Clue for sale

So I teach two main classes: first semester physics and second semester physics. Rather obviously, passing first semester is required before you can take the second semester. Right?

Early registration is starting for the spring semester, and the second semester classes are filling up. So what do I see?

Several students who have registered for the second semester who have yet to pass (even with a D) an exam in the first semester course.

Hello?

Your wonderful optimism is messing with our planning process.

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Quantum Crypto

Nice little article from the BBC today about a practical realization of quantum cryptography.

• Read it here

I particularly liked the line where they conclude that maybe God does play dice!

I don't have the time to write much more, but I will add one thing. Over many years, the most amazing thing about quantum mechanics has been the way it has passed experimental tests of the most arcane predictions. I say that not only because these tests confirm some rather odd physics, but because simply doing them at all has taken truly outstanding skill on the part of experimental physicists.

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10/09/08 07:06:05.04030201

OK, it only works with an American calendar system, but all sorts of fools push numerology of some sort based on some strange premise.

So at a few minutes after 7, when this is scheduled to appear, we'll have a countdown date and time.

Let's just hope the markets don't crash - again - at that moment.

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Take Off Our Shoes - For the Economy!

During tonight's broadcast of "Countdown", Keith Olberman made the following statement during a discussion with Chris Kofinis (at about 2:21 into the 5:43 clip on the MSNBC web site concerning the second half of #5 in the countdown):

Well it's also, it's what do these two things [suspending his campaign and dealing with the economy, when it was as much a crisis last week as this week] have to do with each other. If he'd said "Well, look, to avert any further crisis we need to all take our shoes off" it would have made as much sense as "we're going to postpone a debate"
[my approximate rendering, not an official transcript]

Did you get it? I did.
"Shoes for Industry!" Firesign Theater, circa 1970.

The idea (originally from "Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand me the Pliers" if I recall correctly, although I'd have to dig out some vinyl to know for sure) is that the only way to improve the economy in the bizarre post-war world inhabited by George Leroy Tirebiter is to take off your shoes and turn them in to the government ... thereby creating jobs to replace those shoes.

Shoes for Industry! Shoes for the Dead! Shoes for Industry!

Hi, I'm Joe Beets.

What chance does a returning deceased war veteran have for that good paying job, more sugar, and the free mule you've been dreaming of? Well, think it over. Then take off your shoes.

(pause)

Now you can see how increased spending opportunities means harder work for everyone, and more of it too. So do your part, Joe. Join with millions of your neighbors and turn in your shoes. For Industry!

This is heard as a radio or TV ad in the background of the story, but is frequently referenced elsewhere -- like when the student at More Science High complains that he would really rather take off his shoes, sit in a tree, and learn to play the flute.

My favorite line from that album concerned Commie Martyrs High School where "there are no classes in our society, or in our school".

"Shoes for Industry" is available on the album "Shoes for Industry!" as track 12 on disc 1.

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Yankee Stadium

Today is the last game at Yankee Stadium. Only time will tell if abandoning that hallowed ground will mean hard times for the NY Yankees. Many of us can but hope that it will! (Has Notre Dame struggled in football because they remodeled their stadium? Only Touchdown Jesus knows that for sure.) Where I grew up, there were two kinds of people: fans of the Detroit Tigers or one of the teams in Chicago, or jerks who were fans of the Yankees just because they won a lot of games.

But this is a time for nostalgia, so here is my contribution. I've never been in the place, but back in the early summer of 1967, on a circuitous return home from Expo 67 in Montreal, my Dad made a point to navigate past various landmarks in NYC. That included driving around Yankee Stadium.

From the outside it was more impressive than Tiger Stadium (originally knows as Briggs Stadium), which looked more like a run-down factory. Yankee Stadium at least looked like an out-of-date office building, if your office building had a giant black sign around the top. Since plenty of NYC buildings did have an ostentatious sign on them (as did the GM building in Detroit), it fit right in.

My other Yankees memory is of going to Detroit for a ball game sometime in the early 60s to see the Tigers play the hated Yankees. To a kid, that shutout loss (1-0? 2-0?) was a boring nightmare. I think I would have appreciated watching masterful pitching (I think it was Whitey Ford on the mound) a bit more if my present-self could have talked to my then-self.

