My world's a selfish place

[austin_dern]

I'm afraid that I missed the deadline to enroll in the campus's blogging competition. Yes, you read that correctly. There'll be prizes for best university blog, for funniest blog, and for ``best blog design,'' with prizes including MP3 players and cash. I appreciate that I'm living in a place with so many people eager to get the whole community involved and interested in different things, although there are times I think the booster committee could have maybe switched to decaf. Come to think of it, I never did learn who won the inter-varsity manga arts competition last year.

Channel 5 is showing Teen Wolf Too on Thursday, showing that they're not going to let themselves go overboard with this pesky Winter Olympics trend.

There's a report in Physical Review Letters that that research team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has managed cold fusion. Well, of course they have. They could hardly do otherwise. A February in Troy is counted as warm if the atmosphere fails to liquefy. The device uses pyroelectric crystals to create a strong electric field and a chamber of deuterium gas, indicating that the time spent in rec.arts.startrek.tech is not wasted. A similar device was used by Dr Seth Putterman's group at UCLA last year, but the RPI device has some changes. In the words of grad student Jeffrey Geuther, ``Our device uses two crystals instead of one, which doubles the acceleration potential,'' the sort of sentence you rarely see in peer-reviewed papers because it's not intimidating enough. Right now they project it'll be more useful as a neutron generator than as a power source.

Trivia: A 1758 parliamentary committee under Lord Carysfort determined the capacity of the Winchester bushel was defined as four distinctly different values by a single act. Other units were even more confused. Source: Measuring America, Andro Linklater.

Currently Reading: Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, by Edwin G Burrows, Mike Wallace.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

If you can locate it, using your super-secret faculty powers, I'd recommend watching a Horizon documentary from about 1991, revisiting Pons and Fleischmann's work a couple years after the initual brouhaha had subsided. It examined a few groups that were carrying out experiments based on their work, and there did indeed seem to be effects occurring, though poorly understood. Mostly of very low energy, although I recall one incident apparently resulted in a fatal explosion - unfortunately, it's been about 15 years since I last watched that tape (now long gone), so I'm only able to offer up frustrating vagueness. (So, nothing much different to normal)

Sadly, all I've been able to catch of the Olympics thus far has been Jon Stewart's look at the opening ceremonies, in Monday's Daily Show. (A classic, to be sure - he quite enjoyed examining Cheney's shooting incident)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I don't know that program specifically, although I've read some articles and books on the Pons and Fleischmann fiasco (also on the polywater fiasco), mostly because the sociology of it is fascinating. One of the big problems with their cold fusion was that the question of whether energy was being created or not depended a lot on how you counted the amount of energy put in, and the amount of power received. The bigger problem was they just didn't get neutrons out, and without that it's mighty hard to see how you could have fusion going on.

The modern approaches are only related to that in that they're, well, cold. But they're definitely neutron generators, which makes for a pretty convincing case.

I've got to remember to watch the Daily Show Global Edition this weekend. I keep meaning to, but I never watch CNN (where it airs) so I keep forgetting.