciscans, she looked downright boring. To blend in a little more, she stopped at a Starbucks and ordered a frappuccino and a limousine to the airport. The only crime she needed to worry about was in the murder mystery she was reading.
Agatha felt a familiar thrill as the limo flying a green, blue and yellow flag pulled up. Soon she’d sell the bridge and live like a queen again. She should be able to live at least another twenty years before needing to pull another heist. She grew more and more confident as she checked in for her flight. Her luggage was respectably underweight, and her passport passed the security tests. Despite surprise at the new procedures, she obligingly removed her tennis shoes and cockily presented her hastily-prepared clear plastic bag of perfectly innocuous bottles of liquid — just a little shampoo and some diamond polish. She strutted through the metal detector, knowing she’d left her knives in her checked-in luggage, and the Golden Gate Bridge was safely masked within her chest TARDIS.
As she was gathering up her things from the conveyor belt, a security guard approached. “Ma’am, we’ve picked up something unusual on the millimeter wave scanner. We’re going to have to take you aside for some further screening. ”
Millimeter wave scanner? Agatha cursed her habit of rarely reading past the crossword page to the Life & Crime section of the V.I.L.E newsletters while she was out of the game.
Agatha was ushered into a small room by two female security agents. One of them patted her down, paying extra attention to her chest area. When they asked her to remove her top, Agatha was at the same time white with fear and blushing, which gave her a somewhat normal appearance.
No doubt newer chest TARDISes were thinner and lacier than her decades-old model, but Agatha never bothered with the fashion pages of the newsletter either. The agents prodded at her rock-hard brassiere, looking for secret pockets.
Until one of them found the button.
The Golden Gate Bridge exploded out of the bra, destroying a large section of the airport and bopping a taxiing plane into the Bay. Agatha was thrown back by the force unleashed by her undergarment, and was quickly detained by unfazed security personnel without so much as an arrest warrant.
The airport bridge became San Francisco’s most famous tourist attraction. In a bid to win back some of their tourism dollars, Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary erected a particularly Carmen-Sandiego-esque statue of Agatha in one of their rooms, claiming that she had been held at the prison after the attempted heist. Carmen Sandiego started up a legal landmark-moving business with the slogan ‘Anywhere in the world’, and became richer than ever, eventually starring in a business startup reality show entitled ‘What Would Carmen Do?’ Lady Agatha Wayland spent the rest of her life conning other Guantanamo Bay detainees into giving her advance payments on the bridge they needed to cross the bay.
Queen of Diamonds: A Tale of Two Dinosaurs
Posted by Angela Brett in Dinosaurier, Writing Cards and Letters on October 14, 2012
This dinosaur’s preserved for all to see,
so you and I can tell how life got wings.
That dinosaur’s preserved in you and me;
its atoms passed the years in living things.
“This dinosaur the fossil represents,
has lasted so much longer than I will,”
that dinosaur (in human shape) laments
while cleaning off a bone upon a hill.
This dinosaur’s remains lay still through eras
to show us that its kin were once alive.
That dinosaur’s remains run through chimeras
though consciousness of neither can survive.
This dinosaur thinks nothing in its head.
That dinosaur as well will soon be dead.
Yesterday I went on a fairly spontaneous trip to the Jura with some friends. We parked the car in a Jurassic park, and saw some dinosaur tracks; not too surprising, I suppose, since the Jurassic period was named after this region. I’ve hastily put up a few unedited, barely-viewed photographs; you can read more about what’s in them at the dinoplagne site.
Anyway, a friend said something about her remains not lasting that long, and it occurred to me that if everything were fossilised there’d be nothing left to make new things with, and we were actually made of atoms that had been in dinosaurs. I didn’t think that was necessarily good enough to write about, but I still hadn’t come up with a better idea by this evening. In search of a better idea, I looked at last cycle’s Queen of diamonds (which I think is better than this one, although it’s a little weird) and was reminded that there’s such a thing as a sonnet, and they only take 14 lines and have plenty of structure to help the uninspired writer fill them in. So I wrote this first draft of a sonnet about dinosaurs. Oddly enough, odd-numbered lines in odd-numbered stanzas, and both lines of the final couplet, start with spondees instead of iambs, or at least that’s they way they should be read.
