2014 — 19 January: Sunday

Mainly bright and sunny?1

Meanwhile...

... at just a couple of minutes past 07:00 it seems a bit early to go fossicking around for anything much beyond the "start your engines" cuppa, though I do have a spot of fruit stewing to be done ahead of my next heap of breakfast cereal... And fresh socks to unearth for the walk later.

I may yet snaffle this, if only to hear "the sounds of the superbs (sic)" as promised.

It seems like...

... only a couple of months since I was reading essentially the same story in The Chronicle but here it comes again, in today's Observer recast as "plucky amateur Brit takes on US academia".

Gotta love the "top-notchness of the research" being debunked. Or, psychology: say hello to inappropriate use of perfectly good maths.

Perhaps psychologists...

... could focus their attention on the opinions of those who have moved to the Right having left the Tories?

Another piece of nut

Personally, I've always suspected the people who most fiercely denigrate behaviour of which they disapprove (on the grounds that they may just be protesting a little too much [as the Bard might have put it]). Which reminds me, I still don't have a clue what went on in Gomorrah, nor any interest in finding out... Though I don't have anything against blaming the boy Dave for all manner of problems here in the Benighted Kingdom.

After all, I certainly didn't vote for him :-)

6.37 miles later...

... the walk has been walked, the shower showered, the car's screen wash topped up, anecdotage and information about our two new Oppo Blu-ray players has been exchanged, the laundry is busily laundering, the lunch is smoothly digesting, and I'm now in quiet, "feet-up" mode for a bit. It was nice weather, but distinctly squelchy underfoot at the muddier bits. On with the show.

If I can believe...

... (or do I mean "trust"?) the search indexes maintained by the almost unbelievably useful Copernic desktop search tool I have so far only mentioned Max Planck twice on this rambling ¬blog, though I do also host a neat quote (regarding the miniscule distance that is the "Planck length") pinched from one of the essays in "The New Physics (1989)" that I won't forget in a hurry as I initially spent altogether too much time trying to emulate the typesetting in HTML before cheating and using a scanned image from the book:

Planck length

So what? Well, I'm currently reading Our Living Multiverse (the book by Fred Adams) and have found an easier typesetting candidate in the same sort of are(n)a. Over to Fred, who developed the concept of an energy index specifically for his book:

The energy of any given astronomical event or process can be expressed in terms of the mass-energy of the proton. More specifically, energy is written in units of GeV, where one GeV is roughly the amount of energy liberated if the mass of a proton is completely converted into energy through the familiar relation E = mc2. As a point of reference, one GeV is the amount of energy required to lift a single small grain of sand one centimeter off the surface of Earth.

A simple logarithmic unit of energy can be used to span the vast range of energy scales required for astronomical creation. If we write the energy, expressed in GeV (proton masses), in the form
E = 10wGeV
then the exponent "w" is called the energy index... and defines a type of cosmological Richter scale similar to that used to rate earthquakes.

Date: 2002


He goes on to present a fascinating one-page table demonstrating various "events" on this energy scale. These range from the energy of microwave background photons (often somewhat poetically2 referred to as an echo from the Big Bang) clocking in at –12.7, photons of starlight (–9), through the energy involved in lifting a cup of coffee (+10), daily human calorie intake (17), the Planck mass (19), the cometary impact widely assumed to have ended the Cretaceous (33.5), the energy that would be needed (for example, by Darth Vader's death-star) to annihilate the Earth (51.5), and the energy needed to form a galaxy (61).

I can't remember the last time I read such a clearly-written exposition. Though perhaps "Powers of Ten" comes close? There are times when I almost wish I'd stuck with physics rather than my slide through aero-engineering into computing.

  

Footnotes

1  Let's hope so.
2  Not by our Fred, however. He goes with "smoking gun" :-)