The key bit of trivia during the broadcast of tonight's game (not to mention the all-day pre-game show on ESPN) has been the price of tickets back in 1923 when the stadium opened. I used the info on Robert Sahr's inflation info site to do the conversion: It is a factor of about 12.5.

So that $1.10 paid for a grandstand seat in 1923 should be about $14 today, which is just enough to get into the bleachers at today's prices. You have to more than double that to get into the nosebleed section of the upper grandstand, and fork over about ten times that to get into the "mid priced" grandstand seats.

And that 15 cent program would be $2 in today's money. What a joke! But then I'll bet it wasn't a glossy color production either.

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Arrrrr

Pirated around the office today ...



Gotta love the cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse, conic sections, and his skills in calculus (both differential and integral), but if you need something more sublimely ridiculous:




Nothing quite takes the edge off of Annoying Administrative Actions like the Llama Song.

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Parsing Politics

Yesterday's speech (you can find the text here, as well as many other places) by Gov. Palin contained lots of errors (such as the lie that Obama's 5% tax cut for working families was actually a tax increase rather than almost twice as big as the cut promised by McCain) that were so glaring they were identified in an AP story almost as soon as the speech was given.

But I want to single out something that said more by what was omitted than by what was said - and it goes to the heart of the "Rob America First" energy policy that McCain is promoting. Palin said

We need American energy resources, brought to you by American ingenuity, and produced by American workers.

Notice that she didn't say "American companies" anywhere in there? No? That is because significant amounts of off-shore and Alaskan oil is produced (and thus owned and sold) by foreign companies such as British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, and Statoil (Norway). We might "need" those resources, but those foreign companies will sell our resources to the highest bidder.

The McCain campaign wanted you to think that she was putting America First, but she is really advocating giving away our grandchildren's oil at today's low prices for the short term profit of her state and oil speculators. You can learn a lot if you listen and read carefully.

Here is another example from today's news.

As reported today on CNBC, my home for investment news:

Axelrod told reporters aboard Obama's campaign plane that the Republican National Convention speakers had distorted the Democratic candidate's record and ignored his resume. He also suggested that John McCain's running mate was only parroting what she'd been told.

"There wasn't one thing that she said about Obama or what he's proposing that is true," Axelrod said.

"She tried to attack Sen. Obama by saying he had no significant legislative achievements. Maybe that's what she was told."

That statement drew strong reaction from McCain's headquarters.

"For the Obama campaign to suggest that she is simply being told what to do is offensive and takes our country backward," communications director Jill Hazelbaker said.

So Jill is implying to us that Palin knowingly made false statements about Obama's legislative achievements, one of which was an extremely significant bill to limit the spread of nuclear weapons that he pushed through in a bipartisan effort with Indiana Senator Richard Lugar? Knowingly making false statements is what is known as LYING, so did McCain's spokesman decide that it was better to have Palin be known as a liar than as a parrot? Not really. Jill didn't actually say that Palin was not being told what to do, she only said that suggesting it is offensive to her as the communications director.

Yeah, it was a strong "reaction", but don't ever confuse a "reaction" with a "denial". Since the McCain campaign did not actually DENY that Palin was told what to say (which would be odd given all of the stories yesterday about how she was being coached and prepared for the speech), we can take this non-denial as proof that Palin was told what to say and someone else (maybe the communications director?) was responsible for those lies.

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Thoughts on the Palin Speeches

The Highlight:
As they all gathered on stage after the speech, particularly an uncomfortable looking Levi and his preggers GF, all I could think was "biggest shotgun wedding ever". Man that guy looked like a moose caught in headlights. A million tabloid dollars for his thoughts! (And that might be his best job opportunity right now.)

The other highlight was reminding us of Harry Truman. Truman was VP for less than three months before the President died and put him the position of negotiating the partition of Europe, where many still argue that he gave away 1/4 of Germany by splitting it in half rather than quarters. But, oddly enough, she forgot to mention that the "haberdasher from Missouri" had been a US Senator from Missouri for a decade before he became VP. That national experience was crucial when he had to step onto the world stage without even knowing the US had an atomic bomb that was almost ready to be used. Even with all that, Sarah Palin is no Harry Truman. She didn't even have a passport until last year? Sheesh.