Jack of Diamonds: They might not be giants
Posted by Angela Brett in 54 Costumes of Manneken-Pis, Writing Cards and Letters on October 7, 2012
Note: this poem is now available on a poster!
“If I have seen farther,” the scientist said,
“it’s not because I am a giant.
“Great minds of the past have helped me get ahead;
it’s their shoulders on which I’m reliant.”
“Now listen to me!” said the great on whose shoulder
the first one was glad to have stood.
“I’m quite short of stature, it’s just that I’m older
and those before me were so good.”
And sure enough, this one was perched on the neck
of a giantist of great renown
who balanced in turn on another; by heck!
It’s little guys all the way down.
And some were thought giants, and some were thought midgets
and some were thought nothing at all,
but each would insist, “Those below were no idjits.
It’s them that have made me so tall.”
And scrambling around them their fans would aspire,
to see something not seen before
by climbing the tower of dwarves, ever higher
for glimpses, or footholds, or more.
Most could not scale to the summit in time,
before their peak fitness would end.
Some found it tough and abandoned the climb
while some would, with vigor, descend:
Aware that such heights were so taxing to reach,
they helped to lift people and hopes,
inventing new ladders and platforms to teach,
securing and showing the ropes.
“They might not be giants, but they must go far
and that journey isn’t for me.
I’ll boost them through science, raise them and the bar
and profit from what they will see.”
So said the teacher while lifting a child
on shoulders so humble and stressed.
The youth saw a vista that had them beguiled
and bounded straight up to the crest.
Quotes similar to “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” have been attributed to many scientists and scholars. It’s been bugging me for a while, because even if the people whose shoulders they’re standing on are metaphorically taller than average, they’re nowhere near as big as how giants are imagined today, and they’re surely standing on someone else’s shoulders. There are no giants; it’s a tower of dwarves, and if it ever looks like it’s made of ivory, it’s just because the dwarves don’t spend enough time in the sun. You don’t need to be a giant to get up onto the topmost shoulders, but you need to do an awful lot of climbing; there’s a lot to learn before you can discover something new these days. Enjoy the view on the way up.
Luckily, we have people who invent new climbing techniques and equipment, and telescopes to see more when we get up there. This poem focusses more on teachers, but they could be science writers, YouTubers, educational charities, scientific songwriters (yes, even the ones that might be giants), inventors of more efficient lab equipment (the real or metaphorical telescope), maybe even code monkeys like me. Now that I’ve listed those things, it reminds me of the song ‘Somebody Will‘ by Sassafrass.
I would love to see illustrations of the tower of dwarves.
Ten of Diamonds: Another Perspective
Posted by Angela Brett in Declaration of Independence, Golden Gate Bridge, Katzen der Welt, Writing Cards and Letters on September 30, 2012
Here are some more arrow poems. Click the poems for pdf versions you can enlarge and copy the text from.
As promised, I got Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm to pick the cards this week. Jonathan chose Richard Stockton, and Paul chose first the European shorthair cat, and then the Golden Gate National Parks card on behalf of Storm, who had just gone to do something else at the time. I’m fairly sure Paul and Storm are entangled, so I accept this as a valid Storm choice.
I read that there’s a large homeless population in Golden Gate Park, and also that European shorthairs are not popular outside of Scandinavia because they resemble a lot of homeless cats. Richard Stockton died a pauper, maybe not homeless, but close enough. Given that it’s a natural state for a cat to roam, and the idea of owning a human family or two might seem strange and restrictive to one who hasn’t previously tasted cat food, I wondered what would happen if a sad, newly-homeless Stockton had encountered a happily ‘homeless’ cat in the then-nonexistent Golden Gate Park. Probably some hissing, a rift in space time, and either a nourishing kitty stew or a very scratched-up politician. I couldn’t think of a storyline that wouldn’t be trite and generally the worst fable of all time, so I fell back on the arrow poem form I invented previously. It’s easier than it looks.
