Daybreak, Tesla, the New Yorker and of course Physicists

I spent some time playing around with the Daybreak ARG, (alternate reality game), android app this morning. Prior to this morning I had no idea what an ARG was. Players solve puzzles within the app to receive new clues. In addition, players are encouraged to post JackBoxer, (the name of the Daybreak game), logos near their locations to receive additional messages via SMS from the game's coordinators. The mathematical puzzles in the app had me reviewing Fibonacci sequences and looking up Platonic Solids. AT&T and Daybreak's creative team have done a great job of assembling material that gets people enthused about math and science. Some of the game media even mentions quark and gluon jets ala the experiments going on at Brookhaven National Laboratory only a few miles from Tesla's Wardenclyffe laboratory. Some of the game's clues have players speculating about Feynman diagrams and string theory.

Several of the game's documents mention Tesla living in the New Yorker Hotel. Last year I helped to organize an amateur radio event to support the ongoing restoration effort for Wardenclyffe. The New Yorker was kind enough to host one of the amateur radio stations commemorating Tesla's laboratory. We got to go on a tour of the hotel including the basement areas where Tesla may have spent much of his time. Here are few pictures I took during the tour:

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Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...

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The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

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