But I really liked how she spent more than 10 minutes talking about her family and only a few minutes lying about Obama's strong position in favor of going after Al Qaeda rather than fighting someone else's civil war as McCain preferred to do while bin Laden rebuilt his organization, and a few more lying about his tax plan and tap dancing around McCain's massive deficit plan. Others spent much more time lying about the Democratic ticket, so that was a plus. Otherwise, it was strong on insult and weak on specifics. It seemed like her only comment on foreign policy was that we should "Drill Baby Drill" so it would not matter if Russia captured the pipeline in Georgia.

Russia: We're going to invade the Ukraine.
Palin: We'll drill for oil off of Florida. Fixed you!

But the highlight was talking about bring back small government. Based on her huge goverment in Alaska? And not raising taxes? Gov. Palin pushed through a HUGE TAX INCREASE on oil that all of us are paying at the gas pump. That windfall is why her state has a budget surplus, not vetoes or good management.

You see, I have a good ear for numbers and order of magnitude. Last night I heard something about her executive experience that just did not make sense for a state with less than 700,000 residents. Their budget is what? They have how many state employees? The state budget of the state of Alaska totals more than $16,000 per person. The US budget is almost half that, only about $9100 per person, and that is while supporting an army fighting a war in Iraq! Even the most bloated "elite eastern government" like the one Rudy Guiliani ran is a fraction of that. Delaware? Delaware has 25% more people than Alaska, but only 30% of its budget. Delaware spends less than $4000 per person, less than a quarter of the gargantuan, bloated budget Palin brags is "limited".

How can the residents of Alaska afford the taxes to pay for all of that government? They don't have to. We pay the taxes down in the lower 48, and Alaskans each get $1500 of it, in cash, to spend as they wish.

Once the media get past the hypocrisy of family values that saw John McCain "forget" about his adopted child when posing for a family portrait on the People magazine cover and Lieberman tap dancing as fast as he can to avoid answering a question about Palin being ready to deal with Russia on Day One, maybe they will get to pocketbook issues like Palin raising the price of our gasoline to pay for the bloated budget in Alaska - and then pretending Alaskans had to sacrifice to pay for the Bridge to Nowhere themselves.

Finally, I'm sure everyone noticed that one of the speakers broke the rule about attacking family members with a snide attack on Michelle Obama's patriotism. So much for that promise of civility from the McCain campaign.

PS -
If you want to see Republicans hoisting themselves on their own petards, be sure to see a rerun of tonight's (Wednesday 9/3) Daily Show. Most. Brilliant. Use. Of. Clips. Ever.

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Storm Surge

UPDATE (9/9/2008):
There is an awesome (silent) video from the BBC showing the storm surge as Ike made landfall in Cuba. It is one thing to read about it, quite another to see the spray from a breaking wave rising above a 5-story apartment building and a half meter ? high wave running down a street and smashing into a house. Also see picture number 6 on this photo page.

The live news coverage of Hurricane Gustav has included video from an NBC affiliate showing waves breaking over a levee on the Industrial Canal, an area where there were failures during Katrina. The MSNBC web site has a Reuters photo showing the area in a viewer that makes a link rather useless, but the BBC has an AP photo showing this area:

• Waves breaking over the flood wall

This is a great picture because it illustrates one of the main improvements made after Katrina. (It also shows that the surge is at treetop level in the canal.)

Analysis of the failures after Katrina by the American Society of Civil Engineers and the US Corps of Engineers showed that many levees failed even though the water level from the storm surge was below the top of the levee. Why?

The surge itself is not much more than a steady rise in the water level, although it can be as rapid as a flash flood on a river. This would be a static equilibrium problem familiar to any student of physics and calculus. [The force on the wall is found by multiplying the water pressure times the area of the wall. Since the water pressure increases with depth, you need to do an integral to add up the forces on the wall that try to push it sideways, or the torque that tries to rotate it about its base.] At least one wall failed during Katrina because its foundation was not strong enough to withstand those static loads even when the water was a foot or so below the top (as it is in this picture).