If you like, you can think of the up arrow as being from the perspective of a cat and the down arrow from that of Richard Stockton. Perhaps Jonathan subconsciously chose this card for the same reason he writes so many sad songs.
And on the subject of Jonathan writing sad songs (some of which are funny because they’re about monkeys and cephalopods and vampires) he’s also the down arrow in the second poem. Opening band Paul and Storm are the up arrow, because they’ve only written one sad song that I know of. That’s not to say that Jonathan is a downer; plenty of his songs are funny without being sad, and I love funny sad songs (and non-funny sad songs) anyway.
In case you were wondering, following the tour was awesome as always. I met a lot of nice people, caught up with several I already knew, discovered a new sciency songwriter when she gave her CDs to Jonathan, and also visited Bath. I’m uploading videos of the Union Chapel show now, and will put up the rest over the next few weeks, and in the mean time you could watch the Susie Asado videos I’ve put up. Next stops: Wax Mannequin at my favourite venue on land, and Marian Call at CERN (which will probably become my new favourite venue on land once I have reason to call it a venue. But then again, it already has Hardronic.) Would you believe I’d never been to a concert of my own volition until December 2008?
Nine of Diamonds: Willpower Zero (based on a true story)
Posted by Angela Brett in Play Switzerland, Writing Cards and Letters on September 18, 2012
Bladder: Go to the toilet.
Can’t. Sleepy.
Bladder: Go to the toilet.
Can’t. Sleepy.
Free will: Well sleep then.
Can’t. Bladder full.
Free will: Well you may as well check the internet on your iPad then.
Can’t. Sleepy.
Free will: Come on. It’s the internet. You like that.
Okay.
Bladder: Go to the toilet.
Can’t. Internet.
Free will: You should think about the thing you were going to write.
Can’t. Bladder full.
iPad: Shall we play a game?
Okay.
Bladder: Go to the toilet.
Can’t. Game.
Bladder: Go to the toilet. Seriously.
Okay.
iPad: Play again?
Okay.
Bladder: Go to the toilet!
Can’t. Game.
Free will: You really have to get cracking on that writing, and the laundry…
Can’t. Game.
Bladder: Are you listening to me? It’s been an hour already! Go to the toilet!
Okay.
iPad: Play again?
Okay.
Bladder: If you don’t go to the toilet soon I’m going to wet the bed and blame it on you.
Okay.
Free will: So about that writing…
Can’t. Toilet.
Free will: Just go to the computer when you’re done, alright?
Okay.
Free will: So how about a first line?
Can’t. Internet.
Legs: We’re cold. Can haz pants?
Can’t. Internet.
Free Will: So we were thinking about maybe writing about encoding and decoding of emotion in poetry…
Can’t. Cold legs.
Stomach: I don’t want to be rude or anything, but once you’ve got Legs sorted out, could we maybe eat breakfast?
Can’t. Internet.
Clock: Hey, it’s almost time to publish some writing.
Can’t. Not enough time.
Free will: But you could start…
Can’t. Cold legs.
Internet: Hey! You have a Kiva repayment. Let’s make a loan with it!
Okay.
Free will: Well, at least we got something good done. But seriously, you’d rather sit there cold, hungry and pantsless than write?
Can’t write. Cold and hungry.
Legs: If pants are not your thing, how about a nice warm shower?
Can’t. Internet.
Legs: Please?
Okay.
Internet: Hey, your friend says hi!
Tell her I have to take a shower.
Internet: She says she’s being lazy too! Oh, and she wanted to talk to you about that trip to the UK…
Okay.
Legs: Uh… you can’t feel us any more, but we’re still here.
Free will: When you’re done with that, could we get back to the computer and actually write something?
Okay.
Legs: Thanks for the shower! Now let’s get some pants on before we get cold again.
Can’t. Internet.
Stomach: Hey, I’m being patient and all, but have you finished with Legs yet? We could have lunch.
Can’t. Naked.
