Archive for the 'physics' Category

Saturday, October 27th, 2007

Scientific Bad News For Goth Chicks - Vampires Are Not Real

Groundbreaking - and heartwarmingly unessential - research done by University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou has attempted to confirm what a generation of suicide girls has always feared - that vampires do not exist.

His reasoning? On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was just over 530 million people. If one vampire existed on that day and bit one person per month, and then each new vampire also bit one person per month, by 1605 the entire planet would be nothing except vampires.

Now, I am okay with there being no vampires, though I think the world would be poorer without that cinema classic, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

And, without vampires, I would not be able to spend 4 seconds scouring the internet and find pictures like this:

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Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

My Dirty Secret - I Am A Six Fiend

I have always loved numbers. My whole life I have manipulated them, caressed them, cared for them.

My friends, I am a six fiend.

And I am not alone. Heck, even among physics gurus I am in pretty good company, including notables such as Paul A.M. Dirac, which, by the way, is his real name and not something he made up just for D&D. That guy lived for number correlations.

Numbers are significant because on a personal and a collective conscious level numbers help us understand the world in a way that letters cannot. I can go anywhere in the world and hold up two fingers and the most illiterate peasant in China knows that means I am with two supermodels. Can I speak Chinese? Well, yeah, Mandarin actually, but you can’t.

Plus, there are 400 dialects in China so I certainly can’t express how many supermodels I am with in any other way and have it be so clear. Numbers are the magical language. I can do music with numbers ( the circle of fifths ), language, art and science. Even when I do TKD I am using a sine wave.

Numbers work for everyone. Numbers have order and meaning. To pseudo-scientists they even have esoteric definitions. Numerologists, for example, claim that 1 is the Yang and 2 is the Yin, staying in our Chinese theme. More on that later.

My favorite? Six.

Six is important. Six is famous. Six was the magical number of ancient Avalon. Christian authorities labeled six “the number of sin” and 666 is certainly a bad thing. One of its Egyptian forms is seshemu (”sexual intercourse” ) ­ shown in hieroglyphics by male and female genitals doing … you know, what I do a lot more of than you … and we still know of it today in the Sufi love-charm designed to open the “cave” of the Goddess: “Open, Sesame.”


6 In Chinese.

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Thursday, May 31st, 2007

The Science of Relationships II: Keeping Magic Alive


Sexy Scientist is a rare and powerful card

People are not always sure there is a science to relatonships until I spend a minute explaining it to them. Everything in the universe is about inductance. Inductance has lots of gobbledy-gook definitions that require you to know what a lot of other words mean, so physics definitions don’t always help, but inertia is part of the lexicon and everyone knows what that is.

Inductance is like inertia, except for electricity. You know that inertia means. It takes some effort to get something moving but, once you get going, it is actually easier to keep it going. So it goes with relationships. With inductance, you have more electrons in one place than another and they are induced to go somewhere else, like when I went green by using fruit for all my electricity. There’s a metaphor for relationships in that also.

Romantic inertia is obvious for men in statements like “it’s always easier to get a girl if you already have one.” Romantic inductance is obvious for women because a woman knows that if she takes her vagina into a bar full of men that have no vaginas, the vagina-lacking men will be induced toward her until equilibrium is reached.

Seriously, you can make an inductance metaphor for almost anything in life. 1

Relationships have inductance, and we’ll get to that in a minute, but first we have to overcome romantic inertia, which means you need a girl. Science can help here also.

Before you can create romantic inductance with her you need to overcome her inertia about you. Girls love to laugh. There are some spectacular women who have dated some ugly men because women are on a higher intellectual plane than men and will overlook a lot of things for a guy who makes her laugh, including your Star Trek “SET PHASERS FOR FUN” t-shirt with barbecue sauce on it from dinner three nights ago.

Here are some personal favorite opening lines to interest that science chick:

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Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007

Go Green By Switching To Fruit Power

It confuses some people that I can be an environmentalist and a Republican. It’s confusing because Democrats are handed a checklist of “coalition of the oppressed” platforms they have to believe in, so they don’t understand picking and choosing positions based on logic and common sense. Republicans don’t much care if you are for ice-picking fetus skulls or paying high taxes, as long as you have an oil well in your backyard and all of your TV channels parent-blocked except Fox News. Republicans have a pretty big umbrella that way, mostly because rich white guys can only buy so many votes and thus they have to broaden their appeal.


Don’t write me emails about this girl in the picture. For left wing chicks, this is the best you’re getting.

So people are confused that I can think Al Gore is an opportunistic shill mobilizing the left with deceit and still care about good old Mama Earth. Well, I do, but instead of asking someone to nationalize Exxon or fly airplanes all over the world telling people they should ride bicycles, I do practical things. Small differences add up to big effects. And I can show you how to make a difference too.

Everyone likes to talk about making a difference but no one is really sure what works. Carbon credits? Scam. Carbon offsets? Scam, only liable to make you rich, so worthy of consideration. But while you get rich selling carbon offsets to suckers on Craigs List, how can you legitimately lower your carbon footprint yet maintain the decadent western lifestyle you’ve come to enjoy?

The answer is simple, my fellow environmentalists: fruit power.

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Monday, April 30th, 2007

Music, Math and Models


I’ve said a few times that music is math. I’ve also said a few times that I’m a Chinese jet pilot and that Halle Berry wants to bear my children so it’s probably hard to know when you should take me seriously and when you shouldn’t.

But let’s go back to this “music is math” stuff. On that part I’m not kidding. At the end of the day, a lot of things can be math, including music and supermodels. A few months ago I did an article on how Phi, the famously named Golden Ratio, could even tell us who would be a supermodel. It contained excellent science, humor, Elle MacPherson, Carol Alt and Heidi Klum , yet still left some math questions unanswered.

In that article I mentioned the golden ratio in music, namely that the octave, fifth, and major and minor sixths are ratios of consecutive numbers of the Fibonacci* sequence, making them the closest low integer ratios to the golden ratio. But that doesn’t make a ton of sense until we get a little more basic, mostly because math doesn’t exist in the real world, it isn’t a hard science like physics.

So we’ll figure out how math is music but first we’ll show how music is physics.

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