However, there are also dynamics at work here. The wind produces waves that pound on the wall and break over it. Water landing on the back side of the wall can erode the dirt holding the wall in place. Weaken that foundation, which resists the loads on the wall, and it can slide sideways or tip over, or both. Notice that the wall in this picture has a concrete footing, like a sidewalk, where the water will land if/when waves (or even the storm surge itself) go over the top of the wall. This dissipates the energy of the falling water, which can then run gently off down the sodded levee below rather than erode the base of the wall.

Imagine the difference between running a hose full blast on a sidewalk and running it on your garden or lawn for a day or two. The sidewalk will still be there, the garden will not. Now imagine it was a fire hose rather than a garden hose, and you will see the problem when Katrina drove 6 foot waves over a levee while the storm surge itself was still below the top of the levee.

PS -
Another picture from that same set shows the other side of a Weather Channel standup out in the storm. The secret to getting a steady shot of the reported being buffeted by the wind is to have a small camera man being held by what looks like a retired offensive lineman. I guess if you can bench press 400 pounds, you can hold onto anything in any wind!

Historical Context

Although this NOAA picture is not as clear as the news photo, this photo of a breach of a flood wall due to Katrina shows only grass, rather than a concrete roadway, on the back side of the wall. However, this wall was an outright engineering design failure of the foundation, not a result of overtopping. In the bottom half of the picture, you can still see the levee and floodwall that was pushed, intact, about 30 feet sideways into the Lakeview neighborhood by the water pressure. Metairie (on the left) was dry because water levels never reached the top of the wall.

I thought I should also point out that this famous picture does not show water pouring into the city as was frequently stated in the news. Anyone paying attention will notice that it shows water flowing back out of the city, into the canal! Water was flowing OUT of the flooded areas during the time they were desperately trying to close the breech in the levee with helicopters dropping giant sand bags, not in.

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The Palin Spin

What an inspired choice! As we discussed at work today, Gov. Palin has lots of experience dealing with junior hockey referees as a Hockey Mom, which is perfect preparation for dealing with Putin. Even better, I now learn that she has never thought much about Iran or Iraq (despite the impending deployment of her son), so she can look at it with fresh eyes right after getting brainwashed by Cheney's team.

But that's not why I'm blogging. I'm blogging because Dan Barlett, now paid by CBS to act as a mouthpiece for George Bush and the Republican party, said tonight that Sen. Biden will have to be careful to not be too tough on Gov. Palin in the VP debate because she is a woman.

Apart from being positively insulting to women in general, does Bartlett think that Putin would "play nice" just because our President was a former beauty queen, should she have to take over in January if something happened to McCain's health due to the stress of the coming campaign?

She has a ways to go to prove that she is anything more than an older Paris Hilton with a good campaign slogan, a big hairdo, and an assault rifle. She is certainly no Golda Meir (who was active in national government for decades before becoming Prime Minister) or Margaret Thatcher (ditto), and I can already hear Sen Biden saying "I know Hillary Clinton, and you are no Hillary Clinton".

It was also clear that Bartlett was already concerned about her limited knowledge of world affairs in the way he compared, unfavorably, preparing her for the VP debate to preparing then Gov Bush for his Presidential debates in 2000.

McCain looks as desperate now as Mondale did in 1984.

Notes Added:

Apparently the way she cut taxes on Alaskan citizens was to increase the price of oil to the rest of us by raising the oil extraction tax collected by Alaska. According to this article, Gov Palin's plan transferred SIX BILLION DOLLARS from our gas tanks to Alaskan citizens in just the past year.

Unlike Obama or McCain, she took a publicity photographer along with her when she visited wounded troops overseas: see this photo from the Wiki commons obtained from the state department of military affairs while it is still there.

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What a bunch of whiners

Isn't politics about who is more popular in an election?

Isn't it about being able to excite people and get them to come to a rally and vote for you?

So why is it a bad thing when your ideas can convince 75,000 people to cross the country on their own to attend a political rally, as the Republican "somebody says" folks feeding talking points to the media claim?

Oh, I know why. It's a bad thing because your own candidate can't do it.

The Republican Party is whining about Obama drawing a big crowd because their own candidate can't do it. In fact, lots of party members and elected officials are doing all they can to stay away from him.