Legs: I think the pants are in the bedroom. We’ll take you there if you like.
Okay.
iPad: Play again?
Okay.
Free will: Uh… could you at least open the notepad on the iPad?
Can’t. Game.
Legs: We’re getting cold. How about those pants?
Can’t. Game.
Free will: You know, there’s a shiny new encyclopedia of poetics on the floor just there…
Can’t. Legs cold.
Free will: And while Legs are going on about pants, you know you need to do laundry before going to the UK, right?
Can’t. Game.
Legs: We’re getting really cold here! They don’t have to be clean pants. We won’t tell.
Okay.
iPad: Play again?
Okay.
Stomach: Hey, can you just do as Legs says so we can have afternoon tea? I don’t ask for much; just an apple will do.
Can’t. Game.
Stomach: Come on. An apple. You like apples. They’re like iPads but edible.
Okay.
Legs: Us first!
Okay.
Free will: Okay, now that you’ve eaten something, how about you gather up the dirty laundry and you can write something while it’s in the machine.
Can’t. Internet.
Stomach: Hey, thanks for the apple. Can I have another?
Can’t. Free will wants me for something.
Free will: Okay, so you’re going to gather up the laundry?
Okay.
Free will: Great! Now we just need to take the laundry downstairs and put it in the machine.
Okay.
Internet: Hey! Your other friend says hi.
Tell him I said hi.
Free will: You’re still going to take the laundry downstairs, right?
Can’t. Chatting.
Stomach: I was lying before. An apple isn’t really enough. Can I have another?
Okay.
Free will: This guy’s not saying anything important. How about we do the laundry?
Can’t. Eating.
Free will: How about now?
Okay.
Free will: Great! Now let’s start writing.
Can’t. Internet.
Internet: Hey, remember how you said you’d go vegan for a day for that guy’s wife’s birthday? This could be the day.
Okay.
Stomach: You know that means cooking something, not just stopping at two apples, right?
Okay.
Free will: You could find a nice vegan restaurant after the laundry’s finished, and write something while you’re eating. You know you like writing in restaurants.
Okay.
Stomach: But I’m hungry now! Cook something!
Can’t. Internet.
Stomach: Really? Look, just stick some stuff in a pot and you can look at the internet while you’re waiting.
Okay.
Clock: Hey, it’s time to get the laundry out of the machine.
Can’t. Cooking.
Clock: Hey, it’s time to get the laundry out of the machine.
Okay.
Free Will: Okay, so now hurry up and hang the laundry up so we can get on with this writing thing.
Can’t. Hungry. Cooking.
Stomach: Is it dinner time yet?
Clock: No
Stomach: How about now?
Clock: Yes
Stomach: Hey, dinner’s ready! Give me some dinner!
Can’t. Internet.
Stomach: But it’s ready! I’ve been talking with Legs and they’re okay with walking over to the stove to get it.
Okay. No need to growl at me.
Free will: Okay, so now can we write?
Can’t. Eating.
Free will: Well could we watch the videos of that concert so you can upload them?
Okay.
Internet: Hey, look at me!
Okay.
Free will: What about those videos, just while you’re eating?
Can’t. Finished eating.
Free will: Okay, so you’re going to write now? Or hang up the laundry?
Can’t. Internet.
Free will: Can you at least do some research on the internet so you’ll know more about the topics you’re going to write about?
Can’t. Stupid topics.
Free will: If we don’t get this done soon you’ll end up having to write about writing or something, and there’s no worse topic than that. You know, you could listen to things from the internet while you hang up the laundry. You could even jot down writing ideas on your iPad as you go.
Okay.
iPad: Play again?
Okay.
Free will: Hey, uh… laundry?
Okay.
Stomach: I’m still hungry. Can I have another spoonful, and you can finish this later?
Okay.
Internet: Hey, look at me!
Okay.
Free will: Oh, the computer, eh? You’re going to write something?
Can’t. Not enough time.
Free will: Giving up already? Then you may as well go to bed.
Can’t. Internet.
Free Will: But you said there wasn’t enough time! If you’re going to waste time, you may as well go to bed.
