link-aware professionals

[jinian]

This piece from Salon is a little old (it's been sitting in my notes file for at least a week) but it's very cool. I don't think telepresent reporting is going to work well right away, but the future is creeping closer.

Sometimes mean people are funny. http://www.changingtheclimate.com has happy bumper stickers to give to owners of big pointless SUVs.

Last week, I stole this article from le_merle. It's about the big Seattle earthquake I've been hearing about since I was a child, and for the first time I was actually worried. Generally I'm pretty blase about quakes, but there is a big scary quake out there that's like nothing I've ever felt, and we don't know how to prepare for it. Eep.

I want more tabletop fusion stories! Hey, this one might even be true. I guess we'll find out. At least it seems a bit more likely than the tepid water one.

Enjoy the scary fetish gear at http://www.ratemygasmask.com/ (not work-safe).

Engrish.com gives me the laughter! snout, go here and scroll all the way to the bottom. It made me think of you, as did Don Don the elephant.

Dude! You can help NASA identify craters on Mars! Distributed Proofreaders is more in my usual line, but I hardly ever get to do crater identification at work.

I found a lot of gallery-style links today.

Those looking for more LJ userpics can go to Monster Cards of the 1950's and 1960's. Most horrifying of all: Star Trek trading cards from 1967.

In a similar vein, Attack of the 50-Foot Web Site has lovely old horror movie posters. Oh no! It's the Amazing Colossal Man! And he's in Italian! Run!

I love the web. It means that I don't have to go to the Puyallup Fair to see people's freaky collections of Chinese propaganda posters (unless I want to, of course). This one is my favorite.

Comments

[pbrane.livejournal.com]

cold fusion: feh! "Show me the neutrons!"

(I wish these articles would say whether there are *physicists* doing these experiments or *chemists*. *Biiiiiiig* difference.)

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

so is there a special 'disdain for chemists' class in physics grad school? did you pass? :)

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Does it suddenly become more plausible if they're self-deluding physicists?

[pbrane.livejournal.com]

no - i just expect better understanding of nuclear physics from physicists, so if these are self-deluding physicists, I'm more disgusted than if they are simply chemists who don't know nuclear physics that well.

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

ok then.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Well, to answer this and many other questions, you can look at the reports of the research. (I note that I'm not convinced any evidence exists for fusion in the experimental results.)

Quoting from last Friday's issue of What's New

1. BUBBLE FUSION: A COLLECTIVE GROAN CAN BE HEARD.
A report out of Oak Ridge of d-d fusion events in collapsing bubbles formed by cavitation in deuterated acetone, is scheduled for publication in the March 8 issue of Science magazine. Taleyarkan et al. observe 2.5 MeV neutron peaks, evidence of d-d fusion, correlated with sonoluminescence from collapsing bubbles. Pretty exciting stuff huh? It might be, if the experiment had not been repeated by two experienced nuclear physicists, D. Shapira and M.J. Saltmarsh, using the same apparatus, except for superior neutron detection equipment. They found no evidence for 2.5 MeV neutron emission correlated with sonoluminescence. Any neutron emission was many orders of magnitude too small to account for the tritium production reported by the first group. Although distinguished physicists, fearing a repeat of the cold fusion fiasco 13 years ago, advised against publication, the editor has apparently chosen not only to publish the work, but to do so with unusual fanfare, involving even the cover of Science.

So it's pretty obvious that Bob Park at AIP doesn't think much of this.

I can't find a copy of the actual paper online anywhere. It'll be out in next week's Science and I suppose we can make more educated conclusions about the work then.

In the meantime, today's Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38511-2002Mar4.html) has an article that looks at both sides of the plausibility question.

[pbrane.livejournal.com]

hmm... yeah, this makes me pretty skeptical - since they seed the solution with neutrons, *of course* they are going to be getting tritium and neutrons out, the question really becomes whether they are really getting the 2.5MeV fusion-neutron peak. And their fellow Oak-Ridgers couldn't see that... If I were in their shoes, I'd really wait until this kind of thing was reproduced by *a lot* of people before going all "oooh ohh! i've got tabletop fusion!!!"

hmmm...