It's time to say goodbye...

...to blogspot and say hello to wordpress!

Those of you who were here from the start would know that the intention was always to go with wordpress - it just took me 112 day, 71 blog entries and a number of css tutorials to finally get my act together.

But now my new blog is ready...so come on over!

Rocket Launch

I am currently watching the web cast of the Falcon 1 launch. At the moment it is a whole bunch of talking and a stationary rockets swaying in the wind, but I imagine that it will be pretty cool when it takes off. Click here for the web cast.

Update: So that was pretty cool. At lift-off, the ground camera got completely engulfed in flames - and then something I didn't expect - they switched to an on board camera which was looking out the window, down the side of the body of the rocket and onto the ground. You could see the ground getting further and further away, condensation on the window and then the first stage came off and fell away. Then something else came off and also fell to the ground. Then after a while, you could actually see the edge of the earth - I first thought that it was just the side of the window, but it wasn't shaking with the rocket and it kept moving toward the inside of the screen like as if the earth was getting smaller. Then the video disconnected. I guess they didn't want us to see anymore.

Update 2: For a more detailed account, check out Joel's comments on the launch here and here.

Indiana Jones 4

Ooh, ooh, ooh! Cate Blanchet has just been confirmed "to star alongside ...* Harrison Ford in an upcoming addition to the Indiana Jones series". News has been scarce on the upcoming flick, so this is very exciting!

According to IMDB, the script is ready and filming is expected to begin in June 2007. The movie is scheduled for release on the 22 May 2008 in the US.

Now all we need is for Arnie to quit politics and go film Terminator 4, then we'll all be happy.

* I refuse to leave the word "ageing" in there as it is irrelevant. If his on-screen father is anything to go by, then age should be no handicap.

Is Pauline Hanson your type?

I don't often (ever?) post about news - there are enough bloggers out there doing this already - but this news.com.au headline and summary made me giggle. Then the "quick vote" really made me laugh (or was it cry? It was difficult to tell). Are they for real? This is the state of our media in Australia.
In case you actually want to read the article, it is here.

The Origin of the Universe and Life

If you're after "pretty good answers" to the question of life, the universe and everything, check out the next BrisScience on tonight!

THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE AND LIFE - Charles Lineweaver

In this talk, astrobiologist and cosmologist Charles Lineweaver will review what we think we know about the origin of the universe and the origin of life. Where and when did the first stars and terrestrial planets form? Where is there liquid water in the universe? How old is life on Earth? Is life common in the universe? Dr Lineweaver will give pretty good answers to most of these questions and educated speculations about the origin of life on Earth, in our Galaxy and in the Universe.

For more info, click here.

Movie titles (from an alternate super-geeky universe)

While we're on theme, I thought I'd dig up a little something my fellow peers and I came up with during the final weeks of honours, when things started to get a little...how shall I put it?...creative. I hope you enjoy :)

The Propagator
The Pauli Matrix
The Matrix: Reduced
The Matrix: Transpositions
Texas Chain Rule Masacre
Field Theory of Dreams
Covalent Bond: The Ψ who loved me
Debbie Derived Dirac
Bra Wars: The Phantom Dual Space
Ket Wars: Attack of the Conjugates
Braket Wars: A New Note-ation
The Life Algebraic
The Silence of the Lamb Shifts
Sky Capture and the World of Astronomy
Lost in Translation
Lost in Hilbert Space
Cruel Expansions
Fatal Abstraction
True Lie Algebras
Lord of the Ring Cavities
The Hunt for Red Shifts
The Truth About Kets and Bras
The Parity Kid
The Renormalising Man
Dangerous Interactions
The Kroneckers of Nabla
Alien: Renormalisation
Pumping Ion
Corrections of a Dangerous Supervisor
The Integrables
One Hour Photon
Finding Timo
Deriving Miss Daisy
Ten Things I Hate About U
Supermanifold
Precursor
Point Source
Seven Years in Qubit
The Last Symmetry
BaseKet Ball
Van Heisenberg
Indiana Jones: The Operators of the Lost Dirac
Power Ranges: The Movie
Transformers: The Movie
Escape from ϵ
The Fantastic 4-vectors
The Never-ending PhD
Crouching Tensor Inner Product
The Long Thesis Goodnight
To Annihilate a Mockingbird
Johnny Neutron Star
Jurassic Quark
Quark’s Tale
The Sound of Muons
Single White Noise
Enemy of the Ground State
A† Pet Detective
θ Pan
iλ 4: Endgame
φ Hard
Ψ-co
χtan(iC)
Supersize Mie Theory
American π
Austin Exponential Powers
The Fifth Tensor Element
The King and √−1
A Series of Unfortunate Space-Time Events
BMX Bandwidths
Topology 2001: A Space Odyssey
Indecent Grant Proposal
The CRO
|Velocity|
Zo-ρ
The Shawshank Renormalisation
Requiem for a Beam
A Program Bug’s Life
Hitchhiker’s Waveguide to the Galaxy
Sleepless in the Honours Room
Teenage Mutant Whinging First Years
Meet Joe Black Hole
Six Degrees of Freedom
The Interpolator
Gauss is Coming to Dinner
Look Who’s Teaching
Cern and Ising
Twelve Angry Supervisors
A Few Good Post-Docs
Wheatstone Bridges of Madison County
Jacobian Park
An Assumption Too Far
Bridge Over River χ
Tea With Mr Fermi
Kelvin 761
Indiana Jones: Radius of the Lost Arctan
The Vergence Suicides
Quantised Field Earth
The Devil’s Ohm
A Bogoliubov Mind
Basic Integral
6 Days 7 Nights Until Thesis Due

The facts

Ever wanted to see Michael Nielsen do a roundhouse kick?