Okay.
Internet: Hey, another friend wants to talk to you about that trip to the UK!
Okay.
Clock: Hey, it’s time to go to bed.
Can’t. Chatting.
Free will: Seriously, you should go to bed. Just end the conversation.
Okay.
Free will: Now go to bed.
Can’t. Laundry.
Free will: Fine. Finish hanging the laundry.
Okay.
Free will: Now go to bed?
Okay.
Clock: Hey, it’s way past bedtime.
Can’t sleep. Computer clock too loud.
Free will: Go turn the sound off then.
Can’t. Sleepy.
Free will: Come on, you know you won’t be able to sleep if you leave it on anyway.
Okay.
Internet: Hey, look at me!
Okay.
Free will: No! Don’t look at that! Didn’t you hear the clock? Go back to bed.
Can’t. Internet.
Free will: Just stop looking at it.
Can’t. Sleepy.
Free will: Go to bed then!
Can’t. Internet.
Free will: That’s it. Go to bed or I’m leaving you.
Bye.
The deadline elves were out in force this Sunday. It’s not usually quite this bad, and I did get a lot of things (other than writing) done on Saturday. In case you’re wondering why I’d planned to write about the encoding of emotion, ‘encoding’ and ’emotion’ were the entries closest to ‘Emmental’ in my Princeton Companion to Mathematics and newly-acquired Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics. Neither had an entry for Emmental itself.
I got this pack of cards in Bern last week, where I filmed the videos I mentioned uploading. They are of a Susie Asado concert. I did upload a few of them (that’s why I left my computer awake and able to tell me the time late at night, instead of putting it to sleep) but haven’t written my usual overly-verbose video descriptions yet, so the videos are still private. I’ll put a link here soon. In the mean time, here is a video of the Bern bears.
The trip to the UK I mention is to follow Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm around on tour again. I probably won’t publish anything next Sunday, since I’ll be busy getting from one show to the next, but I will get the three of them to each pick a card, so I can write about all three of them when I get back, like I did last time.
Eight of Diamonds: ISS vs. LHC (a comparison)
Posted by Angela Brett in Kennedy Space Center on September 12, 2012
Here is a handy, sometimes whimsical (but always as accurate as I could manage) comparison between two of my favourite scientific endeavours (now version 1.1, with changes detailed in a new post, along with a HTML table version with all the notes visible.) It is too cluttered with information to be a good infographic, so I’m calling it a TMIGraphic. Click on the image for a higher-resolution pdf with links and copious notes. It’s best if you save it and open it in a pdf reader rather than viewing it in your web browser, as the notes didn’t show up in the browser I tried. Click on each information box for the primary or most readable reference, and click the note icons for more explanations, references and interesting links. If you can’t see the note icons in the pdf, or if clicking on them doesn’t do anything, let me know and I’ll try to figure something out; the notes are important.
I’ve wanted to do this for at least three years
; I think it started with wondering which was cooler, and immediately answering myself with the relevant temperatures. When I started this round of Writing Cards (and not so much Letters) I thought I’d work on it slowly throughout the year, then finish it when the appropriate cards came up in one of the NASA decks and the CERN deck in the same week. This didn’t work for two reasons: every time I started to work on it slowly (and also, when I first came up with the idea of doing it as an infographic a year or so ago) I got stuck on the vacuum pressure outside the ISS. And even though the week’s CERN card is about LINAC-1, the NASA card seemed like a challenge that I couldn’t resist. Is the International Space Station really the largest, most complex international cooperative science and engineering program ever attempted? Well, I don’t want to choose a favourite. Let’s just say the Large Hadron Collider is the largest, most complex international cooperative science and engineering program on Earth, and the ISS is the largest, most complex international cooperative science and engineering program in space.