And they are muttering about him being a "celebrity" because that is the closest they can get to calling him what is in their Nixon and Karl Rove infested minds: an Uppity N*****. Why do I say this? Because the Republicans thought celebrity was just fine when they picked Ronald Reagan to run for office. And because John Sidney McCain III came home as a huge celebrity (I remember his return from an NV POW camp) and that celebrity status played a huge role in all of his campaigns. Even today he exploits it, playing the POW card whenever he gets in trouble. If being a celebrity actually disqualified you for public office in the Republican Party, they would never have nominated Ronald Reagan and would have dumped McCain back when he became well known as one of the Keating Five - who worked for the fat-cat bankers against the interests of their working-class depositors.

So when they complain about how many people showed up, on their own, for Obama's speech, they are just admitting that he is a great political leader and that they can't even come close to getting that many people to listen to McCain - even when they pay their expenses to go to their own convention.

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Happy Birthday, Bro!

Had a wonderful time celebrating your 55th birthday today.

Sang "Happy Birthday" at about 9:30 and had a fantastic chocolate cake with chocolate frosting - not to mention infused with raspberry liqueur - as part of the long distance celebration. Yummy.

You see, a coworker (and namesake!) shares the same birth date, and we try to do it with style in our part of the building. That goes double when that date falls during the insane, mind-numbing first week of classes, as it does this year.

Oh, and we hope you were amused by the gift and its wrapping. Mrs. Pion was really on the ball when she spotted it at one of many absurdly eclectic shops in town. The wrapping was my idea, but I'm sure you figured that out.

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If I was writing the speech ...

I would have Hillary hold up a coat hanger and ask the PUMAs out in the audience "Is this what you want?"

McCain could not have made it clearer that his vision of the future is a return to illegal and unsafe back-alley abortions, simply to punish young women for their sin. As if he has the right to cast the first stone.

But it is actually worse. If he got his way and made every fetus a protected human life from the moment of conception, every woman who had a miscarriage would be guilty of involuntary manslaughter and those who smoked or drank might be considered guilty of voluntary manslaughter or third degree murder.

With that focus, maybe the PUMAs would no longer be tossed softballs by interviewers when they pretend that a true Hillary Clinton supporter would celebrate a McCain victory. My conclusion is that every last one of them must be a racist.

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Ready to Rock!

So the cycle begins again!

One sign is the release of Beloit College's list of the mindset of the class of 2012, as I was reminded in a recent IHE article that picked off their favorites.

Mine was:
20. The Warsaw Pact is as hazy for them as the League of Nations was for their parents.
because they might get drafted to fight there against Russia.

But the real sign is that I have a tall stack of syllabi ready and other materials ready for Monday, the last pre-semester meeting is over, my adjunct is all set to do a great job this fall, and my only remaining task is to verify rosters one last time before Monday.

Oh, yes, and finish cleaning my office.

I started cleaning my office, so it now looks like someone's front yard when Clean Sweep comes to visit, but never got past stage 1.

But it looks like the semester will be fun. The economy has brought me some really good students (entering physics as a freshman with AP calculus) along with some promising older students, even if one of them last took calculus before the first one was born. Time to get the game face on and remember Jumpin' Jack Flash. I've already put the Basics idea to work, not only in my classes but as a meme for some others. It has been well received, so thanks to everyone who provided feedback on that subject. And I see some academic-politics storm clouds on the horizon. No great year can lack those.

On a closing note, my second fave from Beloit was

34. Pee-Wee has never been in his playhouse during the day.

The one about the Hubble Space Telescope would have been up there if Astroprof hadn't already reminded us that the Hubble has been up there for 18 years and has now completed more than 100,000 orbits

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First Adjunct Job

This is the rather belated completion of a belated posting following up the comments I posted on Dean Dad's blog addressing questions from a poster looking for a first job as an adjunct. (You should also look at the comments on the IHE version.)

I pointed the poster to my "jobs" articles, but I thought I should pull out the ones that I think are of greatest relevance.

1. Part 3, on types of jobs.

You may think you know what academia is all about, but most students (such as the person wrapping up a PhD at Big Name University) have only seen a tiny (and rather elite) slice of it. The starting point is to have a vague idea of the differences between where you went to school and the 4-year or 2-year schools you want to work at.

