Sunday, December 30, 2007

TV Shows


The Office is an award-winning American television comedy which deals with the daily lives of office employees in the Scranton, Pennsylvania branch of the fictitious Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. Although fictional and scripted, the show takes the form of a documentary, with the presence of the camera openly acknowledged.

Based on the British series of the same name, it was adapted for U.S. audiences by executive producer Greg Daniels, a veteran writer of Saturday Night Live, King of the Hill and The Simpsons. Original series creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have production credits on the show, and wrote an episode for the show's third season. It is co-produced by Greg Daniels' Deedle-Dee Productions and Reveille Productions, in association with NBC Universal Television Studio.
wikipedia

Faster-than-light particles


Tachyons
Tracking the elusive faster-than-light particle

In 1962, a group of physicists made the provocative observation that Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity does not actually prohibit matter from traveling faster than light, only from being accelerated to faster-than-light speeds. This may seem like an irrelevant distinction—and perhaps it is. But suppose there were a particle that came into existence already traveling faster than light. Because it did not have to be accelerated in order to reach that speed, it does not violate Special Relativity. Physicist Gerald Feinberg gave this hypothetical particle the name tachyon in 1967, from a Greek word meaning “speedy.” Later, the term tardyon was coined in order to identify ordinary, slower-than-light particles; these are also sometimes known as bradyons.

The tachyon, if it existed, would have a number of fascinating properties. Unlike ordinary particles, it would have to decrease in mass as it went faster, meaning that the speed of light—at which its mass would be infinite—would be just below its slowest possible speed. Likewise, adding energy to the tachyon would slow it down, rather than speed it up; to slow it all the way down to the speed of light would require infinite energy. For a long time, physicists believed that a tachyon’s mass would have to be an imaginary number—a number with a factor that’s the square root of –1—though more recent formulations of tachyon theory suggest that such a particle could have a real mass. Most intriguingly, a tachyon, if it is to adhere to the principle of relativity, would actually be able to travel backward in time—seemingly making all sorts of trouble for the notion of causality.


—Joe Kissell
Tachyons
Tracking the elusive faster-than-light particle

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Here Comes Another Bubble

A funny video from the richterscales.com.
It is hard not to listen to more than once.



Here Comes Another Bubble

Friday, December 21, 2007

Absinthe the Green Fairy.

Banned for a century for inspiring madness and murder, absinthe is legal again. So pour yourself a glass and get to know the real Green Fairy.

Perhaps you already have your own absinthe story. You drank it in New Orleans one foggy night, too full of fumes to remember much aside from the cloudy green swirl of the drink as water drip-dropped into the glass. You smuggled a cheap bottle back from Spain and brought it out at cocktail parties like a magic trick. You tried it at a party where someone mixed a batch in the back room, and it was caustic stuff, as mean as moonshine. You sipped it in a gloomy underground Czech bar, where everyone looked like spies, and the bartender lit the sugar cube aflame. Or perhaps you've never even touched absinthe, maybe you just read about it, and became interested in the lore of the Green Fairy -- how it was a muse to the artists of the belle epoque, how it made people mad, made them hallucinate, made them slaves to the drink, how it drove Van Gogh to cut off his ear. Perhaps you don't have a story about absinthe at all.

Well, now would be a good time to get one.

Absinthe is legal in the United States for the first time since 1912, the year it was banned in America.

Evidence of its current chic can be found at Employees Only -- a charming roaring '20s-style bar in New York's West Village -- where a handsome Serbian bartender named Dushan Zaric (who also co-owns the bar) makes a variety of asbinthe cocktails for me. And, much as I do like straight absinthe, I find these mixed drinks easier to sip socially; they demand a little less of my attention. There is my favorite, the Billionaire Cocktail -- 107-proof bourbon, homemade absinthe bitters, lemon juice and homemade grenadine. There is absinthe and champagne, crisp and effervescent, a drink reputed to be a favorite of Ernest Hemingway's. It's hard to imagine absinthe could ever be the next vodka and Red Bull, but if people caught on to how good these drinks taste, it might be more than a mere trend.

Nobody's predicting a drink once fabled for inducing madness will take over the glitzy table-service clubs of L.A. anytime soon. But you know what? If that happened, I would totally start watching "The Hills" again.

Sarah Hepola Everything you know about absinthe is wrong.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Best movies of all time

Best movies of all time. Extra points are given for movies seen recently.

1. Hoax
2. Bourne Ultimatum
3. March of the Penguins
4. Sicko
5. Primeval
6. Little Miss Sunshine
7. Capote
8. About Schmidt
9. Harold and Kumar go to White Castle
10. Garden State
11. Seabiscuit
12. Catch Me If You Can
13. The Talented Mr. Ripley
14. Fast and Furious
15. Fahrenheit 911
16. Rounders
17. Cellular
18. Godfather
19. Apocalypse Now
20. Blade Runner
21. Eyes Wide Shut
22. There's Something about Mary
23. The Matrix
24. Pan's Labyrinth
25. Twin Dragons
26. Return to Paradise
27. Slacker
28. Studio 54
29. Your Friends and Neighbors
30. My Dinner with Andre, 1981.
31. Saving Private Ryan. The knife in the heart scene is chilling.
32. Negotiator. Nice and corny. You have to suspend disbelief, but that is easy to do.
33. Wild Things. Has some amazing plot twists, the ending is fabulous.
34. Primary Colors
35. Big Lebowski
36. Apostle
37. Aviator
38. Pursuit of Happyness
39. Time Lapse of the 2007 Burning Man

Blog, blog, blog, blog . . . .

We are blogging more now, and so have more blogs!

The name of this blog has been changed to Zeitgeist 2008 and will focus on the spirit of our times.

We blog about Art and Artists on the new Art and Artist Blog.

We blog about poker on the Scoby Poker Blog, and about the development of poker robots on the Poker Robots Blog.