This took longer than my usual deadline of a week, but not through procrastination. Also not so that it would be released four years and two days after the first beam went through the LHC, though I’ll use that as an excuse if it helps. Almost every one of those numbers took quite a bit of effort to get right, and you’ll see in the notes in the pdf (that’s the old pdf, corresponding to the TMIGraphic pictured; here‘s the most recent one) that most of them come with various caveats and explanations, because nothing is simple. I’ll have to update some pages in wikipedia after this. I’m certain I still have some things wrong; maybe some obvious things. Please point them out, and I’ll fix them in the next version. Also, feel free to tell me how bad my layout is, iff you have a better suggestion. I know this is not perfect yet and I intend to keep working on it. If you have ideas of information to add, I’d like to hear that too; especially if you have leads on where to get that information. I can provide the original OmniGraffle document if you want to make your own changes, but I’d have to clean it up a bit first; there are a few things that I just made invisible rather than deleting.
The vacuum pressure outside the station gave me the most trouble; I’d hoped it would be a simple equation, or a statistic NASA would publish on their general ISS fact pages, but mainly I just found statements that the pressure inside the LHC beam pipe was the same as at 1000km altitude. For ISS orbit I found values or equations around the place suggesting values that differed by a factor of a billion, and nothing that seemed convincingly more authoritative than the others. Finally, via the Wikipedia page on orders of magnitude of pressure, I found a NASA document with the numbers for 500km, so I used those. It actually varies by a factor of 20. This is still at least 70km higher than the station, so outside the station it’s more likely to be toward the higher end of that range; that is, a less perfect vacuum than inside the LHC beam pipe.
I also had some technical difficulties with the presentation (apart from the clutter and my lack of graphical talent or training.) Firstly, I’m sorry if colour-blind people have trouble distinguishing anything. I wanted to use a colour-blind safe palette, but the paler colours wouldn’t have had enough contrast with white to work with the style I’d chosen. The colours of the information boxes are not essential anyway; they just group them into broad categories and might make it a bit easier for people to find the corresponding information about the ISS or the LHC.
As for finding the corresponding information boxes about the ISS and LHC, it’s really not optimal. There’s a tangled mess of dashed lines connecting them which is really no more functional than background decoration. I thought of making each info box link to the corresponding one on the other diagram, but although that worked in OmniGraffle, in a pdf viewer it did not zoom in enough on the linked box to make it sufficiently obvious which one you’d just jumped to. I also would have liked to make the links in the notes clickable, and add images to some of them. Again, this was possible in OmniGraffle but not in pdf. I’m not sure if there’s a common format that allows all these things.
So, after all that, the important question: Which one would win in a fight?
Of course it depends what the fight is, and here’s where you can get creative. In a weight-loss competition such as The Biggest Loser, I think the ISS would win, having lost about an eighth of its weight by going up to 426km altitude. Though the LHC did lose a fair bit of helium at one point. Meanwhile, the ISS literally runs rings around the LHC, and would certainly win the high jump. If you have an idea, feel free to comment here or, as the TMIgraphic says, tweet it with the #ISSvsLHC hashtag. Maybe it’ll catch on.
As for the ultimate winner, I’ll let Wil Wheaton have the last word. Science. SCIENCE!
Update: I heard back from my friend who had information on the LHC tunnel temperature (actually the temperature of the LHCb cavern, but it should be about the same), and updated that. I also added information in the notes about the exhibition on the AMS detector which you can come see at CERN Microcosm at the moment, and nudged a few things inwards so the preview is a little narrower. If you’ve gone through all the notes in the old pdf you might already have seen this talk given at CERN by the astronauts who installed the AMS on the International Space Station. I was there, and I wanted to ask (for the purposes of this comparison) which they thought was the most awesome out of the LHC and the ISS, but I was in one of the few spots without a microphone.
One thing I’d been meaning to mention is that the path to ‘orbit’ of both things starts with a proton and continues with a booster. The first module of the ISS was put into orbit using a Proton rocket, and many of the rest were taken to orbit on the space shuttle, with its solid rocket boosters. In the LHC, it’s the particle called a proton and the Proton Synchrotron Booster which accelerates it as part of the journey to the LHC.