Toilet graffiti

I got Avogadro's number, but I never called him back.

Only in the physics department....

Hot Fuzz

I went to the premier of Hot Fuzz tonight (thank-you 4ZzZ for the tix). I had no idea what to expect and didn't really expect too much, but I was pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed every moment of it. Really great. Really funny. Not complicated, but cleverly done. I recommend that you don't follow the link and don't read anything about it, just go see it.


While I'm on the topic of movies, I finally watched the Borat movie the other night. I also didn't expect much from it and had hoped that this attitude would also leave me pleasantly surprised, but it did not. Some things I really did like - I really admired the lengths he went to in many parts of the movie (my favourite scene was returning to the high society table with a little bag full of you-know-what after a visit to the rest room - this sounds stupid if you have not seen the movie). For the most part, however, I found the whole thing to be really boring. I have never seen the TV show, but I get the impression that the skits themselves could be quite funny, it just doesn't really work as a movie.

Myths, physics, and the nature of light

Dr. Timo Nieminen from the University of Queensland will be giving a departmental colloquium this Friday at 4:00pm. Afternoon tea starts at 3:30pm. All are welcome to attend. For more info, check out the colloquium website.

While the value of the history of science in the teaching of science is widely recognised, a significant portion of the historical material used is either incorrect or misleading - sometimes deliberately. Such material tends to foster belief in mythical versions of the history of science which can linger long after the other course content is forgotten. I will discuss the nature of such mythic history, and its occurrence in physics teaching. Electromagnetism, optics and relativity provide a rich complex of myth. Penetrating this thicket reveals some hidden and instructive lessons concerning the development of physical theories, and the nature of light.

Eating Strategy

When I am eating something, I tend to put some effort into optimising my eating strategy. For example, if I am eating a meal like steak, potatoes and some other veggies, I like to ration it in such a way that I either get a mixture of everything in almost every bite or I alternate between each type of food, so that for my last bite, there is a tiny bit of everything left so that I can finish off with a nice mixture of flavours.

If I am eating a meal which contains something which I don't really like next to something that I do like, I would either: eat only the thing that I like if this was enough to fill me up; or eat the thing that I don't like first, getting it out of the way so that I can finish off with eating the thing that I like the most; or, if it looks like there is way too much food for me to eat, then it would be a shame to fill up on the thing that I don't like, not leaving room for the thing that I do like, therefore a more complicated strategy is required.

On the other hand, I have a friend who, when eating the steak, potato and veg meal described above, would eat the steak first (his favourite thing on the plate) then eat the less favourite things last. To me, this seems crazy as I would finish off with the thing I like most. However, his reasoning is that the steak's quality decreases with the loss of temperature more than the other things on the plate ie. the steak is best when hot but the rest of the stuff is average anyway so who cares if it goes cold.

If I eat nachos, I know that there is a load of topping on the top but a whole heap of boring chips on the bottom, so again, you need to eat it in a way such that the topping makes its way down to the chips at the bottom. This becomes a problem if you are sharing the nachos with someone who does not instinctively follow this procedure as they eat all the topping first.

I am curious if this sort of behaviour is related to the fact that I am a physicist or could it be that I just have an obsession with food. I find I do similar things in other aspects of my life, eg. optimising my walk to the bus stop using different combinations of waiting for lights and jaywalking depending on the traffic situation. Then there is the going to the rest room/getting a drink of water problem: It is more energy efficient to go to the rest room downstairs as the more energetic activity of climbing the stairs is done while carrying less mass. Similarly, it is more efficient to go to the water fountain upstairs as you only have to walk down the stairs with a belly full of water.

On the other hand, I know physicists who never do any form of optimisation in their everyday life as they permanently have their head in the clouds and these trivial matters are of no concern to them. So maybe this behaviour suggests that I am a bad physicist as I should be thinking about my work and not the best way to get to the bus stop. In my defence , I have mastered this type of optimisation process such that it now only needs to run in the background, leaving the rest of my CPU free for other processes.

Is it funny, or what?

Join the Great Muffin Joke Debate.

Help, please

I just received a call on my personal mobile phone from a man saying he saw my photo on Skype and that I look very nice. When I enquired how he got my phone number, he said it is listed on Skype.

The reason I entered my mobile number into their system is so that I can send sms messages from my Skype account. I was not aware that my phone number would be made public. For some time now, I have been bothered by random people trying to get me to authorise them on Skype on a daily basis - this is moderately annoying, and I have looked everywhere through the settings to work out how my info is being made public, but to no avail.

However, getting calls on my mobile is too much. Does anyone know what I need to do to make my profile private? Please let me know.

New goodies for Aggie

I finally got to use my Eckersley's gift voucher (thanks Mike!). Now I'm equiped for some screen printing fun. We tested out everything on the weekend by making a friend's birthday card and it was sweeeeeeeet. Watch this space for some groovy arty-farty prints a la Andy Warhol.