Copasetic Flow

I came across muon catalyzed fusion this week. The basic gist of the idea is this: When you replace the electron on a hydrogen atom with a muon, the radius of the atom reduces by a factor of 200. This allows the atom to come much closer to the nuclei of other atoms where there is a finite chance that it will overcome the Gamow barrier penetrating into the other nuclei and achieving nuclear fusion. The muon is a particle that is identical in every way to the electron except two. It is roughly 200 times more massive than the electron. The extra mass is why it's orbit around the hydrogen nuclei has a radius 1/200th as big as the radius of the electron's orbit. The muon is also short lived. After a few microseconds, it will decay into other particles. Some of the earliest theoretical work in the field was done by FC Frank at the University of Bristol based on experimental evidence found by Lattes, Occhialini, and Powell both in 1947. None other than J.D. Jackson of ...

A few weeks ago, I asked a friend of mine if he'd mind testing a Facebook app, ( MapMyFriends ) that I was working on. It's a simple little app that maps the locations of your Faceboook friends on a Google Earth plugin. the app has grown and now it will fly you through a global tour of all your friend's photos displaying them on the globe where they were taken... But I digress. My buddy came back with the rather unexpected response that my app wasn't setup for secure browsing on Facebook and he couldn't see it at all. This led me into a few days of work to make the app secure. I've included my notes below in case you run into the same issues I did. First: It's not difficult You'll find lots of documentation on OAuth 2.0 and user authentication, but at the end of the day you probably don't need it. You've already setup account login however you want it in Facebook right? If all you want is an application that communicates back to the...

The transit of Venus across the sun is coming up on June 5th! If you would like to go to a viewing event in your area, NASA has setup a handy map for you to locate an event . For ham radio operators, there are plans to collect transit data via APRS . For everyone that's interested, you can learn more at the following links: NASA school workbook on the mathematics of the transit [pdf] The workbook doesn't have an explanation of parallax measurements. It turns out that Parallax is more than just a comic book character. It's the process by which you can calculate the distance from the earth to the sun using transit data. Wikipedia however, has a great page on parallax . Finally, there is a smart phone app for recording transit data . Picture of the Day From 6/4/12

I was working with the Google API Javascript Client this week to shorten the URLs of Google static maps generated by my ham radio QSL mapper . The client interface provided by Google is very useful. It took me a while to work through some of the less clear documentation, so I thought I'd add a few notes that would have helped me here. First, you only need to authenticate your application to the url shortener application if you want to track statistics on your shortened urls. If you just want the shortened URL, you don't need to worry about this. The worst part for me was that the smaple code only showed how to get a long url from an already shortened rul. If you follow the doucmentaiotn on the insert method , (the method for getting a shortened url from a long one), there is a reference to a rather nebulous  Url resource required argument. It's not at all clear how to create one of these in Javascript. The following example code shows how: var request = gap...

While searching for low frequency, high current amplifiers I cam across the following two articles in an issue of Popular Science from 1944 on Google Books . The first is a great article on how oscillators work and what they are used for. The second article is on iron. The great part is that there's a "try it at home" recipe for thermite and a primer on the first page of the article. They definitely know how to grab and hold a reader's interest. Finally, check out the whole issue at the link above. There are lots of other cool things like two color pages containing Disney created fighter squadron insignia, (some of which are shown above). For the moment, the Google Boooks embed code below has gone loopy, so follow the links to the magazine articles. Oscillators: Thermite:

The following is from "Studies in the history of general relativity: based on the proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on the History of General Relativity, Luminy, France, 1988"

A while back, I reported that Agnew Hunter Bahnson Jr. was named after the pair of doctors that removed his grandfather's elbow. The elbow bone wound up in the possession of another grandson, Dr. Henry Theodore Bahnson M.D. I turns out that Dr. Bahnson was the first surgeon to successfully perform a heart and liver transplant. He studied under Alfred Blalock and in the Bahnson family tradition named his son Alfred Blalock Bahnson. Dr. Bahnson is shown with Dr. Blalock below, and, (I believe), Agnew. Dr. Blalock was featured in the movie about the life of Vivien Thomas , the African-American surgical technician who developed procedures for treating blue baby syndrome in the 1940s.