2. Part 5, on getting a CC job

One of the themes in my article that also showed up in the discussion in Dean Dad's blog is the importance of teaching experience. It's great that this person is thinking about how to get an adjunct job a year before seeking it, but I think that person should get at least a single good class worth of experience before leaving Big Name U to head west for a job.

I mean, the only thing you might need to do to get an adjunct job is call or drop by the relevant department office this week. Seriously. I think we just covered one of the sections for majors a day ago, and I am sure there are still some classes being taught by Professor Staff or Ms TBA. We don't quite go beating the bushes near the homeless shelter (that disheveled teacher in surfer shorts is a fulltimer), but that is a common snarky suggestion directed at the Dean at this time of year.

That said, the time to get your name in the hopper is when the full-time sections are set and the adjuncts are getting lined up. This could be anywhere from late spring to early summer depending on how well managed the college is.

3. An article about my CC students

I'll repeat that my students may not be typical. We are a largish CC that feeds a large university with the sort of programs (such as engineering) that attract a significant number of students to us who need to take calc-based physics or organic chemistry. But our students are different, in aggregate, from the ones who start as freshmen at Wannabe Flagship. The key point is that there are really good reasons for the interview questions about reaching "different types of learners", and that you will be more successful if you know something about the student body of the school you want to work at. More successful at getting the job, but also more successful in the job.

If you want to know more about the CC environment, there promises to be a lot of interesting information in a special report from the National Center for Education Statistics about community colleges. (I have not had time to read it yet, but the Feds collect every bit of statistical data you can imagine.)

Those, and the links in "Part 5" to the resources at the Chronicle and IHE as well as other blogs, should get you started.

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He Hate NBC Sports

10:30 AM EDT - while NBC was covering the Olympics "live"

Usain "Lightning" Bolt wins the 100 m gold medal in a World Record time of 9.69 s despite celebrating his victory over the last 15 m of the race! (Or is it actually faster to turn your body sideways to the wind?) What would have happened if he had run through the finish? It might have been as legendary as the 1968 long jump by Bob Beamon in Mexico City, where he broke the old record by 55 cm (almost 2 feet). That jump was so long that they couldn't use the official measuring device. Its scale was too short.

5:55 PM EDT - Advertisement for the 8 pm broadcast

Tune in for the 100 m, which might be the fastest ever.

Yeah, I think they could be right about that, since they have the result on their own website with a photo gallery showing his celebration nearing the line.

UPDATE: 11:30 PM EDT - Race shown on NBC

What is particularly annoying is the way NBC deliberately keeps the schedule a mystery, even when we know (from the official Chinese site) the exact time an event will run live and can get the official results within seconds of the end of an event. NBC has a fancy web site that will tell you what might be on each channel sometime in a three or four hour window. You would never guess that they might actually have a plan for the night's coverage or that the WWW can be updated in real time if a schedule has to change.

UPDATE: Commenting on the race.
I have to agree with the commentator that Bolt might have run a 9.59 if he had not cruised through the last 6 strides (which is what, 60 feet?). That would have put it in the "all time greatest" territory with Beamon. Beamon took the long jump record from 27 feet to 29 feet, skipping 28. Taking the 100 m record from 9.7 to 9.5, skipping 9.6, would be in the same territory. Michael Phelps, as impressive as his effort has been, is not in that territory. After all, he did not set a world record in every one of his events, as Mark Spitz did, and the one he missed was an individual event. Worse, he had to wear a swim cap and a $600 swim suit to do it. [Note: Follow that link for the photo. Mark Spitz is now an OLD MAN! Guess that fits my theory that most great athletes mature earlier and age earlier. Certainly was obvious at my 25th HS reunion.]

And I see that Dix got rid of those silly blue Nike arm covers that were supposed to reduce wind resistance. Memo to Dix: Your hair is a bigger source of aerodynamic drag at around 30 mph. You needed a Nike swim cap more than you needed those arm covers.

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Identical Times by Phelps

When looking at the start info for tonight's (actually tomorrow morning's) 200 m Men's Butterfly competition, I noticed that Michael Phelps had equaled his own Olympic Record (set in his preliminary heat) when swimming in the semifinal round. Both were done in 1:53.70, which is 113.70 seconds. Identical to better than one part in ten thousand!

I thought it might be amusing to look at the splits to see just how evenly paced those two swims actually were.