Seven of Diamonds: My Real Super Power
Posted by Angela Brett in Models, Writing Cards and Letters on August 19, 2012
I’ve joked about getting superpowers from hair gel or physics labs, but there is a superpower I actually have. Maybe you have it too.
I hope the image isn’t too large; back in the day, people used to say an entire web page should be 30KB, and my screen was much smaller and less colourful than this image.
This is another one I’ve had in mind for a while, though I couldn’t find my notes about it so I may have missed some of the things I’d thought of. Perhaps they’ll be in a future episode. I think I planned to do some kind of CSI meme tie-in. I decided to do it this week because the model on this seven of diamonds clearly doesn’t really need those glasses. I forgot to give Myopic Person underwear over their clothes, just as the model on the seven of diamonds forgot to wear clothes over her underwear. I also forgot to draw the cape in the last panel, so I did it later with different software, as you can probably see now that I’ve pointed it out.
I was in a print shop as it was closing just before I went to a café to work on this, and I briefly considered buying an iPad stylus there to try it out on this comic, but I decided against it. I think maybe I should have bought it, just to make the handwriting neater and easier.
When in disguise, Myopic Person probably wears Paul and Storm’s ‘glasses are great‘ T-shirt. I don’t have one though.
Six of Diamonds: Emotion (xkcd remixes)
Posted by Angela Brett in Periodic Table, Writing Cards and Letters on August 12, 2012
A while ago, xkcd published this comic:
I’ve been wanting to make my own versions for a while, and since this week’s element can be used to treat cancer, I figured it was time to make these:
But of course, it all depends on what you mean by cause:
The amounts are almost certainly wrong. I just skimmed these documents.
But, although it may be in poor taste, when I think about that comic I can’t help thinking of this song by The Arrogant Worms (note that the lyrics on their website seem to have been transcribed by an automatic speech-to-text program or non-native English speakers on Mechanical Turk. Listen to the song if you want to know what it says.)
As The Most Hardcore Wormfan of All pointed out in a comment, this should really say ‘Things Mike McCormick talks about, by year:’
This was another week when I didn’t even deal out all of the cards, and started working on something on Saturday that I’d been thinking about for a while. The card which I figured gave me an excuse to do it was Lutetium, which is used in cancer fighting.
Do you know what else is used in cancer fighting? Protons and carbon ions, accelerated to high energies. I work on control systems for an accelerator that will do that. Here you can find slides and video of a CERN summer student lecture about that from 2011. There’s a more recent one from this year, but it looks like there’s only a video from part 2 and not part 1.
The font is Humor Sans (not Comic Sans! I never worked for the ATLAS experiment) and the harsh straight lines in my first remix were a bad idea.
Five of Diamonds: Immortal
Posted by Angela Brett in NASA 50 Years, Writing Cards and Letters on August 5, 2012
The first few hundred years were okay. I had a lot of thrilling death-defying adventures. I lived the dream.
I got used to my loved ones dying, and got better at meeting new ones, and better at being by myself. Not a problem; before the accident, I’d stayed eight years at a lab full of one- and two-year contractors and students. I stayed there for a while afterwards too, but it seemed silly to chip away at the minutiae when I’d seen how huge and incomprehensible the whole thing was. Even with the amount of time I had, I knew I could never get my head around it.
In any case, the universe would stick around for a while. I wanted to study the things that wouldn’t. I don’t think I realised back then just how little time I had to do that. I always felt like there were so many more people to meet, so much more alone time to savour, so much more to learn, so many more ideas to realise than I had time to, but somewhere in the back of my mind I assumed I could get back to them later. Oh, if only I could.
I travelled the world while there were still means to do so, tried the foods when I could pay for them, smelled the flowers when I found any, learnt the languages, met the people while there still were some. Had a few wives. A few husbands. A few children. Thirty-three thousand, nine hundred and eighty-three known descendants, before I lost count. They all died, of course. I had my alone time to savour.
