More excitement in the markets: Three days ago we got quoted $0.60 per pound for stainless steel scrap. Today we dropped by with 10 thousand pounds. The manager was apologetic, but they were no longer buying at any price. Scrap metal prices collapsed about in half (at least here on the West Coast), probably due [...]
Entries from September 2008
September 28, 2008
PDG on road to fixing psi(3770) meson mass
The big paper on the mesons is coming along. Yesterday I was checking the mass formulas for heavy quarkonium, a subject which was discussed here a few months ago. While checking numbers for the paper, I found that the Particle Data Group has changed the values for psi(3770) in our favor! For us it was [...]
September 27, 2008
Unusual Activity at the Federal Reserve
It’s not very often you see graphs like this:
The above would be highly inflationary except that the Fed simultaneously has been selling treasuries. The graph, also in billions of dollars (note that the time scales is shorter than the above):
September 26, 2008
Dark Flow, the Speed of Gravity, and the CMB
Kashlinsky, Atrio-Barandela, Kocevski, and Ebeling have just put out a preprint on the peculiar motions of galactic clusters: A measurement of large-scale peculiar velocities of clusters of galaxies: results and cosmological implications. In short, they claim that all galactic clusters appear to have a motion with respect to the cosmic microwave background (CMB). [...]
September 16, 2008
The image of the Sun
Today at Moses Lake the sun went down in cloudless skies. Naturally, my mind drifted to the subjects of religion, time, astronomy, sunspots, optics, history, and climate, and of I ran into the fermentation section of our ethanol plant to see if I could image the sun. The west wall of our plant has a [...]
September 15, 2008
Quantum Entanglement
Alice and Bob are very anti-social electrons. For financial reasons, they have to share a house (a helium atom). Due to their antisocial nature, they come to a condition where both of them never are in the same spot (state) at the same time. We’re interested in their spin, (political spin). If we ask one [...]
September 14, 2008
Quantum Cloning
It’s time I blogged some physics instead of filler like mouse transportation. There’s a lot of physics stuff going on around here but right now it’s kind of hush-hush and I can’t tell you about it. Which reminds me, I found an older version (perhaps a reader will disavow me of the notion that it [...]
September 10, 2008
Quantum Field Mouse Cube Theory
I’ve been staying at our ethanol plant in Moses Lake, and I’ve got a bit of a rodent problem.
The locals tell me that these are “field mice”, and that if you have a place near grain fields these will invade your home. Wikipedia says “field mice” actually are meadow voles. Reading further, one can tell [...]
September 9, 2008
Tameshigiri (試し斬り), the Art of Cutting
Saturday, I attended a demonstration of Tameshigiri, the Japanese Art of test cutting, at Bellevue Community College’s annual Aki Matsuri (Japanese festival). The demonstration was put on by Ishi Yama Ryu, a Seattle area martial arts school specializing in the art of cutting.
I didn’t have my camera, but I did pick up the end of [...]
September 8, 2008
The Physics of David W. Talmage
Professor David W. Talmage (ret) has kindly allowed me to put a copy of his latest physics paper on the web:
Relativity with a Quantum Field
A sharp distinction has been made between the confirmed observations that were predicted and form the essential core of the theory of relativity and the untestable explanations that have become the [...]
September 3, 2008
FQXi Essay Contest: The Nature of Time
The Foundational Questions Institute, FQXi, is running an essay contest, with the subject of the Nature of Time. Up to 21 prizes are to be awarded, with amounts ranging from $1000 to $10,000 per prize. But probably more important are the bragging rights. You have until December 1, 2008 to submit an essay. Your essay, [...]
September 1, 2008
New Evidence Against Einstein: Si-32 and Ra-226
A post at physics forums has just pointed out to me a fascinating new article on arXiv that one shows that the radioactive decay rate of certain isotopes depends on what time of year one makes the measurement.
A new article, Evidence for Correlations Between Nuclear Decay Rates and Earth-Sun Distance by Jere H. Jenkins, Ephraim [...]