The line labeled "Pace" gives the time needed to swim each 50 m segment.

	50 m	100 m	150 m	200 m
8/11	26.12	55.44	85.01	113.70
Pace	26.12	29.32	29.57	28.69
8/12	25.89	55.32	84.95	113.70
Pace	25.89	29.43	29.63	28.75

The consistency is amazing. He must have a clock running in his head that is accurate to the tenth of a second.

I find it interesting that the last length is faster than the previous two. They really do save energy for that final leg of the race, at least in these preliminary races where the only goal is to finish high enough to move on to the next race and when you might have other races coming up within 12 hours, or a championship race within the past hour. In this case, his second competition in the 200 m butterfly was at 11:10 am, while his world record in the 200 m freestyle had been at 10:16 am.

For that matter, let's make a note of the info from his 28 March 2007 world record set in Melbourne, Australia. After all, the odds are high that the winner of the Gold medal will set a new world record. [Updated: Yep, but just barely. I have added his 13 August 2008 world record to the table.]

	50 m	100 m	150 m	200 m
2007	25.26	53.62	82.87	112.09
Pace	25.26	28.36	29.25	29.22
2008	25.36	53.53	82.75	112.03
Pace	25.36	28.17	29.22	29.28

Interesting. His pacing is quite different when everything is on the line. In this case his last leg is only slightly faster, and slower than the second leg. He puts a lot more energy into the first half of the race, then hangs on to the finish. [Updated: Look at how similar these times are! When they showed the line for the WR pace during the race, he was right on it. And you can see why he was disappointed at his finishing time. As the commentators noted, he started to tie up and slowed down in the last 50 m rather than being slightly faster as in his race at last year's World Championship. A split of 29.21 would have put him solidly into the 1:51.xx territory.]

Note 1:
The first 50 m is always fast because of the huge advantage that comes from launching yourself off of the starting blocks.

Note 2:
This issue of pacing is not so different as it is for a race horse, where my analysis of the 2007 Kentucky Derby (here and here) showed that the horse pulling away at the end of the race was not speeding ... the others were slowing down. I didn't bother looking up the splits for the come-from-behind victory of the US over the French in the Olympic 4x100 m relay, but that might be what happened on the final leg of that race.

Note 3:
I decided I should link to his Wikipedia entry as well as the Beijing Olympics entry up at the top, and discovered that he also has his own website complete with a personal logo (he has a P.R. firm?), studly professional photos, and a version in Chinese!

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Last Week of Peace

It won't be long now.

As I wrote in a comment on another blog this morning, this is the last week of peace before the landing craft beach themselves in front of the dorms and apartments, disgorging the product of our public schools like Russians into Georgia. Or maybe that would be Sherman into the US state of the same name.

So much for the bucolic days and quiet streets so typical as the summer semester fades away to the quietest weeks in any college town.

We can already see the warning signs: Budget rental trucks and U-Haul trailers. One by one they appear, like Navy Seals clearing the beaches of obstacles or my great^N uncle's cavalry unit scouting the way for Sherman. It won't be long before they appear in waves.

I'd like to know how many cops are on vacation this week. I'll bet its a lot, since it will be nothing but overtime during the week of parties that lead up to the first week of hangovers in class. That all gets compounded by the start of public schools, as all of the Mommy Vans hit the road to carry Child Too Precious to Ride the Bus to school before going home and then to work. Three trips where there was only one trip the week before.

It really is amazing to experience every year. Its part of the rhythm of life. I should think about what periodic function best describes the exponential decay into calmness after the end of spring semester and the phase transition into madness when the kiddies arrive. Probably not far from the result when a square wave drives a simple circuit, but it needs a big overshoot at the start and a modest one for spring finals so it needs some coupled elements.

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Opening Ceremonies (Free Tibet)

I guessed right: CNBC had a live shot of the stadium behind their Beijing staff at the auspicious hour of 8 - and the sky simply lit up with fireworks. (It looked like this picture from later in the show.) Only live shot in the US, I think! The NY Times is liveblogging from the Olympics, a sure sign that they aren't own by GE. You can also follow what is going on with the feeds, schedule, and photo gallery at the official Olympics web site.

Obligatory science comment and spoiler: one of the performances about the history of China will demonstrate movable type printing. Oh how I love artsy sciency performance art!

