DSD

On Jan­u­ary 13, 2008, the won­der­ful web­comic xkcd posted this car­toon.

Within hours, the comic ren­dered itself spec­tac­u­larly inac­cu­rate. Rec­og­niz­ing that it’s impor­tant that the pub­lic prop­erly under­stand the dan­gers of this mod­ern world, we pro­vide here some more recent research. Con­tinue reading…

This is the story of how Honda engi­neers screwed up a big expen­sive project with a sim­ple arith­metic mis­take, tried to fudge their result with sound edit­ing soft­ware, and con­grat­u­lated them­selves for being totally awesome.

When I was a kid, my fam­ily used to drive up to The Pin­ery in Ontario, a beau­ti­ful park by Lake Huron. Very scenic. My favorite part, though, was a stretch of road a half-hour out­side of the park. To dis­cour­age reck­less Cana­di­ans from bar­rel­ing past the houses and barns, the local gov­ern­ment carved five sets of grooves in the road before every stop sign. Drive over them, and the car would vibrate: “vbvb­vbvb… vbvb­vbvb… vbvb­vbvb… vbvb­vbvb… vbvb­vbvb.” The faster you drive, the higher the pitch.

My Dad is a musi­col­o­gist, with a par­tic­u­lar inter­est in tun­ing. So there was no way he was going to pass up the chance to exper­i­ment with this instru­ment. Every time we approached some grooves, he’d start fast over the first set, and try to slow down by the last set, to play a descend­ing scale: G-F-E-D-C. If there was no oncom­ing traf­fic after the stop sign, he’d swing over to the other side of the road and play an ascend­ing scale as we sped up. Con­tinue reading…

I’m often frus­trated by not hav­ing a canon­i­cal place to write things down, but what really pushed me over the edge is the sub­ject of the sec­ond post here. It’s nerdy. It’s kind of hilar­i­ous. I know peo­ple who will def­i­nitely appre­ci­ate it. So this blog exists for that.

How­ever, I don’t expect to be writ­ing those kinds of posts very often. I’d also like to write some notes on high energy physics sub­jects that are widely mis­un­der­stood (at least among us grad stu­dents), or not often spo­ken about, but actu­ally impor­tant. Half my life these days is fig­ur­ing out such things. I guess this blog could save some peo­ple the same trou­ble. But it’s just as much for me, since my mem­ory isn’t great, and I’d like to be able to look up answers instead of fig­ur­ing them out all over again.

Visu­als

The cur­rent theme for this blog is a slightly hor­ri­ble mash-together of my old web­site and the default word­press theme. Web design is one of my hob­bies, so expect that I’ll find some time to fix things up around here.