One by one, then ten by ten, species went extinct. We got used to it. People are good enough at ignoring things as long as they’re still comfortable. Eventually things were stretched too far to be comfortable. After the human race died out, when there was not much left bigger than bacteria, I went through a moody phase. For a millennium I’d be content just wandering around admiring the landscape, watching erosion create interesting patterns. Then I’d occupy myself by carving my own intricately-shaped rivers by hand and swimming back and forth along them. I learnt to shape them in such a way that oxbow lakes would form naturally to complete my designs. Next thing I knew, I’d be in a ten-thousand-year blue period, craving someone to hold, barely noticing as the mountains grew. Those lifelong romances seemed so short.
Sometimes the despair would give way to industriousness. I tried to work out a chemistry that would allow complex life to thrive in the changed environment. I tried to evolve something from lichen using as sole selection criterion ‘something I can talk to.’ Later I changed the goal to something I could enjoy eating. This was rather more successful, maybe because millennia of hunger had made me less picky. Every so often, I’d find little niches where life had figured out how to adapt in ways more ingenious than I’d come up with. I’d sit and watch them for generations upon generations, but nothing complex enough to be worth watching was ever as successful as before.
Time always seems so much shorter when it’s behind you, but in my case, things really did happen more quickly back then. Two-year contracts, 80-year relationships, ten-thousand-year bad moods, million-year species. When finally something interesting happened, it seemed sudden even though by mortal standards it took a long time. I still remember watching the sun expand and redden like it was yesterday, and I suppose it was yesterday, for I wouldn’t define days by that pitiful white dwarf I ended up with.
Boy was it hot when the Sun expanded to near Earth’s orbit. I’d been injured plenty of times, many times enough to kill anyone else, and it hurt a lot. If I was having a bad aeon, there were times when I jumped off cliffs or into volcanoes every day in the hope of dying. But the first time I felt the corona of a red giant, I really thought that was the end. A nanosecond of it was worse than all the pain I’d experienced until then. I did not know why my nerves could even feel pain at such magnitude. I just closed my eyes and waited for death to come. I waited what could have been thousands of years, not like the thousands of therapeutically-dull years of river carving, but thousands of slow, slow years in which I felt every moment.
And then… then it was over, but it still felt like a long time looking back. It took me a while to recover emotionally, and the blood-freezing cold didn’t help. The Earth wasn’t engulfed by the Sun, but just continued orbiting the cool, withdrawn white dwarf. The atmosphere and liquids were lost to space. I didn’t miss breathing as much as I missed eating and speaking; the urge to breathe comes more from the buildup of carbon dioxide than from the lack of oxygen, and I had none of that. There wasn’t any life I could see, but from what I’d already seen, I was sure some had survived somewhere under the surface. Sometimes I’d dig down and have imagined conversations with bacteria I couldn’t detect.
The next life-changing event came when the Earth was knocked out of its orbit. A few chunks came off it, and I had less gravity and some fragments to look at in the sky for a while. I took to jumping around the world, pretending to fly. A couple of destructive meteorites later and I accidentally reached escape velocity. Goodbye, cool world.
There was no such thing as a year for me after that, but it may as well have been ten billion years ago. I haven’t come close to any planets since. I’ve passed through a few stars, and I can tell you it doesn’t get any easier. Spent some time squished inside a black hole waiting for the Hawking radiation to free me. I took little comfort in knowing it was quicker for me than for anything on the outside.
Between stars, with no air or plasma rushing past my skin, no sound, almost no light to prove my fantasies wrong, I could construct worlds in my head that felt more real than anything else. I’d forget I was lost in outer space with nothing to look forward to but that moment of beautiful views and relief from cold that preceded an epoch of burning inside a star.
A frequent dream is that of finding the genie again, the god, that creature I had conversed with through that little tear we’d made in spacetime. Back in the old days, even before feeling the hellfire of a red giant Sun, I used to wish I’d asked to be impervious to pain as well as immortal, but now my only wish is mortality. And once again, I feel like time’s running out. The universe is expanding away from me. If I don’t find a way to summon the genie before the last matter retreats over the de Sitter horizon, I will be stuck with nothing but the taste of my mouth and the feeling of my cold, hungry body, for infinitely more time than I had anything else.
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