If "drum solo" doesn't strike fear into your heart, the ceremonies got rolling with 2008 drummers each with a chinese drum (fou) made of a clay pot. (picture and picture and picture) We'll have to see if the TV broadcast can reproduce that audio experience.

The fireworks I saw on CNBC were part of this show. (picture) The BBC story today on the start of the ceremonies shows the pollution level has fallen so it is merely at "almost OK for a developing country" levels - but that was before all of the fireworks!

(They have a great page that follows the pollution status of the city with a picture taken of the skyline each day from the same location. If you scroll through the pictures and correlate visibility with the pollution level given in the caption, you will see that describing it as "fog" is totally bogus. On "foggy" days it is high, on clear days it is low. Maybe someday the Chinese will learn what they learned in London when they got rid of coal-fired stoves in every kitchen, that the famous "London fog" was just good old smog.)

That said, I can't wait to see the 29 fireworks "footprints" cross the city to the stadium, apparently (from the description on the official site) as the lead-in to the start of the performance. I think I heard CNBC say that 35,000 fireworks costing almost 1% of the ceremony cost (hence almost a half million dollars) will be used for the show. That is a lot of air pollution!

Hopefully, all of that spectacle will not overshadow the Chinese support for the tragedy in Darfur and the oppression of Tibet. Your fear level has to be really high to have to arrest people who are praying.

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63rd Anniversary of Hiroshima

Today is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. (One of these years we need to take a vacation across the Pacific that includes both Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, to see both ends of that war.) The city that is now a thriving metropolis and home to the factory that built the car I drive was destroyed in a few seconds on 6 August 1945.

I knew one of the people in the photo recon plane that took the famous film of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, so that event means a bit more to me than it does to everyone in my generation who grew up under the threat of nuclear war.

One thing that many people don't know is that we NEVER TESTED the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima. (The test we performed in late July 1945 was for the bomb later dropped on Nagasaki.) This has important political /science consequences in today's world.

There is no need to test a uranium weapon.

The design of the "Little Boy" was simple and was invented independently by a Russian (Flerov) and the team (given their many nationalities, I hesitate to call it an "American" team) that put together our plans in the summer of 1942. The physics behind this is not trivial, but the calculations provided in the Los Alamos Primer show how easy it was to use the basic facts of nature and deduce that a gun (literally a gun, I was once told the exact model used) would provide enough velocity to push together the two sub-critical pieces of U-235 without the chain reaction starting prematurely. All we had to do was purify uranium, separating out the rare U-235 isotope from the U-238 isotope (which is called "depleted uranium" when it is used to make bullets and anti-tank weapons). Anyone who has pure U-235 can make a bomb.

That bears repeating. ANYONE who has enough pure U-235 can make an atomic bomb comparable to what destroyed Hiroshima. They don't have to test it. (The reputed fizzle of a North Korean weapon's test was almost certainly for a plutonium-based weapon, which is much trickier to design and does require testing.)

Eliminating excess U-235 that might fall into the hands of someone less responsible than the USSR or the USA is, therefore, a big deal. This is why the US has been burning Soviet U-235 in its reactors since a major initiative began in 1993. [It was important enough that it started under GHW Bush, was implemented by Clinton, and might have been the only major Clinton foreign policy program retained by GW Bush.] It is also why the enrichment of uranium by the Iranians is a big deal, and also is why obtaining "yellowcake" (which is not enriched) had squat to do with a WMD program in Iraq even if the report had not been a total fabrication.

However, the difference between taking natural uranium that is 0.7% U-235 and turning it into "enriched" reactor-grade uranium (around 3% pure, a factor of 5) or turning it into weapons-grade "highly enriched" uranium (probably around 99% pure, a factor of 140 or so) is significant. It takes many more resources (or a lot more time) to do the latter. The scale of such a facility (and its energy requirements) makes it easy to identify, but the only way to know its objectives is to inspect it. That is why the IAEA has always played such a major role in controlling the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

I highly recommend Richard Rhodes' book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" for anyone interested in this subject. Not to name drop, but Robert Serber (who gave the lectures summarized in the Los Alamos Primer) told me it was an accurate description of what went on during the Manhattan Project.

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